idallassleeping less and reading more

Sonos has announced a new set of devices that work together over ethernet to provide digital music to any room in your house (well, every room with the player device) all controllable from a nifty looking LCD remote control. In addition to the controller, you buy the player device that has a built in 50W amp and discrete RCA outputs. You put a player in every room you want music and the controller can control them all at once. They all access the digital music stored on your Macs and PCs on your network. Nifty. Kinda expensive, though.

Finally, a gadget to reduce the size of my wallet! Chameleon
Network has produced a device that can mimic any magnetic card such as credit cards and those supermarket
savings cards. It sounds pretty nifty, but I think they might have trouble selling it to the average Joe or
Jane. They are pushing it as being more secure than a traditional credit card because it has a biometric
fingerprint scanner and other security features.
xhref=”http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62545,00.html” mce_href=”http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62545,00.html”>Wired has some more info on it. I may not
be first in line to buy this thing, but I’m all for reducing the number of cards in my wallet.

Wired article about a machine that can supposedly help you dream exactly the dream you want to dream using a combination of lights, music, smells, and recorded phrases in your own voice. It’s still in development now, but should be available in the U.S. in 2005. It looks like it’ll cost something like $140. Whether it works or not, it seems like a fun thing to play with!

New technology will allow music to be carried wirelessly over a bluetooth connection. Wireless speakers and headphones exist now, but they are not high enough quality for discerning listeners. This technology transfers the audio digitally and future digital music players will probably include the transmitter, so the sound quality issues may be resolved once and for all. Nice!

Financial Times Article
Sony has released more information on their upcoming PSX entertainment console, combining a Satellite TV Receiver, TiVo-like functionality, a DVD recorder (nice!), and a Playstation 2 into one box. The pictures I’ve seen of it show it as more of a ‘living-room friendly’ box than the existing black plastic Playstation 2. It will only be available in Japan to start (of course) and the announced price is around $719. That’s a couple hundred bucks too much in my eyes.

A company called Brotron is making robots and futuristic weaponry for display in your space-age lounge. Nice! Here’s a movie of the Death Ray.

Yahoo News Story

It’s an attachment for a GBA that will let you use it to place a ‘video call’ another GBA over the regular phone lines. Neat!