My friend Aideen has been doing fun stuff with the TP-Link micro-routers.

These things are amazingly small – note the relative size of the USB socket – and very cheap.

She’s written it up in a nice blog post here.

Under the Vesari Corridor, Florence.

I like shutters. Why do we have so few of them in Britain?

These are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

Today, there’s some more good news.

Towards the end of Ndiyo’s life we started to experiment with a model we called ‘Hubster‘ – the name coming from using a USB hub as the core of a thin-client terminal, something made possible once DisplayLink’s evolution of the Ndiyo technology allowed monitors, as well as keyboards and mice, to be connected over USB. The idea is to share the power, cost, and the carbon footprint of a PC between two or more users at once, simply by plugging in enough USB peripherals to give the extra users access to it. This is important for everybody, but especially for the poorer parts of the world where the cost of owning one PC per person is prohibitive.

Well, over the last few years, Bernie Thompson at Plugable.com in Seattle has been beavering quietly away to make this more of a reality, by providing DisplayLink-based terminals at reasonable prices and by maintaining the Open Source software to drive them. There are two bits of good news coming from his recent efforts:

• First, he’s been working with RedHat to get support for USB terminals built in to the standard distribution of Fedora 17. We’re getting very close now to the ideal situation where you can turn any Linux box into a multi-user box simply by plugging in enough components for a new user, and a new login prompt will appear when you do so. Imagine, say, a disaster-relief information centre where one person with a laptop connected to a satellite link can easily provide access for half a dozen members of the team just by plugging them in. And it’s all Open Source. Zero extra software cost per user.
• Secondly, in an attempt to get the cost of these terminals down and support ongoing development of the Open Source components, he’s launched a Kickstarter project called ‘The $50 Computer‘.

Some may, quite sensibly, ask how this compares to the RaspberryPi, which is, after all, even cheaper, and is a standalone machine. Well, this one comes with a box!

No, seriously, they are both excellent projects – I have a RaspberryPi on order, too – but they fill different roles. RaspberryPi, in the early years at least, will be about teaching people the basics of how computing works.
Bernie and the Plugable team are creating a system where providing fully-featured applications to multiple users at very low cost is something that a non-technical user can do simply by plugging in USB devices.

In some situations, perhaps in an internet cafe, you may just want to give extra users access to a Chrome browser. But with this system you also have the option of providing them with OpenOffice, with Scrivener, with Blender, with Corel Aftershot Pro, with Sublime Text, with Skype, with… well you get the idea! And, of course, with access to however many giga- or terabytes of storage you care to put in the PC.

I think the Kickstarter plan is a great one – I wish it had been around when we started Ndiyo.

Please support it if you can… Even if you don’t need more affordable computing devices, for your kids, your school, your internet cafe, your office, there are millions who do. Billions, in fact.

Every $10 we can shave off the cost of access to IT makes it accessible to many thousands of new people globally… and now you have a chance to help.

XYX has indicated you are a Friend:

Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.

I guess he must just have a very positive view of mankind…

It reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox:

“Who are you?”

“A friend!” Shouted back the man. He ran toward Zaphod.

“Oh yeah?” said Zaphod. “Anyone’s friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?”

Douglas Adams was a true visionary…

The Labour candidate’s leaflet is emphasising the number of ‘broken election promises’ from the Lib. Dems. If memory serves, they formed a coalition with a very different party and had few, if any, election pledges in common with them. And they had about one-third of the number of votes of the Tories. So, on a rather simplistic but purely statistical basis, we should expect them to have to break their election promises about three-quarters of the time, shouldn’t we, to be democratically fair?

As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other ones which have been tried!

iThoughts HD

I’ve always had mixed feelings about mind-maps. They’re a great way to capture thoughts and to brainstorm, but a terrible way to communicate with others. The chief responsibility of somebody writing a paper or giving a talk, it seems to me, is to turn such a personal 2D ‘splat’ of ideas into a logically-ordered serial presentation that can be followed by others with different mental processes, and not just to serve up the splat in its unprocessed form.

Still, I do use them for my own notes, and a paper and pen has always been my medium of choice. I’ve tried several highly-regarded pieces of desktop software, but keyboards and mice just don’t seem right for doing this. iThoughts on the iPad is the first environment that feels pretty natural, especially if you use it with a stylus.

Instacast

I listen to lots of podcasts, every day, while shaving, driving, walking the dog. I always used the facilities built into the iPhone music player and iTunes, which aren’t bad, so I had never really thought about using a separate app for it. And then I tried Instacast and was an Instaconvert.

Scanner Pro

If you have a recent iPhone with a good camera, then Scanner Pro is a really useful thing to have in your pocket. In essence it’s a photo app designed for capturing documents, or parts of documents, and it makes it easy (a) to crop and de-warp the images so as to get something closer to a proper scan and (b) to capture more than one ‘page’ as a single document and then (c) to email that as a PDF to someone (or upload it to various services). While you’d never confuse the results with the output of a proper scanner, there are times when you might be browsing in a library or perusing a magazine and you don’t happen to have a flat-bed scanner in your pocket…

The dictionaries

OK, here’s where you might need to start spending some real money… but I’ve definitely found it worthwhile when travelling to have the Collins language dictionaries in my pocket. I’ve now bought the expensive versions of the German-English, French-English and Italian-English ones and, even though they’re amongst the most costly apps on my phone, have never regretted it. They cost about the same as a hardback equivalent, but are a lot easier to carry around and I find, surprisingly, that I can look things up more quickly in them than on paper.

Another wonderful treat is to have the Shorter OED on my phone, something which in dead-tree form is hard even to lift off my bookshelf! (The current edition comes in two large hardbacks of around 2000 pages each.) It’s fabulous for all those times when someone at the restaurant tables asks, “What is the origin of the word ‘poppycock’?”. Sadly, the iOS app has been discontinued, so if you haven’t already got it, you’re out of luck, but there are a lot of lesser-but-much-cheaper options available, including Chambers.

Yes, you can often find good stuff on web, but not as quickly, especially if the restaurant table is in a basement. And if it’s in a foreign basement, then looking stuff up online may be rather expensive too.

Vous êtes hereux de me voir, ou vous avez une bibliothèque dans votre poche?…

and refined…

Don’t let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants should be in the parade.

(Because he has a very limited idea of what an elephant means)

Later in the podcast he had another good quote:

You can judge a person’s power, anywhere in the world, but particularly in an organisation, not based on what they say no to, but what they have the power to say yes to.

All the best,
Quentin

which appears when I type ‘atb’ and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it’s a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn’t too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.

But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad’s. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there’s no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can’t find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)

Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I’ve realised that I’m using that all the time too.

Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my ‘All the best’ trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: ‘qqsf’ expands into ‘Quentin Stafford-Fraser’, complete with capitals and punctuation.

But the thing I’ve found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I’m always having to type, say, ‘quentin@mycompany.com’ on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with ‘qmc’ and a space.

One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type ‘qmc<space><backspace>’, but that’s still a great deal easier than the whole address.

Various friends have been asking just what ‘back to work’ entails for me at present, since my situation has been decidedly vague for a while. So here’s a quick personal update for those interested…

After leaving Camvine in the autumn, I had a bit of a break, and then started a new company, Telemarq Ltd. (Hans Rosling once told me that he had worked out my model: whenever I run out of money, I start a new company! That’s not the intention, but it does sometimes look like that…)

Telemarq was initially formed as a vehicle for the exploration of a new invention. I think I have a good and viable idea, but I don’t have the resources to get it very far on my own (and I haven’t yet filed the patent, which is why I’m not broadcasting the details!)

Anyway, as I was debating whether to go out looking for investors for another startup, I was approached by several different companies who wanted some consultancy work, and I thought they would all would be rather interesting/enjoyable clients. Besides which, my bank account had dwindled to a level where it needed some topping-up!

So, for the moment, Telemarq is a consultancy business through which Rose and I do our work (which means it already has a rather broad remit, since our fields are very different). I’m delighted that Richard Morrison is going to be working part-time under the Telemarq banner too, since he’s one of the nicest and smartest chaps I’ve run into in a long time.

A big part of Telemarq will be software development, but there’s some teaching, some publishing, some intellectual property stuff in the mix already, and we’re only just starting.

May need some more people soon, or some more days in the week…!

To the extent I’ve formulated a coherent plan, it’s this:

To do really good work, on interesting projects, for, and with, people we like.

Not exactly a conventional business mission statement, but I’ve seen a lot worse. It’ll do as a placeholder!

Giambologna’s splendid sculpture of The Rape of the Sabine Women, carved from a single block of marble.

(The Wikipedia article points out that ‘rape’ here chiefly means abduction, rather than its more modern emphasis, and suggests that it might actually have been quite a good deal for the women concerned…)

The best way to see the popular spots in Florence, we discovered this morning, is to do it before about 8 a.m.

But I have walked on this stone before, in many cities around the world, and in a finely-polished form, because it is used as the flooring material in Apple’s retail stores.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs describes how this came about:

In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence’s sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian — a concern that it’s hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic.

The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence. “We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity,” said Johnson. “Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity.” So designers in Florence picked out just the right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its companion tiles. “Knowing that it’s the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time,” said Johnson.