Category Archives: Asides

You want fries with that 802.11g?

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From The Register…

Proletarian fryhouse McDonald’s has announced it will offer free Wi-Fi in its 1,200 UK burger outlets by the end of the year.

The move will make McDonald’s the country’s largest public hotspot provider, and pits it against Starbucks’ pay-as-you-go T-Mobile service for high street internet supremacy.

It’s all part of a company-wide drive upmarket and away from the traditional McDonald’s experience: scary clowns, mechanically-recovered beef, and screaming infants.

Some sites already had Wi-Fi through an arrangement with BT Openzone, but access was not free. That partnership will continue, but with McDonald’s footing the bill. As part of the expansion, it’s also signed a second deal with The Cloud.

Some 8,000 of McDonald’s 13,000 US chow sheds currently offer free connectivity.

The UK announcement comes days after BT’s launch of BT FON, a Wi-Fi sharing initiative that it hopes will expand its coverage on the cheap. Up to two million Home Hub owners are being targeted and it’ll open to other ISPs’ customers around new year.

Cooped up

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Snatched with a Leica M6. I didn’t see the kid in the car until I saw the print. Also the fact that the lamp-post slopes at the same angle as the door pillar!

Dream Realisation, release 1.0

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When we embarked on the Ndiyo Project we always knew that the realisation of the vision depended on shrinking the thin client down to a chip. Well, our colleagues at DisplayLink have done it! This is the USB version of the Nivo, and it’s now in the back of monitors from two of the world’s leading manufacturers of displays — Samsung and LG. It’s an amazing achievement. And there’s more to come. Stay tuned.

Not ‘If” but ‘When’…

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From Simon Heffer…

The other day I went to one of the most disturbing events of my life. Together with a number of others, I listened for the best part of two hours to two American security experts: their area of expertise was Iran and the threat it poses.

The burden of their observations can be summed up as follows: that an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a question of if but when.

And, it was emphasised, this certainty is not dependent on the man the world regards as the warmonger Bush still being in office: his successor, be he or she Republican or Democrat, will see that there is no option but to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions too.

The terrifying thought is this: what he heard at that seminar may well be right — that the US will eventually go for it.

We have such short memories. It’s not that long ago since: we (Britain and the US) egged on– and armed — Iraq in its war on Iran; turned a blind eye to Iraqi use of poison and nerve gas against Iranian troops (there are still people in Iran dying from the after-effects of Iraqi gassing); and did everything in our power to prevent UN intervention to stop the conflict. Why? Because it was deemed necessary to stop Iran at all costs.

Nothing’s changed, really. But the Iranians have learned the lesson. In a world that is irredeemably hostile to them, nukes are the only safeguard. Which is why they’re going for them. We’d do the same in their position.

Life imitating art

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Just heard a news snippet on a radio station about a life-sized cardboard cutout of a police officer which had been installed in a Nuneaton shopping mall to deter thieves. Yes — you guessed it! — it’s been stolen!

And I swear…

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… that if I ever again hear anyone say “awesome” when they mean “good”, “pretty good” or even “terrific” then I won’t be answerable for the consequences.

‘Awe-inspiring’, however, is a different matter entirely. Think of Yosemite on a crisp spring or autumn day.

Antisocial networking

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Lovely snippet from Lorcan Dempsey’s Blog…

From the personal ads in the current London Review of Books:

Divorced, 1950s born man, deeply at odds with the frivolous and incomprehensible nature of everything outside of this typeface and that pair of brogues seeks absolutely anyone who isn’t on facebook at box no. …. [London Review of Books 20 September 2007]

Hmmm… should that headline read “anti social networking”?

Say cheesy

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A snip from the specification of the SONY Cybershot T70 compact digital camera.

Technology, said Heidegger, “is the art of arranging the world so that one doesn’t have to experience it”. Cue some of the new SONY Cybershot range which come equipped with a ‘smile shutter’ that recognises grinning subjects and then automatically takes a shot. Apparently, when several people are in the shot, the shutter only fires when the main subject – who must be manually selected – smiles. A sequence of six smile shots can be taken without manually pressing the shutter.