Play him off, Keyboard cat!

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Pocket monster

This guy's physical and vocal resemblance to an android is, truly, remarkable. But his product seems to rock.


So I saw this yesterday.

I've had a three year old old-for-2005-got-it-cheap mobile phone that I have felt no need to upgrade because it's basic and simple, and doesn't try to pretend to look like a computer, like the current crop of mobile phones do, without doing much, if anything, else. They're trying to chase iPhone's arse, but they've just gotten wider and bigger and have more flashing colours and mimic the physical appearance of the iPhone, but basically all they do is transmit voice and short text information.

So far, my reluctance to hook up to an iPhone subscription is twofold: I am living rootlessly at the moment, and currently you have to subscribe for some lengthy period of time to a particular server, and this just doesn't rhyme with the way I live. And secondly, it's not cheap. I hardly ever use my mobile phone. But I use the internet constantly, and I spend hours every day on my laptop. And that's what the iPhone is talking about.

Ultimately, the iPhone is a small device, which is what is great about it, and also its limitation. I can't edit movies on an iPhone, I can't record songs, it's not really feasible to pore over a tiny screen to write anything for much time, without getting a headache. So it is what it is, and its scope as a work tool is limited. But in terms of a constant internet companion, now THAT is something I can understand. Maybe it'll mean I'll get out more!

Whether I get an iPhone, however, despite my affection for the Mac OS, is moot. Check this out: a Linux/Google version of iPhone is on the way by the end of this year, the Android platform, which, if you look at the video at the top of this post, seems to be really drawing together the various google applications into an open platform pocket internet device. I'm excited to find out how they release it.

The interesting thing about all this generation of device, of which the iPhone is clearly the first to emerge, is that they really make redundant the telecommunications industry standard of paying in terms of 'minutes' spent engaging with the network. There has been a revolution in my own life this past year since I got this laptop (a year old tomorrow!) and iPod and basically the software therein: the iLife suite, the iWork suite, and New York city's freely available wifi. Not every city has wifi running on tap in the same way, partly to do with the sheer density of New York and the way it runs, partly to do with the fact that networks in Ireland, at least, and Spain and Denmark I think also, embed a password as a requisite part of signing onto their broadband package. I have only found an open individual subscription in Ireland once: people seem to guard their wifi access as if throngs of laptop owners would be likely to flock to their doorstep and hang around in the rain, nudging ever closer to the wall, eagerly googling.

It is only when a city's culture understands the need for the internet to be like running water, freely available, run on individual subscriptions, but with an open sensibility so that if you find yourself out of range of your own house-based connection, then you'll always find a friendly port to give you access. It's an alternative community idea, it's about building internet infrastructure, understanding that people live mobile lives, and some live more mobile lives than others.

Less than a year ago, I found Dublin to be a very inhospitable place to wifi access. Everything was on a charge-basis, none of the hotels had open access, and cafes offered 'free' wifi in the form of a password that gave 20 minutes of access, presumably because of a fear that people would linger ever slightly over their coffee if the wifi was on tap. Well, it's a long way from Brooklyn's fields of white laptops, one to a table, that have colonised some of the city's hipper cafes, mini office spaces for cash strapped writers, developers, designers, students. Yeah, I don't know how these coffee shops pay their rent either, but it's a part of what makes New York so interesting: subcultures develop and teem over. Endlessly dancing circles.

Anyway, last weekend I found a few more Dublin hostelries advertisting 'free wifi' in their windows. I also got the impression that it had been a bad summer for the hospitality industry, so maybe they've got to work a little harder for that five euro skinny vanilla latte, but it seems like a step in the right direction, a necessary direction.

Introducing... the banana guard!

Just found an amazing product for people who like to casually sling a banana in their bag on the way out the door... only to find it at the bottom of your bag, mushed, a couple of hours later. I just wonder how they figured a standardised banana shape... I've heard stories about bananas' shapes being standardised according to EU regulations, dunno if they're just urban myths, but organic bananas always seem curvier to me. Also, I recall having heard once that 21% of the world's total pesticide output is sprayed on bananas alone. If you're going to reduce your organic greengrocery shopping to 2 products, make them bananas and lettuce, which is also highly sprayed, unless organic.

But this banana guard, though it will likely make people stare, and stare hard, looks like a fruit-packing revolution.

Made in China

I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt printed up that says 'Made in China' and go around being a piece of shit technology for the day. Maybe Christmas.

A different kind of Apple ad

It wasn't until I held my iPod in my own hands for the very first time this evening that I understood. Now I do. I understand the iPod craze. It has reached my fingertips and I am truly grooving with the whole Apple concept of living.

It is a magnificent object. I rarely actually fall in love with inanimate objects. I can get turbo fond of clothes and shoes, and find it difficult to give them away. I have a kind of a serious thing about this pendant I wear around my neck. There's a gold cross my mum gave me, and if I were ever to find that I was parted with it, that would surely hurt. But the arrival of this MacBook and iPod three weeks ago has totally rocked my world.

I am Mac'd.

I have been using Macs for twelve years now. I started out on a lover's dad's Performa, which I typed away at in a cold tunnel-shaped Dublin dive while playing Koji the Frog until 4 or 5 in the morning. My first very own Mac was also a Performa, which was brought to me on the very last day of a very unpleasant gig I had been working on for three months.

The big event of that Mac was a nine month-long daily email courtship with a man who had recently become a father for the first time, in Nashville Tennessee, and led right up to the morning my flight was about to take off for my very first trip to America to meet him. More recently, I got a second hand g4 desktop which was my first introduction to the new apple interface.

You've got to love interfaces. They're our little protecting veils between the technology that is finding increasing intimacy with us, to us, in us, and they can make things smoother, at one with us, or they can really be a pain in the arse and will always make it unpleasant to operate this kiss-close part of the ever-expanding-it-seems human consciousness.

Take Nokia for instance. They made the mobile phone system that just makes sense like your first night on crack makes sense. It just makes sense. I can't explain why. It's not that I like it, not that it's great, it's that it just makes sense.

That's all. And now I can't use anything else without getting tetchy.

I suppose that's what it's all about, creating addicts. Everything shouting and looking shiny and hotlipped and fuckable. Come purchase me. You whip out your wad or your plastic honey c'mon, we'll go places you never dreamed.

Yeah, so this is me tonight, on a saturday night in New York city, sitting in a room with two whippets I didn't know ten days ago and have subsequently fallen a bit in love with, working on my MacBook and listening to Seal on my iPod.

This is my crack.

How's that, Apple?