Every summer, Mr. X does what he calls “The Gathering of the Flashlights.” A leftover habit from our Philadelphia Folk Festival and camping days, The Gathering is Mr. X’s ritual of collecting all the flashlights in the house and replacing batteries and bulbs.
Well, National Geographic emailed me an ad for the gem pictured above - the National Geographic Self-powered Emergency Radio. What self-respecting engineer wouldn’t want a flashlight with a hand-crank? Let’s face it, folks, Green is more than a bumper sticker. 90-seconds of cranking gives an hour worth of battery for the radio. No fumbling in drawers in the dark trying to find the right size battery.
Ok, so National Geographic is more impressed with the radio aspect. And it’s a cell phone battery charger. It even gets international shortwave radio bands.
Oh, get this - it also has a red flashing beacon and a siren.
Since I got a data plan with the new cell phone I’m doing a lot more web browsing. My last cell phone had wireless so I didn’t bother with the data plan. Hmmm, it had a touchscreen too, and Windows Pocket PC rather than Windows Mobile phone edition. And was the size of a brick instead of the size of a candy bar.
Think about it: there are **scads** of middle-aged women driving around with handhelds looking to steal your bandwidth. Some of them want your files, too. Lock that wireless router, folks, especially if you share the C: drive on your home network.
Anyway, I’ve been spending more time on the mobile web and, well, sometimes you just have to say WTF. I got a .mobi domain and am distilling the entire planet into it. Sort of.
I’ll be adding content over the next couple of weeks. I’m evaluating chat sites now. This one looks ok.
Bipolar Planet® Chat
Chat with bipolars from around the world right from your mobile phone. This site is public and unmoderated. For more privacy, sign up for the email list instead.
I’ve been playing with the .mobi stuff and discovered that 2D codes have a use other than to count packs of cigarettes. I can put my web site URL into a QR-Code or a ShotCode, print it on stickers, and stick the stickers to things. Then folks can point their cellphone cameras at the code block and the URL will show up in their phone as a clickable hypertext link.
I was thinking I could sell my bumperstickers that way, put the QR-Code on them.
There is a nice java app for cell phones at QuickMark Mobile Barcode - Web Site QuickMark. This app also reads SemaCode. Some fun! QR-Code even has error correction built in so that if the code block is torn or partly obliterated the app can still get the information out of it.
Another 2D code is ShotCode. This one is targeted for advertisers. You have the option of logging all kinds of information about the cell phone and user.
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
Take a giggly cheerleader. Give her a Cinderella driver’s license, an SUV and a cell phone,. Then throw four more cheerleaders in the vehicle with her. What do you get? Well, moms and dads, you get a fiery crash.
My cell phone account gives me a complete list of all calls and text messages sent and received from the three phones on the account. The girl’s parents had to have a clue. I won’t even go into the utter foolishness of putting a new driver at the wheel of an large inertial mass. “We got it for safety,” they’ll tell you. Well, the safest vehicle is one that has an attentive driver.
Santa wasn’t very good to me this year. I suspect that he heard me accidentally call him Satan the week before Christmas. Or maybe he figured out that I’m a [tag]techno-Pagan[/tag].
I bought myself a toy instead. It’s better that way… I got exactly what I wanted and I didn’t have to be a good girl to get it.
My latest toy is a [tag]Siemens SX66[/tag] PDA phone. I needed this phone, really I did. My old Toshiba e310 is still in great shape, but it doesn’t have enough RAM. My old cell phone was one of Cingular’s freebies.
It’s not cutting edge, but the
SX66 is still an impressive little device. It runs the [tag]Windows Mobile 2003[/tag] OS, so I didn’t have to RTFM.
Yeah, ok, you want some more details. 400MHz [tag]X-Scale[/tag] processor, 128M of RAM and 64M of flash. For reference, my spare computer is only marginally faster and originally had less RAM. 128M of RAM doesn’t hold much in the way of fun, but the SX66 has an SD slot so I can carry around videos and photos on SD or MMC cards.
I have Cingular, and they have this silly thing called MEdiaNET. It’s expensive, a penny per kbyte. Fortunately the SX66 also has [tag]WiFi[/tag], and I set it up to check for WiFi first. It also has bluetooth - and of course the first thing I did was make it talk to my husband’s Motorola Razr. Hmmm, Santa was pretty good to him this year. The second thing was to have a great bluetooth group grope at work. Engineers…
As an aside, there are variations on this PDA for other phone systems. The Audiovox XV6600 PDA Phone works with Verizon and seems to have a bonus - a camera.
The SX66 connects to my PC with ActivSync via USB, just like my old Toshiba. It shares the calendar, notes and contact list with Outlook. I don’t use Outlook for anything but to keep all that stuff backed up.
And if that’s not good enough, it also has an Irda port. I had a universal TV remote on the Toshiba, which came in handy more than once. I love a good practical joke.
And of course, I had to get some accessories:
Information age
technology
magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Globalization
China
I, Robot
tools
witchcraft
global economy
evolution
politician
Asia
self-improvement
Isaac Asimov
Innovation
Delmarva peninsula
Zero Population Growth
ZPG
One-child Policy
greenhouse gases
Global Warming
creationists
public education
