Inventions – Page 16 – Auxiliary Memory

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

Inventions Wanted #2 – The Solar Power Tree

Update 8/19/11: Kid tests out solar tree collector

I think crystal balls are showing households should become more energy independent, or at least, less dependent on distant sources of energy. The first line of attack on this problem is to just use less energy, but another solution, which for me is a long term solution, is to produce energy locally. This is neither easy nor cheap – $12,000 might buy me a modest system that would supplement my energy needs, but it’s doubtful that it’s cost effective. 12k is equivalent to 60 months of $200 payments, and that would buy a lot more power company energy than I would generate. In other words, generating your own energy isn’t about saving money. At least for now.

Owning my own energy producing system would get me some energy independence if we have blackouts or other failures of the central energy grid and would let me us less energy from polluting sources, or less energy from nations I don’t care to support. My worry is the energy production grids in this country won’t keep up with demand. Producing my own energy would reduce the load on the central systems, contributing to the common good, and give me some electricity when things are bad, contributing to my selfish interests. In other words, if the forecast is for global warming, I want to stay locally cool.

The easiest was to produce electricity at home is with a generator, but that’s not a long term practical solution if we’re talking gasoline generators. Fuel cells may become practical, and most homes are ill suited for wind or geothermal electric generation. The only other solution is photovoltaic panels. Now my house is completely hidden under a canopy of trees, which is a natural way to keep cool in the summer and save electricity to boot. Memphis, the city I live in, has so many trees it feels like the suburbs are really houses built in forests. And I don’t want to cut down my trees. I love the shade and they suck up lots of carbon.

The invention I would like to see is a solar power tree – a photovoltaic collector shaped like a big Christmas tree that I can raise above the tree line – but not look like a big eyesore. It could also serve a dual purpose of being a HDTV antenna or hold a satellite dish. I picture this device sitting on an extending pole that can be automatically raised and lowered depending on weather conditions. All the photovoltaic panels I’ve seen are flat, but flat panels are not something good to send skyward because of their aerodynamic drag. Trees, branches and leaves are a natural shape that’s suited to collect sunlight and handle strong winds.

What’s needed is the maximum surface area to collect energy that can easily shift to follow the sun, low weight, and high strength to handle wind and rain. It will also need to withstand lightning. I have no idea how to build such a thing, but if it was reasonable priced, worked well, and produced a decent amount of electricity I’d want one.

If a variety of solar energy collectors could be designed and marketed cheaply enough, that would have a major impact on society, because how would things be different if every house generated 20-80% of its own clean energy? I think a lot of people fear the world won’t adapt to dealing with global warming because it will require too much change from people. What if the changes required actually benefited people directly? Instead of making sacrifices, you bought something at Home Depot, like buying another appliance and it made your home better, is that such a sacrifice?

JWH

Supplemental 11/23/7. I got to visit the Solar Decathlon in Washington, DC this past October and it furthered my desire for a solar collector shaped like a tree. All the houses were built with the assumption they would be shaped and lined up for the maximum exposure to the sun. This isn’t practical for retrofitting an older home, especially one where trees block the sunlight. I asked about other kinds of solar collectors but didn’t find much encouragement for my proposed design.

Then Nanosolar was mentioned in the December 2007 issue of Popular Science as their Innovation of the Year. The PowerSheet product is a cheap film-like material sold in rolls as a solar collector that can be applied easier than the more bulkier old-style box collectors. It’s manufactured rather than assembled making it cheaper. It’s not hard to imagine that this stuff being produced as solar leaves that could be assembled into three shapes.

Using fractal mathematics its probably possible to design an optimal pattern of leaves and branching that would work with the electrical wiring needed to channel electrons down the leaves, stems, branches and trunk, like the reverse osmosis of sap. Further, it might be possible, within the need to be energy efficient, to design this solar collecting tree with servo motors that would keep the leaves and branches oriented to the sun. If a complete system could be sold for $5-10k that produced enough electricity to supplement a normal house need’s then it might be practical for commercial success.

It would not have to have a battery system to be useful. As long as a local collector reduces the overall drain on the grid providing power during the day, and using grid power during the dark, the overall effect would be to reduce dependence on foreign oil, reduce the carbon footprint of the house and improve the reliability of the grid system.

UPDATE 10-28-08

Open Energy Corporation shows off an energy tree prototype.

Inventions Wanted 001 – The Memory Bank

In our age of technology new inventions flood the market daily, but the pace still isn’t fast enough for me. I can always think of new things I wished I owned or services that I wished existed. Here’s an example. I’d like an internet company where people could register photos by date and location, for sharing. I’m obsessed with memory, probably because I have such a bad one, and it would be great to go to such a photo database and ask if there are any photos of Maine Avenue, at Homestead Air Force Base, in Homestead, Florida from 1961-63? Or Air Base Elementary from the same time and place.

If I had known how bad my memory would become when I got older, I would have taken one photo a day when I was a kid to document all the places where I lived and grew up. I lived in a lot of places and met a lot of people and I’d really, really love to see them now. Are there enough people who think like to me to start such a business?

Imagine being able to input an address and get a list of photos taken near that address over a range of years. Or enter a person’s name and the name of a school and location and get a screen of thumbnails to click on. Even more fantastic is if such a photo database could be combined with a Virtual Reality viewer and I could walk from my old home to my old school via a series of stitched together images wearing VR glasses and then see a collection of mug shots of my fifth and sixth grade classmates. Cooler yet, would be the ability to click on a face and then see a series of photos showing that person growing old.

Of course, back in the 1960s people didn’t take photos like they do now. There’s a chance that nobody took a photo of Maine Avenue back then, or even inside the classrooms at Air Base Elementary. My family tended to take pictures on special occasions, usually at Christmas.

My parents would have me and my sister Becky walk outside where the light was good and snap a single shot of us in our new Easter outfits and then not finish the roll for three years. What I’d love to see now is pictures of houses, cars, streets, school rooms, stores, and all those places we hung out in daily or pictures of people not in my family that we used to know.

Using the same system, users could register film and video clips, sound recordings and any other clues about the past. I even have a name for this hypothetical company: The Memory Bank.

By the way, I tried to go back to Maine Avenue a few years ago. My old neighborhood was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew and bulldozed away. All that’s left is a vast close cropped field patterned with flat black streets that I imagined looked like a printed circuit board from the sky. Like a dummy, I didn’t take a picture that day. I wished I had.

jwh