October 16th, 2006

Convergence

October 16th, 2006

Well, this post comes via a 3G network, using my Nokia E61.

I’ll write more about this device soon. It does so much more than my Blackberry – better sound, wifi connectivity, VOIP calls, lovely big screen and pretty decent keyboard, to name a few – but some aspects are noticeably more flaky or obscure.

I had my Blackberry up & running and doing what I wanted very quickly, whereas I’ve been playing with this device all weekend and still haven’t quite got it as I want it. But that’s partly because there is so much more you can do with this… I didn’t spend much time configuring my BB to connect to my Asterisk server via wifi, for example! But the BB is basically an enhanced phone, where this is a very capable PDA, almost a tiny laptop, with a whole new operating system to learn – Symbian, in this case, which I’m much happier to have on my phone than anything from Redmond.

The main reason I wanted to try the E61 was to get 3G connectivity for my laptop, and it does that very nicely. It’s also better for doing blog posts from the breakfast table!
But for general ease of use, it’s hard to beat a Blackberry.

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“The Device”

October 16th, 2006

The DeviceThis is very cool and I wish I’d thought of it first. It will…

…keep track of several things that need metering. That includes anything from “CPU Usage” to eBay Auction Status” to our personal favorite, “The Current GDP of Uzbekistan.” From what we can tell, “The Device” connects to your Windows machine (Mac / Linux support is coming soon, apparently) and displays some piece of data generated from your computer or culled from the internet.

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October 15th, 2006

Getting greener

October 15th, 2006

I detect a worrying trend here.

It started when we got the ‘green bin’ recycling scheme, and Rose began pressuring me into recycling everything that could possibly be recycled. I grumpily acquiesced, but am now rather proud of the small amount of stuff in our non-recyclable bin when it’s collected each fortnight.

Then we made a recent decision to start buying organic food when possible, despite the premium prices at Waitrose. This is the modern equivalent of tithing to the church, I guess, but we think of it as one of the little luxuries that you’re allowed when you don’t have children to feed as well!

And now we even have a box of local vegetables & fruit delivered by the nice people at the Cambridge Organic Food Company.

But no, I’m not about to grow a beard, and any Birkenstock representatives considering contacting me as a result of this post should think again. Sometimes, though, this green stuff provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. Actually, almost anything provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. That’s another thing you can do when you don’t have kids.

This particular toy is a sensor which clips onto the main power lead coming into my house:

Electrisave sensor

and provides a nice little wireless display telling us how many kilowatts we’re currently using. Just about 1.1, at the moment:

Electrisave display

It can also tell us in pence per hour, or tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, should we so desire. It’s also a temperature and humidity display. Quite sweet. It would take a long time, I think, for me to save sufficient electricity to pay for it, but every little helps… It’s an Australian invention, called an Electrisave over here, and is available in the UK from their site, or, more cheaply, from British Gas.

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October 11th, 2006

Mojopac on the Mac revisited

October 11th, 2006

I wrote a few days ago about Mojopac, and whether we might get something similar on the Mac.

Steven Talbott pointed me at this interesting patent that Apple was granted yesterday which covers, very approximately, keeping your home directory on an iPod and being able to log in to a machine using that account when you plug the iPod in.

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Gutenkarte

October 11th, 2006

Gutenkarte takes texts from Project Gutenberg and links them to map data from Metacarta – the idea being that as you’re reading The Odyssey, for example, you can easily find the places on a map. I think this is a great idea.

Unfortunately, the parser can be a little over-enthusiastic. I doubt that the Court of Chancery referred to in Around the World in 80 Days actually took place in Chancery, France. And even Phileas Fogg, when talking about the West End, probably wasn’t referring to West End, Alabama.

Similarly, when the Martians in War of the Worlds emit their haunting cry, “Ulla, ulla, ulla!”, it hadn’t occurred to me that they were in fact pining for a small town in Southern Ireland.

I think this needs some community-based human editing à la Wikipedia – and that is in their plans.

The interface is a little strange, too – you have to start with the map and work back to the text, where I would have thought the other way around was more natural.

But it’s a cool concept…

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October 10th, 2006

Public enemy no. 1?

October 10th, 2006

David Linhardt, a notorious Chicago-based spammer, is suing the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus for nearly $12M in lost earnings.

This is ridiculous enough, but his suit is made more complicated by the fact that Spamhaus is based in the UK. Hurrah!

Now, however, thwarted by the fact that the UK seems to be outside the jurisdiction of the Illinois courts, it seems that Linhardt is trying a new tactic. Mmm. How to win friends and influence people in the 21st century…

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The Hole in the Wall

October 10th, 2006

I think this article is a fascinating and enjoyable read. It’s a few years old, but I hadn’t come across it before.

An Indian physycist, Sugata Mitra, installed a PC with a fast internet connection in the wall of a building in New Delhi. He just left it there, with no explanation, to see what the kids growing up in the slums would make of it. What do you call a mouse pointer, for example, if you don’t even know that the thing you’re using is called a mouse?

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October 9th, 2006

PocketMac update

October 9th, 2006

If you’re a Mac user and a Blackberry user, you might like to know that there’s an update to the free PocketMac software which syncs the two. You can get it from the Blackberry.com site.

This is still far from perfect – in particular, it corrupted my Mac address book the first time I ran it, perhaps because the Blackberry went to sleep in the middle – I’m not sure. I strongly suggest you backup your Address Book and iCal before trying it for the first time – they both have easy backup options in their menus. I restored them, and did a one-way synchronisation, overwriting the Blackberry, which took a phenomenally long time.

Since then, it’s been fine, if not speedy, and it has a lot of features not in the earlier version. Most important for me is the ability to have just a subset of your calendars on the Blackberry – vital if you subscribe to many calendars belonging to your friends and family.

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Networked scanner and Mac OS X

October 9th, 2006

HP Officejet 3330In the corner of my home office, there sits an HP OfficeJet 3330. I’m rather fond of this beast – it has provided us with a copier, scanner, fax and laser printer (albeit b&w) at home for a very reasonable price, and has never given us any trouble. There’s a JetDirect box stuck to the back so that it’s on the network and we can print to it from any machine in the house.

As an aside – I never realised just how useful having a copier at home could be until I got one. Here’s an example: I occasionally like going for longish walks around the Cambridgeshire countryside on Sunday afternoons. I used to stuff a guide book in one pocket and an Ordnance Survey map in another. Now, I just photocopy a couple of pages and the relevant bit of the map. Much easier to deal with in rain or a high wind…

Anyway – the HP software is laughably bad, but we normally only need the printer driver which works just fine. Occasionally, though, I need to scan things. I forget whether there was no HP Mac software which worked with networked scanners, or whether it was so bad that I abandoned it, but for years I’ve been using the web interface to do any scanning. Not very flexible or convenient, but it worked.

Today, however, Dave Hill showed me a much better way, albeit rather more complex to set up. Those who are unlikely to want to try this should probably move on to John’s blog at this point!

Continue reading »

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October 8th, 2006

Losing a friend

October 8th, 2006

Canon EOS 600

I’ve decided to sell my old Canon EOS 600 on eBay. I’ll be sad to see it go. Much as I love digital photography, you’d have to spend a real fortune now to get something as solidly engineered as this.

If you’re interested, you can bid for it, together with a nice Canon lens which is compatible with Canon DSLRs, here.

I’m sure you also won’t want to miss:

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October 5th, 2006

Jarndyce and Jarndyce

October 5th, 2006

To follow up on my recent posting where I mentioned the SCO/Linux fiasco, Eben Moglen, in a recent episode of the FLOSS Weekly podcast, estimated the overall costs of SCOs unsuccessful action as between $100-150M! And he’s pretty well qualified to make a good estimate.

So if you’re thinking of investing in a company because they’ve suddenly discovered they have a great IP claim, as many people appear to have done with SCO, just remember where most of that money will be going… Unfortunately, SCO wasn’t the only one paying.

One of the best things about the UK legal system, I think, is that if you bring an action against somebody which is unsuccessful, you are generally liable for their legal costs as well as your own. It’s one of the best barriers against an over-litigious society. May we never lose it…

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October 4th, 2006

What a strange world…

October 4th, 2006

It’s quite bizarre, I think, the whole world of anti-virus and security software. Fixing the failings in Microsoft’s products has become such a huge business for the likes of Symantec and McAfee that they are complaining bitterly about Microsoft’s attempt to fix the failings itself.

This is because Microsoft is getting into this business itself, and charging for software which is supposed to fix its own security holes – another slightly bizarre concept, but not, I suppose, much worse than a car dealer charging for repairs on a car he sold you, if you subscribe to the concept of ‘normal wear and tear’ being applied to software. It’s interesting, but Windows does seem to degrade over time in a way that other software doesn’t, so perhaps this model is valid! I’ve often wondered how many new PCs are sold because the old one is “getting very slow”, and the process of wiping the hard disk and starting again from a fresh install is just too scary…

Anyway, competitors worry that they won’t be able to compete with the official car dealerships because they won’t have the tools, and the same is true in the software world.

I worry about what incentives Microsoft will have to make a secure system, when they directly profit from its insecurities. Especially when some of the insecurities will only be fixable by them.

It’s about as far from the Linux model as you can get…

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