Keys Corner » On the web

Dementiaville

John — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:33:27 +0000

The first thing that went through my mind, when I read this article in The Independent, was that “Dementiaville” must be just like the village (Portmeirion) which the British cult TV series “The Prisoner” was set in. The Prisoner, an involuntarily retired British secret agent, was held in a village at an unknown location without any obvious guards, which he was unable to escape from:

The newly approved €20m (€20,37 ()m) housing project is to be built next to the Swiss village of Wiedlisbach near Bern and will provide sheltered accommodation and care for 150 elderly dementia patients in 23 purpose-built 1950s-style houses. The homes will be deliberately designed to recreate the atmosphere of times past.

The scheme’s promoters said there will be no closed doors and residents will be free to move about. To reinforce an atmosphere of normality, the carers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants. The only catch is that Wiedlisbach’s inhabitants will not be allowed to leave the village.

The Prisoner used to be an absolute “must” for me to see when I was at school – even better than “The Man from Uncle“!

… sardines in a can

John — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:37:20 +0000

Japanese Subway

I think this is something I don’t really need to experience first hand!

Learn how to make better use of Google

John — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:14:49 +0000

Typical Monday agoogleaday puzzle

Google is running a series of puzzles at agoogleaday.com over the next months, which can be solved if you know how to use Google to help you. If you get stuck, you can click on “Show Answer” below the puzzle, and Google explains what you needed to search for. The questions are easiest on Mondays and get steadily more difficult as the week progresses. If you make your searches directly from the agoogleaday page, Google filters the results so you don’t see any websites which have posted the answer.

Here the answer to the (easy, Monday) puzzle above:

Answer to the above puzzle

Map showing the quakes in Japan

John — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:52:25 +0000

Realtime quake map of Japan

Paul Nicholls in Christchurch, New Zealand, has produced a continuously updating map showing the location and depth of the quakes which have struck Japan since the magnitude 9.0 quake on the 11th March 2011. Today (17th March), there were 34 quakes, including one measuring over 6.0 on the Richter Scale. Bear in mind, that the Richter Scale is logarithmic, which means that a difference of 1.0 on the scale is a difference of 10 times the magnitude, and a difference of 2.0 is a factor of 100 times difference in magnitude.

(The Christchurch quake this year was 6.3 on the Richter Scale).

If you are interested in an informed view on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, and on background information about radiation and nuclear processes, try the well-written MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub, which is written and maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

Rich Snippets – Google recipe search

John — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 08:38:04 +0000

Recipe Search on Google

I just noticed – Google has added a recipe search item to their home page. You can filter the results by ingredients, cooking time or by calories.

To get included in the results, sites need to tag their recipes using rich snippets.

Rich snippets can also be used to add information (e.g. geo-location, address, phone number) that Google uses in its search results for other types of data about (for example) events, product reviews, or businesses. It looks like it would be a good idea for businesses to add the necessary code to their sites and then tell Google that they have done so.

Microsoft: Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6

John — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 08:18:00 +0000

Microsoft: Encourage Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade

Aggressive “dissing” of your own product. Microsoft has set a goal of getting the proportion of Internet Explorer 6 users reduced to 1% and is actively advising people to stop using it.

Currently, around 12% of internet users, mostly in Asia, are still using MSIE6, which was incredibly buggy and caused headaches for web developers who had to add extra code to web sites to work around the bugs.

Complete make-over for IHArchitects.com

John — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:01:20 +0000

The new look for IHArchitects.com

Having just reworked the content and given a mild update to the appearance of Richard and Simon’s web site in January, we decided to ask Caroline Archer, the graphic designer who did their logo and corporate image, to give it the once-over.

This time we have kept the content the same (apart from adding the contact details to every page – previously some users had difficultly finding the contact page) and have completely revamped the appearance. (See above).

We think Caroline’s done a great job!

DCalling: cheap international mobile phone calls

John — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:42:32 +0000

Most of the time, I will be visiting our building site on my own, over the next months. Ruth is still working, earning the money to pay for the house! So I will need to call home to discuss any issues that arise. Last time I was in Spain, we tried out the DCalling Service.

This seems to work. Well. I think we’ll be using it a lot in future.

You register with DCalling, which will get you a small credit on your DCalling account (25 cents, if I remember correctly), to allow you to try out the service. If you like it, you can top up your account in units of 20 Euro, which will be enough to keep you going for over 17 hours if you are making international mobile phone calls to land-lines within Europe.

They give you a unique free-phone (0800) number for every country that you can call locally and then enter the “destination number” in the country you wish to call. The number identifies you, as well as being the gateway to cheap calls. This is how they know whose account to charge. The only cost should be 1.9 cents per minute which they charge to forward the call to your destination number, if it is a land line in Europe. (I say “should be” as I haven’t yet checked the balance on my Spanish pay-as-you-go phone to make sure the local call is really free in Spain). You can also set up a phone book of frequently called numbers, for which you can define short-dialling codes on DCalling’s web site. So, for instance, our home phone number might have the short-dialling code of “1″. I can then dial “1″ instead of our home number when I am using DCalling.

That sounds much more complicated than it is. Here’s how I used DCalling in Spain, calling home using a mobile phone with a Spanish SIM card:

Call my personal freephone number in Spain
Wait for the announcement to telling me to dial the number I want (in my case our home phone number)
Dial my short dialling code for our home number: “1#” (the # sign causes the call to be routed via DCalling)

That’s it. After that the phone rings and I am through to Ruth. I’ve set up short codes for her mobile phone, her office phone and the numbers of several people in Spain, who I may from time to time want to call on my mobile from Germany. If I call Spain from Germany, I use a different free-phone number, which is a local German number. I can get the free-phone numbers for all the countries I want to make calls from by visiting my account page at DCalling’s web site. I have entered them into my phone book, so I always have them with me.

If my destination phone number is a mobile phone, instead of paying 1.9 cents per minute, the cost is around 20 cents per minute within Europe, which I think is also very reasonable. (The DCalling price list for call charges is here). DCalling also offer call-back services for countries where they don’t yet have a free-phone gateway.

Light relief

John — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 22:18:04 +0000

The construction of our house in Xàtiva started a couple of weeks ago, so we are busy thinking about all the decisions we still need to take, before the builders take them for us by default. The sanitary ware, taps and showers in the bathrooms, the interior doors and their handles, the floor and wall tiles, and so on and so on… I plan to go to Valencia in a few days time and look at some samples with Antonio, the architect. And visit the building site, and convince myself that work really has started.

For light relief, it is good to take a break and also browse Unhappy Hipsters now and then!

Nifty way of miniaturizing bar codes

John — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:51:37 +0000

The Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab has come up with a way of marking objects with a 3mm wide bar code that a normal digital SLR camera can read at a distance of over 4 meters (a cell phone camera needs to be closer) :

Comparision of the new bokode and a conventional barcode
(Image from MIT Camera Culture Club's Paper about bokodes)

The experimenters at MIT call the new bar code a bokode, to distinguish it from its larger counterparts. The bokode uses an effect known as bokeh which is a characteristic of all camera lenses and often causes the highlights of out of focus objects to appear as groups of circles on the photograph.

The advantages of the bokode are its small size, which means that it can offer very inconspicuous identification of objects, and that it can be read from several meters away, thus allowing new applications for bar codes.

One possible use could be to add information to shops and other buildings which could be read and stored by Google Streetview cars, allowing more information to be displayed on on-line maps. The researchers have several other ideas, and are looking for commercial partners to develop the bokode further.

See a video about bokodes here; read more about bokodes here.

(Via Cool Hunting)

Pay for your Ku Klux Klan membership with Visa/Mastercard…

John — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:44:49 +0000

… but you can’t pay to support WikiLeaks.

Wikipedia on the Klan:

Today, a large majority of sources consider the Klan to be a “subversive or terrorist organization”. In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization… …In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.

From today’s Guardian at 4.14pm (my emphasis):

Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are “white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”

It seems that Visa and Mastercard don’t have consistent interpretation of their own terms and conditions. Which organisation is most likely to be involved in criminal activities? (Remember too, that when the Washington Post investigated the Watergate scandal, that was no talk of action being taken to close down the newspaper or to cut off funding from subscribers.)

How to opt out of on-line advertising

John — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:07:52 +0000

If you don’t like being tracked (i.e. having advertisers being informed about which sites you have visited) when you are visiting websites, you can block some 20 or so ad-serving companies doing this (including some big ones, like Google, Yahoo and Akamai). You will still see on-line ads but at least you won’t get targeted with car advertisements because happened to visit VW’s website last week!

Visit aboutads.info to restrict advertisers tracking you. You need to fill out the form in each web broswer you use, as the request mechanism sets cookies in the browser.

The situation might improve more, if the US government gets its way – the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is supporting an initiative called Do Not Track.