Month: March 2011

Time is like the Temperature?

I’ve been thinking about some of the mystery of the mind, specially since I started my quest to explore ideas and memes with mydreamscape.org after my own bleed on the brain back in May 2010.

I started thinking temperature is quite similar to time?

  • Time is different for everyone, try getting people to tell the time without a clock
  • Temperature feels different for everyone
  • Time has a man made scale
  • Temperature has a man made scale
  • Time goes slow when your having fun
  • Temperature feels suitable (hot or cold) when your having fun
  • Everyone has a preferred temperature
  • Everyone has a preferred time
  • There are places in the universe we can’t really go due to temperature extremes
  • There are places in the universe we can’t really go due to time extremes

Ok maybe its not a perfect match… but you get the general gist…

When the buisness model gets in the way, its time to move on?

By now everyones seen the ravings about Twitter changing the developer API and telling developers not to build twitter clients.

In a statement issued today by Twitter on its official developer mailing list, the company informed third-party developers that they should no longer attempt to build conventional Twitter client applications. In a move to increase the “consistency” of the user experience, Twitter wants more control over how its service is presented to users in all contexts.

The announcement is a major blow to the third-party application developers who played a key role in popularizing Twitter’s service. More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor. The situation highlights the importance of decentralization in building sustainable infrastructure for communication.

This I feel will have a massive chilling effect through out the developer community. Ideally people would move to status.net but I fear even this change isn’t enough to push people over and if the people won’t go the developers are unlikely to change focus to status.net and identi.ca.

I can’t quite link the two but in my mind there along the same lines. Cory Doctorow did a interview about why DRM is no friend of business. A very good interview which hits all the right points but theres something about twitter’s api change which is related. Maybe its about building a business model on shifting ground. If there business model and your business model don’t match or go in the same direction, maybe its time to move on?

Goodbye Kingswood warren

Kingswood Warren

I do work for the most excellent BBC R&D and for the longest time, this was the home of BBC R&D, kingswood warren. When the BBC decided to shut it down and move all the researchers, engineers, etc elsewhere there was a massive backlash. I do understand why, I mean this was not just a location for R&D but also the spiritual home of R&D. Freeview, FreeviewHD, Freesat, Canvas (now youview), Dirac, BBC Redux, DAB, etc, etc came from here.

However things had to change… The notion of a R&D lab stuck over a hour away from the rest of the BBC in the middle of a super prime plot of land was never going to fly in 2010. I can’t tell you the amount of times I lost the way to Kingswood Warren!

Sort of emblematic Kingswood was of the shift in R&D as a whole towards much more public engagement I feel.

My Kindle Ecosystem

Chrome to Kindle

I pretty much take my Kindle most places and people keep asking me what I feel about it? I always say its great and of course I carry it around everywhere… (in actual fact it would be great if Amazon recognized the fans/ambassadors like myself)

Then they usually ask about the books… What book are you reading?

This is where I tend to divert from the normal kindle owner.

So how do I get news on to the Kindle? Well there seems to be a whole bunch of ways.

  1. Calibre is your long lost friend
    No matter what you do this is the first point of call for any ebook reader, even the ipad. It converts ebooks and with the recipes you can point it at almost any website and it will turn it into a ebook for reading on the device. One of my favorite recipes is the Google Reader recipe, turns my unread RSS subscriptions into a nice ebook. And to top it all off, Calibre can be setup to automatically send the ebook to the kindle. Of course I have this setup, so I never have to sync my kindle anymore. In actual fact I only need to plug it in once a month when the battery is low.
  2. Instapaper is simply great
    Instapaper most people know about but one of the new features is the ability to send to a Kindle as a kindle compatible .mobi file. No need to wait for Calibre. Plus it also has the option of sending only when there’s a certain amount of clipped content, so you don’t get lots of empty or single page ebooks. On top of that the Kindle treats them as periodicals so, it automatically archives old ones instead of clogging it up with old instapapers.
  3. Klip me with chrome and soon others
    Send to Kindle with Klip.me works exactly how you expect. The only thing is it currently only works on Chrome and Safari. They are working on a Firefox version but till then you can use the beta bookmarklet service which does the same thing but not so elegantly.
  4. Email for Free
    One of the things which Amazon don’t make very clear is the ability to send emails with attachments to Amazon and have them delivered for free over wifi. This of course totally displaces Amazon’s own conversion service, whispernet and if your like me, don’t really trust Amazon enough to give them access to everything on my kindle (see the whole 1984 issue), then you bought a wifi only kindle.
    Your email address is what ever your kindle email is but with @free.kindle.com instead of @kindle.com. This is very handy for example I have sent things from my Evernote to the Kindle for further reading. Of course you have tell amazon which email address are valid, so you don’t get spam on your kindle.
  5. Send to Kindle from Android
    Nice little tool if you happen to for example get a tweet to a very interesting but lengthy post but can’t be bothered to read it on the small android screen. Usually I bookmark it using delicious, instapaper or readitlater but now I can go direct to the kindle which is handy.

The biggest problem with the kindle for me is simply once you read something in the google reader ebook its hard to find out who exactly wrote it. I keep meaning to modify the recipe include the blog titles. If I happen to be in a place with wifi, I can link to the kindle webbrowser but then I’m stuck again.

Ideally I would be able to send it to readitlater, instapaper or whatever. I though about using the tweet function but as I’ve discovered the tweets well pretty much useless. Don’t get me wrong it does what it says and its great if your reading a book but its no good for self published stuff.

Finally I don’t understand why but I can’t get my kindle to work with my HTC Desire mobile wifi hotspot (myfi). If I did I might be able to sort out some kind of solution but I can’t work out why…

Saying all this… I still love my kindle

Verifone throws its weight behind FUD

If you’ve not seen the video from Verifone about Jack Dorsey’s Square startup, its well worth watching if you can find it. There is a Parody which sums up everything we’re all thinking.

VeriFone’s business model has been side-swiped (pun intended), so they decided to use Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to counter this, and hope to drive their competition out of business. Remember, VeriFone is the one who makes, and gives away, the app to skim Credit Cards — and they’re talking about trust? VeriFone, go fuck yourself with a cactus. I’m sticking with Square, who won’t rip me off.

The weird part of this whole thing is Verifone creating a proof of concept application at sq-skim.com. Which raises the whole question about hacker ethics.

Verifone putting out a proof of concept app before telling square about the flaw… And making it available for anyone to download and mess with. This is bad form, and if they were not in the business of pushing there own solution (which is much bulker and no where near as elegant) they might have told Square about the flaw and pursued them to fix it.

Verifone are certainly running scared…

Kinect the fast growing, all down to the hackers

Sony’s War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

Microsoft announced today that it has sold 10 million Kinect sensors since the Xbox 360 accessory launched in November. In addition, Microsoft reported that over 10 million Kinect games have been sold. The global sales figures, according to a company spokeswoman, were tallied through the end of February.

Since its launch, Kinect–which allows gamers to control on-screen action with only the movement of their bodies rather than a controller–has surpassed expectations. Microsoft initially expected to sell 5 million Kinect units through 2010. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, however, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that the company actually sold 8 million units through the end of the year.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20041213-17.html

Although I’m really happy the Microsoft Kinect has outsold even the Apple iPad, The Nintendo Wiimote, Halo, etc. One thing no one seems to be mentioning is the fact Microsoft made that massive U Turn on people hacking the Kinect.

There is no doubt in my mind that being hacker friendly made all the difference. In actual fact if there was a graph of sales, I bet after the first rush to get a kinect, things were steady before sales went a little crazy once someone hacked the kinect. After Microsoft did the whole U turn, sales must have gone through the roof.

I look forward to seeing the increase sales once the SDK comes out. Microsoft are on a roll, now if only Sony, Apple, etc would see the benefits of working with the hacker community.

The ambassadors of cool

Facebook Like Button

Revision3 has started this scheme to find amabassadors for each of there programmes.

You’re a die hard Revision3 viewer who never misses your favorite show and makes a point of telling your friends to tune in too. We appreciate your loyalty and passion so now we’re giving you the chance to make it official and become part our Internet television revolution. Help us spread the word about show launches, live events, products, apps and other news. Join the Official (and by "official", we mean unpaid) Street Team and become a Revision3 Ambassador!

Its a interesting concept but I do wonder if we could take the whole thing forward in other areas.

Combine the current Like fascination with your lifestream and you got your real Ambassadors. No sign up needed… Hey and to be fair it would be honest and a great way to reward your real fans.

Supermarket dating

Cashback Film

From the Asda dating site via Tim Dobson,

Forget speed dating, supermarket dating is where it’s at.

Research reveals the supermarket has overtaken the pub and the internet as the nation’s number 1 spot to find love.

Supermarkets have always been a great way for singles people to meet.

So it makes sense that if you’re now shopping online for your groceries, why not find love online too?

Heard the idea of supermarket dating a while back but I’m not convinced. Can I also add that if I was going dating in a supermarket, it certainly wouldn’t be Asda, even though there is one just up from me.

Without sounding like a snob, can you even imagine what kind of people you would bump into? When ever I’ve personally gone into Asda, I’ve been frankly a little shocked at the people walking around. It might just be the prices but to be fair I’m looking for a lady who understands its not about getting the cheapest price of food. Quality costs…

Can you imagine going supermarket dating in Aldi or Lidi? I’m sure the cheap prices has a effect on the type of people who will go in there. However there are isolated cases like Manchester central where supermarket dating could actually turn up a whole bunch of young, lovely and beautiful women.

I imagine the inner city Sainsburys local and Tesco Metro’s would be a great place to meet such young and lovely ladies.

Reversed EyeFi card almost

Hak5

I was catching up with Hak5 and Darren was doing a few interviews from the RSA 2011 conference. One of the interviews was with Kingston, who were showing off there new secure USB memory stick, called Blockmaster.

One of the features seems to be around the ability to push content to the memory stick. I’m not sure exactly how it works but I assume when you plug the memory stick into a web connected computer it will refresh its content with a centralised kingston service? I guess it works like dropbox but limited to what can fit on the memory stick.

This of course raise all types of hacker type questions but putting that all a side for now, this goes one more step closer to the idea of a reversed eyefi card.

With a reversed Wifi card you could easily push images to a photoframe which would be simply amazing. Bloo from the forums outlines the idea…

I would like to see an Eye-Fi card which pulls photos from somewhere and puts them in a directory on the SD card.

The primary use case for this would be to wifi-enable digital photo frames; however it could also enable those frames to be information displays for other applications: some program stores images in directory on a PC and the frame downloads from there on a regular basis.

If the Kingston blockmaster was add wifi in the future, I believe the reversed eyefi would be done and a whole ton of people would buy it. The closest we are to the reversed eyefi card is Isabella miniusb stick

The black movie rules

A while Girlwithaonetrackmind, posted a tweet about tron legacy and after following the tweet, I found out about the Bechdel test…

The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes to Watch Out For, in a 1985 strip called The Rule. For a nice video introduction to the subject please check out The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies on feministfrequency.com.

Since I’ve been wondering if there was a way to do a similar thing for Black people in films? We usually get stereotyped and frankly typecasted in certain films, so would it work? I certainly think so…

So here’s my start…

  1. The film has to have at least 2 black people in it, who…
  2. Talk to each other calmly and not threatening, about…
  3. Anything except Drugs, Guns, Hiphop or Cash.

Sounds simple but trust me, now you’ve seen these rules… you will be surprised how many films fail on even point number one.

  • Tron Legacy – Fails on all points
  • The Social Network – Fails on all points
  • Inception – Fails on all points
  • Scott Pilgrim vs the World – Fails on all points
  • Unstoppable – Passes on all points
  • The Matrix series – Passes on all points
  • I am Legend – Passes on all points
  • Enemy of the state – Fails on all points

I can certainly think of a load more… Can you?