Monthly Archives: October, 2007

MacPorts tips

If you do development on Macs and you don’t use MacPorts, you should seriously consider it, especially if you come from a Unix background. Formerly known as DarwinPorts, it’s the equivalent of the Debian package-management system for Macs, and exceedingly useful when you find you just need to grab a copy of libpng, or try something with PHP 5, or some such.

The documentation will help you get started, but it’s very handy when someone like Garrett Albright writes a helpful tutorial to explain some of the more obscure features. Thanks, Garrett!

LucidTouch

A nice demo of a new interaction mode. I can’t quite decide how useful it is yet, but they get points for innovation! (And for a good video)

Thanks to Claes-Fredrik for the link.

Fon home

Now there’s a surprise. BT has joined forces with FON. I first heard about FON and met the founder at the e-Tel conference couple of years ago. Basically, it’s a system to allow people to share some of their wifi bandwidth with passers-by who also subscribe to the FON system. I liked the idea – I’d written a proposal for something very similar when I was at AT&T – but I didn’t think FON’s model would work because it would violate the usage contracts of most ISPs, who don’t like you sharing your broadband with others.

Of course, if the ISP is in on the action, then that’s a different story! Congrats to Martin Varsavsky for this, and to BT for not behaving like an old-fashioned telco. It will be very interesting to see how popular this proves to be…

More info at BTFON.com

Sunshine after rain

One of the many joys of working in the Ndiyo/Camvine shed is the view from the window, looking westward towards Grantchester. It rained for much of today, but the sun came out in the evening.

View from the Ndiyo shed

Click for different sizes

True faith?

This is a short but wonderful clip of Richard Dawkins demonstrating what he does believe in!

Ansell ‘Andset?

An interesting idea: Nokia are trying to convince people that their N95 phone is a real camera by sponsoring
an exhibition of photos taken with it.

Eco-joke of the day

What did the lightbulb say when it was switched off?

See the comments for the answer…

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