I'm slowly warming to the new iMac

The new Apple iMac G5 was introduced already a while ago. Among with many others I was a bit underwhelmed by the design and specs of the thing. However, as some time has passed I have started to find the thing actually quite smart. Especially when ordered "fully loaded" with WLAN, Bluetooth, Airport Express, wireless keyboard and mouse (nor necessarily made by Apple..) it would make very smart looking and usable home computer. It could be a real desk estate saver too when installed with wall mount.

There are two personal thoughts behind this pondering:

1) Compact design: The flat we're living here at UK does not offer the very optimal space for the computer equipment - therefore we've been using laptops only for quite a while now. New iMac could be a good compromise for a "fixed" home computer - a role which is now handled by old G3 iBook with dead battery. 8)

2) Secuirty and Usability: The next time I'll buy a computer to computer illiterate it will be OSX-based. I've seen so much hassle in many cases updating/checking/advicing/worrying about a windows PC box somewhere without no nerd living next door.

Oh well, the number of computers at home is at its sensible limit (= 2) so I'm not upgrading anything until something happens to iBook. More probable is that I cannot resist the 40 Gig iPod when the London Apple Store opens November..

Would you pay premium for helium?

Here's a premium rate phone number I have not stumbled before - "Helium call". It is supposed to transfer the voice of the caller (and also called) to hight pitch that you get when you have just inhaled helium. Quite a fun idea, at very steep price: the time I checked 1.50 euros per minute..

In principle this would not be that hard to code in to modern smartphone software, at least one using some flavour of push to talk, hmm... 8-)

Virtual Windows

I have always wondered how long it takes to somebody to come up with virtual windows. This guy hooked eight 15" LCD panels in fake window frames on his living room wall. Connected with multi-head display adapters he's now having room with virtual view!

I just found new moblngging software for S60: PicoBlogger. Let's see if it works..

Moblog with PicoBlogger.

Unbelieable little robot - Omnihead

This japanese little robot is unbelieable! Just check the videos! I bet all those moves have been preprogrammed and there is no AI whatsoever. Anyway the manouverability itself is good example how things are gradually advancing..

BBC NEWS | Health | Dementia has dictated our history

BBC news article about dementias effect in world history is an interesting read. Defineatly food for thought in these not very peaceful times around the world. The arcticle points to research results which speculate e.g. if the second world war could have been averted, if the late president of USA would not have been ill.

BT slashes broadband pricing! (finally)

According to a BBC news story BT is going to cut broadband prices by 25%. That is great news for us as we are using the (formerly rather expensive) 1Mb service from them. So, our montly 39 UKP payment will be reduced to 29 UKP!!

I haven't heard anything directly from BT yet but what concerns me is that they are going to introduce some traffic limitations for everybody. So far, their 1Mb conneaction has been without them..

Apple updates from WWDC 2004

As a user of Apple computer (ooold iBook serving as a music player) and OSX I usually follow very eagerly of the Apple product releases. On this years WWDC, the biggest thing was Tiger, the next release of OSX. Tiger will bring true 64bit OS and some serious video performance, system wide contextual searching, along with loads of trimmings.. Tiger was followed by announcement of up to 30" 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution displays (serious drool) and some tool developments.

I got my iBook by chance by winning a web competition. I wish I have similar luck early next year! 8)

Kablog troubles

For last couple of weeks I have been constantly trying to use Series 60 version of Kablog to post blog entries with images through blogger.com. The emphasis of my trials have been on images, and that is exaclty the thing that does not work.. Everything works as expected with the test blog of kablog, but with blogger.com and the blog hosted on own server, just odd error messages.

OK, I agree that Kablog is very early in development, especially the Symbian version. Additionally, the posting of images needs specific blog host related settings to work even with the blogger web interface. My present guess is that kablog cannot handle the sftp path setting that is specific to the server the blog is hosted at - I bet that kablog uses hardcoded value instead.

Kablog authors have a lot work to be done on the usability of the utility, too. It is kind of shame, as having very well thought and utility utility like this would be really a success. Anyway, it is the only possibility there is right now so I will continue trying..

First things to improve would be:

• Provide complete examples how to use the tool with different configurations of blogging systems, not just for the test blog.
  
• When resizing the image, provide a possibility to duplicate the image first - not to resize the original one!
  
• Lots of usability issues - Take a look at S60 style guide.. 8)
  

Any pointers for open source mobile blogging utility with possibility to post also images? (Hmm, maybe I should start one on the next momemt of Spare Time(tm) 8)

Bloglines - easy web-based way to follow your favourite blogs and rss feeds

Bloglines is as described on the site "Free, Web-Based News Aggregator". I have used it for couple of weeks now, and it has proven very useful site. It has actually changed a bit my web surfing habits: Now I first check the RSS feeds from the favourite sites first using bloglines, and only after that check the sites without feed, like finnish news sites. Before, the usual session was to launch dozen tabs from my links page and go through them.

NationMaster.com - Where Stats Come Alive!

NationMaster.com - Where Stats Come Alive!

nationmaster.com seems to be interesting stats site, with which you could compare different countries using unbelievably large number of attributes.

(Is reported to crash certain mozilla and firefox browser versions)

First post to personal blog

First post to my personal blog. Of course there is relation to Wokinkolo -blog which offers snapshots of our life in UK. However, there will be no overlap as in this blog I will concentrate more to my personal aspirations, interesting links and technology news. Also, this blog will be written in english.