A Consuming Experience

Google online calculator and converter

2008-05-10T23:18:00.001+01:00

Did you know Google's search page includes an online calculator & converter? One of my very IT literate friends didn't know this trick, so I thought I'd post this tip. In the standard Google search box, if you type in a calculation then hit enter or Search, it'll actually do the calculation online for you, and provide the answer where you'd normally get search results displayed. Use * for multiply, / for divide, and +, - and brackets in the usual way, then Search to see the results (more...

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Faster searching in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera

2008-05-10T23:10:00.005+01:00

Speed tip: if you're a faster PC go go keyboard person like me and use Internet Explorer, try installing this speedup searching hack for Internet Explorer, for quicker access to Google. I use Ctrl-l to call up the address bar then type g then space then my search, for very quick results (or you can just click in the address bar then type the keyword for the site you want to search, space, then the search term, if you prefer). So I use w for searching Wikipedia without having to go to that site...

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Lessig recording: Corruption 2.0 - the next problem technology must solve

2008-05-07T08:28:00.005+01:00

Recording of talk by Prof Lawrence Lessig at the Institution of Engineering & Technology, London for the Society for Computers & Law (free download under a Creative Commons licence, of course!) - just click the arrow to play it online: Prof. Lessig on Corruption 2.0 (see the main page with links to the intro speech etc): "In this lecture, Professor Lessig builds upon the work of Oxford Professor Jonathan Zittrain to identify a critical dynamic in policy making affecting the Internet,...

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Dr Sophie Kain: On Being a Geek,The Apprentice & Sir Alan Sugar (London Geek & Girl Geek Dinner 26 April 2008)

2008-05-04T23:51:00.001+01:00

I've posted the full video of this talk, given at the joint London Geek Dinner & London Girl Geek Dinner of 26 April 2008, on the Girlygeekdom blog (main video on Blip) - but here's a short excerpt, just for fans of reality TV show The Apprentice, of the provocative bit where Sophie Kain, as she puts it, "slags off" Sir Alan Sugar! More seriously, the extract is on whether it's easier for geeks to learn business than for business people to learn geek. No prizes for guessing what her view...

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Zittrain "The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It" book & download

2008-05-04T19:16:00.003+01:00

Jonathan Zittrain virtually needs no introduction: world-renowned expert and visionary on the internet and the law / society, professor at Oxford's Oxford Internet Institute and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, his book "The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It" just came out on 1 May. I was lucky enough to be at the book launch in London, chaired by ORG head Becky Hogge, last week at the RSA. His lively, witty and informative talk at the launch was...

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Funny silly ad

2008-05-04T19:08:00.000+01:00

Just saw this ad in a MicroAnvika pullout in T3 magazine, the gadget mag I read in spite of their ridiculous attitude to women. The last sentence made me laugh. The claim it so makes breathlessly is certainly correct, strictly speaking. But it scares me that they think it would actually impress people who read it. Maybe they're targeting the Dumb Britain crowd. I hope... Now what would really impress me is a scanner that's over 100% accurate: automatically paste the text into the right spot...

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Blogger scheduled posts: postpone or delay blog post to future date

2008-05-02T17:44:00.002+01:00

Blogger have, as they earlier heralded, finally rolled out the ability for Blogger users to post-date their posts, i.e. write a post and then schedule it for publishing at a future date and time of your choosing. The ability to postpone or delay blog posts written in advance has been in demand for years. This facility is great for holidays, spacing out your blog posts more evenly over the week, etc. (I admit I don't use it much myself, I'm too paranoid about my post having content that may be...

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Get & review a free Penguin Classic book

2008-05-02T15:45:00.000+01:00

Thought I'd blog this fast in case all the books go... you can register on the Blog a Penguin Classic site and if you're fast enough you will get sent a free Penguin Classic book to review. Titles are sent out at random. In return you have to post a review of the book on the Blog a Penguin Classic site within 6 weeks after you receive it. Fair enough! It's a simple and brilliant idea. Kudos to whoever thought it up at Penguin or their marketing company. What a superb way to combine old and...

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Why the Asus Eee is flying off the shelves

2008-04-29T21:20:00.001+01:00

In the market for a portable computer? On the left - a Sony Vaio laptop computer. Yours for only £1599. On the right - an Asus Eee notebook computer. A penny under £200 (!) - for the 2GB version; the 4GB is a shade under £250. No wonder Asus can barely make enough Eees to meet the demand... Tags: Sony Vaio, Asus Eee, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience

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3 mobile broadband: Huawei E169G HDSPA, E220 USB modems review - first impressions

2008-04-23T10:28:00.005+01:00

Thanks to 3mobilebuzz I have been testing 3's new Huawei E169G high speed mobile broadband USB dongle for portable computers on a short term free trial of 3's mobile broadband service. Here's a pic of what you get in the box: You remove the USIM card (like a SIM card for mobile phones) from the plastic card and bung it into a removable USIM holder in the stick. Remove the end cap and insert the dongle into a spare USB port (there's a short USB cable too if your port's in an awkward place)....

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Get free online music, references at home by joining library

2008-04-22T20:16:00.001+01:00

Maybe I'm behind, but I've just found out that members of certain London libraries, like City of London or City of Westminster, can have free access, for non-commercial use, from any computer - including their home computer (not just library computers) - to a wide range of useful online material or resources which have been subscribed to and paid for by the library / local authority, including: music, which you can select to stream to your browser over the Internet, with player controls (I...

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BarCamp London dim sum challenge

2008-04-21T08:46:00.005+01:00

Are you going to be poised at your computer at 11 am on Thursday 24 April? If so, please do me a favour - sign me up for BarCampLondon4, and I'll not only be eternally grateful but I'll also buy you a dim sum or other lunch, tea & cakes, or drinks, as you prefer. (My name you know, my email you'll know from my sidebar.) The downside - it'll have to be with me. But I think you already knew that... Is this against the rules? I don't know, but what I do know is that for popular BarCamps like...

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Other people's feeds, YOUR liability risk; and linking risks

2008-04-20T23:36:00.002+01:00

If you show content from other sites' feeds in the body or sidebar of your blog or website, you could get sued for their content, at least in France. A recent case there is, it seems, the first ever instance in the world of a court holding a site responsible for someone else's RSS feed content. This is a seriously bad development in my view. Lots of people display content from other sites' RSS feeds on their own web sites, for interest or for convenience, or because they think it's helpful for...

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Windows Vista source code (funny, especially for non-Windows users!)

2008-04-12T17:04:00.001+01:00

With thanks to Azyure, this very funny purported Microsoft Windows Vista "code extract" - originally posted on PC World New Zealand's Linux-focused Tux Love blog (read their post, excellent!), via MyLox blog. Non-programmers, don't be fazed - it may look like code at first, but just persevere and read it through! (I hope that PC World won't have a problem with the direct link to the pic but if they do please let me know and I'll remove it.) I'd add that I'm not using Vista yet, and when I...

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How to make BBC News site easier to read

2008-04-11T00:10:00.001+01:00

I'm a big fan of the BBC, but recently they revamped their site so that the text on the BBC News pages is now grey instead of black: I find that very hard to read, in fact after a few paragraphs I feel like my eyesight is going. (Other pages on their site, e.g. the BBC blogs, are I find easier to read, maybe because of the dark sidebars, or the spacing between lines - whatever the reason, it feels like there's greater contrast between the text and its background). I find this particular...

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OpenID: intro & howto for non-techies

2008-04-04T03:30:00.004+01:00

This is an introductory guide / tutorial on the OpenID online identity management system, which is increasingly topical - e.g. internet giant Yahoo! recently announced its official support for OpenID, on 17 January 2008, and started a public beta trial of its "Yahoo ID" service at the end of January. OpenID is also one of the main planks of the DataPortability movement (see this short video on DataPortability, and this longer DataPortability video, and DataPortability discussion). As with my...

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One million unique visitors today!

2008-04-03T16:58:00.001+01:00

Wow, I can't quite believe it. With many thanks to Kirk for the heads up - that dear man keeps a better eye on my stats than I do! - this blog has actually hit 1 million unique visitors today. That's one million people who've stopped by since I started A Consuming Experience way back in late 2004. Thank you all for reading, and I hope this blog continues to be useful, fun and interesting to you. I should thank the Googlebot too, as most of my visitors seem to be from Google rather than...

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Report: what consumers want from comms technology

2008-03-31T10:16:00.005+01:00

The Ofcom Consumer Panel's recent research report "Switched on: an exploration of Britain's tech savvy consumers" (PDF) (see also their 27 March 2008 news release), conducted for the Panel by Sparkler, is a good summary of what consumers want from communications technologies like mobile phones or the Internet, and indeed its conclusions could be applied to any technology. It's an interesting read - very clearly written, and the conclusions are I think pretty obvious to consumers, but it's...

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"Strictly youth dancing - ministers join 'Strictly' stars and Royal Ballet to boost youth dance", pah

2008-03-29T17:31:00.000Z

When I saw the above Dept of Culture press release headline (it was issued a while back, I'm slow!), first my mind boggled, then I got angry. The initial image which that line conjured up in my mind's eye was of British ministers desperately trying to be hip, awkwardly trying their hand, or rather shuffling feet, at joining the "yoofs" in dance - and it wasn't a pretty picture. Even if mildly amusing. Then, I got annoyed. Talk about making Dumb Britain worse. Why aren't they putting as much...

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Free sound samples: OLPC, Freesound

2008-03-28T22:21:00.001Z

Music & sound clips donated for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project are available for everyone to download, use and re-mix etc, from the sound samples page of the OLPC wiki (via the Creative Commons blog). (On the OLPC itself see this OLPC video.) There are over 6,500 samples (over 8.5GB) available currently, including sound effects, background sounds or "soundscapes" whether from nature or cities like rain, trains, wolf whistles etc, loops, grooves, drum sounds, voices and all manner...

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Earliest voice recording causes Radio 4 giggles

2008-03-28T16:03:00.005Z

After a studio colleague said in her earpiece that the earliest known voice recording (from 1860, of someone singing "Clair de la Lune") sounded like "a bee buzzing in a bottle", BBC Radio 4 newsreader Charlotte Green completely lost it and collapsed into a fit of giggles live on the Today programme. Absolutely hilarious, I love "corpsing" stuff! Her hysterics were so popular with listeners that the BBC reported it officially on their news site and even the Times picked it up. You can hear...

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Convert Word doc or Webpage to wiki

2008-03-24T23:26:00.003Z

To convert a Microsoft Word .doc document or a Webpage to wiki markup format or wikitext (the special syntax or code used to format a page when editing a wiki), the conversion tools linked to on Wikipedia are the easiest way, though I've found that some tools are easier than others, and various links there are broken. For me, the two ways which worked the best were: Convert Word to HTML via Gmail, then convert the Webpage's HTML to wikitext with Emiliano Bruni's excellent HTML2Wiki Converter...

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Electronics manufacturers' green credentials

2008-03-23T16:52:00.002Z

Here's the latest (7th version) Greenpeace "Guide to Greener Electronics" league table (full PDF scorecard report), which "ranks the 18 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals and recycling." As you can see, Toshiba and Samsung are leading the pack towards the green; the next group is Nokia, Sony, Lenovo and Dell, with the next being Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics, Apple, FSC and HP. Motorola are just...

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Feedburner: new help group, Community Experts

2008-03-23T16:35:00.001Z

Feed magicians Feedburner moved their users' help group from their old forums to Google Groups earlier this week: see the Feedburner Google Groups. (Newcomers to feeds may be interested to read my introduction to feeds for beginners especially if the terms below just seem like alphabet soup.) That move was inevitable following their acquisition by Google a few months ago. What wasn't inevitable was that they've actually asked me, Improbulus, to be one of the Feedburner Community Experts on...

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Over the Air event: for mobile / wireless developers, designers, hackers and entrepreneurs

2008-03-10T22:31:00.001Z

Looks like signup is open for the Over the Air event on Friday & Saturday 4-5 April 2008 in London, organised by Mobile Monday London - it's free, sponsored by BBC Mobile (more on Over the Air, and schedule). The Over the Air blog describes it thus: "Bringing together developers, designers, hackers and entrepreneurs to explorer the potential exciting future of wireless and mobile devices/applications... Over the Air is unlike any other event you have ever been to. Part conference, part...

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