Archives for Technology
On the OLPC Movement... (February 20, 2008) A couple of months ago I was asked by Icon Magazine to write a review of the OLPC XO laptop for the developing world. You can read the finished article in their January issue or on their site (OLPC review...
Social whitelisting with OpenID... (January 24, 2007) My ex-colleague Simon Willison has recently been doing some profoundly good work out in the wilds of the Internet promoting and explaining OpenID. In fact, the best articulation I've seen anywhere on the Internet of the OpenID concept is his...
On Wattson and Electrisave... (November 12, 2006) Thanks to a fascinating conversation on haddock the other day, I'm now completely obsessed with a brand new class of personal lifestyle gizmos - a class that is very much in sync with the emergent energy puritanism that I find...
The unusual flakiness of the MacBook Pro... (October 22, 2006) I have had four MacBook Pros and even more power supplies for MacBook Pros since the top-of-the-range Apple laptops launched in March. I love the machines, but hot damn has my experience of them been unusual. Let's start with the...
An Inconvenient Truth... (September 16, 2006) My politics are pretty well known to people who read this site, I suspect - I'm basically economically centrist, believing in the the necessary efficiencies of a free market curbed from excesses and derailment by regulation at the extremes. I...
Maps, Invaders, Robots & Throwies... (FOO 06) (September 8, 2006) So I thought I'd end my series of posts on FOO (which some of you may have determined was originally one grotesquely long post of approaching 5,000 words, roughly chunked to last as long as possible sometime last weekend) by...
Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don't have so much to directly say about them. I've got one more post to come though, so...
Brain stimulation for the masses... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he'd happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation - basically how to use focused magnetic...
On a global AIBO consciousness... (FOO '06) (September 5, 2006) My third FOO post in a row, and I'm only just getting onto the talks themselves. This time I learned from my experience last year and made sure that I tried to steer myself towards talks that were outside my...
Why I'm looking forward to Leopard... (August 13, 2006) I've been letting last week's WWDC settle in my brain and have been thinking through the various features both announced and alleged. I'm not particularly overwhelmed by the whole thing, but there's enough evolutionary change to keep me comfortable as...
Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield? (July 19, 2006) Today it was announced that the BBC's New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned - for example, Simon Nelson who was the...
On playing with my Holux GPS unit... (July 8, 2006) I have a new toy. It wasn't enormously cheap and it basically looks like a little box with three lights on it that pulse in interesting ways, but it is extremely exciting and cool. It is a Holux GPSlém 236...
The RCA Summer Show 2006... (June 26, 2006) Once a year the RCA Summer Show opens its doors - showing over six weeks off all the incredible creative work that its students have created across all their disciplines. The show comes in four main parts, three of which...
What has been killing my server? (May 23, 2006) Today I was at work when Barbelith went down. MySQL errors everywhere, the community in uproar, IMs and e-mails. And it wasn't like I didn't have enough to do. So I explore in more depth. First step, see what's actually...
How American are Startups? (May 17, 2006) The second day of XTech and the first day of the conference proper (yesterday being tutorials) starts with a keynote from Paul Graham (see his Wikipedia entry) talking about whether or not the success of Silicon Valley might be replicated...
My 'Future of Web Apps' slides... (February 13, 2006) Right then. My slides. I've been trying to work out the best way to put these up in public and it's been more confusing than I thought it would be. Basically, the slides are so Keynote-dependent and full of transitions...
On Metafilter's folksonomic subdomains... (January 14, 2006) I'm going to move on quite quickly back onto something way way less embarrassing and mainstream back into the boring semi-beating heart of one of my pet work-related fetishes, the folksonomy. In particular I thought I'd talk about a new...
Eagerly awaiting an Apple Media Hub... (January 7, 2006) While I'm on a roll and getting all my wanted-to-post-but-didn't-have-time stuff out in public, I thought I'd just put out my stall again with regards to what I think an Apple Media Hub should be like. With MacWorld only three...
In which Google launches blog search... (September 14, 2005) Okay, so the big weblog news of the day is that Google have launched their Blog Search. First impressions are that it doesn't feel right, that quite a lot of the spririt of the weblogs and the faces of the...
Quick thoughts about the Apple 'Mighty Mouse'... (August 11, 2005) I managed to sneak Mr Hammond over to the Apple Store after work today to have a fiddle with the new Apple Mighty Mouse. I have to confess I was disappointed with it. Of course it looks amazing, a beautiful...
Supernova '05: Byron Reeves on MMORPGs... (July 3, 2005) It's difficult to articulate how busy I've been since Supernova - what with servers falling over and jet-lag and work and general calamities. All of which probably explains why I'm still writing up Supernova notes almost two weeks after...
Cal Henderson on "How We Built Flickr"... (June 20, 2005) So Day Three of my weirdest ever holiday finds me at a one-day workshop called Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr. Right up front I should probably say that it's presented by my mate...
On leaving and rejoining services online... (June 20, 2005) Ok, so I'm holed up at Lance Arthur's pad for a couple of hours and I'm taking the opportunity to plough through some of the stuff that I can't get written in London. First up, a post about FeedBurner and...
Weinberger on the BBC / Are presentations redundant? (May 7, 2005) So this is nice - via my boss I'm directed to a brief piece by David Weinberger on some of the work going on around the BBC at the moment and featuring some of the stuff we've been doing in...
On Tiger and Mail and Automator and Dashboard... (May 1, 2005) A new operating system and a Bank Holiday on the same weekend. It's like fate. And it means that all around the country there are geeks fiddling and installing and reinstalling and losing serial numbers and going "oooh" pretty much...
The Age of Point-at-Things... (April 26, 2005) For much of last year I worked on a project in the BBC called Programme Information Pages. Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph and I recently gave a talk on the subject at ETech. The project was/is about creating coherent data structures...
Social Software for Set-Top boxes... (March 23, 2005) You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb). A buddy-list for television: Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with...
Preamble towards a post on Social Software for Set-top boxes (March 23, 2005) The following post contains some of my thoughts about Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. But before I do so, I thought maybe I should write really briefly about some of the context. I've been thinking around this stuff for a...
On trying to get an image right... (February 19, 2005) A long time ago during all the Warchalking palaver, I got interested in the idea of trying to find imagery that might convey they concept of an available wifi network to people. Warchalking obviously had its utility - it was...
On the iPod and shortsightedness on the Microsoft estate... (February 2, 2005) I have enormous performance anxiety at the moment. The world's turned to look this way for a few scant moments and everyone else is rising to the challenge and I'm just hiding. And it looks like I'm not the only...
The iPod Shuffle and some entertaining cultural differences... (January 11, 2005) Just a brief note: the iPodShuffle was one of the products released today by Steve Jobs and the Apple team. It was long-rumoured and kind of makes sense in a do people really want something that can only take that...
A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Illustrations) (January 11, 2005) This part is mostly about: Illustrations of what an Apple Media Hub might look like and how it might function. If you have not done so already, you should first go and read Part One and Part Two which do...
A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Part Two) (January 11, 2005) This part is mostly about: How to get a device into people's homes that opens up these markets and these possibilities and lets people do more stuff with their stuff. If you have not done so already, you should first...
A really rough proposal for an Apple Media Hub (Part One) (January 11, 2005) This part is mostly about: The drive towards digital media in the home, and changes in the media creation and distribution ecology: So I'm going to write this quickly because it's been stuck in my head for months, and even...
The New Musical Functionality: Portability and access (July 26, 2004) The other day I started this run of posts on the New Musical Functionality by arguing that the behaviour of an until-recently small group of digital music fans seemed to be now spreading into the mainstream. I also listed four...
The New Musical Functionality... (July 17, 2004) Over the last few months webloggia has been full of discussions about the new musical functionality that's starting to emerge around the web. I wasn't immune from this trend - I wrote about MediaUnbound (On MediaUnbound and Recommendations Engines) and...
A proposal for Wifi-hubs to be built into landlines... (July 11, 2004) Brief summary for people with too little time: slap an ADSL modem and wifi hub into every landline phone and allow them to network automatically with each other and you suddenly have a simple way to bathe an entire home...
First impressions of Tiger... (June 28, 2004) A few first impressions of Apple's upcoming Operating System: Tiger: Spotlight - basically an Apple native verstion of Launchbar with a few self-evidently nice features (searching Mail). After using Launchbar for a while I can state without question that it...
Notes from NotCon: Hardware (June 8, 2004) Well, anyway, since I'm up I may as well finish off my coverage of Sunday's NotCon. After the Geolocation panel (my notes), I joined the Hardware panel. Over the entire day I self-consciously avoided all the political panels because they...
Notes from NotCon: Geocoding (June 6, 2004) So the first panel of the day is over and we're not waiting in the over-crowded downstairs for the Matt Jones- hosted "Hardware" panel to get going. My initial reactions to the Geocoding panel were extraordinarily positive - the first...
Notes from NotCon: Introduction (June 6, 2004) So it's Sunday morning at 11.30am and I'm going to start taking notes of the goings-on at NotCon. Probably the best way to describe the feel of the place so far is that it's somewhere between the sensation of being...
What is the future of typing in public? (March 1, 2004) ETCon is a conference like no other. This is not because of the quality of the speakers but because of the type of audience it gets and the culture that has self-generated around it. One of the most notable features...
Live from ETech: iRobot... (February 10, 2004) For the most part the ETCon keynotes are pretty much high-concept fluff. They're fundamentally high-profile, high-glamour bits of hardcore tech that (often) are completely outside the practical experience of the so-called Alpha geeks that attend these events. But they have...
On the benefits of competing audio formats... (January 27, 2004) There's a fascinating clump of posts going around the place at the moment about the various DRM-based digital audio solutions that you can buy at the moment. The one that kicked stuff off initially was a post on The Sobleizer...
Using Wikis for content management... (January 9, 2004) So here's a thought partly inspired by an e-mail from a work colleague and partly by Haughey.com. Creating and editing wiki pages is extremely simple and elegant once you get past the first 30 minute learning curve. And essentially you...
Letters, Data and Metadata... (January 7, 2004) Considering how annoying I find The Social Life of Information (again - more on that later), it's surprising how often I feel that I should be posting some of the nuggets contained within it for a larger audience. Anyway, there's...
Enhanced reality: Noise in Space? (September 28, 2003) So it occurred to me (while watching some dumb sci-fi TV series set in space) that maybe spaceships that make noise in a vacuum isn't such a dumb idea after all. I mean, obviously they wouldn't (couldn't) make any noise,...
Quick thoughts about global undo... (August 1, 2003) If only I had time to give this the attention it deserves - but alas, I must soon get drunk. Neat Chris from anti-mega has brought into public attention that massive and aggravating UI problem that is what happens when...
Cameras communicating with Cameras... (June 16, 2003) So here's a dumb idea about digital cameras. Let's imagine a world in which everyone has a camera - and they carry them with them all the time. Say - for example - that they're built into mobile phones. Right....
Highly unoriginal thoughts about mobile devices... (May 21, 2003) Notes from a conversation with Dan Hill pertaining (in particular) to address books on mobile phones. I make no claim to their originality or their novelty. Almost certainly they're on page six of a really well known influential book that...
Don't write off Conversations as a geek toy... (April 14, 2003) So there's an article in the Guardian today about UpMyStreet. The article is called Street Plight and aims to understand why the company is in administration. Now generally, it's a pretty flattering article - and a fairly accurate one -...
Register Refutations... (April 12, 2003) A week or so ago I wrote a little post called Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere. It was about an article at The Register in which Andrew Orlowski managed to mix a few half-facts with some general paranoia to assemble the spectre...
Hydra - a brief experiential review... (April 8, 2003) So Mr Webb and I have been playing with Hydra for a couple of days, trying to find uses for it and trying to get other people engaged in its use (with the hope that in the process we'll come...
NetNewsWire Strawpoll... (March 27, 2003) Inspired by a terrifying conversation with Dan Hon in which he revealed that he had 135 subscriptions strapped to his groaning copy of NetNewsWire, I decided to do a bit of a straw-poll. Not enough people were available online for...
The first sign of the googlopalypse? (March 9, 2003) It's the first sign of the apocalypse - Google is throwing up errors all over the shop. I've checked with a few other people to see if it's happening with them too. My favourite response was from Matt Haughey who...
Value Judgements on two kinds of networks... (March 8, 2003) I don't have the expertise or the discipline to dive into this as fully as I would like, so I'm just going to sketch out a few thoughts which maybe someone else would like to pick up and run with....
How to contact Kim Howells and tell him what a plonker he's been... (January 21, 2003) Thanks to Matthew Davis, George Wright and Tim Duckett for writing in with various e-mail addresses for Dr Kim Howells, the Minister for Culture who so resolutely confused music piracy online with drug-dealing and prostitution and in the process declared...
Robbie Williams supports prostitution and organised crime... (January 20, 2003) So Robbie Williams supports prostitution and organised crime? Well - according to the culture minister Kim Howells, he does... And why? Because he supports 'internet piracy'. After all, as we all know, music distribution online is all about making lots...
Observations and Speculations on Music (January 19, 2003) Being a long list of observations about the ways in which people are starting to use music and its relationship to computing practice generally, with some thoughts about how the music industry should be working in the longish-term...
On the Guardian and UpMyStreet Conversations... (January 9, 2003) There's at least one clear analogue for the process of (1) getting exciting by a work project, (2) getting completely involved in said work project, (3) going at it like a mad badger and (4) collapsing exhausted afterwards. And the...
Live Blogging of MacWorld... (January 7, 2003) And here's where I will be live-blogging Macworld as I watch it over Quicktime in real-time. There's apparently a video stream of the keynote stream going into the Vatican. 68% of people going to Apple's Switch Pages are using Windows....
On the ethics and responsibilities of running a web-site... (December 29, 2002) The ethical and legal problems that occasionally Google is confronted with are essentially the same as any site run by any individual or business: Do I have an obligation to the people who use my site? How do I reconcile...
Towards a way of measuring a stale paradigm... (ps. needs an edit which I'll come to later) (December 7, 2002) Let's start by positing the idea that Thomas Kuhn is right when he talks of paradigm shift - that ideas don't simply change slowly over time, but instead occasionally move with seismic speed, size and repercussions. That the progression from...
Apple and the Pirate Everyman (November 17, 2002) "Don't Steal Music" says the sticker on every new iPod. But is Apple being disingenuous? Because no other platform in recent history has done as much to help information (and entertainment media) to be easy to create, copy or disseminate...
How to fill a 5Gb iPod... (October 27, 2002) So here's what the thing would be if I were really bored and absurdly anal on a Sunday early-evening... As an iPod early-adopter, I may be the last person left in the Western hemisphere with a mere 5Gb to fill....
Domain names & the "Google Effect" (January 16, 2002) Dan Gilmour has recently argued that the "Google effect" - ie. the fact that Google and other search engines are now so good that they can locate extremely accurately what someone is searching for - will reduce the demand for...
The Complete Human Genome on CD... (September 28, 2000) I went to a meeting today with some people who work at Prospect magazine, which markets itself as "the magazine for the intellectually curious general reader". I wasn't familiar with the publication before the meeting. I pick up a copy...
Thoughts on Encryption and Privacy... (July 21, 2000) FACT ONE: There is increasing invasion of privacy by governments. There is no denying that the surveillance of the public is at an all time high in Europe and America at the moment. In London we find ourselves routinely...
Tom's thoughts on cryptography... (July 21, 2000) Tom's thoughts on cryptography FACT ONE: There is increasing invasion of privacy by governments There is no denying that the surveillance of the public is at an all time high in Europe and America at the moment. In London we...
On PGP and Tom's file at the FBI... (July 17, 2000) When I survey the epic terrain of my web presence from a dispassionate stance what I see worries me. Not because I am particularly self-indulgent (which I can be, admittedly), not because I am particularly dull (although, god knows, I...
Internet Time (Part Two) (January 4, 2000) I am back at work, and thrilling it is too... I am really taken with the way that metajohn has incorporated the date information into his blog. I may be forced to steal valuable sexy ideas from him. INTERNET TIME...
Internet Time (Part One) (January 3, 2000) Mr Blair, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, has given his approval to the creation of GeT Greenwich Electronic Time. The site for this is incredibly boring, and I can't help feeling rather misses the point. I mean of...
