Mailinator

Got this email from Dave today

If you are tired up creating mail accounts anonymously only to have an
access to a website, here's a nice solution. Just give a mail address
of the form “something@mailinator.com” and you'll get the access codes
easily at http://www.mailinator.com /images/emoticons/wink.gif That address is only for
receiving and it's up for three days. Everybody else can read mails
sent to that address. Go there and see what kind of mail
bob@mailinator.com has got /images/emoticons/happy.gif

And boy oh boy was I impressed by the simple solution to junk email this is. My only hope is that it wont get flooded with use that they will have to take it down or charge for it. Also had a good read of the authors thoughts on mailinator at his own blog.
Also the FAQ blog cover everything you ntk about the service.

Been reading through his other blogs too and they seem kinda interesting. Might add him to my feeds, if i can find his rss link.

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Cubicgarden.com changes

I was meant to be learning Python while on my holidays but that plan got slightly disrupted with crazy nights out on the town in Manchester and long sleeps to recover. No worries, I guess its what I should be doing on holiday anyway. However in between all the crazy nights, I did manage to start to jiggle things around on a couple of domains I own.

I recently switched over the commenting system within my blog to Disqus. The main reason is because lots of people comment elsewhere on my blog entries and I wanted to find a way to aggregate them and reply to them sensibly. Disqus also has a import and export ability which will be useful for when I do finally move my blog to wordpress.

As many of you might have seen, a while back I made a static summary page about myself on cubicgarden.com. After a while it refreshes and send you to the blog url. Some people have asked me how to avoid the landing page (as such). Simple just type cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/ or even cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog. Most modern browsers will autotype in previous locations you've been to, so you don't need to type the lot. However this is a temporary solution. I originally wanted to install Sweetcron at cubicgarden.com, so people could see what else I get up to elsewhere online. But then I found Storytlr which allows you to semi-host a lifestream under your own url. Friend feed and tublr get a mentioned a lot in this space but to be honest storytlr was ideal. So you can get to that stream by now going to www.ianforrester.org. Enjoy…

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Give it to the children

I went to this thing yesterday with Dave and SarahK. It was better than I expected and hosted at the design council, Convert Garden. The title was – Understanding the future of mobile devices, which instantly rings alarm bells in my head.

It was my first time to this event, so I was a little uneasy about the format of the meeting (as such), not enough questions from the floor for my liking and no real debate. But I was attracted to the event my friend dmarks and by the listings of previous meetings, also on the website.

The key points for me were Joe Odukoya's talk, which was a round up of different technologies and when were expecting to see them become common place. I did question the lack of discovery in his chart but mainly to start a debate, which didnt work. But yeah over all good simple and entertaining presentation. Just the kinda person I would invite to talk in college. Maybe just maybe?
One of the suprising things for me was the fact eastern markets prefer cables, hence why bluetooth, wifi and even infra red were not common place. Scarey! Also he pointed out the America market is run by the corps while the european market is run by consumers, hence why wireless instant messaging will be more popular here than wireless email or push to talk.

Ok till then I was ok with everything, then this guy Dr Simon Roberts does his presentation.
He presented the idea of bottom up content rather than top down – yes because we havent heard that before. But then he went off on how the early adopters are to blame for a lot the issues with mobile technology. I was like what the fcuk! Anyway, it didnt take long for people to challenge him and a guy from IDEO said the most sensible thing of the night. Give the technology to the kids and they will do something different. The point he was putting across was the fact technology when it first comes out is expensive, yes of course the early adopters will be a certain group. Make it cheap and afforable and give it away and you will see a new group of early adopters doing different things.
Early adoption isnt bad, just in its current state only a few can be the adopters.
However Simon did bring up some good points and a subject I've never heard of before. Kinship? – I tapped down, The study of linkage, Relationship of people and content.
And i was wondering how sematics and otologies fits into this?
Also he had some good quotes including this one. We use people to find content, we use conent to find people
and this European have a fear of falling. Eastern Asians have a playful nature.

Remind myself to get there early next time and get a seat in the crowd rather than the edge. Will be going to the next event for sure…

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Designer rooms

Smartmobs found another good link. And brings back the issue of collabration spaces. Well for me it has.
Great stuff from Carnegie Mellon University all the same

But as usual a few things,
The Barn records TWI and allows people to jump to those points like chapters of a meeting. But someone has to hit a button? Why? Wouldnt it be a better idea if the system realised this was a TWI or at least a chapter point rather than someone out of character hitting a button?

Why does a person have to login if there wearing RFID tags? Surely the rfid tags would be part of larger system in the business? Simular to the way most employees have swipe cards.

The all important question is then, what is the meeting stored in? That is crutical to the whole system. Can I extract bits out of it, can I only watch one person or a group of people, can I get a highlight of the TWI's, etc, etc.

I wrote a schema for meeting minutes in my college and its going to be put into use very soon. But it was made for conversion afterwards, so I never interfere with the note taker. I did think about a app which could be built which would guide or assist the note taker though the process of writing structured meeting notes. The notes would then be added to the background information like who attened, the time and date, etc to make structured meeting minutes.
Even thought something like a tablet pc would be the perfect tool for such a thing. But I know how much people love to write on paper – maybe that OCR plugin would be useful david after all.

Anyway, i'm going off topic here.
I do think CMU are doing a good job, but I'm more interesting in keeping it real and would like to see more work done in the area of assisting current methods of recording meetings and collabration sessions.

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Ink Markup Language

So the W3c have a working draft of InkML and looking at the authors there is no sign of Microsoft at all. Interesting enough HP, Corel, Apple and IBM as well as others are there.
I can see why Apple and Corel would be very interested.

But whats this xml spec do?
This document describes the syntax and semantics for the Ink Markup Language for use in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework as proposed by the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity. The Ink Markup Language serves as the data format for representing ink entered with an electronic pen or stylus. The markup allows for the input and processing of handwriting, gestures, sketches, music and other notational languages in Web-based applications. It provides a common format for the exchange of ink data between components such as handwriting and gesture recognizers, signature verifiers, and other ink-aware modules.

Which you must agree with me, is highly amazing and I cant wait to see how this blends with other standards such as rdf, svg, etc. Theres already talk of SMIL.

A photo taken with a digital camera can be annotated with a pen; the digital ink can be coordinated with a spoken commentary. The ink annotation could be used for indexing the photo (for example, one could assign different handwritten glyphs to different categories of pictures).

Once again a dual category post = Tabletpc and XML

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Battle of the blog

The Rss issue spelt out, with some interesting views from some of the most inflentual people on the net, well worth a read.Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs

I wont comment too much, because I havent yet made my mind up. I like RSS2 because its really simple. But prefer RSS 1.0 because its using a standard (rdf) which makes alot of sense. How Pie, Echo and others come into this, I dont know but this is going to go on and on and on. Thank god we can just write xsl which will convert between whatever format is prefered.

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The end of email marketing?

I spied this. It basicly goes on about the use of html emails and how outlook 2003 doesnt display them in html. But the interesting part comes later about other revenue models such as rss?

Its a interesting one, because yes outlook 2003 actually does a pretty good job at showing html emails as text, and its default now. Plus simple rules like if your not in my address book your email goes in my junk box. Which works super well by the way. Doesnt mean email marketing is totally dead yet.
I can see a change back to the text based email marketing where the only rich feature was the mail client replacing http://blah.com with a real link. And honestly, I can wait to go back to that, as I will then beable to read such emails on my ipaq once again.

Also wanted to add, this post is typical example of a post which should exist in more than one category. David's example of multiple category plugin coming in the next blojsom, hoooray!

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Free mindmap software

Got this link from Semantic Blogger demostrator, FreeMind is free mind mapping software, written in java.

Going from the screen shots alone, it looks as good if not better than my pocketmind map software on my ipaq. It is also ment to support export to xml? Which schema it uses i dont know, but I'm sure I can knock out a what ever to topic map xsl, if someone hasnt already done so.

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Nokia Image viewer

The Nokia image viewer su-2

So at last Nokia have realeased there little secret image viewer. The SU-2. I remember seeing it on the Nokia stand a while back but they wouldnt show me it working. Previous blog about it

I found a review of it on infosync just a moment ago.Review: Nokia Image Viewer SU-2

The review praises the SU-2, whoever came up with the idea of the Nokia Image Viewer SU-2 must have had a stroke of genius.

I think the conclusion was fair. For triggerhappy camera phone users, the Nokia Image Viewer offers an excellent solution to the problem of how to share and enjoy pictures in a more relaxed environment than on a PC or even the phone itself. It does only what it needs to do, is small and portable and runs on battery power for when a charger is not available or inconvenient to carry – such as when visiting friends or at the cottage. And although it's not cheap, it's not too expensive either.

Things which stike me.
Why is the pictures only limited to 640×480? why not 352×288 as well? Is 3 meg really enough? Why not have more? It supports the Bluetooth OBEX object push profile which opens it up to palmtops and laptops too. And I have to agree this is a brilliant concept but needs lot more work. I mean if it plugged into a tv why not take advantage and support mpeg4 video too?
Oh well we shall see, maybe in SU-3 or 4?

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At long last 3g comes good

I was at the redbull flugtag
 in London's hyde park today and I believe everyone was having troubles with there mobile phones. Well what do you expect with 70,000 people in a 3 mile radius? Anyhow i never had any such problem with phoning or texting with my 3g phone. Could be just because few people are on 3, or because it operates on a different frequency and/or its all data not voice. What ever it is, its good stuff at long last.

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Blog Experiment

So this guy from the school of infomatics is doing some research on writing styles using blogging. My Blog Experiement, do I get involved? Hummm, I'm not sure… Maybe I will.

Hey theres little to loose from doing it, just a little bit of my time, I have to submit all my blogs made during May 2003 and fill in a questionnaire. All for this guys PhD?
Oh what the heck lets do it.

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