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Getting old younger
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1–2 minutes·
1 comment on Getting old youngerImagine a device, similar in appearance to the iPhone, that you could point at a street sign in a foreign language, and it would display that sign on the screen – translated. I described this dream device to some friends a few weeks ago, explaining that there was nothing technically insurmountable about it – optical…
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STT
The acronym TTS is well known among those who develop call centre software, GPS car navigation devices and software for the blind. It means ‘Text To Speech’, and is more commonly known as voice synthesis, such as the conversion of written text (e.g. ‘Take the first turn on the left into Coronation Street’) into a…
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Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle
I feel ambivalent about the Kindle. The Kindle is a new eBook reader from Amazon that can download books anywhere (without a computer) and surf the web. It costs $400 and the cost of books for it from Amazon are significantly cheaper than the new physical versions – which doesn’t mean that they’re cheap, though.…
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Free the Man Bookers!
I’m currently in Zurich at the GameHotel conference, so I don’t have much time to cover this, but The Times is reporting is talk of making all six shortlisted Man Booker prize novels available online for free. I say ‘talk’ because it’s not entirely clear what’s being discussed between the publishers, the Man Booker Prize…
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Barclays OnePulse: A Tale of Woe
The bottom line: Barclays hates its customers, and doesn’t even know how to run its business. A few months ago, I decided that I was finally going to move my current account away from Barclays to someone more sensible, like First Direct or Egg. Barclays is a big bank with a lot of branches, but…
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Bits and Pieces: The Future
This is almost exactly a year late, but Vernor Vinge, one of my favourite SF authors and perhaps the most insightful prognosticator I know of, gave the keynote lecture at the Austin Games Conference in 2006. He covers so much ground in the lecture that I suspect he lost a few people not familiar with…
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The Next Sony Reader
The first image of the new Sony Reader PRS-505 leaked out today on an electronics store website, no doubt ready for sales in the next month or two: At 128MB, the PRS-505 has double the memory of the previous model, meaning that it’ll be able to store about 160 books quite easily – enough to…
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Amazon Kindle: Must Try Harder
The New York Times has an interesting article about the progress that eBooks are making, based largely on two major pieces of news. Firstly, Amazon will unveil their Kindle eBook reader next month. Kindle has a similar display to the Sony Reader, which I’ve reviewed, but it’ll also be able to connect to mobile phone…
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The Sony Reader: An Illustrated Primer
The device that set off such a furore on this blog about The Death of Publishers and also resulted in a feature in the Bookseller has finally arrived in my hands. While I’ve only been using it for a week, I think it would be useful to share some first impressions of the Sony Reader…
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BBC iPlayer: well over a day late and a dollar short
As has been widely noted, the BBC’s iPlayer application, which lets people watch the last seven days of TV over the internet, didn’t actually launch on 27th July. It’s still currently in beta, and if you apply to test it, it’ll take a couple of days to receive your login details. This is not particularly…
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