You know what can teach you Braille and piano a lot more quickly than traditional means? Vibrating gloves, or gloves with haptic feedback, if you will. In fact, IEEE Spectrum senior editor David Schneider was so intrigued by the idea, that he put together his own version to serve as a haptic touch-typing tutor for his 11-year-old son. He admits that his gloves (made using transistors, $14 worth of vibration motors purchased from eBay and long cords connecting them to an Arduino Nano board) aren’t as sleek as Georgia Tech’s piano-teaching ones . But, hey, they worked, and once he created a program to go along with them, they did their job well enough. Schneider’s program displays one among the 100 most common English words at random on screen — it does so one letter at a time, sending vibrations to the right finger as the letters appear. Not bad for something he merely cobbled together. But (as he realized later on), the program would’ve been a lot more fun and effective if it were more of a typing game than a boring digital tutor. Filed under: Peripherals Comments Source: IEEE Spectrum

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Home-made vibrating gloves train your finger muscles to touch type (video)

If you typically share your computer and your browser with a sibling, a roomie or a friend who has no respect for your privacy, this latest Google Chrome beta update might make things easier for you. It comes with a pull-down menu that lets you easily switch users, put the browser to guest mode or launch an incognito tab on Windows, Mac or Linux. According to some comments in the update’s Google+ announcement , though, you still have to log off from your accounts to be sure your activities remain for your eyes only, just in case someone decides to peek. The guest mode automatically deletes the other user’s browsing information, on the other hand, so they won’t have to worry about you seeing their secrets. Aside from this update, Google has also unleashed a 64-bit Chrome beta for Mac, a few days after the company released a 64-bit stable version for Windows computers. This will make the browser launch more quickly and will generally make it faster than its predecessor. Finally, the new beta update also comes with a bunch of APIs for web app devs to play with. You can get Google Chrome beta (or any other channel you want, whether stable, Canary or Dev) through The Chromium Projects website . Filed under: Misc , Google Comments Source: Google Chrome Blog , Chrome Releases , Google+ , The Chromium Blog (1) , (2)

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Google Chrome beta gets account switcher and 64-bit support for Mac

America’s mad science division is at it again, this time imagining a future where your body won’t need (as much) medicine to stay healthy, simply by using the resources it already has. Put simply, a person’s peripheral nervous system runs the internal organs and summons the troops to fight off infections and repair injuries. DARPA’s just received $78.9 million of funding to look into harnessing this system to develop a miniscule implant that’d not only make people healthier and less prone to disease, but could also be used to treat mental health complaints like post traumatic stress disorder in the future. DARPA’s plan is to build implants no thicker than a nerve fiber that can then be implanted into people’s bodies. Once there, the devices would monitor the status of your nervous system, organs and overall health, keeping the system regulated by triggering responses through electrical impulses. In a way, it’s a bit like building a pacemaker for your central nervous system, except one that’s capable of helping people live with complaints like arthritis and other inflammatory diseases. According to neural engineer Dr. Douglas Weber, the eventual goal is to turn the body into a “closed-loop system, ” that continually assesses itself, ensuring that as soon as any sickness is detected in an organ, the body can quickly deal with it. The upside is that patients won’t need to take medicines (which can have adverse side-affects) because they’ll rely more upon their super-charged immune systems to deal with problems. Of course, even for DARPA, this is a big ask, since current neuromodulation implants are huge and require complex surgery to install, and we doubt that the technology will shrink to nerve-fiber sizes in just five years. That said, we’ll be first in the queue if this ever becomes available – after all, we’re fairly sure this is almost the plot of Jake 2.0 . Filed under: Science Comments Via: Motherboard Source: DARPA , Defense.gov (.PDF)

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US researching implants that’ll help your body and mind heal itself

If you’ve ever sat back, stared into the sky and wonder would happen if WhatsApp was taken over by a singing telegram service, then boy, today is your lucky day. Film director and artist Miranda July has teamed up with Prada sub-brand Miu Miu (nope, us neither) to design a social messaging app / publicity stunt with a twist. Instead of simply letting two people swap messages, Somebody (for iOS) finds a person in the nearby vicinity to your contact, asking them to walk over and deliver the message, in person, on your behalf. You can even add stage directions like crying or whispering, and the recipient can rate their delivery with a star rating in the same vein as Uber. If we’re honest, there are a whole host of reasonable, legitimate objections to this. After all, giving away someone’s personal location to complete strangers is a bit weird, as is the idea that people would willingly volunteer to break up with someone on your behalf. The app does exist and is available to download, although it seems that other would-be somebodies haven’t been able to get SMS-verified yet. I’ve signed up to convey two messages in my nearby area, but so far no-one’s sent over an address to deliver the missive personally. Maybe people aren’t impressed by my lack of obvious whimsy and a Miu Miu outfit, but if I do get sent on a mission, I will let all of you know how it goes. Filed under: Cellphones , Internet , Apple Comments Via: Huffington Post Source: Somebody (App Store) , Somebody

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Get strangers to deliver the bad news with ‘Somebody’ messaging app

Microsoft’s 15-year-old MSN Messaging service will soon be a part of computer lore. It has been shut down in most places for over a year , but Microsoft kept it running in China where it was still quite popular. However, with the advent of Tencent’s QQ , Line and other services, Redmond recently emailed Chinese users (on their Hotmail accounts, naturally) that the service would ride into the sunset on October 31st. To give you an idea of how old it is, the service was created in 1999 by Microsoft to compete against AOL’s AIM chat service. However, we doubt too many users will get misty-eyed about its demise — the only nostalgia most folks likely have is how difficult it was to get rid of. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Via: The Verge Source: Technode

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MSN Messenger will finally, definitely be dead in October