Inside View

Proven Technology

FOUND BY JOHN WALKENBACH and also part of a musty collection of JFK Papers at home in Pennsylvania, this handheld "scrambler keeps private phone conversations safe from wiretappers and eavesdroppers. Fitted to an ordinary handset, it needs no electrical connection, has its own power source. To hear, a person needs an unscrambler coded identically. Delcon Division, Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., sells it for $275, keeps your name and code locked in its vault." The demonstrator is not ironing her face.

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Modern Mechanix -- "Wiretap-proof telephone" from 1966.

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E90 Communicator 365

WITH MORE THAN 365 consecutive days of carrying the Nokia's E90 Communicator around with me, I feel like a very specialised mobile phone customer because nearly every smartphone review in Ireland omits the Nokia E90 from its gallery of phones. Perhaps that's because the phone is more a computer than a mobile phone, ultraportable enough to be used on small tray tables on commuter trains when posting to my blog or reading web items over O2-Ireland 3G (see right). Or maybe it's because its dimensions dwarf the slim and small builds of nearly every other phone on the market. But that larger size means (1) ample battery power that normally lasts me through an entire business day of data and voice usage and (2) significant shock absorbing capability when the phone drops to the pavement. I've dropped several models of Communicators that I have owned since 1997, including the 9000, 9110, 9210i, 9500, and the E90. One interesting thing about the E90 is its browser shares a codebase similar to the iPhone Safari browser, which means my browsing often appears as an iPhone and I can see most iPhone Web Applications through the Nokia E90 browser as well.

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Nokia on the E90 Communicator. I've made more than 3000 references to the Nokia E90 on my blog since it's the key ingredient in my mobile social network.
Essential Link: "E90 Zone"

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Hypermiling

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Screenshot from Automotive Insider

FROM THE OXFORD American Dictionary prepares comes the 2008 Word of the Year hypermiling. You're a hypermiler if you keep the tires on your car properly inflated to maximize your mileage. If you removed the roof rack from your vehicle to streamline your car you're also on the shortlist. Some hypermiling driving techniques can drive Irish drivers demented. I know I can squeeze an extra 10 miles out of the yellow warning light on our fuel gauge by hypermiling. It means shutting down the engine at red lights, keeping the car's vacuum gauge between 30 and 50 mpg and rarely overtaking. 

Keeping in the spirit of the movement, other finalists include:

• frugalista - person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying second-hand, growing their own produce.
• moofer - a mobile out of office worker - ie. someone who works away from a fixed workplace, via Blackberry/laptop/wi-fi. If you're good at this, we should go moofing together. 
• topless meeting - a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries, or mobile phones.
• toxic debt - mainly sub-prime debts that are now proving so disastrous to banks. They were parceled up and sent around the global financial system like toxic waste, hence the allusion.

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Bernie Goldbach saves definitions.

Personal Energy Consumption

WE JUST BOUGHT AN energy-sucking electric fireplace because we needed to quickly patch a drafty kitchen extension while also getting an open plan clothes dryer for a washing load that has tripled in the past year. And as I await the first rendering of the electric bill, I know we've got to cut back other usage of electrical components in the house if we are to remain below the European average of 5,400 watts of power burned in the home. John-Paul Flintoff got me to thinking about these things as he used a manual typewriter to prepare a recent article for the Sunday TImes in the dark, "wearing two jumpers, a hat and a scarf and a pair of fingerless gloves". He got an added benefit--no spam, no unread blog items, no winking avatar to distract him. John-Paul is planning to throttle his digital life. "Out with the computer unless strictly necessary, in with the typewriter. Out with the Palm Pilot, in with the paper diary." The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology would smile at his efforts because experts there believe each of us on the planet must stick to energy consumption of precisely 2,000 watts if we want to keep earth hospitable for the next generation. In our home, we could keep the wall-hanging electric fire on full blow for the entire year and not use up 2000 watts--but those watts are meant to be a sum of all living, not just the burn at home.

Working Faster Underway

I GET A LOT of work done while traveling, surrounded by a cocoon that includes deeply implanted earbuds, a small ultraportable computer and an occasional data connection. These things work well for me aboard Irish Rail, even though there are some black spots of spotty data connectivity. I've enough in my cache, scribbled in my Moleskines, and on 4GB data cards to keep me totally engaged between coffee breaks. I don't understand why Aer Lingus persists in prohibiting any electronic gadget which has Bluetooth or Wifi from being used aboard its aircraft. I flaunt this rule routinely when crossing the Atlantic because I cannot survive with the imposed fare of in-seat entertainment. Besides, I fly to work and that means using my gear. I also cannot understand why Irish Rail does not offer Whisper Zones for people who want a quiet journey with no threat of someone two seats away yelling, "I'M ON THE TRAIN" just about the time you nod off for a nap. You can get Quiet Zone respect aboard Amtrak so why not aboard Irish Rail? It's actually a money-spinner because I'd pay an additional five euro for a totally whispered two-hour journey into Dublin.

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Image from my Flickr photostream, shot from aboard Irish Rail while decelerating into Kilkenny, Ireland.

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Sunday News with Irish Bread

THOSE WHO FOLLOW MY meanderings around Qik know that many Sunday mornings include a short walkabout the Rock of Cashel and into a shop where we buy a few Sunday newspapers. [0] Today, we returned home with the Observer, the Sunday Business Post, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and a loaf of bread from Pat the Baker. We spotted the yellow loaf with a Web 2.0 seal on the side so we had to check out what that was about. As my littlest one stuck her fingers into the bread, I found something in the Sunday Business Post about the Bebo sticker on the bread loaf [1] and I also remembered something from my Google shared feeds so I rewound my FreeNews and found Damien Mulley and Philip Macartney serving up some meaty thoughts about bread on Bebo. For me, a baker using Bebo is like McLuhan using Twitter. There's a message in the medium being used in a handy way and there's a fourth year creative multimedia final exam question being written on this exact issue. That's not an unusual manifestation of my daily web reading. Today's Qik reading of the Irish Sunday papers is also here as a 33 MB 3GP file for those viewing my blog on a mobile phone. And for Neville Hobson, a hat tip for poking me about the domain InsideView.ie not being the same as this blog. That problem is my own making and one I have to repair before my next set of Moo cards arrive. Shownotes for my Qikstream follow below the break.

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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