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Damn those clever Japanese! Just when you think you've seen it all, they come up with a way to control your phone or mp3 player by having your ears listen to your eyes.

I watched a surreal demo today at the NTT Docomo stand. Alongside the gleaming screens and locked cases of new devices and beautiful carefully prepared artwork, there was a torn piece of paper taped to the wall with "Demo Now!" written on it in ballpoint pen.

Just beside the sign a very stiff young man in a suit stood ostentatiously wearing a pair of earphones. Behind him was a big plasma screen with a wiggly line which apparently showed the direction his eyes were pointed based on electromagnetic sensors in his earphones.

There was a legend as well. I'll post a photo in a bit. To fast forward to the next song, you glanced to the right twice quickly. To turn the volume up you rolled your eyes clockwise. To turn it down, counterclockwise.

There was also a somewhat distracted, mad scientist type giving a running commentary and directing the young man to move his eyes this way and that.

Overseeing the whole thing was a burly security guard who was there, no doubt, in case we made a mad grab for the magic headphones.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not optimistic about technologies that make the user look like an idiot. Virtual reality glasses have been on the market for years but I have yet to see anyone wearing them on the tube.

I'm sure someone will come up with a good use for the underlying tech though.

-- Posted from the Ethersphere

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a peering-into-the-future, what-should-the-BBC-be-doing-on-mobile brainstorming session. It was all right as such things go: interesting, but not particularly useful. I felt it focused too much on the web and ignored any future-gazing that wasn't directly connected to the internet.

I find this happens a lot in new media circles. We’re a spoiled lot, really. And tend to ignore issues like global warming or the economy or plagues of frogs. Instead there was a lot of talk about displays becoming bigger and better, the devices becoming more powerful, and software becoming much more connected. These will, no doubt, affect how people use their mobiles and what place the BBC has in this space, but I think other pressures will also exert their influence (e.g. the need for people to inexpensively monitor flocks of frogs blocking the suns rays).

I’m at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona now and I’m pleased to report that others do appear to be thinking about the economy and global warming and plagues of frogs (or at least heathcare).

Yesterday I saw Samsung’s new Blue Earth phone which is due to launch later this year. It is has a solar panel on the back of the phone and is made out of recycled plastic bottles. The Samsung rep stressed that they tried to think about every aspect of the product from an environmental perspective. The packaging for instance, is not only made from recycled materials, but is also as lightweight as it can be. The heavier a package is, the more energy required to transport it and the more materials needed in the first place.

It also uses a more energy efficient charger than normal and has a cool built-in pedometer that displays the amount of CO2 you would have generated if you’d driven the same distance you just walked.

Samsung also had on display a couple of concept chargers – one a hand-cranked mobile phone charger and one a dynamo designed to fit on to a bicycle.

I’m quite keen to see this last one in the stores. Motorola announced one at CES in 2007, but a quick google reveals no trace of it since the announcement. I did find one called the PedalPower+ made by a small company in Australia. They don’t appear to have a stand at MWC, though.

I also saw a number of solar powered phones designed for the emerging markets on display. These were very basic models expected to retail for about $30 to $40 USD.

And in the about-bloody-time category the GSM association announced an initiative to create a universal phone charger that will consume 50% less energy on stand-by than today’s chargers. More importantly, by 2012, they hope the majority of new handsets will all use this one charger. The GSMA estimate this may eliminate the need for up to 51,000 tonnes of extra chargers.

A couple of days ago, I set up a webserver on my phone. Some may see this as a foolish and geeky activity. Some may not understand the boon to productivity and convenience such a thing provides…

I created a bunch of accounts for various friends and sent them out. Now my friends could see exactly where I was thanks to the GPS on my phone; they could send me messages; see whether I was talking on the phone and how much juice I had left in my battery. They could even activate my camera without my knowing and take a picture of the inside of my pocket!

All of which is pretty cool, but kind of useless. However, one thing that is kind of neat is that I installed a couple of yahoo widgets that let me do things like use my laptop to send an SMS through my phone via the web server, or see what missed calls I have.

Ah, I hear you ponder, but isn’t your phone always with you? Aren’t there blue-toothy or usb connectiony things that allow pretty much the same thing?

Here, gentle reader, is where I point out the error of your ways. Right now I am lying in bed annoying my wife by writing this blog entry. My phone is in my office, having its tasty electrons replenished. I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to reply to a text message from an American heiress. What to do? I suppose I could have gotten out of bed and walked to the other room, but what if I’d fallen down the stairs or encountered a burglar or a wildebeest?

Thanks to the webserver on my phone and the Yahoo widget and Tim Berners-Lee I was able to send the message without even wrinkling the duvet.

Of course, if it wasn’t for the stupid web server, the battery on my phone wouldn’t need to be charged and I could have kept it close by while I slept.

Well, I'm at the Over the Air conference and I'm blogging. I usually don't blog about any worky or geeky events but maybe it's time for a change. This may be partly inspired by the fact that a friend of mine just had a novel published by random house which looks like it will be a smash hit blockbuster wackadelic literary treat to the brain. I haven't actually read it as it has only been released in North America so far. It's due out in the UK on 30 April, but I have no doubt it will be brilliant. Padma has been selected as one of the Canadian New Faces of Fiction for 2008. So, if you're in the States or Canada, go buy The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan.

There's a dude from Imperial College talking about something called "Life Planning" which is a project involving trying to make technology useful to people. One project he talked about is Vortix. This is a NFC "Near Field Communications" project which involves an app on your phone giving you guidance about how to navigate the London tube network. He didn't mention how successful this was or if all the people trialling the system ended up trapped in the abandoned Aldwych train station as food for Ken Livingston's secret army of badgers.

Imperial Dude is gone now and it's my boss, Matthew Postgate, talking about the BBC's involvement in Mobile. He's doing a laudable job, although it may be a touch BBC-centric. I'm not sure how non-BBC folk will take it. It may be a bit sad, but I have to admit a small flush of pride looking at the plain-jane BBC Mobile site circa 2002 that I worked on. It makes me feel like a grey old survivor of a dangerous near frontier. I've now been working in this area for seven years. It sometimes makes me a bit stressed and I have to admit to the

And now Dan Appelquist from Momo London and Vodafone is speaking and the event becomes suddenly a maelstrom of acronyms and buzzwords. "Memes" "2.0" "Mobile AJAX" "bundesligaplayer" "toothpaste". I'm not sure he really said that last one but it's stuck in my head for some reason -- too much sugar in my coffee this morning, perhaps. He argues that this is "The Year of Doing It", that the majority of web use will be via Mobile within five years, and that we're past the time of talking about mobile and it is now time to start doing things on mobile. Have to admit, he's got prettier slides and a geekier patter than Matthew. I rate it a tie.

And now Margaret from betavine is talking about the point of today. We're all supposed to innovate and come up with something brilliant. Ideas come from "What Ifs". She suggests that before the car was built, if Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" and the Morgan Aero8 would never have been born and I never would have got a ride in one after James and Bernie's wedding and my life would be slightly less rich than it turned out to be.

Now there's a Belgian guy on the stage. He's explaining the difference between mobile 1.0 and mobile 2.0. Basically, 2.0 is more advanced than 1.0. Confusingly, apparently it has four pillars. In which case, why isn't it called mobile 4.0? He's pointing out some interesting sites which I am now having trouble finding because I'm too slow and the screen is too blurry. One is http://mobref.com/ which looks like another WURFL but with marketing stats (ish). Mobile4hire, which looks like a network which enables people to buy and sell mobile testing services. He started out pretty boring but he's not pointing out a lot of interesting stuff so I'm paying more attention and typing less so I actually have some interesting links to impart but, paradoxically, I am unable to note them down. Whoops, I'll track them down later. Time for lunch.

I’ve been playing around a bit with a borrowed PSP (Playstation Portable) trying to get video recorded with MCE (Media Center Edition of Microsoft XP) to play on it. It took me a while to figure out that the key thing is the naming convention. And now I’m having a mental google-block and can’t find where I found it out. So I thought I’d stick this up here. Apologies if it’s a bit off-piste for this normally useless blog.

To get video onto a PSP (Playstation Portable):
1. The file has to be in MPEG-4 format or Sony’s AVC format
2. If it’s in MPEG-4, it has to be put on the memory stick in a directory named /MP_ROOT/100MNV01. The file itself has to be named M4V****.MP4, where * is any digit from 0-9. Note: there needs to be four digits.
3. If it’s in AVC format, it has to be put on the memory stick in a directory named /MP_ROOT/100ANV01. The file itself has to be named MAQ****.MP4, where * is any digit from 0-9. Note: there needs to be four digits.
4. Oh, and by the way, you’ll need a tool to convert your MCE (dvr-ms) files to MP4. Personally I use Nero which is a commercial product, but there are others.

Sweet Mother of Jaysus, I really need to write about my encounter with B.J. Cooke. In the meantime though, I thought I should point out that I've got an account on a web picture service at http://www.flickr.com/photos/yanda/.

I initially signed up for this as we went to a friend's wedding and they are using it for their wedding pictures. It's one of the best services of its kind that I've seen and it's unbelievably easy to set it up to receive pictures from a camera phone. I'm using the Nokia 7610 right now which has the best camera I've come across. In theory, it should also be easy for flickr to automagically post things to this blog but I've been too lazy to set this up as my first attempt failed. So, anyway, for now at least, I'll be posting camera pics to flickr.

My charming spouse just moved house and there are some shots of the new place there. She teaches at the University of Wolverhampton and I work in London so we rent a room in a shared house in London and a room in a shared house in Walsall. The pics are of her new place in Walsall.

And, of course, there are pictures of Fiona and Matt's wedding. It was a gorgeous wedding held in the Royal Society of Arts off the Strand. The food, in particular, was amazing. Not as amazing as the bride, of course, but still damn tasty.

Geoffrey Young did a couple of tests on "Writing Tests with Apache-test" and "Why mod_perl 2.0 Sucks, Why mod_perl 2.0 rocks" which should eventually be linked from http://www.modperlcookbook.org/~geoff/. There's a version of the Apache-test talk from an early conference up there already. Geoff is a great speaker -- very enthusiastic, knowledgeable, funny. Go see him. He's a star.

Stas Bekman did a tutorial on mod_perl 2 which was much more in-depth and has links to his slides and handouts. Nice handouts, but he's not quite as easy to listen to as Geoff.

Doc Searls Talk (might take a few hours before this gets up there). He basically said that the Apache community should keep on the way they are, which is basically to ignore the vendors and just keep building what they think they should. And he points out that this is worked quite well so far. In particular, that Apache is by far the most popular web server in the world, used far more than any other, including Microsoft.

I'll add more about the other speakers later once I get some coffee.

http://www.indo.com/distance/

The above link lets you measure the distance between any two points on the globe using a number of different references, such as place names or latitude and longitude (which you can get from sites like http://www.streetmap.co.uk/). I suppose it isn't much of a surprise such a service is available on the web. But what is cool is that it's hosted in Bali 7770 miles from London.

Another interesting tidbit… If you accidentally type http://www.streemap.co.uk instead of http://www.streetmap.co.uk you get "Hanky Panky College" which is surprisingly different from StreetMap and seems to have nothing to do with cartography.

Thought I'd start listing cafés and other places with wireless access points as I come across them. Maybe my googling skills aren't that great but I couldn't really find a list like this anywhere. Anyway, here's number One...

Alphabyte Café in the Shepherd's Bush Shopping Center, W12 London. It's a coffeeshop, newstand, internet café with four screens, and mobile phone store with free wireless access. Not particularly luxurious but functional and not too crowded. And free access.

Torrefazione at 1234 Government Street, Victoria, B.C., Canada. Found it through FatPort. It's a commercial service though. $4.95 CDN for an hour (unused time cached for 90 days). $6.95 for 4 hours (but expires immediately afterwards). $9.95 for 24 hours (but again immediately expires 24 hours later). etc.

NodeDB.com Not a physical site just a link to a wireless node database listing open nodes around the world. Have to check out Benugo's Sandwich shop in Clerkenwell.

BT phone boxes BT now has a number of phone boxes that are wireless nodes near motorway service stations, airports, conference centres, hotels and cafes around the country. Pricing is £6/hour or £15 for 24 hours, plus various other schemes you can see at http://www.btopenzone.com/Openzone/buying.jsp