Wardriving With Doc

Picked up Doc Searls from his hotel in Regents Park last night en route to G&S in Soho (where I would later meet Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolf, and some other fine people I've previously met) and no sooner was he sitting in the passenger seat than he whipped out his not inconsiderably sized widescreen Powerbook and set about firing up his Macstumbler app to scan the route for WiFi hotspots. It was great to chat and share stories, Steven Wright jokes and various other stories from the tech frontline. Both my and Doc's social networks have been converging in one way or another for about 4 years, initially on outer fringes via the Cluetrain mailing list in 2000, then in low earth orbit via our blogrolls and posts and now in good old fashioned facetime - we first met face to face back in May but never got a good opportunity to chat with him properly. I never cease to be amazed and I delight at the way technology influences my life like this.

But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.

I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?

Speaking Of Smart Phones

So, I've ditched my Pocket PC in favour of a combined phone/PDA in the form of the SonyEricsson P900. So far, it scores a geek factor of 10 out of 10 with its MP3 ringtone capability (a novelty which will probably fade with time), 640x480 VGA camera / video camera functions, MP3 / MP4 movie playback and lots more stuff I've yet to find.

I've been using PDA's since 1988 (ahem) and latterly in conjunction with mobile phones providing email & web access for about 6 years and all the while I've been patiently waiting for the day to arrive when the separate form factors finally converge without massive amounts of compromise.

I think that day has come.

Pocket Frasier

Today I finally worked out why they call it the M25. For twenty-five miles per hour is the average speed, actually this is more like an aspiration, you'll achieve as you wend yourself slowly and painfully round it's north-western section. And so it was this morning at about 7.45am on the aforementioned road to hell that I took some geekish consolation in being able to watch Matrix Reloaded on my Pocket PC which was perched precariously in front of my speedo, an instrument I decided I could do without for the time being. I wired the headphone jack audio output through my car stereo's casette player using a simple patch rig (the same one I used last year to pump internet radio through my car stereo) and the overall experience was pretty bloody good, actually.

That this is even possible is thanks to a trick new piece of software that goes by the name of DVD To PocketPC which I picked up from Handango last night.

It works like this, bang a DVD of your choosing into your PC's DVD drive, fire up DVD To Pocket PC, point it at your DVD, flick some settings about, hit GO and wait 2 hours for your average movie to be extracted and then encoded into a Pocket PC optimized Windows Media movie file. A couple of hours of movie and stereo audio takes about 128Mb which should fit easily on a reasonably sized SD card and which can then be played back on the handheld. As far as I know video playback is optimal on the latest 400MHz X-Scale processor equipped Windows Mobile 2003 PocketPCs, I suspect the older or slower models would stutter too much on playback. On my suitably specced iPAQ the playback is smooth and the sound is good. I reckon that watching one movie would just about kill your battery but this is understandable.

Right now I'm encoding a handful of Frasier season one episodes and I'm more than comfortable with the future propsect of being able to kill down-time or departure lounge time safe in the knowledge that, together with a pair of headphones, I'll be able to watch a couple of classic episodes on demand.

For the last few months I've been trying to get my head around the true market potential for pocket video playback devices. I don't think that pocket video clips will ever be as readily pickup-able or ubiquitous as MP3's, but given today's increasingly low-cost and high-capacity pocket playback devices, they're definitely in the same ball-park for sure, especially suited to episodic media like Frasier, The Simpsons and other short form material.