Writings on technology and society from Wellington, New Zealand
Last week I spent a couple of days in Australia, and as part of it I was driven from Canberra to Sydney by the amazing Pia Waugh. In the car were not one, but two OLPCs.
The One Laptop Per Child is intended to be a cheap but functional laptop suitable for children in developing countries. It’s a very nice little machine, and I was really impressed.
The new MyLocation feature on Google Maps for Mobile is spooky but cool.
Google Maps is a way of finding maps of just about anywhere, online on your computer. Check out maps.google.com if you haven’t seen it. It provides street maps, driving directions from A to B, and it can overlay satellite photos so you can see what the area looks like from above.
Google upped the ante on that service in the middle of this year when it introduced Google Maps for Mobile – the whole thing runs on most of the fancier kinds of mobile phone. So, if you’re lost or don’t know a street you are looking for, you can whip out your phone and get a street map of Wellington, say, and search for the street you want or the one you can see.
And you can switch between the map view and a satellite picture type view – a very detailed aerial photo just like in Google Earth. This is endless fun. You can armchair travel to all kinds of places, or just look down on familiar ones. (more…)
I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working – you had to really, really, want to. Once you could get Linux to fire up, it was rock solid of course as it has always been, but the process of installing it was challenging even for geeks. Then you had to figure out how to get it to use your screen as anything more than a line by line device – Linux could and can do this beautifully and flexibly, but you had to know so much about your hardware and edit the configurations just so before it would go.
How things have changed! First Mandrake through the early noughties, and now Ubuntu are making wonderfully good and easy to install CDs of Linux. (Just a note to the side – Linux is just the kernel or core of an operating system, and you need a lot of other software to make it work. A lot of that software comes from the GNU project, so it’s more proper to refer to GNU/Linux. And that’s how the different flavours, or distributions of GNU/Linux differ – it’s all a matter of which additional programs are supplied with the kernel, and how it is packaged up for installation.)
Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African man who made a lot of money in the dot com boom and has obviously decided to put something back. And with its latest release, Ubuntu has surpassed the ease of use of Windows in many respects – especially those annoying registrations and activiations, because Ubuntu is totally free.
The latest release of Ubuntu, which goes by the names 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, is very good indeed. It installs easily, and provides access to an ocean of free software, some of which is of the highest quality, through the menus. You can try Ubuntu without installing it on your computer, or you can install it side by side with Windows, or you can put Ubuntu on first, then virtual machine software from Virtualbox and re-install your Windows in a VM so it lives in a window under Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a 700 megabyte download or a $15 CD purchase delivered from LinuxCDMall or Copyleft. Give it a go!
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about podcasts – what they are, why they are useful, and how to use them. You can use them to listen to radio programmes you have missed, or to ones that aren’t broadcast in New Zealand, or to programmes that were made for podcast and have never been on the radio. And you don’t even need an iPod – just a computer and broadband.
Read on for my notes, with links at the end.
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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about how you go about turning you CD collection into a music library you can listen to on your iPod or other portable music player. There’s some concrete advice in there, do read it if you are interested in having a go yourself.
Just one point before going ahead, though. As the law in New Zealand is currently, loading your CDs into your computer or iPod is illegal. That’s right, against the law. It’s perfectly legal in most other countries, of course. The government has shown us a draft law which is supposed to make it legal to use your iPod, but the last time anyone saw that, it still had big holes in. New Zealand badly needs the government to make iPods unconditionally legal as they are everywhere else.
Read on for the speaking notes, and some links at the end.
Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the Cult of the Mac – a slightly flippant look at the way Apple’s Macintosh computer is winning more and more converts around the world.
Macintosh computers have gone from being a marginal choice from an esoteric company that was about to go under, to the automatic choice of a high proportion of people who just love using computers. Macs have a reputation for being easier to use and more secure, and there’s little doubt they are better-looking than their competition.
Did I conclude that Mac worship is a cult? Read on. As always, there are links at the end.
Laudable aim or inappropriate toys? The OLPC foundation aims to distribute one laptop to every child in the world. Of course, that’s hopelessly impractical with laptops costing about $1,000. But what about $200? Or even $100?
The laptop has been designed and is available. It’s nothing like a traditional Windows machine, or a Mac for that matter. It runs a version of Linux, and there is a special key to see the source of whatever you are looking at, be it program or web page. Kids are encouraged to change things and see what effect that has, and they can restore the laptop to its original state with a button if they get it wrong.
A reviewer for the New York Times has got his hands on one – and he likes it. Have a read.
Update: the good people over at geek.com have a great post summarising the laptop and drawing lessons from it about laptop design. Perhaps some of what this ‘toy laptop’ does is sufficiently advanced that we will see it in our machines in the future!
On 28th June 2007, I talked on Radio New Zealand National about the hype around the launch of Apple’s iPhone. The bottom line: there are outrageous amounts of hype, it’s a great-looking phone, and I’d love one!
My notes for the programme are below, and so are the links I gave out.
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