So I'm reading MAKE:Blog today (see link to the left), and two things caught my eye. I'm throwing this out there to the public. Maybe one of you can build it, maybe I'll build it myself (Though it seems likely that by the time I can afford the development costs, I won't have the time).

Link 1: A detailed review of the Fly Pentop Computer

The fly, if you haven't already heard the hype, is a gizmo targeted at the 8-13 crowd. It's a computer shoved into a pen. You scribble on a piece of paper (Has to be special paper, unfortunately. There's some very clever math in how it works, but the notion is that there's this thing called the Anoto pattern, which the Fly -- and most other digital writing systems -- uses to orient itself), and it does interesting stuff. The most basic of its features is that it can record what you wrote. Of course, since the Fly is, in addition to being a pen computer, a computer pen, you've technically already got a hard copy of whatever you wrote.

But it does other neat things. You can draw a calculator and use it to do math. It's very flexible in this regard; you write a C within a circle, activating calculator mode, then draw a rectangle and put some numbers and symbols in it -- in any arrangement you like -- then tap on them to do math. You can also draw a keyboard and play music. Or insert the translator biochip [2 points], and have whatever you write in English read back to you in Spanish. (Actually, I kinda get the feeling that they invented this thing, then realized that they couldn't think of very much to do with it.)

But limited in use though it may be (for now), it's a really neat evolution of the medium. Which is why an alarm went off in my brain when I saw this:

Link 2: How to turn an optical mouse into a handheld scanner

As you know, an optical mouse is a mouse that uses, very basically, a pretty simple digital camera (or, rather, a CCD -- the bit of a digital camera that takes the picture) instead of a ball to detect motion. As it turns out, there is a way to just pull the image from the CCD on some mice instead of turning it into a direction and distance.

So, here's my big and infeasable idea: Let's combine the information in these two links and build ourselves a Ghetto Fly homebrew pen computer.

There are some obvious problems with this idea. First, the optical mouse CCD has a very low resolution, and probably can't read an Anoto pattern. Second, the Fly is not built from off-the-shelf components. But hey, I just stuck a computer inside a radio. I think we can overcome these problems if we just make everything BIGGER.

I'm now imagining my homebrew pen computer. I figure that the "pen" would be about the size of an electric leaf-blower. A sheet of notebook paper would have to be enlarged to, say, 8 feet wide. It would weigh about 50 pounds.

But imagine pulling that out at a party...