GSM Scanner Project – Request For Comments – this looks like a project by enthusiastic but slightly clueless people, or, at least, people outside of the mobile phone industry.
If a radio station were a car crash, bad and wrong, but so so compelling. Includes facial exercises and a plea to a kidnapper and a retaliation to whoever posted that awful wasp joke.
…and if car crashes had an RSS feed (slightly disturbing myspace death list, they’re all car crashes or fights about drugs)
Todays revelation is that not everybody knows that the electricity companies use a Radio 4 sidechannel to broadcast metering information. I thought every techie knew that, but the only reference I managed to turn up in a(n admittedly brief) web search was AMSS – the data rate isn’t high, 46 *bits* per second.
Does anyone know any more about such channels, and what kind of information gets broadcast over them?
MOC Car factory – what do you do if you’ve got too many mindstorm lego sets?
I’d like to complain about your choir…but thats probably not in the spirit of it. Helsinki is particularly fabulous for the choral take on ‘the nokia tune’.
And if you’re in a band, do yourself a favour and make a better website than this, three layers of random flashing things with scrollies and links that don’t do what I was expecting.
“Creating word-of-mouth marketing”
This is an interesting book, written (or at least published) at the height of the dot.com fiasco it takes a look at the way some of the ‘new economy’ was marketing itself. There is an element of hubris to it, that this new way has eclipsed the old way of doing things.
There are a lot of good examples, including things like Trivial Pursuit, which although is something I quite hate (I have a head full of trivia, but its not the same kind of trivia they put into ‘mainstream’ games like that, pinout for 16450 anyone?) is also something that clearly had an incredible momentum behind its marketing, it got into a huge network of people who were interested in a fairly light socialable game which would not take too long and involed talking to each other.
There are also plenty of good ideas about how to get yourself noticed in a world of reducing attention spans and more noise.
Who should read this book? Anyone who is trying to get a message out to the world about what they’re offering, especially high tech things in the modern world. Our marketing department.
So much for feeling more organised this year – its my birthday this weekend and I haven’t gotten around to organising any kind of gathering, I would like you to help me celebrate. I was considering a museum visit during the day then onward to the remains of a board gaming session for the evening. Brooklands is quite tempting if anyone is interested in cars (I think they have planes too), or perhaps a visit to London during the day? But who is about and what would you prefer to do?
“The phone having various function such as neat and tidy design like a competent businessman, and voice recorder can provide you the advanced business competitive power besides refine senses, resulting in your successful business.”
…the machine, not the time.
Seems like it’ll work on the road (or rails, even). Though then pen keyboard could get quite tiresome quite quickly.
Peeling back the skin of the onion – why ToR isn’t as anonymous as it could be
Proving just how much fun you can have with some post-it notes and a Jaguar
The futures not so bright for anyone trying to sell advertising on mobile phones….
Its a long time since I’ve been to Whitby (I think I was last there while I was living in Tokyo).
This was a smaller affair, only a couple of hundred people at the Metropole. There were three nights arranged, 30th, 31st and 1st, with the highlight obviously being the 31st to see in the new year.
Now, most of you know I’m not much one for celebrating new year, I like to mark it and recognise it as a time to think afresh about how life is going but the celebration itself doesn’t have much interest for me – theres too much drinking and silliness for my liking, and I feel a bit like I’m bringing people down by not joining in.
evilmattikinz was teaching us Briscola on a 40 card deck while simonsatori left his (replica, I assume) firearm on the table giving our corner the air of an illegal drinking/gambling den of years passed.
The new year was seen in without major catastrophes and a fabulous time was had by all. Though somehow I was feeling a bit detached from it, the crowd has changed in the time I’ve been away, or maybe its really a different crowd where I was expecting it to be the same. For a start I didn’t actually know many people there, and anyway everyone appeared to be very coupled off, so they were there to have a pleasant middle class, middle aged time with their partner of choice trying to relive some of their wild youth in a safe environment. This worries me, since the environment is very different to that I knew only a couple of years ago. (I’m not sure I’ve really explained what I’m feeling properly here…and I’m aware this could be read as being negative, its not intended to be, more of a ‘this isn’t me’ feeling…best thing to do would be to talk to me about it next time you see me if you think I’m being critical, I can probably explain myself better in person).
Variously over the weekend we visited the abbey, watched the bridge open a couple of times, visited the basement of the Metropole (hardly the souterrain it was sold to us as, but quite a fascinating insight into the way the place works), walked on the beach, banquetted and avoided indoor minigolf.
Probably the closest thing to excitment was the following:
