Brilliant, and yet all too familiar to me.

View "Introducing the book" on YouTube

I want a system that I can run a video or audio file through that will take all the words being spoken aloud in the file, transcribe them, and put them back into the file so that the text is aligned with the words being spoken at that moment in the video.

Then, I could easily search that file for certain keywords and content without having to manually assign those keywords to the video. If the video or audio is an hour long presentation, but I’m only interested in three minutes of it, this kind of system would make finding those three minutes a lot easier.

Of course, as soon as such a system is brought onto the web and tied into YouTube, Google Video, and other such online multimedia systems, it gets far more interesting.

I’m sure the government already has such systems in place (like ECHELON), but I’m talking about a consumer-friendly system here.

I admit it, the ModBook is pretty sweet. It’s an after-market Mac made by Other World Computing and Axiotron. The basic idea is simple: they buy regular MacBooks from Apple, take them apart, upgrade and reconfigure certain pieces of hardware (including adding a stylus-sensitive LCD screen and an optional GPS unit) and put it back together in the shape you see there.

It doesn’t have a keyboard, but I suppose the idea is that Inkwell should suffice when you’re mobile, and if you have to plug in an external keyboard, you can. People who buy these probably aren’t getting them to type papers, anyhow.

So if you need a “tablet Mac”, there you go! Unfortunately it comes at an $1100 premium over what an identically-configured MacBook would cost, but MacBooks don’t have stylus-sensitive screens or built-in GPS, either.

If you missed the keynote on Tuesday (and by “the keynote” I’m referring to the one that changed the entire world and everyone in it), don’t worry! Help is on the way!

iTunes has the entire Macworld San Francisco 2007 Keynote available for free. Enjoy.

It’s not often you get 1.21 GB of high-quality ones and zeros for free with just the click of a button. Plus, with this version, you can easily fast-forward over the extremely-boring Cingular CEO and his Notecards from Hell.

Get ready.

I’m going to resist the urge to write a ten-page detailed review of the thing since those are available elsewhere. Just google “wii review” and you’re likely to get something more professional. I already wrote about the Wii controller back when the Wii was still called “Revolution.” Now that I’ve had a chance to play with it for over a month, I want to say a few more things. I apologize if this seems a little thrown together. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking this through or scaffolding a logical series of statements because I’ve been having too much fun playing with the Wii.

I think the Wii is the most compelling video game system I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s easily the best gaming system I’ve ever owned. There are many reasons I say that, but the primary one is simple: everyone wants to play. Playing is much, much more fun when it’s with the people you love. I’ve already had three little parties at my house that mostly centered on the Wii, and everyone loved it. I’ve heard countless stories of people’s non-gaming parents and grandparents picking up the controller and using it successfully on the first attempt. These are people who usually find it difficult to even use a computer mouse, let alone a game controller.

The gameplay, as exemplified in the included Wii Sports game, is so completely intuitive that no one really has to tell you how to do it. When you’re playing Tennis, for instance, you just swing your arm as though you’re holding a real tennis racket. There are absolutely no buttons the player has to push. Your character’s feet move automatically, so there’s nothing left to do but think about your forehand and backhand, timing them properly. It’s also realistic: if you swing your arm harder or more softly, the ball will react appropriately. If you put spin or angle on the ball in a realistic way, it’ll happen on screen.

And that’s just Tennis. We haven’t even talked about Golf, Bowling, Baseball or Boxing yet. All of them are smash hits at my house. Last week a very fit friend of mine was panting and sweating like crazy after defeating eight or so opponents in boxing matches. This system is about something much more interactive and fun than pushing buttons. Something that will reach a lot more people.

Aside from the Wii games (and I must point out that I’m skipping a lot of things that could be said there), the system itself is a ton of fun. Creating Miis, (which are little caricatures of yourself, your friends, your family, favorite celebrities, etc) is a blast. I created my Mii, one for Steph, and a few others before I even began playing any of the games I bought for the system. The best part of all is that in Wii Sports, you can play using your Mii! So you essentially play as yourself, seeing a little cartoon of yourself on screen as you swing your racket around. Your friends and their Miis are oftentimes in the stands cheering you on, walking by in the bowling alley, or playing center field in baseball. The fact that the Wii has built-in wifi makes it easy to get it online and share Miis and send messages to my Wii-owning friends, too.

As if all that wasn’t enough, you’ve got the Virtual Console to top it off. Nintendo is re-publishing some of its best games from its previous systems (NES, SNES and N64) and the games of other, previously-competing consoles like the Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx 16. And they’re offering these games in a sort of iTunes-like a la carte system. What this means is that I can download the original Super Mario Brothers from 1985 and play the game in all its glory on my Wii, on my widescreen TV, for $5. Worth it? Yes. Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. The original Zelda from 1987 is on there. Sonic the Hedgehog from 1991 is on there. They add more titles every single Monday.

So in short, I’m incredibly impressed with the system, and I hope that even people who haven’t previously enjoyed gaming will seriously consider picking one up. I mean, I need more people to send my Miis to!

If you’re a long-time reader, you may have noticed that I’m a tad obsessed with bumper stickers. I’ve been thinking lately about why that is, and I think I know why. I recall talking with my dad when I was younger about bumper stickers. He’d sometimes discuss the merits or problems of a particular idea someone was expressing, but more often still, he’d point out the correlations between the stickers. He loved to ask my sister and I if we could find the common ideological assumptions that tied the stickers together. I still do that to this day, almost automatically.

Lately I’ve been wondering if I could somehow make a website out of the question of “How are certain bumper stickers ideologically tied to other bumper stickers?” Someone already made a website out of a fascination with the question “Where has this dollar bill been,” so this doesn’t seem that crazy.

I want to be able to make a short list of bumper stickers from a car I saw this afternoon, for example, enter them into this website, and have it show me a sticker cloud (hmm… stickercloud dot com is available…) of all the other bumper stickers that would be most likely to be seen on a car with the ones I saw. It could even show me the stickers that are least likely to be seen on that car, so I could see the ideological opposites of those stickers. It would save the data I had entered, too, and as more people used it, the ideological ties would become clearer and clearer as more data was entered in.

There are two big problems with this idea as far as I can tell. First, it would be difficult to associate the same sticker (or an extremely-similar sticker) seen by two different people unless there was a finite set of stickers to choose from. You’d have to have some kind of search mechanism that only displayed known stickers, but that would artificially limit how the cloud could grow. That’s hard to solve.

The second problem is that there’s nothing stopping multiple people from entering the same car over and over again, and making those ties seem stronger even when they only really represent one car or one person. I figured I’d have to allow users to also enter license plate numbers to keep that from happening, but I don’t know what the legal implications of collecting license plate numbers are. That’s the other issue.

What do you all think? Interesting idea or useless waste of time? Any help with the two difficult parts of the idea would be much appreciated. We’ll see where this goes.