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top - 12:40:22 up 134 days,  2:52,  1 user,  load average: 10.24, 6.99, 5.46
Tasks:  90 total,  15 running,  75 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 94.7%us,  4.0%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.7%hi,  0.7%si,  0.0%st

Everything’s locked down using WP Super Cache and as a result the server seems to be coping, though its CPU use is way up.

Note: if you’re going to reference the article please just link to it, and don’t hotlink the image. Depending on how much residual traffic the current hotlinking generates I may have to deny access to the image and redirect to a picture of a kitten, or something.

So, how do I unlock it? Either I use some kind of jailbreak software, or, perhaps there’s an official O2 unlocking service for phones that are out of contract.

I called O2 this morning to ask. It took about 2 minutes to get through to an operator, so I asked my question, and as expected the bloke on the end of the line didn’t know, so he put me on hold whilst he went to ask someone else.

He came back after 6 minutes to apologize for the time taken and ask if I’d like to hold more (extra brownie points there). He was talking to someone on the other line. He said he was talking “to Apple” to find out about it and would call me back (even more brownie points for not keeping me on hold).

An hour later he called back to say that unlocking my phone is not something they can do. All brownie points were immediately revoked.

Do I really have to jailbreak my phone to be able to use it on another network, or is there an alternative that O2 don’t know (or don’t want me to know) about?

The only fly in its ointment is that the iPhone insists on telling me that it’s being connected to an older and less compatible device every time it’s plugged in. Perhaps this’ll can be included as a “don’t tell me again” option in iPhone OS 3.0 or 3.1 – fingers crossed.

In the mean time I’ve become an ardent podcast subscriber – they’re so much better than most of the news (which is generally bad) and the popular music radio stations, which invariably manage up to 15 minutes of interesting broadcast before descending into the less popular part of their playlist. Podcasts 1, traditional Radio nil.

I’ve used a lot of unix variants for work, and found the file structure of Mac OS X (which is based on BSD) to be a little different from Debian, Gentoo and Solaris, so all kinds of files and daemons weren’t where I expected to them to be, but stranger still, most of them have a UI component to control them.

It’s like riding a bike with the front and back brake levers switched around, odd at first, but adaptation is swift.

I’m particularly pleased so far with Spotlight, the search facility, which appears as good as Google Desktop on Windows (I nearly wrote “on the PC” there, but that would be silly (because an iMac is a PC)).

So far we’ve added Adium, TextWrangler, Spotify, Picasa, Google Earth, Zattoo and Open Office. I also managed to add 15 years of archived email with remarkably little effort (the beauty of having used Thunderbird and it’s predecessor Netscape Messenger which use sensible UNIX mailboxes).

I’ve also walked through the process of setting up WordPress, which required a few extra minor steps when compared to a Windows / Linux setup, but overall everything works as well as a linux box, but with a pretty and stable windowing interface into the bargain (my linux preference BTW is xfce).

There’s not much else to say, except, suggestions for great Mac apps are welcome!

We were recently looking at an application called “Private-I” for the iPhone: it’s designed to look interesting to someone who’s stolen (or found) the phone. When they open the application, it cunningly says it’s “loading” things; but what it’s really doing is transmitting its GPS coordinates to a preconfigured email address. As the inquisitive thief waits in vain for the thing to load, the GPS fix gets better and better, so additional emails are sent, pinpointing the phone so you* can retrieve it.

It’s cute but in most cases it’s somewhat irrelevant because the amateur thief is not going to get through the access control system unless they get lucky (be it a PIN, a password, a biometric lock, or whatever). It makes sense therefore to dispense with the subterfuge of the cute application and just link the access control system of the device with a system for transmitting GPS coordinates.

i.e.

• Each time the correct pin is entered, the phone unlocks.
• Each time an incorrect pin is entered, the phone transmits its location.

This simple change won’t stop a professional thief (they can still break the device up for parts, or reset it to factory defaults), but anyone who finds a phone that’s been dropped or accidentally left somewhere will have a strong deterrent against trying to use it … what’s more all the police have to do is switch it on when it’s kindly handed in and the owner will know where to collect it.

The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim that their Perfect Gadget does everything up to, and maybe even including, ordering sliced bread from the online grocer at the precise thickness that it knows you will prefer (a fact derived from a semantic analyses of how you use said gadget).

Socially driven news sites will go utterly berserk.

So how long must we wait until Apple actually makes this announcement? Perhaps we’re only five or ten years away from The Perfect Gadget 1.0.

Converging on Perfection, and Overselling the Dream

In 2007, Apple announced their intent to produce the iPhone. Even before the announcement, the iPhone was hotly debated by potential owners whose excitement was akin to a small child who’s told they could go on the swings and the roundabouts and visit the local shops to buy as much sugar based confectionery as they can carry before going home to watch cartoons, leading some to call it the Jesus Phone. Even I, as a non Apple owner*, was hooked by the hype. Mesmerised by the hope of a perfect gadget.

The iPhone was never going to change the world, but reading back over some of the rhetoric that Apple spun into their press conferences you’d be forgiven if you thought it would. When Apple chief Steve Jobs opened his keynote speech saying “we’re going to make some history together today” it was an archetype of overstatement. Apple are not alone in overselling. The technology industry as a whole is guilty, and the trend is going to increase as gadgets and appliances become less about the technical specifications and more about the design of the hardware and the software – the human factors. Any company that’s marketing something with intangible or immeasurable value, can safely oversell and over-hype their product, because those that buy it want all the hype to be true. They need it to be true to validate their emotional buy-in and to affirm their “lifestyle choice”.

Future Perfect

There will come a time however, when The Perfect Gadget really is released. It will herald a fundamental change in the the world of consumer electronics. A ubiquitous device that people don’t want to part with. Users will not upgrade because they will be perfectly happy with it, so eventually there will be billions of units in circulation.

Past Imperfect

As a seasoned user of seven laptops, seven desktop computers, several hosted severs, eleven different types of mobile phone and three PDAs I’ve probably invested more time and energy than the average punter who uses gadgets. I’ve relied on them for my livelihood, maintained their hardware and software, synchronised their data with the other devices, and failed to part with most of them, so I have a fall-back if the next gadget doesn’t work. So what would be my personal perfect gadget? The gadget that would force me, the moment it’s announced, to call up the person on stage announcing it and say “I don’t care how much, I want the device that’s in your hand, name your price, sir/ma’am, ship it to me now“. When I wrote them all down, my list of requirements became unwieldy, so I thinned them out to a manageable core that can be found later in this article.

Benefiting from the Paradox of Choice

Gadgets with a similar form factor to the iPhone are both blessed and cursed with simplicity. The keyless form factor enables the gadget to be more easily be tailored to the users desire, but such devices are intrinsically harder to differentiate, and their potential can overwhelm.  Often the key benefit that gets marketed is that a product can do more than the competition, which leads consumers into the paradox of choice. With so much potential, how do they avoid selecting the wrong gadget? They have to fall back on the emotional – they choose the gadget that makes them feel good. This is something Apple do really well, they focus on ‘their way’ of doing things and make that it simple and rewarding.  The perfect gadget, above all, will be intuitive and emotionally rewarding to use.  Technological sedimentation and improved software can simplify the multiplicity of capabilities, so a dual focus on the intangible factors of software and hardware design are the critical factors in differentiating gadgets that have identical underlying technological specifications.  Apple’s name change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. highlights its bias shift towards non-technical consumer devices. Indeed, Apple are in an enviable position that when they announce something, there is a lot of interest from consumers who tend do not burden themselves with technicalities: they’re just happy to know that it’s new, that it looks nice, and will reassure their ego of its value, whilst being generally useful and (critically) unchallenging to use.

Enjoy the gadgets, but beware the hyperbole.

The Perfect Gadget Specification

The perfect gadget should incorporate:

1. Everything in the iPhone. Because in a world where design differentiates, the iPhone is a great design. Telephones have undergone two critical form factor changes in the last 30 years. The first was moving the keypad onto the handset, which enabled the whole phone to become mobile. The second is the removal of the keypad from the handset, which removes the limitation on the device to be predominantly a phone. It can now just be a device that has communication as one of it’s capabilities. Apple were not the first people to suggest this: cognitive scientists have been saying it for years, but Apple brought it to market very successfully.
2. Screen size vs Portability. Phone screens are too small and a larger screen area is key to making the gadget useful in more circumstances. Something that uses up every available millimetre in the back pocket of a pair of jeans is perfect.
3. Flexibility. The problem of a device that’s sized for the back-pocket is that placing it there will put all kinds of stresses through it (because buttocks are not flat) so some degree of flex would be a bonus.
4. Induction Charging. I never ever want to plug my device in. Instead, I will have a tables and shelves around the house that are rigged up with an inductive charging system. The shelf by the door is a perfect candidate. Anything left on these inductive shelves would be recharged with no need to connect cables. We already have all the phones syncing over Wi-Fi and bluetooth, so it makes total sense to never ever have to plug them in again.
5. GPS/Galileo. I want the unit to know where it is at all times so my whole life can be tracked, then every photo and every calendar event can be correlated. GPS is good, but for Europe, Galileo is likely to be better (because of the control and positioning of the satellites).
6. Compass and spirit level. The device must know which way up it is and where it’s pointing, so that when I take photos using the device both location and viewing frustum can be recorded.
7. Cameras. Equally spec’d cameras and screens front and back (so that front and back become concepts in software only). The camera image sensors should be interspersed with the screen pixels so video chat is more natural and doesn’t appear as if the other person is talking to a point on the wall just behind you. With a screen on both sides, the image could be viewed by the person taking the photo, and by the subjects, bringing to an end all pictures where the subjects are needlessly and awkwardly tilting their heads when they’re already in-frame.
8. Social awareness. The device should be able to associate geographical locations with social conventions. When I visit the library (or the crematorium) the gadget must know this and no matter how loud I have it set it must not interrupt.
9. A Thermometer. If the device is below body temperature, it’s in my bag not in my pocket, so vibrating is less to help – it should know this and be more noisy. If it’s below body temperature and flat on it’s back, and its after 11pm, and it’s dark, then I’m asleep, so don’t ring until after 7am… Intelligence and configurablility of all these capabilities is key.
10. Peer awareness. Sensing the environment can be enhanced if other sensors can be consulted for comparison. If multiple perfect gadgets are near each other they could (and should) share common information. Rather than each one of them running at full power measuring all things, they could take it in turns. One sampling and sharing GPS position, another doing cell negotiation, etc. Sharing the work could mean reduced overhead and increased battery life.
11. Waterproof. Induction charging would make a 100% sealed unit a highloy viabile possibility; and with so9lid state devices operating better than disk drives under increased pressure it could be made waterproof for diving (or mountain climbing if that’s your bag).

… and of course, since the is the perfect gadget …

1. Tactile Feedback. A feedback system that makes the surface smoother and stickier as it is exposed to a varying electrical current. The whole experience of using the iPhone is lacking in tactile feedback and whilst a vibration feedback system would improve things, it’s not enough.
2. Self Repair. An organic surface, that can repair itself of scratches.

What’s probably not necessary…

1. Replaceable or Upgradable Storage. Globally ubiquitous and fast network connections with inexpensive data rates will render on-device storage irrelevant. Users will no longer need to replace their device every eighteen months for the sake of more space.
2. Replaceable Batteries. Opportunities to recharge mobile devices could increase exponentially. An induction device in your car seat would mean you never have to take the phone from your back pocket. A induction device in the train table would mean your phone would charge whilst commuting. Your whole desk at work could charge phones, laptops all at once. Batteries will never run out of charge.

Touchable Devices Cometh

I’ve always been fascinated by alternative input devices and became interested in touch screens years ago when my manager told me about his patent for using strain gauges to create a touch sensitive screen. Whilst touch screens tend to work well in concept, historically, they’ve been plagued by problems of miscalibration, poor application performance, and (on public terminals) vandalism and uncleanliness. Touch screens have not necessarily got a bad press in the real world, they just didn’t get much press at all because until now they’ve appeared too inaccurate & slow, which are not particularly appealing or interesting attributes. In many environments however, e.g. point of sale terminals, they’ve been slowly taking over as the preferred means of input. Most recently the use of touch screens as a convenient and low-cost alternative to the restrictive miniature number-pads traditionally used on phones has increased their audience and given them a much needed perception boost.

Goodbye Keyboard

The logical progression beyond the form of the laptop is what will most likely drive the next generation of keyboards. Most laptops these days have a touch pad and a keyboard that have to vie with each other for what little finger space there is, so if the two could be combined it would make space and cost sense to do so. When OLED screens become cheap and large enough, the humble keyboard is finally doomed. The thing that convinces me that it’s likely to happen is a recent patent application from Apple which details a clamshell iPhone layout, with touch screen on both internal surfaces. If it can be done for a phone, it can be done for a laptop sized device.

Hello Book

So this laptop would have two screens, the normal one for displaying content, and the new one on which a keyboard is drawn. Both screens can be touch sensitive so two next steps might happen. Firstly, the physical QWERTY layout can start to die out, it’s survival thus far has been due to the dominance of the physical keyboard. As keys become purely software devices, experimentation with new key layouts will become commonplace. Slowly, but surely, QWERTY will start to look as curious and antiquated as the penny farthing. Secondly, once the physical orientation of the keyboard is eliminated, it can be displayed and used from any angle. We’ve already seen how the iPhone can go widescreen when rotated through 90 degrees, so the future laptop may also be held and used like a book.

There have been several forays into tablet computers, but none have really taken off. The perceived flaw with most of these tablet machines was their need to include a keyboard for any “serious” productivity work (i.e. typing). With the right hinges, a laptop with twin-touch screens and no keyboard could open out to have all the benefit of a large tablet. The laptop shape has a major advantage over the basic tablet format – when it’s closed, it halves the size of the device, and keeps the screen clean and protected, so it’s unlikely to die out, it’ll just vary in size. Plain flat tablets will probably exist and do well, but having carried an iPhone around for the last 3 years I can attest to the scratched mess that the surfaces have all become.

Interacting Bricks

Over the last three or four decades, technology has driven computation power from mainframes to desktops and now, partially, back to the modern equivalent of mainframes, servers, which are especially good for storing and managing the data we want to manipulate. Widely understood patterns, methodologies and protocols for working with servers and other connected devices have evolved: service oriented and peer-to-peer computing models for example, yet our interaction with these machines has been influenced immeasurably by the need to have a specially designed device on which to enter commands and information.

The emergence has begun of generic low-power mobile tablets, essentially not much more than a flattened brick in shape (sometimes with a hinge) that can take input and display output. Whilst they may eschew the familiar form factor of the three box PC, they’re more likely to subtly redefine it. A tablet acting as a keyboard, several tablets providing displays, several more doing processing. The removal of moving parts helps to protect these small gadgets from obsolescence, so a device that is good enough, and fast enough to display an interface today, is likely to have a very long lifespan.

The only magazine big enough to be seen from space – and only in Vegas!

That’s beautiful… only in Vegas… and maybe Paddington, West Australia.

Seen from Outer Space!

Here’s what Maxim has to say on the subject:

Constructed near Vegas out of vinyl mesh to celebrate our 100th issue, this colossal babe can be seen from outer space using Google Earth.

This is utter nonsense, but brilliant marketing.

Invisible from space.

When I was composing the backstory for the iPod gag, one thing I was very careful of was to give it enough factual basis that the silly bits could be believed, so I checked about the height where space officially begins, and I checked that the tailings dam was visible from that height in Google Earth, without magnification.

The Maxim advert which covers 697 square metres is a tiddler in comparison to “the iPod” which is more than 1000 times bigger, covering 893240 square metres.

If the advert exists (and I’m assuming it does) it has an absolute zero chance of being spotted by an orbiting astronaut taking a walk after lunch. As commercial ventures/hoaxes go, however, it’s a total success, because it’s got press coverage, and it’s got web coverage.

The journalists at C|Net, Yahoo etc. may be feeling a little used right now over the whole “from space” thing. This however, is the world of entertainment, where facts don’t matter and a good story is the only thing of importance.

So what is this Maxim thing really?

If you use Google Maps to go to the spot where the magazine is supposed to be you find a big plain empty patch of ground.

To create this image I used this bookmark from Google Earth to show the spot where the magazine is supposed to be – look for the remarkably small white rectangle just above right of centre.

No evidence?

There are no images currently in Google Earth that show the existence of a giant magazine cover. You can’t see it without an overlay.

The lack of evidence from a trusted third party (in this case Google) is what has prompted many to cry hoax. This is also the reason why the iPod gag took off – it was visible in Google Earth and Google Maps without any overlays, people believed they could verify its existence, so they believed the story.

Maxim have had to create an overlay that you can load, which adds the image of the magazine onto the desert, and for good measure, it adds a bit of desert too. This is probably so you don’t wonder why the nearby desert is in such low resolution when looking at the magazine in relatively high resolution. The downside of this is that although it looks nice, people don’t trust it.

Ultimately, Size Does Matter

So did they really create it? It’s feasible. It’s not particularly big, so it could be done. Remember this is 1000 times smaller than the iPod; but why bother when photo manipulation can do it so effectively?

One theory (which I’m enamoured with) is that we are seeing a preview of higher resolution data that has not yet made it into Google Earth; in which case Maxim have spent a lot of money on an advert that seems to have arrived too late. Hence the need for the overlay. Supporting this theory is the fact that this image can be downloaded from earth.google.com.

If that’s not the case, then it’s a pure unadulterated and massively successful hoax.

One not so giant leap for advertising

If the tailings dam really were an advert, then it really would be visible from space, but whatever the full story is behind the Maxim magazine cover, it’s not visible from space (as is claimed on the cover itself), because it’s just way too small, which is a shame.

In the centre you’ll see that little white rectangle again. That’s the size of the magazine.

You can try taking Google Earth to the edge of space and looking for it (62 Miles/100Km high), but you won’t see it. In fact, to make it simpler, I’ve shifted the maxim overlay to Australia so you can see one within the other. The size remains the same, only the magazine’s positioning has been transposed (which is why it appears upside-down). The height is set at 62 miles up to get you started, then you can zoom in.

And the winner is…

Google, obviously.

It’s another wonderful example of Google Earth becoming the advertisers dream, which, oddly enough I sort of I predicted back in October 2004 when I wrote:

Virtual billboards here we come.

Ah well.

Digg this.

It’s not really a giant iPod; and no, there was no high-stakes poker game between Kerry Packer and Steve Jobs, I made that bit up.

Space really does “begin” at 100Km high, so the dam really could be visible, but is most likely indistinguisable.

What’s also true is that it’s Apple‘s 30th Anniversary on April 1st 2006 – and in Australia it already is April 1st, ’cause Brisbane is 10 hours ahead of GMT, so although this server’s time zone tells me it’s still 31/3, I have no doubt Dad is (probably at this very moment) attaching an exploding cork to someone’s hat and hiding a plastic novelty spider under a toilet seat.

See it in Google Earth (Free Mac & PC versions available here).

Thanks

If you believed; if you wanted to believe, or if you blogged it or reported it, thanks!, it was fun to watch a small April fool that was intended for a few family and friends as it went global!

Getting mentioned in Engadget, Gizmodo, the Grauniad, CNN Money and InternetNews was great. There are too many others and I’ve not had time to see them all yet.

A special mention is also due to Leon who kindly contacted me and put me straight thus:

I already read this somewhere, I cant remember where but when I saw this and read that it was an exclusive story; I have to correct you, it isn’t, I already read it and that it was aquired in a poker match, and saw it on google maps, sorry mate.

Having someone believe the story so much that they let me down gently about not being an exclusive, especially highlighting the bit about the poker; that made my week.

Thanks are also due to Apple afficionado Steve Woolley for proof reading the original article and also to the people kind enough to point out that the structure is a tailings dam (there were remarkably few of you). I didn’t know this when I made up the story, but assumed there was some kind of evaporation happening because of the pattern.

Tailings

So you may well ask: since it’s not an iPod, what is a tailings dam?

There are an estimated 300 tailings dams in Australia, but fewer than 100 are in operation.

The exact content of a tailings dam depends on the geological composition of the ore that is being mined and any chemicals (explosives, corrosives and catalysts) that are employed in the mining and extraction process.

Paddington is actually a gold mine (not a disused mineral mine at all, I made that up too), so the tailings will be commensurate with a gold extraction process. Close up, the (highly acidic) tailings dam in Paddington looks like this.

The general cosensus is that tailings dams are among the most toxic man made areas on Earth. As liquids are absorbed into bedrock or evaporate, the dessiccated tailings can become airbourne, leading to long-term widespread pollution of the area surrounding a tailings facility.

Discovering the iPod

Several people have asked how I came across the thing in the first place, and that’s down to the fact that searching for locations in Google Earth is sometimes a bit hit and miss. I was looking for Paddington, a residential area of Sydney which I now know is about 2.5K SSE of Sydney Opera House.

I tried entering “Paddington, Sydney, Australia” into the GE search bar and it came back with no match. So then I tried “Paddington, Australia“.

If you have GE installed, give it a go, you basically land slap bang on top of the Paddington gold mine with the iPod (tailings dam) in full view.

Apple

So there you have it. Sadly there’s no gargantuan iPod, but we can at least be happy that Apple make lovely looking machines, and have contributed immensely to the public understanding that Human-Computer Interaction should have a strong emphasis on the “Human” side of the equation, so thanks and happy 30th anniversary to everyone at Apple, past and present.

I wonder what they’re really going to announce.

Today I learned from a trusted source that Apple is poised to make history next Saturday when it unveils the worlds first advertisement that can be seen from space.

Apple had hoped to keep their creation secret until the grand unveiling, however, after I was tipped off, and with just a little bit of lateral digging, I was able to uncover enough background information to get a clue of the location.

From there, it was just a matter of firing up Google Earth, and hunting for it! The pictures are a few months old, but clearly show the advert well on the way to completion.

The sheer size of the publicity stunt is difficult to comprehend. It covers 893240 square metres; roughly equivalent to eighty football pitches.

The ad, which depicts Apple’s flagship iPod product has been constructed on the site of an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia. It has been in development for almost two years since Apple’s founder Steve Jobs acquired the location during a game of poker with (the late) Australian publishing and gaming tycoon Kerry Packer.

Aliens need not worry about advertising regulations however; the general concensus is that the edge of space is at a height of 62 miles (100Km), and once you go much higher than that, the ad will very quickly shrink towards invisibility. It’ll look like an iPod nano for a while, then maybe a tictac.

Speculation is currently rife that the grand unveiling will be coordinated with the launch of a touch screen Video iPod.

Apple have a press meeting scheduled at the start of next month when more details will be revealed – you heard it here first.

See it in Google Maps.
See it in Google Earth (Free Mac & PC versions available).

Until recently the gadget market has been dominated by young to middle-aged, technically minded men. So Apple’s release of an iPod shuffle derivative aimed directly at the female market is illustrative of their position as one of the few companies whose appeal is equally split between the tech savvy and urban chic of both genders.

The text of the iPad ad’ says it all:

Meet iPad shuffle, the discrete new member of the iPod family.

Wear it with almost nothing else.

It’s waterproof, sandproof, ergonomically contoured and invisible under swimwear,

We call it summerproof.

…and in case you drift off listening to 240 of your favourite thongs we’ve incorporated a discrete vibrating alarm function so you never forget to reapply your sunscreen.

Available April 1 2005 from rom $99.
Brown Mac & Not PC.

It will be interesting to see how it fares when it is released today.