I came by this amaz­ing con­cept car from Chevro­let called the Chevy Volt, with its rev­o­lu­tion­ary E-Flex Propul­sion System which will be dif­fer­ent than any pre­vi­ous elec­tric vehi­cle because it will use a lithium-​ion bat­tery with a vari­ety of range-​extending onboard power sources, includ­ing gas and, in some vehi­cles, E85 ethanol to recharge the bat­tery while dri­ving.

When it comes to plug­ging in, the Volt will be designed to use a common 240-110 Volt house­hold plug. For some­one who drives less than 64 km (40 miles) a day, Chevy Volt will use zero gaso­line and pro­duce zero emis­sions. For longer trips, Chevy Volt’s range-​extending power source kicks in to recharge the lithium-​ion bat­tery pack as required.

Researchers at the Human Media Lab­o­ra­tory, Queen’s Uni­ver­sity in Canada are devel­op­ing pro­to­types of new “non-planar” devices, which are vir­tu­ally com­put­ers that have a flex­i­ble shape. Com­put­ers are nifty, but often too bulky to be car­ried around. Even a laptop is too big to put in your pocket, but imag­ine if your com­puter looked and worked like a mag­a­zine or a piece of paper to be tucked away into your pock­ets. Not only will they take on flex­i­ble forms we’ve never imag­ined like pop cans with browsers dis­play­ing RSS feeds and movie trail­ers com­put­ers of the future will respond to our direct touch and even change their own shape to better accom­mo­date data.
The con­cept behind these next-​generation com­put­ers is “organic user interface”. Every­day com­put­ers live in only two dimen­sions and as a result, have become narrow-​minded. You are essen­tially look­ing at a tiny tunnel into a flat, on-​line world, and that causes people to think in a two-​dimensional way. ”Flatland” inter­faces are incred­i­bly lim­ited com­pared to nat­ural 3D ones”. This is in my opin­ion a rev­o­lu­tion in human-​computer inter­ac­tion. So Apple if you’re read­ing this…

Our days have been a bit hectic lately, not because of our new born son, but because of all the nice people who: vis­ited, send cards, send e-mails, flow­ers and presents. Thank you all so much we have been over­whelmed by all the atten­tion and my sin­cere apolo­gies for those who had to bail-​out at my request. I had to manage the number of people who called and tried to visit us. Tris­tan and Mar­ijke need their rest. Tris­tan is now 16 days old, he weights 4.4 kg (9,7 pounds) and is about 57 cm (22,5 inch). This morn­ing I grabbed my trusty SLR (Canon EOS 350D) and took some pic­tures of him laying on our bed.

I am happy to say that I’ve become a father. Our boy (Tris­tan) is called after a medieval romance Tris­tan and Iseult. I’m going to bed now because I am exhausted.

With the baby coming we had to buy a car. I am not a caro­holic like some people, but I had a wish list: sta­tion wagon, 5 doors, reli­able, cli­mate con­trol. Not only did I got my wish list but even more: cruise con­trol, elec­tric win­dows, rooftop and mir­rors, auto­matic trans­mis­sion and the list goes on and on, I’ve made a good deal, my brother-​in-​law went along he’s wiki-​car-​pedia. I let him test-​drive the car and even told me how to nego­ti­ate. I’ve bought a car stereo a Pio­neer DEH-P7000UB and as a travel com­pan­ion I’ve got TomTom XL 31 Europe Widescreen from my wife. The TomTom Home soft­ware really sucks balls big time, I’ll later write a review about it. The car we’ve bought is a Volk­swa­gen Golf Vari­ant 1.6 Com­fort­line, a real nice family-​car, lots of room for all the baby gad­gets. But as of today I am going to intro­duce a new term: dad­gets, these are baby gad­gets which dad also likes. Paci­fiers are not one of those, though they will help with your relax­ation process

The World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence 2008 had an unusual high atten­dance (52.000 atten­dees). CEO Steve Jobs announced a couple of inter­est­ing items during the event: Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leop­ard), Mobile Me and of course the iPhone 3G. The ses­sion of Mac OS X 10.6 this after­noon will be cov­ered under non-​disclosure, so don’t expect any offi­cial fea­tures or announce­ments to be coming from Apple but as usual some infor­ma­tion is cer­tain to leak. The iPhone is finally coming to the Nether­lands, sorry you guys who’ve bought it recently on eBay. Again and again I’ll tell people the same mes­sage, it’s a devel­oper con­fer­ence not a con­sumer event. So for those who are dis­ap­pointed wait for the next event and you’ll be amazed!

MobileMe will hope­fully bring the long over­due upgrade to .Mac. Now I only have to wait until July 11 to buy myself an iPhone 3G.