Category: Random Ramblings

Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.

Smart fridge magnets make poetry

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

[tags]Poetry, magnets, Cool[/tags]

Senators see the light on broadcast flag

Over at EFF (support this group if you don’t already – they work to protect our digital rights), there is an article about how some Senators are turning against the broadcast flag. The reason for this is they now see that the broadcast flag would make Senator Stevens’ ipod fairly worthless. This matters, because Senator Stevens is one of the original proponents of the bill.

[tags]Broadcast flag, EFF, Digital rights[/tags]

Infinium gets $5 million funding?

In the “How in the world did that happen?” section today, we have news that Infinium, the company claiming to be making the Phantom game console, has secured an additional $5 million in funding to continue developing the system. There have been announcements for years of the soon-to-be released Phantom console. So far, the phantom identifier appears about right. From the article:

However, with a recent financial statement revealing that Infinium Labs still “has recurring losses from inception of $57,570,723, has a working capital deficiency of $10,085,662, a stockholders deficiency of $9,470,271 and has a negative cash flow from operations of $14,888,265 from inception”, and will need to pay significant cash amounts to game licensors and Phantom hardware contractors, the Game Service itself may have to wait a little longer before getting officially under way.

[tags]Phantom, Infinium, Vaporware, Gaming[/tags]