If you’re a frequent traveler like my mom, you would know how hard it is to leave your family behind. Yes, you will definitely miss your loved ones. Which is why I have much respect for OFWs.

The guys at Cute Circuit think so too. And they’ve been working on a hug shirt that can literally hug your loved ones over a distance.

The project has been nominated in Time Magazine’s Best Gadgets of 2006, although the hug shirt project has yet to be finished.

How does it work?

The Hug Shirt is embedded with sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one.

For the shirts to work, your partner must have a Java enabled cellphone with her. When you send an sms message to your loved one, it will communicate with the Hug Shirt via Blue Tooth and thereby hugging your loved one.

Is the Hug Shirt for you?

It’s sounds pretty creepy to me. But on the other hand, looks interesting too.

Personally I’d like to give it a try and see if it does feel a REAL HUG.

How about you? Would you try or even BUY something this crazy?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Good news to all YouTube fans! You can now upload multiple videos per batch through YouTube’s Multiple Upload Page. All you need to do is install the YouTube uploader and start uploading like crazy.

But it doesn’t stop there. YouTube just increased the max file size limit of each video from 100mb to a whopping 1Gig! Talk about high quality videos! Hehe. The sad part is the max length of the videos remain at 10 minutes per video. I do hope they will increase the max length soon.

Nonetheless, the announcement of the YouTube Blog on the recent updates show how Google continuously improves on YouTube’s services. With the file size limit increased to 1Gig, expect more high quality videos on YouTube.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Good news to GMail users! Aside from the whopping 2GB+ (almost 3GB) storage from gmail, Google has announced an increase in their counter and will be giving out more free storage.

Googlified calculates:
2912MB by October 11, 2007 midnight Google time
4.2GB by the 23rd this month
6GB by January 4th next year
42GB by the year of 2038

Actually, I haven’t consumed even a quarter of the storage space I have on my gmail account, and now they want to increase my free storage. Cool! Why argue when they’re giving it for free right?

Popularity: 5% [?]

Find your invisible Yahoo! friends with:
1. Xeeber
2. Invisible.ir
(Just pick any of the two)

I have read several techniques on how to do this manually, but they are too much hassle for me.

The two websites above are way simpler. Just type in their Yahoo! usernames, click enter and find out if they are indeed offline or hiding their ass with the invisible mode.

Popularity: 21% [?]

For the last couple of days, the news that we can now send as well as receive payments through Paypal here in the Philippines has been circulating the pinoy blogosphere and was indeed confirmed by Yugatech.

This is absolutely great news!

But after reading more news on the topic, the new implementation of Paypal is not yet fully supported by local banks. Which means, we can receive payments in our Paypal accounts but to withraw the money, we need a to have US bank account.

There is also another alternative, which is to use third party services like Xoom to transfer the money to local banks here in the Philippines. But because it is a third party service, the fees are higher compared to withdrawing directly from Paypal.

In conclusion, Paypal is seeing the potential market here in the Philippines although they may still be negotiating with local banks. What do you think? Can’t they incorporate it with Unionbank’s EON Card?

Popularity: 4% [?]