LIVEdigitally

I remember playing the video game Robocop more than the actual movie. The film came out in 1987, and back then I was an 8 year old Nintendo addict. Meshing machine with man has always been the fantasy of us geeks. Some people are pretty close to having their mobile phones attached to their ear permanently, but for the most part electronics and mankind are two separate entities. Bill Gates was interviewed on the topic, and told that our sci-fi future is nearer than we think. Some people already have devices that help with hearing, seeing, and pain relief. I’m not in need to see or hear any better, but I would like to have a WiFi chip integrated into my head, and some sort of heads up display on the inside of my eyeballs, with speech recognition software. I could surf the net and read emails while pretending to pay attention.

I heart blogging. I have my very own “Blogger” shirt purchased via the Google store that I wear with the utmost pride. Written journals were for middle school girls, but as soon as someone put an electronic spin on them and let the whole world read, they were suddenly for everyone. General Motors has even jumped on the wagon. First they let everyone buy their cars at the employee discount, and now they’re blogging! I’m personally not a fan of American cars, but these guys are raising my brow. They allow comments. The filter only cuts out the SPAM and the obscene remarks. GM and blogs, what a great combination.

PC modding (modifications) was a new emerging trend. The boring industrial grey towers, monitors, keyboards, and mice bored us geeks. We dressed them up with see through enclosures, LED lights, graphics, and even water cooling systems. Some newer computer systems come bundled with these so called ‘mods’ which no longer makes them mods.

The Mini-ITX computer is screaming to be modded. The small form factor, and fanless CPU makes this system easy to fit into different, unconventional locations. I came across a website that really tickled my Mini-ITX fancy. I can’t tell which installation is my favorite. Check out the site, my dream is to make it on here one day. All I need is a mini-itx, an idea, time and energy, funding, heck… everything.

Microsoft has been in the works on it’s new operating system for some time. PC Magazine got a hold of the latest Longhorn build, in order to let us PC users know what lies ahead. Longhorn will be a 64bit system, have the Avalon graphics engine, and Indigo, which end users won’t see or feel. There were plans for a spotlight type indexed search function deemed WinFS, but that’s been postponed due to deadlines not meeting.

Microsoft has taken advantage of file attributes in the NTFS file system already available in Windows XP to make Explorer better at ferreting out documents according to author, camera model (for photographs), or genre or album title (for music files). The operating system lets you create virtual lists based on these attributes so that, for example, you can see every photo on your system or all Microsoft Word files, regardless of where they are stored and without having to explicitly search for them.