Sequence Omega » Oddball http://www.sequence-omega.net Fundamentally Different Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:33:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 If I had $500 to spend on content per year… http://www.sequence-omega.net/2011/11/13/if-i-had-500-to-spend-on-content-per-year/ http://www.sequence-omega.net/2011/11/13/if-i-had-500-to-spend-on-content-per-year/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:01:09 +0000 Anthony http://www.sequence-omega.net/?p=1246 I thought about this the other day, about how most websites have garbage ads on the sides, most of which are complete fucking scams. One of the websites I read I subscribe for $50/yr. So if I had 10 websites, $500 a year, to spend on content subscriptions where would I spend it?

  1. Ars Technica (which I already subscribe to for $50/yr)
  2. Las Vegas Sun
  3. Green Car Congress
  4. AnandTech
  5. The Verge
  6. BoingBoing
  7. Five Thirty Eight (a blog on the NY Times website, I’d subscribe to the entire site just for this and the Paul Krugman columns)
  8. Fareed Zakaria GPS (a blog on CNN’s website)
  9. Fierce Wireless/Fierce Broadband Wireless
  10. Reddit (not a news site, but still I’d pay)
]]> http://www.sequence-omega.net/2011/11/13/if-i-had-500-to-spend-on-content-per-year/feed/ 0 Odd-ball: Why doesn’t everything talk to me… http://www.sequence-omega.net/2009/03/10/odd-ball-why-doesnt-everything-talk-to-me/ http://www.sequence-omega.net/2009/03/10/odd-ball-why-doesnt-everything-talk-to-me/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:47:46 +0000 Anthony http://www.sequence-omega.net/?p=180 I was thinking about making this a twitter, but it might sound weird without some proper explanation. The basic premise is that I want more devices to talk to me. But more importantly, it needs to sense what is going on.

It sounds sci-fi, but I would enjoy waking up every morning, telling my omni-device good morning and it would proceed to list a bunch of useful information…

“Good morning Anthony, its March 10th, its 45 degrees outside with a high today of 65. Yesterday your portfolio went down 4%. Your solar array output at work was 5% over nominal, and you might want to look at inverter number 13A, it seems lower than the others. There are currently no accidents or major traffic jams on your drive to work…”

Seriously, I want my information spoon fed to me – its not like I need to open up five different web pages to collate this information. Its frustrating that someone hasn’t done it and commercialized it yet.

I guess part of it is data availability. To do something like this, I would need an internet-connected alarm clock and a speech synthesis engine. It would grab XML files from all over the place, providing authorizations as needed (e.g. my stock portfolio), and gather the necessary data and putting it into sentences that tell me whats going on. If XML files don’t exist for that data (road conditions for example), then it cant provide me that information. It could be integrated with a central calendaring solution so that it’ll tell me if I have meetings or appointments to be at. You would need some software on a stand-alone computer to program it with what data to pull down.

Microphones in the unit would not only listen to my voice but also use them as an ambient noise sensor that would adjust the output volume (if its a quiet room, it doesn’t need to be so loud). If the alarm goes off and it doesn’t detect anyone in the room then it should turn it off – I’m either not home or dead =^(. So yea, thats the odd-ball idea for today. There are talking alarm clocks, but I haven’t seen one that can read and digest XML feeds and give you information like that.

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