Details about Podcast audio manipulation using Audacity [from: del.icio.us]

Note to self.
http://www.musicplasma.com/
http://www.music-map.com

peer to peer broadcasting of sound and video compatible with shoutcast [from: del.icio.us]

20 years old today.



It's sad that the promise of battery powered personal mobility is really no nearer than it was then.

Now what I really want is a recumbent bicycle with a battery powered booster engine. In can be had but for £1500 upwards. [from: JB Ecademy]

Rather cool, nerdy comic. Thanks SuW. [from: del.icio.us]

Distributed BitTorrent [from: del.icio.us]

Oi!

You lot out there on the web.

Stop writing so much!

I can't keep up.

Just heard of this.

Text the word "DONATE" to 83321. The whole £1.50 is donated to the DEC disaster fund.

Do it now.

Tell others. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yay! lightweight decentralized identity [from: del.icio.us]

jbond posted a photo:

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

Mike Southon. First to lunch.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

Between sessions

[from: Flikr Photos]

An open letter to my good friend, the Blogosphere's resident Cigar expert.

As a fellow connoisseur of the noble leaf, Nicotiana, I wonder if I could prevail upon you for some advice. Early in my smoking career I developed quite a taste for Turkish tobaccos. So much so in fact that on an overland journey to the east, I reduced my co-driver to apoplexy by working my way through 5 large duty free tins of The Balkan Sobranie consumed in a rustic Bavarian pipe. My normal smoking pleasure since then has been Camels but sadly, their “subtle blend of Turkish and Domestic tobaccos” is not what it once was. Both thoughts for my health and consideration for others, compels me to descend to the infernal “Light” variety rather than the full strength untipped of my youth. And I feel sure that Messrs R.J.Reynolds, the proprieters, no longer pick the finest Latakia and Perique leaf but rather use the sweepings from the floor as often as not.

To whit, the point. For all these long years I have been searching for a supplier of a turkish, virginian blend of hand rolling tobacco, or custom “cigarettes” made from same, but sadly without success. My inquiries in various purveyors of tobacco products have been rebuffed with either blank stares or mutterings to their partners of “stuck up git, innit”. I confess I have been perplexed that the elegant (and fragrant) establishments I remember with their rows of humidors and pipe displays seem to have been displaced by some combination news agent and toy store so perhaps I am in the wrong place.

Many, many years ago I did try the Tobacco Emporium in Burlington Arcade (now a shoe shop) but I suspect that my attire prevented an honest answer. Though I felt that I cut quite a dash in my ripped jeans, combat jacket and woolly hat, I understand now that this was not quite the right approach even if the staff in nearby Charbonnel and Walker were too polite to comment. Ah the Foolishness of Youth! Dunhills produced a similar reponse, but then I have always found rather suspect their own devotion to their brand. They may be in St James, but they have an air of the Nouveau Riche about them quite unlike say Locks, the hatters.

As I write this, it has occurred to me that perhaps the answer is to seek out Sobranie Black Russians (https://www dot ipcvision.com/page05/lux-cig-01.htm) or even (god forbid, I have no wish to appear as some consumptive poet) Sobranie Cocktails but I have heard a rumour that these were discontinued some time ago. I certainly haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since dear Aunt Mildred’s funeral, of which the least said the better, a decade ago.

So you see my dilemma? My addiction demands to be fed, but I am unable to find a ready supply of a product to feed it that will both satisfy me and enhance my standing among my peers. I live in hope that you can provide me with some pointers.

I remain, sir, as I began,
your most obedient servant.

No sooner do I write my blog about SMS trees and disaster warning systems than this appears:-
ChiensSansFrontiers: ARC - Alert Retrieval Cache via BoingBoing.

Brilliant.

Now here's a challenge. I've got really close to recreating the call to Google AdSense Preview for IE in Firefox. The Google Adsense preview tool depends on some embedded javascript which accesses a variable external.menuArguments.document. I figured out how to create a new window and add an objt to it "external" with a variable menuArguments which is of type Window set to a copy of the current window. But then I got stuck because Google's javascript isn't valid in the Firefox javascript runtime.

Hey ho.

[from: del.icio.us]

What happened to my favourite Del.icio.us add on? Nutr.icio.us feels like it's been hijacked by a No-IP pop under and it's now showing an HTTP Auth demand from www.lifeofexile.com?

Why do Blogs use a calendar mechanism for navigating the archives? It sucks!

It's fair enough to have this as a secondary mechanism, but what's actually needed is better search combined with straight forward VCR controls.

The recent horrific Tsunami disaster has highlighted the failure of centralised early warning systems. It seems that there were people in all the countries involved who knew what was coming but there ws no mechanism for getting the word out. So here's a small proposal.

Combine Smart Mobbing based on SMS trees with one-to-many SMS services like TXTMob with a central disaster management system running 24/7. Concerned individuals with a cellphone would sign up to the service and agree that if they received an alert, they would forward it to their address book. And if they became aware of a disaster they would alert the central management system.

So for example, the system would work like this. People like the Earthquake monitoring agencies would have a hot line through to central control. They would report a best guess of the impact and geographical spread. The central control would craft an SMS message and target the signed up individuals in that region. Each of them would then forward the SMS to their contact list. Within minutes and with very few hops, the local cellphone population in that area would all have been alerted. Each of them decides what to do next, whether it's run from the beach or if they're in the local government systems begin disaster control processes.

Rather than make the system completely decentralised and automated, I think there has to be a central agency that verifies and decides whether to launch the system to avoid the dangers of crying wolf. The point here is that we wouldn't need a copy of the old style Pacific Tsunami warning system or for a huge buy in from governments round the world. We can use existing cheap technology and a minimal central bureaucracy and decentralise the rest out to ordinary people.

I've been thinking about what a PDA might look like. The inspiration came from Google. If you are signed up to AdSense then you can get the AdSense Preview tool. This adds a right click option to the IE popup menu. When you choose this you get popup with the top 10 Ads for that page and from there you can get a list of the URLs that you would get if you clicked in the Ads. It would be comparatively trivial to put a few buttons against each one that said "Show this", "Like this", "Ban this" in order to adjust the Ads which appear on your own site. If you saw an Ad on someone else's site that you wanted on yours, it would only be three clicks to tell the Ad Agency to do this.

As an aside there really should be a version of this for Firefox. If Google won't do it, since it's all http driven, I bet some third party could build a Firefox extension that copied it.