Status-Q

Regular readers will know that one of the things I'm currently working on is the Pico project, which is trying to find a long-term replacement for passwords.

I learned an interesting statistic yesterday from Angela Sasse: we recently passed the point at which more passwords are entered on mobile devices than on traditional computers, and that, on average, entering a password on a mobile device takes three times as long as on a laptop or PC.

This would seem to confirm our belief that the need for Pico, or something like it, will become more and more apparent over time.

For me, there is nothing quite so evocative of happy adventures to come as the sight and smell of freshly-Nikwaxed walking boots.

The MetaPhone project has some great examples of what you can deduce just from phone call records.

Excerpt:

Participant B spoke at length with cardiologists at a major medical center, talked briefly with a medical laboratory, received calls from a pharmacy, and placed short calls to a home reporting hotline for a medical device used to monitor cardiac arrhythmia.

Participant C made a number of calls to a firearm store that specializes in the AR semiautomatic rifle platform. They also spoke at length with customer service for a firearm manufacturer that produces an AR line.

Wandlebury woods were magical this morning.

At first I thought this was just a nice seat that had been installed for the purposes of enjoying the view. But now I suspect it may also say something in Japanese... :-)

If you're a fan of the Aerobie frisbee-like device, or the Aeropress coffee maker, or, like me, both of them, you'll enjoy Zachary Crockett's fine article about how they came into existence, and about Alan Adler, their inventor. Nicely done.

Many thanks to Hap for the link.

You can't have an explosion in a movie without a big bang, even if that explosion comes from a starship drifting through the vacuum of space. If the USS Enterprise is anywhere nearby, it's also likely to be buffeted by the pressure waves, and the crew thrown across the bridge.

In a similar vein, it was one of the Weta Workshop guys in the 'bonus features' on the Lord of the Rings DVDs whom I first heard point out that swords, coming out of wood-and-leather scabbards, somehow always make a zzzhinggg sound. Whereas in fact...

Well, I'll let this chap demonstrate:

Thanks to James Fraser for the link!

St Andrew's Church, Orwell

Douglas, Isle of Man, in December

You might think that, of all the household devices that could be connected to the 'net, a washing machine would be amongst the least useful, except perhaps for the purposes of energy monitoring or service diagnostics.

So I was particularly impressed with Berg's Cloudwash demonstrator, which emphasises the user interface aspects of connectivity. It's always struck me that washing machines tend to have particularly awful user interfaces. Until very recently, for example, we had one where program '4' was the one we used all the time. We needed to remember that, and on the rare occasions when we needed a different program, we had to look it up on a card.

Often, by giving a device connectivity, you can also give it a better user interface, even if that's only used to configure the buttons on the front.