Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The move to the iBook continues apace.

This weekend I received the D-Link Bluetooth adapter. It's a rather delightful piece of kit - a tiny little USB dongle that doesn't protrude too far out of the side of the iBook. I've also found Apple's software (find out more and download it from here) is surprisingly easy to use. Just install the software, plug in the adapter and you're ready to go - exactly the sort of usuability we should expect for that sort of tool. It's also only £43 inc. VAT, cheaper than many other Bluetooth adapters.

Still, I'm looking forward to MacOS 10.2 Jaguar where Bluetooth support and adapter drivers should be part of the base OS, rather than an additional download.

Then there was the 1.2 update for the iPod (which looks like it may have solved my iPod battery life problems, too). While there are some UI changes, I think they do make it easier to navigate through the music library - especially when you've got at least 1000 tracks on the beast! It's also added a clock and calendar support. Add that to the contacts tools, and the forthcoming iCal, and it looks very like Apple are slowly turning the iPod into a simple read-only PDA. In fact there's very little difference in functionality between an iPod with the latest software update and the old REX PC Card PDA...

Any bets on an iPod 2.0 with some form of user input?

...and looks rather good.

I switched back to Winamp as my defult player for CD and MP3 on the PC a few weeks back, just in time for this new release. It works very well with WinDAB as a tool for playing back streamed DAB radio from the Wavefinder.

Now I just have to remember just what skin I was using on the home PC.

And I need to find an alternative ripping tool to replace MMJB. I'm currently tempted to wait for Jaguar, and to use the iMac as the main media hub machine, dumping files to a shared drive from iTunes 3.0.

Jon Udell (who wrote one of the best books on how to really work with Internet technologies in the shape of the O'Reilly book Practical Internet Groupware) is doing some really important thinking in both his blog and his Infoworld columns.

Like this piece, for example, on the intersection between blogging, collaboration software and Microsoft Office.

It's interesting, as he's putting into words some of the things that I've found myself thinking about over the last month or so - specifically on concepts like presence, publish and subscribe XML web services, and distributed knowledge frameworks. I really have to write and publish in one way or another two thought pieces (one on frameworks for knowledge-based web services, and the other on distributed rights management) that I've been shaping in various conversations with people over the last couple of weeks. And after a conversation we had at ConteXXt, A3 would like me to put together a seminar for Reading University on some of these ideas, so I really do have to get something done...

One thing I've noticed - since leaving Scient and feeling so much less stressed - I've become a lot more creative. As you might be able to tell I'm feeling good about this!