Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Last night we went out to dinner with Phil Zimmerman (who created PGP) and Jon Callas, the CTO of PGP Inc.

A very interesting set of conversations kept the evening buzzing, covering everything from civil liberties, the politics and morality of cryptography (of course), the problems associated with hashing functions, and British sports cars, but it wasn't until the end of the evening that we started to realise that there were other connections...

...at which we point we discovered that Jon and his wife knew not only mdlbear and flower_cat, as well as mr_kurt and saffronrose (oh, and rowanf too!)...

...and then we got onto the stories of a young Eric S. Raymond at SF conventions...

...comes Open Tech 2005

A one day conference on DIY technologies, from the UKUUG and NTK.

Sponsored by backstage.bbc.co.uk, Open Tech 2005 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference about technologies that anyone can have a go at, from "Open Source"-style ways of working to repurposing everyday electronics hardware.

Taking place on 23rd July, 2005, in Hammersmith, London, the line-up currently features:

• Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext, on where the web went wrong


• The official launch of the backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network, opening up BBC content for you to play with


• Plus: able to record an entire week of all Freeview TV and radio channels, probably the UK's largest (fridge-sized) PVR

Worth attending just for the Ted Nelson talk, I'd suspect.

Looks like it could be the geek event of the summer...

...it's the cellphone thong.

Available in red, black or black with studs...



It's even got corset laces...



Scared now!

I think I'll stick with my Fortnum & Mason leather tissue case. It fits my SPV C500 like a glove, and is nicely supple and soft. Hard to believe something so nice came out of a cracker!

[via Gizmodo]