I’m all stuffed up with a nice seasonal cold. Skilled craftspersons among VCTB’s audience who would like to make me feel better are welcome to build me one of these.

[Via Boing Boing]

The system-restore data image for Apple’s new iPhone is already loose on the internet.

My money says it’ll be under a month before the first flashable mods for the OS are available. The term ‘closed system’ has a half-life, just like radioactives.

Some booky gubbins from over the weekend … a sad bit of news that caught my eye on the SFBC blog is that Perseus Book Group is axing a few subsidiary houses in their acquisition of Avalon, one of which is Thunder’s Mouth Press.

In my fortunate position of getting sent more books than I have time to realistically read, it’s a rare occasion that I lash out my own cash on one, but two of the books I bought in the last year were Thunder’s Mouth titles: Sterling’s Visionary in Residence collection and Rucker’s Mad Professor. There’s a lot of these amalgamations happening in publishing at the moment, and I wonder how this will pan out over time - the Long Tail hasn’t yet kicked into the book market the way it has music.

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Some bibliophile at The Guardian got given a demo unit of iRex’s forthcoming Iliad ebook reader to try out for a month, and seems to be fairly impressed by it – although he reckons it’ll be a long time before they kill of the print book business, which is something I’ve always conceded and which has been stated by minds far greater (and more versed in the technology and economic ramifications) than mine. But as reflects the item above, the following statement is interesting:

“It won’t destroy bookshops, any more than the much more advanced music-download business has destroyed albums.”

I can only assume the gentleman hasn’t seen the sales figures for the music industry recently – the album is indeed dying as a format, as is the bricks-and-mortar music outlet. The effects will take longer in an industry like literature, where pace of change is by necessity that much slower (books take time to write and edit after all), but if there is a truism in media these days, it is that “technology disrupts markets – inevitably and irreperably”.

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Finally, we have the one and only Bill Gates proclaiming that reading will eventually go entirely online. There’s no timeframe mentioned, of course, and it’s probably a tautology to all but the most agressively technophobic. But Gates has scored well as a futurist prediction machine in the past – his book The Road Ahead, published in 1995, was stunningly accurate as far as such documents go – though not without some prophecies that look remarkably silly in hindsight.

We’ve got a long future of paper books to come – with POD technology making short runs more practical and affordable, there’s little reason that science fiction should suffer the effects of change any more than the greater market as a whole. But as the Guardian fellow says, we will start to see ebook readers in the hands of the ubergeeks – Stross’s “Slashdot Generation” - very soon, and the first increments of change will begin to unfold.

If I had £500 spare, I’d happily be one of those technology pioneers – indeed, should anyone from Sony or iRex be reading, I’d be more than willing to evaluate and critique their product for them over a lengthy time period …

So, as mentioned before, the people at Hill and Knowlton (who are handling the blogosphere PR duties for LG’s new Shine phone) decided that yours truly was the sort of person who should be sent a demo model to take a look at – I’ll reproduce the terms and conditions at the bottom of this post in the interests of full disclosure. Having finally found a bit of time to try it out, here are my thoughts; you can see the opinions of other bloggers aggregated at the official LG Shine blog. Continue reading “LG Shine KE970 mobile phone review”

The ability to spool a variety of ‘content’ onto the web from any moment and/or location we find ourselves in is growing by the month. But what use is it in real terms, and how much of that content is actually worthwhile? Continue reading “Shadowcasting”

I love libraries, and not just because I work at one. Libraries kept my brain well fed when I was a kid (as well as providing somewhere to go where a lot of other kids wouldn’t be), and supplied me with dreams, ideas and new experiences. Most libraries today, however, look rather old-fashioned when seen through the eyes of young people raised in a digital age, and are underused by that demographic as a result.

They might not seem so dated were they to have devices like this available, though:

Continue reading “Biblioroll – technology and the future of books and libraries”

Ladies and gentlemen, as always, Friday at VCTB can only mean one thing – Friday Plant Blogging!

Continue reading “Friday Plant Blogging! Aloe again”

It happens on a Friday. It appears on a blog. It’s about plants. Must be…Friday Plant Blogging!

Continue reading “Friday Plant Blogging! Peter Piper better keep his hands off”

After a week of flim-flam over a real non-story (Pluto will not change shape or size, no matter what it gets labelled as), it’s a real relief to find something in the RSS feeds that really gets your motor running. MIT’s eLens project is just such a thing. Continue reading “The Real World Web – envisioning a future of ubiquitous information”

If you read this site regularly, you’ll know that I do tend to be a bit wide-eyed and ZOMG!!! about new technologies and gadgets. I also describe myself as a futurist, which is a word with a highly contentious set of meanings, but can be broadly described as a person who tries to peer ahead into the coming years to see not only where we are heading as a species, but hopefully what obstacles (or power-ups) lie around the next corner, too. Continue reading “Looking beyond the gadgets”