Inside View from Ireland

Personal Media Player

FOR CHRISTMAS 2008, I may be lucky enough to get a personal media player that costs less than €300. I've learned that if I blog about something (or add it to my wishlist), I often get rewarded with my lustworthy items. The Cowon O2 32 GB Video MP3 Player (in white, of course) is a touchscreen Personal Media Player that effectively crushes my desire for an iPod video. Nothing against the iPod video player but it's a matter of value for money and since I know that I need something with drag-and-drop AVI storage (480p or less) linked to a screen that looks really good, I'm test driving the Cowon O2 32GB player every time I walk past Peat's in Dublin, Ireland. This well-constructed PMP enables our creative multimedia students to watch their scratch video work quickly and on the go. It weighs less than a Creative Zen. Files encoded with Adobe Premier Elements drag and drop directly onto the unit or play back easily from the SDHC card. This little PMP isn't as lightweight as many of Apple's iPod options (and certainly it feels like a brick when compared to a Nano) but the things it can do!

Directional Acoustic Arrays

PIRATES OFF THE AFRICAN COAST are facing blasts by highly focused acoustic devices from American Technology Corporation. The one shown is a medium range device that can be used to bark out verbal warnings and if that doesn't achieve the result, it can be used with a deterrent tone to influence behavior. These devices have highly unique direct acoustic outputs, using efficient, customized capacitive transducers. They achieve full output with less than 400 watts. MRADs (shown) and LRADs can blast targets with a precise beam of sound. They can be connected to MP3 players and then cranked up to excruciatingly painful levels. British private firm Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS) hires out three-man teams of ex-military personnel who use LRADs on ships to work against pirates off the Somalian coast. When running at full power, MRADs and LRADs will result in permanent hearing damage to anyone who gets within 100 meters of the antenna.

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Xeni Jardin -- "Focused Sound Laser for Crowd Control" on NPR, 13 June 2005.
AFP -- "Pirates thwarted with sonic blast" 19 November 2008.

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Adding Social Text to Searching

ONE OF THE BEST features of the internet since 2006 has been the ability to see what others have written alongside some pages and Google has jumped into this space with the public launch of SearchWiki. By logging into my Google account before I start to search for something through Google, I can see the results of my past searches and I can also see comments made by other people on search terms. It's like having a personal Digg account without every leaving the Google search page. I believe I can see through the noise generated by people with bogus accounts and make my own mind up about the relative placement of specific results. I'll gladly accept the fact that some other people might be arguing with a placement that some results achieve by skimming commentary they make about those results. More is better, in my view. More information might not be better in the view of search engine optimisers because when you can see the rabble leaving behind their own little post-it notes, you can change the likelihood of someone trusting what the original publisher has first published.

2012

UPDATED in late 2011.

MY WORK DAYS PUT ME in contact with a special group of creatives--all third level students--nudging me to consider what kind of world awaits them in 2012 when all will be through a BSc in Creative Multimedia. I think they will enter a workplace where it will be unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. Blogging will be going strong in 2012. In the age where leaked information has become an online sport and with social networks peeling back the layers of anonymity we used to enjoy down the pub, in an Irish society where pre-crime is becoming ushered in as a forensic approach to civil order, some truths will be hand-rolled, others will be outed and spotlighted. This is something my twice-retired CI buddies are telling well-regarded transition team members right now in the Old Executive Office Building and it's a careful advice I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did. And by 2012, we anyone with rudimentary skills will know your first degree of separation, the geotags for your home, the financing remaining on your car, and the last time your pet was immunised. This is the near-term future and we have made it that way.

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Self-shot in Havana, a free and open wifi zone in a friendly centre location of Dublin, Ireland. I used a three-year old Fujifilm S7000 camera while thinking of Euan and tapas.

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Obama's 100 Billion Green Plan

OBAMA SAYS HIS TOP PRIORITY will be creating a new energy economy. He could do that if he follows the short list set down by the Center for American Progress (CAP), the think tank run by Obama's transition chief, John Podesta. Writing "In the Arena", Bracken Hendricks of the CAP has "identified $50 billion in programs that are ready to go immediately. The package would create two million jobs across the skill spectrum, from blue collar to high tech, and in almost every area of the country. There was huge congressional appetite for this even before the economic crisis hit." According to Joe Klein in Time magazine, the package has five components.

Easy Nokia Charging

ONE OF THE MOST USEFUL little things in my Bihn Bag is a USB charger for my Nokia phones. It's the Nokia CA-100 charger and it recharges my phones' batteries through the USB port of my laptops. The charger plug can be inserted into a 2.0 mm charge connector of any Nokia phone. All you have to do is remove the cap from the top of the charger, plug the charger into the USB port o the computer and walk away. As long as the laptop stays on, your phone charges. The CA-100 does not work if your laptop enters the hibernation mode. I bring the charger to work, put my phone next to my laptop, and work away. That means I'm giving my phone a trickle charge nearly all day. In my common usage patterns, this has extended my phone's power to more than a 20-hour day. I use the CA-100 on the train, meaning I run my Nokia E90 as a 3G modem while powering it from my mains-assisted laptop. After nearly two hours on the train with a full-on streaming connection aboard Irish Rail, I arrive in Dublin with both my laptop and my phone ready for a hard day's work. The only negative thing about the CA-100 is its price. I paid EUR 40 for it and that's a lot of money for a USB charger. However, its ease of use is giving me a 20-hour working lease of life for my main phone and that's double the life that I have ever run with a 3G iPhone.

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Pervasive ICT

ONE THING VISITORS to my blogs continue to tell me is the era of pervasive information and communications technology (PICT) is well and truly underway. People visit InsideView.ie in search of digital signage, online meetings, RFID, satnav, free wifi, and smart phones. Put them all together and you have a PICT cocktail.

Small smart displays exist now, carried by UPS drivers and walked across hotel lobbies by kitchen staff. I cannot walk the length of Grafton Street in Dublin without being asked to download at least one promotional ticket from a nearby shop. The bar codes on the back of my car's dashboard sensor actually work to help me register the tag because it's actually powered by RFID. I'm looking at ways of making the television mounted in our kitchen (see left) offer more than a TV signal. I know we are slipping into a PICT realm, without really objecting to the privacy issues that it will bring along as baggage.

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Sent mail2blog by Nokia E90 TypePad service using free and open wifi on the campus of Tipperary Institute, Clonmel, Ireland.

Previously on this blog -- "Pervasive Information and Communications Technology", 1 September 2003.

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Feeling Treasured

WHAT MAKES FACEBOOK SO DURABLE? Maybe it's something that people have been searching for all their lives. Simon Garfield says people "feel it is designed exclusively for them, and that is its trick: it makes more than 100m people feel like treasured individuals." Garfield drew his conclusion after talking to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 24-year old multibillionaire founder.

Irish Sunday Tech News

I FIRED UP MY NOKIA E90 and recorded 14 minutes of thoughts arising from the Sunday newspapers in Ireland today. Before I upstreamed my comments to Qik, Pat Phelan was denouncing one of the items as a scare piece. [1] I think I see Pat's point, but I don't think it's scaremongering to explain how some Irish legislators have helped to criminalise my daily activities with my digital lifestyle. Actually, my deviant behaviour would be subject to civil prosecutions but in Ireland, you can never count on laws to be enforced so Pat is right to say it's a scare piece and I feel safer ripping my CDs, posting photos of people I don't know, lending my DVDs, demeaning people on my blog, using my iPod while driving and showing news images on my blog. In terms of recommendations from today's papers, the Sunday Observer has a profile on Malcolm Gladwell's latest work [2], Time magazine gives special treatment to "The New New Deal" under President Obama [3], and Cuisinart's technology [4] wins topgold billing for those who want to tuck into steaks, burgers, paninis and toasties.