technology

The disposable mobile

It might seem strange for a company that makes cheap pens and disposable razors looking around for a new cutting edge (sorry for the bad pun, couldn’t help it!) product to decide to start producing mobile telephones. But this is what BIC® has decided to do. The phone comes with 60 free minutes, a charged battery, and prepaid SIM card installed.

According to the press release:

Available in citrus orange and lime green, with innovative packaging, the BIC® phone will appeal to consumers who like easy-to-use and pay as you go products. It also meets specific phoning requirements, serving as a back-up phone if needed (e.g. a second line when advertising the sale of an apartment, a car … which leaves the main phone line free).

The phone focuses on basic use, in other words sending and receiving calls and SMS. It’s cheap (Suggested retail price: €49 including tax includes 60 minutes talk time) but not intended to be disposable (battery loader included). The prepaid number is valid for 12 months but then needs to be extended.

So the company does not intend the phone to be disposable but the way in which they talk about it and “look and feel” of the packaging and phone – feels very disposable. So this is all we need now, a cheap addition to the pile of plastics, electronics, toxics, batteries and packaging which will be added to the current environmental mess.

Posted on by mklang

Undone by success

There is a growing trend in Facebook bashing (a type of conservatism claiming that the original versions of Facebook were best), Facebook criticism (Facebook would be better if only one detail or another were changed), Facebook denial (Facebook is never going to be useful/important/worthwhile), Facebook disbelivers (what is Facebook good for) and anti-Facebook purists (Never used, never will use FB).

Whether you are a FB believer or happy user or belong to a basher group it is difficult to ignore the fact that FB is being used to an amazing degree.

Some bashers, for example, Cory Doctorow: “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook“. (Nov 2007) explain that FB will collapse because eventually you will have to accept people you dislike to be your FB friends. Cory writes:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. ”

So I agree with these types of criticism eventually someone, or several someones, will demand to be added. We are back in the seventh grade playground and you are (once again?) no longer the center of your own world – which was the promise of a FB centric world.

My problem, and subsequently my form of FB bashing, is that it is not that the creepy people that concern me but rather all the nice, harmless, friendly, acquaintances that want to be my friends. At present I have just under 200 friends on FB, but the strange thing is that most of my “offline” friends don’t have FB accounts. In reality, and this may be a sad admission, I don’t have almost 200 friends. Many of the people who have befriended my on FB are acquintances (which is ok), online contacts (which is ok) but many are people whom I do not know – which is almost creepy.

Therefore to me the reason FB will fail is that it will never actually do anything. It’s goal, and measure of success is the amount of friends – but achieving this goal is not difficult if you do not care who you add as friends.

But I guess this argument rests on the foundation that Facebook has a point. If it is pointless then I don’t know.

Posted on by mklang

British Library Digitalisation Strategy

The British Library has published its Digitisation Strategy 2008-2011 and in the document it focuses on a continued commitment to produce a critical mass of digitised content. They write in the

We aim to help researchers advance knowledge by becoming a leading player in digitisation. We will produce a critical mass of digitised content, reflecting the breadth and depth of our collection. We will provide a compelling user experience that facilitates innovative methods of research and meets 21st century requirements for interacting with content.

Over the next 3 years we will build on our existing digitisation programme. Current projects include the digitisation of:

  • 20 million pages of 19th century literature [approximately 80,000 books];
  • 1 million pages of historic newspapers in addition to the 3m already digitised;
  • 4,000 hours of Archival Sound Recordings in addition to the 4,000 hours already digitised;
  • 100,000 pages of Greek manuscripts.

The British Library has been very active in digitalisation and in it’s attempts to make sure that the public knows the value and importance of this work. Even though I tend to have a sceptical approach to feelgood documents such as these the British Library have proven themselves to be great open access activists.

Posted on by mklang

My camera history

The first camera I remember was my grandfather’s Ikoflex 1A 854/16

This is a very cool camera which I never really mastered. I now have this as a memory of my grandfather but after reading Ivor Matanle’s article on the history and use of the Ikoflex TLRs Classics to Use (Amateur Photographer, 29 October 2005) I have been inspired to test the camera.

My first camera was nothing this complex. I was eventually given a Kodak Instamatic with a cubeflash. I used this to take my first pictures.

There was an especially long gap between the Instamatic and my next camera. With my first paycheck I bought a Nikon F-301, a really cool toy which I used to experiment with. I tried out different lenses and external flashes. The only drawback was that I did not develop my own photos so experiments were slow and expensive. So I really did not make much progress. Eventually I dropped photography.

My hobby came back when I bought a Canon EOS 30 which was a really cool camera but still had the main drawback in that I needed to develop the photographs before I could analyze the mistakes I had made. Actually I should have gone straight to a digital version but due to some misguided snobbery I chose not to go digital.

Finally, I made the move to digital and got a Canon EOS 400D. Now I am happily taking photos, attempting to understand the results and develop what I see and learn. In addition to this, thanks to my Flickr account I am able to easily upload and share my photographs.

So by going digital I was able to develop my hobby to the extent that it actually can be called a hobby.

Posted on by mklang

Worlds Tallest Skyscraper

For a technology oriented blog I rarely talk about buildings. But it is hard to ignore the Burj Dubai tower. This is the worlds tallest skyscraper and it is nearing completion This is a monster of a building and it is both awe inspiring and absolutely terrifying!

It is difficult to get the scale of the production but take a look at David Hobcote’s images over at Gizmondo…

(More images and info here)

Some stats from wikipedia

The tower is composed of three elements arranged around a central core. As the tower rises from the flat desert base, setbacks occur at each element in an upward spiralling pattern, decreasing the cross section of the tower as it reaches toward the sky. At the top, the central core emerges and is sculpted to form a finishing spire. A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes views of the Persian Gulf. Viewed from above or from the base, the form also evokes the onion domes of Islamic architecture. During the design process, engineers rotated the building 120 degrees from its original layout to reduce stress from prevailing winds. The tower, at its tallest point, sways a total of 1.2 m (3.9 ft).

The exterior cladding of Burj Dubai will consist of 142,000 m2 (1,528,000 sq ft) of reflective glazing, and aluminium and textured stainless steel spandrel panels with vertical tubular fins. The cladding system is designed to withstand Dubai’s extreme summer temperatures.

The interior will be decorated by Giorgio Armani. An Armani Hotel, the first of four by Armani, will occupy the lower 37 floors. Floors 45 through 108 will have 700 private apartments on 64 floors (which, according to the developer, sold out within eight hours of going on sale). An outdoor zero-entry swimming pool will be located on the 78th floor of the tower. Corporate offices and suites will fill most of the remaining floors, except for a 123rd floor lobby and 124th floor (about 440 m (1,444 ft)) indoor/outdoor observation deck. The spire—itself over 200 m (700 ft) tall—will hold communications equipment.

Check out this comparison chart from Wikipedia

Tall buildings are fascinating but structures of this size are more than simply tall. This tower becomes it’s own ecosystem in the middle of a desert. The official website informs readers that at peak cooling times, the tower will approximately require per hour the equivalent of 10, 000 tons of melting ice per day.

Say no more…

Posted on by mklang

BBC to adopt open standards

The director of BBC Future Media and Technology Erik Huggers has announced that they will move away from proprietary software into open standards.

The advantage for the audience will be a noticeable improvement in audio and video quality. Furthermore, it should become easier for the media to simply work across a broader range of devices. While it’s not a magic bullet, it certainly is a significant step in the right direction. The first service to make content available using these open standards based codecs will be iPlayer. Anthony Rose will have more details of introducing H.264 to the iPlayer later today. It is our intention for other AV services across bbc.co.uk to follow quickly.

Posted on by mklang

My personal balkanization

In 1995 the term daily me began to be bandied about by some writers and thinkers, Nicholas Negroponte for example discussed the concept in his book Being Digital. The term’s democratic and social implications was developed in Cass Sunstein‘s book Republic.com (2001). In this book (and followed up with Republic 2.0 in 2007) he argued that …the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs… (Wikipedia). This process is sometimes known as cyberbalkanization but I feel the latter is a badly chosen term since it implies the need for cyber, which is not necessary.

No matter what term you prefer it is obvious that the daily-me phenomenon can be easily achieved with digital technology. Yesterday I took another step in my personal balkanization.

Already in my work the main part of my reading and writing is based on mainly non-Swedish sources and publications. The blogs I track track across the Internet are mainly non-local, defined by subject rather than geography. For lesuire I mainly read foreign magazines and books. I rarely read newspapers (not even online), seldom watch television (but plenty of DVDs) and since I travel around Sweden a great deal I tend to miss local events.

Together this leads to a negative (or positive – depends on your perspective) spiral and increased disinterest in local affairs.

Yesterday I took another step in my own personal balkanization by buying an Argon Internet radio. I was actually very skeptical to this but after I quick and easy install I now can listen to live radio from anywhere in the world (within the confines of language). My presets include English, American, Spanish, Maltese and Australian stations.

The little radio is perfect in my kitchen and connects easily to my wifi. In addition to this it actually does work as a “normal, old-fashioned” radio, which was a large factor in convincing me to chose this model but I have not felt the need to use it.

The argon even connects nicely to the music on my computer and to my personal selection of radio stations I chose on the radio website. My only gripe so far is that I have not managed to get the podcasts working but I guess I will have to read the manual.

So now it is even easier for me to ignore what is going on around me and focus on the stuff I like. This is becoming more than a daily me or a balkanization but it is definitaly a step in the fragmentization of a society. But at this stage I would like to quote Margaret Thatcher (I never thought that would happen) “Society does not exist“. Thatcher used this provocative statement to promote extreme individualism. But I would like to use this to remind us that “society” is a social construct which has no meaning outside that which we consciously and unconsciously agree to fill it with. But the short sharp Thatcherite version sounds better.

Posted on by mklang

Late night project

Last night I decided to install Ubuntu (HardyHeron) on an old mac as a small side project naturally any such experiment is only carried out under the delusion that “this will be easy”. The actual installation went quite well with only a few minor hitches – all solveable.

The rest of the night, and a long night it became, was spent adjusting, fixing, adapting and tweaking the new system. The main annoyances that still remain are the reactrion times on the keyboard and that the short commands are not installed in the way that I like them yet. Not to mention all the programs (and their settings) that I rely on still need to be installed.

But so far it’s looking good. I wonder if this may be the switch? My last times with GNU-Linux were just explorations.

Posted on by mklang

The Orwell Diaries

Starting next week (9th August) George Orwell’s diaries will be published online at The Orwell Prize.

Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

Putting the diaries online is a very cool way of using the web and showing how important cultural artefacts can be made available to anyone and everyone without depriving someone of access. This has been done several times before but I must say that I am looking forward to reading Orwell’s private diary. This is technology put to good use.

George Orwell square in Barcelona is under camera surveillance! Is this an instance of beauracratic humor? Photo by Wrote (CC by-nc)

Posted on by mklang