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M.I.A. invites her Twitter followers to pass around her new single "Born Free" so I'm embedding her pass-along code on my blog and then watching to see if my phone can play it from Opera Mini.
Direct link to MP3: http://www.insideview.ie/files/born-free.mp
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VOICE-OPTIMISED SOFTWARE stops me dead in my tracks. I'm finding more and more of Google's shadow in the handheld voice space whenever I look at free voice-activated offerings for my SonyEricsson Xperia X10 phone (shown with some battle scars at left). Dan York's reports from places like the Mobile Voice conference gives me an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings feature strongly in the Android Market. Google clearly has the attention of all the speech vendors and many text-to-speech developers whose work I've followed during the past six years. Tim O'Reilly wrote about the emerging Internet Operating System, capturing the growing importance of networked applications that rely on massive amounts of data, some accessed by telling your phone what to do. For a relatively low cost of entry, we're now equipping college students with the ability to talk to their phones and to get results. In my case, I'm watching a legally blind student use spoken content on the Xperia X10 when studying for his final exams. Next year, he'll use voice controls to find information related to his course work and his phone will read back the relevant information. His Android phone will be a centrepiece of his academic success. This is really exciting stuff for me. Disclosure: SonyEricsson gave me an X10 to dropkick and use for creative multimedia development at Tipperary Institute. Punters have to pay €359 to O2-Ireland to get this same piece of kit.
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AS A BY-PRODUCT of forced migration, I was happy to read Jeffrey Kaye's account of "how coyote capitalism fuels global immigration." I watched Jeffrey explore the impact of migration on Ireland during a three-day videodocumentary that he did right after Dell announced it was winding up its operations in Limerick. The hard cover version of Kaye's story goes well beyond the Republic of Ireland, tracking immigration policy across a global landscape. Human migration is one of the least understood phenomena of our time and I believe it is a flash point for some of the racist attacks that occur in Ireland. Kaye's 310 pages of Moving Millions include index references to readers Pat Phelan and Conn O Muineachain and that alone make the book worthy of standing proud on my bookshelf. After another reading, marked up with highlighter and India ink, I believe I'll order a few copies for the Mass Communications and Culture module that I teach in Tipperary Institute.Jeffrey Kaye -- Moving Millions ISBN 9780470423349
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SUDDENLY, THE WORLD has garbage collection and the complete spectrum of porn on the iPhone. I'm waiting for this Canadian code by David Wong to make its way into the wild. It looks like very stable iPhone Linux in alpha.
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WATCH SAMMY DOZEN on YouTube because if he gets 1000 views before the end of April 2010, he earns another 10% in the continuous assessment portion module of the Social Media module at Tipperary Institute. The third level creative multimedia degree programme has a strong video production element.
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BOOKING A BUS got easier with Twitter approaching critical mass in Ireland. An online message sent by Aidan O'Connell seeking two people to share a taxi from Barcelona to Cherbourg ended up with over 50 people sharing a bus on the same route.
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A CREATIVE AND FINANCIAL tension has developed between the Irish public broadcaster and commercial operators as more Irish citizens try to stay informed on the go. Not long ago, Ireland was an Angelus Nation where the news came to you when you sat and listened to it. People paid their license fees and they got their talking heads. That hierarchical model of information flow has changed dramatically with the opening of the broadcasting spectrum and with the rise of handheld information aggregation. More specifically, 3G over-the-air connectivity means people can tap a screen and often get the news as it breaks--but from a blog, a social network, or a personal newsfeed. You don't have to pay a license fee to get your news on a pocket touchscreen. The Irish Minister for Communications wonders, "How do you apply a licence fee to an iPad or an iPhone?" Then he added, "I'm not saying that you do. But it's one of the questions that needs to be asked." [1] A lot of those handheld screens push advertisements and embedded product placements alongside the information stream.
Continue reading "Now That Everyone Thinks They're Broadcasters" »
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ON THE 20TH of May 1980, I was sitting in the right seat of a C-141 in Utah with a crew about to finish our fourth sortie carrying Minuteman missiles between Utah and Montana. These sorties used max takeoff power from the C-141 Starlifter because the ICBM missiles weighed nearly 70,000 pounds and filled the entire cargo compartment. But after the last run, we knew we could depend on the gas-guzzling Pratt & Whitney TF33P7 engines. They pushed out 20,000 pounds of thrust each and they were highly reliable. So when we wrapped up the work in Utah, we departed Hill AFB with an empty load and rocketed to FL350 for a short trip into California. The route took us due west then across the Donner Pass into Travis AFB. I still remember the uneasy feeling I got when Hal the aircraft commander throttled back at level off because the number four engine burped and shot a 10-foot plume of flame out its front compressor. The whole aircraft shuddered and our main air conditioning pack started a wild temperature fluctuation. We discovered later that we were approaching the leading edge of the Mount St Helen's volcanic ash cloud and that the cloud extended higher than several weather experts had predicted. Since we were nearly directly overhead a military operating area, we told Air Traffic Control we were descending immediately and returning to our departure base. A half hour later we were back on the ground. We spent three days in Utah waiting for a ride back to California. Two of the aircraft's engines had to be repaired at a cost of $109,000 each. I filed away a "note to self" about flying downwind of volcanoes when I saw the final incident report and cost of our 43-minute flight. It's more dangerous than flying into blowing sand. Today, most of Europe is closed to flight because of a large volcanic ash cloud extending from Iceland to the south of France. Aircraft engines represent nearly 35% of the value of a new commercial airplane. As I discovered, those well-tuned pieces of machinery don't like sucking ash instead of air.
Captain Bernie Goldbach flew nearly 2000 hours in the Lockheed C-141. Some flying shots prove it.
Ronan McGreevy -- "Former test pilot recalls flying through volcanic ash" in the Irish Times, 20 April 2010.
There is volcanic ash on my car. (The Qik clip proves it.)
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I NEED TO FOLLOW an information diet, so I'm borrowing some advice I found in the Sunday papers, starting with practising the "five-more rule". This means I have started to read for five more minutes, write for five more minutes, or learn for five more minutes before letting my phone or my laptop distract me with meandering journeys through social networks. Then I will exercise by reading over the back pages of my Moleskine where I've written some vocabulary words that will help me improve my communications. I will relax constructively and that means no TV during the short breaks. I have agreed to turn off alerts from Vark, IM, and email. It's easy to go rustic under Ireland's clear sky, so I'm trying to pack my own sandwich and talk to the birds once a day. I have some help in this regard from a resident bird watcher on campus. I will leverage my chronotype and that means writing at 6AM. It's good to envisage outcomes so I've converted some part of my "to-do list" into headlines and pull-quotes. The toughest thing is consistency and that means I have to find a hook that keeps me on track. In my case, it's the written notes I keep. If I refer to the first 10 pages of my little Moleskine journal, I stay focused. I'm writing a note to myself to be made public on the first day in June, using my blog to automatically publish the progress I've made with my renewed information diet.
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FIVE DAYS OF USING the SonyEricsson X10 have transmogrified my index finger into a stylus. As much as this disrupted my old school relationship with small computers, the X10 has given me ideas about touching and swiping my way through a more productive work day. After I checked with Xperia X10 reviews, I discovered I could change my keyboard to "Android" and get fatter keys with no predictive text, I was happy using both hands to type slowly. Although I really miss the tactile feel and speedy function of a real keyboard, the X10 can run applications simultaneously and those apps provide me slices of information streams that I really should monitor. It pushes updates from my email, twitter stream, Facebook newsfeeds, and Picasa. When combined with direct SMS messages, phone calls and occasional short multimedia clips via MMS, the X10 can be can be a source of information overload. So I established another Twitter identity pruned the number of my Facebook friends. After five work days, I now have a mobile device that effectively leverages SonyEricsson's on-board Timescape in a visually appealing and time-efficient manner. Timescape alone makes the X10 worthy of consideration as a work phone. But then there's the Android marketplace with free applications that worked their way onto my X10 after the first day.
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