Ada Lovelace Day

So here we are and it's Ada Lovelace Day again, when we are meant to blog about women we admire who are working in technology. Last year I wrote about my youngest daughter, admiring her tenaciousness at getting equal time to play with technology. This year in a spirit of shameless self-promotion I want to celebrate my two older daughters, who are now working together, and with me, developing ideas for new media/technology projects and cooking up plans for an interesting joint future

mini projector fun

I saw one of these in action at the BBC Blue Room that had travelled to Bristol to show people some nice bits of future technology at New Tools New Ways of Working.
It's an Optoma Pico PK 101 DLP mini projector, about the size of a mobile phone, that connects via video input to your device. The one I saw was projecting video from an iPhone, at roughly the same size as a 13" monitor. It says it can display up to 60". I have a vision of football matches being projected onto all available surfaces at family events. Needless to say I wanted one.
You can find out more here

babies do skype

clean speech

and speaking of phones, love this idea, that the phone can spot swear words in speech to text and replace them with a row of symbols. It reminded me of the story I was told by someone who was happily playing with his child's toy that translated text to speech, seeing how far he could go with typing in obscenities for the toy to declaim. He managed to get quite a few but there were some words that must have been deemed so foul by the designers that the toy would not even attempt to speak them out loud.

I am not sure whether I would want a piece of software to edit swearing out of speech, although on reflection, I can think of a few people I would like to nominate for permanent use of something similar, everytime they open their mouths.

breaking the unbreakable phone

I did feel sorry for the poor man from the company that makes the unbreakable phone that gets broken in this clip by the reporter from the BBC. Boys do like a challenge don't they?
This phone is obviously unbreakable in the same way that the Titanic was unsinkable, or that the shoes my son went through in three days were kidproof

hardcore gaming granny

I am hoping that 2010 is the year when I catch up with all the things I have started and couldn't finish, partly because of family stuff and partly because I am so easily distracted.
I am hoping to spend a little more time on sorting my blogs this year, and thought that posting something about a hardcore gamer in her seventies was a good start. I read this blog and loved it. Not the stuff about the games, but the great way the blogger talks about grandma. I also love that grandma confounds expectations of how grandmas are meant to behave, as she is so foul-mouthed, speaking as someone who is trying not to swear in front of kids and grandbabies. This women could be a role model for Catherine Tate's Nan.

its all gone a bit wrong

techno meltdown here in my neck of the woods, with laptops that wanted to shock me, not with content but with electricity, and phones that were burning my ear. Sigh. So on the one hand I am watching videos on TED which demonstrate how phones of the future will be projections onto fingertips, while in Real Life I am trying to transfer contacts from sony to samsung. Am cursing sony rather a lot this week as they have their own size of storage cards that don't fit into the laptop that I am borrowing. So, for example, earlier this week we had a visiting nicaraguan who came with a mobile charger that I had no adapter for ( we needed nicaraguan to uk, I only had the other way round) and a sony camera that he could charge but had no connector cable. If my sony laptop hadn't been sent off for assessment for repair (it failed, and that's a whole other whinge) then we would have been able to transfer all his photos and burn a cd. But as I had a bog standard HP laptop none of the cards from any of his kit fitted any of mine. And now I am having the same problem trying to get my contacts off the sony phone and into the new samsung.
On a plus side I Am Liking the new screen and text size of the samsung i8910 - won't need my glasses to read messages when I have worked out what I am doing. And I am looking forward to using the high def video to record small family members for their new youtube channel