The British government is going ahead with testing of an RFID enabled license plate. Not only is it enable, but it is using active RFID tags, which means that the information is transmitted up to 300 feet away. How long before a cop can say:

well the RFID signal from this car was received at mile marker 100 35 minutes ago, meaning that your average speed was 70 mph, so here is your ticket for speeding. (or some other scenario like that)

I am all in favor of trying to make the country a safer place, but this just seems like there are too many bad uses for technology than good uses. There is talk about how the US government has already begun using this in limited places to help track foreign cargo shipments.

So if you want to read more, you can read this blog here, or read the Wired News article here.

-Matt

This is an article about a keyboard that uses OLED screens behind the keys to let you customize what you see on the keyboard. Imagine that when you are in a given application, the images on the keys change cooresponding to what actions you need to perform. For instance, you are in Adobe premeire, and the keys change to video editing functions like play, rewind and fastforward. Imagine that when I go into SageTV, my keyboard changes to PVR related functions… This type of keyboard just has soo many uses…

Supposedly, that is what this site is talking about doing, but since it is Russian, it is a little bit hard to tell for sure. Take a look at the article here. This is a great idea that I would love to see get fully implemented.

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

So while looking at a blog, I saw reference to a touch screen monitor. So I started to web surf for this monitor and I cam acorss another website MP3Car.com, thus I started looking around. This place has all the cool toys that I am looking for, like small touch screen monitors, designed for use in a car computer application. More interesting they have car based computers in there too, and one that I really like looks a lot like a power inverter. Then I got thinking, these little devices would make a great Media Center exteneder, or in my case something to use as a SageTV Client. I have been working on my new client, trying to decide what to get, but this might be a better alternative because they are even smaller than the Shuttle PC that I was looking at. The only problem is that most of these systems are designed to have an external power supply, and this power supply is usually a DC-DC power supply, which causes problems for building it for inside use, but I am sure that someone has a solution for that…

So back to the original reason for coming to this site, they also have small touch screen monitors. The site listed above was using one of these for a digital photo frame application… Hmmm… the uses are endless… I might have to see if Cindy will let me get one

-Matt

Over at Engadget, there is an article about a cell phone signal booster. No this is not one of those that you stick on the back of your phone, it is designed to be used in a house or something like that. The biggest problem is that it costs $370, but if it does work like it is suppose to, I know that my parents sure could use one of those…

The article is here and it reviews the JDTeck JD55-PR . There are some other products on the companies website worth looking at…

-Matt

eHomeUpgrade is running an article about some new Microsoft hardware (here). The first peice of hardware is a wireless keyboard with a few extra features to make controling an MCE computer a lot easier. Me personally, I thik that I could use something like this since I am currently using a Logitech wireless keyboard on one of my SageTV clients. I am not too thrilled about the estimated price around $100. If this was closer to what I can get remotes for, then I would consider it…

In the mean time, I will just have to keep looking for nice remotes for my computers…

-Matt