Status-Q

Hap snapped this picture of Rose and me in Tonbridge Castle car park last weekend trying to find somewhere to stay for the night (using a combination of an OS map and a wifi connection to my phone).

I was successful in finding places, but not ones with any spare rooms at such short notice. At least, not before my phone's battery ran out. It was tired after a long day of being my SatNav.

Incidentally, Quentin's theory of technological linguistics says that a technology is truly pervasive when you no longer capitalise it. How would you write 'satnav'?

US government now owns all your homes. Russian stock market booms. Let's hope nobody's waking up from 30-year coma.

Charles Arthur (on Twitter)

After having a couple of hard disks do slightly wobbly things recently, I've been thinking about backups again, and have just treated myself to a Drobo - a wonderful, if somewhat pricey gadget. Storage Supplies had the best UK pricing I could find for the Firewire version, if anyone else is considering one...

This device looks like an interesting option for making backups to be taken offsite, though:

We had dinner in Ely tonight and walked around the cathedral afterwards in a wonderful, autumnal mist. I only had my little pocket camera with me, but got a nice photo or two by doing things like setting the timer and using Hap's hat as a tripod (which works better when he isn't wearing it, by the way).

A couple of others here.

You know those coverage maps that mobile service providers create? The ones that tell you that, yes, there's blanket 3G coverage in your favourite holiday destination, but when you get there you discover mean 'slight 3G coverage for people sitting on top of their chimneys facing west under optimal stratospheric conditions'?

Well... it strikes me that, now phones have accessible GPS data, we shouldn't need to rely on these particular bits of marketing propaganda. Somebody could write a phone app which periodically captures details of the signal and the phone's location, and uploads them to a service which creates a map showing the true picture. Imagine you could look at your movements over a month or two and discover which operator would really provide you personally with the best service. If you were running the application, the system could even tell you that automatically! (Which would be a good way to get the data-gathering mechanism widely adopted).

Has anyone done this? I might write it up as a student project proposal...

...for a fuller and happier life.

Carpe Dessertum

which, liberally translated, means "Seize the pudding"

Sorry - it's late - getting silly....

What are the chances of getting your laptop back if it's stolen? Pretty slim, probably. But you can at least improve the odds.

There are various utilities out there which, when installed on your machine, will call home from time to time. If somebody steals your machine and connects it to a network, you can then use information from these connections to help track it down.

I've created various home-brewed versions of these in the past but I guess a perfect utility would be:

• not dependent on any one company
• usable on multiple platforms
• secure
• open source
• free

Ah! That would be Adeona you'd be wantin', so it would. More info here.

It's fascinating to watch people discover new ways of using the iPhone/iTouch. The fun, I'm sure, is only just starting. It's the first widely-deployed device that has a multi-touch interface. It's the first mobile device with really good accelerometers in it. It's the first thing you can drop easily into your pocket that has such a beautiful screen. It has good connectivity and location-based services. It's really easy to install new applications. And, significantly, it's the first to combine all of these with a sophisticated GUI and operating system.

Sometimes, though, it's the simple things that can be the most useful. People have just started realising that you can make your phone into a fileserver on the local network, which means (a) you can transfer stuff to and from your phone without using iTunes if wanted, and (b) you can do it from any machine on the network, not just the one you normally sync with, and (c) you can also just ask your family or colleagues to drop files onto your phone. Do you remember how, in the old days, we would carry around memory sticks that had to be plugged in?

The application I'm playing with, DataCase, appears on your network as an AFP and FTP server, which means you can just open it in the Finder or in Windows, and, as an aside, it makes the contents available over HTTP. Yes, it's a web server. And we've certainly only just started to imagine the full implications of carrying a web server in your pocket...

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

- anon

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.

- Jack Handey