Fascinating Digital Media Ecoscapes

I recently saw the display advertising map from Luma Partners and was dumbfounded by what I already knew was a complex environment.

Here's a link to the complete set, which is even more mind boggling.

And you thought a display advertising budget was your biggest headache!

Great April Fool's joke!

TigerDirect has a real sense of humor. Sending out one of their normal advertising emails for the Kube X16 on April 1st; here's the details (ha ha!)

Making parts from scratch

When I first heard of 3D printers, I thought it was vaporspeak. I'd read about such devices in some good Sci Fi stories, but they seemed at least 50 years off, not something that would occur anytime soon.

Well, step aside and embrace the future! Now, you can fabricate small prototype parts and items (just plastic so far) at home if you want to pony up to do it.

The idea of direct CAD  to Fab is an amazing jump, even if it's just for plastic parts so far. Expect to see some noticeable advances in various industries from the application of this technology.

Some companies producing these machines:

• 3D Systems Corp.
• Hewlett Packard (the HP DesignJet 3D)

Why quality matters

Sort of a silly and obvious subject, but here's a real-life example.

On Jan 27, I received a new notebook from a large off-shore manufacturer. It's a generally satisfying computer, with the exception that I noticed one or two pixel failures on the display. Knowing that most manufacturers will state that one or two pixel failures are within acceptable tolerances and since it wasn't that big of a deal, I let it go.

A few weeks later, I noticed more dead pixels had shown up! Hmm, oh well. Not the best quality display, I suppose. I was mildly disturbed that the issue was growing, but hoped the worst was over.

Of course, it wasn't! There have been a few more pixel failures since then and this morning, when I started the laptop, there's a one-pixel wide vertical line on the left side of the display that's there to stay :-(

OK, that's it! This display clearly has a problem and it's getting worse over time. Now, our IT department will have to replace the unit, lots of people (myself included) will invest time and effort, and a lot of needless expense will occur just because of this issue. I sure hope its limited to my unit and not a larger issue, but I have to admit I suspect that mine might be the tip of an iceberg...

So, by now, it should be obvious that quality does matter!

List of Top Innovative Companies

Here's a link to Fast Company's list of top innovative companies. There are some interesting ones on the list!

Amusing physics comment

You can't always get what you want! From Lederman & Hill's book, Quantum Physics for Poets (a wonderful book and a recommended read):

The notion that nature (or God) plays dice with subatomic stuff never sat well with Einstein, Schrodinger, de Broglie, Planck, and others. Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumnavigated, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.

The OLED future dims

According to this IEEE article, the future for OLEDs is less than bright. That's unfortunate, for those of us who've became enamored of organic technology from numerous Sci Fi stories and Babylon 5 in particular. It's always intriguing to think out of the box and consider contrary technologies that are self-healing like the human body or as vital and tenacious as biological processes. Oh well, CFLs and LCDs are a growing option and the incandescent's days and uses are clearly eroding.

Futil v2.4 available for download

I've posted futil v2.4 on SourceForge for download.

This minor release includes two new scripts:

• mhp - Modify Headers parser (useful for sorting and manipulating the header definitions in the Firefox Modify Headers add-on).
• purl - Parse URL script (parses one or more URLs on the input displaying them in an easy format for human eyeballs to read :-)

Enjoy!

Don't count that you can out-run that robot

Check out this interesting article on onmiwheels, robots will be able to change direction much faster than we can ;-)

Optimal settings for better PDF presentation on a Kobo eReader

Through experimentation, I found a set of MS Word 2007 settings that will allow a PDF to be generated with optimal presentation and pagination experience on the Kobo eReader.