24C3 - report part 3 - the future of e-books

There was a talk (German) by Steini (*) about the current status of e-books and the future developments in the morning session today. It covered the few current available e-book readers and the status of displaying technologies (e-ink, bistable LCD displays, visplex, etc.). Although e-books are quite promising the available ones (mainly the Sony libre, Sony Reader, iliad iRex, Amazon Kindle (**)) are too expensive and not mature (slow, bad interfaces, restrictions, lacking features).

Steini thinks that in future due to the low energy consumption and better readability of the e-books they might fill the gaps that the PDAs were suppose to fill. Kids will carry them to school, smaller text books (around 50 pages, less redundancy) will be feasible to be produced, new business models without publisher might come up. Book sharing, automatically transfered manuals of new gadgets and interactive stories are other presented implications.

Some design studies

As I am quite interested in this topic I talked afterwards with Steini. He mentioned that his company is currently working on creating an e-book reader that covers all the important features and lack the teething problems. Well, he is definitely biased but I am curious about the result, that will not only included the reader itself but also the necessary web platform. We will see the result hopefully in a year.

(*) the description of him in the wiki of this year is quite poor so I link to the one of last year
(**) During the later discussion also the OLPC was mentioned as a possible e-book reader. This was proposed also at O'Reilly Radar once.

Will ebooks finally take-off?

As New York Times reports Amazon will soon start selling their own ebook reader called Kindle that can download ebook from Amazon's store (unfortunately in the proprietary Mobipocked format). Google will begin with the fee-based access to full versions of some books in their collection. Having these to big player in the game the likelyhood that ebooks finally take-off is pretty high.

[Via openculture]

Ear bud cable keeper

Okay, this won't make it into Make Magazine but maybe it helps you to solve the cable chaos of your ear bud headphone. It's my do-it-yourself-version of a TuneTie, a ear bud cable keeper, and can be built with some cardboard, sticky tape, a knife and around 10 minutes of time. Just cut the cardboard into the shape you need and stabilize it with tape. In the end add a little cut that is used to hold the end of the cable. As I use bulky "sport" ear buds the shape differs from the original. In the end it looks like this.


PS: Hmm, maybe I should think about making different blogs as my topics are really quite diverse. But I guess people can filter via the tags.

CCCamp 2007 - 7 - Sputnik

Last project I want to mention that was represented (and applied) on the camp is Sputnik. The aim is to show people the potentials and threats of tracking technologies by personal experience. Active RFID tags (newest version v0.2) with different ids were sold to participants and three shelters were equipped with reader stations. The system (2.4GHz based) can track the tags in the range of 100 meters and discriminates between three levels of proximity. With enough stations you can give a very precise position of a person (this was not the case on the camp, but on the congress last year). A button on the chips can be used by the owner to send at signal that something interesting is going on at the current position. The collected data will be available for public use soon.


Due to the fact that only the owner knows the id of his/her tag and that the active chip can be switched off the user can choose the level of privacy. But it still makes people think more about the possibility of total surveillance. Many things like customer cards and passports are already equipped with (mostly passive, low ranging) RFID tags and the rank-and-file is not aware of this. The technology itself (as usual) is not evil. We just have to make sure that it is applied the right way for the right things.

CCCamp 2007 - 4 - OpenMoko

I mentioned OpenMoko, the project to create a phone with open hardware(*) and software, already before. Here on the camp I had the chance to talk to developers and hold a Neo1973 (the first developer model using OpenMoko) in my hand. It is even cooler in reality than it looks
on the pictures. The screen is bigger than I thought and has an excellent resolution (640×480). The device is pretty solid. Booting takes still quite a while as the developers focus at stability at the moment and have not had the time for speed optimization so far. But once it is booted it runs very smoothly.


The next model will be for consumers and should be on the market end of the year. Really looking forward to this. An interesting feature will also be the two 3D accelerometers. You can find more details about all this on the project website and the commercial website.

(*) Unfortunately the GSM part will not be open in the near future.

CCCamp 2007 - 2 - Streams online

EN: For people who are interested in the talks but cannot attend the camp (and for the lazy slackers who want to stay in the tents) there are good news: The streams are online now.

iPhone pushes ebooks

EN: Since quite a while I use plucker to read books on my Treo, but would like to see many more book available in a digital form. Although I personally will not buy a iPhone but prefer an open alternative, I hope its popularity will bring finally a breakthrough of ebooks. This post on O'Reilly radar gives hope.

Alternative machine-interfaces

EN: If you sitting in front of a computer keyboard and mouse usually are the interfaces to communicate with the machine. On mobile phones and PDAs the data input it is more tricky. A recent Google Tech Talk shows a cool solution: Dasher. It is hard to describe the interface, but it feels like browsing through the text you want to enter. It has a probabilistic language model under the hood to make this possible. With this Java applet you can test the concept without installing Dasher locally.

Chinese and other languages with many symbols are supported, too. For disabled people Dasher can be a good solution for communicating.

Although the basic implementation is already some years old, there are new features to add. The video shows how to control it just with head, eyeball or breathing muscles movements. As the Wii seems to inspire cell phone producers to build in senors for motion and rotation the tilting of a handheld device could be used to control Dasher.

Some link I wanted to post already for a while and that fit into that topic: Liquid browsing for displaying and browsing multiparametric data and Octomatics, a very intuitive way of displaying numbers and calculating with them.

23C3 media online

EN: Quick link - As announced the video and audio files of the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) are online now. Same for the official proceedings.

Free your phone

EN: Finally the open source mobile communication platform OpenMoko has a proper web presence including a wiki, a news collection site (with RSS feeds) and more. It contains information about the software (Linux and X.org based) and the first hardware platform called Neo1973.

The sniffing net

EN: Ubiquitous computing and "web of things" can be scary and exiting at the same time: The company Gentag develops combinations of cell phone, geolocation, sensors and RFID technologies to make a network of detecting systems possible. There are sensors for different chemicals including toxic agents and allergens but they advertise it also as system against terroristic attacks.

[Via Spiegel Online]

Hettlage Drive

DE: Ein Artikel der deutschen Ausgabe von Technology Reviews schreibt über das Hettlage Drive, eine Fahrradgangschaltung mit einem ganz eigenem Konzept und vielen Vorteilen gegenüber der klassischen Kettengangschaltung. Coole Sache.

Linux based Palm OS

EN: In the smartphone community there have been rumours about a Linux base Palm OS around for quite a while. David Beers writes in his blog that a Palm close informant has confirmed the existence of such a project at Palm (not PalmSource!) and also of a Treo 650 prototype running with this. An official release of the system is mentioned to be planned for 2007.

Semapedia

EN: Building a bridge between Wikipedia and the reald world - Semapedia.

What a pity that my smartphone is not (yet) supported. :(