Whoa...

Two cool things I observed today:

I was in a deli this afternoon, and while I was paying for my sandwich, I noticed that there was a computer screen behind the cashier that was showing live video feeds from several cameras in the shop. There were little grids of red lines that followed the moving hands of everyone in each of the windows- the people making the sandwiches, the people pulling goods off the shelves, etc. It was the like the facial recognition feature in some of the newer consumer cameras- tuned for theft-related activities. Very cool.

I've been using Mac OS X Leopard's Time Machine to backup my home laptop, and a few times over the past week, I've taken a look at the Time Machine System Preferences window, which displays the time of day the next hourly backup will occur. Usually when I looked there was a time listed- occasionally, there was not. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why sometimes there was no upcoming scheduled backup, until I realized that my laptop was not plugged in. I plugged it in, and a time for the next backup appeared. Unplugged the laptop, and the next backup time disappeared. So Time Machine is smart enough not to backup a laptop when it's running on battery power (which would drain the battery substantially). Very cool.