The idea of telecommuting has been kicking around for a good ten years, at least in practical form, but there’s still been no huge take-up in it. Continue reading “At home in the office”

There’s a lot of talk about virtual environments these days, largely due to the proliferation of online roleplaying games. The futurists (myself included) see a harbinger of new worlds being created, ouside the ‘meatspace’ of reality, but just as alive. Continue reading “Playing God”

Man, I’ve been badly slack on posting here, apart from the link dumps. What can I say, I’ve been a busy person. But today I saw a little gem of a post about the economics of online games and I have half an hour to spare…  Continue reading “Online economies reach across the divide”

Gadgets just get smaller and smaller all the time, it seems. And the trend looks set to continue – a group of scientists have managed to create a diode that is formed of a single molecule.

Continue reading “Honey, I shrunk the electronics”

Robots are getting everywhere these days; hell, the government of South Korea reckon every household there will have one by the year 2020. But it’s not just helpful domestic tasks they are being created to accomplish – now lazy graffiti artists can use them to spray with an accuracy of line that a shaky human hand would find hard to achieve.

Continue reading “Use robots to fight the system”

Yet another example of how the world is becoming more and more like a science fiction story every day. Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory have developed a sensor system that can read your thoughts.
Continue reading “Subvocal thought control”

Good old PayPal – how else would we buy pointless and unnecessary eBay items while blind drunk in the early hours of Sunday morning without being defrauded? Continue reading “PayPal goes mobile”

A few days ago, VCTB reported on a device called the Painstation – an arcade game that inflicts pain on its players. Continue reading “Interview with creators of the Painstation”

I have a whole lot of books. I don’t want to get rid of them, but the extra space would be very handy, that’s for certain. Continue reading “Beat Google at their own game…scan your own library automatically”

As a library employee and lover of books, I’ve been following the ongoing ‘upload-the-books’ debate as closely as I have been able to, given time restrictions (y’know, full time employment, feeding myself, my online writing jobs and, of course, this here blog). Continue reading “Publisher decides to pre-empt Google book scan project”