Category Archives: If I Had Money…

Blog posts of what I would do if I had a lot of money to fund projects with.

Spending Money

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Shanghai

Shanghai.

I thought of a neat way to curb small purchases of < $15 that one makes daily.

It’s been a long-term goal of mine to travel to China and Taiwan. That costs money. So, I need to save.Cutting back on big purchases like laptops, furniture, and car stereos is easy. And that’s great, because if you don’t have the big you don’t have the small. But, as the old saying goes: “Take care of the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves,” I often find myself picking up $5 worth of coffee during a stay at the cafe or, in the case of today, $12 on an awesome game soundtrack. (Gridrunner Revolution from Turbo)

What if I set a goal of seeing how long I could go without spending any money on a day-by-day basis?

Enter the #spentmoneytoday hashtag. Every time I spend even 1 penny in a day on anything below $15, I will tweet what I bought with the #spentmoneytoday hashtag on Twitter. This is sort of a transparent way of embarrassing myself publicly for pushing my trips to China and Taiwan back by minutes or hours (cents and dollars).

Project Natal + OpenSim = Heaven? Getting there!

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Enter The Matrix
Image by kirainet via Flickr

Microsoft unveiled their new Xbox 360 controller, or, lack-of-controller today at E3. Yes, I’m referring to Project Natal.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, you obviously don’t have a Twitter account. All of the videos I’ve seen thus far are pre-recorded, but if this thing works as good as they make it look, we are all in for a treat. Check it out:

Looks pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.

I have a few questions, which I’m sure you all do as well. Mine are

  1. Will the sensor be a USB device?
  2. If so, has anyone hacked their own drivers yet? :)
  3. How long until someone uses it in a virtual world, like OpenSim?

Combine this with a projection-cube-room like this one, a treadmill floor so you can actually walk, and you’ve got yourself a holodeck, son.

What do you think??

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Whatever happened to Virtual Reality?

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Virtual reality uses multimedia content. Appli...
Image via Wikipedia

Am I the only late-20-something that’s sorely disappointed that Virtual Reality has basically dropped off the face of the planet?

When I was young, Virtual Reality was supposed to be the “next big thing.” And for a while, it was. I played Dactyl Nightmare with the best of them on a Virtuality machine in a mall in Port Huron and anxiously awaited any tidbit of news to come from Atari about their Jaguar 3D headset.

Then, all of a sudden, VR disappeared.

I think it’s because of the Virtual Boy. I really liked that system, but I guess at the time it made a bunch of people sick and companies got scared to try it again.

Here’s what I want:

  1. A lightweight, high-resolution, full-vision 3D display headset with built-in (at least Stereo) sound. If it needs to take advantage of dual-header DVI graphics cards, so be it.
  2. Two Nintendo PowerGlove-ish devices that let me manipulate objects in 3D.

Can you do it for cheap?

Does anyone know of a high-quality headset like the one described above? Let me know in the comments!

As far as the gloves… I was thinking about getting 10 Nintendo Wii controllers and removing and then mounting the IR units on the tips of my fingers. Take advantage of the many open-source Wii controller drivers around the net to build a PC joystick driver that can work in engines like Torque.

I often fool around with 3D tools like blender and Torque Construction Set. I get frustrated at the interface with my computer. Not only is any size screen too small, a mouse and a flat 2D display just can’t manipulate the objects fast enough. I want to use my hands, damnit!

Just think of how cool it would be to wave your hand and have a forest grow behind it or earth raise into a mountain. The Matrix, here we come!

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Helping The World = The Power of Ideas + Resources

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Google has launched a new initiative asking people for ideas on how to help as many people around the world as possible. The project is called “Project 10 to the 100th”. Users submit ideas, which are then reviewed by a small panel of experts. The ones that have the potential to help the most amount of people will have financial resources committed to them by Google.

Google is spending $10 million to help these projects get off the ground.  If you have a great idea that you think may help people lead better lives around the world, you’re encouraged to send it in! While you won’t be receiving a financial reward if your idea is picked, you will sleep well knowing your idea is being made for real and will help those in need.

There are 10 categories to choose from. From the official website:

  • Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
  • Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
  • Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
  • Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
  • Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
  • Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
  • Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
  • Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Submissions to the project are due October 20th, 2008. For more information, watch this video:

Links:
Project 10 to the 100
How It Works
Submit Your Idea
Submission Categories
Frequently Asked Questions

Grass-roots open-source gaming console?

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Earlier today, I had a thought: What if a few of us got together to develop specs for a PC-based open-source games console that uses a bootable Linux-based game DVD for games?

I blogged about the awesome boot’n'play Linux CD before, but it still relies on someone to burn the disc and reboot their machine. Also, this requires gamers to (unless they have a unique set-up) sit at their desk and look at their computer monitor to play games. Finally, you always hope that the bootable disc supports your graphics or sound hardware.

Why can’t we put together some specs for a cheap gaming PC in a mini-atx case, include a TV-out card that has composite, S-Video, and Component output, and offer downloadable ISO game-packs from a website. The system can have a hard disk or can save the games to a USB memory card.

The goal is to make the gaming system as easy to use as, say, a GameCube.

Download the ISO, burn the disc, put it in the console and play.

We’re already half there — the games console could easily use the boot’n'play Linux CD I spoke about earlier. It kind of makes you wonder why this hasn’t been done already?