Nokia’s starting to produce some quite interesting software for their smartphones. I wrote a little while ago about the podcast-listening application, and now they’ve come out with Smart2Go, a free and very capable mapping program – think of some mix of Google Maps, Google Earth, and Tom Tom.
They’re giving it away, but some of the services, such as Tom-Tom-style navigation using your bluetooth or built-in GPS, need to be paid for on a time basis. So if you’re visiting Italy for just a week, you can get a 7-day license for voice-based navigation and guidance for £4.29. The app is pretty heavy on network bandwidth, so if you’re not on a flat rate you may want to use the Windows app which lets you pre-download the maps to your phone.
Quite nice.
A nice article by Jon Katz.
Michael Shermer is the founder of Skeptic magazine and the author of several books. He’s quoted often in Dawkins’ The God Delusion. He’s also rather a nice chap. I know this because a few years ago he was cycling high up in the Tuscan hills above Cortona and had a puncture, and I happened to pass by and give him a lift down to his hotel, so got a chance to chat to him.
OK – enough name-dropping. The point of this post is that he gave a splendid talk at TED, which is great fun and definitely well worth 17 mins of your time. You can watch it or download a higher-resolution version here.
I went for a delightful walk yesterday evening, to the north-east of Cambridge.
Interesting statistics about mobile phone usage:
In the UK, the number of outgoing voice calls made to the number of text messages is 0.6:1; in South Africa as a whole the the ratio is 3:1 for pre-pay phones; and in rural communities the average ratio is 13:1. Text messages are cheaper than phone calls, so this data, looked at from a western perspective, seems surprising. However, when considered in the context of a community where a significant number of people are illiterate it is more understandable.
from a talk given by Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group Chief Executive, last February.
One of Apple’s biggest achievements in the creation of the iTunes/iPod system was the balance that it managed to strike between the needs of customers and the needs of the recording industry. Their DRM (Digitial Rights Management) system allows you to make enough copies of your music on enough devices that it will seldom be an encumbrance to anybody, while not being a free-for-all that the music industry couldn’t accept. All DRM systems make me slightly uneasy, but it’s hard, I think, to find another company that has incorporated one as well as Apple.
Nonetheless, they’ve come in for some criticism recently because they don’t license their DRM to anybody else. Steve Jobs has just posted his response on the Apple site. As he says…
Todays most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.
But nonetheless, Apple would very much like a DRM-free world. Cynics may say that it’s easy to say that you’d support something when it’s so unlikely to come about, and that the real message of the piece is “Don’t bring antitrust measures against us – it’s not our fault”. But that doesn’t make the arguments invalid. Worth reading.
About twenty years ago, my brother and I went on a cycling holiday in France. As we sat eating a baguette in the central square of a small town in the Loire Valley, we watched a wonderful scene play out before us. There was a bank on the square, which had a shiny new cashpoint (ATM) machine – something of a rarity back then, at least in rural France. As we munched our lunch, a family approached it hesitantly; a tall, gaunt father, a rather shorter and decidedly less gaunt mother, and a young boy. It was an outing which was to end in disappointment, because, despite the careful attention of the father and the suitably Gallic gesticulations of the mother, the machine swallowed the card and they departed empty-handed.
What I had forgotten was that, that evening in our tent, I had written a short (and most unworthy) homage to Miles Kington’s wonderful ‘Franglais’ sketches. When clearing out my filing cabinet this weekend, I came across a faded dot-matrix printout, and decided to post it here, if only for nostalgia…
| M. Jones: | Ah! Monsieur! Vous êtes le bank manager, n’est-ce pas? |
| M. le BM: | Oui, c’est moi. Can I help Monsieur? |
| M. Jones: | Peut-être. Votre super-electronique nouvelle machine de cashpoint a mangé mon card! |
| M. le BM: | Ah oui, Monsieur. Si la machine n’aime pas le card, elle le mange. |
| M. Jones: | That’s as peut-être. Mais c’etait un perfectly bon card, avec des jolies couleurs et un hologram. |
| M. le BM: | Oui, Monsieur. Mais c’etait le card de la super-store just round le corner. Monsieur is holding notre cashcard dans son main gauche. |
| M. Jones: | Oh. So je suis. Et voila pourquoi votre machine a mangé l’autre? |
| M. le BM: | Oui. |
| M. Jones: | Mmm. Mais comment est-ce qu’elle le mange? |
| M. le BM: | Monsieur? |
| M. Jones: | Est-ce qu’elle fait la cashcard omelette, ou le crunchy cashcard avec 6 added vitamins et iron, ou peut-être le revolutionary beans-on-cashcard? |
| M. le BM: | Monsieur veut savoir? |
| M. Jones: | Oui, Monsieur would. |
| M. le BM: | Mais pourquoi? |
| M. Jones: | Parce-que j’ai trop de petit plastic cards. J’ai votre cheque-card et votre cashcard. Until 5 minutes ago j’avais le card de la superstore. Ja’i le card du hi-fi shop, le card qui dit que je suis an Ami de la Theatre de Bognor Regis, le card qui est mon ami flexible, et le card which will do nicely, sir. Je ne sais pas what to do avec tous ces cards. Puis j’ai pensé que je peux les manger. |
| M. le BM: | Ah oui. Mais je peux vous assurer que les cashcards n’ont pas un goût très agrèable. |
| M. Jones: | Même le cashcard à la caviar? |
| M. le BM: | Même le cashcard à la caviar. |
| M. Jones: | Oh, fiddlesticks. |
| M. le BM: | Mais je crois que j’ai le solution à Monsieur’s problême. |
| M. Jones: | Oui? |
| M. le BM: | Oui. Si Monsieur veut les donner à la machine, elle peut les manger avec plaisir. |
| M. Jones: | Quelle bonne idèe! (Il commence) |
| M. le BM: | Mais Monsieur, not celui-là! |
| M. Jones: | Pourquoi pas? Ce n’est pas aussi nourishing que les autres? |
| M. le BM: | Oh, c’est très nourishing. Mais c’est le proper card pour le machine. Elle va le redonner quand vous avez fini votre transaction. |
| M. Jones: | Alas alors! Qu’est-ce qu’il faut faire? |
| M. le BM: | C’est simple. Il faut le mettre dans la machine de la bank next door. |
| M. Jones: | Ah oui! Of course! Merci beaucoup, Monsieur! |
| M. le BM: | C’est un plaisir, Monsieur. Surtout pour la machine. |
Thanks to John for pointing me at this:
I called my dentist this morning. I could barely hear the receptionist over the sound of hammer-drilling.
Was most relieved when she said they had builders in the surgery that morning.
I liked this parable, quoted on LifeClever.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot, albeit a perfect one, to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
I was getting some laser engraving done by the nice people over at Trilogy Lasercraft, a nearby company. They showed me some of their machines in operation, and they’re great fun to watch. This was for another customer:
They cut and engrave lots of different materials, but paper and card form quite a big part of their business. The light that you see is not the laser, which is infrared and invisible. It’s the flaring of the paper particles that are burned off.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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