A company called Margi Systems just announced 'Presenter-to-Go', a Springboard module for the Visor, that lets you 'print-to-PDA' a Powerpoint presentation as a series of static slides, then take the PDA with you and plug it into a Barco or other projector or TV for remote presentations without the computer.

Cool idea, but I've been exporting slides to JPEG files, then uploading them to my Digital ELPH and using its video-out port to drive presentations. It's not made for it, butit works pretty well, and you can fit about a thousand slides on a 32meg card. Another advantage of this way is that you can easily go over your presentation (or show it to someone else) on the train or in the car using the camera's built-in screen.

I'd use it for the presentation I'm giving for Yahoo next week, but I'll need direct internet access. Still, an extra 8 or 16 meg compactflash card is just the thing to keep a digital wallet of pictures, presentations, or whatever, letting you use your digital camera as more than just a capture tool.

Sorry, no cute pink color scheme or gushing love letters from me this Valentine's Day. But I love all my readers, and since I know you love me too, I bought myself a long-stemmed rose on your behalf.

Thanks!

Okay, a lot of friends have pushed me into brushing the dust off this one and putting it online.

The short version: About twelve years ago I submitted an essay to a contest, predicting what computers would be like in the year 2000. Bill Gates was one of the final judges.

And it all came true.

So I've been putting a lot of thought into archiving techniques, methodologies of managing on-line, near-line, and off-line data, as well as addressing issues of data redundancy and permenance (both in terms of degradation of the storage media and the obselescence of same, for example, my 44 meg SyQuest backups might still be good, but readers are few and far between, while there are plenty of floppy drives, but I doubt my 14 year old disks are still readable).

Anyhow, I realized that surely there are people who have already thought about this alot more than I have, and probably have written up their thoughts, so I turn to the information specialists who read this blog: David? Ann? Can you give me a pointer?

Don't trust traditional encryption? Stegography, or the practice of hiding information within larger information, is pretty cool. It's easy to crack if the person knows there's actually a hidden message in the larger datastream (usually a photo, but sometimes something else). One of the most amusing ways to hide a message in the noise comes from Spam Mimic, which will hide your short text message into a spam email, suitable for pasting into an email message to your secret friend. Of course, now that it's been posted on Slashdot, it's useless for really secure communications (not that it ever wasn't) but it could be just the thing for trading intimate messages with your lovey at work.

Anyone know anything about stegography and mp3 files? Could be interesting...

• Windows 95
• Windows NT
• Windows CE
• Windows 98
• Windows 2K
• Windows Me
• Windows XP

Am I missing anything?

This has been bugging me for months. The US Mint says people aren't using the new dollar coin. Stores say they haven't seen them, and people say they never get them as change and the few they get they horde.

The problem in the pipeline is simple: Every day thousands of businesses get change and small bills from the bank, for the change they'll be giving out throughout the day. The only way the new dollar coin will be accepted is if the banks, without having to specifically be asked by the vendor, give vendors large amounts of dollar coins instead of dollar bills. This is simply the only way to inject change (both kinds) into the system. You can't ask people to go out of their way to the bank and request the dollar coins, and businesses aren't going to magically get them from their customers until they start giving them to their customers.

You get a single dollar coin as change, you might hold on to it. You get 3 or 4 a day, every day, and you start to spend them. It's really that simple. In the first 9 months of 2000, the US Mint made 1.1 billion of these coins, about 4 for each person, and only half of them have left the mint. Most of that half, in fact, is still sitting within bank branches. Right now there are only about 380 million of these coins actually out in the world, and they're calling it a failure because nobody's using them. They literally can't understand how a $40 million advertising campaign failed to started casual dollar coin use, and their conclusion is that people don't like the dollar coin.

By contrast the mint made 4.8 billion quarters in the same 9 month period in 2000 and, as quarters have an average life span of 16 years, there are about 102 billion quarters out there, or about 366 per person. This compares pretty favorably to the dollar coin's 1.3 coins per person.

I don't think the Mint actually wants the dollar coins out there, or if they do then the banks don't. I think I'll go to the bank tomorrow and get a couple hundred dollar coins. I'm going to make a habit of using only dollar coins for purchases under $20. See if I can start a little casual dollar use on my own...

I just posted five more AOLiza conversations. Yes, I know the AOLiza home page is getting a little unmanagable. A UI that was clever for eight conversations has become ungainly now that there are sixty-three conversations posted, with 5 more each week.

The visual redesign is done, and I'll be implementing it in the Fury 3.1 timeframe. The back-end system I'm coding to better deliver and organize Fury will also be used for the sibling sites, AOLiza, Randompixel, and forthcoming projects.

A reader wrote me a letter this morning expressing her distaste for all kinds of coins, including the new dollar, and asking me why I like the dollar coin. I kind of got long-winded, and so of course I thought I might as well repost it here.

Hi Eden,

Good questions. For the most part I hate change as well. I have a coin jar where I toss everything lower than a quarter every night and, like you, I got to a coinstar once every few months and change it into $40 or so (it would of course be a lot more if I didn't sift out the quarters). Nominally I take the quarters out for laundry, but the truth is I just like quarters. I make them into little $5 stacks and will often have between $30 and $60 worth. In that regard I'm clearly a freak.

As for the dollar coins, I like them for a few reasons, despite my aversion to smaller coins. On the shallow end, I like new shiny things, especially if they're gold, but I also think dollar coins are very useful. I keep my bills in my wallet in my back pocket, and I keep change in my front pocket. Right now, I hardly ever have more than about 60 cents in change in my pocket, and I have to go into the wallet and sift out bills for most purchases. Because of my aforementioned neurosis, whenever I get bills back as change I always feel compelled (and I know I'm not entirely alone here) to sort them all in the same orientation, and by denomination, before 'filing' them back into my wallet.

What I like about dollar coins is the freedom to escape this, the ability to bypass the wallet altogether, and the chance to actually have coins that are 'worth their weight' so that the 15 coins in my pocket might have the power to buy me lunch, instead of just being temporary storage before going into the change jar or granting the power to make exact change.

As a student, most of my purchases are under $5, and it's just more convenient in a lot of circumstances. That and the previously mentioned goldness and shinyness. Ideally, I'd have liked the coins to be more like the British pound coin, smaller but thick, for ready in-the-pocket identification, but they have this silly requirement to make the size and weight of the new dollar conform to the tremendously poorly thought-out Susan B Anthony dollar.

Anyhow, I see your point, and I especially agree with your sentiments on the needs of widely accepted electronic cash. I know that the next cellphone I buy will have an infra-red port, and I'll bet it's only another 2 or 3 years before we'll be using it for interfacing with payment stations (parking meters, vending machines, portable widgets the waitperson brings to your table instead of the credit-card folio). Physical money is just another interface layer. It took the place of physical goods in trade, making things a lot easier, but I'm sure that information exchange will supplant the physical money layer. At some point it may even change the way we think of money as denominations of an arbitrary amount of buying power. Who knows?

Thanks for writing,

Kevin

I was driving home tonight, amidst intermittent downpours and lightning, and it reminded me of a memory flash from three years ago.

Some time in early 1998 I stayed working late at CKS. I was the last one in the office, and probably hadn't talked to a real person (other than myself) for a good 6 hours. When the office gets quiet, after everyone leaves, it's like the static is gone and I can hear my thoughts. At any rate, I'd done all the work I was going to do, took the elevator straight down to the parking garage, found my car (so much easier when the only cars left are yours and the two inexplicable porscha coverd in a veil of dust and document in the window stating they were reposessed by the DEA and are currently in the control of the Secret Service (which shared our building, oddly enough).

Get in the car, turn the ignition, all the bleeps and noises telling you exactly what you're doing, even if your eyes were shut. Pull out to the gate, wait for it to raise, pull on to Spear, deserted at 10pm on a weeknight, and drizzling. Take a right, go three blocks up Harrison, then hang a left onto the lower deck of the Bay Bridge for the zip back home.

The Bay Bridge is an interesting span. It's really two bridges, one beautiful 4-tower suspension, one a box-girder eyesore. Completely different, but if you're on the lower (eastbound) deck, both look pretty much the same. If it weren't for the bright yellow tunnel through Yerba Buena Island in the middle, you'd never know they were different at all.

Driving across the first span, I took my place in the pattern with the other cars, all going the exact same 72mph. Across the first span, through the tunnel, and starting on the second span. I don't remember what I was thinking about, but suddenly there was an earth-shattering boom, that went on and on. Booms aren't usually the sort of thing that last very long, but picture your favorite television explosion, the huge bang, and it just reverberates forever. Like looking into a mirror mounted directly across another mirror, sandwiched between the lower and upper deck of the Bay Bridge, sound waves had almost nowhere to go but back and forth.

Instantly I dove for the brake pedal, before I even registered the bright flash of light coming from both my left and right. In front of me I could see about 30 cars on the span and instantly, as if they were all wired together, 30 sets of brake lights flashed on. When I say instantly, that's exactly what I mean. There was no cascade, no reaction to other brake lights, not even the time required for sound to propogate from the first car to the last car. We couldn't have timed it better if we tried.

It took a few seconds to sink in that lightning had struck one of the towers we were driving beneath. The simultanacity of the thunderclap and the light, and the equal flash on both the left and right of the upper deck left no other possibility.

Okay, I've gone on for about 300 words, for what point? Yes, it's a memory that's been seared into my brain, but the interesting bit was the linkage created. The simultaneous experience bound the people on the bridge together. Cars began to pull up next to cars in adjacent lanes, just to look over to their fellow driver and give them a look that silently asked, "did that just happen?" Several dozen drivers, encased in their own worlds, listening to their own music, following their own trains of thought, were instantly shifted into an identical thought pattern, slamming the brake pedals and in so doing forming an instant affinity. Of course it dissapated after less than a minutes, and unless someone else who was there reads this and contacts me, the affinity is essentially gone, but nevertheless it was there, created by common experience.

So, thought for the day: What affinity groups do you have? Which were made by structured social or commercial interaction, and which were formed by random incident? Are your closer friends those who you likely would have met sooner or later, or the people who you happened to connect with in the most unlikely of ways?