My first website – now back online…!
A while ago I came across a backup of the files that made up my very first website from 1997, when I was working at CERN. I had been inspired to learn some HTML for a couple of reasons:
1) I was working at the birthplace of the World Wide Web
2) I had some time to kill on the night shift.
So I fired up Netscape Communicator 4 and started experimenting. I was very proud of my creation at the time, although to be honest I thought there was a little more of it.
The site has had a couple of homes over the years, from cern.ch to Geocities, but each time the host provider either reclaimed the space or closed down.
Now Google has a way of hosting a (simple) website from Google Drive, which you will have if you have a Google account. It’s pretty straight forward and perfect for this use case (and free…)
• Lifehacker: Host Web Pages on Google Drive
Article: On the exponential curve (Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University) (Wired UK)
“Human development over 150,000 years has been local and linear… Your brain is programmed to be linear. But in these next few decades the rate of change is growing so fast that almost everything we can conceive can happen. Every industry is potentially disruptible in the near future. And if you’re not excited or scared, you’re asleep at the wheel.”
Kurzweil sees SU as a means of building “an in-depth, thoughtful community of people united only in their appreciation of the exponential growth of information technology”
Try as I might to think that Ray Kurzweil and friends have half a screw loose, I can’t help considering their (some of their…) ideas seriously.
Choosing an exponential trend is a good idea for a next career move.
They may well be amongst those to change the world.
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• Wired UK: On the exponential curve: inside Singularity University
* Spare Cycles: Further thinking: longer term, greater scale at the Singularity University
• Spare Cycles: Article: Better Than Human (Wired)
• Spare Cycles: Review: What Technology Wants
• Spare Cycles: Mini Review: Race Against The Machine
Film: The Amazing Spider-Man
A new all-too-human incarnation of Spiderman.
It’s well done, but is it really necessary?
Drafts for iPhone
I don’t normally mention apps, but I heard about this from Merlin Mann and it sounded interesting.
Just type in some text and send it elsewhere. Great for sending text messages, email to specific people, items to a to-do app, Tweets, entries into your calendar, updating text files on Dropbox – all a lot quicker than opening the specific apps themselves. I’ve found dictating into it works well.
If you do the same thing with text more than a few times, it’s worth setting up an Action. I keep finding new uses for it. Brilliant.
Well worth a couple of quid of anyone’s money.
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• Macworld: Hands on with Drafts 3.0 and its impressive new organization tools
Macstories: Drafts 3 Review: Better iOS Automation and Workflows
Lifehacker: How to Use Drafts to Speed Up Your Mobile Note Writing
Panoramic Scotland
Here are a few pictures of a recent trip to Scotland to stay in a wigwam for a couple of nights (April 2013). Thought I’d post, as you don’t always see Scotland like this…
Mini review: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (audiobook version)
Earth has been attacked twice by an alien race. The military don’t want there to be a third time and are looking for a commander able to fight off the aliens if they return. They think they have found their new leader – a six year old boy.
The boy – Ender Wiggin – comes from a family where all three children are special. These remarkable Wiggin children will impose themselves on the world, but in different ways. The relationships between them are an integral part of the story. However, principally the story is the character of Ender himself, and that is the book’s strength.
Ender is sent to Battle School – taken and isolated from his family so he can learn the necessary skills. When I looked up information on the book before I read it, this was the main part that people were focusing on. Don’t think that the story ends with the battle school. If you do that you are missing most of the story. It grows in scope and imagination beyond anything that you may have expected.
This book is a winner of a number of science fiction awards and it shows – this is a brilliant story and I recommend it even if (like me) you do not read a lot of sci-fi.
A word about the audiobook version – this is truly a production. There are a number of narrators and it works incredibly well. This is the way to experience the book. This is one of the best audiobooks I’ve heard.
The bottom line: read this book.
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Note: the above image appears to be a mock up of a book cover by these people. It may not be real but it is the best I’ve seen…
A great day out at the Edinburgh Maker Faire
I had a great day out at Scotland’s first Maker Faire yesterday with my daughter.
It was a mix of electronics, arts and crafts, run by enthusiasts and small companies making bespoke products.
My daughter had her first goes at soldering (when making a silver ring) and riveting (when making a hoola hoop.)
There were gloves that made music when you moved the fingers, soap that looked like cheesecake, 3D printing (good to see, but pretty boring to watch), mini dinosaur making from laser-etched plywood, a large number of sewing machines in the workshop to make cushions, Raspberry Pi enclosures, Arduino starter kits, some of the weirdest bikes you’ve ever seen, puppets and a machine that allowed you to poke virtual objects and get touch feedback.
I was very impressed at how many people there were – it was great to see it so busy – and both of us would like it to come back next year (a London event would be even better for us southerners…)
A big thanks to everybody involved!
