As far as I know this is not an April Fool’s joke. The article is two days old, and the patent does apparently exist.
A company called powercast has developed a way to capture energy from radio waves at a variety of frequencies, and to thereby wirelessly power devices. There is huge potential here for the implantable pacemaker/defibrillator business, as the devices currently have to be (surgically) replaced when the batteries run out. I think the current lifetimes are around 10 years.
Today was my first experience with car sharing (or as I think of it, mini-renting). I reserved a car yesterday so that I could run some errands today. When the time came, I walked up, waved my evil RFID card over the windshield, and off I went. It was a hybrid and an automatic, both things I’m not accustomed to driving, but overall it wasn’t too hard to get used to.
I hit a little snag when I tried to extend my reservation because I was running late. The automated system told me that someone else had the car reserved, and that I couldn’t extend, but when I got home I discovered that nobody else had the car reserved for two more hours. When I called to ask why, they seemed puzzled and were unable to give me an answer.
When I was done, I took my stuff out, waved the RFID card over the dash again, the car locked itself, and I was done.
It was handy to have a car to run those errands, but I almost got sideswiped when I had a protected left by some lady in an (of course) SUV who ran a red light. It didn’t help that the guy in front of me panicked and slammed on his brakes, putting me right in the path of the SUV with not much of an escape route. Anyway, the woman caught herself in time and I was saved from impending doom.
My passenger was a little more shaken than me — he would have been on the impact side. Maryland drivers…
Overall it was a very neat experience, and I think it’s something that will continue to catch on.
This is one of my favorite applications for Mac OS X, and it was only available for PowerPC because of major differences in memory stuff on a low level. Rogue Amoeba has come out with a beta version for Intel.
It shows, in the menu bar, the memory usage of the foreground application. For example, right now I can see that Firefox is using 76.7 MB of private memory. Link to the Intel beta page here. If you want the PowerPC version, go here. It’s at the bottom of the page.
I just made two very important discoveries. As much as I loathed buying Acrobat Standard, and as poorly as it ran on my machine using a case sensitive filesystem, it does have a redeeming feature.
It has a built-in OCR engine, which I knew. I hadn’t tried it. I decided to try it on an academic paper that I had in my archive. However, when I loaded the paper (which looked scanned) I was already able to select the text, though I didn’t know why. I was also able to do so in Preview, so it couldn’t have been a feature of Acrobat.
I took another paper that was clearly scanned, and tried to run OCR on it. It didn’t have the selectability that the first one did to start with. However, after OCR… it did.
So, the two important discoveries are that Acrobat will overlay your scanned documents with selectable text information transparently, and that Circulation Research appears to have already done this on their downloadable PDFs from older articles.
This explains why PDFs that I thought were scanned have been showing up in Spotlight searches that pick up their contents.
ADDENDUM: Apparently Acrobat Pro can do this in batch mode. This has major implications for me. I might even consider buying it at some point, once they come out with a universal binary.
I inadvertently discovered the other day that to quickly switch between icon, list, and column views in Finder, you just have to press Cmd- 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Much quicker than grabbing and/or moving the mouse to the buttons.