simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with tech

Jim Pavloff has put up a couple of videos up on YouTube that re-create two Prodigy numbers in Ableton Live. He starts from a clean slate and gradually builds up the songs from samples and loops. It's fascinating viewing.

Smack My Bitch Up

Voodoo People

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Dan Chung (The Guardian and DSLR News Shooter) has shot a video of the Zhongguancun gadget city in Beijing. He shot the video to test his new Canon 550D cameras. But it is of interest to a geek audience because it shows what China's gadget/electronic markets are like. They're huge multi-floored malls in which you can get everything you need to satisfy your inner geek.

The video is embedded below from Vimeo.

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When I wrote about the PsiXpda I made a snarky reference to the long time it was taking for Nokia to release Symbian as open source. Well, what do you know? As soon as I write about it they go open source. Apparently ahead of schedule - though that seems a bit arbitrary since (if I recall correctly) when they started there was no schedule. And the Symbian Source page says... "Not all of the code is yet available under open source licences." Odd that.

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China has been in the news a lot lately. Not all of it good. But here is some good news. The New York Times is reporting on China's rise in renewable energy industries - already World leader in wind turbines and solar panels. And The Guardian is reporting that, in the wake of the US plans to scrap moon missions, China could be the only country remaining with the goal to place men on the moon. Good luck to 'em it will be a marvellous achievement.

See also: China's Scientific Rise

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After the introduction of the iPad last week a lot of hackers (in the Hackers and Painters sense) published a lot of blog articles bemoaning its closed nature - e.g. Tinkerers Sunset. They sound like the Four Yorkshiremen from Monty Python.

They miss the point. The argument that the iPad coming with no programming manual means that there is going to be a sudden drop in the number of engineers is totally bogus. There are enough open programmable platforms around today - far more than when I were a lad - that those that have an inkling to start…

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For someone who spent 14 years in a corporate research lab (seven of those in China) I don't write much about research. Perhaps I should. One of the things that was obvious to me went I came East was that, given the scale of investment and the determinism and hard work going on, China would soon be catching up with the West in research. The numbers seem to be suggesting this will soon be true.

The New Scientist is reporting that by 2020 China will be the World's largest producer of scientific knowledge. Between 1995 and 2006, China's gross expenditure…

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My first PDA was a Psion Series 3c. A classic. This was followed by a Series 5. Even better. And then a slightly mis-judged Series 7. Probably one of the World's first netbooks; released in 2000. These machine were well designed and some what ahead of their time. In classic British fashion Psion managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and gave up the PDA market. They now live on as a supplier of industrial handhelds called Psion Teklogix. The Psion operating system (EPOC) was also ahead of its time: small, realtime, embedded. It…

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Pingdom have put together a nice gallery of pictures of early computers starting from 1944 (Colossus and Z4) to 1964 (Univac 1108). Lovely.

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Andrew Carol built a difference engine in Lego. The difference engine uses Newton's method of differences. Newton and Liebniz invented calculus at the same time without knowing about each other and using different techniques. Newton accused Liebniz of plagarism. There was an epic feud, as discussed in Radio 4's In Our Time. Newton and Liebniz also feature in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. So there you are.

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This is strangely compelling and a very good idea. A new picture every minute and the time too: Bijin Tokei

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