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Gadgets

Wikipedia.com says: A gadget is a device, usually simple in form and function, that has a useful specific purpose and function.

Wohoo, I am famous!

I warned you about this: I am getting famous! I got featured on the front page of the blog of Dutch technology lifestyle magazine Bright!

Here's a couple of videos of me at this summer's panorama conferences, showing the setup I brouight to Bright, as well as some others:

    Loco Roco is sooo cute (and addictive too)

    To celebrate our upcoming vacation, Tessa and I went to see the movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'. Having had great laughs watching Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow in the first movie, both of us found the sequel disappointing.

    The evening was not a total loss though; after the movie I had a spare few minutes waiting for Tessa, and was attracted to one of those Playstation stands we have in our cinemas. It turned out not to have a PS2, but a PSP instead. The PSP was running a game with cute yellow blobs rolling around, and I was sold in an instant. Everything from the intuitive controls, to the convincing physics based animation and the ever so cute music made perfect sense.

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    Cabinet

    One of my last activities before I switched jobs was to attend the 3AD conference, the 3rd conference for Appliance Design. At 3AD I presented some of the aesthetic interaction features of SPi-V. The conference also included a design competition, and the entry by dear friend and ex-collegue Ianus Keller, cowritten by myself and Aadjan van der Helm, won first place.

    Cabinet in context 

    Avinity.net is Live!

    Tessa is not the only one at Hoeben.net who's enjoying a fresh new job. Around november last year, my "company" studioPKO (note the quotes) contracted a big job at the Digital Home group at Conexant in Bilthoven. When the group started to spin off, I was asked to join the technology startup 'Avinity'.

    Lomo fisheye camera

    Today I received a package containing no less than 4 cameras with fisheye lenses. "Business must be going well" you might think... Not that it isn't, but if I tell you the cameras are from Lomo, you might start to realise it's not actually all that impressive price-wise ;-)

    The art of Lomography is to 'shoot from the hip'. From wikipedia:

    minimac

    Like I said, I really want one. They look great, and I have been looking to buy a recent mac to test SPi-V development on. Plus, they look great!

    But Apple made one crucial error. Contrary to a long-standing tradition, Steve's keynote presentation was not broadcasted live. By the time the presentation was available on the Apple.com website, I had already seen all new stuff that had been presented, including the mini mac. No need to watch the presentation...

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    First post

    Hi,

    As part of the Hoeben family, and Internet savvy person, it is an honour - no, a duty - to be active with a blog on hoeben.net. Favorite subjects of my blog will probably include gadgets, cars (a special kind of gadgets really; Volvo's, Healey's and other classic english vehicles I'll be adding to my collection), music (Bach) and my favorite pet, Hobbes. So let's get going...

    Yesterday I bought a Roomba. Remi (friend and colleague at the Digital Home team of Conexant) was raving about the Roomba, and I overheared Ronald (dito relation) ask Remi where to buy one. I chimed in that I would like to have one too, so off Ronald went to buy 2 Roomba's at the MediaMarkt. After a long night charging, I finally got the Roomba to do some vacuuming. First impression is that it is really good at it; it collected lots of Hobbes' hair and seemed to be pretty intelligent about obstacles. At the moment I write this post it is doing the most complicated room in my house; the kitchen. I just saw it rotate around one of the table legs, quite neat! The only downside would be that it sometimes gets stuck on doorsteps; I probably need to improve the 'Roomba friendlyness' of my house. A more fundamental issue could be that the Roomba I have is really designed for spaces up to 5 by 6 meters; observation learned that the algorithm uses the size of the room (small, medium, large) to determine how long it should travel along the walls with its patented side-brush, or how long it should traverse a room before doing circles again (I'll explain more about the algorithm in a later post).

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