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Let your kid drive in style, a very geeky light painting and search all your social
sites at once! I’m Cali Lewis. Welcome to GeekBeat.TV!
This episode of GeekBeat.TV is brought to you by Thrillist.
Microsoft is always working on interesting concepts, and one of their main pushes has
been what’s called NUI - simply stands for Natural User Interface. Think Kinect. Their
goal is to make everything we do more natural rather than using things like mice, which
are old and antiquated. Their latest project is a pen where the entire surface is capacitive
and which has a sensor, so it knows exactly which way you’re holding it and based on
what your fingers are doing, it’ll know what action you want to take. You can take
many actions with one device. For example, with one pen, you’d be able to play a driving
game, paint a digital picture, even record music to a device. We don’t really use styluses
for much these days. Do you think having a single pen or stylus for multiple activities
is something you’d like to do? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment or
tweet or facebook!
I told you guys about Backupify a while ago, and I’ve been using the service to automatically
back up my Twitter account. I get an email once a week with a file I could use if I needed
to. Well, you can do more than back up Twitter - it also does facebook and Gmail and Flickr
and Google Calendar...the list goes on. And now they’ve added CloudSight Search. You
know how you can use the search feature in gmail to find old email threads? That’s
pretty much what CloudSight Search does but it searches across all your social sites
- Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...again, the list goes on. So if you’re not sure
where the information was you’re looking for, you can use this to jog your memory.
Remember, useful sites like this and more are being talked about over on WebBeat.TV-
make sure you’re subscribed! www.webbeat.tv
You will definitely be named parent of the year if you get this for your kid. It’s
the Mini Seven from Micro Electric Vehicles. It’s a motorized vehicle that can take your
kid around the neighborhood in style and up to 19 miles per hour. Don’t worry, you can
set the top speed to 12 miles per hour. Or 8 or 5 - whatever you feel comfortable with.
And it has a four point harness seat belt. The roll bar is adjustable for your kids height
as are the pedals. You could even get this thing with a custom logo on it. Maybe you
want your kid to be a driving billboard for your company, or maybe you want to get their
name printed on it. Pretty special, huh? All that specialness is going to cost you! It’s
$11,305. But maybe that’s just what being parent of the year costs.
Thrillist is supporting us today. They’re the way you can find out about off the beaten
path, cool things to do in your city. It might be a beer garden that shows 80s flicks or
a restaurant with a Sushi Robot. We all need to get out, get away from the computer for
a few hours. This is the perfect way to find more interesting things to do than hanging
out at the same place all the time. Signup at thrillist.com/geekbeat to get in. That’s
thrillist.com/geekbeat
This is really interesting. You may already be familiar with the term light painting.
It’s where people create different light patterns in a single photo by setting a reallllly
long exposure, and moving a light source around the frame to...make art. [EXAMPLE PHOTO] A
guy who guys by Timo took the idea to the next level to appeal to your inner geek. He
took a four meter tall pole that has 80 lights on it, going straight up in a line. He rigged
the pole to access WiFi and took it outside to show WiFi access points and signal strengths
across the city. You can see how strong the connection is as you move further away or
closer, and it doesn’t make the pattern you’d think it would!
The entire video is at geekbeat.tv/WiFiLight with more information about how he accomplished
it. Cool stuff!
This week’s Geek Beat LIVE show will be two hours early because of our SXSW travel
plans. Please join us at live.geekbeat.tv Friday at 2pm EST. If you’re going to be
at SXSW, make sure you check our schedule at geekbeat.tv/sxsw and hang out with us!
Our viewer meetup is on Sunday evening. I’m looking forward to it! Thanks for watching!
I’m Cali Lewis. Bye!