Grasshoppermind

New scientist has this old article about MyLifeBits, a piece of software designed so that you can record your life. You can store conversations, emails, video, etc. A google style indexing system gives you the ability to search back through your life archive.

Since 2002 when the article was written, we have much cheaper storage, mini video cameras, HSDPA and locative based technologies that are enabling a greater degree of granularity for recording than ever before. Allowing indexing by date, time, location, people. The security and privacy concerns are also greatly elevated by this type of application.

You can find out more about the project at Microsoft’s Project Page for MyLifeBits

via Techkwondo, who points out this amazing art installation by Seyed Alavi

This must be quite alarming to walk on! Imagine the effect of too many Gin &Tonic’s plus Jetlag, then you get to walk over this. Stunning.

Got this in my email the other day, nice one.

Elsewhere in this blog I commented on the 3 Megapixel Ricoh GPS enabled digital camera . Now via The Maproom Blog we find this example of a GPS with a Camera. Whatever will they think of next? As I’ve wished for before, a GPS enabled video camera would be nice. Apparently according to commenter Rimma on this blog, NEC have filed and been granted a patent for this. I too cannot wait for this. I can now imagine video-enabled tracks on Google Earth!

My brother sent me this email about a freshly released Flaming Lips album called At War With The Mystics.
[Affiliate Link]

I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing his review with you…

Flaming Lips

Click on the Music Tab, then At War with the Mystics and listen to a few tracks.

Go for track POMPEII AM GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG or THE W.A.N.D. (THE WILL ALWAYS NEGATES DEFEAT) or THE YEAH YEAH YEAH SONG (WITH ALL YOUR POWER) and read the info behind the songs. My kind of guy.

Depending on the track you can (in my humble opinion) here influences of Beatles (tune building), Pink Floyd (sweeping scope), Zappa (organised chaos) and maybe even Gong thrown in for good measure.

Album was out yesterday, I already own it. Anyone who can describe a song thus deserves my money:

I was playing electric guitar, Michael was on fuzzwah bass and Steven was on the drumkit and we stumbled upon this druggy prog-rock riff and stuttery, funky beat. It was like Black Sabbath getting mashed up with Sly and the Family Stone or Stevie Wonder, and it sent us off in a wonderful new direction.

The low-res internet versions don'’t really do the songs justice, but gives you a glimpse into their odd musical world.

I know music is subjective. I can’t help preaching when it’s this good…Sorry.

Eddie

Maybe not entirely my cup of tea, but what do you think?

As of 29th March 2006, the Isle of Man is to be listed in the ISO 3166 countries list as a country separate from the United Kingdom. I would love to think that this was anything to do with my contacting Microsoft to get them to add Isle of Man to their website address forms. The truth is that due to concerted efforts from government representatives of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man over a period of five or more years, the ISO have agreed to make the appropriate changes to the countries list known as ISO3166-1. As many websites utilise this database for their pull down list of countries it seems that the Isle of Man will begin to be listed as soon as they refresh their databases.