Materials needed:

• One (or more) gloves
• Conductive thread ($5 sample on SparkFun or Soft Circuit)
• A heavy needle

Here’s what you do. [Step 1] put your index finger in the glove and mark with a marker, pen, or pencil, where your finger pad lies (so that you know where to sew). [Step 2] measure off a good length of thread and thread your needle. Make a knot at the other end, like this:

[Step 3] Begin to sew a small vertical square through the pad all the way through the glove and into the inside. The thread bridges your finger to the outside world:

[Step 4] Finish up your square, and it should look like this. If you sew well and use a heavier needle than me, yours should look far better than this!

[Step 5] Sew another horizontal square overtop the previous one. When done, tie off the thread and cut the excess! You are done!

I just tried it out on my wife’s iPad and it works! My index finger has magical properties! To get better results, practice on a softer glove first–sewing into leather with a regular needle (like I did here) is not just hard, it’s stupid.

What you get in the package (iPod nano, earbuds, charging USB cable, manual)

It’s very tiny, here’s a comparison to a normal set of keys

And in my wife’s small hands

I’m a fan of the little clip

All in all, the new iPod nano’s great. A perfect replacement for the old shuffle. Approximately the same size, but with multitouch, FM radio, big flash capacity. What’s not to like?

• What do you do for a living?
• What is the age of the primary user of this iPod?
• Which of the following statements best represents this iPod?

Either it’s quiz night and Apple is playing questions, or they are making me tell them more than I want to just to sync music to my new iPod nano. Here are the options in the dropdowns you can choose from (I put Other/65+/In addition):

Apple wants to violate your privacy

Apple wants to know your age

Apple wants to know if you’re quitting another brand

It’s worse that you cannot decline to provide this information. If you leave the form blank, you are forced to fill it in:

Apple needs to take its users’ privacy more seriously. If they want demographic brand / market research done, they should pay a PR/research firm to go out and get the data that they need, from willing volunteers.

Other people have complained about the amount of data Apple requires to get an iTunes account opened for their Apple iPads.

I think it’s going to take me some time to sort out (and remember) exactly where everything went. The little icons-in-an-icon are nice, but they only show you 9 of the 12 things inside. And there’s no way to make any particular icon folder stand out from the other folders. Being able to give folders differently coloured borders would go a long way to differentiating your app folders, in my opinion. When you click on a folder, you get a great launcher screen, though:

Any of the folder apps are a quick touch away from launching, it’s a great experience. You can find recently / currently running apps by simply double tapping home, and they show up in a swipeable menu bar along the bottom. Another great feature is a combined email inbox with threading:

Here you see my two accounts are combined into one!

Do you see the threaded message? NICE!

Some of the smaller things I noticed to complain about are:

• The sliding in/out of elements is now bouncier.
• The UI in general seems slightly slower, probably because of fancier rendering.
• The lock screen hasn’t improved. I was hoping for apps to have some way of adding themselves to the lock screen, so you could perhaps control Pandora without having to unlock your iPhone, much like you can double-tap while locked to get music control bars.

Note: if you have an older iPhone you may be disappointed. Here’s an iOS 4 compatibility chart (upgrading newer iTouches are free):

The U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a series of papers, one of which, Association Between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions notes:

The risk of a collision when using a cellular telephone was four times higher than the risk when a cellular telephone was not being used. The relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience; calls close to the time of the collision were particularly hazardous; and units that allowed the hands to be free offered no safety advantage over hand-held units.

Another paper from the DoT, The Impact of Internal Distraction on Driver Visual Behavior highlights the hypothesis (yet to be tested in that forum) that increased complexity in processing non-visual stimuli leads to a direct reduction of visual processing ability:

It is known from past research (e.g., Miura, 1990) that patterns of visual search may be influenced by environmental complexity, such as that available in the road scene. There is also evidence that visual search behavior may be influenced, not only by the external environment, but also by factors internal to the person, such as the cognitive complexity of an ongoing task. Recently, Recarte & Nunes (2000) measured eye fixations while driving. They reported that drivers’ visual functional-field size was reduced (vertically and horizontally) when drivers performed a demanding cognitive task while driving.

According to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, “the use of cell phones by drivers may result in approximately 2,600 deaths, 330,000 moderate to critical injuries, 240,000 minor injuries, and 1.5 million instances of property damage in America per year.” A particularly telling quote comes from University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer: “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”

The problem seems to be quite simple: competing stimuluses rob our brains of the processing power to focus attention on driving, primarily a visual-motor task. The solution, I believe, comes from video games and the air force: HUD displays. If we can collapse all of the tasks we want to perform into a single visual field, motorists will be able to keep their focus on driving. There are lots of ways for technology to assist driving, if voice recognition can be used to direct navigation, with a display directly on the dash, if communications were built into the vehicle, and with additional range-sensing equipment to recognize and highlight obstacles and dangers.

BMW has already begun building heads-up-displays (HUD) into their cars:

Next-generation HUDs will wraparound the entire windshield and contain more, higher-density information. Cars should have the ability to highlight aspects of their surroundings and obstacles to the driver, or take corrective action in their own right. With a HUD to handle coherent output, and good voice-recognition to handle input, drivers will no longer be distracted by outside stimuluses when driving.