Status-Q

I think my iPod has ideas above its station.

I got a new car today. It’s rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.

When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, “Accessory attached“.

The ASUS EeePC has been a great success. Next week, HP will start shipping a similar machine and, yes, the lowest-cost models are also Linux-based.

About a year ago I wrote about my experiments with getting a Sony PRS500 Reader talking to my Mac.

Quietly, over that time, it’s been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

My friend Aideen brought an interesting device in to show us the other day. It’s called a Rollermouse, and it’s a combination mouse and wrist-rest:

The black bar rolls up and down and slides left and right to move the mouse, and you can click it too if you prefer that to using the buttons.

Now, this looks (and sounds) a little strange, but it worked amazingly well. I saw it and was skeptical, and tried it and was impressed. They’re rather pricey, but if you suffer from RSI, or just want a mouse you can easily use in bed, this might be the thing…

In this day and age, you can get almost everything in a USB-connected form.

I must confess that this was something I had never even contemplated, though.

Thanks to Brian Lemaster for the link

One of the most interesting technology developments of the last couple of weeks has, it seems to me, attracted very little attention. The BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you watch most of the last week of  BBC TV if you’re in the UK, and a subset of it if you’re elsewhere, received early criticism because it didn’t work on anything but Windows. 

Now at least some of it works on other platforms, but the latest one is the most interesting. It now works on the iPod Touch and iPhone. I now carry around in my shirt pocket something which gives me an eminently watchable archive of the last week’s TV, as long as I’m in range of a wifi network.  The iPod Touch is a great video player and now, for free, there’s a huge amount of stuff available in a rather high-quality format.

Only a very few years ago, the idea of having any access to an archive like this would have seemed amazing.  But having it on a beautiful slab a few millimetres thick is almost sci-fi.  I just wish I had the time to watch any of it!  But we do live in most interesting times…

“Hard to go wrong with a little bit of DisplayLink” says Engadget.

…when your wishes are granted?

In September I wrote about how I wanted my 3G phone to become a wifi router so it could provide internet access to surrounding devices like my iTouch.

Today I discovered Joikuspot, which, if you have the right phone, is well on the way to being there, though it’s strictly HTTP-only at present. But it does mean that I can use the wonderful browser on my iPod Touch when I’m not near a wifi connection. And I can do so over 3G. Which in some ways makes it better than an iPhone…

If you know somebody geeky enough to run a Linux desktop, they’d probably like a Tux Droid. It’s like a Nabaztag for hackers…

I’ve been wondering how long it would be before somebody did this. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that Google got there first (at least, it’s the first example I’ve seen in a readily-usable form)…

Google Maps Mobile has a new feature called My Location which, if you have GPS in your phone, will pinpoint you on the map. That’s not the cool bit. The cool bit is that if, like me, you don’t have GPS built-in, it will use the nearby cell towers to estimate your position (typically to within a km or so).

Saves you having to spend a lot of time typing ‘Basingstoke’ when you could be appreciating its wonders…

Here’s a story about miracles. Lots of them. Technological ones.

BBC4 last week aired the first episode of a series called The Genius of Photography. It was excellent and I would have missed it completely, but just as it was beginning, John, knowing that I have an EyeTV setup, sent me a text asking if I could record it.

I was working on my laptop downstairs when my phone chirped the message’s incoming arrival. I glanced at the time and saw that the show was just beginning so, with a couple of keystrokes, made a VNC connection to the Mac Mini on the top floor - all wireless, of course - and saw that the opening credits were just beginning. I clicked record on EyeTV, then went back to work.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to watch it on my new iPod Touch, so later that night I clicked on EyeTV’s convenient ‘export for iPod’ button before going to bed.

This afternoon, I slipped into my most comfortable pair of headphones and curled up on the sofa in front of the fire to watch the first episode, which was titled ‘Fixing the Shadows’, about the earliest days of photography.

It was most engaging, beautifully produced, and the gorgeous iPod screen was a joy to watch.

And as if this wasn’t compelling enough, it began to dawn on me just what I was doing…

Here I was, looking at a horse going around a track in Palo Alto. Except I wasn’t really, I was looking at some of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1878 photos of such a horse (taken, incidentally, to satisfy the curiosity of the horse’s owner - a chap named Stanford. His racecourse is used for something else now!)

Mind you, I was really being shown these photos by somebody pointing a TV camera at them somewhere. Of course, I wasn’t seeing what came out of the TV camera. Oh no. That had been recorded, and edited, and stored, and encoded, and transmitted, and received, and stored, and decoded, and re-encoded, and transmitted and stored again, and synced to my iPod, and decoded again, with the net result that I could see it glowing on a little LCD screen I had just taken out of my shirt pocket.

Of course, that’s an abbreviated summary of what happened, and it’s just the start. Think about how many further processes the images went through so that you could see them on your screen now!

I boggled at all of this for a moment.

Then I tapped the screen and went back to learning just how hard it had been for Daguerre, Fox Talbot et al to capture any kind of images which would persist rather than fading after a few seconds. And how they had changed the world when they eventually did so.

Ancient history? No.

That was about one and a half lifetimes ago.

A very generous friend today gave me an iPod Touch. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful bit of technology I’ve ever owned.

It’s not the most powerful, or full-featured, or exciting, necessarily. But as an example of design it is amazing. In particular, it doesn’t have many of the features of an iPhone, with which I’ve also played. But it’s also significantly thinner, which is hard to convey in photographs: lying on my kitchen table it was about the same thickness as the coaster on which my wine glass sat. You can just about see how they fit a screen, backlight and touch sensor in that space. So where’s the battery?

Almost every aspect of this seems to be very nicely thought out, and I’m very impressed. Who would have thought, a decade ago, that Unix machines could look like this?