Day: 14 October 2008

Collections with digital locks

XKCD cartoon on DRM

This came up on the backstage mailing list today. I'm sure most people will shake there heads knowing there's a whole lot of truth in what's been drawn. But for those who are not, can I remind them of the nightmare some customers are having with Walmart. Apple were also threating to leave the digital music store business a while back, which would have screwed over tons of people. This is another reason why I only buy Mpeg3s and Flacs from stores like Audiojelly. I've started adding a section to my data portability talk about the trouble with DRM because its such a problem.

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Tesco direct have Acer Aspire One for 198 pounds

I have been considering getting a netbook or as I'm starting to call them cloud terminals for a while now. I've always wanted a replacement for reading ebooks on without dragging my quite heavy Dell XPS M1210 around with me everywhere. So at BarCampLondon5 either Tom Morris or Cristiano Betta suggested a session titled “bring your gadgets.” So you can just imagine the things pulled out for the session.

Sam from Orange showed off his Acer Aspire One. When I asked him about the price he said he had got his for 199 pounds from the PC World sale a while back. Now it seems Tesco have jumped in on the same game. It needs more more memory as the default had 512meg of memory to be honest, what more would you change? Oh thanks to James Cridland for the tip on the price point.

I like the Dell mini-9 too but its the wrong end of the price bracket for me. I found this compare chart very useful, but there's nothing like feeling the keys of the machine its self. I learned I could use the Acer keys quickly without a problem unlike the Asus eeePC models.

Oh is it payday already… And I actually do need to order food for the flat, question is if I order today will I get it before going to Berlin?

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Twitter IM bot not coming anytime soon

From Twitter Status blog

In October 2006, just three months after Twitter launched publicly, we added IM support—i.e., the ability to get and send tweets via XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk. I was a big fan of this feature, because this interface, which millions of people were already familiar with, seemed a perfect fit for Twitter’s real-time nature.

In December of 2006, we extended that support to AIM, enabling a much bigger number of users to interface with Twitter via the same system they talk to their friends on all day.

While off to an early start, since then, our IM feature has been, well…spotty. We first killed AIM support after struggling for months to make it reliable (which was a side-project to trying to keep the service as a whole reliable). And our Jabber support has been up and down until about four-and-a-half months ago when it’s just been…down.

Oh yeah that's why I'm using Ping.FM alongside a range of other microblogging services such as Indenti.ca and Jaiku.

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