Oh, Maemo, the promises you bring to nerds like me…

Mobile programmable computers have a new meaning now.

After a very interesting presentation by Dr. José Luis Cordeiro of Singularity University, I was left with a few interesting ideas about the coming accelerating technological and social progress.

• Genetic testing is becoming faster and cheaper.  In 3 years full sequencing will only cost 100 bucks and take 5 days, with a huge impact in ancestry and medicine (think about genetically-tailored preventive medicine). Imagine 23andme going mass market.
• We will go back to the moon, especially now that it is found that there’s water.
• World relationships are changing. For thousands of years the important body of water was the Mediterranean, and until recently the Atlantic.  We are now entering the age of the Pacific.
• Robot rights are already under discussion in Korea and Europe.
• Economic, telecommunications and energy source evolution is accelerating.
• The death of death: The Methuselah Foundation.
• Nano, bio, info and cognitive sciences are converging. Everything is information.
• Marvin Minsky (MIT): “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be us!”
• Transhumanism as a possibility, not only a science fiction conjecture.

TEDx Helsinki was organised this year as a local mirror for the wonderful, famous TED talks.  The event was quite good overall, even if the level of the talks was a little uneven.  The only problem they had was with misleading marketing in one important aspect: while their website and the registration process was in English, 80% of the event was in Finnish with no translations, which meant those attendants who didn’t master the language of Aleksis Kivi (and there were quite a few), were given a cold shoulder from the get go.

This was one of those situations where I was really glad to have learned the local lingo. If you are interested to know more about the event, you can check twitter or Anssi Kela’s post (in Finnish).

Hi-def would have been impossible

Originally uploaded by Chiva Congelado

Finally we got a flatscreen TV for the living room, and returned our old one for recycling. Before flatscreen technology, large HD televisions (and therefore HD technology) were deemed impractical because they would have simply not fit through any door. Picture that for a moment.

Reminds me of the famous Bill Gates quote that nobody would need more than 640 kB of memory for a personal computer.

An interesting book I read in the December holiday period, it details how audiences relate to different properties accross media, and what are the new behaviours we are finding as a result.  Even though some of the cases and examples shown are already a couple of years old, if you are trying to understand what are the ways people are actually using, dissecting and mashing content this is definitely the book for you.

A previous review on Slashdot here.

Read a review of it on Blanca’s blog and decided to check it out.  The author discusses the book below.

Interesting post at Stephen's blog about worldwide trends.  Worth reading.

Bought an Apple AirPort Express to connect my laptop with my stereo to listen music and at the same time be able to browse the web.  Since I have a Fonera router for using my network and sharing it with others (not that anybody has actually connected as I live in the middle of nowhere), I thought it would be easy to have them talk to each other and to my PC… how wrong I was!

After 3 hours of fiddling with the different settings I got it all working and now I'm happy listening to music without any wires in the way.  However, it got me wondering about the good old problem of interoperability.  Even when following the same standards, it is ridiculous things wouldn't work because of an arcane problem between WPA/WPA2 implementations in the two routers.  I guess there is still plenty of work to be done.

According to Microsoft, there is about 240 million users of MSN messenger in the world.  I believe that a few of them might be interested in knowing that there is now a version of Windows live (including Messenger, Hotmail, Live Spaces and Search) available for use in Nokia devices.

For more information go to www.nokia.com/windowslive, but it is currently available for owners of Nokia N73, N76, N80 internet edition, N93i and N95 in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, UAE and UK, with more to follow.

Needless to say, we would love to hear your comments about the service.