TDC kicks off to a 2nd great day

The Thinking Digital Conference kicked off to a great start on it’s second (and last) day.  The comedy of Tom Scott was a fabulous tonic to the rest of the first session which kicked off with an exploration od “Digital Darwin”, climbed considerable heights with data visualisation through an Internet connected presentation by Professor Hans Rosling, had a little dip with a spotlight on segmenting the US population for the recent Presidential elections, and finished with the Tom.  Oh, and I almost forgot that there was a great digital piano solo that started the session by Rob Colling.

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Extreme Window Cleaning at the Sage

The picture says it all.  (Had a twitter failure, this was supposed to be a twitpic …)

making cleaning windows interesting?

making cleaning windows interesting?

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Excel is too buggy to be used?

Interesting post by Rob Wier about year and date problems in Excel.  I’m using OpenOffice instead.  They’ve hopefully fixed the problem in Excel by now though?

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Losing Liferea

… has probably been the best thing that has happened to me on my desktop.  It started after an update on Intrepid 8.20 which broke Liferea and stopped it from running.  The effect has been to stop me reading endless amounts of crap and (along with my new Tracks interest) is helping me to focus on doing things that are important!  Expect to see a slightly higher output of blog posts amongst other things!

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Miguel de Icaza – more foolishness?

A, sadly, unsurprising interview that I read at derStandard.at, but alerted from the Boycott Novell blog.  de Icaza has been lampooned in the past for his unpopular views on Microsoft, .net, and C#, but this interview really takes the biscuit.  The guy comes across as extremely naive, foolish, and also, because of his position, frankly quite dangerous for Free Software.

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Why my data isn’t in the cloud

This blog post is one of the best reasons why my data isn’t in the cloud:

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Nope, my data is safely locked up in my own mail server, my own web-server, my own backups, etc.  I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about using Gmail for all my mail.  Now I know why.

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Air travel inside the UK

A couple of weeks ago my wife, Helen, had a business trip to Bristol. So, rather than driving or taking the train, the quickest option was to travel by EasyJet from Newcastle to Bristol. She had to take her passport to be able to get on the plane. It set me thinking; why did she need a passport to travel inside the UK?

After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?

PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.

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OpenMoko: Software and Hardware bugs

Let’s be clear: this is not a phone (yet) for the masses, but I think it is definitely heading in that direction. It has GPS, accelerometers, GPRS, Bluetooth, WiFi and an open software stack on which practically anything could be developed. I love this phone for what it will be able to do – but it’s not there yet.

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OpenMoko: Software stacks

My OpenMoko arrived a few days ago, and comes with the stock OM2007.2 software. I upgraded it with the opkg update command and then tried to use it for a few days at the LUGRADIO Live 2008 event. It didn’t go that well, so I started hunting around to look at the other software stacks. There are three different software stacks for the phone. This is described in some detail here.

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LugRadio Live UK 2008

For the first time, and allegedly the last, I wen’t to LugRadio Live UK 2008 in …. Wolverhampton. I’d never been to Wolverhampton before; it was just about everything I had expected.

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