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Author Archives: qsf
Google thoughtasmuch
Internet giant Google has teamed up with the Daily Mail to develop a unique version of the online search engine which will confirm the enquirer’s prejudices.
Another nice spoof from Newsbiscuit.
Small but powerful
My friend Aideen has been doing fun stuff with the TP-Link micro-routers.
These things are amazingly small – note the relative size of the USB socket – and very cheap.
She’s written it up in a nice blog post here.
Archery
Under the Vesari Corridor, Florence.
Using a shutter to capture shutters
I like shutters. Why do we have so few of them in Britain?
These are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
After the $100 laptop, the $50 desktop?
It’s almost exactly 10 years since we started the Ndiyo project, with the aim of providing computing access to people for something “closer to the cost of a VGA lead than the cost of a computer”. Ndiyo has now formally closed, but it led to many other activities, including the founding of DisplayLink, and successful past projects in collaboration with the GSM Association, No-PC, and others.
Today, there’s some more good news.
Towards the end of Ndiyo’s life we started to experiment with a model we called ‘Hubster‘ – the name coming from using a USB hub as the core of a thin-client terminal, something made possible once DisplayLink’s evolution of the Ndiyo technology allowed monitors, as well as keyboards and mice, to be connected over USB. The idea is to share the power, cost, and the carbon footprint of a PC between two or more users at once, simply by plugging in enough USB peripherals to give the extra users access to it. This is important for everybody, but especially for the poorer parts of the world where the cost of owning one PC per person is prohibitive.
Well, over the last few years, Bernie Thompson at Plugable.com in Seattle has been beavering quietly away to make this more of a reality, by providing DisplayLink-based terminals at reasonable prices and by maintaining the Open Source software to drive them. There are two bits of good news coming from his recent efforts:
- First, he’s been working with RedHat to get support for USB terminals built in to the standard distribution of Fedora 17. We’re getting very close now to the ideal situation where you can turn any Linux box into a multi-user box simply by plugging in enough components for a new user, and a new login prompt will appear when you do so. Imagine, say, a disaster-relief information centre where one person with a laptop connected to a satellite link can easily provide access for half a dozen members of the team just by plugging them in. And it’s all Open Source. Zero extra software cost per user.
- Secondly, in an attempt to get the cost of these terminals down and support ongoing development of the Open Source components, he’s launched a Kickstarter project called ‘The $50 Computer‘.
Some may, quite sensibly, ask how this compares to the RaspberryPi, which is, after all, even cheaper, and is a standalone machine. Well, this one comes with a box!
No, seriously, they are both excellent projects – I have a RaspberryPi on order, too – but they fill different roles. RaspberryPi, in the early years at least, will be about teaching people the basics of how computing works.
Bernie and the Plugable team are creating a system where providing fully-featured applications to multiple users at very low cost is something that a non-technical user can do simply by plugging in USB devices.
In some situations, perhaps in an internet cafe, you may just want to give extra users access to a Chrome browser. But with this system you also have the option of providing them with OpenOffice, with Scrivener, with Blender, with Corel Aftershot Pro, with Sublime Text, with Skype, with… well you get the idea! And, of course, with access to however many giga- or terabytes of storage you care to put in the PC.
I think the Kickstarter plan is a great one – I wish it had been around when we started Ndiyo.
Please support it if you can… Even if you don’t need more affordable computing devices, for your kids, your school, your internet cafe, your office, there are millions who do. Billions, in fact.
Every $10 we can shave off the cost of access to IT makes it accessible to many thousands of new people globally… and now you have a chance to help.
Tenuously LinkedIn?
Someone I have never met, communicated with, or even heard of has just sent me a LinkedIn invitation:
XYX has indicated you are a Friend:
Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.
I guess he must just have a very positive view of mankind…
It reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox:
“Who are you?”
“A friend!” Shouted back the man. He ran toward Zaphod.
“Oh yeah?” said Zaphod. “Anyone’s friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?”
Douglas Adams was a true visionary…
Broken promises
I am not in any sense a political animal, so I approach the subject with due humility, but as a mostly-detached observer with no party loyalties I’ve enjoyed watching the tactics in the run-up to some sort of local election which appears to be happening in the next few days.
The Labour candidate’s leaflet is emphasising the number of ‘broken election promises’ from the Lib. Dems. If memory serves, they formed a coalition with a very different party and had few, if any, election pledges in common with them. And they had about one-third of the number of votes of the Tories. So, on a rather simplistic but purely statistical basis, we should expect them to have to break their election promises about three-quarters of the time, shouldn’t we, to be democratically fair?
As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other ones which have been tried!
Some recent iOS favourites
A few of my favourite iOS apps at present:
I’ve always had mixed feelings about mind-maps. They’re a great way to capture thoughts and to brainstorm, but a terrible way to communicate with others. The chief responsibility of somebody writing a paper or giving a talk, it seems to me, is to turn such a personal 2D ‘splat’ of ideas into a logically-ordered serial presentation that can be followed by others with different mental processes, and not just to serve up the splat in its unprocessed form.
Still, I do use them for my own notes, and a paper and pen has always been my medium of choice. I’ve tried several highly-regarded pieces of desktop software, but keyboards and mice just don’t seem right for doing this. iThoughts on the iPad is the first environment that feels pretty natural, especially if you use it with a stylus.
I listen to lots of podcasts, every day, while shaving, driving, walking the dog. I always used the facilities built into the iPhone music player and iTunes, which aren’t bad, so I had never really thought about using a separate app for it. And then I tried Instacast and was an Instaconvert.
If you have a recent iPhone with a good camera, then Scanner Pro is a really useful thing to have in your pocket. In essence it’s a photo app designed for capturing documents, or parts of documents, and it makes it easy (a) to crop and de-warp the images so as to get something closer to a proper scan and (b) to capture more than one ‘page’ as a single document and then (c) to email that as a PDF to someone (or upload it to various services). While you’d never confuse the results with the output of a proper scanner, there are times when you might be browsing in a library or perusing a magazine and you don’t happen to have a flat-bed scanner in your pocket…
The dictionaries
OK, here’s where you might need to start spending some real money… but I’ve definitely found it worthwhile when travelling to have the Collins language dictionaries in my pocket. I’ve now bought the expensive versions of the German-English, French-English and Italian-English ones and, even though they’re amongst the most costly apps on my phone, have never regretted it. They cost about the same as a hardback equivalent, but are a lot easier to carry around and I find, surprisingly, that I can look things up more quickly in them than on paper.
Another wonderful treat is to have the Shorter OED on my phone, something which in dead-tree form is hard even to lift off my bookshelf! (The current edition comes in two large hardbacks of around 2000 pages each.) It’s fabulous for all those times when someone at the restaurant tables asks, “What is the origin of the word ‘poppycock’?”. Sadly, the iOS app has been discontinued, so if you haven’t already got it, you’re out of luck, but there are a lot of lesser-but-much-cheaper options available, including Chambers.
Yes, you can often find good stuff on web, but not as quickly, especially if the restaurant table is in a basement. And if it’s in a foreign basement, then looking stuff up online may be rather expensive too.
Vous êtes hereux de me voir, ou vous avez une bibliothèque dans votre poche?…
Update 2012–08–14
Since this post, I’ve switched from using Instacast to Downcast. Its interface is a little crowded, on the iPhone at least, but it has a couple of nice features over Instacast.
The first is the ability to skip forward and backwards by a certain number of seconds: useful to skip ads, or to rewind a bit if you were distracted and lost the thread. Instacast has this, but it’s always been very unreliable. With Downcast it’s still a bit hit-and-miss – the buttons often seem to do nothing, or perhaps they’re just too small and so easy to miss – but my success rate is higher.
The second is the ability to sync various things between devices – which podcasts I’m subscribed to, which episodes I’ve already heard, and to some degree, how far through them I am. So I can listen at home on the iPad’s superior speaker and then carry on using my iPhone when I’m on the move.
Very nice.
The look o’ Lucca
Rough…
and refined…
The nature of power
Today’s quote is from Merlin Mann:
Don’t let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants should be in the parade.
(Because he has a very limited idea of what an elephant means)
Later in the podcast he had another good quote:
You can judge a person’s power, anywhere in the world, but particularly in an organisation, not based on what they say no to, but what they have the power to say yes to.
The key to saving keystrokes
For many years I’ve been a fan of TextExpander on the Mac, a utility which converts a short sequence of keystrokes into a much longer one. For example, most of my email messages end with
All the best,
Quentin
which appears when I type ‘atb’ and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it’s a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn’t too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.
But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad’s. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there’s no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can’t find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)
Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I’ve realised that I’m using that all the time too.
Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my ‘All the best’ trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: ‘qqsf’ expands into ‘Quentin Stafford-Fraser’, complete with capitals and punctuation.
But the thing I’ve found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I’m always having to type, say, ‘quentin@mycompany.com’ on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with ‘qmc’ and a space.
One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type ‘qmc<space><backspace>’, but that’s still a great deal easier than the whole address.
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