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Forget multi-touch technology and face recognition. At its Computex booth in Taiwan, Asus displayed concept designs that take the user interface to new frontiers.

Termed "Reality-to-Virtual," what looks like a clamshell laptop with dual LCDs is actually a showcase of how motion sensing can be combined with context-based displays. With a sweep of your hand, for example, the Webcam will detect the motion and switch the upper LCD to the requested application. The lower portion is really a touch-sensitive LCD that can be used as a keyboard, media control, and photo-editing panel. As this is only a concept … Read more

With video search being what it is (see Truveo, Blinx, etc.), we're possibly over the need for video how-to sites that simply compile from other sources. However, I wanted to write about video how-to site WonderHowTo because it's got a great collection of clips, and an even better way to sort through them--maybe more so than your standard video search tool.

Each category goes about two levels deep, but that second level is where all the care has been taken. For example, if you dig into Arts & Crafts, there are 13 different subcategories, each of which has … Read more

Kwiry, the memory-saving tool I wrote about back in December, has just put out a useful update for people who don't like to type. Users can now send photos to their Kwiry stream in hopes of digging up a search for it later. The company is hoping people will use this to catalog things they come across in everyday life, and bookmark them for later like people do with links on services like Delicious and Magnolia.

Kwiry's creators insist this isn't a photo-hosting service--just a tool to help people dig up more information about something they've … Read more

Sometimes I feel like people might think we talk the talk, but don't walk the walk when it comes to using some Web services. Believe me when I tell you we use this stuff every day, and over the last month, nothing has been more useful to me than Craigslist. Why? I was moving, and I did 95 percent of it using a single service to find movers, boxes, people to buy and take away old furniture, and most importantly--a place to live.

After having just finished, I know I could have done some things better, and I thought this would be a good chance provide a focused collection of tips and tricks for each stage of a move. Something useful for any would-be movers who have never used the Web to hunt for a new place, then get the job done by selling excess junk, and finding the right equipment to get from point A to point B. I've also nixed using just Craigslist, as a balanced attack using several best-of-breed Web services will save you time and money.

Mash Maker (review) from Intel is a very slick tool for parsing through Craigslist's myriad of listings and making the data accessible in ways that Craigslist does not provide for. There are a few "plug-ins" for Craiglist in the Mash Maker gallery. The most useful ones are the tables plus maps one that will let you see pricing, move in dates, and more in an easy to use chart that can be sorted. There's also a great one that will give you the price versus subregion that will tell you the average price of apartments based on each neighborhood you're looking at.

Another mash up that existed before Mash Maker, but that's still accessible without the installation of the plug-in is HousingMaps, which mashes up Google Maps with Craigslist housing listings. You're not going to find some of the most up-to-date listings from just an hour or so ago, or be able to search through them like you can on Craigslist, but using the filters it's simply a fantastic way to check out a bunch of places with less text and more topography.

If you're trying to buy a house, there are some even better services that bring a lot more depth to the table. Trulia and Zillow offer simple and deep services that give you a lot of information and put you in touch with real estate folks or homeowners without you even needing to leave your house.

Trulia has the most eye candy of the two, with a time line viewer called HindSight that will show you growth and other housing trends by geography. It's really only useful in a few cities, unlike Trulia's core service which will let you hunt for houses with a high level of ease. Fellow housing search tool Zillow is also great for potential homebuyers, and ties in things such as a mortgage finder and a great map tool that includes homes for sale, recently sold homes, and even places people are just thinking about selling and just waiting for the right offer to get out.

Continue reading to learn about research tools, finding movers, and what to do if you find yourself temporarily homeless...

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So you've been having fun with Facebook's somewhat half-baked chat service for the last day now, but are you growing tired of having to first log-in, then pop-out the chat window? For those of you who want to chat without this two-step process, there's a nice little tweak discovered by Mozilla Links that lets you set Facebook chat to pop out in Firefox's side bar.

I'm not really a fan of sidebar driven applications (gDocsBar not included), but this implementation works out pretty well. It will load up your buddy list and work just like … Read more

Who doesn't like listening to computer generated human voices for hours at a time? If you're a fan of Microsoft Sam, you should check out Dixero, a service that turns RSS feeds into podcasts you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable devices. The company is showing of its products at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, despite the incredibly noisy show floor.

The listening quality is about the same as Odiogo, a service I looked at a few months back and have used with great success on blogs and news sites that … Read more

First, it was a very public detente with BitTorrent.

Then, on Tuesday, Comcast continued its make-nice-with-P2P campaign by announcing a new collaboration with P2P software maker Pando Networks. Specifically, they're leading the development of a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," driven by input from "industry experts, other ISPs and P2P companies, content providers and others."

"By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content," Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner … Read more

OK, Google watchers, you can slow down your pulse. That to-do list posting on the Google Docs blog appears to have been an innocent mix-up.

Google marketing manager Andrew Chang inadvertently published his to-do list on a blog while testing his posting software. It wasn't a hastily removed preview of a new Google online to-do list application, a possibility some raised.

"I was testing out a feature that allows you to create and edit blog posts in Docs and publish them directly to your blog," Chang said in a follow-up post afterward. "One button click later, … Read more

Ramesh Srinivasan has clearly known the tensions of shared computing, especially the bickering over which mail app and browser to set as defaults when two or more users disagree.

Thanks to Srinivasan's two apps, DefaultMail and DefaultBrowser, families and roommates can cool it on the tug-of-war and continue clashing over important things, like drinking milk straight from the carton. The free apps smooth things over by linking default browser apps and e-mail clients to each user account.

Tune in to the video to see how the apps work, but forget typing those long URLs to download the apps. We'… Read more