It’s an exciting time at Cambridge Visual Networks because we’re just starting to get orders from real customers.
CamVine, as we often abbreviate it, is a new company which we’ve set up to develop some of the ideas generated around Ndiyo. We’ve been working on it since the start of the year, but it’s only been officially incorporated for about a month, so it’s very encouraging to get sales, however modest, this early on…
Watch this space…!
Wow. This is pretty amazing (though it does require Firefox, unless you download a local app). Here’s a partial screenshot:
It’s a map of wifi routers in Cambridge – part of the worldwide WiGLE database created, it seems, by people driving around with stumbler software running.
My home network – 20MarloweRd – can be seen here. If you’re in the US, you can overlay the plots on nice maps.
(I always try, by the way, to name my Wifi networks with something that will let people find out where they are. Then if I’m interfering with my neighbours, or if somebody needs connectivity in an emergency, they know whom to ask.)
Many thanks to Michael Dales for the pointer…
There seems to be universal acceptance these days that drinking more water is good for you.
But Heinz Valtin of Dartmouth Medical School found that there wasn’t really any scientific evidence for this.
And there’s more on the subject here, including, for example, the widely-held belief that we need to drink more because of the dehydrating effects of caffeinated drinks. Extract:
Regular coffee and tea drinkers become accustomed to caffeine and lose little, if any, fluid. In a study published in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition in Omaha measured how different combinations of water, coffee and caffeinated sodas affected the hydration status of
18 healthy adults who drink caffeinated beverages routinely.“We found no significant differences at all,” says nutritionist Ann Grandjean, the study’s lead author. “The purpose of the study was to find out if caffeine is dehydrating in healthy people who are drinking normal amounts of it. It is not.”
The same goes for tea, juice, milk and caffeinated sodas: One glass provides about the same amount of hydrating fluid as a glass of water. The only common drinks that produce a net loss of fluids are those containing
alcohol — and usually it takes more than one of those to cause noticeable dehydration, doctors say.
Many of these reports were published a few years ago, which shows that urban legends can take a long time to die. Or perhaps, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, that the bottled-water industry has a lot to gain by perpetuating them…
I think this could be a fun – and environmentally sound – way to do our local shopping.
You can even get it with a solar panel:
They’re aiming for a price of around £5K. More info here.
Seen on Peter Armstrong’s blog.
It’s silly, I know, but I’ve started to create custom icons for the various external drives I plug into my MacBook Pro.
This is something I do rather regularly since the internal 100G drive only has about 3G spare, and I have to tidy things up frequently to keep even that much free! Most of my photos now live on a portable external drive which goes almost everywhere the laptop goes, and when I’m at home I plug in a couple of other drives as well.
Having pictorial representations of the disks in Finder windows and on the desktop makes it easier to know which ones are plugged in and turned on, and I’m much more likely to eject the right disk before unplugging it if they don’t all have the same generic icon. It’s a bit of effort to create the icons, but worth it, I think.
Ah – now, this is really quite interesting. I’ve been watching and playing with a variety of smartphones and similar devices recently. They’re starting to get large amounts of storage, quite reasonable email apps and web browsers, and, with the advent of reasonably widespread 3G and Wifi, decent connectivity. In short, they have most of what I need, most of the time – especially while travelling. The one thing they lack is a decent-sized screen and keyboard, and for some time I’ve been thinking that something like an Ndiyo terminal, driven by a smartphone, might be the architecture of the future.
Palm have been thinking the same way, and this summer they’ll be launching the Foleo.
This may look like a laptop, but actually it’s a ‘mobile companion’, designed to accompany your smartphone on those occasions when you need to type more than a few words or browse the web on something more than a tiny screen. It’s not clear yet how the processing tasks are split between the two, but it’s an appealing idea.
I think they could be onto a winner here.
Anyone who’s done any quantity of web design knows that there are often two phases to the process. The first involves creating your design using nice, clean, standards-compliant HTML and CSS, and the second involves inserting tweaks and hacks to get around the bugs and quirks of Internet Explorer.
Most web designers tend not to use IE. This is not just because of its failings; it’s often because other browsers offer designers facilities which make the development process easier; perhaps the best example is the excellent (and free) Firebug extension for Firefox.
In addition, most people of a creative or technical bent don’t use Windows; they use platforms such as Mac or Linux where IE isn’t available. But they do need to check what the sites will look like for people still using IE. So NetRenderer is a useful service – you type in a URL, pick your version of IE, and it promptly displays the image of your page under that browser.
My friend Hap sent me this fine picture from Dijon.
Looks like… well… my kind of place.
I foolishly got hooked on Katie Melua‘s excellent album Piece by Piece just before going away on my round-the-world trip. Foolishly, I say, because when I got to Beijing I couldn’t stop thinking about the song about nine million bicycles (extract here).
Still, it’s better than the time a few years ago when Rose and I watched The Sound of Music just before visiting Austria. It’s embarrassing to realise you’ve been wandering around a shop humming to yourself about edelweiss or lonely goatherds…
There’s a whole range of transport options in Beijing other than just bicycles, though. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing such a variety of vehicles anywhere else. Here are a couple I quite liked:
At one point we even overtook a tree going down the highway at speed…
I think there was a vehicle under there somewhere.
I really stopped in Beijing to visit some long-lost friends, rather than because I’d ever had a great yearning to see the place. But I found myself enjoying it greatly. There are some downsides – the air pollution, combined with the dust that comes in off the desert, is pretty appalling, and best illustrated by this photo of my friends’ muddy windscreen:
This was the view after a rain shower had passed over the stationary car. The car had been nice and clean beforehand.
Another downside, for those not used to them, are the Chinese lavatory facilities. In some spots, the Tourist Board has started indicating their suitability for visitors with a star-rating system.
Even four stars doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a seat!
But, these things aside, it’s a fascinating place.
I visited the Temple of Heaven and admired the trees in the surrounding park.
I visited Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City, where it’s apparently good luck to rub the brass studs on the enormous doors.
Young volunteers within the walls tell you how privileged they feel to be able to work there, and how they hope you’ll come back, and bring your friends, and see the Olympics. Their upcoming hosting of the games is hugely important to China. Personally, I have minimal interest in the Olympics, and some mild objection to the fact that my taxes are going to fund London’s decision to embrace the huge financial loss which hosting them always entails for the country concerned. But here the symbolic importance is huge and all around the city you see evidence of how things are being prepared, built, tidied up, covered up, so that the city will look presentable for the foreign visitors and the TV cameras.
I think the high point for me (in more ways than one) was the Great Wall. I had expected to be impressed by the scale, but I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. It was a bright, clear (and very hot) day, and we took a cable-car up to the wall, then walked along it as it snaked along the mountain ridges through the lush vegetation.
How dull it would have been if it had been straight and flat! That’s probably what the Romans would have done.
There was relief from the heat inside the towers.
And some opportunities to gather extra material for my collection of notices from around the world.
The food was superb, my friends James and Annabelle were great hosts, the prices were just unbelievable and the people were friendly.
Pity about the government.
And now I’m back in Cambridge, and it’s cold and rainy. Which, after the dust and mid-30s temperatures of Beijing, is actually rather nice.
For some time I’ve been looking forward to the 1st July, which is when public places in England will become smoke-free. Only just over a month to go…
Now I hear more good news. Apparently the EU is clamping down on the outrageous prices that mobile phone companies charge for roaming calls – they should drop to below EUR 0.50/min this summer.
I wonder if this will have any effect, good or bad, on the costs of roaming outside Europe, though…
Like many people, I imagine, the only mental image I had of Sydney was of the Opera House, and even that was flawed: it’s not white, you know, as I had always assumed. It’s actually a subtle beige colour. Here’s the obligatory photo – a night shot, just to avoid being too clichéd!
So I had no idea what to expect of the rest of the city, but I subconciously assumed that modern architecture would be the norm. And while it has a central business district much like many modern cities…
…I was really struck by the older buildings, from the grand to the humble, from early Victorian to late Art Deco.
I stayed at a delightful B&B dating from the 1870s:
And I was impressed with the public transport system, where a ‘day tripper’ ticket gave me access to an excellent rail network which whisked me to and from the centre, and a couple of long ferry trips, around the bay and up the river, all for about 6 quid. (A stark contrast to the tattered remains of a once-great railway system which greeted me when I got back to London. But that’s another story…)
I don’t want to post too many photos at a time, so I’ll spare you the leafy residential neighbourhoods, the amazing sandstone cliffs around Bondi Beach, the lighthouses and bridges…. All in all, I liked Sydney very much, and hope I get a chance to return before too long.
I liked this notice, seen on a platform of the (excellent) Sydney rail system this evening:
Actually, as one travels around the world, one often comes across interesting signs. I think one day I’ll publish a coffee-table book…
This padlocked box was on a street in a New Zealand town. Is the sign intended to fool very dim criminals, do you think?
And this one, inside the door of a loo cubicle, also set me wondering. I must confess, I’d never had the urge to do this before:
Once you’ve seen it, though, you start to wonder. What have I missed out on all these years? What is the attraction? Demonstrating your sure-footedness? Spying on your neighbour in the next cubicle? Pretending you’re in a French toilet instead of a Kiwi one?
Whatever the appeal, it’s obviously sufficiently tempting that they had to make and put up a special sign…
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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