Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008

Microsoft has just released a new highly legible monospaced font for use in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. The font called Consolas is designed for ClearType and allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen. Recommended :)



To get the font, you need to visit Microsoft download page. The setup file installs the font and sets it as the default font for Visual Studio.

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New way to save energy: Disappearing ink

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and parent company Xerox are experimenting with a type of paper and a complimentary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours. A restaurant, for instance, could print its daily specials on a piece of paper, attach the pieces of paper to menus, and then collect the sheets of then-blank paper in the morning to run through the printer again.

How does it work? The paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that turn dark when hit with UV light.

Users don't have to wait for the paper to fade either. By running it through the special printer made for this paper, the printer will erase the old image before putting the new one on.

The paper and printer could hit the market in a few years.

The same sheets of paper can be run through the printer hundreds of time, according to tests conducted by Xerox, said Eric Shrader, area manager, energy systems, device hardware laboratory at Xerox. Typically, the paper isn't reusable only when it gets damaged or crumpled.

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Cool Products Expo 2008

Earlier this month, seventh annual Cool Product Expo at Stanford University School of Business took place in California. There were many interesting products. Exhibitor list can be browsed online at the homepage of the expo.

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A Training Tool for Athletes

A high-tech armband is helping athletes find their rhythm on the basketball court by playing a special tune when the athletes move their arms correctly.

CSIRO is developing wearable body mapping garments that the Australian Institute of Sport is assessing for improving sports performance. In a current project with the Australian netball team, an interactive garment is being used to train goalshooters in automatic rhythms to enable their natural action to remain undisturbed by their conscious thoughts in stressful situations.

In 2006, CSIRO built a virtual air guitar, known as the Wearable Instrument Shirt (WIS) that lets users play air guitar simply by moving one arm to pick chords and the other to strum the imaginary instrument’s strings.

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A new device to translate thoughts into speech

Ambient Corporation, a company based in Champaign, IL, that develops communications technologies for people with speaking disabilities, is calling its latest system "voiceless communication". The company has engineered a neckband that translates a wearer's thoughts into speech so that, without saying a word, he or she can have a cell-phone conversation or query search engines in public.

The device, called Audeo picks up the neurological signals from the brain that are being sent to the vocal cords--a person must specifically think about voicing words--and then wirelessly transmits them to a computer, which translates them into synthesized speech. At the moment, the device has a limited vocabulary: 150 words and phrases.

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