Favourite tech picture of the day – 7th of April 2008

Viper made of keyboard keys! Notice all the mice running around on the ground (Link: Boing Boing)

Ambient Umbrella hopes to save weekends

Coming from a weekend with typically unpredictable spring weather, I stumbled on the umbrella from Ambient Devices. Could it help have a better time? The weather forecast was saying rain, rain and rain throughout the afternoon, but reality was rain up to 4 pm and sunny for the rest of the day!

If I had the Ambient Umbrella I would be able to look at its handle LED while parked at home. By receiving weather info from Accuweather, it would tell me whether rain or snow was perdicted.

Is DAB effectively dead?

Is DAB effectively dead? If we judge from what is happening in the UK, it is probably a matter of time. Although there are currently 6.5 million DAB receivers, defections towards other types of access to audio content have started to become intolerable.

Things of course needed not be like that. DAB was supposed to be the digital FM replacement at a time when competition from the Internet was practically non-existent. A quick standardisation Europe-wide and a forced switch to digital radio broadcasting with a deadline date for analogue brodcasts would have easily done the trick. But what happened instead? As usual, there were no firm decisions in order to keep everybody happy. Radio stations were kept content as they did not have to modernise any equipment, while changes were minor with digital-on-analogue services like RDS and text on screen.