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.

The world is a scary place. The internet is no different. Everyone is out to get you. Everyone wants to hurt you. And they’re always thinking up horrible new methods to do it.

Okay, so yeah, that’s just a tad over the top. No, life isn’t really that bad. But yes, there really are hackers out there in the world trying to be mean and nasty.

Just ask Adobe. What is more internet than Adobe’s Flash providing all sorts of goofy little Flash applets all over the intarweb? Well Symantec has found a weakness in it. An exploited weakness. With at least 20,000 web pages found to carry links to a site that hosts malicious Flash applets that exploit the weakness. Not good. Fortunately, it’s only Adobe’s own Flash Player stand-alone application that is vulnerable. Internet browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, et cetera that support Flash plug-ins aren’t vulnerable. They’re safe. Still, not such a great moment for Adobe.

Speaking of the internet, what about one of the biggest ISPs out there, Comcast? Well just a couple days ago, for a mere few hours, Comcast.net was hacked by a couple of losers who redirected the webpage to one with text that read, “KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK RoXed COMCAST. sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” Wondrous stuff that. Just the hack of the ages there. Fortunately Comcast fixed everything by Thursday and is working with the police, even if they are stymied.

Still, a hack is a hack, and of all businesses out there to be well protected, you’d have thought one of the great cable ISPs like Comcast.net would have held up better than that. Oh well.

And speaking of ISPs and hacks, let’s jump across the pond to everyone’s favorite BT Home Hub wi-fi internet router, which has yet another security hole. When left on the default settings. You see, to combat stupidity from being a factor in hacking the device, recently the default administrator password from “admin” to the device’s serial number. Each being unique and relatively harder to guess than “admin”, it seemed a fairly intelligent way to go. And since it’s stamped on the device you never have to go far to find where you wrote it down. Except that, according to GNUCitizen, it’s not actually all that difficult to request the serial number from the device over a network connection. Hmm. Not so brilliant then. Just yet another reason to change from the default settings to actually secure ones. Good advice for everyone out there, not just for BT Home Hub owners.

In fact, when was the last time you Windows users patched your bugs and holes? You naughty naughty lot. Automatic Updating should be fixing it for you. If you haven’t turned it off that is. Why do I ask? Well, according to a new study by Akamai, China and the US lead the way for denial of service and exploit traffic in 2008. Yes, that’s right. Exploits. As in your computer has a security hole the size of Texas that was fixed years ago, but because you don’t think updating is worth it, you got hacked and now hackers are sending out traffic from your computer. Goodness knows that the past years have seen a great number of really effective worms, viruses, and Trojans for Windows PCs. All of them with fixes. Have you updated your computer with those fixes? Because in the world of always-on-line high-speed internet, if you’re not part of the solution, you really are part of the problem. Update your PC today. With Windows it’s just as simple as turning on your Automatic Updates. Or clicking on that little Windows Update button. It’s never been easier. Protect yourself. Protect us all. Update your PC. Please!

So yes, hubs, computers, even cell phones can be hacked.

Cell phones?

Yes, that’s right, cell phones.

Such as a bug found in Motorola’s RAZR firmware allows intentionally malformed JPG images to execute whatever code a hacker’s little black heart desires. Fortunately, after a year of working on it, Motorola finally has a fix. Yipee! Way to keep on top of things Motorola!

But all is not lost. It’s a scary scary world, but there are plenty of folks out there finding the security holes. And plenty of people fixing them. Or telling you how to protect yourself from them. It’s a scary place, but we’re here to help. If you let us.

That’s right readers in Blog Land, today we study the wonder of the cuchi (or coochie) in technology!

It all started when, just a short while ago actually, I got freaking sick of razor burn and decided to think outside the box. Or, rather obliquely in this case… inside the box. Or at least just around it.

You see, I’m a sensitive man. In many ways. The most annoying of which is that my skin irritates at the drop of a hat. Or more so, at the drop of a razor blade. And I’ve tried everything. Shave with hot water. Shave with ice cold water. Before shave lotions. After shave lotions. Every men’s shaving cream known to man, especially ones designed for sensitive skin. Even Visine. (Get’s the red out of skin as well as it does eyes.) And so on. I even shower after shaving so that I can put hair conditioner on my irritated just-shaved skin. And then after drying off I go and put moisturizing lotion on the irritated skin. And if I’m lucky, I won’t have red irritated skin all day.

So you’d think I’d give up on shaving. Except that I’m far too vain. I’d be a real mountain man, just out of the woods, psycho mess from hell. No one wants that. So I shave. And suffer.

So I was driven to think of something. Something desperate. And it occurred to me, there are places where skin is far more sensitive than it is on the face, but people still shave. Well, women mostly. (Though in my opinion more men should, for the same reasons.) Surely they won’t put up with walking around all itchy down there all the time. So they must have some secret weapon, right?

And thus did I find it: Coochy Cream!

It’s more like really slippery conditioner than shaving cream. But in a way, that makes sense. You want to protect and heal the skin. And low and behold, it works!

Okay, so Coochy Cream doesn’t instantly solve all woes. It just leaves the skin less irritated than, well, even the best “sensitive” men’s shaving cream I could ever find.

So that’s where the coochie journey started. Then on El Reg I saw an article on a product that just plain made me laugh. The “Call Me” panty.

Yes, that’s a pocket for a cell phone right where it’d be most entertaining. At least so long as you remember to put it on vibrate… It’s simple. It’s brilliant. I can’t believe there aren’t a million variations on this already. For that matter why don’t men get their own version?

Okay, so unless you’re a real coochie, you’re going to find yourself in some potentially awkward social interactions when you reach into your underwear to answer your phone. But hotties who don’t mind flaunting it? I can’t think of a man on Earth that would complain to watch that. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Right. It is wonderful. But, you know, it seems there could be an even more technological answer to the same dilemma. One where, perhaps, the awkward playing with one’s crotch to answer one’s phone could be avoided. We do have this neato technology concept called Bluetooth after all…

Enter, The Toy.

Yes, that’s right. Synch up The Toy to your cell phone’s Bluetooth devices. (Which it’s non-broadcasting so it stays private.) Insert down there. And your partner can SMS text message you to turn it on to any number of settings.

The only down side? For such a brilliantly intelligent little device, it seems to be completely lacking in any ability to just set it to a mode where it simply vibrates when your phone rings. Huh. Kind of a bummer there. But maybe a new version will sort that little dilemma out.

No, I can’t really see any woman actually walking around with that thing jammed up in there all day. But hmm, what’s that, “Call Me” panties do have that pocket… That I could see someone doing.

So these forms of demented technology obviously still have some quirks for the true coochie to work out before they’re really ready for prime time. Still, it’s nice to see technology at least trying to address the issue.

And what of Charo up there? Possibly the original coochie? Well, it’s nice to know that in this day and age even Charo can have her own web page to press herself out and hock her own CDs. I also have to wonder if maybe any of the above products, or future ones along similar lines, aren’t in fact missing the opportunity for the perfect spokeswoman.

Ah, technology. Gotta love it!

I don’t think my perfect cellphone exists. Mostly because I don’t really need it much for the phone. I want a cross between a PDA and a micro-computer. But I have yet to find one that actually does everything I want.

Imagine a phone the approximate size and shape of an iPhone. The big shiny screen is on the front. It takes up the whole phone. It’s a touch-screen. The dialing ‘phone operation’ buttons are all touch-screen GUI.

Now, imagine that you can turn the thing sideways and slide the screen up to reveal a thumb-pad QWERTY keyboard, possibly even with number pad if it’s wide enough, just like a real keyboard on a PC. Including the F keys. Because it’s going to be a real PC under the hood. Sort of. With the touchscreen as the mouse driver. No on-screen keyboards.

The phone itself will need two layers of hardware. One standard cellphone. One a micro-PC with 1GB of RAM, an actual X86 processor, a crappy VGA graphics solution, and something like 802.11g wireless. The cell phone layer is always on while the phone is on. The micro-PC is off by default and ‘turned on’ by running an app on the cell phone. This app lets you switch back and forth between phone and PC mode, as well as lets you turn on, off, suspend, or sleep the PC layer. And of course there’s a setting that when the phone rings it automatically switches to phone mode for you.

The PC layer will need a devoted solid-state hard drive of some sort like flash memory. The problem is, no one likes to lose data when your solid-state drive does one too many writes because of Windows pagefiles. But also no one likes to lose data when a mechanical moving-platter hard drive has a head crash while the phone jangles in your pocket. And it’d be nice to be upgradable. So whatever the solution, it will have to be a balance. Maybe it will even consist of two hard drives, one for Windows pagefiles, temporary files, and things you just don’t mind risk losing. And one of files that don’t change. I don’t know. That part is hard. But it needs enough storage capacity to hold Windows XP Home and a random assortment of files.

Yes, I did just say that. This cell phone / PDA / micro PC runs Windows XP Home. Full out. No cut-down version. Which means any software you use on your PC (at least within minimum specs) you can use on this phone.

And, of course, the system should remain open enough that if I want to dual-boot Windows/Linux on this thing, I can.

Of course, if it’s made by Apple, I guess it should use a real Mac OS instead of Windows by default. But the rest remains the same, now including the ability to tri-boot.

The drawbacks? Well of course when running it in PC-mode it’ll eat up more power, so your operating time will be shorter than just phone-only mode. And of course the processor and 3D video acceleration will be by far slower than a modern laptop, so you’ve definitely got no gaming rig. For that matter the video output will probably be a non-standard format for a PC which will make most fullscreen games look like crap. But that’s okay. This isn’t a gaming rig. It’s a cell phone. A cell phone capable of running MS Office. A cell phone that you can actually show PowerPoint presentations from.

Which means two things. One, this little bugger needs at least one USB port to plug in things like a CD ROM, keyboard, mouse, etc. The port probably should be non-powered. Anyone who wants more than one port can use a hub. Two, this little bugger needs a DVI-I port (and in the packaging a VGA adapter) so that it can connect to a monitor or a projector. Maybe even an accessory would be a docking station that includes an additional hard drive, an ethernet port, extra powered USB ports, etc. so that you can use it like a real computer.

And, ultimately, what do we get out of this? Well, a PDA that really works for one. And a cell phone that every traveling business person can appreciate for two. Sure, it’ll cost more for something neat like this. But as the iPhone has shown, people will pay if it’s worth it. Heck, they’ll pay if it’s even perceived as worth it. No more crappy little apps that pretend to do something but don’t. Make it a PC and let it run real apps. Cell phones and PDAs don’t need the killer app. They need ability to run the real apps that you and I use every day so that we can kill all of those stupid cell phone and PDA apps that never work as advertised or desired.