A goon over at forums.somethin­gaw­ful.com poin­ted this out to me and I relished the idea of having one of these so much that I deci­ded to make a blog entry about it. At the moment this is only a con­cept piece, howe­ver there are patents pen­ding and from the forums thread their is sig­ni­fi­cant inte­rest in such a pro­duct. It is inge­nious without a doubt.

“Every key of the Opti­mus key­board is a stand-alone dis­play sho­wing exactly what it is con­tro­lling at this very moment.”

“Addi­tio­nal block of keys on the left is meant for switching bet­ween pro­grams or modes”

Stan­dard key­board in English, same key­board dif­fe­rent dis­play when pla­ying Quake, sho­wing the controls.

The pos­si­bi­li­ties of this are end­less. So many times I have pla­yed video games and for­got­ten the con­trols, had dif­fi­culty remem­be­ring key­board short­cuts, wan­ted impro­ved func­tio­na­lity and quick (and obvious) one key com­mands (I have this to some extent with my MS natu­ral key­board but you need to remem­ber each button’s func­tion). This key­board can also be sold inter­na­tio­nally as it incor­po­ra­tes very easily all the dif­fe­rent setups and arran­ge­ments of keys and cha­rac­ters, i.e. the Rus­sian or Greek alpha­bets. It’s a sim­ple aid and solu­tion to com­mon key memo­ri­za­tion pro­blems, cus­to­mi­za­tion and adap­ta­bi­lity and it looks inc­re­dibly cool. I want one.

Ima­ges © 1995–2005 Art. Lebedev Stu­dio

BBC says:

A cam­paign encou­ra­ging peo­ple to store per­so­nal details on their mobile pho­nes to help iden­tify vic­tims of acci­dents and disas­ters has taken off since the bomb attacks in Lon­don.

Users are being urged to enter a num­ber in their phone’s memory under the hea­ding ICE — In Case of Emergency.

Para­me­dics or police would then be able to use it to con­tact a relative.

The idea is the brainchild of East Anglian Ambu­lance Ser­vice para­me­dic Bob Brotchie and was launched in May.

Well, today I was trea­ted with the plea­sant sur­prise of goo­gle video adding fully func­tio­nal video pla­ying sup­port to their goo­gle video ser­vice. Peo­ple have gra­dually been uploa­ding their videos to goo­gle and various tele­vi­sion sta­tions have sub­mit­ted their shows with search able clo­sed cap­tions. Until now this was the extent of the video ser­vice, you could see when a show aired, search its script, seen when new shows were going to air and see a sim­ple screen shot taken so far in. All this being pretty use­less to someone living in the Uni­ted King­dom (although still very cool, I hope for some BBC inte­gra­tion soon). Now howe­ver, goo­gle video pro­vi­des video. Goo­gle results that have a pla­ya­ble video show up with a little play icon next to them. Upon ope­ning the page there are options to start the video from various 30 second inc­re­ments, upon clic­king, the video plays right there and then in the brow­ser. Now, most in brow­ser video pla­yers are fairly bulky, con­sume con­si­de­ra­ble resour­ces, load the brow­ser with unnee­ded hin­dran­ces, pro­vide anno­ying applet con­trols and require buf­fe­ring times. Howe­ver, goo­gle video is based upon the popu­lar and utterly fan­tas­tic open source “video­lan pla­yer” open source setup. VLC gene­rally plays all stan­dard codecs with ease and has highly func­tio­nal strea­ming options, sub­tit­les, mul­ti­ple video and audio stream capa­bi­li­ties and much much more (inc­lu­ding the option to view a video in ASCII). This goo­gle video vie­wer loads seam­lessly, has no nasty but­ton inter­fa­ces, does not load the brow­ser or cause over the top cpu usage and has a once click full-screen option (i.e. click the video for fullsc­reen). The video requi­res very little buf­fe­ring time and is of sui­ta­ble qua­lity and reso­lu­tion for fullsc­reen and tele­vi­sion play­back. I really do love it and I have been pla­ying for the last hour or so.

“The clips play right in the page using the brand new Goo­gle Video Vie­wer, which was crea­ted by our engi­neer Aaron Lee using code from the open source Video­lan pro­ject. It works great in both Fire­fox and IE, and we’ve desig­ned it not to fight with any other video plu­gins you might have. We’re relea­sing the Win­dows ver­sion first, with Mac coming soon.”

“A fea­ture we’re espe­cially plea­sed with is search within a video, which means you will get a result poin­ting to the pre­cise spot in the video that matches your query. Try loo­king for ser­gey brin and you’ll see what I mean. There are even more peo­ple get­ting crea­tive with video here. So have fun watching, or shoot your own videos — and keep sen­ding them in!”

MIT News Office: “CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT scien­tists have brought a super­cool end to a hea­ted race among phy­si­cists: They have become the first to create a new type of mat­ter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.”

“In super­fluids, as well as in super­con­duc­tors, par­tic­les move in locks­tep. They form one big quantum-mechanical wave,” explai­ned Ket­terle. “Such a move­ment allows super­con­duc­tors to carry elec­tri­cal currents without resistance.”

For those who know not of superfluidity:

Ans​wers​.com: Super­flui­dity is a phase of mat­ter cha­rac­te­ri­sed by the com­plete absence of vis­co­sity. Thus super­fluids, pla­ced in a clo­sed loop, can flow end­lessly without friction.

Mozi­lla Update :: Exten­sions — Remove It Per­ma­nently: “Per­ma­nently hide con­tent from web pages using the Con­text Menu. Simply, click and ‘Remove it Per­ma­nently’. Now inc­lu­des pre­vie­wing of items before remo­val, sup­port for IFrame as well as lots of advan­ced fea­tu­res to make it easy for anyone to remove anno­ying con­tent from web pages”
“This exten­sion lets you remove anno­ying ad links, ad tables, was­ted whi­tes­pace and other HTML “con­tent” that AdBlock doesn’t con­cern itself with.”

This is what I have been wai­ting for in terms of a fire­fox exten­sion. I no lon­ger have to put up with ANY ads, anno­ying tables of con­tent I never read, copy­right text, bloa­ted ima­ges, columns of empty­ness left over from an AdBloc­ked ban­ner, etc… . It has a high degree of con­trol too, you can block the ele­ment for one page only, one domain only, simi­lar pages only or just the web­site you are on. Adi­tio­nally there are “Undo Last RIP” options for mis­ta­kes in remo­ving things, “Disa­ble RIP” for current site/page/domain if things have been rede­sig­ned, etc… . No more bloa­ted web­si­tes for me EVER. A great exten­sion and another rea­son to use firefox.