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.

I came across a great metaphor for relationships awhile ago - bricks and mortar. Bricks are the “big things” - the events of life that you share with friends. Mortar is the little, everyday stuff, that the people you are closest to just know about, often whether they want to or not.

As Scheherazade wrote in her original blog post that caught my eye, bricks get all the attention. When we think about communication, we think about the bricks. But mortar is what makes it all stick together, and without it there’s no solid foundation.

I somehow magically got a Wii for my birthday, and have been meaning to post about it. Lots has been said about it, but there are two main points I think are worth mentioning.

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’m one of those people who thinks that in this day and age it’s pretty embarrassing that we’re still interacting with machines using a WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface. So I was thrilled to see this video of someone who’s trying a different approach.

(via William Gibson’s blog)

I think every day should be a day without DRM, and so in that vein, I’m supporting Defective by Design’s campaign against DRM. Go visit them. Learn. Download. Support.

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!