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.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been focusing on my fiction a lot more lately. And as a part of that, I’m really excited to be launching the podcast of my SF novel, Beautiful Red.

You can have a listen to the promo here, or even better, head over to the site at http://darusha.ca/beautifulred to subscribe to get the episodes automatically.

For a number of years I’ve been interested in prison systems, particularly the current counter-productive nature of the US system. So, I was really interested to hear this week’s Tech Nation on IT Conversations, which is a discussion with Sasha Abamsky about the state of prisons in the US, the history of the penal system and some of the things going on today that curdle my blood.

I know everyone and her dog will be talking about this, but I have to admit that it’s the first announcement Apple has made that actually excites me. The iPhone is an entirely new design, with a wide touchscreen as opposed to buttons. It’s a phone, iPod and tiny computer that runs a version of OS X. It has wifi and bluetooth and is a quad band GSM phone on the Cingular network.

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.

I’ve been having trouble with the Yamipod part of the myPodder to iPod solution I posted about previously. So I wrote an Automator workflow to use iTunes instead. If you’re on a Mac running 10.4, you can use it too. Download the workflow here.

If you’re a power podcast user like me, you’ve probably found that iTunes doesn’t have the feature set you’re looking for in a podcatching client. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that myPodder, the client that goes with the online site Podcast Ready, now supports iPods. I was less than excited, though, when I discovered that “support” means that the application runs, not that you can actually play the stuff you download directly on your iPod.

Okay, this is unbelievably cool. Via Treehugger, I learned about these guys who are making solar powered wifi nodes. You plug one of them into a broadband connection, then distribute the rest around a community for cheap-as-free wifi for all. This is definitely part of my vision for a good future (as opposed to the kind of future I ususally think we’re headed for). Hooray for good news!