Inside View

Truly Mobile Nomadic

I HAVE A soft spot for Sony's VAIO notebook range because they have always served me well. You can get them small and that means "perfect form factor" for nomads like me who camp out with other Bedouins in Ireland. Vic Keegan is impressed with the powerful Sony Vaio SZ2 and he cited "its facilities, including a very thin 13.3in screen, Wi-Fi, and DVD all packed into a thin case weighing just under 1.7kg (compared with a bit over 2kg for my Apple laptop with 12in screen)". For me, I've smacked around the TX2-HP, which weighs only 1.2kg with more than seven hours of battery life and fits inside my Bihn Bag.

Instant Free Sheet

BEFORE SETTING OFF on a holiday to the States, I recommend using Yahoo! Local to get a feel for the local area. In some localities, the front page comments on Yahoo! Local are like reading the display ads, editorial content or snippets from the local free sheet. Too bad it doesn't work for Ireland. There are enough bloggers in Ireland to support the venture with no real oversight from Yahoo! UK. We've bookmarked 17603 and Chinatown for immediate use due to poor health in the extended family there.

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Worth a Trip to the Big Smoke

WE HAVE MARKED the first Saturday in October for a trip to the Big Smoke where a group of Irish bloggers plan to meet up in the Digital Hub to talk about the Irish election. This might be the biggest nationwide community event to ever to occur in the former Guinness premises. We will bring a dozen students from Tipperary Institute to watch, listen and contribute.

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Watch it! They have mics and earbuds!

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Arrogant MySpace

THERE ARE REASONS to distrust MySpace, some illuminated by the COO of News Corporation who thinks widgets from other domains only serve to leach traffic from MySpace. In conversation with company investors, Peter Chernin indicated that MySpace will build out its own services that will not hook into other places. His attitude is anti-Web 2.0 and while that's not damning, his basic philosophy sounds at best very risky for outside developers and at worst his remarks have a "dangerously arrogant" ring to them, according to Tech Crunch.

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Mike Farrell -- "MySpace May Launch YouTube Rival"
Marshall Kirkpatrick -- "MySpace: We Don't Need Web 2.0"

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NASA Podcast Competition

UPDATED 13 September 2012 to remove ExplorationPodcast.com

NASA RAN its first Exploration Podcast competition from 1 September 2006 through 10 October 2006 for students agec 11-18. Students createda either an audio or video podcast that answered "How will space exploration benefit your life in the future?"

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Derek Baird -- " 21st Century Explorer Student Podcast Competition"
NASA Education Programs
KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom

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Active Citizens Participate

THE PARTICIPATE project "explores convergence in pervasive, online and broadcast media to create new kinds of mass-participatory events in which a broad cross-section of the public contributes to, as well as accesses, contextual content - on the move, in public places, at school and at home." It offers ideas that I believe should be adopted by the Active Citizen initative in Ireland. It is a collaborative project that integrates sentinent devices with active human commentary.

Screenshots Can Cost You

IF YOU SNAP screenshots and upload them to Flickr, you need to know you're close to NIPSA-land. Flickr occasionally tags photostreams containing screenshots as Not In Public Site Areas (NIPSA) and the Flickr terms of use clarify that "if the images you're uploading either (i) aren't photos, or (ii) are images you've found on the web, stock photos, celebrity photos, stuff that appears to be copyrighted by someone else, screenshots, content that's inappropriate for public areas or full frontal nudity, it's safe to assume that we will probably have marked you as Not In Public Site Areas (NIPSA); otherwise, your account is in the review queue, and will be attended to shortly."

Does your boss spy on you

FEW PEOPLE expect their supervisors to spy on them away from work. Fewer check employment policies before signing their contracts for employment. But once issued with a phone for company business, the practise could become commonplace. That's because most people keep a single mobile phone number and throuh it comes more than business phone calls. With records of those calls kept as part of the monthly phone bill, your boss has a record of conversations well-suited for data mining. Your boss might not mine them. Someone else might buy them for their use--a jealous boyfriend, a gossip columnist, a stringer in search of a story. Once you have calling patterns for people who call each other, you start to get a wiring diagram that maps onto calendars, club openings, late night binges, and premium chat lines.

10 Questions for your Sunday

YOU COULD EASILY miss interesting tidbits of information if you spend a dreary day in Ireland painting skirting boards. We have plenty of brushes for DIY readers, but you have to get half of these mainstream current affairs questions right before we give you a brush.

Oil Currency

TWENTY DOLLARS can buy you a stun gun kit.