I suddenly realised that I expect Amazon (and indeed many other websites) to correct my misspellings in the same way as Google:

Did you mean: lost in translation ?

But it doesn’t.

They should fix this.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using Dopplr and TripIt a lot recently as I’ve been travelling more. Although TripIt is far more featureful, I know more people on Dopplr and so keeping it up-to-date is useful as it increases the chance of serendipitous coincidences. They are competitors, but I like them both.

So far it’s been a pain to enter information into Dopplr manually, but they announced today that it can now watch iCal calendars and create trips accordingly. I’ve added my iCal feed from TripIt and it seems to work well so far. They are minor niggles. For example, it gets confused if you have multiple destinations in your trip as TripIt doesn’t really allow for this concept. Also, not all trips involve advance booking, so I don’t bother adding them to TripIt - they’ll need to be entered into Dopplr manually. Nevertheless, it should cut down on the amount of data entry.

I went to the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC at the weekend. The show itself was a little disappointing, obviously oriented more around trade sales than the end-consumer, and was marred a little by poor organisation from the NEC resulting in large queues, a car-park merry-go-round, and so on. But nevertheless, there were some interesting stalls - Canon and Nikon having the largest and most impressive, with some substantial Canon L-series lenses on display.

I availed myself of the special show pricing (and suffered the robust crowds) to buy a Canon 400D body, plus the lens I’ve been trying to get hold of - the Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS. The lens is cheap, but allegedly better optically than its poor non-image-stabilised cousin that is shipped by default with many Canon bodies. At some point, I’ll invest in something better.

I had a (35mm) SLR some time ago, but sold it when I started using my digital compact more. I’ve been missing the flexibility of an SLR, though, and the appeal of higher ISO (the heroin of digital photography?) was too much. I’ll give it its first proper crack at the whip at the weekend, no doubt.

As I’ve starting travelling a lot recently, I’ve been making reasonably heavy use of both Dopplr and the less well-known TripIt. The idea behind Dopplr is simple: tell it which cities you’re travelling to and it will share that information with your other Dopplr contacts, notifying you when you’re in the same place. You can also syndicate your travel plans - I have mine published on Facebook and available as a feed via Google Calendar.

TripIt, although it has similar facilities for maintaining a list of travelling contacts, originates from a slightly different and more ambitious idea. Essentially, you email TripIt confirmation emails for hotels, airlines, car rental, etc. - and it parses them and automatically organises them into trips with information-rich itineraries, including weather, maps, city guides, etc. You can print those out, but (more usefully) you can again syndicate them into tools such as Google Calendar via iCal. This way, I end up with details about all my flights, hotels, and so on in my calendar automatically.

TripIt’s not perfect - I’ve found a few bugs - and TripIt doesn’t support every single travel agent (for example, it doesn’t support the one we use within IBM - at least not directly). But the TripIt team are very responsive to feedback - I notified them about a Hertz reservation email this afternoon that wasn’t recognised. They’ve already fixed the bug and the information has appeared in my TripIt account. I’m not sure how they plan to monetise their service (although that’s still not clear with Dopplr either), but I am likely to stay a regular user for the foreseeable future.

(Honourable mention for another useful travel website goes to Kayak, which has the most flexible and useful flight search interface I’ve found).

I’m surprised at the poor state of online contact management, given how mature the online e-mail market is. I’ve just spent a frustrating and mostly wasted morning with Plaxo, trying to see if it could fulfil my relatively simple needs (online contact management, syncing with something desktop-based, ideally Thunderbird, and syncing with my mobile phone as a nice to have). After struggling with the over-engineered Plaxo interface, a wobbly Thunderbird sync extension that loses critical bits of data, and a de-duper that misses obvious duplicates, I gave up. The latter service requires signing up to a free trial, which I’ve now cancelled.

At some point I’ll give Yahoo Address Book a go - initial investigations look good, it does away with the unnecessary social networking guff (I’m already signed up to Facebook and LinkedIn, thanks, Plaxo - try focusing a little harder on your core business), and is much speedier. Unfortunately, the Yahoo effort seems to be a bit basic - mainly a lack of sync points - but at least that does remove some of the potential for damage.

Does anyone know of any other solutions? I was willing to pay for Plaxo, and I can’t be the only one. I think there’s an unmet need here.

NatWest have recently introduced a one-time pad device on their on-line banking system, which I’ve just got my hands on. As someone who travels a lot, it’s going to be an inconvenience to carry around, so I phoned up NatWest to see if I could have it disabled. The chap I spoke to implied it was being introduced by all UK banks in one form or another and wasn’t going to be optional. Does anyone know if this is true? I wonder if they have really thought through the implications for their customers. Online banking is often of the most use when you are away from home, and carrying a physical device seems like a very stone-age method of providing security. Why can’t I choose not to have it?

David Hill wrote recently on a Lenovo Blog about the design qualities that make Thinkpads great. Whilst some of these are shared by other laptop manufacturers, I have to say I largely agree - even if mine is supplied ‘free’ for use on company business. After dropping it again the other day (yes, I’m clumsy, sorry boss), it took a huge chunk out of my wooden floor. But after the battery had been popped back in, it spun back up and back to life. Truly amazing.

I would buy one myself.

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments on my blog recently, which even Akismet isn’t catching.

So I was amused to get this comment today:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site….

I think you can see where it’s going. One can’t help but feel that just maybe he knows a lot of spammers and knows I get a lot of spammy comments because he is a [fill in the obvious blank]. How frustrating.

Oh yes: is this legally blackmail?

Just finished reading Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy. Mark is a chap of many interests and the creative driver behind the excellent (and varied) euroGel conference I attended in Copenhagen last year.

The premise for the book is that the computer-using public are getting swamped by e-mails, web content, blogs, photos, files, and so on - something that most folk would probably agree with. Mark ranges over all of these topics, and gives recommendations for how to handle each. Some of the material borrows from elsewhere - for example, the chapter on email appears to be heavily influenced by David Allen’s now-infamous Getting Things Done method - but this is no bad thing: it’s obvious that Mark is trying to bring together a style guide for the technical world. The Elements of Style is mentioned at least once as a model from the world of the written word. Most of his recommendations are straightforward and backed up with a solid amount of reasoning.

I don’t entirely agree with all of Mark’s recommendations - I think he has a deliberate bias away from anything that removes one’s control over data. Whilst this is a noble and sensible aim within reason, there are other advantages to be wrought from keeping data on the network (and sometimes you have to just chill). He also advocates a degree of customisation - for example, changing one’s keyboard layout to Dvorak - again, something I’ve found to be unwise as you move from computer to computer. But maybe I just do that more than Mark, or maybe he’s more adaptable than me.

Irrespective, there’s a lot of sensible and useful material in the book. Some will be a little basic for some readers, but as The Elements of Style proved, sometimes the basic bears repeating. It’ll be a hard job, given the rapid pace of change in technology, but maybe this book will enter the annals of history in a similar way. I wish Mark the best of luck with the next edition

It appears that all the cool kids are using Dopplr to run into each other more often. I’m kinda curious to know whether it’ll work (I ran some numbers on this a few years ago with some colleagues and we concluded it wouldn’t). So I’ve signed up. I’ve one beta invite left, so if you’d like it, let me know.