ome time ago I wrote about the health implications of cellphones, Wi-Fi and wine. There are the “only make believe” and wishful thinking studies, which much like in global warming can be funded by those with vested interest. And then there’s reality. After a study from Japan which suggests cellphones are no health hazard there’s this from the news:

Heavy mobile phone use may be linked to an increased risk of cancer of the salivary gland, a study suggests

A lot of people will be unhappy to read this. Personally, I’m glad I stopped carrying a cellphone back in 2003.

Not the actual box. Treat as
placeholder for illustrational purposes.

When you see a great deal, you simply know it! 149.95 dollars will buy you:

• AMD Duron 2.8 GHz Processor with 800 MHz FSB
• 180 Gigabyte Hard Drive
• 256 Megabytes of RAM
• K7MNF-64 nVidia nForce2 Socket A Motherboard
• nVidia nForce2 chipset

[...]

The machine will of course run GNU/Linux. It seems too good to be true, so I remain skeptic. Having toyed with the cart feature, it seems to be genuine though. The site statistics (Alexa, Netscraft), as well as some other available products, seem to suggest it is real.

Noteworthy: get Windows and double the cost of the worktstation…

Related item: Expensive Developers, Cheap Hardware

Picture from PlanetQuake

HECK out some of the strangest computer setups you have ever come across. I particularly like the one which demonstrates, side by side, the difference between a dual-head setting and a very large screen. It has recently begun being manufactured for Dell and Apple, but is rather pricey.

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

ESTERDAY I read about three-dimensional displays, which are said to require no glasses and make stereo-vision a reality. This seemed like ‘queue hopping’ from a scientific point-of-view, so I had to read it carefully and identify some points of skepticism. I was successful in finding some gaps and deficiencies, which a careful read would quickly reveal (albeit the headline is very eye-catching — an exaggeration within or even beyond reason).

If you have some idiosyncratic interests which pertain to the study of vision and human-computer interaction (HCI), you may find some of my past essays on the topic intersting:

• Spherical Display
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow
• 3-D Interaction on the Desktop
• Accelerated X Draws Competition
• The Desktop Sphere
• Next Generation of X
• Spherical Desktop

A shrimpy yet fully-functional USB drive

Here are a couple of fun lists which I have recently come across:

• Top 10 Strangest Custom Gaming Systems
• Ten Products Google Should Develop (hypothetical)

Some even contain videos.

ORE nations than ever before are showing interest in a purely electronic system for managing people’s records, funds, and vehicles. Take, for example, this older story on the use of biometrics. Cities and individual shops can already make authentication immediate when payment are being made. More latterly, a city in France began testing the idea of cities where cash is a antiquated notion of the past.

The tourist city of Caen in Normandy is hosting a major European trial of the use of NFC (near field communication) – a mobile technology that can be used for anything from paying for groceries to finding out about your home town.