I’ve finally stopped using my pager and got myself a mobile phone. People are usually surprised that I don’t have a mobile phone, they’re such common gadgets and I’m a geek laden with PDAs, digital cameras and so on. So far I really haven’t needed one, and although I’m a techie gadget lover, I’m not keen on paying monthy fees for something I’m not going to use. I’m also not sure about the wisdom of holding quite a powerful radio transmitter to the side of my head, either.

But times change, and as I’m about to move around a lot more I won’t always be near a landline, and broadband connection of some type. My pager is on it’s last legs, and pager services are almost extinct. It’s time to join the mobile masses.

I’ve settled on a T68i from Expansys, with all the trimmings (a poor but cheap and usable camera attachment and a nice bluetooth headset) then connected with Orange Pay As You Go. I was after a decent phone with good Bluetooth and low radiation, and so far I’m very pleased with it.

Bluetooth is an excellent technology, now that it seems to work. It certainly works between a T68i and an iBook - a couple of clicks and it’s all done, with no need to install drivers. The headset was also excellent value, £40 with a travel charger. Strangely Orange sell it online for £160, a markup that’s quite bizarre. Now there’s no need to irradiate my poor brain, whatever the actual danger. Bluetooth is 1500 times weaker than mobile phone signals. Now I’ve just got to get it working with Linux.

WAP2 is… possibly useful. With GPRS it isn’t as utterly crap as the old WAP, but it still lacks any ‘killer application’. MMS is surprisingly good - fun, and with a huge untapped potential. MMS uses open standards such as SMIL. I’m already pondering what neat little hacks I can build around it. The Orange MMS -> Email gateway seems to mangle the mail attachments a bit, but it works. Old SMS also has some project potential - I’ve got some old Jabber projects that I can maybe finish now.

The phone’s UI is OK, but text input is very frustrating. I’m so used to thinking straight to screen (I do c.60wpm thanks to UNIX and MUDs) that even the cunning predictive text method is horribly slow. It can’t be avoided, I suppose.

The only big problem is the cost. This thing eats money. GPRS is a great idea, but £3 to £4 per megabyte is extortion. Net access via GPRS is like the bad old days of clock-watching dialup, but now it’s data-watching. I’d pay £20 a month for all-you-can-eat GPRS, but at the moment it’s for occassionaly use only.

It gets even odder: “erotic” balloon subcultures - a paid subscription site dedicated to Goths and balloons. I would have assumed that large brightly coloured party balloons were the mortal enemies of pale, monochrome Goths, but they seem to be getting on just fine.

Link: Goth Balloons

Photos and videos of (clothed) women blowing up balloons, and sometimes popping them. Very odd, but as strange sexual fetishes go, it looks pretty harmless. And also completely unerotic.

I found this while looking for airship information. I’m a fan of airships, but not, I repeat not in this way. I wonder what balloon-o-sexuals think of airships?

Link: Maria’s Balloons

I don’t like garlic. I like the taste (or at least I once did) but I don’t like the side effects. If I eat garlic, I soon end up feeling as if I’ve got flu: head and stomach aches, dizziness, nausea, even less energy than normal.

Trying to avoid garlic is remarkably difficult. I’m a vegan, but avoiding meat and dairy is a piece of cake compared to avoiding garlic. Garlic is everywhere, and sometimes it’s not even on the label. I dread the words “New Improved Recipe!” on a label, as it usually involves added garlic.

Garlic intolerance isn’t common or well known - I’ve only met one other person who is aware they’ve got a garlic problem. I say ‘aware’ because I suspect that many more people have the problem but don’t realise - they blame “foreign food” instead (we traditionally don’t cook with garlic in the UK).

Well, now I know of two other sufferers:

1: Silvio Berlusconi “Above all, no garlic. Like some Nosferatu, Berlusconi lives in fear of it, allegedly associating it with “boredom and death”. He is said to be able to detect it from great distances, causing complications at summit dinners. At Genoa, moderate protestors tried to disarm groups of anarchists, offering them garlic to throw instead of bricks, unaware what a potent weapon they had. He detected it on the breath of one of his Forza Italia members during a debate in 1996. Next day, they all received a mouth spray and a letter: “I beg you to accept this fresh and perfumed little gift intended for the palate and to use it so that your close-up encounters with the President of Forza Italia, the honourable Silvio Berlusconi, and with your electors will always be pleasant.” ” – James Fox, The Guardian

I like pesto, but it usually contains garlic. I’ve found some excellent garlic-free pesto, (Biona Organic Pesto) so all is well. Berlusconi can visit the Portofino region of Italy, where pesto is made without garlic. Except for when someone deliberately spikes his pesto…

2: Homer Simpson “Garlic gives me sour stomach and throw-up burps.” – Homer Simpson, replying to an email

So that’s one rather controversal politician, and one fictional character. It’s a start.

Of course, there’s The Other Side to worry about: Never Trust Someone Who Doesn’t Like Garlic!

That’s a little unfair. You can trust us. Well, me and Homer. OK, you can trust me. Really, you can.

On the theme of “What if they had a search engine and nobody came?”

If MS integrate their new search engine with the next version of Windows, the already narrow search engine market will become even more restricted.

Google currently dominates web searching, and for a simple reason: it’s very good. Google offers good results, is simple to use, and also has a good attitude to web developers and users. Despite Google’s popularity, if another company produces something better, the challenger can compete - users aren’t tied to using one search site, and can easily switch to another.

However, if most users are running Windows, and Windows pushes them towards Microsoft’s search engine, this relatively level playing field may become rather tilted. Integration can easily go much further than just setting a default search page in Internet Explorer. MS will probably integrate on an OS service level, not just via the web browser, using similar technology to Google’s web services API. ‘Service’ level integration is very worrying - it could have a damaging impact on the development of the ‘Semantic Web’.

Maciej Ceglowski of IdleWords is encouraging sites to boycott Microsoft’s future search engine by blocking access to its indexing software now: if it can’t gather information, it can’t work well. At the very least the boycott will publicise the issue.

I’m not sure about this strategy: I think it’s worthwhile as a campaign, but it could set a dangerous precedent - what if selectively blocking search engines to make a point gets out of hand? What if people decide to only allow their favourite search engines to index their sites? They’ve got every right to, but it might cause more damage. That, however, is two ‘what-ifs’ against a ‘probably’: I’ll wait and see - if MS go ahead and integrate at a services level, I’ll definitely be editing my robots.txt file.

Link: Boycott Microsoft Search!

This is an excellent site. I think it’s based on a childrens’ TV show, but rather than being packed with the usual thinly-disguised marketing material, the Boohbah web site has great, educational content instead.

It’s very well suited to young or special needs children, but it’s also quite pleasant to pointlessly wander around if you’re an adult. The animations are soothing and abstract. it’s one of the rare occassions when a confusing Flash-based site is a good thing.

Link: Boohbah.com

If you feed cow milk to calves, there’s less cow milk for people to drink. So it pays to feed the calves on as little real milk as possible. In the USA, young cows are fed on a “milk substitute” made from the blood of other cows. And when they get older, they’ve got some tasty reprocessed dog food too.

Link: Consumers may have a beef with cattle feed

The Idler is putting together a book about crap British towns. Metafilter (I wish I could post, it’s a good site) has a discussion on the topic.

Quite a few people dislike Coventry*, which is understandable, but Nuneaton is mentioned twice, and then Atherstone! I’m a little startled that someone in the somewhat exclusive Metafilter site mentioned Atherstone - it’s a town smaller than the nearby village I grew up in:

“Also not mentioned, and less exciting even than Nuneaton, is Atherstone, an intensely uninteresting yet mildly spooky backwater where I once spent the better, or should I say longer part of a year.”

That would be it. I was once chased by an Atherstonian primary-school-aged child wielding a knife (I was 19), but that was in the ‘bad’ part of town (two or three streets). There are some very nice people there, and a real community, but there’s definitely something odd about the place.

*In Coventry’s defense, it was extensively bombed during WWII and then rebuilt by idiots. It still isn’t as grim as Gateshead city centre.

A. has finished her last exam, so we’re free to start the move to Manchester.

Stage 1: Find new jobs in Manchester.

I’m surprised to see that at least one company is recruiting a lot of “E-Learning” staff in Manchester, all at rather good wages too: designers, programers and sales staff. The education software market isn’t too strong at the moment.

If you’re based in Manchester and just happen to be looking for a rather good sysadmin, my CV is online, with some extra info. Password available on request.

Back to the job sites.

The credit card concept is mainly based on trust at the moment, and assumes that most people are honest - the actual security involved at the moment is shockingly bad. I’m often bothered by how little attention is paid to signatures by shop staff, and this experiment proves it.

Discussions on the UK Crypto list at the moment make me doubt that the new PIN based cards will be much of an improvement. Storing the password on the card seems a potential problem - the encryption will be broken.

Link: The Credit Card Prank