Time to dump the remote controls

  by redjar

Every electronic device you buy for your home comes complete with its very own remote control. My home is full of them, some used every day whereas others are hidden away and forgotten. We've even got a few so-called universal remote controls that are supposed to replace all the others but we've never really figured out how. So there are still four controls on the coffee table and we're still waiting for the solution to the problem.

So I was pleased to read an article on Digital Trends called Why mobile devices spell certain death for the universal remote control. The future belongs to mobiles and tablet and it only makes sense to use them to control our household gadgets via a smart app. One mobile device for everything seems the way to go.

"In the modern world, apps have supplanted dedicated devices. Why own five products with five different purposes when you could own one product with five million purposes? Connected mobile devices with app functionality have forced plenty of competitors into obsolescence and the universal remote will soon lie somewhere on that laundry list."

Can't come soon enough for me.

All lies but who cares?

  by  Caucas' 

I can't help mentioning an intriguing new angle on net-dating. It's not a subject I write about but I saw an article in the New York Times (I'm not real but neither are you) about a service called Cloudgirlfriend.com. The idea is that you create a totally fabricated profile for yourself complete with celebrity photo and wait for other heavily disguised soulmates to make contact. Everyone is lying but what the hell?

Admittedly many profiles on regular dating sites are probably slightly economical with the truth so it's almost refreshing to see a service that admits freely that everything on it should be taken with a sackful of salt. The original idea was that the service could create Facebook accounts for your highly enhanced personality so that you could engage in your fantasy relationship in the midst of your regular FB life. However that fell through since Facebook was less than enthusiastic about being swamped in false profiles. Thank goodness for that.

However the idea of forming fantasy relationships online is not new. Virtual worlds like Second Life are full of avatars that bear little or no relation to their owners and when you meet people there you have no idea who you are really talking to. Many people manage to live their second lives and form relationships based on mutually agreed deception. I spent a lot of time in Second Life a few years ago and created 3 different avatars just to see what it was like to "be" someone else. I realized that I'm no good at role play and even if my alter egos were unlike me my personality shone through anyway. I stopped the deception and used an avatar that looked like me and had a similar name.

For many the opportunity for online roleplay can certainly be very valuable. Whether a real relationship can develop from one based on blatantly false identities is another matter.

At last - a universal cellphone charger!

A BBC news item today made me jump for joy (well, almost). The International Telecommunications Union has announced that they have approved a new universal cellphone charger that will work with all handsets in the future. I think we have seven or eight different chargers lying around the house plus duplicates at work or in bags. Every time you get a new device you get yet another charger that doesn't work with anything else. ITU, I love you!
Now how about sorting out electricity sockets?

Unplugged

Despite all the advances in wireless technology I still have masses of tangled wires behind my computers and TV screens both at work and at home. Plus, of course, several drawers full of power cords, adapters and other wires. I am constantly amazed at their ability to get tangled up no matter how carefully I arrange them, especially if they're in a bag. The minute you turn your back they start snuggling up to each other.

I have often joked about having wireless electricity to solve all this and I've now started finding reports of exactly this breakthrough. Below is a talk on TED by Eric Giler (MIT) showing the principle of WiTricity; how electricity can be converted to a magnetic field and then back to electricity. Basically electricity can be transmitted wirelessly for short distances and the potential for this in the home and office is enormous.

One solution is to have a power pad on a desk, plugged into the mains, and you simply lay your cellphone or other device on it and it recharges. Could this be the end of all those infuriatingly incompatible battery charger cords that infest the world? A giant-sized pad could be on your garage floor to recharge your electric car at night. I almost feel moved to burst into song ....

Read more in an article from CNN, A cordless future for electricity.

On the bandwagon

After several months of passive membership I have begun playing with Twitter (see my Twitter feed in the right hand column, @alacre). Each year one social networking tool gets the full media spotlight and Twitter is the star of 2009 (Facebook was 2008 and Second Life was 2007). If the present media hype is any guide I'm probably one of the last people on earth to join up but you can't have an opinion unless you've actually tried using something.

The reason behind my hesitant approach is that once you start it's hard to set limits. My three blogs have become rather addictive and they're a bit like those wonderful Tamagotchi creatures that once inhabited people's cellphones; once you've got one you need to feed it regularly or it will die. I'm interested in following other people's tweets to get ideas and links but once you start following you soon feel the urge to start contributing! There are of course lots of tools that can gather all these channels together and I use Netvibes for all RSS feeds from news sites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many other clever widgets. Another nice tool for gathering all your feeds in a graphically attractive way is Seesmic.

The key is to integrate all the new communication channels. Back in the early nineties there were numerous e-mail tools which were mostly incompatible with each other. It took a few years before the world could agree on common principles and suddenly we could all communicate. It seems we're heading into a similar situation today. As I write this I have the following communication tools open: desk phone, cellphone, 2 e-mail accounts, Skype, Facebook and Twitter. Then there are several more channels that I use only seldom. All with different user names, passwords, addresses and so on.

Books in the iPod

In the previous entry I dreamed of a link-up between the Kindle and the iPod/iPhone and as if my magic came an article in the New York Times announcing a deal between Amazon and Apple making their e-books available to iPods. Still far from an open solution but at least a little bit of compatibility. However, I don't think I'll be reading War and Peace on my iPod any time soon.

At last - cellphone compatibility (maybe)

How many cellphone battery chargers do you have lying in drawers at home? Every time you buy a new model you need a new charger because no two models seem to use the same type of charger. You would think that since the manufacturers are able to invent such incredibly smart devices they could manage to develop a universal battery charger.

However there is hope. An article in The Guardian claims that mobile manufacturers have actually agreed to implementing a universal battery charger enabling us to use the same lead even if we change model. This is part of a wave of "green" measures announced at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona. Other new features will include devices with solar panels and devices made from recycled material.

How green is the net?

We often claim that using the net more will cut our carbon footprint. More e-meetings mean fewer flights and car journeys. There's no doubt that we can save enormous amounts of money and time by having smarter ways of meeting and collaborating.

But maybe we shouldn't be too smug here. Better not mention concepts like the paperless office - ever seen one? Despite everything being on the net we still print embarrassing amounts of unneccessary hard copies every day in every office I've ever been in. Then there's the question of all the equipment we throw away every couple of years. Perfectly good machines are being sent to the scrapheap after only a few years because the industry demands that we update regularly.

There's a new report from the British organisation JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) called Sustainable ICT in Further and Higher Education that deals with the environmental footprint of our computerised higher education sector. They estimate that in UK higher education alone there are nearly 1.5 million computers plus around 250,000 printers and a similar number of servers. The electricity bill for all these is substantial but the main worry is that all of these have fairly short useful lives before new software and capacity demands render them obsolete. Computer graveyards are overflowing.

The report looks at the problems and offers a variety of possible solutions. The thin-client/cloud computing model seems promising since this puts the applications in "the cloud" rather than on your hard drive and maybe we won't need to replace our terminals so often. We can learn to print out less, manage our storage space more actively (many servers are clogged up with useless and obsolete files) and find more ways of saving energy.

There are many excellent proposals here but it's a hard battle when the industry demands new products every month and make sure that whatever you buy today will be hopelessly out of date in a couple of years. The first wave of flat screen TVs are already turning up at the recycling plants.

Built-in obsolescence

Those wonderful market forces demand that we have to replace all electronic devices in our lives every few years to keep up with the accelerating gallop of technical development. This sad fact was once again made clear to me when I tried to find a replacement cartridge for our trusty old printer. It has worked flawlessly now for about 8-9 years and is still going strong. However I've now discovered that the print cartridge for it isn't in stock any more and as a result we'll have to dump the printer. What's more, a new printer costs about the same price as the cartridge would have cost had it still been available! So it's time to buy a new printer and reckon on it lasting a handfull of years at most.
Imagine now a world where we buy devices that can be upgraded over the net. The hardware is built to last (give me chrome fenders and leather upholstery!) and you pay to download all the upgrades you may need over the years. I admit it's tricky to download printing ink but I really hate to take perfectly functioning machines to the rubbish dump. What about the IT industry doing its bit for the environment and working towards net-based solutions rather than this hysterical production of billions of devices to replace the ones produced only last year. Just visit any major electronics store to see the overwhelming range of products these days.
Maybe a revamp of the old thin client principle with all the applications available on the net rather than sitting on your bulging hard-disc. Many are working in this direction so we can hope for more sanity in the future.
Farewell then old printer, let's hope we can be a bit smarter in the future.

Pictures at an exhibition

I enjoy art galleries and especially work from the past 100 years or so. I was walking around one the other day and I looked at some video art. Of course I began thinking about preservation. Paintings and sculpture can of course be preserved for hundreds of years for future generations to admire and study but what about film and modern video? If future archaeologists discover a video tape or a DVD how are they going to play them?
Today's artists and writers have a vast range of media by which to express themselves but how will it be preserved for future reference? If Shakespeare had written exclusively on the net there wouldn't be anything left of his work now. The collected letters of Wordsworth or Dickens are still available but who will ensure that the collected blogs or e-mails of today's writers are preserved? Many artists are doing very interesting work using net-based tools but such work will be transient, available only as long as the server is connected or the format becomes obsolete.
I read a great science fiction story as a kid about space explorers who land on Earth to find it uninhabited and in ruins, presumably after a nuclear war. They find the remains of human civilisation and most importantly a film. They take the film back to their own planet and scientists discover how to play it. After years of analysis and study they feel that they have a good idea of what life was once like on Earth. Only one thing baffled them. At the end of the film were four words they couldn't decipher .... "A Walt Disney Production".

Virtual worlds - waiting for take off

I attended an interesting seminar in Second Life yesterday. I've been to quite a lot of events there over the last year or two and still find it fascinating to see my avatar sitting with other avatars participating in a meeting while I sit at my RL desk drinking coffee. This one was about how business and the academic world in Norway were using SL and it struck me that SL seems to have reached a plateau after the explosive development of 2007. Plenty of companies, universities and other institutions working in there but it's still in its infancy really. When will virtual worlds become mainstream?
It's still a bit too exclusive. SL in particular requires client software, regular updates and most importantly a really good graphics card. I've already had 2 computers who couldn't cope with SL and several people I know have given up with SL when their computers started struggling. There are now several new virtual worlds on the market (Google's Lively, Vivaty and 3DXplorer) but all seem to have drawbacks and none are as massive and immersive as SL. The new ones work in your browser and are integrated to the web (great!) but restrict communication to text chat and have only pre-set environments (game set and match to SL).
Businesses in SL are testing the technology and waiting for a mass market which doesn't seem to be happening as fast as we had hoped for last year. Waiting for the killer application takes time and when it comes it's not often what you expected.
Look at SMS. Originally it was a rather basic and dull signalling function in GSM phones to enable operators to tell you that you had a voice mail message. It's not even so simple to use since you have to text everything on a tiny keypad with multiple clicks. The developers could never have imagined that SMS would take off the way it did and even today, when mobiles have every function under the sun, people still text SMS messages like never before.
Virtual worlds need to be linked to each other with servers all over the world as with the web. You create your avatar and can teleport to any other world. You need to have free, open worlds where anyone can meet anyone and anything can happen and you need other worlds where special rules apply and with restricted access and privacy (as on the web). Just now it's all rather fragmented and mainly for enthusiasts. But I'm probably just too impatient.

Digital preservation

Remember the original TV version of Mission Impossible? I always loved the start when Jim Phelps got his orders from a reel-to-reel tape recorder rounding off with the classic line "This tape will self destruct in five seconds" after which the tape magically went up in smoke. Self-destructing tapes are still not commonplace even today but we do have a problem with information that inexplicably disappears.

I've had several cases of files that I've stored on a USB memory stick that suddenly became corrupted and about as useful as a second-hand Mission Impossible tape recorder. My digital camera suffered a similar fate this summer when one day's photos became corrupted data overnight. Back to a favourite theme then; how long can you trust a memory stick to actually store what you put on it? How long will a CD or DVD last?

I read an fascinating article in Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish) about the growing concern about digital preservation. The problem is how we are going to preserve all the digital films, photos and documents on all the world's servers. According to one test around 40% of all DVD-R discs will be unreadable within 15 years and similar figures apply for many other storage forms. All archived material has to be reformatted regularly otherwise the next generation of computers will not be able to read them and just this task will be a full-time never-ending job for a lot of people. In contrast paper can be preserved for hundreds of years.

An interesting example was the BBC's project to produce a digital domesday book to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the first one. One million people contributed to this epic which was produced on a laser disc. Sadly 15 years later the material was unreadable because the technology which could read the files had become obsolete. Furthermore it costs $12,000 a year to preserve a digital movie and a mere $1,000 to keep a traditional film version in a suitable archive.

It's reassuring to read that there are now projects and organisations dedicated to trying to find solutions to this enormous problem. It would also be nice if the industry could cooperate by trying to ensure more compatibility between applications and especially backward compatibility. Otherwise we face losing vast amounts of information, documentation, culture and entertainment for ever.

The Swedish Centre for Long-term Digital Preservation is just one of many international groups working with this. There's also an EU project called CASPAR. Good luck to them!

Far from the Madden crowd

I must admit I'm a bit of a gaming enthusiast, especially sports games. I've been playing for ten years now though sadly without ever mastering any game I've ever tried; my finger coordination just isn't fast enough to cope with any game at advanced/professional level. Despite my lack of talent I keep hoping that some day I'll stumble upon some magic formula that will enable me to step up a level and play as well as the average 13 year old. I've tried most of the sports available; FIFA, NHL, NBA, Cricket and most recently Madden (American football).

EA Sports' Madden 09 is due for imminent release and that causes an enormous media hype especially in the States. Today I decided to order it and discovered to my horror that it won't be available for PC this year and the message is clear - if you want to play sports games in the future you'd better invest in Xbox or Play Station or you can forget it. Of course it's not too expensive to go out and buy a console and continue playing but I feel frustrated at the whole issue.

How many electronic boxes do I have to buy every year to keep up with development? What's the life expectancy of each of these boxes/formats/programs? We've got lots of boxes, enormous tangles of cables and other electronic equipment around the house but have chosen not to invest in a games console since the computers have so far filled that role. I'll probably be forced to fork out in the end but only under protest.

Think of all the music and films you have. Vinyl LPs, audio cassettes, CDs, mp3 files, VHS, DVDs, mini DV cassettes etc etc. All of them requiring different players and virtually no compatibility anywhere. I've managed to convert lots of music to mp3 but when will that become obsolete? At times like these I can understand how some of my more technophobe friends feel. Whatever you buy will be out of date a couple of months after you've bought it. It certainly keeps the wheels of commerce in motion but I do wish we could have a bit of stability for a while.

Proprietary solutions are the headache. Can't we try and find audio and video formats that can be played by all devices? Games that can be played on all devices? The answer is sadly predictable - companies earn more money by shutting out each other. Your Play Station game is just as useless without a Play Station console as the old Betamax video format (remember that?) was useless without a Betamax player. You pay your money and take your choice but tough luck if you bet on the wrong format.

Will I buy Madden 09? Not at present anyway and maybe not at all. Problem is I suspect that my desire to keep playing sports games will be greater than my futile protest at market forces.