Victor Roncea Blog

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Kid Finder helps you track down kids, keys

In DIGITAL LIFE, PRODUCT INNOVATIONS
For parents worried about where their children are going, there are several devices available out there to keep track of them from afar. Every mobile provider now carries kid-friendly phones that have alarms and GPS capabilities that allow parents to watch via satellite. Other techniques, such as sending email alerts to parents once children go through train station gates with their RFID train passes are also hands-off ways to track.
Recently, Princeton unveiled a tiny device that is designed for finding kids, but might be even more useful with your keys! The Kid Finder (shop link) is a remote that displays basic directional information to lead the holder to the corresponding receiver (front, right, left). It also gives basic distance information and has an alarm for the kid’s side in case of strangers bearing candy.
Since it works up top 90 meters, you won’t exactly be able to find your kids with satellite precision from far away, but the idea is that you keep good track on them in public places while you’re there. However, it’s a bit surprising that devices like this haven’t made more of a splash for basic things like bags, pets, and the ever-elusive house keys.
This is radio-based, but with the decreasing costs for RFID tags making the technology more affordable, and receiver integration into most phones in Japan, we could be looking at tagging just about everything we have! Just bring it up on the phone’s menu, and get instant feedback on location. For now, the Kid Finder is the best we have it seems, but combine it with a camera and we’ll need nothing else!

Tomy Wonderful Shot dog camera test run

In DIGITAL LIFE
We’ve wanted to get one of these for a long time, and my obsessive nerdiness with cameras finally took hold. The Wonderful Shot dog camera from Tomy fits right onto your dog’s collar and takes pictures from his view, though not entirely accurate since it’s in color.
The camera is 0.35 megapixels, which actually turned out some pretty decent pictures. Even though Sakura and Ibu (my girlfriend’s spoiled dogs) have short legs, you still get a pretty good view from their level. Of course, the pictures aren’t actually taken by the dogs themselves, but are either activated by the remote or by the timer which takes them in various increments.
This means that you can leave your dogs for a while and then check on what they’ve done for the day, or just take a walk together and snap a few. Even more interesting would be to put the Wonderful Shot on a cat and really get a chance to see what those things get into all day.
Here are some random shots around the garden:
The Wonderful Shot has an 8MB internal memory which holds 90 photos, and has a built-in battery which is charged via the included “dog bone” USB.

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