Paul Mc Namara's WorldView

Now this is an interesting device which was reported by laptop mag has reported. The article also mentions a device where a 12 inch table can attach itself to a keyboard to transform itself into a notebook. However, I’m a fan of devices becoming as small as possible but also to be usuable. The iPad (which I saw for the first time yesterday) is too heavy and too big for my liking. That’s what makes the third device to interesting.

As a note-taker, the Eee Tablet could hardly offer more functionality. Its stylus uses Wacom technology to give it an incredibly smooth drawing / hand writing experience. But if writing down notes or drawing diagrams when you’re in a meeting or class is not enough, why not take a picture of the whiteboard? The Eee Tablet has a back facing camera that will take photos of anything and let you annotate it. You can also record sound while you take notes. So just imagine recording a college lecture and then playing it back while you read the notes and look at photos of the whiteboard.

It seems to me to be something business people would take to in droves. The iPad is notoriously unhelpful for productive tasks like writing, there is no camera and as far as I’m aware, there is no microphone. The ASUS tablet has all three. It seems that ASUS has stolen a march on their competitors yet again. Watch them try and catch up.

The Guardian reports that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks.

Help is at hand. An economist, Makoto Watanabe, has calculated that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks in advance of flying.

His yet-to-be-published findings also suggests that airline tickets are cheaper when purchased in the afternoons, rather than the mornings, prompting him to speculate that airlines are assuming business travellers will book their tickets at work in the morning on the company account, whereas leisure travellers are more likely to book from home in the afternoon

Hmm, I did a couple of searches yesterday but for me, the theory didn’t hold true. But Sunday wasn’t a normal day so perhaps that is the exception.

Achilll man JP Grealis is still missing in the Netherlands. Today in the Irish Times, his family have offered a reward of €10,000 for information of where he is.

The family of James Patrick “JP” Grealis has put up a reward of €10,000 and described it as their last chance of discovering his whereabouts.

The last reported sighting of JP, a carpenter then aged 24, was when he checked out of a BB in the town of Breda on October 23rd, 2008, saying he was going to find work in another town.

The Grealis family, of Tonragee, Achill, hope the involvement of a team of Dutch experts who have recently taken up the case will provide a breakthrough. A retired detective, a criminal psychologist and a well-known crime reporter who take on cold cases or those the police are not treating as crime have started their own inquiry.

They believe his disappearance was suspicious, and that he may have been murdered. “The Grealis family came up against a brick wall, they were sent away again and again as they tried to discover what happened to their son and brother here,” said crime reporter Jolande van der Graaf of De Telegraaf newspaper.

There is also a report in Dutch in the newspaper, De Telegraaf in the Netherlands with a video of his sister making an appeal for help. The video is in a mixture of Dutch and English.

De afgelopen weken zamelden de eilandbewoners 10.000 euro in voor ‘hun’ JP. Vanuit Ierland looft de familie Grealis dit bedrag uit voor informatie die daadwerkelijk leidt tot de terugkomst van James Patrick Grealis of zijn stoffelijke resten

I just rewatched “Before Sunset”, the sequel to one of my favourite films “Before Sunrise”. I was struck during the dialogue that Ethan Hawke’s character notes that 6 months after a life-changing event whether it was winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic, a person reverts to the psychological state that they inhabited before the event. Then I read the latest post by Tim Harford this evening.

It’s quite possible that our image of these possible futures is not very good. As the psychologist Dan Gilbert points out, you might think that winning the Lottery would make you happier than being permanently paralysed from the waist down, but the empirical evidence suggests that this is just a failure of imagination: paraplegics are not, in fact, less happy than people who have won the Lottery.

By the way, the film is definitely better the second time around. I wish that I could see Before Sunrise again right now. My favourite part is at the end of the film where they show all of the places in Vienna where the story unfolded the next morning, deserted. I felt that way about Prague for a long time.

It seems that many mobile phone applications for both the Apple and Android platforms secretly extract data from the phone. Usually, I breeze through those warnings on my HTC Tattoo. Time to re-evaluate what I’ve installed.

Lookout Inc., a mobile-phone security firm, scanned nearly 300,000 free applications for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and phones built around Google Inc.’s Android software. It found that many of them secretly pull sensitive data off users’ phones and ship them off to third parties without notification.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/07/28/financial/f121220D57.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0v44r2Vtn

I see the successor to the Panasonic LX3 has been announced, the LX5. More details of which can be found on the main photo review sites (dpreview.com for example). The new features don’t seem to justify an upgrade for someone who already owns an LX3. What was particularly disappointing was the fact that the lens cap is still detached from the camera. I will be very interested in the successor to the Canon S90 if it arrives in the near future.

This is brilliant! This article in The Guardian discerns the differences in perception that can arise between the two types of people in the world, Askers and Guessers.

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that’s achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”

More from the Guardian here

This is a test post from my HTC Tattoo

This story in The Guardian got my attention. Imagine having 4 years of work removed at the drop of a hat? That’s what seems to have happened with Google’s decision to shut down some music bloggers. Apparently, they weren’t even give any warning.

In what critics are calling “musicblogocide 2010″, Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites – and years of archives – were wiped from the internet.

This is not a problem of Google per se. It’s a problem of depending on any third-party to hold your data whether it’s Facebook, Salesforce, Flickr, Hotmail or any other site holding your data. I came across this problem during the initial internet bust when my files were deleted by a data hosting company and I was unable to retrieve them. If it’s important, always make local backups of your data and have workarounds in place so that if one provider kicks you off or goes bust, you have an alternative option to keep functioning. If you blog, get your own domain and hosting provider and backup your files. It’s much easier than remembering what you wrote 4 years ago…