Inventions – Page 15 – Auxiliary Memory

Science Fiction Overload

I’ve always loved science fiction but keeping up with the genre is a big damn job. I constantly worry I’m going to miss a breakthrough novel with the impact of Neuormancer or The Life of Pi or Replay just because I was wasn’t keeping up with the times.

As a young bookworm I read several books a week at a time when the science fiction section at the bookstore was a wire rack at the drugstore where I bought my Popular Science and Mad Magazines. There just wasn’t that many new books being published every month and the real focus was on feeding an indiscriminate reading appetite. Reading the book review sections in Amazing, Fantastic, Analog, Galaxy, If, and F&SF kept me perfectly up-to-date on the world of science fiction publishing in 1968, but it’s not enough for 2008.

Every year now Locus Magazine reports there are over 2,000 SF&F books being published as well as a large variety of magazines, graphic novels, online zines, ebooks and other outlets of SF&F storytelling. The field is long past the size that I can comprehend. I’m a small town bookworm living in a giant metropolis of fantastic fiction. Last night I was watching a documentary on Discovery HD about Miami, the town I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. My father’s family moved there in the 1920s. The show made me realize just how much of the city and its glamorous history I had never noticed even though I had lived in many places in Dade County. If I went back home I’d be just another tourist. That’s how I feel about SF&F today. I can’t believe I miss so much.

What I need is a Lonely Planet Guide to the vast hyperactive country of science fiction. For years that was Locus Magazine’s job but even it overwhelms me today. Thank God for the Internet, and a special prayer of thanks to the guys who invented RSS. This year I’ve been on a voyage of discovery to find just the right RSS feeds that are easy to read and reduce the fire-hose of SF information overload down to a water fountain burble.

Of course I added the RSS feed to my old favorite Locus Magazine but strangely enough I was disappointed with its cryptic posts in my Outlook inbox. Some RSS feeds send the entire article and others just send snack-size snippets to entice you to click on a hyperlink and jump over to their site to eat the whole whole meal. The bite-size phrases from Locus seldom get me to byte. I do click now and then and sometimes discover perfect little gems like 2007 SF/F/H Books on Year’s Best Lists, which cross-tabs several review sites to list the books that have gotten the most recommendations for best books of 2007 (first posted on 2/13/8).

This same article was written up by SF Signal on 2/20/8. SF Signal is a fantastic web site that very successfully reports on the most tasty data bits about SF&F. It serves the same function for our genre as Slashdot does for computer news. I’m now trying to decide if I can abandon my RSS feed for Locus Magazine and depend on SF Signal to keep me up-to-date about anything worthy that Locus does publish. In other words a plain RSS feed is not always perfect, so maybe a meta-feed is even better.

Of course the best solution would a single RSS feed that notified me from many sites just the stories I would likely love to read. So if I could train my feed from SF Signal for just the kinds of stories I want to read then that would really save me some major time, but that might be too science fictional of an idea. What I’m wishing for is a reading robot companion that gets to know me perfectly and then spoon feeds me just the right stories.

The trouble is I can only read maybe 7-10 science fiction and fantasy novels a year and maybe another 20-25 short stories. (OK, yes SF&F is great, but there’s actually more healthy stuff to consume too, like science and history books, so I have to limit my SF&F candy.) Logically I should ignore all books but the very best sellers and also read one SF best of the year anthology to sample the best of each year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well doing that. I can dip into several best of anthologies and only find a few real nuggets among the fool’s gold. Not that a diamond to me won’t be cut glass to someone else, or vice versa. And many best sellers are less than filling to me.

What I’m learning to do is search out blogs by various SF&F bookworms with the hope I’ll find a few taste-clones of myself. I’m currently reading:

These readers don’t have my exact reading habits but they read much slower than review sites and they comment about books in a low key personal manner that I identify with. This slows the pace down for finding books. I hope to add other blogs in the future. I find it very easy to keep up with their blog feeds and figure I can eventually handle maybe ten or twelve blogging friends this way. It’s a virtual book club and we chat with each other without even knowing the other is in the room, so to say.

I also find speciality sites like The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Audio to be very helpful too. They cover more stuff than I ever want to handle, but I can easily pick and choose. SF Audio has a good RSS feed with enough content in each post so I quickly click yay or nay with my mouse. IRoSF is formatted like a magazine so it’s easy to pick and choose in the TOC, however I think I would like it better if they sent out RSS feeds of their full stories. Although that might not be what they want after creating such a nice magazine format, but my desire does fit with the new reading paradigm of the RSS.

When it comes down to it we spend a lot of time reading emails, so RSS feeds simply spoon feed us reading material in email size bites. I wish my Kindle was more of a true RSS reader. I haven’t experimented with it using RSS feeds, but I will. The Kindle is even easier to read than my Outlook client. And that’s what my needs comes down to, an easy method to shovel just the right words into my head. I’m getting old, so I can’t process as many words as I want, but these futuristic times really do have the technologies to do less with more. Imagine if I could get all my reading through email sized chunks of words?

Sure, there are downsides to the emailization of reading. It’s all fast food consumption and nothing is saved for studying. What some clever programmer needs to do is marry Outlook with MediaWiki. That way we could read and digest our words into something for long term memory.

I wish I had more time to read more books. Reading reviews at least show me the myriad of ideas being explored in the world of SF&F. To get an idea of what I mean just read January 2008: Short Fiction at IRoSF – there’s a reason why the old magazines were called Amazing Stories or Astounding Stories of Super Science and Fantastic Tales. There’s a lot more to SF than spaceships and more to fantasy than hobbits.

SF&F are the genres that require their writers to think up wild ideas, and boy to they ever. And me, I’d love to explore than all, but I can’t. I just can’t. So what I want to do is find the most sense of wonder I can for my limited reading time.

Jim

Inventions Wanted #5 – Cell Phone Voting

The news is full of reports on the failures of electronic voting machines. After the 2000 election everyone expected inventors would jump on the problem and produce a full proof voting machine. That hasn’t happened. I’m wondering if there isn’t a simpler solution. Why not use the cell phone for voting.

Imagine on voting day just picking up your cell phone and dialing the number and voting. Could it get any easier? Nearly everyone has a cell phone. And if it was easier to vote maybe more Americans would participate in democracy.

One of the major concerns of voting machines is whether or not they can keep accurate tallies. Cell phone companies seem to be quite good at keep call records. Another concern with voting machines is to make them fraud proof. Now here’s the problem with cell phone voting – big brother will know how you voted because accurate registration and verification tied to a system with perfect tracking means they could look up how you voted. However, there are solutions to that too.

Cell phones have unique numbers. They are registered to you. Your phone could be registered with the voting registration system. It would be possible to invent a voting system that would take only one call from every registered number. It would also be possible to separate identity from voting at some point, maybe with an encrypted key in case of recounts. That means there would be two systems. First would be the voting system via the cell phone and second a database system collecting votes. At some point they could separate identity or make a complicated mathematical system that could reconstruct the voting if necessary.

One thing I hate about presidential elections is we have to pick one guy who wants to solve all problems in the same way we do. In other words, if there are twenty issues, we want elect the candidate that closely matches the way we think about twenty subjects. I’d much rather that have referendums and just let us vote directly. That would change things so we vote for a manager of problems rather than a decider. In the debates we always hear each candidate talk about their solution to a problem. I’m much rather that politicians research all the good options and then put them through a series of public votes until we come up with a solution that the majority wants.

Easier voting would allow for more referendums. So why invent a complicate system that is usually set up once a year and few people participate in when an easier system may already exist that would get more people voting?

JWH

The Kindle is My First Portable Auxiliary Memory Device

My Kindle started out as a crutch for my handicaps, but it’s becoming a cybernetic tool to supplement my brain. Necessity really is the mother of invention. The Kindle has come at just the right time to be a multipurpose tool.

I miss my epic bookworm days of youth. Most of my current reading is done in front of my widescreen LCD monitor because my greatest source of reading material is the Internet. Fiction usually enters my brain via my ears with books bought at Audible.com and played through my iPod. I plug into my audio book whenever I find myself doing something that doesn’t require my full attention, like doing the dishes, exercising, or eating alone. I get about fifty books a year read this way – far more than I read in paper form, which only averages about four books during the same period. I’m still a bookworm, but a strange technical geeky bookworm I guess.

I’m not quite becoming the bionic man but I need gadgets to supplant what my body used to do. One reason why I don’t read as many books is because my eyes demand large print despite my thick prescription reading glasses. The reason I ordered my Kindle is it’s a high-tech magnifying glass that instantly makes all my Kindle books into large print editions.

Another reason why I don’t read like I did when I was a kid is my back and neck can’t take hours and hours of holding a book. To read I must sit in my La-Z-Boy with a swing-arm book holder. Reading is no longer casual, but a strain I must gear up for. I bought the Kindle because it promised a wider selection of large print reading material, including magazines and newspapers, in an easier to hold portable format.

This blog is named Auxiliary Memory because that’s my dream gadget – a device to carry around everywhere that helps my brain function better. I’ve always considered my computer and the Internet my first auxiliary memory, but I’ve wanted a smaller more portable edition. The Kindle is the first of many machines that will ultimately fulfill this dream. It’s not perfect but it’s a step in the right direction.

While sitting in my La-Z-Boy with my cats, Nick and Nora, in my lap the other night, I struggled to recall facts in my failing brain which has an average seek time that varies from microseconds to hours. The cats were sleeping so peacefully that I hated to disturb them by getting up to go over to the computer. Google and Wikipedia are great for free association to improve my neural access time. Then I saw the Kindle, and luckily, it was within arm’s reach. I thumb-typed into the search box and bingo I was on Wikipedia recalling forgotten knowledge. This was when I realized the Kindle was my first portable Auxiliary Memory Device that I could carry with me everywhere. The Kindle offers limited access away from the computer, but it also means reading for fun away from my chair and bookstand too.

The Kindle isn’t the perfect reading machine but it’s a start. Breaking the tether from my desktop computer means a paradigm shift. Laptops are portable but not that portable. I was thinking about buying an Asus Eee PC just before I bought the Kindle, and I still might, but the Kindle trumps the Eee PC with its free broadband cellular wireless. I also considered buying an iPod touch, Nokia N800 or a Palm TX all of which also depend on the less universal Wi-Fi for connectivity. On the plus side these devices offered better user interfaces to the Internet. On the third hand though, is the fact that the Kindle is very readable.

My penultimate science fictional auxiliary memory would store a copy of everything I’ve ever read and it would help me call up ideas and reference them when I needed. My ultimate auxiliary memory would record everything I see and hear for ready reference. At fifty-six memory loss is a regular problem and scares me about the future. The idea of having a little device I carry everywhere that helps me remember produces a warm fuzzy feeling. The Kindle is my experiment expanding on that idea.

I bought a 2 gigabyte memory card for my Kindle and that will allow me to store about 2,000 books. I only want to store books and articles I’ve read on that memory card and use the built in memory for books, periodicals and audio books I’m currently reading.

Moving ahead poses many interesting obstacles. I don’t think I’ve read 2,000 books, but I’m sure I’ve read more than a 1,000, but finding them in Kindle format will be tough. Even though Amazon crows about the 90,000 Kindle books available through their store, it’s really just a page in the Encyclopedia Britannica compared to how many books are out there on the world wide bookshelf. Also, 2 gigabytes of memory is skimpy when it comes to audio books, which I’d also like to store in my auxiliary brain.

Nonetheless, the Kindle is a great start. The internal memory allows me to listen to a book while reading one on screen. Now that might sound silly, but it’s a useful function for memorizing stuff. I took a series of Shakespeare courses in college and I would read the text while listening to recordings on LPs (it was the 1970s). I aced every exam for remembering details. I recently bought A Midsummer Night’s Dream on audio but found it extremely difficult to follow the details. I plan to get a Kindle edition to follow along while I listen. I’ll supplement my reading and studying by connecting to Wikepedia. Not only will the Kindle be a reading and external memory device, it will also be a study device that helps reinforce my real brain’s ability to think and remember.

For a future Auxiliary Memory Device I’d love to store all my music and audio books on it. Hell, at the science fictional level, I’d like it to be a black hole of personal experience and include everything I’ve seen or heard, thus all movies and television shows I’ve seen and any book or article I’ve read and all my photographs. But that’s too much to expect of the current generation of Kindle.

The 1.0 Kindle will store books. I’m also thinking of going through My Documents folder and looking for stuff that will help my faulty memory. I think I’ll start making memory lists. People gripe about the ten cent fee Amazon charges for converting documents for the Kindle, but I’d gladly spend a dime rather than hooking the Kindle to the USB cable. What I’d like to see is the equivalent of the RSS symbol on Internet pages, so when I read a good article or essay I can zap it over to the Kindle to live on my Auxiliary Memory and recall with a quick search.

I’m even thinking about cutting and pasting all the stuff I read each day into an email, adding comments and thoughts and then emailing the results to my Kindle. For three dollars a month it can become a diary.

This is why I love that the Kindle supports magazines and newspapers and has the save clippings feature. Many of my conversations with friends involve starting my conversation with, “Well I read this cool article…” and then stumbling over the details, forgetting the source, and like telling a joke badly, not quoting the essential facts correctly. If I carried my Kindle everywhere, I could pop open the article and just quote the damn sucker.

Here’s where the experiment needs real world testing. I’ve been so afraid of hurting my Kindle that I don’t carry it everywhere. I’d hate to smash up a $400 device. If it was a $100, I’d wouldn’t worry because I’d gladly rush out and buy another. But I just don’t know how many $400 readers I want to buy and how often. (My friend Linda knows the sick feeling that comes with smashing an ebook reader.) Not only do I need to get over my fear of taking it out of the house, but I need to get over my fear of carry it everywhere in my house, including the bathroom. (Is that too much information?) For an auxiliary memory device to work it needs to be by my side constantly. (Note to Jeff Bezos, how about adding a voice recorder – that’s another device I carry everywhere now.)

The current 1.0 version of the Kindle is not grab-and-go friendly. I’m constantly pushing the wrong button and so does everyone I let play with it. To make me feel better about carrying it around I keep it in its cover. I think I’d prefer a hardened Marine version designed for combat in all-terrain conditions. Something my cats could puke on and it would survive. Something that I could drop several times a day. Like a cell phone I expect to upgrade regularly and carry with me 24×7.

That brings up how to carry such an Auxiliary Memory Device. I keep my phone in my left pants pocket and my iPod in my shirt pocket. The Kindle isn’t quite pocket-able or even purse-able. I do carry a messenger bag, but not around the house. I do have a potbelly big enough to make a kangaroo pouch but that might make some people squeamish. I can picture a flat purse like holder to be worn around the neck, but when it comes down to the realistic nitty-grity, the Auxiliary Memory Device might be something we constantly carry in our hand. That means it needs to be rugged, waterproof and food-proof, and handle extremes in environment. The Kindle isn’t that device, but I not saying don’t buy one because it’s not. The Kindle is more than good enough to start practicing on having an Auxiliary Memory Device, and there’s plenty of room for inventors to make clever holders for it.

The idea now is to explore the ramifications of having an Auxiliary Memory Device, and you can’t do that without road testing something. The Kindle may be the best device to start with because of its broadband communications and combination of features.

JWH

Inventions Wanted #4 – The Desktop Art Gallery

I don’t know why this doesn’t exist already, but I’ve been Googling my brains out trying to find fine art masterpieces for sale to be used as desktop backgrounds. I’m shopping for a 24″ LCD monitor with 1920 by 1200 resolution and I want it to be my personal Desktop Art Gallery. A good example of what I’m talking about is here for Van Gogh’s Irises. Visit that site and right click on that image and make it your desktop background. It helps if you have a large wide-screen LCD monitor. (FYI, it will replace your current desktop art, so you may want to just view it on a full-sized window. If you are using Webshots, it will automatically replace Irises during the next scheduled photo rotation.)

Last month I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and I was so impressed that I’ve taken on a minor obsession with art. My wife and I had been planning this vacation for years and I expected to go crazy over the Air & Space Museum, since I’ve been a space nut all my life. I loved the Air & Space Museum, but I was mesmerized by the National Gallery of Art. Since I’ve returned I’ve bought several art books and I’ve been watching a 24-part lecture series on DVD on the history of Impressionism. None of the reproductions can do justice to actually seeing the originals, but my high-definition TV and computer screen comes closest.

Art for the TV screen has already been invented evidently, since I found Ambient Art at Amazon.com. Amazon has other TV art collections too. But I can’t find anyone selling fine art collections of .jpgs for computer screens. I guess copyright owners are afraid .jpgs will be pirated all over the internet, just like MP3 files. Although the prints in art books are great for casual study, their reproductions are usually just terrible when you compare them to the originals. (I have to admit that some reproductions are better than the originals. I don’t know why. The Pissarro exhibit at the Brooks Museum in Memphis was somewhat disappointing to me because all the paintings seemed color faded whereas the reproductions online and in books seemed colorful.)

Here’s what I want someone to invent. I want a program that uses my desktop and screen saver to display art and if I hit a hot-key to narrate a history about the piece and if I hit another hot-key bring up text and hyperlinks for further study. I want this system to be open in such a way that when I buy an art book or visit a museum they can sell me a CD/DVD that contains a digital version of the show that I can add to my Desktop Gallery. I want it to be modular so that there will be folders for artists, show collections, and permanent collections. If a big collection is traveling around the country, I’d like a centralized service to offer a digitized version for my Desktop Art Gallery that reminds me when and where I can go see the originals. I’d loved it if art books came with a supplemental disk that added reproductions and commentary to my Desktop Art Gallery. And I supposed the same service could offer me shows by unknown new artists to try.

I’d also like my Desktop Art Gallery to generate shows by programmed criteria. For example, I might want to see all the paintings from France from 1700 to 1900 in chronological order. Or select a particular artist and pull his work from all the collections. I don’t know what the technical ramifications would be, but I’d like to examine each piece like Deckard examined the photograph in the movie Bladerunner. I guess this would mean making a grid over each painting and taking further 1920×1200 resolution images of each portion of the grid. And if people write up studies and critiques of paintings on the Internet, I’d like a way for this program to track them – maybe through Wikipedia.

This system really needs an open format, probably in XML, so my Desktop Art Gallery can grow with acquisitions from any source. I’d like it to be smart enough so it won’t duplicate paintings using the same image copy. Which means it needs to allow for multiple versions for each image. It’s actually very hard to photograph a painting and it would be worthwhile to have multiple perspectives. Brushstrokes can be seen depending on which angle the light comes from. Color is very hard to match. Some of the paintings I saw in Washington I’ve since seen in many different books and they all look different. Some don’t even look like the painting I saw since the colors are so jarringly different. I don’t know if there are calibration sensors for such copy work like there are for matching monitor colors with printer colors, but it sure would help if there were.

I do have some art collections on CD-ROM that came with art books, but the reproductions are tiny and the software crude. And there are some screen saver companies that do sell art collections, but they only work with their software – a closed system. For my dream system to work it has to be open. It’s too bad the copyright owners can’t trust .jpg or its future improvement because that would allow many programmers to try and invent such a system, or for an open source system to develop. I think DRM systems will go the way of the Dodo, but it will take time. And the world of art lovers might be such a small group that there just isn’t enough of a demand for product like I’m describing. But if you love art, try finding some good 1920×1200 images to study and you’ll see why I want this invention.

JWH 11/14/7

Inventions Wanted #3 – The Perfect DVR

Once you own a DVR, a digital video recorder, sometimes thought of as a TIVO, you’ll understand what a magnificent device it is for television lovers. The functionality is so useful you’ll want one on every TV set you own. However, that doesn’t mean DVRs can’t be improved.

Within a very short time you’ll want more hard disk space, especially if you’re recording shows in high definition. We can save 10-20 shows depending on length and quality. Our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD allows for an external SATA drive to be attached to the unit to expand storage capacity, but I’ve already got enough electronic boxes sitting on my television stand and too many plugs plugged into my surge protector. I would say a 320 gigabyte hard drive, about double our current capacity, would be about right. You want to keep a nice selection of shows for the family to watch when the mood strikes them, but you don’t want to create a junk hole like the drawer in the kitchen that collects everything but where you can’t find anything.

Now that brings up my first idea. It would be great to save shows to folders, so each family member could have their own selection of shows to control and protect. Space allocation should be assignable to each folder.

Next up is bookmarks. I’d like to be able to bookmark where I left off – and each show should have it’s own bookmarks. An even spiffier feature would be named bookmarks, so each family member can have their own. When a show is highlighted in the DVR directory, it should display how many bookmarks are placed on the show, that way people won’t erase any show someone is still watching.

One way to handle bookmarks would be to offer the option: delete up to this point. That would save a viewer’s place and add space back to the drive for more recording. These are computer hard drives, so adding such features should not be hard. It’s just computer programming.

The biggest feature I’d love in my next DVR is a built-in DVD player. I hate switching video sources and juggling two remotes. Why have a whole other box needing a second HDMI cable and HDMI port when it’s very logical to just combine the DVD and DVR players into one box. It would save power, remotes, and further simplify the use of televison. Better yet, make that built-in drive a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD recorder. Then if the hard drive gets too full I could off-load shows to disk.

Now this might be a total fantasy of a desire, but why not add a 5.1 sound amplifier into the box so I could jettison my AV receiver too? It would help if a new standard emerged for speaker cable connections or even wireless connections, so that the back side of this box wasn’t as big as my current receiver. I don’t expect high-end audiophile quality either. All I want is more simplicity in my setup.

Finally, and I know this is showing just how much of a TV whore I am, but I’d love another tuner. Susan and I can currently record two shows and watch a third from the recorded list, but quite often we wish we could record three shows at once.

If Comcast and Scientific Atlanta ever came out with this dream DVR we’d be loyal subscribers for life. By the way, I do feel the perfect DVR has to be part of the set-top box. I’ve messed with computer PVRs and they just don’t cut the cake. And standalone DVRs like TIVO just add complexity to my television viewing. My basic belief is a cable TV or satellite TV provider is only as good as their set-top and DVR combo box. It’s no longer how many channels they provide, but how easy they make the television viewing experience. Susan and I would hate to go back to the pre-DVR television days. The enjoyment of television watching has been improved by DVRs as much as when TV broadcasting added color.

jwh