Blog My Wiki!

The Man They Call Robert X has an exciting column this week (Jon says ‘Exciting? It’s almost a manifesto!’)… all about a very savvy Canadian and what he’s managed to do with a bit of WiFi, some broadband internet access, a satellite dish and a serious Linux server. “…one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones.”
I read this and thought “this is the future”.
And then “some big vested interests are going to put a stop to this!”

Sgt Pepper It Ain’t
In a moment of boredom I stuck an old bit of Windows wallpaper I used to use at work on the OtherMachines front page.
Have a look at here and see how many people you can spot – I don’t expect anyone to guess my wife Catherine, and my sons William and Henry, but there are at least eight other (semi) famous people in there!

It just occured to me that there’s no link anywhere on my sites to TypeStick – development of which is, er, stalled for now
It’s a little program I wrote for MacOS X and Windows to help you write HTML to put text in web pages, where the characters of the text are made up of individual images.
Hard concept to explain, visit http://www.othermachines.org/typestick for more info and to download it – it’s free!

Apple’s sucky mouse.
I hate to admit it, but the Microsoft optical USB mouse is much better than Apple’s.
I know I sound ungrateful – my wife rang me from the Washington DC Apple Store to ask me if there was anything I wanted. I really wanted a new battery for my iBook, but they didn’t have any. So she got me an Apple optical mouse and a spare power supply for my iBook – the latter was very welcome (much lighter than the hockey puck which has since died anyway), but the mouse… sucks. Really sucks. I’ve used it once and it’s been in a drawer ever since. It freaks out on the wooden desk I work at – and it’s not polished at all, let alone ‘highly polished’. And I really miss the scroll wheel I have on my Microsoft mouse at work…

Bad industrial design. Insanely bad industrial design…
Just got a Kingston USB keyring flash drive – very useful, very fashionable. Keep lots of data with you at all times. Cringely can even boot Linux from his and get back up and running if his house in Charleston is destroyed.
Just one snag – instead of putting the keyring on the unit itself, they put the keyring on the cap that goes over the USB plug – so if the cap falls off, instead of just losing the cap… you lose all your data.
Doh!