Scrollable unrollable

February 11, 2007 at 8:07 pm · Filed under digital life

You’ve got to love this haven’t you?

This is the Readius PDA, a mobile PDA device to be launched in Italy later this year featuring, as you can see, the world’s first scrollable, unrollable digital screen.

The contrast on this is absolutely superb, so it can genuinely be used to read on the go – the clarity is said to be good enough for reading books.

But where does this lead us? Mobile computing is seen as the next great advance for e-Commerce as the ability for us to work or buy extends beyond the home or office. The difficulty, as ever, is getting a screen big enough and portable enough to make it worthwhile.

Time will tell for this unit. As a PDA, it’s interesting. As a full wifi enabled device with a mobile browser, this could well be the first step in enabling e-Commerce on the go.

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Themeing and Scheming

December 24, 2006 at 1:31 pm · Filed under digital life

The ammonite theme on this website lasted a few days then before boredom took hold and a new theme started to germinate.

The current look, entitled “Yosemite”, is based around the photo in the header that I took on honeymoon in July 05. Cleverly (and because the base code used here is K2), it’s all controlled by a subsidiary CSS sheet which makes it remarkably easy to flick between styles and to create afresh.

More details, when I’ve actually got any, can be found on my projects page.

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Wikiasari to rival Google?

December 23, 2006 at 6:46 pm · Filed under digital life

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the Wikipedia organisation, has announced plans to launch a search engine based on the same wiki technology.

Named Wikiasari (‘Wiki’ from the Hawaiian for quick, and ‘Asari’ from the Japanese for rummage), the service will be launched on Amazon.com first. It was first mooted under the Wikia name some time ago.
Personally, whilst I’m sure Mr Wales sees Wikiasari as a great opportunity to make a few million dollars of the back of his current not-for-profit companies, if Wikiasari is anything like the quality of the search on Wikipedia, then I can’t see people queueing up to use it. A search engine that fails to recognise “Jonathan” as being the same as “jonathan” is painful.

And named after the Japanese for rummage? When I rummage, it’s a rather uncoordinated search process with several shouts of :

Will this do, Hazel?

Will it make money? You bet. Will it rival Google? That I seriously doubt.

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last.fm, a music folksonomy

December 22, 2006 at 6:40 pm · Filed under digital life

Nearly three years ago, I was introduced to a neat iTunes plug-in called Audioscrobbler that sat in my MacOSX toolbar and quietly listened in to my musical tastes. It didn’t pass judgement, which was pleasing.

I’d forgotten that it was still installed until, quite by chance, I stumbled across an RSS feed that someone had set up on a wordpress blog. Great thinking thought I and tried to set up a copy. Sadly though, it appeared that audioscrobbler had stopped listening in September, recording a rather melancholy week in which Johnny Cash was my top musical artist.

last.fm is the successor although quite when it changed, I can’t tell. The program itself invites users to tag the music they’re listening so building an excellent database of what we’re all listening to and, importantly, what we all describe it as. With such tagging, personalised radio stations can be built using the last.fm software.

All I need to do now is to get the RSS feed to work properly. Clever – another excellent application of a folksonomy.

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