I’m waiting for the right price point on a good >24” monitor with a narrow bezel to drop low enough that I can buy 4 or 5 of them to make a panoramic display wall without the gaps being too large.

However, another idea that I think would be very cool would be to exploit the gaps between the monitors to create a simulated set of windows in a wall looking out onto a scene. It’s been done before in lab experiments with single monitors, but not as a large panoramic installation or something long term from what I understand. The value in the multi display approach is that now the gap between displays is a feature rather than a problem, and viewers can see the whole picture by moving. (Video walls must edit out the seams from the picture, removing the wonderful seamlessness of a good panorama.) We restore the seamlessness in the temporal dimension.

To do this, it would be necessary to track the exact location of the eyes of the single viewer. This would only work for one person. From the position of the eyes (in all 3 dimensions) and the monitors the graphics card would then project the panoramic image on the monitors as though they were windows in a wall. As the viewer’s head moved, the image would move the other way. As the viewer approached the wall (to a point) the images would expand and move, and likewise shrink when moving away. Fortunately this sort of real time 3-D projection is just what modern GPUs are good at.

The monitors could be close together, like window panes with bars between them, or further apart like independent windows. Now the size of the bezels is not important.

For extra credit, the panoramic scene could be shot on layers, so it has a foreground and background, and these could be moved independently. To do this is would be necessary to shoot the panorama from spots along a line and both isolate foreground and background (using parallax, focus and hand editing) and also merge the backgrounds from the shots so that the background pixels behind the foreground ones are combined from the left and right shots. This is known as “background subtraction” and there has been quite a lot of work in this area. I’m less certain over what range this would look good. You might want to shoot above and below to get as much of the hidden background as possible in that layer. Of course having several layers is even better.

The next challenge is to very quickly spot the viewer’s head. One easy approach that has been done, at least with single screens, is to give the viewer a special hat or glasses with easily identified coloured dots or LEDs. It would be much nicer if we could do face detection as quickly as possible to identify an unadorned person. Chips that do this for video cameras are becoming common, the key issue is whether the detection can be done with very low latency — I think 10 milliseconds (100hz) would be a likely goal. The use of cameras lets the system work for anybody who walks in the room, and quickly switch among people to give them turns. A camera on the wall plus one above would work easily, two cameras on the left and right sides of the wall should also be able to get position fairly quickly.

Even better would be doing it with one camera. With one camera, one can still get a distance to the subject (with less resolution) by examining changes in the size of features on the head or body. However, that only provides relative distance, for example you can tell if the viewer got 20% closer but not where they started from. You would have to guess that distance, or learn it from other queues (such as a known sized object like the hat) or even have the viewer begin the process by standing on a specific spot. This could also be a good way to initiate the process, especially for a group of people coming to view the illusion. Stand still in the spot for 5 seconds until it beeps or flashes, and then start moving around.

If the face can be detected with high accuracy and quickly, a decent illusion should be possible. I was inspired by this clever simulated 3-D videoconferencing system which simulates 3-D in this way and watches the face of the viewer.

You need high resolution photos for this, as only a subset of the image appears in the “windows” at any given time, particularly when standing away from the windows. It could be possible to let the viewer get reasonably close to the “window” if you have a gigapan style panorama, though a physical barrier (even symbolic) to stop people from getting so close that the illusion breaks would be a good idea.

As digital cameras have developed enough resolution to work as scanners, such as in the scanning table proposal I wrote about earlier, some people are also using them to digitize slides. You can purchase what is called a “slide copier” which is just a simple lens and holder which goes in front of the camera to take pictures of slides. These have existed for a long time as they were used to duplicate slides in film days. However, they were not adapted for negatives since you can’t readily duplicate a colour negative this way, because it is a negative and because it has an orange cast from the substrate.

There is at least one slide copier (The Opteka) which offers a negative strip holder, however that requires a bit of manual manipulation and the orange cast reduces the color gamut you will get after processing the image. Digital photography allows imaging of negatives because we can invert and colour adjust the result.

To get the product I want, we don’t have too far to go. First of all, you want a negative strip holder which has wheels in the sprocket holes. Once you have placed your negative strip correctly with one wheel, a second wheel should be able to advance exactly one frame, just like the reel in the camera did when it was shooting. You may need to do some fine adjustments, but it is also satisfactory to have the image cover more than 36mm so that you don’t have to be perfectly accurate, and have the software do some cropping.

Secondly, you would like it so that ideally, after you wind one frame, it triggers the shutter using a remote release. (Remote release is sadly a complex thing, with many different ways for different cameras, including wired cable releases where you just close a contact but need a proprietary connector, infrared remote controls and USB shooting. Sadly, this complexity might end up adding more to the cost than everything else, so you may have to suffer and squeeze it yourself.) As a plus, a little air bulb should be available to blow air over negatives before shooting them.

Next, you want an illuminator behind the negative or slide. For slides you want white of course. For negatives however, you would like a colour chosen to undo the effects of the orange cast, so that the gamut of light received matches the range of the camera sensors. This might be done most easily with 3 LEDs matched to camera sensors in the appropriate range of brightness.

You could also simply make a product out of this light, to be used with existing slide duplicators; that’s the simplest way to do this in the small scale.

Why do all this, when a real negative scanner is not that expensive, and higher quality? Digitizing your negatives this way would be fast. Negative scanners all tend to be very slow. This approach would let you slot in a negative strip, and go wind-click-wind-click-wind-click-wind-click in just a couple of seconds, not unlike shooting fast on an old film camera. You would get quite decent scans with today’s high quality DLSRs. My 5d Mark II with 21 megapixels would effectively be getting around 4000 dpi, though with bayer interpolation. If you wanted a scan for professional work or printing, you could then go back to that negative and do it on a more expensive negative scanner, cleaning it first etc.

Another solution is just to send all the negatives off to one of the services which send them to India for cheap scanning, though these tend to be at a more modest resolution. This approach would let you quickly get a catalog of your negatives.

Light Table

Of course, to get a really quick catalog, another approach would be to create a grid of 3 rows of negative strip holder which could then be placed on a light table — ideally a light table with a blueish light to compensate for the orange cast. Take a photo of the entire grid to get 12 individual photos in one shot. This will result (on the 5D) in about 1.5 megapixel versions of each negative. Not sufficient to work with but fine for screen and web use, and not too far off the basic service you get from the consumer scanning companies.

I have some of my old negatives in plastic sheets that go in binders, so I could do it directly with them, but it’s work to put negatives into these and would be much easier to slide strips into a plastic holder which keeps them flat. Of course, another approach would be to simply lay the strips on the light table and put a sheet of clear plexiglass on top of them, and shoot in a dim room to avoid reflections.

Negative viewer

It would also be useful if digital cameras or video cameras tossed in a “view colour negative” mode which did its best to show an invert of the live preview image with orange cast reverted. Then you could browse your negatives by holding them up to your camera (in macro mode) and see them in their true form, if at lower resolution. Of course you can usually figure out what’s in a negative but sometimes it’s not so easy and requires the loupe, and it might not in this case.

I have several sheetfed scanners. They are great in many ways — though not nearly as automatic as they could be — but they are expensive and have their limitations when it comes to real-world documents, which are often not in pristine shape.

I still believe in sheetfed scanners for the home, in fact one of my first blog posts here was about the paperless home, and some products are now on the market similar to this design, though none have the concept I really wanted — a battery powered scanner which simply scans to flash cards, and you take the flash card to a computer later for processing.

My multi-page document scanners will do a whole document, but they sometimes mis-feed. My single-page sheetfed scanner isn’t as fast or fancy but it’s still faster than using a flatbed because the act of putting the paper in the scanner is the act of scanning. There is no “open the top, remove old document, put in new one, lower top, push scan button” process.

Here’s a design that might be cheap and just what a house needs to get rid of its documents. It begins with a table which has an arm coming out from one side which has a tripod screw to hold a digital camera. Also running up the arm is a USB cable to the camera. Also on the arm, at enough of an angle to avoid glare and reflections are lighting, either white LED or CCFL tubes.

In the bed of the table is a capacitive sensor able to tell if your hand is near the table, as well as a simple photosensor to tell if there is a document on the table. All of this plugs into a laptop for control.

You slap a document on the table. As soon as you draw your hand away, the light flashes and the camera takes a picture. Then go and replace or flip the document and it happens again. No need to push a button, the removal of your hand with a document in place causes the photo. A button will be present to say “take it again” or “erase that” but you should not need to push it much. The light should be bright enough so the camera can shoot fairly stopped down, allowing a sharp image with good depth of field. The light might be on all the time in the single-sided version.

The camera can’t be any camera, alas, but many older cameras in the 6MP range would get about 300dpi colour from a typical letter sized page, which is quite fine. Key is that the camera has macro mode (or can otherwise focus close) and can be made to shoot over USB. An infrared LED could also be used to trigger many consumer cameras. Another plus is manual focus. It would be nice if the camera can just be locked in focus at the right distance, as that means much faster shooting for typical consumer digital cameras. And ideally all this (macro mode, manual focus) can all be set by USB control and thus be done under the control of the computer.

Of course, 3-D objects can also be shot in this way, though they might get glare from the lights if they have surfaces at the wrong angles. A fancier box would put the lights behind cloth diffusers, making things bulkier, though it can all pack down pretty small. In fact, since the arm can be designed to be easily removed, the whole thing can pack down into a very small box. A sheet of plexi would be available to flatten crumpled papers, though with good depth of field, this might not strictly be necessary.

One nice option might be a table filled with holes and a small suction pump. This would hold paper flat to the table. It would also make it easy to determine when paper is on the table. It would not help stacks of paper much but could be turned off, of course.

A fancier and bulkier version would have legs and support a 2nd camera below the table, which would now be a transparent piece of plexiglass. Double sided shots could then be taken, though in this case the lights would have to be turned off on the other side when shooting, and a darkened room or shade around the bottom and part of the top would be a good idea, to avoid bleed through the page. Suction might not be such a good idea here. The software should figure if the other side is blank and discard or highly compress that image. Of course the software must also crop images to size, and straighten rectangular items.

There are other options besides the capacitive hand sensor. These include a button, of course, a simple voice command detector, and clever use of the preview video mode that many digital cameras now have over USB. (ie. the computer can look through the camera and see when the document is in place and the hand is removed.) This approach would also allow gesture commands, little hand signals to indicate if the document is single sided, or B&W, or needs other special treatment.

The goal however, is a table where you can just slap pages down, move your hand away slightly and then slap down another. For stacks of documents one could even put down the whole stack and take pages off one at a time though this would surely bump the stack a bit requiring a bit of cleverness in straightening and cropping. Many people would find they could do this as fast as some of the faster professional document scanners, and with no errors on imperfect pages. The scans would not be as good as true scanner output, but good enough for many purposes.

In fact, digital camera photography’s speed (and ability to handle 3-D objects) led both Google Books and the Internet Archive to use it for their book scanning projects. This was of course primarily because they were unwilling to destroy books. Google came up with the idea of using a laser rangefinder to map the shape of the curved book page to correct any distortions in it. While this could be done here it is probably overkill.

One nice bonus here is that it’s very easy to design this to handle large documents, and even to be adjustable to handle both small and large documents. Normally scanners wide enough for large items are very expensive.

After every RV trip (I’m back from Burning Man) I think of more I want RVs to do. This year, as we have for many years, we built a power distribution system with a master generator rather than having each RV run its own noisy, smelly and inefficient generator. However, this is expensive and a lot of work for a small group, it is cheap and a lot of work for a larger group.

There’s been a revolution in small generator design of late thanks to the declining cost of inverters and other power conversion. A modern quality generator feeds the output of its windings to circuits to step up and step down the voltage to produce the required power. The output power is cleaner and more stable, and the generator is spun at different RPMs based on the power load, making it quieter and more efficient. With many models, you can also combine the internal output of two generators to produce a higher power generator.

RVs have come with expensive old-style generators that are quieter than cheap ones, and which produce better power, but today they are moving to inverter generators. With an inverter generator, it’s also possible to draw on the RV batteries for power surges (such as starting an AC or microwave) beyond what the generator can do.

I’m interested in the potential for smarter power, so what I would like to see is a way for a group of RVs with new generation power systems to plug together. In this way, they could all make use of the power in the other vehicles, and in most cases only a fraction of the generators would need to be running to provide power to all. (For example, at night, only one generator could power a whole cluster. In the day, with ACs running, several would need to run, but it would be very unlikely to have to run all, or even 75% of them.)  read more »

RVs all have a fresh water tank. When you rent one, they will often tell you not to drink that water. That’s because the tanks are being filled up in all sorts of random places, out of the control of the rental company, and while it’s probably safe, they don’t want to promise it, nor disinfect the tank every rental.

I recently got a small “pen” which you put in a cup of water and it shines a UV light for 30 seconds to kill any nasties in the water. While I have not tried to test it on infected water, I presume that it works.

So it seems it makes sense to me to install this sort of UV tube in the fresh water tank of RVs. Run it from time to time, and particularly after a fill, and be sure the water is clean. Indeed, with an appropriate filter, and a 2nd pump, such an RV could happily fill its water tank from clear lakes and streams, allowing longer dry camping which should have a market. Though of course the gray/black water tanks still will get full, but outside showers and drinking do not fill those tanks. A urination-only toilet could also be done if near a stream or lake.

Many RVs come with generators, and the air conditioner is the item that demands it be a high power generator. The Generator needs to be big enough to run the AC, and in theory let you do other things like microwave when you run it. It also has to be big enough to handle the surge that the AC motor takes when the AC starts up.

This surge is huge, and will often overload a generator, particularly external generators that are commonly used on smaller RVs. To fix this problem, there’s been a bit of effort to develop “soft start” electric motor technologies that start up motors slowly, and store charge in a big capacitor in order to provide the surge.

However, the RV also has a deep cycle battery and (if a motorhome) an engine starting battery. Both these batteries can usually deliver 100 or more amps in a burst. (The engine starting battery can deliver several hundred.)

Today, high-power inverters have gotten much cheaper, even those that can deliver 500 to 1,000 watts (and peak to far more) are getting cheap. I have wondered why it has not become standard to include a high power inverter in any RV so that small 110v appliances can’t be run off the battery for short times, rather than firing up the generator. To microwave something for 30 seconds requires starting the generator which is quite wasteful, and also noisy. Of course, what runs off the battery should still run on 12 volts, and some things (like the fridge in electric mode) should not run off an inverter. Short microwave bursts, and a few hours of flatscreen TV watching can run off an inverter.

And so my proposal is that such an inverter also be available to provide surge power to the AC compressor when it starts, even if the generator or shore power is on. The extra 1000 or so watts the inverter can provide would allow the use of a smaller, cheaper generator. This requires an inverter that can sync to the phase of the incoming AC, and of course safety circuits to assure that power is not fed back into the shore power port when it is disconnected.

Today, the big trend in generators is actually to have them use such high-power inverters. The generators are thus free to generate dirty power, and to run at whatever RPM is best for them at the time. The inverter cleans up the power and puts out clean, constant voltage. There are modest losses but overall it’s a win, as you get a generator that is much more efficient and quiet, and better quality power. Many suspect that RV generators will switch to that approach. In this case, it becomes much easier to have an integrated inverter generator able to also draw from the battery for its surges. No need for grid tie logic in this case.

To wit, one could see a system where a 2kw inverter generator, able to boost to 3.5kw by adding in the battery, could be enough for a typical RV, even with a decent sized AC. You might have to have a circuit that says “If the microwave or other big load is on, don’t start the compressor” but that would only be an issue if you wanted to microwave something for a long time on high. Note in a proper AC the compressor is not running all the time, so the AC would not be off — it would just not be doing on cycles during the microwave use.

There would probably be some 110v plugs in the RV which are marked “On under shore or generator power only” vs “always on,” or possibly switches to control if they are on the inverter or not, since there are loads you would want to make sure stay off if running only on battery. A little more complexity to the internal wiring, but a big saving on generator size and a better dry camping experience. It also means a more usable RV when plugging into a 15 amp external shore power line. In many RVs, plugging into 15 amps is not enough to start the AC, and certainly not enough to run the AC and another device. The power control system would want to know if it’s plugged into 15A, 20A or the normal 30A. And it would also want to notice if something is drawing too much battery power and shut it off before the battery gets too low.

Obviously as well, the 12 volt converter and battery charger must only run off true shore power or the generator, never off the inverter!

In my quest for the idea panorama head, I have recently written up some design notes and reviews. I found that the automatic head I tried, the beta version of the Gigapan turned out to be too slow for my tastes. I can shoot by hand much more quickly.

Manual pano heads either come with a smooth turning rotator with markers, or with a detent system that offers click-stops at intervals, like 15, 20 or 30 degrees. Having click-stops is great in theory — easy to turn, much less chance of error, more exact positioning. But it turns out to have its problems.

First, unless you shoot with just one lens, no one interval is perfect. I used to shoot all my large panos with a 10 degree interval which most detent systems didn’t even want to support. Your best compromise is to pick a series of focal lengths that are multiples. So if you shoot with say a 50mm and near-25mm lens, you can use a 15 degree interval, and just go 2-clicks for 30 degrees and so on. (It’s not quite this simple, you need more overlap at the wider focal lengths.)

Changing the click stops is a pain on some rotators — it involves taking apart the rotator, which is too much no matter how easy they make that. The new Nodal Ninja rotators and some others use a fat rotator with a series of pins. This is good, but the rotator alone is $200.

Click stops have another downside. You want them to be firm, but when they are, the “click” sets up vibrations in the assembly, which has a long lever arm, especially if there is a telephoto lens. Depending on the assembly it can take a few seconds for those vibrations to die down.

So here’s a proposal that might be a winner: electronic click stops. The rotator ring would have fine sensor marks on it, which would be red by a standard photosensor. This would be hooked up to an inexpensive microcontroller. The microcontroller in turn would have a small piezo speaker and/or a couple of LEDs. The speaker would issue a beep when the camera was in the right place, and also issue a sub-tone which changes as you get close to the right spot — a “warmer/colder” signal to let you find it quickly. LEDs could blink faster and faster as you get warmer, and go solid when on the right spot. They would also warn you if you drifted too far from the spot before shooting.

Now this alone would be quite useful, and of course, fully general as it could handle any interval desired. Two more things are needed — a way to set the interval, and optionally a way to ease the taking of the photos.

To set the interval, you might first reset the device by giving it a quick spin of 360 degrees. It would give a distinctive beep when ready. Then you would look through the viewfinder and move the desired interval. Your interval would be set. If doing a multi-row you would have 2 sensors for angle, and you would do this twice. You could have a button for this, but I am interested in avoiding buttons. Now you would be ready to shoot. It would give a special signal after you had shot 360 degrees or the width of the first row in a multi-row. Other modes could be set with other large motions of the rotator, such as moving it back and forth 2 times quickly, or other highly atypical rotations.

(If you want buttons, an interesting way to do this is to have an IR sensor and to accept controls from other remotes, such as a universal TV remote set to a Sony TV, or some other tiny remote control which is readily available. Then you can have all the buttons and modes you want.)

We do need to have one button (for on/off) and since off could be a long press-and-hold, the button could also be used for interval setting and panorama starting.

The next issue is automatic shooting or shottign detection. The sensor, since it will be finely tuned, will be able to tell when you’ve stopped at the proper stop. When all movement ceases, it could take the shot without you pressing the shutter using a bunch of methods. It might also be useful to have you manually control the shutter, but via a button on the panohead rather than the camera’s own shutter or cable release. First of all, this would let the head know you had taken the shot, so it could warn you about any shot that was missing. It could also know if you bumped the head or moved it during any shot — when doing long exposures there is a risk of doing this, especially if you are too eager for the next shot. Secondly, you should always be using a cable release anyway, so building one into the pano head makes some sense. However, this would not be included in the simplest form of the product.

One very cheap way of having the pano head fire the shutter is infrared. Many cameras, though sadly not all, will let you control the shutter with infrared. Digital SLRs stopped doing this for a while, but now Canon at least has reversed things and supports infrared remote on the 5D Mark II. I think we can expect to see more of this in future. Another way is with a custom cable into the camera’s cable release port. The non-standard connectors, such as the Canon N3, can now be bought but this does mean having various connector adapters available.

A third way is via USB. This is cheap and the connector is standard, but not all cameras will fire via USB. Fortunately more and more microcontroller chipsets are getting USB built in. The libgphoto2 open source library will control a lot of cameras. Of course, if you have a fancy controller, you can do much more with USB, such as figure out the field of view of the camera from EXIF but that’s beyond the scope of a simple system like this.

The fourth way is a shutter servo, again beyond the scope of a cheap system like this. In addition, all these methods beg more UI, and that means more buttons and even eventually a screen if an LED and speaker can’t tell you all you need. However, in this case what’s called for is a button which you can use to fire the shutter, and which you can press and hold before starting a pano to ask for auto firing.

The parts cost of all this is quite small, especially in any bulk. Cheaper than a machined detent system, in fact. In smaller volumes, a pre-assembled microcontroller board could be used, such as the Arduino or its clones. The only custom part might be the optical rotary encoder disk, but a number of vendors make these in various sizes.

In the early days of microprocessors, people selling home computers tried to come up with reasons to have them in the home. The real reason you got one was hobby computing, but the companies wanted to push other purposes. A famous one was use in the kitchen. The computer could story your recipe file, and wonder of wonders, could change the amounts of the ingredients based on how many servings you wanted to make.

This never caught on, but computers have come a long way. But still, I mostly see nonsense applications promoted. For example, boosters of RFID tell us that our fridges will be able to track when things went in the fridge, and when it’s time to buy more milk. We should give up huge amounts of privacy to figure out when to order more milk?

With that track record, I should stay away from the area, but let me propose some interesting approaches in the kitchen.

The cooking area should have a screen, of course. Screens are already in the kitchen to watch TV. While you could (and would) put digital recipes up on the screen, I imagine going further, and having TV cooking shows, where you watch a chef prepare a dish. You would be able to pause, rewind and do everything that digital video does, but the show would also come along with encoded instructions tagged to points in the video. When the recipe calls for cooking for 5 minutes, the computer would start appropriate timers.

The computer should have a speech interface, and a good one, allowing you to call out for timers, and to name ingredients and temperatures. More on that later.

The first thing I would like to see is smart, digital wireless scales in a lot of places. A general one on the counter of course, but quite possibly also built into the rack above the burner which holds the pot. You can get scales built into spoons and scoops now, and they could be bluetooth.  read more »

I have tripods with both 3 segments and 4 segments. A 4-segment tripod has 3 clamps per leg, which means 9 of them to open and close in extending and collapsing the tripod. That’s a pain. Enough of one that you sometimes find yourself asking whether a shot is worth setting up the tripod. But even 3 segment tripods are only a bit better.

I have my 4-segment legs because I can pack the tripod down into a reasonably small suitcase. I do most shooting when I travel so this is actually my best carbon fiber tripod. But when I am out carrying the tripod, or more commonly carrying it in the car, it doesn’t need to be this short. Unfortunately, the tripod fully extended, with camera and pano mount on it, is too long to fit in most cars, so I have to collapse one set of legs. That’s not so hard but it’s still very long and unweildy with just one set collapsed.

Here’s a possible answer: A 4 segment tripod where the bottom two segments join not with an external clamp, but which screw or snap together to make a smooth double-length segment. You used to be able to get monopods like this. Of course, the threaded join is not very convenient, and is not adjustable. However, you could readily take it apart to pack the tripod in a suitcase. If it can be made strong enough, a snap-together join would be best, with some recessed buttons to push to pull the legs apart. Then takedown and setup could be quick enough that you would also use it to put the pod into a backpack.

However, what you would have when put together is a 2-segment tripod, because the lower pair of segments, with no bumpy clamp, could feed up into the upper two segments when both of those are extended. In other words, you would have a nice tripod you could quickly reduce to half its length and back with just 3 clamps. A reasonable length for carrying and a very easy length to put into a car trunk or back seat.

You would not, however, be able to make the tripod any shorter than half-length without undoing the bottom join. Then you could get the tripod down to 1/4 length for low shots and for placing on tables and stone walls if half-length was just too high. That use is rare enough that I could handle that, especially if it’s just snaps.

The same approach could apply to your center column, or you could have just a 1/4 length center column, which is fine for most applications, since you don’t want to extend the column unless you have to, normally.

Note that the top join would be normal, so you would have 2 clamps per leg, and one hard-join. You don’t want a hard join at the top because presumably that will thin the inner diameter of the pole if you want it strong, stopping the lower segment from telescoping inside.

The 3rd segment (2nd from the ground) into which the bottom segment snaps, could also possibly have a spike or small foot coming out the center, which goes into a hole in the bottom segment. Or a place to attach such a foot. This would allow you to also configure a shorter, 3-segment standard tripod when you don’t want to snap in the lowest segment.

Ok, this is something I have to believe somebody else has thought of, but I haven’t seen it, so I thought I would ask readers if they have, and if not, to put it forward.

Everybody has a socket wrench set. The wrench heads tend to come with a square hole in the top, typically 1/2” or 3/8” square, into which the square drive from the ratchet inserts. There are sometimes spring-locks to keep it in place.

However, when you have a nut that’s going on a long bolt, you can’t use a standard socket as the bolt won’t fit inside. So you need to get a “deep socket” head, which may be able to handle the long bolt. Yes, you shouldn’t have such long bolts, and perhaps should saw off the end, but in reality this happens in places where that’s not easy or worthwhile. You can’t have just a deep socket set, because that’s bigger and heavier to carry around, and may not fit in various confined spaces.

The problem is that the drive is a solid square pin inside the wrench head. If the drive were able to grasp the wrench head from the outside, like a standard nut, then you could have an “extender” which could make any of your sockets a deep socket. To do this, the top of the wrench head would not be round, as it typically is, but hexagonal. In fact, your “extender” could simply be another, larger wrench from the set which fits around this hex head. Or you could have a small number of extenders in various sizes, and in extreme cases, multiple extenders. The extenders might do well to also have spring locks like the current drives do, to hold elements in place for you.

One could also have a thin hex shell embedded in the socket, the way lockable lug-nuts do, but that would not be as strong. Of course, one could try to do a whole new type of driver which is hollow, but the existing drivers are so well standardized now (there are not even metric versions) that I doubt it would get much adoption.

While we’re on this topic, here’s another idea. Organizing socket wrenches in a case is a pain. They often fall out and it’s hard to put them all back in the right place. I’ve seen colour coded sockets (fairly good) and laser etched numbers that are easier to read, and cases that try to bind the wrenches so they won’t fall out as easily. Realizing that the outside does not have to be round, I wonder if we could have patterns at the nut-end of the wrench that make it easy to slot how they go into their case. Perhaps just a couple of bumps or notches, so that no wrench can go in the wrong slot, even a slot for the wrench that is just a bit bigger.

As our devices get more and more complex, configuring them gets harder and harder. And for members of the non-tech-savvy public, close to impossible.

Here’s an answer: Develop a simple browser plug-in for all platforms that can connect a USB peripheral to a TCP socket back to the server where the plugin page came from. (This is how flash and Java applets work, in fact this could be added to flash or Java.)

Once activated, the remote server would be able to talk to the device like its USB master, sending and receiving data from it and talking other USB protocol commands. And that means it could do any configuration or setup you might like to do, under the control of a web application that has access to the full UI toolset that web applications have. You could upload new firmware into devices that can accept that, re-flash configuration, read configuration — do anything the host computer can do.

As a result, for any new electronics device you buy — camera, TV remote control, clock, TV, DVD player, digital picture frame, phone, toy, car, appliance etc. — you could now set it up with a nice rich web interface, or somebody else could help you set it up. It would work on any computer — Mac, Linux, Windows and more, and the web UIs would improve and be reprogrammed with time. No software install needed, other than the plug-in. Technicians could remotely diagnose problems and fix them in just about anything.

So there is of course one big question — security. Of course, the plug-in would never give a remote server access to a USB device without providing a special, not-in-browser prompt for the user to confirm the grant of access, with appropriate warnings. Certain devices might be very hard to give access to, such as USB hard drives, the mouse, the keyboard etc. In fact, any device which has a driver in the OS and is mounted by it would need extra confirmation (though that would make it harder to have devices that effectively look like standard USB flash drives into which basic config is simply read and written.)

One simple security technique would be to insist the device be hot plugged during the session. Ie. the plugin would only talk to USB devices that were not plugged in when the page was loaded, and then were plugged in as the app was running. The plugin would not allow constant reloading of the page to trick it on this.

For added security, smarter devices could insist on an authentication protocol with the server. Thus the USB device would send a challenge, which the server would sign/hash with its secret key, and the USB device could then check that using a public key to confirm its talking to its manufacturer. (This however stops 3rd parties from making better configuration tools, so it has its downsides.) It could also be arranged that only devices that exhibit a standard tag in their identification would allow remote control, so standard computer peripherals would not allow this. And the plugin could even maintain and update a list of vendors and items which do or don’t want to allow this.

There are probably some other security issues to resolve. However, should we resolve this it could result in a revolution of configuring consumer electronics, as finally everything would get a big screen, full mouse and keyboard web UI. (Non portable devices like cars and TVs would require a wireless laptop to make this work, but many people have that. Alternately they could use bluetooth, and the plugin could have a similar mode for working with paired bluetooth devices. Again, doing nothing without a strong user confirmation.)

This works because basic USB chips are very cheap now. Adding a small bit of flash to your electronics device and a mini-USB socket that can read and write the flash would add only a small amount to the cost of most items — nothing to many of them, as they already have it. Whatever new toy you buy, you could set it up on the web, and if the company provides a high level of service, you could speak to a tech support agent who could help you set it up right there.

I put pens in my pockets. However, sometimes I put them in without caps, or I put in retractable pens without retracting them to keep the tip inside.

The result, as all who do this know, is from time to time a pen leaks out and ruins a pair of pants, sometimes more than that. It’s expensive, and hard to solve. Since the earliest days the badge of the nerd has been the shirt pocket protector, but I put them in my pants. You could try tyvek pocket liners, I suppose, but it’s hard to see how to easily add them.

I wonder if we couldn’t come up with designs for retractable pens where there is some timed decay to the extension of the tip, so that it automatically returns to being inside after a modest time, perhaps half an hour to an hour. It could either just return at a very slow pace with the spring pushing back against something firm enough to keep the tip in place, or something that slowly bends and releases the ratchet. The latter is better because of course the tip must be firmly held for writing, we don’t want to be able to push it back in with the pressure of writing.

The time to return might well be fairly short. Today I find that I only use pens for short bursts of writing. I do all serious writing on a keyboard. I will pull a pen out to make quick notes and then I am done. While it might be annoying from time to time, I could even imagine it clicking back after just a couple of minutes. Of course many pens would not do this — which is a problem, because one will still be regularly picking up other pens, as one often does. But you could still reduce the number of times pen accidents happen if you bought mostly pens like this for yourself.

Electronics getting as cheap as they are these days, this could also be done instead with a sensor. Clicking the pen to extend the tip stores energy in the spring and might store it elsewhere, so that after a couple of minutes it beeps if it hasn’t been reset.

Digital Picture Frames are finally coming down to tolerable prices and decent resolutions. We are about to give my mother one that’s 1024x768 and 15” on the diagonal. In part that’s because I never got around to building one out of a laptop though I still think a linux distro that turned an old laptop into a digital PF would be a great idea because the ability to do wireless networking to subscribe to flickr and other feeds is the waiting killer app for these frames. (Or frankly, I just want the wireless module for flat panel displays I have spoken of before.

However, turnkey appliances still have their attraction, and digital picture frames are one of the hot items for this year and probably a few to come.

However, one thing bothers me about them (and all other computer slide shows.) I take a modest number of photos in “portrait” mode, which is to say tilting the camera on its side to make a picture that is tall rather than wide. Of course I take many landscape too. And most digital picture frames are set up in landscape mode. When you see a portrait picture you lose half the resolution. You could get two frames — one arranged in portrait mode and one in landscape, but I propose making a frame where the panel and frame have a small motor on them. Every so often the motor would rotate the frame 90 degrees, and the frame would then switch to doing the pictures that are right for that orientation, and later switch back.

You would want a silent motor of course. It need not be very fast, and you could blank the screen while it turns, or even put up a clever animation that itself counterspins around the axis point so it looks still. It would not work if you only had a very small number of portrait photos, but should be fine for most folks.

Slow, quiet stepper or servo motors are not very expensive, much cheaper than a second frame, though this does add moving parts.

I’ve wanted something similar as well for projected slide shows. There the motor could turn the internal panel, or perhaps just a mirror. If these things existed, people might take more portrait pictures. Today, seeing most photos on computer screens, there seems to be no reason to shoot portrait (other than to get a wider field of view.) If you will always view on the computer, shooting portrait — for those who don’t understand its value as a compositional tool — may just seem like a waste. Now it would not be.

Here’s an idea for a way to bring reputation based shopping to the brick and mortar world.

You would get a new special credit card, Visa or Mastercard. In order to use it, you would be required to rate merchants with reputation scores. You would do this when getting your online credit card bill — a random set of the merchants you purchased from would be highlighted and you would have to put in ratings. You would not have to do all of them, nor more than a set number each month and could also beg off some months to avoid it being a burden. This produces a set of ratings which are not nearly as self-selected as most rating systems, and makes it harder for the merchants to deliberately inflate their own ratings or lower competitors, because they actually have to buy stuff and don’t always rate the purchases they choose. (The system could allow manually chosen ratings but would treat them differently.) If you chargeback, your rating would also get special examination.

However, that’s just step one. The real meat comes when you use the card. You could set thresholds, and if you made a purchase at a vendor with a very poor reputation, below your threshold, the card would decline your purchase. At that point, you would have several options:

• Get the signal that the merchant is bad, and abandon the purchase
• Call the 1-800 number on the back of the card on your cell phone. It would spot your caller-ID, and immediately the computer voice would tell you the reputation of the vendor — or tell you that you hit your credit limit. You could then command it to authorize the transaction.
• Alternately, you could just have it automatically approve any second attempt at the transaction, and thus you could just say “run it again.” (Stores could know this and abuse it, however, so the call method makes more sense.)
• More simply, if you still want to purchase, you could just pull out another card, and tell them to try that one.

This would work just as well in online shopping, through frankly browser plug-ins make more sense there. However, people don’t use them so this would still work well. In this case you could go to a web URL instead of call the number. And of course it would be nice if paypal also did this, but they don’t seem inclined.

I don’t know if this would violate any bank agreements with Visa or Mastercard, or if, more to the point, they would rewrite the agreements to make it be a violation. The stores who lose business would of course hate it, but they would tend to be the scam houses that just cause lots of chargebacks anyway, so I don’t see why Visa/MC would want to come to their aid.

More and more people are walking around Borg-ified with bluetooth earpieces. It's convenient, and a good idea when driving, but otherwise looks goofy and also wears on the ear. I've been a big seeker of headset devices that are wireless, but meant to be only put on while talking, and thus very easy to put on and remove. Self-contained bluetooth devices, with the battery in them, tend to be hard to put on. Nothing I have seen is as easy to put on (or as bulky) as a typical headphone headband.

I thought of something you could quickly clip onto your glasses but the weight will tilt them. It should be possible to build bluetooth eyeglass frames with thick over-ear sections with the battery, slightly thick arms (ideally not too dorky) for the electronics and a microphone hidden in the bridge (though it might pick up breathing a bit too much.)

Another idea is a microphone in a necklace, but just the microphone. It's a good place to get sound and it's far from the speakers which is good. One could imagine a permanently worn necklace/pendant and them another piece which is put on the ear or head for calls. Some vendors are selling "bluetooth pendant" headphones which have earbuds which plug into a pendant worn on the neck today.

My necklace could work with a 2nd wireless part (meaning two batteries) that comes from the pocket or snaps onto the pendant itself. Or a combination eyeglass frames with speaker and pendant with microphone. Of course, no phone is able to understand talking to two devices for the mic and speakers as yet, and while that could be fixed in the future, this system would need one of the devices to talk to the other and combine the signals for the phone, which is wasteful but doable.

Another way around that would be a retractable earbud or other earpiece that pulls out of the pendant and retracts back into it. Or this could be something that hangs on glasses.

Of course the pendant could also vibrate for calls, and show you the caller-ID. These pendants could be designed by fashion designers as jewelry, and not look so borgish. Some models might be super thing and be designed to be worn unobtrusively under the shirt (but still in range of good sound) for people who don't want it to be so obvious. They could be pulled out of the shirt for calls if need be for superior voice.

And please, no bright blinking LED just to tell me you're alive!

I get forms to fill out and sign in electronic form all the time now. Often they come as PDFs or word documents, every so often by fax, and more and more rarely on paper. My handwriting is terrible and of course I no longer have a working typewriter. But none of the various tools I have seen for the job have had a nice easy workflow.

Now some PDFs are built as forms, and in Acrobat and a few other programs you can fill out the form fairly nicely. However, it’s actually fairly rare for people to build their PDFs as fillable forms. When they do, the basic Acrobat tools generate a form which free Acrobat reader will let you fill out — but bars you from saving the form you filled it out. You can only print it! Adobe charges more, on a per form basis, to make savable forms. However, some other readers, like Foxit Reader, will let you save what you fill into forms, even if the creator didn’t pay Adobe.

You still can’t sign such forms in electronic fashion, however. And as noted, many forms of all types aren’t enabled this way. Forms that come as Microsoft Word documents can be filled out in MS Word or the free Open Office writer or abiword. And you can even insert a graphic of a signature, which gets you closer to the target.

Often however, you are relegated to taking a fax, scanned paper document or PDF converted to bitmap, and editing it in a bitmap editor. Unfortunately the major bitmap editors, like Photoshop or GIMP, tend to be aimed entirely at fancy text and they are dreadful and entering a lot of text on a form. They don’t even make it so easy as quickly clicking and typing.

I encountered a commercial package named “Form Pilot” which is for Windows only but appears to run on WINE. It’s better than the graphics editors, and it does let you click and type easily. However, it has some distance to go. Here’s what I want:

• Be smart and identify the white spaces on the form, and notably the lines or boxes. Figure a good type size if the default isn’t right.
• When I click in one of those boxes, or above a line, automatically put me at a nice position above the line for typing. This is not a hard problem, hardly even OCR, just finding borders and lines. Let me use a different click if I want to do precise manual positioning.
• When I hit TAB or some similar key, advance to the next such box or line in the form.
• If I type too much in a box, do an automating shrinking of the text so that it fits.
• Of course, let me go back and edit my text, and save the document with the text as a different layer so I can go back and change things.

Signing

Now the interesting issue of signing. For this, I would want to scan in a sheet of paper which I have placed many signatures on, and have it isolate and store them as a library of signatures.

When I wish to apply a signature, have it pick a random one. In addition, have it make some minor modifications to the signature. Modifications could include removing or adding a pixel here or there along the lines, or adjusting the aspect ratio of the signature slightly. Change the colour of the ink or thickness. There are many modifications which could generate thousands of unique signature forms. If you run out, scan another sheet.

Then make a log of the document I signed and the parameters of the signature that was added, and record that. All this is to assure the user that people who get the document can’t take the signature and copy it again to use on a different document and claim you signed it. You’ll have a log, if you want it, of just what documents were signed. Even without the log you can have assurance of uniqueness and can refute fake signatures easily.

(Refuting forged signatures is actually pretty easy on electronic documents.)

When done, let me save the document or print it, or hook up with a service so that I can easily fax it. The result should be a process of receiving a document or form, filling it out and signing it and sending it back (by fax or email of course) that’s even easier than the original method on paper.

I was surprised, by the way, at how bad all the free bitmap painters I tried were at typing. Gimp and Krita are poor. xpaint and kolourpaint seemed to have the easiest flow even though they are much older and primitive in UI. If you know of programs that do this well, let me know.

Videophones are still an early adopter thing, but I was imagining an interesting application for them — reunions. Recently a theatre company I was in had a reunion far away, and I couldn’t come, but I wanted somebody to bring in a laptop so we could run a SIP or Skype videophone there. It would not have given me a true sense of participation, but individuals I wanted to catch up on could have come to the video phone and chatted.

Most conferencing applications assume there is going to be one big meeting with everybody talking together. That’s useful, but I can see a use for something that facilitates a lot of parallel one-on-one or small group conversations, for something like a reunion. In fact, one might be able to do a decent reunion entirely on the internet, or mostly on it.  read more »

So many people today are using tags to organize photos and to upload them to sites like flickr for people to search. Most types of tagging are easiest to do on a computer, but certain types of tagging would make sense to add to photos right in the camera, as the photos are taken.

For example, if you take a camera to an event, you will probably tag all the photos at the event with a tag for the event. A menu item to turn on such a tag would be handy. If you are always taking pictures of your family or close friends, you could have tags for them preprogrammed to make it easy to add right on the camera, or afterwards during picture review. (Of course the use of facial recognition and GPS and other information is even better.)

Tags from a limited vocabulary can also be set with limited vocabulary speech recognition, which cameras have the CPU and memory to do. Thus taking a picture of a group of friends, one could say their names right as you took the picture and have it tagged.

Of course, entering text on a camera is painful. You don’t want to try to compose a tag with arrow buttons over a keyboard or the alphabet. Some tags would be defined when the camera is connected to the computer (or written to the flash card in a magic file from the computer.) You would get menus of those tags. For a new tag, one would just select something like “New tag 5” from the menu, and later have an interface to rename the tag to something meaningful.

As a cute interface, tag names could also be assigned with pictures. Print the tag name on paper clearly and take a picture of it in “new tag” mode. While one could imagine OCR here, since it doesn’t matter if the OCR does it perfectly at first blush, you don’t actually need it. Just display the cropped handwritten text box in the menus of tags. Convert them to text (via OCR or human typing) when you get to a computer. You can also say sound associations for such tags, or for generic tags.

Cameras have had the ability to record audio with pictures for a while, but listening to all that to transcribe it takes effort. Trained speech recognition would be great here but in fact all we really have to identify is when the same word or phrase is found in several photos as a tag, and then have the person type what they said just once to automatically tag all the photos the word was said on. If the speech interface is done right, menu use would be minimal and might not even be needed.

Those who know about my phone startup Voxable will know I have far more ambitious goals regarding presence and telephony, but during my recent hospital stay, I thought of a simple subset idea that could make hospital phone systems much better for the patient, namely a way to easily specifiy whether it’s a good time to call the patient or not. Something as simple as a toggle switch on the phone, or with standard phones, a couple of magic extensions they can dial to set whether it’s good or not.

When you’re in the hospital, your sleep schedule is highly unusual. You sleep during the day frequently, you typically sleep much more than usual, and you’re also being woken up regularly by medical staff at any time of the day for visits, medications, blood pressure etc.

At Stanford Hospital, outsiders could not dial patient phones after 10pm, even if you might be up. On the other hand even when the calls can come through, people are worried if it’s a good time. So a simple switch on the phone would cause the call to be redirected to voice mail or just a recording saying it’s not a good time. Throw it to take a nap or do something else where you want peace and quiet. If you throw it at night, it stays in sleep mode until 8 or 9 hours. Then it beeps and reverts to available mode. If you throw it in the day, it will revert in a shorter amount of time (because you might forget) however a fancier interface would let you specify the time on an IVR menu. Nurses would make you available when they wake you in the morning, or you could put up a note saying you don’t want this. (Since it seems to be the law you can’t get the same nurse two days in a row.)

In particular, when doctors and nurses come in to do something with you, they would throw the switch, and un-throw it when they leave, so you don’t get a call while in the middle of an examination. The nurse’s RFID badge, which they are all getting, could also trigger this.

Now people who call would know they got you at a good time, when you’re ready to chat. Next step — design a good way for the phone to be readily reachable by people in pain, such as hanging from the ceiling on a retractable cord, or retractable into the rail on the side of the bed. Very annoying when in pain to begin the slow process of getting to the phone, just to have them give up when you get to it.

Those who travel on trips through many countries face the problem of how to plug in their laptops and gear. Many stores sell collections of adapters, but they are often bulky, and having multiple adapters for multiple gear can be really bulky. (Usually you get one adapter and then use a 3-way splitter or cord for your type of plug.)

Today, however, almost all my travel gear is 2-prong, not 3-prong. It’s mostly my laptop and various chargers for cameras, phones etc. And all of it runs on every voltage and hz found in the world.

It seems if you’re willing to break the rules on rigidity of plugs, one could make a very small adapter by using independent pins, perhaps with a flexible rubber strip handle between them to keep them together and make it safer, but still allowing the pins to bend and have different spacing.

If you do this, there are really just a few types of pins you need. Thin blades, thick blades, thin round pins and in a few places fat round pins. The blades come at different angles — parallel in North America, slanted in Australia, colinear for thick blades in UK. With pins it’s more a question of spacing than angles. A single plug with a way to adjust the spacing could also work. (Israel has a strange pin I haven’t used, I don’t know if other pins or blades could be adapted to it.)

Generally this would not be suitable for plugging a wall-wart into a wall, you would want to plug in a short extension cord with multiple sockets of “your” type. And it might be hard to sell a product like this due to safety standards, since they don’t want to trust the user to know what they are doing, know that they are only plugging in equipment that takes any voltage and doesn’t care what pin is live and which is neutral, doesn’t need ground and doesn’t draw lots of current in any event. But it would be very compact.