Post-it marries technology: divorce soon?

What happens when the good old post-it meets technology? Well, that's what MIT researchers must have wondered.

They have introduced a post-it featuring a RFID chip which sends what has been written to a program (running on a normal PC) that automatically creates a database of post-its and eventually communicates to Outlook meeting and events to keep track of.

Is this really needed?

Is this the right approach to "getting things done"?

I don't think that the post-it needs to be revived: it works because it's simple, fast and comes in nice colors.

Connecting it to the computer makes it less easier to use and creates a burden on the user: what if the PC is turned off? How are post-it kept synchronized between the computer and the fridge?

It's clear that the first time the post-it is not copied to the computer because it is turned off the user will stop using such device and will return the the old post-it.

Moreover I believe that smartphones have the potential to become the "digital post-it": think about the "Notes" application of the iPhone, isn't it enough?

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The best Do It Yourself Multi-Touch device

Probably multi-touch devices are the most exciting way to give inputs to a computer. Since having a multi-touch by buying a Microsoft Surface or an Apple iPhone would be too easy we want to make our own multi-touch device. Just for fun and to see what's the future without having to spend too much.

Surfing the web I found some interesting projects. In my opinion these are the most valuable for the reason I'm going to explain in the next paragraphs.

MT Mini by Seth Sandler

MT Mini

Probably this is the simpler multi-touch device I've seen. You can build it with extremely cheap materials and I think that it is ideal if you don't want to spend too much time in making the device. On the other side this is only a input device, you won't have your screen directly on your MTMini.

MultiTouch Display by BlaXwan

Multi Touch Display

This is a very useful page: it explains what kinds of multi-touch display you can build with some technology tips and the theory behind them. Since the prototype proposed uses Infrared instead of light it's more accurate but it requires more work to make it and it's a bit more expensive. It worths reading this link just to know a little of theory that could be useful even in other projects.

Johnny Lee's Wii remote projects

Wii Remote Project

This is probably the best example of DIY multi-touch application. If you ever wanted to do something like Tom Cruise in Minority Report does you have to build this device. All you need is a Wii Remote and a projector.

Before tcid and sirus begin complaining :-) because of I haven't mentioned their beloved OSX in the whole post I tell you that Bridger is working on a Multi-Touch device for OSX. Since TouchLib is Windows-Only he had to do some work to support his OS but seems he is doing a good job. Seth and BalXwan uses TouchLib, Johnny works in C# so you have to use Windows to control one of them device.

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Twine, keep an invitation and dive into semantic web

Yihong Ding invited me to Twine, the first mainstream semantic web application.

Twine produces a personalized knowledge network for every user by allowing them to find, share, and organize information from people they trust. Thinking Space

In this semantic approach the focus is in what you know, not in who you know. That allows you to create a personalized knowledge network without have to know who can give you the information you need. Topic, in the form of Twines, are the key of this application that helps us creating a hierarchy of interests to help you find exactly what you want searching by meanings and not by keywords.

Another point that distinguish Twine form common 2.0 networks is that not necessarily what you insert in your network should be published. You can use that application to store  and organize your knowledge in networks without having to tell the world you've done it.

For more information read this post.

I've few invitations available, if you would get one write down an email address on the comments.

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RSS day, spread the world

RSS is a way to get updates by sites you follow without having to go to the page to check for news.

It is clear that RSS is a powerful tool to receive updates from web sites and blogs you're interested in. With RSS you can visit a page only to read the fresh content, not just to check if there is any new article, avoiding to waste time looking for news.

On the other side RSS have a big issue. They're too addicting, in a busy day you could get so much news that you can't read, even if you try to do it. In fact when you start using RSS you will subscribe to any site you follow, making your subscription list bigger and bigger, vanishing the time earned using RSS for the few sites you followed in the pre-RSS era.

So add UnderTheWire to your RSS, just to let us know that you're aware ;-) It's easy, click on the orange button in your browser.

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Customize Vista start search

Via Channel 10

Do you think that Search Everywhere and Search the Internet is not enough for your Start Search?

Customize it is easy, just do the following things:

• Press WinKey and type gpedit.msc (Run it as administrator)
• Open the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Instant Search\Custom Instant Search Internet Search provider policy setting.
• Enable the policy setting, type provider name in the first textbox, add the address of the search provider you want to have in the second textbox, and click OK. You can find a list of providers at the end of this post.
• Try a Instant Search. If you can see the third provider you have done the work. In the other case you just have to open a command prompt and type gpupdate/force to immediately apply the new policy setting.

Some providers:

Wikipedia (To get other languages change en with your language code): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%w

Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=%w

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%w

The rule to find the URL for the search provider is to search TEST in the search engine, cut the URL of the result and replace TEST with %w.

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