Wearable technology, death, and music

Voiceless phonecalls - a collar thing that picks up the neural messages from your brain to your throat, allowing you to 'talk' without ever moving your muscles. It works on speech recognition, i.e. "that looks like he's trying to say 'buttsex' so we'll have our speech synthesiser say that", so it's reliant on the software's ability to interpret. At the moment, the software is apparently about as good as speech recognition was a few years ago, i.e. not very. But given time this could be very cool. Another interesting, if slightly creepy, use for it is when you ponder about something and say something to yourself without actually opening your mouth or whatever, it could do a google search on that, giving you the information you were after. Interesting in that it's a somwhat transhumanist situation of instant knowledge the moment you wonder about something, but creepy as there's the question of what level of sub-vocalisation this thing will pick up. Via Warren Ellis

Phone/wristwatch/PDA/min-ilaptop/fashion accessory – again it's something we won't be seeing particularly immediately, but it may not be that far away. Via oakthorne

I so need a pair of these – glasses that you identify your stuff to, then they keep track of it using a digital camera that records as you go about your daily life. if you've shown it a particular book and mislaid the book, it can show you an image of the last time that book was recorded by it. Via freddiefraggles

Multi-touch is getting closer Via Digg.

---

( Life, death and dice – discussion of death in RPGs, cut for the uninterested )

---

Pimp some good music at me!

I've got an eMusic account, as I wanted to use their '50 free tracks when you join' thing to get the entire discography of a band I rather like, and I've stuck with them as it's not too expensive, lets me slowly expand my music library (having been feeling I knew it all too well previous to this), and means I'm actually supporting the music of the bands that need it more - the smaller/indie acts.

And tommorrow my downloads for the month are refreshed, giving me 30 songs to download. If there's some artist/song you think I should hear, see if they have it (they've got a lot of indie stuff, but less of the mainstream), and tell me what it is any why I should listen to it. I may or may not get it this month, as I'm currently already tempted by some stuff from VAST and Wet Spots, but if I like it then I'll add it to my list of stuff to get in the coming months.