Tag: duncan geere
Cod eats phone, fisherman catches cod, phone returned to owner
Andrew Cheatle is a lucky chap. He lost his phone on a beach a couple of weeks back and assumed it’d been lost at sea. On a shopping trip to replace the handset, however, his girlfriend’s phone rang. She handed it to him, saying it was some guy going on about a cod.
On the end of the line was fisherman Glen Kerley. He’d found a handset in the belly of a cod, and figured he’d try and return it to its owner. After going to meet him, he was reunited with his (rather battered) handset, and after it dried out, he was amazed to find it worked perfectly.
So what was the handset that survived a week in a fish? I wasn’t sure, so I consulted the masses on Twitter. The wonderful @lovelychaos was first with the answer – it’s a Nokia 1600 – a handset designed for use in developing countries. Well, I guess it’s proved its worth!
BBC teams up with ITV and BT for "Project Canvas"
Following the utter failure of Kangaroo, BBC and ITV bosses have put their heads together and come up with a different strategy. They’re launching a public consultation on a proposal for a IPTV service that they’re calling Project Canvas.
There’s not a whole lot of detail available yet, but it appears that the companies want to put together a set-top box service that’ll deliver television (in HD), a PVR service, internet access (to YouTube and other sites), and some sort of electronic program guide to it all. Sounds messy, but then so did Kangaroo.
The partners hope that it would cost in the region of £100-200 for the consumer, and a 2010 launch is aimed at. The BBC says it’ll contribute £6 million to the project over the next five years, out of a total of £16.6 million that it’ll need.
Don’t know about you, but I’m perfectly happy just plugging in a PC to my TV and using that to watch YouTube or iPlayer as necessary. Why would I need a set-top-box to do the same thing? As with many things, I think the key will be in the implementation. If it’s done as well as iPlayer, it’ll be wonderful. If not, it’ll be an expensive waste of time.
Microsoft announces improvements to Xbox Live
Microsoft today announced plans to extend the services offered on Xbox live, pushing the console even further from being a pure games machine to include movies too. There’s also plenty of content for existing games, and a gameshow.
Starting with the movies, Microsoft has done a deal with NBC Universal, which means that a limited selection of films will be offered for people to buy using Microsoft points, in both standard and high definition. Average price is £3 – £5, depending on which format you want, and how new the film is.
Then there’s a selection of bonus content for a variety of games. More content for Gears of War 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Fallout 3, Tomb Raider, Fable 2, Lips, Rock Band, Guitar Hero World Tour and Scene It will be available, all of which will be exclusive to the Xbox 360 platform.
Lastly, there’s going to be some sort of weird quiz show thing called 1 vs 100. Over to Microsoft to explain it: “a completely exclusive, completely interactive television quiz show game giving gamers the chance to compete against each other and win real prizes”. Is anyone even remotely excited about that?
Overall, it’s a decent upgrade to the system and a ‘thankyou’ to owners, but I don’t think it’s going to be selling any new consoles over this. Especially when the company is banning people who identify themselves as a lesbian.
Nuke your enemies with a mashup
I hate Gary Cutlack. I don’t actually hate him, but for the purposes of this article, let’s assume I do. Let’s assume I wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on his head, as in the picture to the right. How would I go about doing that?
I could enter into shady negotiations with North Korea or a breakaway Russian republic, but it’s much quicker and easier to just use this Google Maps mashup instead. Simply search for your target, pick a bomb, and you can see exactly how far away people will be affected by the thermal effects of the explosion.
Interestingly, if someone nuked Covent Garden, the inhabitants of Regents Park would be fine. Well, fine until the fallout began, anyway. An asteroid strike, on the other hand, would annihilate everything down to the Sahara. Ouch.
Who would you nuke and why? Let us know in the comments.
(via io9)
O2 sells 1 million iPhones in the UK
O2 has just released a statement on its Digital News Centre announcing that more than a million iPhones have now been sold in the UK. I can attest to that personally, I was in a pub the other day, and the three other table inhabitants ALL had iPhones. I would have felt left out if I didn’t love my N95 so much.
The company’s also announced that it’s signed up 1.1 million new customers over the last year, with 390,000 of those joining O2 between Oct and Dec 08. That’s a lot. Good work, O2.
RUMOUR: PSP2 won't use UMDs, and will be out in the Autumn
Didn’t Acclaim’s chief creative officer, David Perry, pay any attention to the World War II aphorism “Loose Lips Sink Ships”? He’s been mouthing off about the PSP. He reckons it’ll come out in the autumn:
“I spoke to a developer who is working on it right now, I know this developer is already working on it, so that means they have a prototype. That would sound like a fall release to me.”
Also of interest is that the device would be free of the PSP’s proprietary UMD disc format, and would instead rely on digital downloads and connectivity with your PC for games. There’ll be space for a memory card, though, so retailers could sell games pre-loaded onto those.
It’s expected that all current PSP titles would appear on an online store, much like Nintendo’s download channel. The idea makes a lot of sense, but consoles are primarily marketed by their games. What will happen if Sony lose all the shelf space currently dedicated to the PSP?
(via Kotaku)
Nintendo releases 'Pro' Wii controller
Nintendo’s got a new controller for the Wii, in addition to the Wii Remote/Nunchuk combo and the ‘classic’ controller, used to play retro console games. It’s called the “Pro”.
It rejects some of the differences between the classic controller and most other gamepads, adding back in the ‘legs’ and moving the wire back to the top of the device. The shoulder buttons are also made more accessible, and the whole thing’s put on some weight, too.
Unfortunately, there’s “no plans” for a European release, let alone any pricing. I wouldn’t chuck away your classic controllers just yet.
(via Eurogamer)
The Revolution Will Be Streaming
This is my 1,000th post on Tech Digest. My first was about Robopong, and I have no idea what my last will be about, but this one’s about the economics of free music, which is a subject that I’ve touched on many times while writing here. It’s about how a free download turned me into a massive fan of a band.
Yesterday, personalized streaming radio site Last.fm announced on Twitter, that its free downloads page was back. It’s a page, which can be found here, that lists a bunch of tracks that bands have decided to give away, for promotional purposes. According to the old thinking prevalent among record companies, a download = a lost sale. In this case, a download led me to a whole lot more than that.
The download in question is a song called, wonderfully, “The Revolution Will Be Streaming“, a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. It’s by an American post-rock band that I hadn’t previously heard of called Saxon Shore.
My eye was caught by the title, and I downloaded it on the off-chance I’d like it. I did like it, a lot, and after a few listens, I headed over to Amazon. The band’s got a few tracks available on the download store, but the album featuring “The Revolution Will Be Streaming”, “The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore” wasn’t. So I bought the CD instead. On import.
Because the album has to be sent over from the states, I’m looking at a couple of weeks before I can listen to the damn thing. So I checked Spotify. The band isn’t there, sadly. I realized that when it does arrive, all I’m going to do is rip it to high-bitrate MP3 and put in on my Zune, so my next step was to head right over to the Pirate Bay and see if I could find it.
Turns out that the site doesn’t (at the time of searching, anyway). Luckily I’ve got other sources, so I grabbed it from another tracker and this morning on the bus on the way into the office, a bizarre and unexpected diversion around the back roads of King’s Cross was made all the more lovely by Saxon Shore’s wonderful album.
The band doesn’t seem to be touring at the moment, but when they show up in London, I’ll definitely be there and I’m fully intending to drag down as many of my post-rock-friendly friends as I can. I might well buy a t-shirt, and when I’ve fully digested this album, if I’m still loving it then there’s a good chance I’ll buy some of the older ones.
Now, I’m not pretending that there’s millions of people doing what I did above. Nor am I pretending that this would work just as well if every band in the world started giving away tracks. But if Saxon Shore hadn’t given away that song, then they wouldn’t have gained me as a fan. That’s why free music works, why music blogs are the best way to find new bands, and why free music isn’t the devaluing of art that some claim it is.
I welcome your comments and thoughts on the above, but before you do, go listen to the track in question. You can stream it from Last.fm here. The revolution will indeed be streaming, it would appear.
Amazon makes a terabyte of public data available on its servers
Amazon’s got quite a bit of spare server capacity. In its goal to become the world’s top online retailer, it bought so many servers that it’s now also running a cloud computing business on the side that’s actually rather cheap.
Last night, Amazon announced on its Amazon Web Services blog that it would be making a terabyte of public data available to its cloud computing users, for them to do whatever they like with.
The data includes stats from the US bureau of transportation , an *entire* dump of Wikipedia, the DBPedia knowledgebase (which includes info on 2.6 million people, places, films, albums and companies) and all publicly available DNA sequences, including the entire human genome.
There’s also a bunch of other stuff, and it’s all being made available at lightning-fast speed in machine-readable databases to Amazon’s cloud computing customers. It’ll take a while for the internet to really get to grips with this stuff and use it, but anything that’s about freeing up data and information is wholly supported around here. Three cheers for Amazon.
What would you do with the data? Work out why your trains are always late? Work out how many degrees of link separation a random Wikipedia article has to another? Use the human genome to create a clone army and take over the world? Share your ideas in the comments, and make me your second-in-command as world leader.
Amazon Blog (via ReadWriteWeb)
Guardian finally launches mobile website
I read newspapers on the bus in the morning. Not on paper – that’s expensive, wasteful and a bit of a hassle – but on my humble Nokia N95. I start with mobile Techmeme, then hit up Google News for the big stories, then over to the New York Times, because their mobile site is one of the best there is.
If I was forced to pick up a paper copy of the newspaper, it’d probably be the Guardian. Their website’s second only to the BBC for me, when it comes to online, too. That’s why it’d be nice to get the paper’s editorial perspective on my phone. And now I can!
Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement, actually. I could if I was on Three. Guardian News & Media has launched an initial version of its mobile site on the Planet 3 portal. Following a period of exclusivity with 3, and then another period of exclusivity with Vodafone, the general public will finally get access later this year.
It won’t be a moment too soon. Although phones are starting to get better at displaying the full internet, it doesn’t take much to slim down your page load times and shrink the photos, and many people won’t have full-internet capable phones for a few years.
What’s your experiences with mainstream media on mobile devices? Share them in the comments.
