Sidingsound

A quick update on the weekend ahead: according to the friends we’re staying with, the area where we’ll be going may not have 3G network coverage (or at least not as much as I’m used to), and we won’t have any WiFi.

This means that whilst I should be able to get some Twitter and blog posts out (providing there’s at least GPRS or GSM data), I may have to wait a couple of days to upload any batches of photos (and more likely, any videos) I take while we’re away. Be sure to keep an eye on my Twitter feed and this blog for updates as I have them, and hopefully I’ll have more 3G access than I’m expecting to.

Posted by Wordmobi

This seems to be a time for following up on previous blog posts, so here’s another one “revisited”:

Back in May (when this blog was still run off Blogger), I wrote about how I’d really like to find a “hard” carrying case for my Apple wireless keyboard, which I use a lot with my Nokia N95 as an alternative to a laptop.

Basically, I haven’t been able to find one to date—I suspect my particular application for the keyboard isn’t a very common one—so at present I use the cardboard box which the keyboard came in, to protect the keyboard when it’s being carried in my gadget bag (and believe me, without protection, it would really get beaten up in there).

The box works, but I’d rather like a more elegant solution. The nearest I’ve found online is a padded “sleeve” case made especially to fit the Apple wireless keyboard, but nice though this is, it wouldn’t necessarily prevent the keys being pressed whilst the keyboard’s in the gadget bag, and I’d rather avoid this happening to save the keyboard’s batteries (and the N95 responding to unwanted key signals).

I’ve been thinking more about what I’d want in a hard case for the Apple keyboard, and here are a few of my ideas:

• The case’s dimensions should be quite close to that of the cardboard box which the keyboard came in, including the recess to accommodate the cylindrical part of the keyboard which holds the batteries and the power switch, and tilts the keys off the desktop.
• There should be some measure of foam rubber padding inside, if that can be done without increasing the case’s size much.
• I’d like to be able to use the keyboard inside the case (i.e. lift the lid, and it’s ready to go)—think of how a laptop works, and you’re on the right track.
• Related to the above point: if possible, the lid should be “angle-able” like a laptop’s screen, and I’d like to be able to place the N95 on the lid so that I can see it while controlling it with the keyboard. (In concept, this would be a bit like the phone holder on the Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth keyboard.)
• Definitely not essential, but a carry-handle might be useful, a bit like those you see on briefcases (and preferably smaller than those).

I wouldn’t really mind what material the case was made from, as long as it worked as set out above (and wasn’t liable to give me splinters or damage anything near it).

It’s at times like these that I wish I were more “handy” with DIY, software-coding and that sort of thing…

Posted by Wordmobi

I promise this shot was not a setup – we were out walking, and saw this little fellow on the path, just as you see here.

(This was mostly an excuse to try posting a photo directly to this blog via Pixelpipe—I probably won’t do this often, but at least it worked!)

For a few years now, I’ve had an idea in my head that I’m sure someone has already worked out long before me, and that I would really like to see in the real world.

In short, it’s a modern variant on a frequent feature of those “home of the future” predictions we saw so often in the 1950s and 1960s: where the man of the house (and it invariably seemed to be a man) would head for the door to leave for work, and pick up his newspaper—which would be personalised specifically for him.

Leaving aside the absence of the six-foot-tall lumbering Robbie the Robot lookalike which (more often than not) would be the one handing over the newspaper in this scenario, in 2009 the grounding technology has existed for a personalised newspaper for some years. We use RSS feeds and aggregators all the time (well, OK, I do), and it’s rare to find a major media outlet which doesn’t provide information this way.

Moreover, Web “portal” sites have long provided an “at-a-glance”, personalised summaries of various information sources (iGoogle, My Yahoo! and Facebook are three which spring instantly to mind), and they have their place. However, these are all (unsurprisingly) formatted for the screen, and if you were to try and print out the portal page (whether on paper, or to an “eBook” format for a Kindle, Sony eReader, etc.), it would be very unlikely to fit on one side, and certainly wouldn’t look optimised for print.

Here’s my idea (and again, I stress that I believe someone has already done this, or something similar):

A Web service (or standalone PC/Mac application), which for sake of argument, let’s call “The Daily Me”. It would perform a similar task to a Web portal, by pulling in current information from RSS feeds and other sources, and then formatting it and laying it out as a print document in the style of a newspaper front page (or maybe a magazine), before exporting this document as a PDF for you to print, load onto your iPhone/ebook reader/whatever, etc.

To give you an idea of the kind of information I would have on my “Daily Me”:

• a couple of headlines from a couple of news sources (if there’s enough room on the page);
• Weather for my home town;
• Travel updates (if relevant);
• A selection of Twitter updates (perhaps the ones which came in while I was asleep);
• any Facebook updates/reminders from the last twelve hours;
• calendar events for the day, and reminders of others a few days in advance (e.g. birthdays/anniversaries);
• perhaps a picture of the day (e.g. from Flickr), and/or a daily cartoon (I like Dilbert myself);
• a Bible verse and a quote or two.

Perhaps the application could include various “themes”, so that you could have your “Daily Me” look like a businesslike broadsheet, an arty magazine, a tech blog, or whatever took your fancy. (I should mention that an enterprising group of hardware tinkerers has been working on a similar concept for some time, but via a very different route: using old receipt microprinters to print off small daily “digests” of information sourced from the Internet. The idea above partly came from this, but I’m thinking of something a little more… shall we say, ‘ornate’?)

I don’t know quite how I would find a service like this, assuming my suspicion is correct and someone else thought of the idea first, but I’ll let you know if I find one.

(Update: Before I’d even published the above, my instincts appeared to have been confirmed, when I Googled for “rss daily newspaper”, and came across FeedJournal. On the face of it, the service looks like it offers most of what I wrote about, including choice of paper size. Upon closer inspection, though, the site is basically generating a mini custom newspaper (i.e. multiple pages, except populated by the news and blog content you specify), rather than the single-page day-at-a-glance document I’m thinking of.

I may look further into FeedJournal anyway, as it looks promising, even if it may not quite be the concept I had in mind.)