Kinect hacked; The beginnings of a new paradigm?

Without doubt, Kinect is a very exciting technology.

And it was inevitable that the hobbyist-types would waste no time to dismantle the device to observe the "gears" in action.

It's now official that the persevering few have indeed figured out the protocol and have built drivers that allow the Kinect to interface with the PC, and not just XBox 360.

I found this DIY step-by-step of figuring out the USB protocol to be particularly interesting: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/diykinect/

What is particularly interesting to me  is that academic types are using the hacked device to build some interesting scenarios. Such as described  in this NYTimes article.

I would wager that this is classic disruptive technology behavior, that would result in some interesting product breakthroughs.

Going for a Linux laptop

So for the heck of it, I thought it was high time I explored things outside of the Microsoft bubble, and therefore decided to get myself a laptop running Linux.

Did the usual internet search for Linux based laptops but found that the only ones available were custom ones that were pretty expensive. Dell had one for $579, but overall wasn't too impressed with the specs.

So I decided to get a cheap regular Windows-based laptop, and convert it to Linux. A random visit to the local Staples store revealed a bunch of HP laptops for less than $500. I finally decided on the HP DV6-3010US which has a dual-core AMD CPU, with 4 GB of RAM and more diskspace than I'll ever need.

I'll do another blog post that provides details on converting the laptop to Linux, but overall it was a breeze!

The laptop is now running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), is connected over wireless (which took a bit to setup), with a few apps I installed later like Eclipse for development purposes.

On the whole I'm pretty impressed with Ubuntu. Happily, Ubuntu's borrowed many of Windows GUI and usability aspects, so using the OS was easy enough.

A quick note on the HP DV6-3010US. Without a doubt it's a cheap laptop, and the cheapness is very evident in the quality of the materials used for the laptop (think Kia or Hyundai quality years ago). The processing horsepower with memory is decent enough, though. The most irritating part of the laptop is the mouse-pad which is close to impossible to use, and if you touch it wrong, does all sorts of wacky things (like suddenly highlighting and deleting all your text as you type). I clearly need to get a wireless (or wired) mouse before the mouse-pad drives me nuts.

Google Wave

So I was trolling the Net earlier today, and came across a small snippet somewhere about Google Wave.

So I start watching the YouTube video of a demo, and WAS BLOWN AWAY!!

This was exactly the app I was wishing I had 2 weeks ago when I was at the outplacement agency and needed to sync information (email, chats, docs etc) all in one app. Rather than having a bazzillion webpages and apps open.

Looks like the app was created by the same guys (Lars and Jens Rasmussen) who had originally created what became Google Maps.

So questions\thoughts that come to mind right now:

1. How is Google going to make money from (the marketing term being "monetize") this app?

2. The UI is already looking complicated. They should look at simplifying it.

3. They are already talking about working with the standards body to enhance HTML to support some newer features. This is the kind of stuff Microsoft used to do back when.