Controlling Your Life With Nothing But Brain Power

I just watched a 60 Minutes segment discussing what I think is the most amazing use of computer technology I've ever seen. Neuroscientist have been able to capture electrons firing in the brain and allows a person to control electronic devices, such as computers, wheelchairs, and possibly robotic prosthetic. For me this is truly amazing.

One thing I thought was interesting, was the brain keeps firing electrons, whether the body can respond or not. It's like a gun; you can keep pulling the trigger even if the gun has no bullets. It fires, but does nothing. Just like the brain.

I told my wife if I'm ever in a position where I'm locked in my body, please have these people install this device in my head. Immediately.

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Ubuntu 8.10 Caters To The Mobile User

Looking at the new Linux flavored operating system; Ubuntu 8.10, the latest direction is towards the mobile user. It's obvious more and more users are going the laptop route, and that has been an issue with operating systems like Ubuntu, possibly because of integrated or proprietary hardware.

I've been running Ubuntu on my HP laptop for about 7 months now. It has had issues, specifically with audio drivers and power management. The two issues I'm hoping the 8.10 release will fix are (1 and 2 are basically the same);

1. The auto detecting of my USB headset (affiliate link) when it's plugged into the port
2. The volume control works with my USB headset
3. Manage my battery better. Ubuntu burns through a fully charged battery in under an hour. I should get 2+. It's a new battery.

I'm installing the OS right now. I'll run through my own set of tests and write up a secondary post letting you know how it goes.

By the way, my Ubuntu midnight release party was a bust. When the clock turned over, all I saw was Ubuntu 8.10 coming soon... disappointed. I couldn't download for another 9 hours. Oh well, I have it now.

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Morgan Burns The Zune

If you watch the TV show Chuck, undoubtedly you heard the Zune burn on last nights episode. To set the scene, Chuck is trying to figure out how to reach the Kill Screen on the video game Missile Command. Chuck realizes the sequence to win the game matches the Rush song Tom Sawyer. Chuck looks at Morgan, his trusty sidekick..

Chuck: “Morgan, hey, uh, buddy do we carry any rush cds in the store?”
Morgan: “No need I got’em all on my Zune”
Chuck: “You have a Zune?”
Morgan: “Are you kidding me, no, no, I’ll grab my iPod”

I was on the floor laughing for about 30 minutes. I had to rewind the TiVo so I could finish watching the rest of the show. It was great. Wonder how much Apple paid for that jab.

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Mash Your RSS With Yahoo! Pipes

Over the past several months I've started writing blog posts for sites other than my own. This is pretty cool, and I want a way to capture all of my posts in an RSS feed that I can display on my main site. This required some mashing of RSS feeds. Enter Yahoo! Pipes.

I've used pipes before but it had been a while. I fire the interface back up and it looks slicker with a more intuitive interface.

I started by adding several feeds this little widget. Plug in the feed URL and you now have a link.



Next I created a filter limiting the posts in the feed to a specific word. No even if I post on someones blog, I can filter out all but my posts. The cool thing here is the filter reads all the possible properties of the RSS feed and makes them available in a drop down. So you could filter on the Author, the date, category or any number of other properties.



And finally I wanted the latest posts at the top so I created a sort pattern using this little widget.



Once I have all of this ready to go I get a sample of what the output will look like so I can see if my filter is working correctly. If not I can go back and make changes. There is a refresh button that lets you see a new output each time yo make changes.



The end result is a nifty looking widget layout of the whole process.



A couple of cool features are the ability to share your public pipes, clone someones public pipes and then modify for your use. At the moment its all free, which is cool. Draw back, there is no SEO for using the type of feed. So I wouldn't recommend it for your blogs main RSS feed.

If you are looking for a way to mashup several RSS feeds, Yahoo! Pipes is a great tool.

What services do you use to mash your RSS?

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View From Our Room At Snowbird

View From Our Room At Snowbird, originally uploaded by digitalthom.

Fantastic view from our balcony at Snowbird. Wish there was actually snow on the ground. Oh well.

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