JoostTeam

It may look a little precarious and uncomfortable to ride, but Honda believe their new ‘personal mobility‘ device could one day be zipping up and down our streets.

The vehicle looks like a very modern unicycle and to ride it you simply lean your weight in the direction you want to go, whether that’s forward, backwards or even sideways. It maintains its own balance travelling up to 3.7MPH.

The U3-X, which was given a test-run by reporters in Japan today, was designed to be small, safe and unobtrusive enough to mingle with pedestrians or use indoors, according to Honda Motors.

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via Honda unveils ‘Segway-style’ unicycle that travels in any direction you want | Mail Online.

People hate IE6; they’ve made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it.

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. Let me restate that slightly to make it more clear: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.

Yes, it’s both hilarious and awesome or hilariously awesome, if you will that Google seems to dislike IE so much that it has spent its own time improving it. Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. That said, they are only targeting one browser, IE, right now.

via Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome.

I am not really crazy about Microsoft products but this one is really cool. The product is called Recite and run on Windows Mobile Phone 6.0+

Microsoft Recite is a search technology for your voice that runs on Windows Mobile* devices. With Microsoft Recite, you can use your voice to easily store, search and retrieve the things you want to remember, where and when you need them. Microsoft Recite is available as a free technology preview beginning February 16, 2009.

*Microsoft Recite can be used on devices running Windows Mobile version 6.0 or higher. Not sure what you’re running? A complete list of devices can be found at http://recite.microsoft.com

Microsoft Recite’s voice search makes it easy to retrieve your stored thoughts and notes by using voice pattern matching. It analyzes the patterns in your speech and finds matches between two recordings — the notes you stored on your phone, and the search you do using your voice. With Recite you can store thousands of spoken notes, and then later retrieve the notes you want based on a match with your search term(s). This is different from speech recognition, which has to accurately convert spoken words to application-readable input.

Here is an awesome demo:

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• Microsoft Recite (blogs.msdn.com)

Here is another comparison video I did pitting the Canon HV20 against the Flip MinoHD in usual daylight conditions. It show interior house scenes (don’t comment on some of the mess in my place… kids, you know…) mixed with bright whine snow scenes. Sorry, no sunny beach since it is winter around here!

The MinoHD is actually holding quite well. It has some trouble with exposition in some scenes when compared to the HV20. Contrast is also not as good… but overall for the size, price and portability you can’t go wrong.

The biggest thing for me is the lack of image stabilisation. Even when mounted on an heavy tripod the lack of camera shake on the HV20 footage is a tribute to it’s very good optical image stabilization system.

Maybe the next gen MinoHD will include a bigger sensor that will allow for electronic image stabilization?

For the record the HV20 is left and MinoHD is right. No color correction was done. Simply re sized the HV20 footage to frame it similarly to the Flip MinoHD for proper comparison. Because of the extra pixels captured by the HV20 this resizind was not giving an edge to the Mino ad more than enough pixels remained to support a fill 720p picture.

Canon HV20 vs Flip MinoHD Daylight from Bernard Maltais on Vimeo.

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• Just received a Flip MinoHD

I took some time today to put the Flip MinoHD through it’s pace… and decided to capture some scenes of my typical work day… minus the work

So I captures a bunch of random video sequences of the view from my office (nice heh!), me waiting for the bus, me in the bus looking out the window… me on my street looking at cars slip sliding in the snow and finally my son walking in the snow with great difficulty!

I took all the footage and made a quick movie that turned out not so bad.  The final quality is much better on my system then what is rendered by Facebook (sorry Vimeo but you only allow 1 HD movie upload a week and I already burned my credit… so facebook it is now… I will need to talk about this in another post).

OK, Facebook it won’t because apparently my video is longer than 2 min and Facebook want me to share my phone # to get more time… err… no!

So youtube it will be!

So enjoy the short movie entirely captured by the MinoHD and produced with iMovie 08.

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• Just received a Flip MinoHD

Hello fellow Joost, Apple, Hulu, WebTV followers. Just a uick one to let you know that I am heading south tomorrow to attend the Cisco Live Networkers conference in Orlando.

Leave me a comment if you are attending too. Maybe we will have a chance to meet and greet over there.

I will keep updating my blog as much as possible during the conference.

Cheers

Image via Wikipedia

Responding to a consumer shift toward more fuel-efficient vehicles, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and big sport utility vehicles at four North American assembly plants and would consider selling its Hummer brand.

The moves, announced Tuesday by the company chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner, will slash 500,000 units from the automaker’s overall production, and pave the way for increased investment in smaller cars and passenger vehicles.

Wagoner said that rising gasoline prices had forced a “structural shift” by U.S. consumers away from truck-based vehicles built by GM. Read more…

Microsoft recently announced the new user interface for Windows 7 and it will support multi-touch. HP TouchSmart desktop and their somewhat similar touch-screen laptop is already making Multi-Touch (and touch in general) a Windows reality.

Where touch works best is when you are manipulating objects or navigating through items. If we weren’t already used to using a mouse and the fact that touch-screens have traditionally been too expensive and suffered in terms of brightness and resolution, historically we’d likely all have touch-screens today. Read more…

What we have been calling the Asus Eee Box looks to finally have an official name. Based on unnamed sources, the Inquirer is reporting that the desktop PC will be called the Asus EBOX. As already speculated, they are saying it will be revealed on June 3 at Computex. Specs also look to be what we’ve been told already: 160GB HDD, 2GB RAM, and a Linux OS. Nothing much more to see here, but we’re hoping Asus will give this thing a competitive price for those looking to tinker with a slick open-source box.

(Via Engadget.)

Webware report that:

Adobe on Thursday is expected to launch a beta test program for the latest version of its Flash Player software.

Flash Player 10, developed under the code name Astro, includes better support for 3D animation and video hardware acceleration, among other improvements.

Adobe said that Flash Player 10 will now support custom visual effects, created with Adobe’s free Pixel Bender tools. Developers can write code to create effects that can be rendered by Flash Player at runtime. Read more…