Longshot City

This would sure help us include people in meetings when they’re far away.  Further, it helps someone “take a look at something” from afar.

UPDATE: It occurs to me now that instead of the robot arms, which are great but horribly impractical, it instead have the screen on a super-quick motorized pan (left/right), tilt (up/down) AND rotation (leaning to left/right) control, so that all the ways one can move his head around is translated into the screen’s movement.  That’s a whole lot of expression right there, and it could theoretically be controlled via pattern-recognition wizardry on the picture of the person’s face.  That can work.

Oh yeah, and a motorized laser pointer, so the remote person can reach out and point to stuff: that button right THERE.

When your computer’s RAM is maxed out, then what?  How about some RAM in an external box that the computer swaps to over USB/Firewire?

Further, maybe it’s worthwhile to recycle old RAM SIMMs and DIMMs that are taking up space in coffee cans and shoe boxes accross America.  Doing a buy-back “amnesty” for old RAM could be a cheap way to get a whole bunch of gigabytes in a hurry.

Surely this exists already, but I can’t figure out how to even search for it.  Eric was right about my Google-fu being weak.

It’s just a thingie+service that lets me pretend that my internet connection is in a data center somewhere.  The trick is that it can use (“load-share”) multiple internet connections (DSL, cable and wireless, for example) while doing this, and is ready for any one or two of them to break and still do its thing.

(As for what’s going on between the thingie and the data center along the colored lines in the video, I have no idea.  Maybe it’s iptables wizardry, or maybe it’s something else entirely that’s IP-based but weird and proprietary.)

So really, this is my naive best guess at how an ideal load-sharing redundant interent connection scheme would work for small-timers such as myself.  ‘Sure seems obvious enough from here.

(BTW, Sorry about the annoying noise at 3:23.  It only lasts ~20 seconds.  It’s my cellphone RF-interfering with the microphone, sheesh. –Craig, aka Mr. Production Values)

PS (Sept 16): I forgot to mention how the snap-in connectors at the ends of Cat5 cables are pretty small, and not wide like DB connectors.  Ergo, Cat5 cables are easier to push/route/yank around/through holes and constrictions.  (In fact, there’s a new class of Cat5 end connectors that are specifically designed to be yankable without getting caught on things.)  Once the ends are in the right places, the fat and clunky adapters are clicked on at the last minute.  The bigger/nastier your cabling situation, the more convenient this is.