My wife saw the other day a very cool gadget, Pulse smart pen, made by LiveScribe. The pen uses special paper (although they are trying to give users the ability to print the paper) to capture what is written. In addition the pen has a mic to capture the audio associated with the notes being written.
Last night I was looking at the pen. One of the cool features is that by tapping on an icon say battery the built-in LCD will display the battery life remaining. Put together a bunch of icons and you can have a calculator for example.
This got me wondering could I program the pen. It turns out the answer is yes. You write applications for the pen using Java and their Development SDK. The applications are (wait for it you know what they are going to be called) Penlets. OK so the name is funny and predictable. However the power of computing has shrunk so much that I can have a computer with 2 GBs the size of a pen. And that I can program that pen using Java and Eclipse or Netbeans.
Of course with the move and new jobs I exhausted my free time very quickly. I had no chance to try it myself. I did find a small community working on the SDK. Hopefully shortly you will see more posts.
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