I have reviewed pens that can interact with computers before, and I had a chance to try out the A3 Smart Pen from Apen. I’m going to share with you the pros and cons. I’ll start with the cons. Fist of all, the unit that clips onto the paper that you see here has a fragile clip

Now that the tablet market has taken off with the advent of the iPad, more and more people are watching movies on a touchscreen. A group known as Condition One has decided to take advantage of this trend with a new form of cinematography. Simply put, this new technology allows the user to interact with the movie by shifting the camera angle with a flick of a finger. As you can see in the video after the jump, the user finally gets a chance of seeing what is happening past the edge of the screen.

What you are seeing here is a project from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, and it could easily be the future. This OmniTouch has the amazing ability to turn any surface into a touchscreen. All of this is possible with this shoulder-mounted device that is both pico-projector and Kinect. So if you want to use your hand to run applications, just hold it out and the proper buttons will appear.

For those who are looking for a personal home monitoring system, complete with cameras, might want to look into the iZON. As its name implies, the iZON is another way of saying “eyes-on”, and the small “i” designates that it is designed to work with iPhones and iPads. The iDevice user needs to download a Stem:Connect App

Having recently conducted a security audit of several free/open source software programs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chris Palmer and Dan Auerbach have published some guidelines for improving security in free/open software: Avoid giving the user options that could compromise security, in the form of modes, dialogs, preferences, or tweaks of any sort. As security expert Ian Grigg puts it, there is “only one Mode, and it is Secure.” Ask yourself if that checkbox to toggle secure connections is really necessary? When would a user really want to weaken security?