Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing.
I really love this new design of the computer mouse. The video below is very intriguing and really makes me want to make my own version soon. Depending on just how functional it really is, I could see this blowing past the gyration mouse to be the most innovative mouse advancement in thirty years.
“Universal Display Corporation’s FOLED® flexible OLEDs are organic light emitting devices that are built on flexible substrates such as plastic or metallic foil. FOLED displays can offer significant performance advantages over LCD displays that are typically built on rigid glass substrates and contain a bulky backlight.”
This may be a little elementary to some of the tech savvy readers that frequent stumble across zerosign, but this little tip definitely saved me a headache last night. On any normal web surfing session, my Firefox window is filled with literally dozens of tabs containing sites that, for some reason or another, I desperately need. In the example from last night, I was in the middle of coding a new template for one of my wordpress sites on my new laptop when I suddenly realised that I didn’t have the ColorZilla extension installed yet. After finding the extension and downloading it I then realised that I had to restart Firefox. Ouch…all those tabs, all those sites that I needed. To by bass the chore of bookmarking each site individually, here’s a quick cheat that I used:
In Firefox
- go to Tools–>Options and click on the General tab.
- in the Home Page area simply click “Use Current” then click “OK”
This will set all the current tabs as your home page. You can then close the browser and the next time you open Firefox all the tabs from the previous session will be there waiting.
Certainly not the most elegant trick, but anything to save me time and the annoyance of downloading more needless software is greatly appreciated.
I also use a similar technique to organize my daily reads. There are so many sites I have to visit each day that I classify them into three different tiers. The ‘must read as soon as I’m awake’ sites get set as the homepage using this method. The 2nd tier of ‘read at my earliest convenience’ then get put in my bookmarks toolbar folder for easy access when I have some time. The last tier of sites wind of getting thrown in my Bloglines account to get checked whenever I get around to it. This system works pretty well at keeping me informed of things that absolutely matter, and the things that can wait and hour or two.
It seems another version of the NES controller TV remote has been spotted in the wild. From TechEBlog:
“One of our longtime readers — Andy S. — created his own version of the NES Controller TV Remote, complete with numberpad and wireless functionality.”
While I belive the number pad may take away a little of the aesthetic beauty, I’m sure it comes in handy when jumping across the channel spectrum. Great job Andy S.!
