I’ve written occasionally about how LED lights will gradually displace incandescent bulbs in most applications over the coming decade or so, and this is already happening – look closely at the tail lights of that truck you’re passing, or the traffic light you’re stuck at, and also note how you can buy LED bulbs to replace your existing incandescent bulbs right now, they’re just a little pricey and a little dim for most applications. There’s news today that major progress has been made on the dimness front – researchers in Japan have managed to almost double the luminosity of LED’s. I think this means you’ll be able to manufacture a bulb that’s sufficiently bright to replace incandescents for most household uses. At what cost, I don’t know (and given that the inventor is leaving his research job to commercialize this, my guess is ‘not cheap’ to start), but it’s another step down the path.

Regular visitors may have noticed how I’ve been gradually sprucing up this site over the past month or so. New server, new design (crabbed from elsewhere this time), new tools (streaming music is back, a wiki, and others yet to be revealed) and more integration with public tools (most of which is invisible aside from the presence of commenters outside our social circle – I’m getting indexed in some engines I had kept blocked in the past – there’s more of this to come as well). Anyway one of the next things on my list is dealing with bookmarks. In the past I kept a sitebar installation going. I’m tempted to move everything over to del.icio.us but a little worried that the firefox extension is going to slow down my browsing tremendously. Anyone have any experience with this? The idea is you store your bookmarks in del.icio.us and use a browser plugin to synch your local browser’s bookmark list with the del.ico.us server. You can do the same thing with sitebar and your local browser, the difference is there is some benefit to maintaining a public profile in del.icio.us that you don’t get in sitebar in terms of traffic to my site. I’d prefer not to have to maintain two sets of bookmarks, invariably they get out of synch. So. Anyone running the del.icio.us extension with a huge bookmark list and synching it with firefox? How’s the performance?

I’ve mentioned qumana in the past. It’s a fairly good weblog editing tool for Windows. It’s no ecto, but really it’s one of the better tools on windows. They recently updated to version 2.0. What’s most interesting about this is a feature they’ve added, which is all about integrating keyword ads into your weblog posts. I’m not a fan of this, really, and I’m not sure that their model of building their own keyword ad network will play out well for them, but if it helps subsidize the ongoing maintenance of a decent weblog editor and they don’t force their adword schemes on you (which for now at least they don’t), then more power to them.

I’m on a tagging kick today. Let’s say you’re wanting to get started with tagging, but since you’re new at it you’re a little unsure what tags to use. You may find that tagyu can help. It’s a tag suggestion tool – paste in a block of text and tagyu will offer up some suggestions. There are tools to help you integrate this into your workflow, including wordpress and movabletype plugins and a bookmarklet.

I dumped the text of this post into tagyu and got the following suggestions:

tools del.icio.us blog tagging tags

All appropriate in my estimation.

I’ve already installed the wordpress integration stuff (Ultimate Tag Warrior), I just haven’t turned it on yet, I’m waiting for a few things to settle themselves before I integrate tagging into this site.

So tagging’s all the rage these days, thanks to the emergence of tools like flickr, del.icio.us and technorati. If you’re on a Mac, take a look at Spotmeta and imagine applying the same principles to the file system of your local computer. This is pretty slick stuff, and it’s free. Note however that it’s fairly early in its development, so be sure to check the known issues page periodically.

Check out Synfig, a really promising looking open source cross platform 2d animation tool. There are binaries for Windows and MacOS and source for linux folk. The developer warns that this is a preview release and not ready for real production use, but some tinkering with the windows version suggests that this has a ton of potential. If you’ve ever wished you could play around with professional-level 2d animation tools, here’s your chance.

Check out the freeplayenergy Freecharge Weza, a power generator that uses a foot pedal to generate electricity. It’s a bit spendy at ~$300 but if you paired this with a ~$40 power inverter you’re basically able to power any device you need to through human power, from a car battery to your cell phone. This thing would be awesome on our annual camping trips and I already have an inverter. Their site doesn’t give you its weight, but with a lead acid battery in it I’m sure it’s too heavy for backpacking. It would be fine for our boat camping trips though.

[via futurismic]

Check out this excellent little device – it’s a USB ->IDE and SATA adapter, allowing you to quickly mount your internal 2.5″ or 3.5″ IDE or SATA drive without having to install it in a computer. I have an IDE-only version of this and get a fair amount of usage out of it. I’m glad to see a combination device with SATA is on its way. Hopefully they’ll be just as cheap as the $14 IDE one I bought.

[via akihabara news]

Check out this piece over on betanews.com talking about how instant messenger use is on par with email use these days. This isn’t surprising to me. It is a source of minor frustration in that I have had at best mixed success trying to convince educators that they should begin using IM as a way to communicate with their students. I’ve also had mixed success convincing institutions they should be providing IM services to their campuses – at Bowdoin I came within a hair’s breadth of solving this before I left, but I guess after my departure it fell apart. Skidmore’s willing to talk about it but that’s about as far as it goes. I’m blogging about this mainly for myself, so I have this link around later to point to the next time I have one of my ‘would you consider adopting IM as part of your communications toolkit’ conversations at work.

Check out this handy web service that builds a pdf file you can print and fold to make a cd case. The next time you grab a great concert off of archive.org’s live music archive you can make yourself a beautiful case to wrap it up with.

[via downloadsquad.com]

Microsoft is under price pressure in a variety of product categories from the open source movement and others. Most folks are probably unaware that the true core of this is not Office and Windows, despite how important they are to MS’s revenues. A developer friendly culture and strong development tools are a big piece of what’s contributed to MS’s ongoing success – these lead to a healthy software base for their operating systems and indirectly to the broader use of their products. If folks are writing all the books in your language, it’s the language most folks are likely to use is a way to think of this if you’re a non-technical person. It’s actually a good bit more complex than this, but it’s a really important contributing factor to Microsoft’s dominance.

Meanwhile if you take a look around higher education these days, what you’ll discover is that more and more computer science programs are teaching Java and very few are teaching .Net or C#, Microsoft’s preferred languages. If a school’s not teaching Java it’s teaching C. (or really, more accurately, they’re teaching both, but almost none of them are teaching .Net or C#). There are a variety of reasons for this but a huge one is the free availability of great development tools for Java, especially Eclipse. Additionaly even Apple is releasing its dev tools for free these days, as are Sun and IBM, and there are a variety of free alternatives available for linux.

All of this represents a medium term risk for Microsoft as newer generations of software engineers come up using non-MS development tools. Microsoft is of course not stupid, so what’s a struggling monopolist to do? We should all know by now simply by looking to the past. Release the developer tools for free, which they’ve just announced.

Normally I wouldn’t link to stuff like this since it’s really over the head of basically all of my audience, but here’s the thing: having a windows compatible IDE and compiler available is pretty handy at times, and this deal, at least for now, is only promised for the next year or so. So take a moment and go here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/install/

And download your tools. Just tuck the CD images away on your hard drive somewhere until the day you need them, in total it’s less than 2 gigs of data. These are unrestricted licenses and the link is to a download location that doesn’t require registration or product keys. These are not full versions of the products, but they’re more than sufficient for any hobbyist’s need or the casual geek who just wants to compile something they’ve grabbed off of sourceforge.

Check out these tiny little thumb drives from US Modular. Nice looking enclosure and a decent price, $99 for a disc-based 2GB thumb drive is not bad at all. This is a worthy holiday gift for the right geek. Me, for example.

Check out this post to the snapstream company blog. Beyond TV is moving to version 4 and adding support for direct DivX encoding, radio recording, and HDTV support amongst a host of other features. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while. If you’re not familiar with it, BeyondTV is Tivo for the build it yourself crowd. It’s the primary way I interact with video content and an application I use daily. It blows away what you can do with a Tivo. Upgrades are only $30, or for around $100 you can get the software and an HDTV encoding card. I will definitely upgrading the moment this comes out – native DivX encoding alone makes this worthwhile.