You don’t have to like sci-fi to enjoy these words and images, just interesting things. Things like neolithic cities without streets, the Chilean socialist internet, London’s 19th Century hydraulic power network, privacy issues for genitally-modified computer game avatars and cities with legs for walking.

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.

This morning in the shower, I heard something on the radio and thought, ‘Oh, I must remember that!’¹ and at the same time my left hand formed the shape required to hit Shift+Ctrl+S, which is the command key combination I use to launch the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

In the future, this will, of course, be a completely reasonable response. The Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter embedded beneath the skin on the back of my neck will respond to such a gesture by automatically scanning my recent thoughts, linking the desire to remember to the timecoded BBC Radio 4 stream, recording the audio snippet in question and its associated URLs, adding a huge array of metadata, and placing a new item in a queue for later review so that I can choose to post to either my private todo list or my public MegaWebLifeWorkEntertainmentFilterLog (which will be called Submit Response for nostalgic reasons).

Just now, though, it is a sign that I really need to get out more.

1 - Lacking both an embedded Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter and a working short term memory, I’ve forgotten what it is I wanted to remember. ↩

My bit will be about, very roughly speaking indeed, hacking and art, with an emphasis on small interventions, loose couplings of existing ideas and technologies, stuff that I will take great pains to avoid calling ‘life hacks’, the formally experimental novels of B.S. Johnson, stuff about social engineering, stuff about art that requires the involvement of the viewer, the relationship between all these things (if there is one), and some other things, too. There will also be covert cameraphone videos of folk keying in their PIN numbers, and projections of exciting celebrity details drawn from Paris Hilton’s hacked Sidekick.

My portion of the evening will be, as you can see, a bit loose, but the idea of the Upgrade! events is to prompt lively debate more than to present a solid argument. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Do come along.

Update: Here’s the official blurb for the talk, which may or may not make clear what it is I’ll be banging on about:

> [Jack] will be talking about, for want of a better word, hacks. For the purposes of this talk, hacks are small actions or concepts that may have large effects, loose couplings of existing ideas that produce unforseen consequences, or any elegant intervention that changes our understanding of a system. Though the roots of the term lie in the world of computer hacking, it can be applied to everything from changes individuals make to their own lives, artistic practices developed to engage audiences, or small shifts in society itself. It remains to be seen whether there is a relationship between hacks and hacking in these different fields.

If you emailed me or called my mobile ‘phone in the last couple of days, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible today.

A full report of my brave and selfless investigation into technology-free living will appear in the next issue of the List, and here, too, after publication. One tidbit: you miss out on a lot of opportunities to get drunk in fine company if you cannot receive text messages, but, conversely, nice people will pop by your house to make sure you’re still alive if you’re offline for a day or two.

I’m breaking into a cold sweat at the very thought. And the fact that my first thought was to post about the experiment to my weblog suggests that I might find the task something of a challenge.

If you need to get in touch with me during my period of noble sacrifice for the entertainment of List magazine readers, um, well, I suppose you’ll have to come round my house.

The report claims that 600,000 digital receivers have been sold in the UK, and switching off the analogue signal would render some 100 million existing sets obsolete.

So, er, why on earth are they even considering switching off the analogue signal at this point?

(Confession: I listen to radio at home by tuning into the BBC’s live and Listen Again streams online, or playing recordings made using iRecordMusic, then broadcasting FM from my computer via a Belkin TuneCast, to a Tivoli Model One analogue mono receiver. Does anyone know of a support group I could contact?)