Status-Q

My friend Seb has done a nice little WAP service which UK readers may find useful.
Type in an ISBN number on your phone while browsing in Borders and it tells you how much the book costs at Amazon. Seb has some reservations about the ethics of this, but it’s quite cute anyway! He decided it was up to you to decide whether or not to use it..!

More info at Amawap.

I hadn’t come across the Economist’s Big Mac Index before. Interesting. And here’s Lattenomics.

The exchange rates are rather different now from when these were published, though.

John’s been posting some wonderful photos over on Memex recently. He claims the trick is to use a good-old 50mm fixed-focus lens with his (rather nice) Nikon D100. I think he may be right, but a large part of the trick is also to be a good photographer.

Dan has departed from the San Jose Mercury News after 10 years. I’ve enjoyed his writing there and will follow the news of his new venture in his blog.

Despite being one of the founders, I’ve been very bad at posting stuff to Living Without Microsoft in the last few weeks. But some of the other guys have been doing a much better job, and there has been some interesting news there recently. If you’re interested in alternatives to the Monopoly, check it out…

Oh, and please send in your contributions!

Interesting – if you have a GMail account, you can subscribe to it as an ATOM feed. (ATOM is very similar to RSS and accepted by most things that accept RSS). More info in the Gmail Help Center

IT Conversations looks as if it has more than enough interesting stuff to keep my iPod topped up for a while!

And there are plenty of RSS feeds available. One thing that’s good is the option to download AAC files instead of MP3s. These provide better quality for a given file size, but the main advantage on iTunes/iPods, when playing long talks, interviews, audiobooks, is that the system stores a bookmark which remembers how much you’ve listened to. If you go and listen to something else and then come back, you carry on where you left off.

Bad news about the British Bobby.

Now, this would be very interesting if true…

The EcoBot II is a robot which powers itself on a diet of dead flies and similar yummy stuff.

Wonder if they’re also doing a VeggieBot?

Follow-up: we talked about this at lunch today, and decided that the veggie version should probably be a TofuBot, tofu having no other obvious use.

The numbers which are coming in of the casualities in south-east Asia are just incomprehensible. I have tried in the past to put the September 11 attacks, terrible as they were, in perspective by pointing out that twelve times as many people die every day from starvation. Current estimates are that nearly 40 times as many died last Sunday.

Now, I’m very proud that my country has pledged more than any other country to help with disaster relief for the tsunami victims. The UK, at nearly $100M, is offering more than twice as much as the rest of the EU and nearly three times as much as the US, for example – astonishing in itself.

But it’s still a small amount of money in global terms. Estimates of the cost of the ongoing Iraq conflict run to more than that per day. Wouldn’t it be good if our governments spent even a tiny fraction of the amount of money on saving innocent people that they spend on killing them?