Inside View

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.

FOWA Dublin 090306

WE HAVE STARTED LOOKING at ways to fund four college students to attend the Future of Web Apps in Dublin on 6 March 2009 because we believe all creative multimedia degree students need to attend major industry events. We call these outings "media trips" and assign continuous attendance credit to them. FOWA generates a lively amount of cross-talk whenever one of the conferences occurs and a Dublin running will certainly be one of the liveliest on the 2009 conference calendar. In the value-for-money stakes, FOWA delivers a nice return for the entry fee (less than 100 Irish punts) and if there was a better gender balance among the proposed speakers, this would be a top-rated event. Setting that shortcoming aside, FOWA always entertains with a fresh blend of speakers, quality pitches by start-ups, approachable journos like Mike Butcher, and an energetic amount of catching up with extremely knowledgeable developers. With four students live blogging the event, we plan to bring a Tipperary slant to the Big Smoke for FOWA 2009 in Dublin.

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FOWA Blog -- "FOWA comes to Dublin"
Sabrina Dent -- "FOWA: The future looks mighty male"
FOWA Dublin 2009 opens in Liberty Hall, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland on Friday 6 March 2009.

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Hands-on Driving

NOTHING BEATS THE FEEDBACK you can get from hands-on driving and that holds true for a car, a plane, or our Moodle. While waiting for car repairs in a BMW garage, a friendly salesman invited Ruth to drive a few models (see left). Following less than 10 minutes in a four-year-old car used car from the lot outside, we were on our way to buying it. The test drive was part of the sales pitch and as anyone in the business knows, those tests often get prospects to qualify themselves as customers. The same kind of consumer psychology holds true in my work with our Moodle virtual learning system. I have set a considerable number of writing assignments on Moodle, in the belief that the only way you learn to write well is to write often. The frequency of the assignments also induces a bit of stress in students, causing most of them to hunker down and actually do the work in an organised way. However, the bottom third show a tendency that recurs year after year. They are slow to take up on the VLE, claiming they don't know where to start or they don't understand what to do. We normally work around these twin hesitations in an open setting like the campus canteen or even outside in a field of grass sprayed by the free and open campus wifi network. It takes less than five minutes to test drive Moodle and for new students to think they can proceed on their own. It's a student behavior I saw while an instructor pilot as well in flight simulators. You needed to just get the show on the road, share a few demonstrations, and everything would rock on from there.

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Have a poke around Media Writing if you like, and see how it's possible to earn more than 100% of the continuous assessment marks available.

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From mail to blog

ONE OF THE MOST useful pieces of functionality in my life is my ability to post to my weblog in the dark without a computer. For example, this short post is coming to you from the glow of a Nokia E90 screen illuminating a small keyboard while I sit on the edge of a bed with a sick little toddler. She sleeps quickly on big beds but tends to roll off them so I bring my ultraportable office to her and life goes on. Downstairs in the sitting room, my wife occasionally brings her Shockwave work home and she carries a 17" laptop onto the sofa to move vectors on scenelines. After a month of that kind of work, she wants to ban laptops from sitting rooms because you cannot converse while editing key frames. Back to my ultraportable window to the blogosphere. From experience, seen since 2003 when I started services with Six Apart, I have emailed hundreds of blog items to InsideView.ie. Whenever someone comments on my blog, my phone vibrates and shows me what they've said. If I want to kill the comment or block a spammer, the email gives me the deep link to pare back as I wish. The ultraportable E90 computer (it's too big for most people to consider it a phone) also aggregates  a minimum of 1300 blog posts on my phone for offline viewing on aircraft, in rural areas or on the side of a bed with a sick kid. I think it's important to mention these capabilities because so many people assume a browser is the first screen to the internet. We know the text-based two-colour screens are the way the connected universe can always be sure of communications. The sooner I get ultraportable computers (i.e., smartphones) into the hands of my Media Virgins, the better our connected world will be.

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Sent mal2blog using O2_EDGE Typepad services in Cashel, Ireland before sunrise.

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Frugal MP3 Player

WE HAVE A TIGHT CHRISTMAS fast approaching and this year that means ignoring lust-worthy Apple components and looking a viable alternatives like the Creative Zen MP3 player at left. I've been admiring the credit-card sized Zen in several Dublin electronics shops and the only reason I haven't bought one is because my brother-in-law swears by his. I don't want to look like a follower so I'm holding off for a 32 GB Flash version of the Creative Zen. It's handy to have a SD/SDHC card slot because that helps me leverage my SD collection. The Creative Zen supports MP3 and AAC which means I can rip and play--with one additional step required to rip iTunes music. I also have to convert my 3GP and MP4 files to video in WMV or DivX/XviD at 320x240 resolution but Creative's software could help with those tasks. Let's see whether I get one of these little numbers for Christmas.

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Creative sells the Zen online in Ireland for €229.

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Sleeping with E90

[UPDATED 13 Nov 08: This was a mail-to-blog post sent to Typepad from Nokia Mail in Ireland on 6 Nov. I don't know why it spent a week circling the Six Apart servers.]

I FEEL SHEEPISH admitting that I often take my brick to bed because I don't believe one should bring things like Twitter to bed. But here I sit, on the side of our guest bed, with my Nokia E90 spewing tweets from Dabr while I nurse a toddler into her second nap of the day. Young Mia is feeling the effects of a major immunization and the best way to give her deep sleep is in a big bed with deep duvets. Since she can roll off the bed, I took my portable office (water bottle, Nokia E90, reading lap case and Moleskine) to her. Years from now, when she may face the same domestic challenge, I wonder whether she will ensure all the big beds have home office IT in the walls. I have already figured out how to build pull-down writing tables on the walls and it's just a matter of time before ] the price points of interactive white boards dip below 42" television screens. You can never have enough white boards. Nor can a 13-month-old ever get too much sleep.

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Mia in deep sleep happens rarely in my Flickr photostream.
Sent from my Nokia E90 phone using O2-Ireland HSDPA from the top east-facing window of my home.

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