I’ve been fairly silent around these parts for the past while, mainly because I’ve been focussing on preparing myself and my boat for an imminent long sailing adventure. For those who are interested, my sailing blog has all the skinny on that.

However, I’ve been doing a lot of work on board to get the computer stuff all up and running. I’m still maybe only halfway there, but it occurred to me that it might be time to lay out the basics so far.

As everyone probably knows, Amazon made a big stink recently with the launch of its ebook reader the Kindle (and the associated ebook store). I’m on a mailing list for authors who distribute on podiobooks.com, and the Kindle set that normally very quiet mailing list on fire. Everyone seemed to have a very strong opinion.

It’s not exactly that I don’t like iTunes - when I first started using it I was blown away by how great it was. And it just kept getting better until it hit that point. The point where it’s trying to do so many things that it doesn’t do anything right for me.

I admit that I’m not a lover of converged devices - I have a pda, a phone and a music player; they are all separate devices to perform separate functions. I like it that way.

Combining two of my current obsessions (soccer and technology), I am experimenting with an IPTV provider to get access to my beloved Champions League. Last year, we got our CL action through a subscription to a Real service. We had all the games on demand through streaming, and I just fed the signal through my laptop to the TV.

I’m not for computers in schools, so why do I support the One Laptop per Child program? More technology is great, it just doesn’t need to be focussed on kids.

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According to DesktopLinux.com, the One Laptop per Child program (aka the $100 laptop) has orders for 4 million laptops from Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand. I’m glad to see that this program seems to be gaining speed.

Tags: $100 laptop, olpc

Check out the first glimpses of the MIT media lab’s $100 laptop (the cornerstone of the One Laptop per Child program).

For more info, watch the Pop!Tech 2005 feed from IT Conversations for a talk from Nicholas Negroponte about this project. The talk should be posted in a couple of weeks.

Update: You can now hear the Nicholas Negroponte talk here.

Here’s the list of technologies I want in my grubby paws by this time next year. My kingdom for a fab lab…

It’s a new year, and that means that everyone and their dogs feel compelled to write about the most interesting things of the last X amount of time. CNN had weighed into the fray with its list of the top 25 innovations of the last 25 years.