Just came across this trailer for a maze game (via kottke.org). Check it out. It’s pretty amazing!

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Yesterday I finally got around to purchasing a FON router. The idea behind FON is that you share part of your broadband connection with other people, who pay to access it, and you get a share of the revenue – although not yet in the UK it seems! The other benefit is that you get roaming access to the FON network – other WiFi hotspots – anywhere in the world. 

The version of the router I bought is a developers edition that allows you to develop applications for it. From the product description:

“The Fonera 2.0 is intended to be a Liberator of your desktop computers by being able to both execute applications that you usually need to run in background on your computers and to help you share USB devices between the notebooks connected to your Fonera 2.0, like USB Disks, USB Scanners, USB Printers or Webcams.”

This is great for, say, downloading podcasts, radio shows and other large media. For example, I regularly listen to a couple of different podcasts. I subscribe to most of them through iTunes which dutifully checks every now and again to see if there are any new episodes. If there are any new episodes, it starts to download them … and I sit there and wait for them to come down the pipe. With the Fonera I could push that functionality off to it and as it is always connected to the Internet, when I turn on my laptop, or my iPod Touch, my “media” is already there on my local network. No more waiting for downloads! Well, at least that’s the idea I intend to play around with when it arrives. It runs OpenWrt which is a Linux distribution for embedded devices; I guess I’ll have to brush up on my Linux skills, e.g. what exactly is firmware?

It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Time Capsule – I bought one of those a few weeks ago. The Fonera doesn’t have a built-in hard disk like the Time Capsule does but it has a USB port so it’s possible to connect something like an external drive or a USB fob to it; from what I’ve seen on the wiki it’s possible to mount an external drive over Samba (I think). Both don’t have a built-in modem. A big difference is that the Fonera is an open system as opposed to Apple’s Time Capsule, which, as one comes to expect from Apple, is closed. 

I’m looking forward to playing around it. Hmm! Maybe I should get out more.

I woke up this morning at 8.50am. A short while after – the time it took to change my clock – it was 7.50am. Some times it would be nice to go back several days or years!

Nothing to see here. I have just installed Disqus and am just testing it. Basically, I get a lot of comment spam. Most of it is handled by the current plugin that I installed but I have decided to try using an external commenting system to see if I can reduce the amount of bogus traffic that gets sent my way. Feel free to try leaving a comment on this post.

Update: Well that was easy to set-up! Seems OK. Doesn’t look great but it appears to work how I thought it would.

Seems that Apple are finally going to announce new versions of their laptops this Tuesday, 14th. Although they are announcing them on Tuesday I have no idea when they will be available in stores. Any ideas?

I’ve been holding off buying a new laptop because it seems that every time I buy a “new” laptop, the next generation gets released the very next day (this did actually happen when I bought the laptop I am using now!).

What is particularly interesting is that the casings for the new laptops are rumored to be carved out from a single block of aluminum using 3D lasers and water-jet cutting. Not being much of a manufacturing expert I’m not sure what benefits that will bring but it sounds funky.

It’s over! Build something useful.

Today has been a lazy day. I have had a heavy cold since Sunday so haven’t really been on form the last couple of days. Today was no exception. I woke up just before 9am, which is late for me, had breakfast then spent most of the morning in a coffee shop reading my (freshly signed) book.

In the afternoon I got a couple of quotes from the usual high street banks about opening a merchant account for taking credit card payments online. The transaction costs aren’t too bad, it’s all the “extras” that they throw in. For example, here’s a quote I got from one bank based on the volume of transactions that I gave them:

• 150 GBP joining fee
• 25 GBP per month
• 2.43% per transaction cost with a credit card
• 23p per transaction with a debit card
• Additional charge of 2% of total turnover per month

Ouch! I am still waiting for a quote from WorldPay but based on the prices on their website, they appear to be even more expensive. Needless to say after doing a bit more poking around it looks like PayPal has the best rates.

I also listened to this episode of The Gillmor Gang where they interviewed some of the Chrome guys; it’s worth listening too.

Oh, and I also managed to free up 3GB of space on my laptop – this was important as I only had just over 2GB available at the time and I’m not buying a new laptop until Apple release the new versions of their laptops, which, if you believe the rumors, should happen in the next couple of weeks. 

I even went to Whole Foods to buy dinner as I couldn’t be bothered to cook anything! I have a cold so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Update: I’m listening to the Arsenal game on Radio 5 and a player has just come for Porto called Hulk! Probably best not to make him angry.

I was reading Richard Branson’s new book this afternoon in a coffee shop – as one does at 3.30pm on a Monday – when I discovered that he was going to be signing copies of his book at Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus from 5.30pm. I hopped on a bus, arrived there just before 5pm and discovered there was already a rather long queue. I took a ticket and got in line; I didn’t tell the staff at Waterstones that I had actually purchased my copy of his book from Amazon! Anyway, after waiting for about an hour I finally got to meet the man himself. Why I always look half asleep in photographs is beyond me!

 
Turns out my friend John (who is about 6ft 5in) was also in the queue. After taking a photograph of John with Richard Branson, Sir Richard decided that he would even things up a bit by climbing onto the table next to John.  

Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to point and click correctly so I didn’t get the table in the shot but, hopefully, it gives you a good enough idea.

Or perhaps a more pertinent question is: where have I been? Well last night I attended a talk at the BCS offices in Covent Garden about mobile location-based services. Overall the talks were quite interesting; ironically the speaker that I thought would be the least interesting turned out to be the most interesting!

There were lots of examples of mobile location services shown throughout the evening – I’m not going to list them as there were too many. One particularly interesting service one was Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle. It was described as a location brokerage service that allows you to update and share your location with services and applications that you have chosen and authorized. An example that was demoed during one of the talks was updating your location from Fire Eagle that was then automatically picked up by blogloc, a service that allows your readers to see where you are; apparently Dopplr also has support for Fire Eagle. I haven’t looked at it yet but OpenStreetMap got a lot of mentions by all of the speakers given that, apparently, the main aggregators of map data, TeleAtlas and NavTeq, have data black holes, e.g. there are some areas on the planet that they just don’t have data for.

What else? Well it turns out that navigation is still the biggest use of mobile location services followed by search. According to a Gartner report the mobile user location space will be worth a cool $8 billion by the year 2011. In terms of actually locating a user the main ways are: cell ID, GPS and – more recently – WiFi network finger printing. Oh, and GPS doesn’t work inside buildings 🙂

Finally, there was an amusing anecdote about one of the founders of Skyhook Wireless who received a message on his mobile saying that it was Steve Jobs and could he call him back; they thought it was a crank call. Well it turns out it really was Steve Jobs – Skyhook provides the “Locate Me” (?) functionality on the iPhone.

It’s been just over a week since I got back from Spain and during that time I have done absolutely nothing, which I have quite enjoyed actually. Anyway, enough relaxing; time to be productive again. Well, that’s the theory anyway! We’ll see just how ‘productive’ I am over the next couple of days. 

First up today I’m going to take a look at the CMIS specification and have a bit of a play with it in Alfresco. The other thing I want to do is make a start on finishing off the Erlang book I bought months ago!!

This evening I am off to a talk being held by the BCS about mobile location-based services. Some of the speakers look interesting so hopefully it will be an interesting talk. We’ll see! If I discover anything worthwhile I’ll mention it on this blog.