These will be all the rage at future demonstrations

Twenty years ago, David Brin wrote about the death of privacy in "Earth" (later, he wrote a non-fiction book covering this in more detail, The Transparent Society. The lynchpin piece of tech behind this was the ability to record everything that people saw during the day, and then post it online. Which was pretty forward thinking for 1990.

Today, jwz posted a link to this:

It has a five hour memory. It records all of the time, but only starts saving when you hit record - at which point it starts at the beginning of its 30-second buffer. In other words, you see something suspicious, hit the button, and get the thing that you saw recorded for later perusal.

If I was going to be somewhere the police were going to be, well, policing, then considering the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the intermittent bad behaviour which occurs, I'd be wearing one of these things. Heck, faced with a group of people all wearing recording devices, would you want to cause trouble?

Next up - software to take the output from a few hundred of these, map them together, and produce a 3D playback that you can then pan a virtual camera through...

I wish you could buy these in the shops

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-25-2010

• A brief history of the famous 'Wilhelm Scream'. I'll be hearing it all over the place in the future.
  (tags: sound movies history video)
• Roger Waters The Wall - a set on Flickr. Oh. My. God. Want!
  (tags: RogerWaters PinkFloyd TheWall concerts music photography)
• Some fascinating thoughts on the most interesting uncharted waters in social software design?
  (tags: research socialnetworking design software)
• The guest of honour for WisCon who is not Elizabeth Moon writes about the situation.
  And if you don't know what any of that means then just count yourself lucky.
  (tags: fandom wiscon)
• Testing a $50,000 Mattress. Nicely written.
  (tags: bed review funny)

Facebook WTF

So, I wanted to say something on Facebook. Except that I have some work people on FB, so I decided to make use of their filtering/security system to say it. Not that it would have caused trouble, just because my work people probably don't want to know huge amounts about my home life.

So I set up a FB list of Actual friends, went to post, and discovered that you can't post to a list of friends. I could include certain people (by typing in their names individually) or exclude certain people (likewise), but there's no way of posting something so that a particular list can see it.

I haven't been using FB much recently, and I think that's basically why. It's gone from being actual friends to being mostly actual friends, with a smattering of other people, and I don't feel as comfortable with it.

Am I missing an option somewhere? Or am I just going to have to resign myself to not using it nearly as much?

Phonetacular

Orange have, apparently, finally released the Android 2.2 update for the HTC Desire.*

I have therefore decided to do a backup of the files from the SD card to my PC, reformat the SD card, put everything back onto it, and then upgrade it.

Fingers crossed that it all works.

*Next time around I'm very tempted to buy the phone outright for myself, meaning I get the update when the manufacturer releases it, not when Orange have finished putting their crap on it. Not that Orange seem to put a lot of crap onto the Desire, that I've noticed. If it wasn't for the phone insurance, and a new Desire costing £400 new, I'd have done that last time around.

Just in case you were wondering

(via teaotter)

To my left is Julie, resting against a large cushion (about a metre square) which she sewed together herself. I'm not sure whether to use the cushion as a weapon, or Julie. Or possibly get Julie to use the cushion as a weapon against the impending zombie hordes. In any case, I'm sure that we'll be fine :->

The Woman I Love

"I hope that if I ever get killed by a serial killer, it's not during their experimenal phase."

(She's been watching lots of Crime shows recently. There's generally someone unpleasant doing something unpleasant to someone on the TV. Thankfully, sometimes it's Dexter, and this evening it led to us watching The Untouchables. Sean Connery's Irish Accent For The Win!)