John & Brian found a very nice little web app. You give it a word and it spells it out using letters from Flickr.
You can insert Javascript in your own page, if you like, then you’ll get something different on every reload:
Good David Pogue style:
Man, oh man. How’d you like to have been a PR person making a cellphone announcement last week, just as the iPhone storm struck? You’d have had all the impact of a gnat in a hurricane.
But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple’s.
For a modest extra charge on your cellphone bill, you can make free wifi-connected calls from any wifi network – including T-mobile hotspots, and also from a router they provide for your home. There are only a couple of phones currently offered, but they can hand off seamlessly from wifi network to GSM and vice-versa.
BT and others have played in the past with mobile phones which could, alternatively, use DECT when they are in your house, and many smartphones are now capable of making voice calls over wifi, but there’s nothing as elegant as this, if it works as advertised.
US only at present. Definitely worth watching.
UK online advertising grew 46% in 2006 – making us one of the biggest users of the medium. In 2007, more than half of the online advertising spend in western Europe will be in the UK. And if you look at online advertising as a proportion of our total spend, we are way ahead of anyone else including the US.
Source: ZDnet/BusinessWire
It’s now estimated that the iPhone sold more than 700,000 units in its first weekend. A few people are having trouble getting their account activated with AT&T, which is perhaps not too surprising… AT&T have never had any device sell that many units in its first month before.
My brother Simon pointed out a wonderful use for YouTube tonight: finding those great comedy sketches that you remember from days of yore. So I went off searching for Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and came across an old favourite – the art gallery sketch:
Cook was absolutely brilliant at improvisation, but Moore had many other talents. I love his parody of Beethoven: Lots more good stuff where they came from!
Apple’s iChat AV allows you to make video calls. I often have problems because I’m usually behind firewalls but when it works, it’s very good. And most Apple machines have built-in cameras which make it a low-hassle process.
For those who have Macs without a camera, however, there’s more of a problem, because Apple’s (excellent if pricey) Firewire iSight camera was discontinued a little while ago, and iChat didn’t support anything other than Firewire inputs. So what do you do if you have a Mac Mini? Or an older Mac without a camera? It’s hard to find Firewire cameras these days, and using a camcorder is a bit messy.
Well, the good news is that, as of the 10.4.9 Mac OS X update, USB cameras are supported, at least if they’re recent ones and conform to the standard USB 2.0 video protocols. The Xbox Live Vision Camera is confirmed to work, and I’ve just ordered a used one from eBay to try out.
(Other USB cams have been and are supported if you install third-party drivers, but drivers are not normally something that Mac users have to bother with, so we get out of the habit and view them with slight suspicion…)
The NYT’s David Pogue has done a fabulous little video about the process of reviewing the iPhone. Very nice!
Many thanks to John for the link.
At CamViNe, our CODA system lets us put ‘albums’ of visual information onto an arbitrary number of ethernet-connected screens – we have several around the office.
We often use this for simple photo slideshows, but increasingly we want to display dynamically-generated information sourced from the web, so we created the CODA Markup Language (CML) which is easy to generate and produces beautiful antialised output for whatever information is currently of interest:
One thing the system can do is take RSS feeds and convert them to CML, so we have an ‘album’ of our favourite blogs and newspaper headlines on one of our displays. But in the last week or so everybody’s been talking about Facebook, so I signed one of my screens up to the status feed of my Facebook friends. Ta-da! An instant way to keep in touch with what my pals are up to.
This is fun stuff. Perhaps it’s the modern equivalent of having a pinboard with holiday postcards and change-of-address cards stuck to it…
On Friday afternoon in the US, the iPhone will be launched, and one thing I’ve been wondering is how they’re going to handle the paperwork for the thousands of people who will be queueing up for a new AT&T contract – the first obligatory accessory to the device.
Well, of course, it turns out that Apple won’t require anything so last-decade as a signature on a piece of paper. From Steven Levy’s review:
Instead of going through the usual complicated contract signing and credit-vetting ceremony with a fast-talking and slow-processing salesperson, Apple has come up with a startling idea: you simply buy the thing and go home. Then you open up the snugly fit black box – the design blitz at Apple begins with the packaging – and take out the handset.
…
Setup is a snap. As with the iPod, the device is a satellite of Apple’s free iTunes software. Plug the iPhone into a computer with your iTunes library (Mac or Windows) and the automatic sync function not only carries over your songs, videos and movies on iTunes library, but also photos, your contacts and calendar items. It also copies your e-mail address book and information onto your phone. This is one of the few phones that easily imports your information from your PC; because this is usually such a painful process, the vast majority of people with mobile phones never get around to moving over all their contact and calendar items. Signing up for phone service is easily handled in a straightforward process through the iTunes store.
The features of the iPhone have been discussed elsewhere in a phenomenal number of column inches and podcast minutes. As Leo Laporte says, this is perhaps, with the possible exception of the PS3, the most eagerly-anticipated consumer electronics device ever launched. But Levy points out that it may also have a huge impact even for those who don’t splash out on this Mercedes of mobile devices:
In a sense, the iPhone has already made its mark. Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products.
And about time too.
My friend Pete Naughton is in Buenos Aires. There’s a lovely snapshot of life there in his blog today.
Got 100 quid in your pocket and just have to buy something with it – doesn’t matter too much what it is – for the sake of the ‘retail therapy’?
I guess there are such sad people in the world, and they may be grateful for Burning A Hole.
40 years ago, the world’s first ATM was installed in Enfield, London. John Shepherd-Barron, its inventor, tells the story to the BBC.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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