Review - Tom Tom Drum WUSB Touchscreen.

In the days before Google I used to work for TomTom, so this review might be biased, but the Drum is awesome! I got my hands on prototype and its the dog's kahunas. It's 100% right there, bang-smack exactly what I have been looking for for the past two decades: it's a very feminine transsexual masseuse/tech-philosopher. No! No! I mean it's one of these babies:

Its the first - to my knowledge - WUSB Touch screen (Control4 and Panasonic did some WiFi ones a few years back). The technology has been possible for a couple of years I guess, but this is the Walkman. The Drum has no real CPU or GPU, it has no memory, no drive. No moving or thinking parts. Think of it like a really cheap, light, rugged, weatherproof Tablet PC that goes for 12 hours, weighs a bit more than an average paperback and doesn't get hot.... or make a sound.


I have one of the Logitech WUSB keyboards and proper mice, and so I use them around the house when I am not in the mood for typing on the screen with a pen.

In terms of the tech that's all you can really say. I could go on about the nice crisp screen. I could whinge about the lack of any speaker in the device - a Drum with no sound: those crazy Dutchies:P!

I could eulogise on how it's nice to have so much power (that's really on my desktop) in something light and cheap - 200 big ones.

But whats the point?

You know if it's like the other TomTom stuff it's going to be well built and look good. Sub-Apple looks, but good looks. Most of all, you know its a great idea and you want one.


Playing C&C in the bath with never be the same again.

Order at TomTom.com

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Future Blog: The sIgnature SP Pen

I finally got my hands on one of these intriguing little buddies, the sIgnature SP. As you can see, its a pen.

It cost me 4k and I'll prolly never use it, but its funk and rare and worth 6 on ebay I reckon. It feels heavy, like a Mont Blanc Nevee, but it isn't that kind of craftsmanship - its a bit sony. *shrugs* So what do you get for your 4 big ones:

• A pen that writes in blue chemically unique ink. As in, each pen has a unique and easy to scan chemical composition. (You can get a scanner that will authenticate for another 2k, but you don't need it).
• It has 2 hi res cameras (nib and top) that record what is being written was well as the face of the person writing. (It conforms with MeID 1.1, which is good)
  
• A sphere motion sensor (like in the Fin pointers). This motion data is all tied in with the camera images.
  
• The ball in the nib is istelf is a sensor that works out the path on the paper.
• The side of the pen is a fingerprint scanner. One of the new weak filed ones. You just can see it in the picture.
• GPS tracker.

How does it work?

The idea is that the sIgnature SP will be used for signing important business documents and stuff like that. It says on their website that the UN and the World Bank are using them, so that’s a good plug.

The SP only works when connected. When you want it to authenticate a signature or signatures, you simply blue in and give it the MeID of the signatories. It then downloads all the data it needs for those MeIDs and blues back that it’s ready. It took less than a second for me.

When you sign with it, all of the data recorded by the sensors is hashed together in real time and compared with the MeID data it has. At the same time it uploads the signature data to the proprietary sIgnature waterhouse. So the time, location and biometrics of the person are locked in with the act of signing. At the same time it can blue out confirmation that the people who signed were the people who were supposed to sign.

It is all pretty nifty. Impostors can’t sign and fakes are not possible and there is a digitally eternal record that the document was signed.

Any downers?:

1. They charge $70 each time it’s used but will release the data off free of charge at your request. That’s pretty good I suppose. I guess it's not aimed for home use.
2. Their watermark server isn’t connected to Open Waterhouse. There is no need for this and it would add extra certainty and reliability – I guess their reasoning is its already certain enough.
3. They claim its impossible to fake but I reckon if you could get physical access to their waterhouse and some q-grid access you could pop it. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be possible – that’s my guess.

Conclusion

For what its does is awesome. But I cant help think is what it does needed or is it just another avenue for commercialising. I have never heard of signatures being contested or doubted. At least no recently and a search on google legal doesn’t show up much.

If you want to prove with certainty that you signed your new rental (or maybe global peace treaty) in person at that time and place, then you need this pen. Offer me 4k and it is yours, else its going ebay.

(This pen is featured in The Final Chapters)

Futureblog: How my husband discovered my affair.

Sorry I haven’t been posting for ages, its been a bit of a nightmare:( Last week my husband found out that I had been having an affair for the last two years. The dust hasn't settled and we are in mediation, my mother hates me, my brother called me a "Harlot" and Jeff is devastated. As you know we have no kids, but nonetheless, eight years in its looking all over.

I am angry. Jeff is angry. We are angry with different things.

Readers of this blog will know that four months ago Jeff had a mass noted in his left lung during a routine work medcheck. It was small, about the size of an almond, but there where it shouldn't be. He went for some more tests, all paid for by his private insurance, and they found that is was cancerous. They would need to operate and give him some reparative stem therapy for the damage. We were assured that everything would be OK, and on the cancer front it was. A month later it was gone and the damage close to being repaired.

We both felt very lucky.

The day Jeff got the final all clear he also got a paper letter from his private insurance. It started off talking about the success of his recent treatment, etc etc. Then, on the next paragraph it was stated that:

We have evidence that you have been undertaking in activities that contravene your insurance declaration and, under agreed terms of your policy, we will be investigating this evidence further.

It went on with a load of legal talk and recommendations that seemed helpful and friendly. Jeff and I were shocked and couldn't think what they could be talking about. He called his lawyer, who liaised with the insurance company and, a few days later, gave us the low-down. Once the claim was made the insurance company went into "automated refutation" mode. Bots and engines owned by the company tried all they could to disprove the claim. Its how it is nowadays, I guess.

They found a face that looked 93.3% matched to Jeff in someone’s public Goggle album. It was a picture taken on Cay Caulker two years ago. The lawyer got us a copy of the photo in question. The man in the photo, that they said was Jeff, was hidden away in the background on a trestle table in a dimply lit bar or restaurant. The photo was just in an album of some German holiday makers.

In the photo the man was smoking, like people do from time to time on holiday. That was all they needed. The bot sent out the paper letter and the ball started rolling. It transpired that because the facial match was below the required 98% threshold (stipulated by the insurance company) they needed to do more investigation. Jeff’s lawyer said that even if it was 99% match a digital photo couldn’t be evidence without a locked watermark.

The insurance company needed to prove with close to certainty that Jeff had been smoking within the last 5 years, and they were like a pack of hyenas in pursuit of this. They got subpoenas from wimax providers, google, yahoo, ISPs. Even from his work; things like the cams that overlook the outside foyer. We were pretty sure no humans were involved in this. The various bots and engines sent messages and requests to each other. And as it all rolled out, we were kept constantly updated with emails. Trust me, until you have been involved with this kind of process you have no idea how clever and frenzied it all is.

Jeff was in such a panic. He talked about having to mortgage the house, sell the car, downgrade this and that. All in all it was a time filled with as much, though not the same calibre, tension as the cancer scare.

They must have looked through zillions of images and cams, checked millions of store records for a purchase of cigarettes. They found nothing and the claim remained intact. We were ecstatic and feeling the luckiest people two times in as many months.


A fortnight ago I was watching "Deal or No Deal" on my specs and he came in with a frown like I hadn't seen. He was holding a printout.

"What do you make of this?" he asked, handing me the paper.

I took the specs off and started to read the paper. It was from "Cavendish Detection". I looked at it for a moment, confused. Then I read it. I couldn't believe it. I read it again. I don't have a copy of it but it in essence it said

"Dear Mr Sills, we have found evidence that suggest with a high degree of reliability that a person or persons close to you have been partaking in actions that we feel you would think are dishonest... bla bla bla.... If you would like to see this evidence please contact us....bla bla bla.... and pay $5,000...."

My world melted right then, but, after lying to him for two years, I lied some more and just said something like, "Its spam or 414". I don't know why I lied but it was too late, really.

That night I went to their website, Cavendish Detection. This despicable company is one of the new pre-emptive detective agencies. I didn't really know about them until that point, but, my god, I hate them. So should you!

Employee fraud, adultery, child illegality. These bastards it seems would analyze publicly available information and find "dishonesty" wherever it could be found. They then go to the parties concerned and sell them the evidence they have found. Despicable. You should go read the news on these companies, they should be illegal. I may be an adulterer, and I will carry that guilt with me for ever, but these bastards have no right to cause the trouble they do.

Jeff couldn't sleep and my lie became bigger, day by day. I’m so sorry. For a week he would say thing like "Maybe its Kalvin and the club money?" or whatever. All the while I was pretty sure that it was me and my affair that the bastards had the evidence on. I tried to play it down, and I’m sorry for that too, but after week of sleepless nights, Jeff decided that he would pay. Jeff always equates cost with clothes and for him this was just "a couple of pairs of shoes".

I didn’t know he was going to pay right then, but on this Saturday night, he got out of bed and paid the bastards. They obviously sent him a media file. This was all the evidence he needed. He didn’t wake me, he forwarded me the mail and, when I woke up on the Sunday, he was gone. I’m sorry Jeff.

I didn’t open his mail until lunch time. He wasn’t answering my calls, his GPS and messenger was off. I was in a panic. I opened the media file and went through the professional presentation. I was thinking there might be a photo of Mark and I checking into a hotel, or holding hands as we walked down the street in Prague. It was none of that. No soap opera style revelation.

I met Mark at a my cousins barbecue about two years ago when Jeff was away on business. We clicked though nothing happened for, like, four months. I met him a few more times that summer. We started private messaging each other (Which the bastards couldn’t read) and it grew from that. We were in it for the excitement, for the illicitness. It was that illicit buzz that kept it lasting so long, I guess. (Mark is also married).

Together we took all the precautions we felt we would need to keep our affair secret. But it wasn’t so. Our private messages remained private, but the bastards presented Jeff with a chart of the timings of these messages down to the second. You could see nothing what was said but that so much was said. The same with email timings and access points, did you know they keep all this?

It was shocking the detail they went to. I will never forget there was a gvideo of a cat falling into a sink that was pretty funny, I saw it and private messaged it to Mark. It was there in the bastard’s report, that this video had been watched by both parties within eight minutes.

The evidence never named Mark (I don’t even know if they knew who he was) but they did show that whoever it was wore size 12 shoes, aftershave and liked to watch lez porn vidcasts… and so on.. and on.

As the presentation rolled on and my dignity slipped away there was hope that I could pass this off as an “online fling”. An indiscretion, nothing more. But then there started to be the real world connections, and these were my final damnation.

When we met we always were very cautious not to get caught. We would never share bills, taxis, flights or anything that might leave some kind of evidence that either of our partners might stumble upon. But these precautions didn’t matter to the bastards, they just went around them.

There were three dozen occasions when myself and whoever had the size 12 shoes accessed the net from the same town. A not improbable coincidence. But looking at the map in the presentation, it was pretty clear that these “connection windows” were not coincidences. I’m sorry Jeff.

Even more incriminating; there were sixteen pairs of payments over two years that were from the same vending point in a range places (hotels, restaurants, even swimming pools). These payments were separated by seconds. As a sinister knife in my side, Cavendish Detection even offered Jeff the chance for “further investigation” including the “procurement of supporting video and other evidence”. The bastards. But I guess Jeff didn’t need that. There was more evidence… so much of it, but after half an hour I just turned it off and sobbed till I slept.

Looking back now over this week in hell what I can’t get out of my mind is that all of this was possible because of the insurance claim. Once Jeff's insurance company had "investigated" his smoking all of that data was available under Freedom of Information. Someone has since told me, in another blog, that these pre-emptive detective agencies wait at the sidelines for cases like Jeff’s to be made public, then they start picking through. If those German Holiday makers had taken a picture five minutes later, my marriage would still be intact.

The real gutting thing is that the affair with Mark was a mistake and I knew this way before any of this trouble. In my head and heart Mark and I were over the moment I thought I might lose Jeff to the big C.

I don't know what will happen with Jeff and I. I’m going to go away for a few weeks so won’t be posting. I love Jeff so much, I have been a fool and I have been caught out in ways I didn't imagine possible.

Who was that twentieth century author, she said "Our actions are like ships that we send out to sea, and we don't know when or with what cargo they will return"? She was right here.

I’m sorry Jeff. So sorry.

Draft One (Unproofed)

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Futureblog : Have Bots made my life better?

School

My first teacher was one of the first teaching bots. So you could say I grew up with them. Her name was Jenny and she assisted me from the age of 5. I can remember her now. Head visual, 2D OLED - her 3d cartoony face. I can remember how she looked, exactly.

Depending on the lesson I would communicate with her in voice, or on a hard-keyboard. We didn’t have ineyes then. Tap tap tap. It made a clicking sound like crickets in the summer. Tap tap tap. I can’t remember my real first teachers name... maybe Mr Styles. Something like that. Back then you always had a real teacher in school, even if it’s a state school. Imagine a class of kids listening to a real teacher and talking in text to a bot all at the same time. Tap tap tap. That’s a whole lot of crickets.

I knew that in some sense Jenny was different. Not real. Not physical. But I guess I didn’t really understand what Jenny was. She was someone who marked my work, answered some of my questions and was always there, at home, in school, in my messenger and phone, on my Mum's tablet. You should check out a wiki on how they decide which bot is good for which kid. Its pretty amazing. Even at nursery they are monitoring the kids to get some kind of psyc for your MeID.

After Jenny was Betty Maths. I can’t remember how old I was exactly, but we had moved from Dallas, so I must have been seven+. Betty Maths was my first specialist bot. She really annoyed me. I can see myself now typing to her in messenger and not liking her. I knew she wasn't real but I didn't like her still. Like, sometimes you don't like a friend’s dog. Betty Maths didn’t stay long on my screen. Slagbot.

These bots know if they are not best suited for you, it soon becomes apparent after a few moths trying to teach. Duh! I went through more maths bots than anyone else in my class, and more spelling bots than anyone else in the whole year. My bot count average at school was six until sixteen. Yea, but now I earn a quart so slam that:) My brother has a friend who was one on one in EVERYTHING. Everything. That freak works for VCK, high up, and he is more bot than bot. I guess on one and a half and maxing the perks.

University

I was the first year not to get a free place and OU hadn’t started properly in the US. So that was that, I was unable to study more, and got a job working for my dad's friend in a garage. I had to clean out cars before they were picked up by the owners. His garage was small but had a dedicated service bot on the line. That manbot didn’t make my life easier. Bring on…. when there was a customer issue it would tell me what to do and I would hate it. But the manager, if he ever saw me taking verbals from the bot would smile and shrug as if to say "them is the rules" and "It’s not me bossing you, its the bot."

I really couldn’t stand that job. I knew I could do better. When I was 18 OU started up properly and I was right in there. My manager at the garage said he would sponsor me to go all mechanical and all that cack. But I didn’t want that at all. So I got on OU Science and got good stats. And a year in I was getting stats with stats and soon I was getting qualifications.

Its funny but right as I was starting to roll, you know, I got all interested in the world. I had Muslim friends and knew people from school fighting in Asia and just wanted to go check out stuff that want what I knew.

I dropped out for a year and went to India and china on the gap. Promised myself and my parents id study in the gap but never did. But, when I came back I really picked up. Verged away from chemistry and science. Got my maths to 70 and computing to 84. I could have gone to a site university when I was 23 and I reckon a good one. But what was the point.

If I have kids I wont push for real teaching too much. Id rather spend the cash or tax credits on holidays or tech. I think the key is a good pear group on the courses. If they have that then, at least for me, there isn’t too much need for a real teacher. Lots of people disagree with this. Desi is spending a fortune on real teaching for her kids. Choice choice choice.

Work Etc……

Bots have come a long long way since Jenny. I still get it scary when I speak to these things. Yesterday, I had to have a full-on meeting with one of them from Endemol. I can handle aloof, but sending a bot to a screen to do a humans job is just insulting. The meeting went really well and we got the ad-space - at a great price. But I didn’t like it.

This meeting took ten mins, all voice and some ineye. If it had been onsite with humans it would have taken the best part of a morning. So yes, it was good. Your meant to think.... this pure negotiation... pure reason. No interference. Maybe it was but its just not the same is it?

Draft One (Unpublished)

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