Google Glass Prototype, a photo by Ars Electronica on Flickr.

Although Google Glass is looking great, I’m sure it’ll evolve rapidly over the next few years. Apart from increasing the resolution, I expect it to expand from one eye to two, to allow for three-dimensional display. I also wonder whether it’s really the best idea to put the display above the line of vision rather than below it — if you’re using it for reading a book, surely it must feel like holding the book above your head.

However, the main area for improvement is how you interact with it. Google Glass apparently requires you to touch the frame to control it, which is essential one-dimensional and tiring. However, traditional devices such as keyboards, mice and touch-screens are not going to be very effective, either. I’m not sure what they’ll come up with, but I won’t be surprised if Google Glass 3D in 2016 will be accompanied by a Google Glove (or perhaps just by small sensors on your finger nails).

A couple of days ago I then ordered a weed puller from Amazon, and it arrived today.

I was a wee bit doubtful that it would really be worth the money, but it’s great! It pulls up a dandelion within a couple of seconds, and often with the entire root attached.

Parts of it are made of plastic, but it looks reasonably sturdy, so I would definitely recommend this tool to all gardeners!

Apple claim Siri will get better at understanding its owner over time, but I’m somewhat doubtful whether it can be true.

I’m sure it can relatively easily catalogue a speaker as west-coast American or Australian or whatever (if those accents have been programmed into it), and within those types it can then store typical values for each phoneme, but given that it never asks the user to type in a word or sentence it couldn’t comprehend, how can it possibly learn anything if an accent diverges too much from its expectations?

I understand Apple want a product that people can just switch on and use, but for people with “strange” accents, surely it would be better to have the option of a dedicated training module rather than being stuck with a useless piece of software.

When I was learning to drive a few years ago, I bemoaned the complexity of manual transmission and suggested a better way: “As far as I can see, all of this could be done with the vertical part of a joystick or similar, holding it still to maintain the speed, moving it forwards to go faster, and pulling it backwards to slow down (and braking depending on how hard you’re pulling it).”

When I wrote this, I had never tried to drive a car with automatic transmission. However, during our recent holiday in Tuscany, we rented an automatic Lancia Delta Sport, so I got the opportunity to try it.

At first I hated it! It seemed to disengage the engine just as I was trying to go faster for the purpose of changing gear, and in the same way slowing down was interrupted at the wrong time.

With time I got used to it, though, especially after I found the manual override – it allows the driver to select plus to go up a gear and minus to go down one, which is useful to anticipate the gear change.

However, it did show me what the problem of my old suggestion was: If the driver is slowing down, the best gear change depends on what happens a few seconds ahead. For instance, if the driver goes down from 40 to 30 and then back up to 40, it might be best not to change the gear at all, whereas if the change for 40 to 30 is followed by a further deceleration to 20, it would have been better to lower the gear sooner rather than later. The car cannot know this, however, so it will have to err in one of the two situations.

The only way to make a better automatic drive would be for the controls to be different. If for instance cars had a control for target speed and a brake, in the first scenario the driver would leave the target speed at 40 but press the brake to go temporarily down to 30, whereas in the second scenario the driver would alter the target speed to 20 without pressing the brake at all.

Why aren’t the car companies coming up with ideas like these?

Phyllis has nagged me for some time to get new mobile phones for Complexli, so yesterday I finally called T-Mobile and got the price of our contract reduced by 50% and got two new phones: an HTC Wildfire S for Phyllis and an HTC ChaCha for me.

So far I really like it. The keyboard is very good, much better than what you find on BlackBerries, for instance, and it has a front-facing camera for video conferencing. It also has a Facebook button, which probably will seem quite old-fashioned in a couple of years’ time, but for the time being it’s quite handy.

The downsides seem mainly to be the size of the screen (it’s OK, but some apps are clearly designed for bigger screens), and the battery life, which is sadly quite typical for a smartphone.

All in all I must say that I’m quite a happy bunny!

When we lived in Rose Street, we had just the normal terrestrial TV channels. However, when we moved to Newton Mearns three and a half years ago, we decided to get Sky to please the kids. We didn’t get Sky Movies or Sky Sports, but we still paid £23.50 a month on top of the TV license.

However, the penny finally dropped last month that we were paying £23.50 for just a few channels more than what is freely available through FreeSat, and that our old Sky satellite dish was perfect for FreeSat reception.

So last week we bought a Humax Foxsat HDR 500GB Freesat HD Satellite Receiver and Digital TV Recorder, and it works beautifully.

It gives us a few channels in HD (which we didn’t have before), a bigger harddisk for recording programmes, and a more modern menu system.

We’re just wishing we had ditched Sky years ago!

So today The Times was finally put behind a paywall after a few weeks that allowed users free registration.

It’s insane.

The whole point of the Internet is the interconnectedness of all sites, so the sites that limit access will find it hard to attract traffic to themselves.

I know for a fact that I don’t tend to write blog postings that link to sites that are not universally accessible, so even if I were given free access to The Times’ website, I wouldn’t blog the content I found there without summarising it to such an extent that the blog posting would make it irrelevant to read the original article.

My gut feeling is most bloggers think the same way, so The Times (and soon the other NewsCorp sites) can wave goodbye to a lot of incoming traffic, which again means they’ll find it hard to attract new readers.

It’s the same problem that reviewers are now finding with the iPad’s magazine applications:

Despite the initial novelty of “swiping” to turn a page – not to mention interactive photo galleries, beautifully designed charts, audio snippets and videos – the app possesses the disadvantages of print without acknowledging the opportunities of the digital medium. Ads, for instance – lots of them. Unlike the easily ignored banner ads on Wired’s website, in the iPad app you find yourself assaulted by full-page brand advertising for the likes of Heineken, Samsung and Continental Airlines.

Wired wants you to read the app like a magazine, too: one page at a time. Little is done to improve navigation beyond the ability to view a list of all the articles in the issue.

And more than 11 years after Google made every webpage accessible from the search bar, the Wired app inexplicably lacks a search function. The publishers of iPad apps seem largely disinterested in linking to webpages. Perhaps this is a relic of their print editions.

There’s a bigger problem with the lack of links: If I decide I particularly like an article within an iPad app, there’s no way to link to it. Even if I could, you would need to buy the app to see what I’m talking about.

It looks like many publishers are trying to move back to before the Internet. This is understandable – it’s the world they know and understand.

I just hope most people will realise that paying money for these reactionary initiatives – whether Internet paywalls or iPad magazines – will make the Internet worse, not better.

So products like the iPad will probably break all the time unless people put them into big cases, in which case they might as well have bought a notebook.

So I started wondering whether the solution would be to roll up the computer instead, and my father-in-law has now sent me a video that shows that I wasn’t the first person with this idea:

It looks like a great idea, although I’m wondering whether the outer casing won’t scratch the screen when it’s rolled up — I would have thought it needed to be soft on the outside. I also wonder whether it needs to be so big. An iPad rolled up wouldn’t be much bigger than an banana, I reckon, so it would fit into a jacket pocket or a lady’s handbag.

Sadly, however, this is just a design project AFAIK, not an actual product.

But perhaps somebody will make an actual product out of this one day. If it’s Apple, they could call it the iScroll.

I’ve been discussing with wifie who’ll use the iPad, and we find it hard to find a single group of people that it’s perfect for. Let’s have a look:

• School kids and students won’t like it because they can’t play the Flash games that are their raison d’être, and because they multitask all the time (homework is always done while MSN’ing in another window).
• Content creators (such as bloggers) won’t like it because it doesn’t have a proper keyboard, and because it’s hard to attach a camera.
• Gadget nerds will think they don’t really need it because they already have an iPhone, a netbook, a laptop and a portable DVD player.
• Mature technophobes who would really like a minimal solution for light web browsing and emailing won’t like it because the iPad requires a proper computer for synchronisation, too.
• Business people will not buy it because it cannot be connected to a lightpro for presentations, and they might also want a front-facing camera for conferencing.
• Commuters won’t like it because it’s hard to hold on to on public transport.
• Porn addicts will dislike that it needs to be held in the hands.
• Book readers will not buy it because the screen isn’t as good for reading as electronic paper.
• Women won’t buy it because of the name, and because it doesn’t fit in a handbag.
• Game players will only buy it if there are games available for it that are better than their equivalents on other platforms, and that’s not the case (yet).

So I must admit I find it hard to figure out who exactly will think it’s worth the money, unless some ground-breaking games are soon released for it.