Mr Fry’s gadget bag

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I always thought that Quentin and I must be the most chronic cases of travelling geeks (in terms of the amount of kit we take with us) in the western world. But I was wrong. We are mere amateurs, nay boulevardiers, compared with Mr Stephen Fry. Here is the list of what he has just unpacked in his New York hotel room.

7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.

4 x iPod/iPhone chargers: I seem to use one iPhone exclusively for mad hacking, jailbreaking and frigging about with, another as a pedometer, another for music, another as a – guess what ? – phone. I know I’m putting my botty on the line by confessing to jailbreakage and hackery, but I think Apple (while each update brings a new weapon in their war against Pwnage and SIM-card skulduggery) are man enough to take it.

3 x Hard drives: Took the hasty decision to come to America (I shan’t be back in Britain till late January) with just one computer, one of the new MacBooks. It doesn’t have Firewire. Duh? Maddening, since my favourite hard drive is Firewire only. But at least the MacBook allows a proper connection, unlike the underpowered USB of the original version of the scrumptious MacBook Air. You know that feeling when you have a whole lump of data on one device or peripheral and you want to get it on another and you suddenly realise you can’t? ‘Okay, so I upload it onto a compact flash card. No onto an SD card. Hell where’s my card reader? Right. I email myself the file…’ etc., etc. That happens to me a lot.

1 Snowball USB Microphone: just in case I have the sudden yen to record a podgram. You never know.

6 x SIM cards: Orange, Vodafone, 2 x O2, T-Mobile, AT&T. My UK mobile number is Orange, that’s my regular number, but one needs to swap and shuffle and use other networks in order properly to play. I know. I’m weird. I’ve long accepted it. But weird is just another way of spelling “wired”. I drew weird in another way and got wired.

1 x Blackberry Bold
1 x Blackberry Storm
1 x HTC G1 Android ‘Googlephone’
1 x Pocketsurfer
n x iPhones (too many, you’d only laugh or snort with derision if I told you the exact number)

Assorted CDs

Assorted Manuals and Quickstart Guides.

Mind you, he probably travels by private jet. Try getting that pile of stuff past a RyanAir check-in.

The Gmail diet

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Chris Nuttall of the FT has become a Gmail user.  (He’s on the run from the dreaded Lotus Notes.)  He’s posted some helpful notes on how to make Gmail more efficient. I’ve learned some tricks I hadn’t known. Gratias!

Microsoft: the slide continues

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Last month, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was used by 68.15 percent of the Web surfers monitored. In January 2008, that figure was 75.47 percent; in January 2007, it was 79.98 percent. If you’re in Redmond, that’s got to give you a litte shiver. The agents of this erosion? Mozilla’s Firefox browser, which started 2007 with a 13.70 percent share and finished 2008 with 21.34 percent, and Apple’s Safari, which climbed from 4.72 percent to 7.93 percent in the same span. Even Google’s new Chrome browser, still a blip in the market after being introduced just this fall, did what IE could not and won some new fans.

The Net Applications stats on operating systems were no more encouraging for Microsoft. In January 2007, 93.33 percent of the Web travelers monitored were running Windows; last month, that figure was down to 88.68. Across the same period, the Mac share rose from 6.22 percent to 9.63. And while the use of the iPhone for Web browsing is still comparatively tiny, the growth rate gives Apple even more reason to smile. In just the last six months, its share rose from 0.19 percent to 0.44 percent.

Bad news, good news

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Jeff Jarvis has some interesting stats about the parlous state of the print newspaper business. For example:

• In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers.

• 54% of Americans do not trust news media, according to a Harris survey. A Sacred Heart University survey says only 20% of Americans believe or trust most news media.

• Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will “never read a newspaper.” Never.

• In 2008, the American Society of Newspaper Editors took “paper” out of its name.

And the silver linings in this accumulation of dark clouds?

• But newspaper online site audience has long since surpassed print circulation, reaching 69 million unique users in fall 2008, according to NAA.

• And the total online news audience is about 100 million—more than half total U.S. internet users—according to ComScore.

The pen is…

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… dangerous, apparently. This from today’s Guardian.

A man has been given an asbo banning him from carrying felt tip pens in public after writing abusive comments about women in public lavatories and buses.

David Jell, 49, is also prohibited from carrying spray paint and displaying rude comments or nicknames in a public place under the terms of the three-year order.

Magistrates in Sevenoaks, Kent, served Jell with the order on 22 December after hearing that he had committed criminal damage and harassment between January and September 2007.

Er, what about all those misanthropes and misogynists who write similar things in the pages of the Daily Mail, Sun and Star?

The cluelessness of Andy Burnham

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Nice reproof by Charles Arthur of the Culture Secretary’s potty proposals for ‘regulating’ web content.

The cluelessness of so many of these ideas hasn't been lost on all ministers, however. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, is inviting views about Burnham's comments on his personal blog. As he points out,

Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward your views to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter.

One would have to say that the comments aren't really running in Burnham's favour so far, but possibly the Daily Mail's commenters haven't been alerted about the blogpost's existence. Except even they don't think it's workable.

I think, Mr Burnham, that if even the Daily Mail's commenters don't think it's worth trying to do, then it's not worth trying to do.

(We should point out, by the way, that Watson emphatically does get the net. Perhaps Andy Burnham should drop by for a quick briefing.)

What Should I Read Next?

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Interesting idea — What Should I Read Next?. You type in the title and author of a volume that you’ve finished reading and it comes up with suggestions. It’s based, I’d guess, on a collaborative filtering algorithm. It’ll get better with more signed-up users, but it wasn’t very impressive on first attempts. For example, it’d never heard of J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash, and produced weird follow-ups for Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

The worst photograph ever made?

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Well, this is a pretty strong contender. And it’s by Annie Leibovitz too. It’s crass in the way that Woolworth prints used to be. (Remember Woolworths? Neatly organised kitsch — as Nye Bevan put it. He famously observed that listening to a speech by Neville Chamberlain was “like paying a visit to Woolworth’s: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence”.)

Minimising the risk of credit/debit card fraud

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Here’s a sobering way to start the new year — precautions you can/should take to minimise the risk of having your cards cloned or your bank account ripped off. By Saar Drinen of the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Security Group.

People often ask me what can they do to prevent themselves from being victims of card fraud when they pay with their cards at shops or use them in ATMs for on-line card fraud tips see e-victims.org, for example. My short answer is usually “not much, except checking your statements and reporting anomalies to the bank”. This post is the longer answer — little practical things, some a bit over the top, I admit — that cardholders can do to decrease the risk of falling victim to card fraud. Some of these will only apply to UK issued cards, some to all smartcards, and the rest applies to all types of cards.

Sobering because I’ve realised that I don’t take many of the precautions recommended.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.