jill/txt

A couple of years ago I wrote about a family-aware clock much like the Weasley’s clock, developed by Microsoft - they’ve continued working on it and are ready to have a few families try out the prototype: The Whereabouts Clock. It’s kind of cool - but would depend on family members actually having their mobiles with them, on and charged. Which is probably the case most of the time in many families.

Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD-Jon (remember, the sixteen-year-old who cracked the DRM on DVDs so you can play them on your Linux computer, and he was sued by Hollywood but Norwegian courts found in his favour - you buy a DVD you have the right to play it on any device you choose) has released a method to “activate a brand new unactivated iPhone without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T NSA. The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and WiFi work.” The photo to the left does not show Jon Lech Johansen’s method - that’s a European’s attempt to build his own iPhone from available materials.

Of course, my SonyEricsson Z600 is nearly three years old and honestly, so long as I have the bright stripy cover on it I feel no imminent need to upgrade it. Dorky of me, I know.

Remember those amazing screens they used to analyse memory data from the precogs in Minority Report? Looks like we might actually be able to use screens like that soon:

So this is by Perceptive Pixel, a company started last year by Jeff Han, who demoed it at TED last year. I know about TED because I made Ev Williams (co-inventor of Blogger.com, which was one of the very first blogging sites out there) a “friend” on Twitter, though obviously I don’t actually know him. Anyway, Ev was at TED. So I googled TED. It costs $4000 or so to attend and is invitation only which sounds worse than it probably is as you can apply to get an invitation. Though the $4000 would still be an issue for most of us… Fortunately they share videos of talks, so we can watch Jeff Han’s ten minute demo of the system at TED last year.

But Google Jeff Han and you’ll find he’s a scientist at NYU, and that the major innovation about these screens is that they’re multi-touch screens. He’s worked on some other really interesting human-computer interface projects too - and he was involved in (led?) the development of CU-seeme, back in the day.

Anyway, I’ve no idea when we might get our hands on these glorious touch screens. The Perceptive Pixel website is just an image, there’s no further information out there. But the technology is apparently out there. And I want it.

I found this at NRK Beta, which has lots of good stuff - NRK is like the BBC of Norway.

Oy. Now *I’m* top hit on google for “macbook noise”. See, I blogged having googled that when I first got my (somewhat noisy) macbook and finding a blogpost about how many people had got to that blog through searching for “macbook noise”. Sigh.

And yes, my macbook’s still kind of noisy, and no, I never found a fix, but usually it doesn’t annoy me much. And I love everything else about it.

I lost my iPod somewhere, somehow. I was thinking I’d replace it with a shuffle (so much more fiscally sound at a third the price), but luckily Thomas showed me his video iPod. I love it! There is no way I could be happy with a lesser model after spending five minutes with one of those. I’m in the US for a couple of weeks, so I ordered it from the Apple Store, and look it’s on its way! It’s only about 20 miles away right now!

I’m particularly fascinated that my iPod has been in Shanghai and Anchorage, Alaska. Someday I mean to visit those places too.

Are you as intrigued by tracking parcels as I am?

I was quite surprised to see that Microsoft had come up with the idea of a “family-aware clock” with a hand for each member of the family that points at their location. See, I remember reading about that clock before - there’s one in the Weasley’s house, remember?

It had nine golden hands, and each of them was engraved with one of the Weasley family’s names. There were no numerals around the face, but descriptions of where each family member might be. “Home,” “school,” and “work” were there, but there was also “travelling,” “lost,” “hospital,” “prison,” and, in the position where the number twelve would be on a normal clock, “mortal peril.” (The Goblet of Fire, Chapter ten)

I wonder whether publishing an idea in a book gives J. K. Rowling legal rights to the idea? Though clearly the Weasley’s clock uses magic rather than location data from mobile phones to plot the wherabouts of the family. This is the kind of ambient device I’d be happy to own. Imagine how calm you’d feel when your child had been gone a little too long but you could see at a glance that she wasn’t in mortal peril?

I read about the clock at Textually.org, where there was a link to a Harry-Potter-ignorant article. A search quickly found plenty of Harry Potter fans surprised at Microsoft’s not mentioning the rather obvious source of their idea. Seeing how the Microsoft version has even copied the design of the movie clock, I’m going to assume the journalist misrepresented this rather than that Microsoft would actually claim to have come up with the idea independently.

My green 1999 iMac’s been gathering dust for over four years. I should have sold it long ago. Now it no longer starts when I hit the power button. Maybe it’s the PRAM battery. Frankly, I don’t really care. Should I take it to the dump (to have all its environmentally-unfriendly bits carefully removed) or do you think anyone would actually have use for it? From browsing support groups it looks like to fix it might simply require a new battery, but it might also involve rather a lot of taking apart CRT screens that can kill you if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Actually I think the shop where I bought it is required by law to take it back and dispose of it in a sensible way. That’d be better than having to pay lots at the dump. A little like taking a pet back to the petstore. Oh dear.

[Update: Problem solved. Dad’s taking it to the dump for me and keeping the harddrive and RAM, which will come in handy. Lovely. So nice to wave goodbye to it!]

When I played violin, we used to laugh at the fingernail girls. They had long nails on every finger that needn’t touch fingerpad to wood: the left thumb, the right index, middle and ring fingers. Their other nails were neatly trimmed, for these girls were often diligent violinists and acutely aware of the need to adjust the body to the instrument. The callouses under their chins were as red as ours but still we laughed, and cut all our nails to the quick.

It’s been years since I’ve trimmed my nails to interface with technology, but just a minute’s texting on my new Z600 has me cutting my modest thumb nails. The lumpy, rubber keys on my old phone were far more forgiving than the sleek flatness of the Z600. It looks better, though, and does more. And I like short, practical nails.

I wonder whether bodies are marked by our computers as they are by instruments. My fingertips are no longer leathery, my throat has lost the aching red mark worn by the violin pushed so often against it in the past, but the memories are there, and I pick my violin up as naturally as I ride a bike or touchtype. And I trim my thumbnails.

Telio is a new phone company in Norway that offers IP telephony: if you have a broadband internet connection, and pay them 159 kroner a month (the same standard fixed rate as Telenor takes) they’ll set you up so your phone calls go through the internet instead of through the phone-specific network. You keep your old number. Anyone call call you. Phone calls are free (well, all calls to Norway are free and the first 100 mins of international calls). And get this: if you buy a wireless phone, I think you can even ring and receive calls for free, using your home number, from anywhere in the world where there’s wireless. If I understood that right, it’s almost too good to be true.
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I’d hardly care that the sound quality isn’t that good: an mp3-player necklace - look, here’s a sexier photo.

Instead of packing, I installed Romeo. Now I have to carry my phone everywhere, because my computer mutes itself and turns on a screensaver when I go out of Bluetooth range. And I can remote control presentations and iTunes. Oh yeah.

When we were in Tokyo Lisbeth remarked that there was a new background sound: not just the beep beep of SMSes and mono- and polyphonic ring tones but also an ascending arpeggio announcing the arrival of a picture message to a telephone nearby. No wonder, then, that the first mobile phone that can take pictures with a reasonable resolution is only available on the Japanese market. For those who don’t read Norwegian, a post to Future Technology News links to the Japanese announcement and to an automatic translation into English.

The Casio A5401CA takes pictures at a megapixel, which means the quality’s good enough that you can print them out at 10 x 15 centimetres. That’d be enough for photos you want to use on the web, say for blogging… (via Jon)

Purring Kitty is an interesting-looking bit of software that’ll get your Nokia phone vibrating for as long as you like. Easily bought by SMS from within the UK, but it’s more expensive and more complicated from other countries. I like the idea, but I’m more interested in getting one of these, to be honest. And it won’t support Purring Kitty. How boring of me, huh? (via Wired, via Jane, who has used a game accessory in a similar manner)

I just signed up for a 1 kroner trial “ebox” (what a nothing-meaning name, huh?) which is one of those gizmos you plug in and henceforth can control every piece of electrical equiptment in your house through the internet. The info is minimal, it’ll only work until September (unless they decided to keep doing the wireless servicing of it in Bergen), maybe it only actually works on one socket. But heck, it’s only a kroner. Plus 100 kr in shipping. Ha. You can get one too, if you’re a BT subscriber.

I’m a sucker for gadgets. I’m getting this since I can’t afford an iPod, a webcam, a digital camera or a new computer.