Technology

Economist on Smart Metering

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Today’s Economist is talking energy economics – in the Tech section no less. Their correspondent has been to Demo 09, an emerging technologies conference in California that some of you may have seen Simon Bisson tweeting from. The ideas that are getting our man excited revolve around something called the Smart Gird, which is basically applying computer technology to electricity distribution so that we can better understand how we use the stuff.

In general, people don’t like wasting money. But with electricity we generally have no idea how much our appliances are using. We may have a vague idea that we should do laundry in the evening or at weekends, in order to cut peak usage, but even then our utility companies may not give us any credit for that. One of the primary ideas behind the Smart Gird is that if we only knew how much money we were pouring down the electrical socket then we would be less wasteful. The expectation is that, armed with such data, the average American would cut electricity usage by 10%-20%. And that’s mostly peak usage as well, which is when the dirtiest, most expensive power plants tend to be running. (Don’t ask me how I know – you don’t want a lecture on my day job.)

I firmly believe that this sort of thing is essential if we are going to do something about global warming. Human beings tend not to act without feedback. Getting an electricity bill once a month is not good feedback. Give us data and we can act on it. And it will save us money too. And create new tech jobs. Which is pretty much a win all round.

A Mystery Solved

~ Cheryl

Have you ever wondered why overheard cell phone conversations are so irritating whereas people chatting normally don’t bug you? Well partly it is because people on cell phones tend to SHOUT because they have it in their heads that the person on the other end is a long way away, but there is a psychological reason as well. danah boyd explains.

And yes, I’d like to evolve to cut them out too.

We Are Mobile

~ Cheryl

One of the things about having an iPhone is that you suddenly start to care much more about how your blog looks on that device. Of course you have Safari available, but really the iPhone screen is a bit too small to do justice to a standard blog layout. Thankfully WordPress has plugins. So, all you iPhone users out there (and possibly Android users as well, I don’t know), you can all now check out the new phone-friendly appearance of this blog. Please let me know if you see anything weird (other than my witterings which I’m afraid don’t get any less weird just because you have an iPhone).

iPhone Installation – Epic FAIL!

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

So yesterday I was whingeing about troubles getting the webcam to work. Today I find that the iPhone is even worse. When you switch it on, you get a message telling you that there is no SIM installed. But nowhere in the package are their any instructions as to how to install one. Fortunately Google is my friend. I would never have guessed by myself. I tend to assume that those little holes are for re-booting the device.

The installation instructions tell you to hook the phone up to iTunes before it can be used. So I did so, and I got this message: “This iPhone cannot be used because the required software is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install iTunes again.” No possibility of an auto-update, they expect you to know how to do that yourself. Of course I do, but how are less tech-savvy people to cope?

Of course, while I was in the middle of downloading the latest version the Apple update manager pops up and asks me if I’d like to update my copy of ITunes.

Still, after much downloading of software and re-booting I seem to have got there at last. I just wonder why they have to make these things so hard.

Cory on the Kindle

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Hey, it is a copyright debate! Does Cory Doctorow have something to say? Of course he does. Here he is talking to GalleyCat about how he doesn’t want readers to think that authors are out to rip them off the way they the music industry is.

Update: And Neil Gaiman gives his view on the issue here. Neil’s point is very similar to one I saw made by, I think, Ron Hogan in his tweets from TOC. If publishers were like the music industry they’d want to make it illegal to read a book to your kid because that would infringe their audiobook copyright. On the other hand, Neil’s agent is only trying to safeguard his income, which is her job.

Kindle Breaches Copyright?

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

There’s a fascinating post up on the Small Beer Press web site about the new Kindle. The machine has text-to-voice capability, allowing it to “read” a book to you (presumably in a robotic voice). But audiobooks are a separate market with separate rights, and Kindle editions don’t have those rights? So isn’t the Kindle illegally infringing on the audiobook market? Not so, says Amazon:

The ability to read text aloud is very different from producing an audio version of a written work, so audio distribution rights are not required for any titles currently available as eBooks in the Kindle store.

Oh, I can see a few lawyers making a pretty penny out of that.

The Internet of Things

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Those of you who follow the Twitter feed will already have seen this article which Rick Klaw originally found and Jay Lake and I re-tweeted. It talks about how various clever people have been hacking various devices so that they can send tweets to their humans alerting them of various things. This can be anything from “your laundry has finished, please empty me” to “your household energy use yesterday was xMWh at a cost of $y and $tons of CO2” to “House here – someone has just broken the living room window, help!”

I’m pretty sure we will see a lot more of this in the future. Personally I’d love CricInfo to tweet the fall of wickets in test matches, but that’s something else entirely.

Ada Lovelace Day Update

~ Cheryl

I’m delighted to see that the pledge is now up to over 1300, so we are well past the target, though more are always welcome. In the meantime you may be wondering how all this got started, and indeed who started it. Well, the whole thing is the brainchild of a British IT consultant, Suw Charman-Anderson, and you can get to know her a little better thanks to this podcast interview by Christine Burns. Suw also talks a bit about women she might have written about had she not felt honor-bound to write about Ada herself. I don’t suppose that danah boyd reads my blog, but if one of you knows her please let her know she’s admired over this side of the pond.

And if you have forgotten what the whole thing is about, the details are all here.

I Get Email (in a good way)

~ Cheryl

It has been a while since I got the sort of email that PZ Myers gets, though I’m sure it will happen again one day. Today’s unexpected email was much more interesting. It was from Nokia. And it wasn’t about Finland.

What happened was that somebody noticed my recent post on Chris Anderson’s “economics of free” ideas. It so happens that Anderson is one of a group of innovative thinkers featured on Nokia’s Ideas Project web site. Another featured futurologist is Vernor Vinge. And by now you should be getting an idea of what Ideas Project is all about.

The site has sections with titles like “Personal Genomics”, “Orbital Launch Vehicles” and “Smart Dust”. In other words, it is full of topics that science fiction fans love to think about, and science fiction writers ought to be thinking about. Take that as a recommendation.

Oh, and they understand Web 2.0, so feedback is requested.

Tim Anderson on eBooks

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

A leading IT blogger asks whether eBooks are a good buy:

As for Waterstones ebooks, right now, there are several things to dislike. First, if I’m going to buy an ebook, I do want to be able to read it across all my devices – a specialist reader has its place, but other mobile devices are also important. I wouldn’t consider it without that. Second, the DRM is a nuisance. Third, the prices strike me as too high.

I suspect that the market is going through a phase where everyone is hoping to lock customers into a proprietary system. (Waterstones, for example, have done a deal with Sony). If we all hold out for long enough, they’ll start offering much more open systems.

Ada Lovelace Day Update

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Well, we made the pledge, but from what I can see my blogging about it didn’t help much at all. I’m particularly disappointed that no one commented with suggestions as to people I might write about. Of course a lot of you are women in technology – and women SF writers count – so one of you might end up as the subject of my blog post. Let’s remember what this is all about:

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Full details here.

So we need role models, right? And we are writers too so we can spread the message. I’ve even taken the trouble to spam a bunch of my Facebook contacts (or I tried to, but Facebook crashed on me – if you get the invite, let me know, please). Let’s make a big splash, OK?

Cyborgs R Us

~ Cheryl

British student fitted with artificial hand (Guardian):

It’s so sensitive I can grip a bottle of water or a paper cup without crushing it and even swing a racket. All I have to do is imagine picking something up or gripping it and the fingers and thumb move automatically.

But apparently it is way too expensive to risk on a rugby field.

Cool Software

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Basically we all need this stuff available on the heads-up displays of our wearable computers:

An image-recognition system developed by European researchers can hyperlink reality. It’s true. The MOBVIS system can recognise individual buildings in a photo you take with your camera-phone. Then it can apply icons that hyperlink to information about the building. Simply by looking at a picture, the system knows where you are and can tell what you are looking at.

If nothing else, I want this stuff in museums.

New Toy – Adventures in Electronics

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Sometime earlier this year my Dell MP3 player (aka The Best Xmas Present Evah!) developed an annoying problem – something in the headphone socket is broken and unless you hold the jack firmly in a certain way it will only play mono. This gets wearing on the fingers eventually, and makes the player pretty much a bust for walks.

So as it is holiday season I decided to get myself a new player. After much reading of reviews I got one of these. It arrived last night, and so far I am very impressed. The sound quality is excellent, especially with my Bose headphones, and the video quality is awesome. I’m still learning my way around the various audio functions, but the mere thought of having an MP3 player that claims to do surround sound is rather cool.

The software that came with the Cowon appears to be pretty shoddy, but you don’t actually need it to use the player – files can be copied to it just like it was any other external drive.

I’ve just tried the Cowon out on speakers and it doesn’t seem to have the pop to drive them effectively, but that’s OK because the Dell has a base station / amplified with a separate audio jack that still works perfectly. It might be an issue using the Cowon with a TV, but I haven’t bought the TV Out cable so I can’t check.

More later when I have had a chance to play with the thing some more.

Electronic Ghosts

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Here’s a free story idea for y’all, taken from real life.

There was a “bleep!” It was quite a loud bleep, and Kevin and I both turned our heads to see where it had come from. Neither of us recognized the tone. None of our computers had messages on them. None of our mobile phones are in the room. I even tried turning on the Asus to see if it was complaining about a low battery. Nothing.

Conclusion: somewhere in our office is a ghostly electronic device. It bleeps, but we can’t see it. It wants our attention. Why?

Sony Reader

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I was in Borders this morning and I found someone from Sony doing demos of their ebook reader. I have two things worth noting.

Firstly, of the 10 books that they chose to put on the sample copy of the reader, one is George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Yay! Go George.

And secondly, it didn’t hurt to read the thing. I think that the lack of backlighting makes a real difference. Much as I love physical books, it would be enormously useful to me to have all of my library digitized so that I can do searching and bookmarking. I suspect that in a year or two I may buy one of these things.