Infrared light from a laser(s) is shined just above the surface. The laser plane of light is about 1mm thick and is positioned right above the surface, when the finger just touches it, it will hit the tip of the finger which will register as a IR blob.
Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. A durable 2.5" square provides WiFi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for months. A simple web app allows to you quickly set up your Twine with human-friendly rules — no programming needed. And if you're more adventurous, you can connect your own sensors and use HTTP to have Twine send data to your own app.
Mozilla Labs announced a new product called JetPack, which reminds me of the kinds of features you've seen in Adobe Air, Flock and Songbird, but the tool makes creating said features very simple.
One very simple way to keep your email organized is by using flags in Apple's Mail program.
If you're anything like me, you tend to hold on to your email for months, years, or pretty much all of eternity. 
Now that I have things like Google Apps for Your Domain and IMAP, I can literally keep as much of my email as I want, and always get access to my full message history. On top of this, I have 7 inboxes to check.
My friend Jake called me a few days ago to tell me he will be teaching a User Interface Design class at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, MI next Fall. After my congratulations, he asked me to help him pick out a textbook for his students. Here were my suggestions:
This is a project I've been thinking about for a while, and I'd love to do a hack weekend to get this working sometime.
If you haven't noticed the lovely Lijit search wijit on the left sidebar here, please leave your feed reader and come check it out. This is a very interesting concept to me - they're taking the Google Personalized Search tools and providing a very user-friendly (and statistical) interface to the tool. A mash-up with a business model? Amazing. I've also read on their blog that they're going to start tracking comments on your sites as well and I suppose integrating that with the other statistics and search metrics you're already getting.
