Category: Uncategorized

Let me list this:

• iPod
• GSM mobile phone
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• microphone
• ambient light sensor
• proximity sensor
• orientation sensor
• 160dpi 3.5″ touchscreen
• running OS X
• Speakers
• 2MP camera
• WiFI
• Bluetooth

Er… yowser. There’s ‘convergence device,’ and then there’s… this thing is going to cost a fortune, surely?

Mind you, so did the iPod, originally.

Incidentally – if this does indeed run desktop applications (as Jobs is suggesting), and you can hook up a Bluetooth keyboard, we have the ultraportable Mac laptop here, too.

Oh, and this is why Apple went to Intel. It’s presumably running a low-voltage Core Solo or similar.

I’m in Dublin. I’m about to Skype my director in Las Vegas, I’m in an IRC room with 987 others reading about a ‘revolutionary new product’ from Apple in San Francisco (and it’s not iTV Apple tv, they’ve already done that), and I’m texting news to a chum who’s on a bus heading to New York.

Life rocks.

[update: OS X-running iPhone tablet widescreen video iPod phone! Gaaaah! My head’s going to explode!]

With a past prediction record second only to the Wall Street Journal’s, I’ve naturally been under some pressure this week to lay my cards on the table for this year’s Macworld. Here’s what I think:

• I’m with John Gruber.

Umm… that’s about it. I could go on (like… er… Mark, who’s suddenly gone all fanboy on us), but… um… these days, I’m outsourcing my punditry to Gruber. It’s just more efficient that way.

Oh, go on then:

• New user interface: check. CoreAnimation has to be there for a reason, and most of it isn’t about 3D nonsense. I think the glossy black concept that’s been muttered about is likely the one – while Vista goes all glossily translucent and cuddly and ‘lickable’ (eu), OS X aims clear above it and goes all professional. Which would be a neat bit of maneuvering. That said, I think we’ll see dark grey (à la the Pro apps) rather than black, since the Aperture/Final Cut interface already works well and there are contrast issues and blah blah blah.
• New MacBooks, iMacs, whatever: answer hazy, ask again later. We pretty much have to get new displays, in which case their bezels will tell us whether new machines are coming, whether they arrive today or not.
• Handheld thing. iPod Phone? Palm Treo-esque thing? My money would be on something more like Dell’s new SideShow gizmo, but my money would be about 10p in this case. Apple’s really backed into a corner with the !(‘iPhone’) thing, in that whatever they reveal will disappoint a significant number of people. My guess is that Jobs will simply not release anything, rather than release something that’s not a complete wow.
• HDTVs, iLife & iWork ’07, Airport Excessive X3, not a glimpse of Office:Mac 2008, Photoshop CS3 running like a banshee on an 8-way Mac Pro Ludicrous Speed – yeah, whatever. I’m done here.

A conversation, in the vicinity of Shap Fell on the M6:

“By ‘eck, they’re hardy sheep up here.”

“They must be. Some of them look pretty fat, though.”

“Does that make them lardy hardy sheep?”

“I guess it does.”

…

“You know the way they baa — do you think they’re telling each other stories?”

“That would make them lardy hardy bardy sheep.”

“Quite.”

…

“Some of them look a bit fed up, don’t you think?”

“You mean — lardy hardy bardy mardy sheep?”

“Exactly.”

…

“Hey, those just scampering up the fell to join the others!”

“They’re late, huh?”

“Yes, they’re…”

“Lardy hardy bardy mardy tardy sheep?”

“Yes!”

…

“Can we stop now?”

“I think we’d better.”

Did I just take an unannounced blog holiday? Hmm, it looks that way. Mind you [looks around], it doesn’t appear that anybody’s noticed. Heigh-ho.

Highlights of Christmas:

• Making it back to Glasgow, when everyone was worried the fog at Heathrow would cause me to be stuck in Dublin. Because… er… all Britons live in London, or… nope, sorry, I don’t follow.
• Fuzzy felt! Yay fuzzy felt! (for further details, ask my niece Edith. Though you’d best not expect a reply if she’s in the middle of one of her four-hour fuzzy felt focusses).
• Family Christmas! Hurray!
• Getting my tax return done. Which isn’t exactly how I like to spend Christmas, but it had to be done. Also, I’ve filed all receipts up to and including Christmas, which makes me feel ridiculously virtuous and all. Though the tax bill itself was a bit of a shock. How can I have made that much money last year and still spent the entire period feeling utterly skint? Harrumph.
• Spending almost a whole week with Flossie, oooh! She came up to Glasgow (to… watch me do my tax return, as it turned out. Poor lass), then drove me down to Cardiff. T’ch, devotion — what can one do?
• Making surprisingly elegant sandwiches in the parking area of some service station somewhere on the M5 (M6?). Hints for those in a similar position include: tortilla chips are surprisingly good for spreading pesto; ultrabright LED lights in mobile phones are astonishingly handy, especially when the car interior light has packed in; PowerBooks make perfectly acceptable trays/plates.
• New Year in the Glee Club in Cardiff was a hoot. We went with a bit of a group and had a blast.
• New Year’s Day walk on the beach at Barry, with squally showers and horizontal hail, and pump-action foam rockets. Flossie had a mean glint in her eye as she considered trying to shoot down the kites, which was rather unsettling.
• Chatting to the stoic family with (a.) two young children, (b.) a magnificent sandcastle, (c.) a flask of coffee that I suspect may have been adulterated slightly and (d.) a selection box of chocolates. They were bedraggled, huddled behind a windbreak, and starting to shiver, but also determined that their traditional afternoon on the beach wouldn’t be beaten by something so insignificant as the weather. Too sweet, and the sort of thing that makes me yearn for a decent camera.

So now, I’m back in Dublin. The crew are off to Vegas for CES this week (yes! We got them there!), we’ve had a good week in the edit, and… life is good.

Right. That’s us up-to-date again. Normal service will resume just as soon as we’ve worked out what constitutes ‘normal,’ etc etc.

Modeling protein structures with Pick-Up Monkeys. Not something I can recall ever doing, sadly, which suddenly makes me feel like there’s been something missing all my life.

Gah! I’m trying to sort hotels in Las Vegas, for which Trip Advisor is critical – how else would I know, for example, that the reason the Monte Carlo is cheap at the moment is there’s a big construction project going on in their car park, with overnight pile driving?

However, the traveller ratings are still tricky to interpret – take the Imperial Palace, for example. I’ve found a fantastic deal, but is it any good? Well… Trip Advisor’s reviews vary greatly. It’s clear that some people have had an awful time, but does an average 3/5 rating mean it’s broadly OK, or so variable it’s risky? 3±1 is more reassuring than 3±2.

If more people understood the maths, it’d make perfect sense to quote standard deviations for this sort of thing. To get around that, I wonder if we should start drawing a distribution curve something like Tufte’s sparklines above those five star rating things. That would convey how grouped the ratings are, right?

Scope is, I believe, a ground-breaking series in several ways. Perhaps chief amongst its many innovations is… the production blanket. It’s electric, underlay, and of the all-night variety – highly sophisticated.

It all started when the pellet boiler in the house in which I’m staying ran out of, well, pellets. After a couple of days, the house bottomed out about four degrees above ambient, which in a Dublin December turns out to be – very precisely, mind – ‘ruddy cold.’ Miraculously, the blanket appeared in the production office, a talisman against the frosty onslaught.

I, however, being a doughty sort – not to mention, you know, living in Glasgow and everything – left it to slumber peacefully within its box. It remained in the office as a last resort, an emergency… well, blanket.

Over the weekend, sadly, poor Niamh the PA discovered that she too had an inadequate heating system within her domicile. Bravely, the blanket sallied forth, intent on warming her toes. I shall report back on its efficacy.

The production blanket. I think we should write a line into the budget for it.

A fun day, today. We’re trying to do a show for Scope based around the ‘six degrees of separation‘ idea, which seemed like a good idea at the time but has turned into a recurring logistical nightmare. Plus, all the subjects we’ve managed to loosely tie into the theme have resulted in us utterly failing to find precisely the right interviewee in Ireland.

I lucked out, however, with an item ostensibly about Nike+, the instrumented running shoe thing that uses an iPod as a data store and allows all sorts of cunning interactions via Nike’s website. I had hoped to interview Panic’s Cabel Sasser via Skype or similar, since his excellent review of Nike+ as a massively multiplayer online game was what got me thinking about it in this context in the first place.

Cabel, sadly, proved a tad elusive or busy (or maybe his spam filters are set to stun?). Where do you turn next? Euan, durr. Who kindly put me in touch with Bernie Goldbach, who merrily rocked up at a gym on the outskirts of Dublin today and did the honours for us. And very interesting he was too, about all manner of things including – happily, in the circumstances – Nike+.

(I’ll have more to say about Twitter anon, incidentally, given that I simply hadn’t heard of it a week ago and it’s suddenly coming at me from all directions. Ironic)

Joe the director romped through the rest of the stuff, Danann didn’t complain when we made him run a couple of kilometres, bless him, and off the crew merrily went to Galway, on the other side of the country. Tomorrow, they’re trying to get themselves introduced to a plasterer called Kenny. Run with it, it’ll make sense in the end.

First, however, they’re going to have to find a camera, since they left one in the gym. Which is, I think, the first time I’ve encountered that particular bit of stupidity. Oops.

(not as bad as it sounds, though – they have a DigiBeta with them, but for odd reasons they’re supposed to be shooting on the little Z1 they left in the gym. Durr.)

Christmas Day. Evening. 7pm, BBC1: Doctor Who Christmas special. 7:15pm, five: The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

Oh, monkeys.