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The Guardian Online had a feature on Thursday about some new software from Nokia called Lifeblog. The idea is that you create a kind of daybook of your life by collecting together photographs and SMS text messages from your mobile phone (either ones you take yourself or that you are sent), which are then arranged in date and time order by the software, so that you have some kind of eccentric record of your days. You can also apparently add annotations, which might be useful to explain that bizarre and unidentifiable photo you took after visiting the pub.

It sounds as if the software is PC only (boo), and that it only syncs up when you connect your phone via cable or bluetooth to your PC. I really like the idea, though, and it has made me think about how you might accomplish the same thing via free software with a bit of custom programming (Perl or PHP) thrown in. I can already send my photographs to this blog via Mfop, so it strikes me that I could probably cobble together a private password-protected website that would gather together all my photographs and text messages, and would record the minutiae of my life in some way.

This site fulfils part of that role, but it would be nice to also have a private space where I wouldn’t worry whether something might be interesting to anyone else, but that might serve as a kind of record of my existence. If you’ve seen Shooting the Past, you’ll know that photographs–which in themselves aren’t all that interesting or significant–can become meaningful if grouped together and set in a chronological context.

I don’t know what I was doing in my sleep last night, but I woke up this morning with a really painful neck. I think I might have trapped a nerve. I’ve been walking around all day very gingerly–as if I’m wearing an invisible neck brace. Some kinds of relatively minor injuries seem to cause disproportionate amounts of pain and inconvenience, and you can’t do very much at all without moving your neck. Somebody feed me painkillers.

At some point I’ll get round to a follow up to my What’s on my Treo (Part 1) review, but the Palm application I’m going to discuss here merits a whole review of its own. When I got my new Treo 600, I wanted a sophisticated text editing application. Note that I didn’t say ‘word processor’. On the Palm, I don’t want to be fiddling around with formatting–it’s pointless and just makes it harder to export the file to the desktop.

The consensus on fora¹ and bulletin boards seemed to be that pedit was the vi of the Palm world. Those who are regular readers will know that I’m a bit of a fan of vi, so I found that rather intriguing and encouraging. pedit comes in a number of different flavours, each with slightly different editing capabilities: pedit04 (aka pedit) can handle memos of up to 4K in size (the same constraint as the built-in Memo Pad on most Palm systems) and uses the Memo Pad database, while pedit32 can handle memos up to 32K. peditPro contains both of these versions in one handy package. I decided to live with the 4K limit of pedit04 because of another handy feature I’ll mention later, and because it uses the built-in Memo Pad database, making import and export of memos very straightforward.

pedit has two features in common with its spiritual brother vi:

1. it is extensively controllable via keyboard shortcuts
2. it has innumerable features
3. as a consequence of 1 and 2, it has a rather steep learning curve

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In preparation for our trip to Leek, we tried to plan the best route using various online route planning sites. I tried Multimap first, but that didn’t give an overview map of the whole route at a sensible scale, making it difficult to check the route with our road atlas. Next, I tried the AA, but I got trapped in a Javascript dialogue loop (it reported a script error, but pressing the OK button just spawned the same dialogue again) and I had to force quit Safari to get out of it.

Finally, I tried Maporama. It has a nice uncluttered interface, and produced a good overview map along with some clear turn-by-turn instructions. In a nice touch, there is a link to format the route for printing which gets rid of the spurious junk and gives you a more detailed map. I wouldn’t rely on it for details of journey time–it suggested that Oxford to Leek would take 1h50m, but it was closer to 3h30m. I’m no Colin McRae, but that is wildly inaccurate. There’s another problem with the kind of directions you get from software–it isn’t really compatible with the way that humans navigate.

For example, when the directions include a roundabout, the instructions say something like, “Turn left, follow A515 for 263m; Turn left, follow the roundabout for 45m; Turn left, follow the A515 for 2.5km”. The human version would be, “take the third exit on the roundabout, signposted Cheadle A515”. It’s no use to anyone to know that you have to travel 45m on the roundabout–you need a system which gives you relative instructions, leaving out the superfluous information on distance. I wonder if it would be possible to write software which would output ‘human-meaningful’ directions? I’ve never used GPS in-car navigation systems, but my impression is that they do use just this style of relative referencing.

…I was looking up at a small flock of pigeons circling around a tower of University College, dark against the twilight sky. They settled on the ramparts, spacing themselves perfectly and keeping a wing length between each bird. Four to a crenellation, they made an extra layer of decoration on the battlements–soft, curved, feathered crenellations on top of hard, stone, square ones.

We spent the weekend with some friends who live in Leek in Staffordshire, which was a lot of fun. On Saturday morning, we went for a great walk up The Roaches–a ridge of gritstone with some fantastic views over the surrounding landscape. Gritstone is remarkably sparkly, and since the surrounding earth is formed by the weathering of the same rock, even the mud wore a fetching disco look. Apparently, the rather odd name ‘Roaches’ is a corruption of the Norman-French name roches or rocks.

I love walking along ridges. You feel like you’re tightrope walking along the spine of the world with everything laid out at your feet. The wind was blowing hard, but the sun was shining brightly and lighting up the weird rock formations, which have been sculpted by the very same bracing wind.

It was wonderful getting out into the fresh air in such a spectacular location, and it blew away a few cobwebs. I took some photos, so I might post some later if they turn out to be good enough for public consumption.

I’ve been trying out a preview of an RSS newsreader called Shrook. I had tried the last version (1.x) and quite liked it, but I ended up going back to the excellent NetNewsWire Lite. The preview version is a tad¹ unstable, but it looks very promising.

It sports the metallic appearance (which will either make you love or hate it), and looks like a cross between Safari and iTunes. At the far left of the window, the Sources and groups are displayed in a separate pane. By selecting one of the Sources, the individual feeds within it are displayed in a list to the right. If you then select one of the feeds, the entries within it appear, with a nice preview of the entry in a pane on the far right.

It’s quite smooth, but the constantly unfolding columns mean that selecting what you want is somewhat of a moving target. However, you can work through your unread feeds by just repeatedly hitting the spacebar. The number of new entries in one of the Sources or feeds is indicated by a yellow star and a number.

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I was in Borders bookshop today, and spotted a couple of Japanese women raptly reading a huge pile of those celebrity gossip magazines: Heat, Now, Closer¹ and their ilk. Every few minutes, they would point out some article or picture to one another and discuss it. They spoke in Japanese, but every now and again an English word like ‘Spice Girl’ or ‘Oscars’ would pop out at me. They gave every appearance of finding it the most fascinating thing in the world.

I’ve talked about my bafflement with the cult of celebrity before, but I’m no nearer to understanding the appeal. Just what do people get out of scrutinising the lives of people famous for being famous? That’s not a rhetorical question–I really would like to understand. Of course, I’m well aware that many people would die of boredom when contemplating the kind of reading material I enjoy. It takes different strokes, I suppose…

¹ Which I always misread as ‘Loser’–I wonder why?

While I was in Borders ¹, I spotted the following title, which amused me no end: Windows 98 Annoyances. Priceless. Disappointingly, the description on Amazon suggests that it’s about hacking Windows 98, rather than just listing the bugs.

¹ I should say that I don’t usually buy books in Borders, because I prefer to patronise the local shop Blackwells, but they didn’t have what I was looking for. Nor did Borders as it turned out.

I try hard to eat healthily, and take a couple of pieces of fruit to work every day. However, I do tend to get stuck in a bit of a rut in terms of fruit diversity because not all fruit is easy to deal with at my desk. For example, I love kiwi fruit, but eating them seems to require numerous tools and–as a result–a lot of washing up. Frankly, any fruit requiring utensils is in grave danger of being replaced by a much less healthy–but trivially easy to eat–chocolate bar.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend at work in the summer. He had been bulk-buying kiwis from the market, and asked me what technique I use for eating them. When I told him that I cut then in half longitudinally and scoop out the flesh with a spoon, he told me that I was subjecting myself a lot of unnecessary work. An Indian friend of his had seen him laboriously peeling a kiwi and raised an eyebrow, dryly asking “Do you peel grapes, too?”. She said that everyone she knows washes the fruit well, and then eats it–skin and all. I made a bit of a face at this point and asked him whether is wasn’t a bit, well—unpleasantly furry? He reassured me that it wasn’t, but I wasn’t entirely convinced.

In a spirit of scientific inquiry, I did try the ‘whole fruit’ method once or twice, but didn’t really take to it. So now I’m back to the knife, spoon and napkins technique, and longing for chocolate.