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Hybrid Personal Rapid Transit

When I was in high school, I did a project on PRT -- Personal Rapid Transit. It was the "next big thing" in transit and of course, 30 years later it's still not here, in spite of efforts by various companies like Taxi 2000 to bring it about.

With PRT, you have small, lightweight cars that run on a network of tracks or monorail, typically elevated. "Stations" are all spurs off the line, so all trips are non-stop. You go to a station, often right in your building, and a private mini-car is waiting. You give it your destination and it zooms into the computer regulated network to take you there non-stop.

The wins from this are tremendous. Because the cars are small and light, the track is vastly cheaper to build, and can often be placed with just thin poles holding it above the street. It can go through buildings, or of course go underground or at-grade. (In theory it seems to me smart at-grade (ground-level) crossings would be possible though most people don't plan for this at present.)

The other big win is the speed. Almost no waiting for a car except at peak times, and the nonstop trips would be much faster than other transit or private cars on the congested, traffic-signal regulated roads.

Update: I have since concluded that self-driving vehicles are getting closer, and because they require no new track infrastructure and instead use regular roads, they will happen instead of PRT.

Yet there's no serious push for such systems...

Read on.

4th Amendment Shipping Tape

Looking at printed wedding gift ribbon some time ago, Kathryn thought it would be amusing to put the 4th amendment on the ribbon, and tie it around our suitcases.

That turned out to be hard to make, but I did make a design for shipping tape which you can see below. The printed shipping tape has the text slant so that as the pattern repeats, the 4th amendment appears as a long continuous string, as well as a block.

Do our secure passwords in a bluetooth cell phone.

Password security on the web is a troublesome issue. We have hundreds of web accounts, some of them with access to all our money, and it must be secure, not just from phishers and people snooping the web line, but from viruses and keyloggers that can take over our own computers or roaming computers we want to use to access password protected web sites.

The only way to be secure if you can't trust the very computer you're logging in from is to have a security dongle which contains the real secrets and does the logon negotiation, plus confirmation of any big actions like large cash transfers. People have carried login dongles for years, typically which have a screen with a constantly changing number (securid) or which can do challenge/response.

Most of the world is moving now to having a smart phone, in particular one with a standardized data protocol such as bluetooth. I propose a protocol so that web sites can, given a limited channel to the phone, do a login dialog with the phone. The computer would just be a conduit for the data, it would not matter if it were compromised, as the passwords would not be sent in the clear.

More thoughts...

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Digital Piano keys with computer controlled resistence

The sound of digital pianos continues to improve, and expensive ones also have a good feel, often by building individually weighted keys that go beyond simulating a key on a real piano.

What might be done with more modern technologies, such as super-fast servos, and fluids whose viscoscity can be varied based on the strength of electric or magnetic fields applied to them. (Some of these fluids are being applied to the development of dynamicly responding shock absorbers.)

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How web sites can do a much smarter 'pledge drive'

There is buzz about how Jason Kottke, of kottke.org, has abandoned his experiment of micropayment donations to support his full-time blogging. He pulled in $40,000 in the year, almost all of it during his 3 week pledge drive, but that's hardly enough. Now I think he should try adsense, but I doubt he hasn't heard that suggestion before.

However, PBS/NPR are able to get a large part of their budgets through pledge drives, so it's possible to make this happen. I think we should be able to do it better on the web.

Nominate for EFF pioneer awards

Each year since 1992 the EFF has given out the EFF Pioneer Awards to a wide array of online pioneers. Check out the lists on the web site.

We're seeking new nominees for this year's awards, to be given at CFP 06. We need them by Feb 28. Check out the web page, and e-mail us the nominee's name and contact info with a description of their contribution. Organizations and Systems can be nominated, as well as individuals.

Who do you think has helped make the cyberworld what it is? Get them recognized.

Power through flash hotshoe

I'll be moving soon to the Canon 5D camera from my 20D. It's better in just about every way, but like many "pro" cameras it does not have a built in flash.

It's not that there isn't a reason for this. Built in flashes usually suck, and nobody would use them for any sort of serious photography, except for fill. So if you're going out on a shoot, you would of course carry along some quality flashes and the built-in would be a waste of space.

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"Topographic" map based on zillow-like data

Ok, like a lot of people I find it fascinating to browse Zillow and see the estimated values of my neighbour's houses, and yes, I admit it, my friends. Another example of the little shock you get when data that was always technically public becomes truly public thanks to some new internet application.

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Map of the restaurants on Irving St. / Outer Sunset, San Francisco

We've been working on an inherited house in the Irving Street/23rd avenue neighbourhood of the Outer Sunset of San Francisco. This is one of SF's "new chinatowns" -- the original one on Grant St. long ago given over to the tourists. Irving is where the real asians go to shop and eat. I've been impressed at the incredible quality to price ratio of the food here, I think it's the best locus of value in the city.

How to build a "great firewall of China" -- do it poorly

I'm not in the business of helping countries be repressive, but I started thinking what I would do if I were the Chinese internet censor. I don't think I'm giving them any secrets, but these thoughts may affect our own plans on how to fight such censors.

The most important realization was that I wouldn't want to make my great firewall really strong. That it was not only easier, but possibly better, to make it possible to bypass it with a moderate amount of determination. Not trivial, as in "hold down the shift key" but not requiring cypherpunk level skills.

The reason is that if I allow such holes, I can watch who uses them, and watching them is more valuable to the secret police than plugging them. And if the holes don't require fancy data encryption and hiding techniques, most people seeking to bypass the firewall will do so unencrypted, making it far easier to watch what is done. But even if people encrypt, they do reveal who they are. So long as there are not immense numbers, that's enough to give me a good dissident watchlist.

My goal as censor would be to tune the filtering so that the true dissidents can all bypass it, but make it hard enough that I don't get so many people on my watchlist that I can't handle the size of it. The censors know they can't keep information from the truly determined, even in the most repressive regimes. They just need to keep it from the masses. (Even the masses will hear rumours in any society, but they will always just be rumours.)

This explains why many of the proxies people have put up to let people bypass the firewall remain themselves unblocked. This also can be explained by inefficiency of maintaining the block-list, but this time I am prepared to attribute something to malice rather than incompetence. Especially if the proxies are unencrypted I would not want to block them -- unless they go so popular that I could no longer track the users.

This is one of the problems with the Google China decision. In the past, use of the firewall-blocked google.com was not suspicious, though typing certain phrases into it may have been. Now, with censored google.cn, use of google.com suggests you are trying to get past the censorship at least. A big win for surveillance. Google is, wisely, not keeping logs in China, but that doesn't stop the international gateways from keeping the logs.

(Read on for some anti-censor techniques.)

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Laundromat machine / locker

I haven't been to a laundromat in ages, but we're fixing up a house that has no washer/dryer yet and has a laundromat 200' away. Long ago, when I lived in an appartment tower, I would go to the basement laundry room, and leave my clothes there. Worst case was they ran out of machines and somebody tossed them in a basket. And even though the odds of somebody stealing your clothes are low, most people are not as willing to leave their stuff unattended in a city street laundromat.

So how about combining the machines with a timed airport style locker system. You would insert the coins and pull out a key which you could use to open the washer or dryer. The lock would auto-reset about 10 minutes after the cycle ends, so in addition, you could put in more coins, which would act as insurance. If you didn't get to the machine in time, these coins would be taken, and give you more time on the lock. If you did get to the machine shortly after the cycle ended, you could get back your extra coins in the coin return...

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HDTV to SDTV cropping in the camera, and NBC SD widescreens

Note 1: NBC doesn't have nearly enough HD cameras for the Olympics, and I can't really blame them for not having one for every section of luge track to show us something for half a second.

But it seems in many areas they are showing us a widescreen image from an SD camera, and it looks more blurry than the pillarboxed SD footage they show of past scenes. I wonder, are they taking a cropped widescreen section out of their 4:3 SDTV camera? If so, that's not what I want. Or are there a lot of 16:9 SD cameras out there?

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Why Google took the wrong course over China

Google's decision to operate a search service in China, implementing Chinese censorship rules into the service, has been a controversial issue. Inside Google itself, it is reported there was much debate, with many staff supporting and many staff opposing the final decision, as as been the case in the public. So it's not a simple issue.

Nonetheless, in spite of being friends with many in the company, I have to say they made the wrong decision, for the wrong reason.

Wanted: A google/yahoo/etc. ad optimizer

Yahoo is now entering the context-driven ad field to compete with Adsense, and that's good for publishers and web authors. I have had great luck with adsense, and it provides serious money for this blog and my other web sites, which is why I have the affiliate link on the right bar encouraging you to join adsense -- though I won't mind the affiliate fee as well, of course.

Teach history recycling old calendars

There are 14 different calendars possible -- With Jan 1 on each different weekday, in both regular and leap-year form.

An interesting idea for schools (and other places) would be to put up a calendar for a year from the past which has the same form as the current year. For example, an old 1995 Calendar would work mostly fine for 2006.

One could use real calendars, or specially made calendars which would talk about the history of the year in question, showing events which took place on the days those years ago.

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Newspaper recycling slot at the base of a kitchen cabinet

In thinking about a Kitchen remodel, in a house which sits on top of a garage/basement where the recycling and garbage bins are, I thought it would be nice to have a chute in the Kitchen to drop stuff into the bins down below. But you don't want to waste a lot of space in the kitchen on those.

One idea is to put the chute under a regular cabinet/countertop. It would look like a large mail slot at the base of the cabinet, under the door (or behind the door so you have to open it up to see it.)

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Experimenting with Yahoo Publisher for RSS

While I have been using Google ads on the blog for some time (and they do quite well), they don't yet do RSS ads outside of a more limited beta program. So I'm trying Yahoo's ads, also in beta but I'm on the list.

They just went live, and all that's showing right now is a generic ad, presumably until they spider the site and figure out what ads to run. Ideally it will be ads as relevant as Google Adsense does.

Competition between Google and Yahoo will be good for publishers. Just on basic click-rates, one will tend to do better than the other, presumably. If one is consistently doing not as well, they will lose all the partners, who will flock to the other. The only way to fix that will be to increase the percentage of the money they pay out, until they get to a real efficient market percentage they can't go above.

Read on for examination of the economics of RSS ads.

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