Sometimes, when things get sufficiently weird, subtlety no longer works, so i’ll be blunt: The gleaming device I am staring at in the corner of a machine shop in San Rafael, California, is the most audacious machine ever built. It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do—run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

More on the Long Now Foundation:

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide [a] counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City and found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

I’ve been reading bits and bobs about the Foundation, and Eno’s involvement with them in particular, for years, without ever bothering to look more closely at their ideas. Fascinating stuff.

Update: without realising it, I chose a rather apt topic for this, the 1,000th post at Submit Response, almost coinciding with the site’s 4th Birthday on October 10th (which I forgot all about).

From the BBC report:

The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them more durable, and their AC adaptors will also act as carrying straps.

The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts.

The laptop will be more rugged and flexible than ordinary ones They will have four USB ports, and will be able to connect to the net through wi-fi - wireless net technology - and will be able to share data easily.

It will also have a dual-mode display so that it can still be used in varying light conditions outside. It will be a colour display, but users will be able to switch easily to monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight, at four times normal resolution.

From the MIT page:

When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab.

It seems to me that, in designing a low-cost laptop for educational use in developing nations, the folk at MIT have also come up with the perfect laptop, full stop. I wonder if they’ll offer it for sale at a premium — $300, say — to subsidise the work of the One Laptop Per Child scheme, or if the low price depends on huge bulk orders by NGOs and government departments. (And, yes, I do realise it’s a bit iffy getting all gadget-lusty over this project.)

See also: the Simputer, a handheld device with similar aims launched last March, Bridging the digital divide, a Guardian piece on the $100 laptop from last February, A Lesson in Computer Literacy from India’s Poorest Kids, on the Hole In the Wall computer experiment, and, tangentially, On the Joys of Primitive Computing: The AlphaSmart Neo.

Every adult in Scotland is being offered up to £100 to develop and improve their computer skills.

Deputy Minister for Lifelong Learning Allan Wilson said: “ILA Scotland has already opened up opportunities for thousands of people on lower incomes who previously would have faced financial barriers to learning. From today, the practical support of ILA Scotland is extended to all adults in Scotland. We have chosen information and communications technology (ICT) training for the universal offer because learner research showed us that even where people might consider themselves to have basic ICT skills, relatively few have any formal qualifications as proof of their expertise.”

I think I know of someone in need of the £100 grant - the Deputy Minister for Lifelong Learning himself! His website is a frankly terrifying example of mid-90s eye-scorching ‘design’, complete with a deranged Java applet that displays three-dimensional mirror-finished rotating text. Yikes.

Sniping aside, it is unclear how far the pot of money set aside for providing these grants will go, and I suspect unscrupulous types will be launching crappy courses for a fee of precisely £100, or upping existing fees. That said, this should go some way to encourage technophobes in the direction of computers, which is a good thing.

It’s a free service that lets you synchronise your mobile telephone’s address book, contacts, calendars with the Mobical website.

Setup is a cinch - feed the site your ‘phone number, and it texts you your password and the settings required to start synching. Start a synch from the ‘phone, and your contacts, calendars and the like wend their way via GPRS to Mobical. Once there, you can view your calendars, add new contacts, or synchronise data with your ‘phone.

This is pretty bloody handy - it doesn’t matter now if I lose my ‘phone or fry the memory card on the same day my computer explodes and I forget to pay my .Mac subscription, as, even if I have to change ‘phone numbers, all my contacts are safe and sound.

The only downside is Mobical’s sparse documentation - when trying to work out how to start my first synch, the only instruction was, ‘Synchronization is started from your ‘phone’ and it was left to me to guess that I should probably head for the Sync application in the Connectivity folder on my 7610.

Other than that, highly recommended.

(The service also makes me wonder why, if a free website can make the synchronisation process so smooth and painless by using SyncML, Apple and Nokia haven’t yet given iSync proper support for the protocol.)

When I last had a spell in hospital, the thing I noticed most, aside from the agonising pain and sweet, sweet relief provided by morphine on demand, was the flow of patients between departments, which was far from smooth. For example, I needed at least one chest X-Ray a day, and this involved a painful transfer from bed to wheelchair (top tip: don’t get your chest tube caught on the bed rail) followed by a wait for a porter, followed by another, usually lengthy, wait to see the radiographer, with many fellow patients, most in worse nick than I was, followed by another lengthy wait for a porter to return me to the ward. This is not good - keeping patients with serious conditions in a waiting room is dangerous, compared to the safety a bed, surrounded by lovely nursing staff and handy life-saving equipment.

With a full patient-, and, for that matter, staff-location system, combined with software tracking the status of each department, the time a patient spends away from the safety of the ward could be minimised: is there a backlog in the X-ray dept? Then don’t move patient X off the ward, and move patient Y back to their bed. Is the surgeon’s RFID tag still on the golf course? Then stop pumping anaesthetic into the arm of patient Z, summon up the nearest RFID-tagged porter pusing an empty RFID-tagged trolley-bed, and pop her back to the ward.

Spending money on technology like this certainly seems a better idea than, say, pushing it out of the NHS and into the hands of private sector.

(Just after posting the above, I spotted a more frivolous health-related use of RFID, at RFID In Japan, surely the geekiest feed I read. It’s a talking doll that aims to foster a caring mentality in children by occasionally coughing and sneezing, then responding to treatment with RFID-tagged syringes, sweets and medicine.)

I mean, those viruses that spread themselves by hijacking a user’s collection of email addresses - the ones that tend to have .pif attachments and subjects like ‘Re: Your Message’ - seem to either pretend to come from someone you know, or at least has your email address, or from someone they know, by spoofing email headers. Therefore, by tracking the spoofed email addresses of apparent virus senders, you could end up with a useful set of addresses that could be analysed to find out where you fit into a given social or, more likely, business network.

Hmmn, not sure I explained that too well, but by way of an example, I just found a virus-bearing email in my Spam folder which purported to come from someone I’ve met, but didn’t - until now - have an email address for. So, now I can email the person in question, thanks to the virus. And, if some application was tracking these virus spam emails, I could build an address book of contacts and contacts of contacts, effortlessly. Which would be a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that the people at two degrees of separation and above have never given me permission to find out their email address.

Anyway, if this does make any sense, and I haven’t made false assumptions about the way these viruses do their thing, it’d be nice if something useful could be made out of the malicious practices of virus-writers.

My Brompton T6 arrived today.

It’s good to have a gadget that gets you covered in oil when you need to fix it.

A few notes:

• The riding position is a bit too upright, for someone over six foot at least. I’m not sure how to fix this - adjusting the handlebars so that they lean forward makes them foul the front wheel when the bike is folded, so I might need to invest in some small bar-ends and adjust the position of the saddle.
• Steering is a little disconcerting - twitchy thanks to those tiny wee wheels, to a degree that varies depending on your speed. The gear-changer thingies are also a little awkward - I’m used to those push-button ones you get on mountain bikes - which can lead to more wobbles as you try to remember which of the three changers does what. Shouldn’t be a problem after a few proper rides, though.
• The gearing is just absolutely perfect for tootling about town, though there’s room at the top when you’re going quickly. (This makes me wonder about the gearing on factory spec. Bromptons - the previous owner of this one added a double chainset.)
• Folding and unfolding is a piece of piss. I was initially stumped by the catch that holds the front forks to the frame when the bike is folded, but there’s just a little lift-and-shuffle knack to it. All you have to do is twist a couple of screws, and it pretty much falls into place, as long as you remember that it’s the seatpost that holds everything in place (ie. you really don’t want to unfold the rear forks and wheel when the seatpost is down.)
• Finally, you know something’s not right with the world when it’s too bloody hot in Glasgow for a long bike ride!

This is the story behind the first computer hackers, told in their own words, and featuring the voices of such legendary figures as Captain Crunch, Joy Bubbles, Mark Bernay and cofounder of Apple computers Steve Wozniak.

There’s something awfully charming about the fact that the earliest hackers just put their lips together and blew, whistling into telephones to manipulate the network. And, this being Radio 3, there’s an emphasis throughout the documentary on those whistles, as well as the intercept messages and system sounds generated by the telephone network itself. Think Silbero Gomera meets the Numbers Stations uptown!

You can Listen Again, but only until next Saturday.

It’s the Drift Table, a product of the Interaction Design Research Studio at the RCA, and no ordinary coffee table:

The Drift Table is a coffee table with a small viewport showing a slowly changing aerial view of the British landscape. Shifting items on the table changes its apparent height, direction and speed. The current ‘location’ of the table is shown on a small screen on the table’s side, and an electronic compass aligns the photography with its actual surroundings. Almost a terabyte of aerial photography of England and Wales, donated by GetMapping.com, is available for viewing.

Cool. And in the best news I’ve had for ages, I’m getting to borrow the thing for a month. My friend Barry Brown is organising a project centred around tracking people’s responses to living with the table. I’m not sure of the exact details yet, but the plan involves lending the table to people drawn from different disciplines - visual art, music, technology, etc. - and having them submit a response making use of their particular skills.

Should be fun.

Most of them are easily replaced, either via iSync or more laborious means. Some are not. I had some cool numbers in that phone. Like Kool DJ Herc’s cell, and David Mancuso’s home number. I was never going to phone them again, but there was something nice about scrolling past folk I genuinely admire on the way to the person I needed to call.

I would ask everyone I know to text me so I can store their number, but the SIM-frying episode also disabled my ability to use SMS. Which is marginally less annoying than the number-loss thing. Orange are - how you say? - fucking idiots.

Anyway, enough moaning. The new phone rocks several parties. Here are some photos taken with it:

That’s the sign in my local underground station, I spend a lot of time staring blankly at this while waiting for the little train to come.

Now for some technoporn. This is a photo of the Bluetooth thingy transferring the last photo from the phone onto the computer:

Oddly enough, I have McDonalds to thank for all this new technology. I went in the other day (yeah, I know, they pollute the earth, don’t allow their staff to unionise and serve food-shaped poison; I was really thirsty though) and bought a Sprite. Got handed a special straw. Which contained a voucher for £50. Which is exactly what it costs to upgrade a phone and buy a Bluetooth thingy. Good, eh?