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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the man who is generally regarded as the father of the modern computer – someone who didn’t get recognition in his lifetime and died in ignominy. He’s now seen as one of the heroes of the twentieth century. Read on…
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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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According to polling company Zogby a quarter of Americans think the Internet could replace their partner. Err, come again?

The same survey found, though, that if it were possible to implant an Internet feed directly into the brain only 11% of Americans would choose to do so. That’s…reassuring.

Any NZ polling companies up for a bit of pro bono research on this?

That’s right…amid the hoopla about about launching the New Zealand channel on YouTube, spare some time to look at the home-grown equivalent.

Kiwitube runs from Kerikeri, and shows local video of New Zealanders doing all manner of things. Go and take a look!

There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it, or so said Cicero in the first century BC. And philosophers as a class have a reputation for wasting years and lives on fruitless speculation.

Which is why AC Grayling is so impressive. On paper he has the qualifications for sterile theorising – he is, after all, a Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London. In practice he writes accessible books which take positions about real world issues.

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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!

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about the way the Internet promotes amateurism, and whether this is a bad thing or a good thing. Capsule summary: everybody is an amateur at first; every profession grew out of people innovating and trying things. The Internet makes this happen faster. My notes are below with some links at the bottom. (more…)

Today I talked about the General Public Licence, one of the ways in which software is licensed. It’s very important for several reasons, and it’s controversial because some software companies see it as a threat to their ways of doing business. Others see it as essential. My notes are below, and some links are at the end.
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I confess: despite loving Shakespeare, I had never really “got” Lear before. I know, it’s supposed to be the greatest of the four great Shakespearean tragedies. But it never connected with me viscerally the way the others do – I never got that feeling that, hey that could be me out there behaving like that.

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