Will it bend and succeed?

Bendable screens are now possible, we should be expecting this technology to be available to consumers within 5 yrs time.

Article here

But then it doesn't really show much usefulness. The inventions are there but then it just only looks cool.

Applying HCI into these concepts, this is what it came up in my mind if I were to attract consumers:

Roll out projector screen

It will display without the needs of powerful projector lights.
Energy savings and light weight to carry around without the lense.


Slide/Pop out mobile phone screen.

Well some people may still depends on keypads maybe instead of the screen is made up of plastic cover, a slide out or pop out screen with a press of a button might be cool since these screen are thin it will be slim and it protects from scratches too!


Windsscreen in car

This can also provide useful information to users without looking away from the road. A turn by turn navigation feature will be great useful for road warriors.

Teach Parents Tech

A great way to let other people teach our parent instead of us. http://www.teachparentstech.org/

Extreme geek marathoner...

This guy is totally a geek!!! He create his own invention called iRun, using 4 iPhones and 1 iPad in total. Providing him realtime video recording, GPS location, heart rate monitoring data, environment temperature recording and CO2 emission level. It also comes along with a iPhone app called runkeeper and people can also send twitter messages to his iPad. Really kudos to him..

A Mario hack level that play by itself + playing a song.

This is by far the craziest Mario Hack I have seen, the level play a series of famous jap songs remix and make the level to sync the rhythm with the song. Moreover the its a level that play itself, meaning the player does not need do anything. Its 11 min long so enjoy!

First Try on Microsoft Xbox Kinect

Was invited to the exclusive event to get to see and demo the preview of Xbox Kinect. So far the motion capture was pretty accurate from what I see. Accuracy wise is about 95%. It is able to detect the vital point of the human body except for some cases where clothes might be cut off a bit but it doesn't really affect the gameplay.

So far the impressive game which I see for now are, Your Shape Fitness Evolved by Ubisoft, Kinect Adventures by Microsoft and Dance Central by Harmonix.

Java-4-Ever Trailer...

Gosh man this is so hilarious. Just take the joke lightly and watch the trailer. :)

First Demo on Robotics

Few months ago I blog a post on a robot that can solve rubik cubes, this had led me into great interest on exploring more on robotics which eventually put me into another expensive hobby. On exploring more on affordable and customisable robots, I have made my decision on getting Lego Mindstorms. Reason being its affordable, customisable and even programmable using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio R3 which they are now giving free! :) I went to my local retailer and found out it has been out of stock for quite sometimes. The only place you can find is from the Toy 'r us which cost like 499?! Instead of getting at that price, I went online and get it which was much cheaper



Finally it arrived.

As the box stated, you can build your first robot within like 30min and get it programmed in 1 min if you can understand how programming logic works. So for my first robot, which I named it 'Robby' ~_~, I follow the instruction and set the NXT program(preset commands) from NXT Brick(The main controller unit) which you can give only like 5 instructions to tell what the robot should do. So I just simply set Robby to move forward once it started and if (sensor touch) hitting any obstacle in front will move backwards and loop the instruction again (4 instructions).



On My next demo, I will rebuild robby using the development kit provided by Lego and send instructions to robot to understand more on its behaviour what it can do.

My First WP7 App - Japanese Flash Card

I was reading the recent news about the Windows Phone 7 development and how Microsoft wanted to push their product to the market quickly. They promise that developing on the device prove to be not a problem for exisiting developers who has subtle knowledge on C# and Silverlight.

Since I am free for these few days, I decided to take up the challenge and began reading up developing apps for WP7.
Here are some of the links for those who might be interested in learning it.
WP7 Samples

I strongly recommend to people to watch these videos. It helps to understand the basic features and specs on how silverlight interact with the code-behind C# (sorry no VB.)
WP7 Jump Start Session

To begin developing on anything, one must have an objective and idea what to develop. What I think of is building a simple Japanese Flash Card app which has already exist on most platforms except for this one.

Silverlight tends to be a bit like ASP + XML 'mojo'. I personally find it more easier to code than in ASP.net. Overall I discover that it helps to reduce alot of client-side scripting. There is still much to learn for me as my current app, I put it more in code-behind.

Here are my 1st screenshots released for my first build.



It took me rather very short time about 3 days to learn and 4 days to build WP7 because I have some background knowledge on C# and XNA. (hey! I was once a game developer) So picking up WP7 is not a hurdle for me. My missing knowledge is just Silverlight. My app consist some of the libraries from XNA framework which I am using TouchPanel class to detect fingers touching on the panel. This was quite a challenge for me as I have no knowledge on developing touchscreen application and this was my first app. In XNA 4.0, they include the Gesture class but unfortunately it only works with the real device and not on the emulator. I hope to get a loan set from Microsoft to test that out. :)

Program logic wise is quite a challenge for me as my purpose of this app is to make it feel like you are holding a deck of cards on your hand.

I have programmatically inlcude the gesture for flicking left or right for the next character. This part was quite easy until I came into a problem flicking up and down to advance to the next sets of characters. I did a bit of research on other mobile platform and discover that there is no application doing it that way. (which might explain iphone photo gallery has only left and right gesture) There is no way you can determine if you are flicking up or left if you need to predict something behind that screen. (If there is please let me know which app)

Upon learning it, I decided to discard the flick up and down feature and replace it with double tap. If I tap twice on the upper screen, it will move according to the region I tapping which in this case up and down.

One thing unique about WP7 feature is that you can style your app based on the phone profile.
In this screenshot I just simply change the color theme and my app is automatically applied on that style.

Though the functionalities are almost completed. This app is still far from completion as there is still alot of features like additional syllabograms such as katagana and UI improvement not included in this build yet.

An effective way to turn your sim cut into micro-sim - Cut My Sim

via cutmysim.com

Thinking about subscribing for micro sim because of ipad doesnt like your sim? From what I understand, Singapore Telcos are charging more expensive for the micro sim subscriptions. So its better to use cut my sim if you want to save some cash but then Im pretty sure there is not a need to order one. I guess those shops which sells mobile phones should be able to help you for a small fee.

Gmail to work on blackberry native mail.

Some of you may encounter some problems with using Blackberry Native Mail app to work with the gmail. Whether you tried to add to your account from the Blackberry website or do it from your phone, it will shows

“Invalid email address or password: Please verify your email address and password. The information you provided is incorrect. If the error persists contact mydomain.com (your email provider).”

At first moment, you thought that you may have input the wrong login or password. You tried to login from the gmail website and it worked as normal. Google itself does not provide any solution for this. I happen to stumble across google captcha. For some authentication website, you may need to unlock it. For gmail users you should go to Google Unlock Captcha. For those using the Google App Mail, you should go to this url https://www.google.com/a/mydomain.com/UnlockCaptcha. It works for me at least after I unlocked it.

Note: Remember to enable smtp for your mail account also.