I thought I was doing pretty well with a combination (Telewest and “Telediscount”:http://www.telediscount.co.uk/accessnumbers.php) that cost me 10 pounds a month, a 6p connection charge and between 1 and 3p a minute to call the UK, France, Canada or the US (depending on whether it’s daytime, evening or weekend).

I am still stuck with the 10 pound line rental but now I find 1899.com has a 3p connection charge, lets you call any UK landline for free (except 0845 and 0870 numbers), mobiles for 2p a minute weekends, 10p weekdays and Canada and the US for .5p a minute (France 1p)! An alternative provider “18866”:http://www.call18866.co.uk/printer_version.php charges somewhat more but with a connection charge of just 1p.

When I first came to the UK from Canada my phone habits changed drastically – I was used to paying nothing for local calls to my friends – now I had to pay for every call I made, so I kept my calls short. Now I suspect the boot is on the other foot – certainly my father pays around 50% more for his line rental and I’m guessing I pay less on a per-call basis (except for the fact I still have to pay 3p per call while his local calls remain completely free).

I suspect too that since companies like 1899 rely on word of mouth and (I’m guessing) people finding their website it’s (ironically) the wealthier, better connected people in the UK who can find and take advantage of these deals while poorer people without the time or skills to shop around end up paying much more.

In “California”:http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/9588858.htm?1c a man attached a cellphone to an ex-girlfriend’s car and used it to stalk her (The woman eventually caught the guy under her car attempting to change the cellphone’s battery). Of course it is much easier to simply track your target’s cellphone – something that is apparently being done more and more frequently in Korea. I think all services should require the tracked phone user to acknowledge each tracking attempt.

See “this item from my archive”:https://blog.org/archives/000712.html for info on UK cellphone tracking services.

There are lots of photo sharing services around – (two years ago I did a “little comparison”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000385 of several of them which offer photo printing as well) – but “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ – which I started to try out yesterday – seems to be the Internet geek’s best choice (they’ve got Cory Doctorow, “renaissance geek”:http://www.craphound.com/bio.html advising them so it’s “turning up a lot on boingboing”:http://www.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=flickr).

If after reading the description below, Flickr appeals to you and you want to try it out (basic membership is free), instead of visiting the site right away and signing up I would appreciate it if you could “email me”:http://davidbrake.org/contact.htm and I will invite you. There’s an offer available at the moment – if I successfully invite 5 new people to join Flickr I will receive a Flickr Pro Account (valid until September 15th, 2004). Yes I have therefore a small interest in selling you on the idea but I already have other photo library accounts so it’s not a huge deal for me one way or another. Anyway…

The Flickr feature that first caught my attention is that it has an automatic ‘post to your blog’ feature (which I used yesterday). It also lets you post photos to your Flickr site and/or weblog via email and directly from camera phones. What’s more intriguing though is that it has a number of creative ways of organizing photos. Most photo sites make you sort pictures into albums. This one lets you attach pictures to several different groups, tag them by keyword, lets you and your Flickr-using friends pool and organize your pictures in interesting ways etc etc.

Geekily enough it also supports RSS in different ways so people can automatically know you have added more pictures and they have built in chat and messageboard facilities so people with similar interests can share pictures (yes there are porn-related groups as you’d expect but also groups like “Bonsai lovers”:http://www.flickr.com/groups_view.gne?id=36521982934@N01). I’m a sucker for organizations like this one that just don’t seem to know when to stop adding new features on the off chance that someone will use them. “ICQ”:http://www.icq.com/ was a bit like that – it’s a pity the full version isn’t seeing much development any more. Anyway…

There’s a quick overview of Flickr’s features “here”:http://www.flickr.com/learn_more.gne and a longer “get the most out of Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne guide but the best way to figure it out is to sign up and try out its features.

Signup is free. For the moment you can only sign up for their free account which lets you share either your most recent 100 photos or photos uploaded in the last 3 months (whichever comes first). It must be said this is not over-generous – “photo.net”:http://www.photo.net/ has a 100Mb quota, “Webshots”:http://daily.webshots.com/scripts/signup.fcgi lets you store 240 photos. Also at the moment the only software available for bulk uploading of photos is for Windows XP and MacOS X. Later they will have software available for more operating systems and premium accounts with more storage and capabilities (they are in beta testing at the moment).

P.S. I just discovered “Phil Gyford”:http://www.gyford.com/ has also recently “taken a shine to Flickr”:http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2004/08/25/seeing_the_light.php.

Following on from my brief mention of “blogs from US troops in Iraq”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_world.html#001217 I have discovered a collection of “pictures taken by troops in Iraq with picturephones”:http://www.yafro.com/frontline.php – you need to click on the ‘comments’ part or mouse over the photos to see the context they give them.

Incidentally (and probably not coincidentally) the blogger who was interviewed on NPR I mentioned earlier has now had to pull his weblog down.

Thanks to Torill Mortensen for the link

When Psion stopped producing the Series 5mx I reluctantly abandoned the Psion/Symbian platform for a Palm because I wanted something pocketable but with a full-size(ish) keyboard. Nothing available from Symbian did the trick then or (to the best of my knowledge) now. But it looks like the “Nokia 9500”:http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,54113,00.html “previewed here”:http://my-symbian.com/9210/review_9500.php may do so when it launches – for a price. And if you don’t mind waiting a little longer I now discover they may do a little brother – the 9300 without wifi and built-in camera.

I am smitten, but the projected price of $1000 before subsidy for the 9500 is a little off-putting! Also the review seems to suggest you can’t automatically synchronise Office documents – only contacts, calendar and email. I hope I wouldn’t have to remember to copy the documents I want back and forth between the phone and my PC!

I notice that Fictionwise, which sells ebooks, has a special promotion (top of its front page) on the ebooks of the movies of “Spider Man 2”:http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook22112.htm and “Van Helsing”:http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook22111.htm. I can’t imagine anyone going to these special effects extravaganzas and thinking, ‘I love this but I want to be able to read it in ebook form to really enjoy the subtlety of the plotting and characterisation.’

Wired News’ “Leander Kahney”:http://www.wired.com/news/storylist/0,2339,30,00.html has been writing about how us Brits have supposedly been in the forefront of using the Internet and mobile phone technologies to meet up for anonymous sex.

“Yoz Grahame”:http://cheerleader.yoz.com/ has written a stinging satire entitled Sex-Crazed Brits Just Doing It Everywhere, Like, Everywhere Man, You Can’t Stop Them, They’re Like Dogs In Heat Or Something, And Dude, I Gotta Get Me Some Of That.

The Guardian Online produced a report on “Nokia’s Lifeblog software”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1166303,00.html for turning the contents of your picturephone into a life journal. BBC followed up with an article with a few more details – most interestingly the clever idea that the software would automatically match up the pictures you took with your phone and the location where they were taken using the automatic phone location service that mobile phone operators provide. So as well as relying on labels you add yourself you can query your lifeblog software and find all the pictures you took in central London last week.

Before you get too excited it isn’t due to be delivered before the end of June and the first version (“blog” name notwithstanding) does not connect to the Internet but this still represents the first appearance of the next generation of ‘life capture’ software on the mass market.

Telltale Weekly is a scheme which offers audio books in MP3 or Ogg format charging from $0.25 a story. After five years (or 100,000 downloads) each audio clip will be put into the public domain. It’s great way to fund the development of a public domain library. I have my doubts about whether they will get anything like enough customers to make it worthwhile but it is certainly an interesting and valuable thing to try.

Alas the list of “upcoming releases”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Schedule is not very exciting – but you are encouraged to “make your own suggestion”:http://telltaleweekly.com/index.php?Show=Feedback – personally I would like to hear an English translation of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education…

I wonder if librarians could get together and give Project Gutenberg and other similar projects like this one an idea of which are the most important texts to work with? I can’t believe that what the world needs next is texts like “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction”:http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/3/4/11348/11348-h/11348-h.htm (the latest text produced by the “Distributed Proofreader”:http://www.pgdp.net/ project.

Thanks to “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ and “Ben Hammersley”:http://www.benhammersley.com/dparchives/008110.html for the link.

Published in The New Yorker February 16, 2004

(NB you can browse all the cartoons in the New Yorker’s current issue each week “here”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/prints_currentissue.asp)