number 9

What is it with me and robots?

I wanted a gumstix when they first came out, but had a momentary lapse of technofetishism and decided I had 5 perfectly good computers already, some of which even had swanky thing like ’keyboards’ and ’screens’.

Then some guy at essex uni starts playing with helicopters and I decide I want one again (this despite the fact that on reading the paper it transpires that the current ‘swarm’ is 1 helicopter with a flight time of about a minute before the battery wears out, and has an external pc doing all its computation for it).

So, sanity prevailed – I signed up to the gumstix list, bookmarked the odd link and let Bush weaken the dollar until I could get a connex for under 50 quid (under 55 pounds this morning – USA! USA!).

Then this lot pop up on my radar. Swarm robots again, built from BT-enabled gumstix and cameras (and obviously less prone to falling out of the sky and smashing by virtue of their unique ‘not-flying’ abilities) but this time with robot arms. Holy crap.

Loads of good docs on the various components required too. I was always told I should take up electronics, so think its time to see what basic tutorials I can mug up on. ISTR being a bit hamfisted with a soldering iron, so it might be worth getting a breadboard kit or two to get back into it before melting an XScale.

No rush anyway, I need a few more Rumsfeld speeches on exit strategies before 800 dollars gets affordable.

(oh the hubris! Since I opened my fat mouth, the dollar has shot up. as of 1st July 100 bucks now costs me over 56 quid…)

When I think of Africa and telecommunications, the first thing I think of is spam , but an episode of In business (the beeb are now offering mp3s on ‘Listen Again’ instead of just Realplayer, happily) got me thinking again.

few key points :

1. the remotest parts of Kenya have the fastest takeup of mobile phone usage. (apparently basestations are maxxed out the minute they’re installed)
2. SMS was seen as more cost-effective than talk
3. very low-income users would share a phone rental to keep up to date on market prices around the local area (which apparently vary a lot)
4. the price puts nobody off. For remote users, telecom is a faster alternative to a truck ride

This is totally back-asswards to the UK, where a mobile is a luxury/convenience or a PDA wannabe. Got me thinking about the Australian outback with the whole ‘Flying Doctor’ / ‘School of the Air’ remoteness of it.

One of the nice things about living on a dinky island like Britain is that the closest we come to ‘information deserts’ is the few chunks of the UK where you can’t get broadband….

Well that was the easiest (ooh! ajax preview!) 3 minutes install I’ve done in months.

Lighttpd conditionals seem more flexible than any sane person would possibly want –
NameVirtualHosts are old hat, of course, but it’s not limited to the Host header – you can serve custom vhosts for each regex match of user-agent and other things that sound bizarre but are probably the only way out of some scrapes.