So you got yourself a fancy new G1 cellphone.  It’s so fancy!  It’s so intuitive!

It’s so fancy and intuitive in fact that it even thinks for you.

Like, say, if you were texting someone, and you were telling them how you had to reboot your computer at work, like magic, the fancy G1 would reboot itself upon seeing the word.  It’s that intuitive.

Yes, you read that right.  The G1 handset has a bug that it picks up on keywords you enter, say in texting someone, and operates itself according to those keywords.  So if you text the word reboot to someone, your G1 reboots itself.

Neat!

No, not really.

Even worse, if you had texted that to a server running Google’s Android like your G1 phone does, then that server would have rebooted too.  Or if someone knowing your phone’s flaws was just evil and vindictive, they could keep texting you the word reboot over, and over, and over, and over…

Fortunately Google has issued a fix.  Well, a partial fix it seems.  I guess Android isn’t built in a day.  Or fixed in one either.

Still, how in the world did this bug ever get past testing?  And who even thought this was a useful feature anyway?

It was an innovative if not naive idea: the paperless office.  A world where paper was no longer needed to do day-to-day tasks.  Only, it never happened.  People tried.  All that it lead to were less pre-made forms to fill out, and more use of printers to print everything out.  It was hardly paperless.  In fact, with the loss of the pre-made forms people forgot the usefulness of carbon paper, and soon the paperless office actually created more work.

But then there was an invention that would revolutionize the world: electronic paper!  It would allow devices to be created which could keep a page displayed on the screen without using electricity.  And it gave paper’s wonderful readability instead of the glowing and eye-hurting electronic glow of screens like LCDs and OLEDs.

Only, it never caught on.  Even today, you almost can’t even find an electronic paper display.  I’m not even sure how companies like E Ink manage to stay in business.

And the reason, I think, is that the typical electronic paper device is simply useless.  It’s just an e-book.  You load a file.  You read the file.  End of story.  Great if you can find a lot of books converted into files for you to read.  Not so great if you can’t.  And utterly useless for anything else.

Like the PDA, the limitations of the device hindered its uptake.

Now everyone wants these lost features on their cell phones.  And maybe, just maybe, there’s a point in there somewhere.

Maybe the scope of using e-paper for just e-books is a little too narrow.  Maybe there should be more to e-paper than that.

Imagine, if you will, an inexpensive tablet PC -like device.  Not a fully functional tablet PC.  More like an overgrown PDA.  With easy to use wireless networking, and a nice big electronic paper display, with an integrated touchscreen.  You have a company meeting.  Now instead of everyone printing out dozens upon dozens of reports to read along with the presentation, everyone can simply grab their e-paper tablet and open the report file on the company share.  Or the meeting organizer can email everyone the report and you just open that email up on your tablet.  Information is meant to be shared.  Why print something only to throw it away an hour later when we have the technology to do much better?

Which, to be useful, means that the electronic paper tablet needs the ability to open (and edit) any office document.  It needs email.  It needs file sharing.  It needs so much more than just simple reading of e-book file formats.  And it needs energy-conserving internals to match the e-paper display for a long battery life.

What about e-paper cell phones?  Instead of light-up and then darken on inactivity screens, you can have constantly vibrant screens.  You could have a “closed display” as large as the phone itself instead of just being a tiny window.

What about laptops?  Wouldn’t it be awfully neat if your laptop’s lid actually had an e-paper display on the back, so that even when it was closed you could have a changable display?  You could make it display a company logo.  You could design the laptop to still check email once every ten minutes while in sleep mode and display an email icon on the closed lid.  You could do all sorts of interesting and wonderful things.  And while the e-paper image doesn’t change, the e-paper display doesn’t use electricity.  So it has a minimal impact on your battery life.  Imagine how neat that would be!

The idea of a totally paperless office may be a fairy tale.  But the uses for electronic paper are not.  They can go far beyond the simplicity of electronic books.  They can offer some very neat tools to increase our productivity and the wow factor in everyday devices.  And they can do a lot to conserve paper and electricity to help save the environment.

Smoking bans are running rampant, not just in the US, but across the world.  And the world, of course, is fighting back.  A new technology is emerging which gets around smoking bans.  It’s the electronic cigarette.

It’s typically only slightly longer than your ordinary cigarette.  Only instead of being a burning paper-wrapped stick of chopped-up tobacco, it’s a flameless aluminum tube containing a battery, a nebulizer, a cartridge of liquid nicotine (plus propylene glycol for a mist of “smoke”), and an LED light for effect.

There is no smoke.  There is no burning tobacco leaf.  There doesn’t even have to be a flavor or smell.  All that it really is, is a nicotine inhaler, cleverly disguised as a cigarette.

There’s debate about whether or not there are any health impacts on using the device.  Obviously it clears up all of the hazardous poisons and carcinogens associated with smoking.  Whether or not nicotine itself is dangerous however is still up for debate.  Of course one could make similar arguments about caffiene or alcohol.  Any tool when used properly can be positive, and when abused can become detrimental.

Clearly the electronic cigarette is not intended as a device to help you quit smoking.  It keeps you right on obsessed with your next nicotine hit, and with your oral fixations.  It’s not a tool to help you get over any addictions.  It’s merely a device to allow you to enjoy a smoking-like experience in all of those mean nasty places that have passed laws to ban smoking.

According to Wikipedia (not always the utmost accurate source, but a fair good hand better than guessing):

• In the European Union some countries have stipulated a decision according to the legal status of e-cigarette products.
• In Austria the e-cigarette is seen as a medical device and the nicotine cartridges are considered a medicinal product. This means that an e-cigarette needs to be CE-marked and the nicotine cartridges must be registered as medicinal products before they can be sold.
• In the United Kingdom, electronic cigarette use is currently unrestricted, with celebrity nightclub Chinawhite allowing use of the devices indoors, where traditional cigarette smoking is prohibited.^[10]
• In The Netherlands the use of the e-cigarette is allowed but advertising the electronic cigarette is forbidden as long as no European legislation or guideline exists.^[11]
• In Finland the usage is prohibited as it is considered a medical device by the Finnish National Agency for Medicines.
• In the United States, the e-cigarette is accepted as a smoking substitute or cigarette alternative, but is not approved as a smoking cessation product. Since the e-cigarette does not contain any tobacco, it is not subject to tobacco-related regulations^[1] such as the Clean Indoor Air Act.^[12]

So whether or not the electronic cigarette is right for you, is, well, up to you.  I can’t say that I am entirely impressed with the thought of someone blowing “steam” that has been flavored/scented to mimic the nastiness of a cheap cigarette.  Second hand “smoke” doesn’t have to be a “health hazard” to offend.  So obviously I would prefer that those who use such a device in a non-smoking environment either stick to flavorless cartridges, or try something more appealing like a quality pipe tobacco smell over a cheap cigarette.  Heck, try strawberry flavor.  Or chocolate.  Now that the nicotine hit has been disambiguated from the pollution, one is really free to introduce any flavor or scent combination that one desires.  (Or at least purchase whatever cartridge options are manufactured.)

I, sadly, expect that as more and more smoking bans are put into place, more and more demand for this product will rise.  You really can’t expect people to just give up a drug addiction.  Period.  And nicotine is most definitely an addictive drug.  But now, it can be an enjoyably innofensive drug, much like caffiene.  Coffee in the morning to get you going, and an electronic smoke in the evening to bring you down.  It’s a sad world, but it’s the one we live in.  And thanks to technology, there are new options every day.

Well, sort of.

On the 22 of October, India’s first unmanned moon mission, the Chandrayaan-1, is set to launch.  It will probe the moon’s surface with cameras, lasers, and x-rays.  It will even drop off a lander probe.  This is all pretty big stuff for anyone to accomplish with a budding space program.

Of course, that has been one of the noteworthy comments made.  India, a country still lacking in standard of living for many, is aiming awfully high and spending a considerable amount to aim at their jaunt into the space race.  They have also already pushed back the launch from April to October because of technical issues.  They have a lot riding on this mission.  Let’s hope that they at least manage to pull it off without a hitch.

It sounds cool.  Northrop Grumman, makers of many fine military technologies, has delivered the first production-line quality laser ray gun to the United States Air Force.  A fine achievement indeed.

At first glance anyway.

The Joint High Power Solid State Laser program is intended to one day deliver a 100 kilowatt cannon capable of all sorts of cool things.  Only it has yet to deliver a final end product, as the production of the electricity to power such a laser gun in any sort of mobile platform involves extremely hazardous chemicals.

So insetad of delivering that, we get the Vesta II, a teeny tiny little 15 kW laser. It’s hard to even classify it as a weapon, in that about all it can really do is hurt a lot or maybe, with enough time, explode exposed explosives.  (Say that ten times fast.)

Still, that we’ve got a production-line quality laser “weapon” at all is a huge step forward … I guess.  I mean it’s better than, say, not having any production-line quality ray guns for our military to play with.  I guess it at least allows all sorts of testing and design and consideration to be done.  It’s a step along the way to something cool, even if it’s kind of a letdown itself.

In a time when national financial stability is so questionable though, it could be the wrong time to trumpet any project that fails to deliver bang for the buck.