With all the advancements in optical and laser technologies, the mice works great on most practical surfaces but as soon as you lift it off the surface it degrades to a very bulky clicking device. If you’ve ever leaned right back on your seat or lounged on a very soft couch and tried to use a mouse to surf the web, you’d probably be familiar with the strain on your arms or back. It’s not easy or comfortable.

To help solve this problem, Craig Ranta, Steven Bathiche and Monique Chatterjee from Microsoft came up with a very cool “wearable pointing device” that looks somewhat like a hybrid between the gloves in Minority Report and the Nintendo Wiimote. Their patent filed in October 2006 was just recently published.

Besides looking pretty cool, the design actually takes into account a lot of practicality which leads me to believe this is something more than a fancy research demo. For example by wearing the device it does not prevent you from doing other tasks such as typing on a keyboard. The cursor movements are activated by a “switch” (110) that can be activated by closing your hands, grasping the device like a joystick, and then turning the yaw and pitch to control the X and Y positions respectively. There are also left (114) and right click (116) buttons which can be pressed by the thumb.

The patent actually goes into a lot of technicalities even as far as to name the specific gyroscope modules that can be used, Analog Devices’ ADXRS150 for those of you playing at home, which leads me to guess they might have a working prototype somewhere.

Whilst this is certainly not the first wearable mouse invented, this particular implementation seems practical enough for mainstream users and not to mention Microsoft Hardware has a pretty solid history of building nice peripherals. I wonder if they have one available for review.

For the longest time, I thought almost every single page on Microsoft.com was designed to look different on purpose just to play with you, but I guess I was wrong because the newly redesigned Microsoft.com Support site is actually partially consistent with the frontpage. In general its a subtle update with a more flexible layout giving more focus to the content.

Maybe even one day, they’ll make it beautiful.

P.S. If you don’t know already, check out the auto-complete feature in the search field on the support site. You have to type at least 3 characters before it kicks in. Try “Microsoft suc”. Apparently very frequent query.

Six weeks after my international flight from Los Angeles to Australia was delayed for 24 hours, United Airlines has finally come up with a value for my inconvenience when a full Boeing 747-load (400+) of passengers waited at the terminal for 6 hours into midnight, sent to an airport motel at 2am, lining up half an hour to check-in (guess what happens when 200 people enter one motel at the same time), sleep and wake up in the same clothes, eat 3 meals of crummy tasteless food and not to mention some LAPD cops busting in a room next door. Four dollars and seventeen cents per hour is how much United thinks my time is worth. Even McDonalds has higher standards.

To be blunt, all I missed was a lecturer, tutorial and some work. I can’t imagine how the family of four who missed their child’s birthday party in Sydney, or the half a dozen elderly couples who missed their retirement Pacific cruise must feel when this arrives for them. Considering everyone paid almost $80/hour for the flight, this is worse than a slap in the face.

It’s not uncommon to come across a patch for a software problem you’ve never heard of or thought was possible. In most cases they’re caused by an unconventional use-case or a bad combination of hardware/software configurations. Sometimes the symptoms are so exceptional it makes you ponder about who in the world would be affected by it in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if in this case it was just one person. The Microsoft KB article speaks for itself.

I beg to ask, who discovered the problem, what was the fault, who uses a consumer operating system on a supercomputer and what would happen if you had 31 or 33 processor?

Over the past few days Bryant from AeroXP.org, a popular Windows enthusiasts community, has been writing a series of posts titled “The Five Pillars of Windows 7“. In these posts, predictably five in total, he reveals and discusses a lot of interesting tidbits about the next version of Windows. The information presented is highly interesting and encouraging for any Windows enthusiast, but one could easily become tangled in the web of optimism.

To shed some light on the matter, the information Bryant sources actually comes from the “Windows Feedback Button” that is in the current builds of Windows 7. This tool allows users to leave their thoughts on the Windows 7 experience categorized by a list of “pillars” and “scenarios” as predefined by Microsoft. With each scenario is a brief description of what it is about. For example,

If you actually compare what’s described in the screenshots above with what appears on AeroXP.org, you’d notice a difference, they are not the same descriptions. Because Microsoft’s descriptions are somewhat short and vague, what Bryant has done is added in his own interpretation, knowledge and speculations about what these scenarios mean. Arguably that’s what all bloggers do, but remember he might be wrong or he might be right. The descriptions are not facts.

Another point to note is that these are not Microsoft promises, but merely areas Microsoft has identified to improve on. The important difference is that they simply can’t be held accountable if not all of these scenarios are actually realized because they didn’t indicate they would do so. These are goals Microsoft is working towards, reaching them is another matter. Set your expectations accordingly.

In short, take everything you read, including what you read on this site, with a grain of salt.

By now most of you have probably read about the next wave of Ultimate Extras rumored to be arriving somewhere between now and the distant future. First uncovered by Steven Bink on the recently launched UltimatePC.com website and later removed, was a list of new content for Vista Ultimate extras which has since been confirmed by many official sources at Microsoft. They include “an original game, enhancements to Movie Maker and DVD Maker, additional Windows DreamScenes, screen savers and sound schemes”.

Today, some of those sound schemes were leaked to me by an anonymous and disgruntled Microsoft employee who did this out of frustration at the lack of transparency in the Ultimate Extras program.

In the email he writes, “what’s interesting is that not only did Microsoft bring back Robert Fripp who contributed to the original Vista sound design to work on these new sounds, but also the talent of Ben Burtt who is a notable sound editor and designer famous for his work in the Star Wars movies – most memorably R2D2’s voice and the lightsaber sound effects.” By sampling a few of the sounds, Ben’s contribution can be quite easily identified and adds a very unique touch on each.

Without further ado, you can download the ZIP (674kb) of the sound files here. The files are named in the same format as the original Vista sound files (%systemroot%\Media\) so you can copy and paste them directly over your existing files if you’re happy with them. Having said that I encourage you to keep copies of the original sounds should you ever get sick of these.

It should be noted that this download is not the complete sound scheme package you will receive via Ultimate Extras – many of the sounds have not been finalized, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect in the coming months (*crosses fingers*). I’m personally a big fan of the new UAC sound.