I had some great birthday cards last month. I think this was my favourite, though:
Many thanks to Kim and Robin
Card index
June 9th, 2007
Hanging around
June 9th, 2007
Hello… it’s Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells here… I wish to complain about a distressing grammatical error which gets on my nerves, and which is becoming increasingly common even on the BBC.
I’m referring to the verb to hang, as in ‘to hang by the neck until dead’, and in particular to its past, and past participle, form, which is, of course, hanged.
Somebody on the Beeb this morning was talking about a chap who should be hung, drawn and quartered. He meant, of course, hanged.
Meat is hung. People are hanged.
Thank you for your attention.
Gadget limbo
June 9th, 2007
About a month ago, I lost my Nokia E61 on the far side of the world. This wasn’t as distressing as it might have been, because I knew I had my trusty old Blackberry 7100t waiting for me when I got home.
The 7100t is the best phone I’ve owned, in terms of reliability, quality of manufacture, and design of software. I’ve been thinking it would tide me over until an iPhone came along. But, in Europe, that’s likely to mean waiting until at least the New Year, and 6 months is a long time in gadgetland.
The Blackberry is just as good as I remembered, but I’ve been spoiled now by some of the E61’s features… Spoiled by having the TomTom software in my pocket. Spoiled by being able to use my phone as a 3G modem on T-Mobile’s very reasonable data rates. Spoiled by the wifi connection and the quality of the loudspeaker which meant it was a great way to listen to podcasts. Some of these were a real pain to set up, but once working, they were really quite useful. It’s not clear that even the iPhone will offer any of these. And now Nokia have their Media Transfer suite, which looks like good news for Mac owners with N-series phones. I could be tempted…
On the other hand, I’m not sure that I want to forsake Blackberry software for the rather buggy and disjointed interface that Symbian has, sadly, become. Come on, RIM – give us a 3G modem, at least!
NJFP
June 7th, 2007
I came across a new term for an organisation today. NJFP. It means ‘Not Just For Profit’.
I like that.
Or would you rather be a fish?
June 7th, 2007
A photo from my recent travels.
Ndiyo, DisplayLink and CamVine at GOVIS 2007
June 6th, 2007
Last month I was invited to give a talk about our work at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand.
The video of the full talk is now available in various formats from the Ndiyo site, in case you’re interested!
Ah, well, I might as well embed it here too… such is the magic of the web…
You saw it on the CamVine
June 5th, 2007
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…!
Wifi world map
June 5th, 2007
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…
Drink eight glasses of water per day
June 5th, 2007
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…
Xebra electric truck
June 4th, 2007
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.
Custom disk icons
June 3rd, 2007
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.
Foleo
June 3rd, 2007
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.
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