Hasta La Gadget!

Chad Ruble’s mom has aphasia, a condition she acquired because of a stroke that she had 12 years ago. Like many other people with aphasia, Chad’s mom has a hard time reading and writing, so she can’t use email the way the rest of us do. But with the help of Chad and a Microsoft Kinect, she can now send simple emails.

Chad made a “visual dashboard” that shows a range of emoticons as well as signal bars to help her mom indicate the intensity of those emotions, e.g. there’s an icon for happiness, and the signal bars let her specify how happy she is.

He then used a Kinect and a program he based on open source code to track his mom’s hand as well as to generate and send the email.

It’s okay. I cried a bit too. Wipe your tears and head to Chad’s blog for more details on his hack. I wonder if the dashboard would be easier to use via a touchscreen device.

[via CNET]

Before I used the Inbox Zero process, I was often interrupted by the vast quantity of emails that anyone in tech receives. That being said, attaining Inbox Zero actually isn’t that easy and if it doesn’t work for you, you should check out Inbox Pause, a handy little browser extension that will push the pause button on your emails.

Inbox Pause is an extension that works with Chrome and that allows you to pause your inbox. This could be useful if you are on vacation and need to resist the urge to check your work email. Also, when you are concentrating on a task at hand that requires your full attention, it’s easy to get distracted if you keep getting notifications of new mail.The extension adds a big blue pause button to Gmail. Once you’ve pressed it, received emails will receive a new label, and they’ll be kept out of your Inbox. You can also set up an auto responder to let everyone know that your email has been paused.

Once you unpause your email, all of the emails are moved into your Inbox – which could, of course, result in a massive deluge of messages if you get a ton of emails. If you’ve got Chrome, you can grab Inbox Pause here.

Mozilla might be scaling back its official support of Thunderbird, but it still has love left for those who yearn for more in their e-mail clients than OS developers can give. The newly-released Thunderbird 15 update’s most conspicuous change is a deliberate visual harmony with its Firefox cousin: the company wants its apps to have more in common than just a shared name on the About screen. Under the hood, there’s now a live chat feature to skip the wait for e-mail, a Do Not Track option for web searches and the choice of using Ubuntu One cloud storage for large attachments. It’s hard to know if future Thunderbird releases will be as substantial once the community takes the reins. For now, though, Thunderbird aficionados can relax.

[Thanks, Keith]

Filed under: Internet, Software

Mozilla releases Thunderbird 15 with Firefox-like UI, live chat originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 02:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember Airtime, the Facebook-integrated video calling / media sharing service with a Chatroulette flavor? Well if not, we don’t blame you — usage stats suggest it hasn’t quite taken off, but maybe the new features it’s testing will secure a few more fans. No longer is the service restricted to the here and now, as the major change is all about video posts. Use Airtime to record a message and you can post it to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or via a traditional email to get the conversation started. Friends can then reply to your message through Airtime with a video post of their own, and so on. Its buddy list has also been given a little love, so now it shows friends as online, idle or offline, and details your interaction timeline. Whether the features are enough to inspire wider uptake is questionable, but for the few that actively use Airtime, the updates are out in the wild now on a “limited public release.”

Filed under: Internet

Airtime testing new video post features, improved buddy list originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back when I was growing up in the 1970s, we fully expected that, by 2012, we’d all be driving flying cars to our condos on the moon where robotic butlers awaited, ready to bring us the cure for cancer from the bathroom first-aid kit. How’s all of that working out? Sure, we now have faster, smaller computers, smartphones that talk back to you, and smart TVs, but in so many areas of technology the pace of change is slower than Windows Vista booting off a floppy disk. More »