Pokémon Go is the new sat-nav

When sat navs first became widely used, for years the papers would be full of stories about people driving into lakes and lorries stuck in narrow alleys because they blindly followed their sat-navs. The Daily Mirror did a top ten mishaps back in 2008.

Then taking selfies became all the rage, Wiki has a list of serious injuries and deaths resulting from this activity.

And now it looks as if we are going to be bombarded with people coming a cropper because they were playing Pokémon Go.

Here are a few from the past week:

Florida man shoots at Pokemon Go players after hearing the teens say 'Did you get anything?' and mistaking them for burglars

Teen Killed Trespassing While Playing Pokemon Go

Pokemon GO players stranded 100ft underground in caves while searching for characters

Doesn't have the same appeal as cow attacks though.

Social Networks

From The Guardian:

Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: it was seeing a "decrease in daily users, specifically among teens". In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook; they're just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing.

Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and (shock, horror) commenting on their kids' photos. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.

All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere. On their mobiles.

It's interesting because the thing with personal social networks is that it's about people meeting the people they want to meet, without wasting time with people they don't.

The success of Facebook isn't technological, it's about who joined first. They got Harvard students, people we could best describe as "alphas" in some ways, people that other people would like to hang out with. So then, people in other top universities could join. And because Harvard is above them in social networking, they joined, then other colleges and finally, the public.

But what people don't want is to be bothered. You don't want you mum's crazy 2nd cousin asking why you don't bother commenting on her updates. Or your mum finding out that you got drunk. Or to be bothered by lots of people way down the social scale.

The people who do worst out of this are the people that everyone wants to talk to. So, they move to other networks to get away from people, and with this, others start to follow, until eventually the network has moved elsewhere.

I give it a couple of years and Facebook will be where MySpace is today. And we'll start getting news reports in the Daily Mail about various things people have been getting up to on WhatsApp.

Any Telecoms "experts" out there?

Only having spotted "Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier" in this BBC piece about Maria Miller's planned crackdown on "nuisance calls" I confess to not fully understanding how that would work.

A range of measures is being planned to tackle the issue of nuisance phone calls, the culture secretary has said.

Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier.

A licensing system for call centres may also be introduced in the future.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) document, Connectivity, Content and Consumers: Britain's digital platform for growth, says the calls "can be live marketing calls, silent calls, abandoned calls and recorded marketing message calls".

"More often than not it is perceived as a nuisance, but it can also cause anxiety, inconvenience and distress," the report says.

The measures being taken also include lowering the threshold for number of calls before enforcement action is taken and allowing Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office to more easily share information.

There will also be clarification of the process for opting out of receiving marketing calls and reporting unwanted calls. 

It is a shame, but it has to be said, that is some "but ..."

According to a mini review of the Lytro light field camera, which "allows users to refocus their shots after taking them" and which is about to become available in the UK by Matt Warman Consumer Technology Editor for the Telegraph

"Light-field, or plenoptic, cameras capture more light than traditional models by using an array of micro lenses. They can therefore allow an image to be refocused after it has been taken, or to create ‘living images’ that can be refocused long after they were first captured.

The Lytro camera launched in America last year, and features an 8x optical zoom and f/2 lens in a rectangular (sic). It will be available from next week from £399 for an 8GB model in Harrods, Dixons Travel and John Lewis online. The camera also offers a selection of filters, and wireless connection to an iPhone app. A 16GB version is also available for £469".

The mini review also includes quotes from another longer review in The Verge by one David Pierce in which he states "There’s no doubt in my mind that Light Field cameras are the future of photography, or at least part of the future. Light Field photography gives you photos that are so immersive and manipulable that it’s quickly easy to forget that 2D photos are useful at all."    

So, amazing stuff.  Sadly however David also says "But the first iteration of the Lytro isn’t quite there yet: it’s hard to use, its display is terrible, and outside of a few particular situations its photos aren’t good enough to even be worth saving.”

This is the 21st Century after all, so obviously we've moved on from

18th Century solutions and embraced something in keeping with the times

Says you!

Grazia editor tells PPA Conference : ‘You can’t read an iPad in the bath’

but we most respectfully would beg to differ

nb : A not very well known IT consumer affairs non-expert suggests that sealable plastic bags which would also allow i-Pad (or Kindle) use to continue during a leisurely soak are available at various well known High Street and other outlets for those who consider the Waterwear iPad case slightly over-priced - although it might prove a possible boon to anyone who prefers showers and wants to be able to use their i Pad or Kindle whilst taking one. Googling Ziplock plastic bags for iPad might be a useful starting point.

nb 2 anyone "experimenting" with either bath or shower use of their i-Pad or Kindle does so at his/her own risk, t'ain't nothing to do with us, and don't be surprised if bringing your device and water into close proximity after having been advised not to invalidates the warranty, ok?

I'd throw in "Work programme co-ordinator and advisor"

I saw the headline  Five jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago  and in anticipation of finding some interesting jobs, probably some interesting jobs with a limited shelf life, leapt in ...

The UK jobs market has changed incredibly over the past 100 years; even the past decade has seen a proliferation of new roles. We look at a selection and ask whether your role existed 10 years ago.

I was not disappointed ...

Offshore windfarm engineer
Zumba teacher
App designer
"Green Deal" assessor
Social media manager

Now I, being an boring old fart**, well remember the serious sincere assertions thrown out at us about the benefits increased computerisation and mechanisation  the onward march of technology was going to deliver and in particular how we none of us needed to worry about the future because the fewer people required to do mundane manual tasks etc. the better - First up the vastly increased profitability of being able to do so much more with far fewer humans involved meant not only would we all be guaranteed greater wealth all round, with everyone being able to pick and chose how much, basically how little we worked and living a largely leisure oriented lifestyle but Second up, with the mundane and repetitive being taken care of by machines people would be able to move on and do the new more satisfying and fulfilling jobs that would spring up like Wordsworth's daffodils ...   I don't know where the masterplan fell down and who is at fault but ...

VSLVSL

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Offshore windfarm engineer = engineer
Zumba teacher = PE teacher
App designer = Programmer
Green Deal assessor = Sales Rep
Social media manager = Wanker
The more things change the more they remain the same.

** I'm not alone !  And I'd certainly agree with the sentiment ...  you just can't be "a policy adviser" without a degree any more ... in fact, you can't even do "filing" without a degree, because it is all "electronic" now, and you do of course need to have degree to be able to file documents that only exist in electronic form ...  

whodhavethoughtit

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My role existed 40 years ago when I started work. Basically an an office admin/secretarial role. I still do the same job now but it has to be dressed up with a fancy title (facilitator/co-ordinator/policy officer etc) to justify asking for a degree to get through the door.
I am probably exaggerating for effect somewhat but many job descriptions I see nowadays could come under the generic 'administrator'.

Apparently "aluminium" never caught on in the USSR

From The Daily Mail:

Thank you for flying Soviet airlines: The vast airplane graveyard in Russia where 9,000 giants of the sky have been left to rust

There's an app for that.

From Cybercrimesunit.com:

A woman who tried to unlock a stolen iPhone unwittingly took her own photo. An app on the phone then automatically sent the photo to the owner, who called the police.

The app, identified by some media outlets as iGotYa, can only be installed on jailbroken [wot?] iPhones. iGotYa takes a picture of anyone who tries to unlock it, maps their location and then sends the information to the owner in an email.

That’s exactly what happened in this particular case, Sussex Police said, with an iPhone that had been stolen from the Coalition nightclub in Brighton, East Sussex, earlier this month. Police have released the picture of the woman who might have stolen the phone.

Ah, these precious iPhone owners with all their fancy technology, don't they know they can be outwitted with a couple of simple items which you can buy at any hardware shop or might even have lying round the house?

1. Some black insulation tape to stick over the lens or lenses on the iPhone so that it can't take your picture.

2. You then place the iPhone on a hard surface and give it a sharp blow with a normal household hammer to disable the chip. Then turn the iPhone over and smack it on the other side as well, just to be sure.

There, they'll never track you down now!

iPod niggle

I noticed a few weeks ago that there were certain songs on my iPod (they showed up in the list of 'songs' from the main menu, for example and played as normal) which you couldn't access via the list of 'artists' from the main menu because the 'artist' just didn't show up.

I correlated this back to certain albums (the last couple of NOW albums, if truth be told) and the way to fix this appears to be to choose the original song in iTunes on your main computer, click 'get info', untick the box saying 'part of a compilation' and then 'sync' your iPod again. Which is a bit of a grind if you have to go through each individual song on the suspect albums and untick the box each time - there doesn't seem to be a way of telling iTunes that a compilation album is not actually a compilation album, but hey.

Pond life

My sister took that photo' with one of those point-and-click digital cameras. I think it is awesome.

"Thought-controlled computer games in shops this year"

Brilliant!... but the question on the gaming fraternity's lips is ... will we be able to use this to control the Wii-Fit Exercise Game?