Mark "Dive Into Accessibility" Pilgrim has written a neat little web application which will offer a list of sites you might like, based on the links present on the page you feed it.

When I fed it this site's URL I got this list. A couple of them I read already but not necessarily at the URL cited by Recommended Reading, others I've read but decided not to link to, and some I visit occasionally. I'm not sure that I wouldn't have done better just checking out sites from the link lists of weblogs I particularly like, but it's a neat concept. (The one user interface element of Recommended Reading which I dislike a lot is that every time you click on a "not interested" or "already reading" link for a site the entire page is reloaded. Wouldn't it be better to add a series of checkboxes, so I could pick out all the sites I want to in one go instead of waiting for twenty page reloads?)

Interestingly, if I feed Recommended Reading the old URL for Sore Eyes I get a very similar list. No doubt this is because my list of links (which I transferred from the old site more or less unchanged) outweighs the links in my postings in the eyes of the algorithm Recommended Reading uses to pick sites.

The Simputer is a PDA developed by a not-for-profit company specifically to meet the needs of illiterate villagers in India. The idea is that the US$250 device will provide access to information (such as grain prices) and to software designed teach literacy and help them record information. The Simputer uses a smart card to store personal information, so each villager could in principle use one to store his or her data and plug it in when they got their turn with the village Simputer. There's even a simple text-to-speech module.

All of which is very clever, but at that price Simputers are going to be purchased by villages, not individuals. Wouldn't it make more sense to design that custom software to run on cheap standard PC hardware? Where's the advantage of putting the work into developing a PDA platform to run the software?

Microsoft Research have found a handy way to fill up our hard disks for decades to come. (And no, I don't mean another update to Microsoft Office.)

The MyLifeBits project aims to create a system which will automagically archive all your electronic documents and emails, all the pictures you take, and even the web pages you read.

It all sounds very impressive, but what happens if some of the content your PC has archived is subject to whatever Digital Rights Management system ends up ruling the world? Will your digital archive have gaps at semi-random intervals, or will you find that every time you look at your life story your credit card is charged by thirty or so companies whose sites you haven't visited in a decade or so?

A good interview with Ken MacLeod about his new novel, Engine City and influences past and present on his work:

[...] the first real SF I read was when I was twelve or thirteen. It was Alan E. Nourse's Rocket to Limbo. It had generation ships, FTL drives, and PSI powers. 'The Koenig Drive had given Man the stars." This was the real stuff! It went straight to the vein and into the brain and sent me out for another fix. It also got me staring at suspended light fixtures and trying to make them swing By The Power of the Mind Alone, but let's just pass lightly over that.

[...]

I read Snow Crash when I was between drafts of The Star Fraction, working my way down a mental checklist – anarcho- capitalism, enclaves, drugs, mind viruses, virtual reality – and I was thinking that if he had Trotskyism in there as well I'd just call it a day.

I'm very glad he didn't.

ContinuedAsNormal by digitalkara. A gorgeous shot of a pier at sunset.

No, not me. Jon Carroll.

Writing in The Atlantic Online, Rene Chun describes Fischer's decades-long decline. A sad, sad story.

In the wake of the news that McDonald's will be taking product placement in games to a new level in The Sims Online, Tony Walsh suggests that a game as flexible as The Sims offers plentiful opportunities for ad-busting while online. I particularly like this one:

• Picket the nearest McDonald's kiosk. Stand in front of the kiosk and tell visitors why you think McDonald's sucks. Be careful not to use foul language or hinder the movement of your fellow Simians. Polite protest can't result in your account getting suspended… can it?

The Guardian tells the story of the efforts of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to remember soldiers who perished in Iraq almost ninety years ago.

I'd never even heard of the Kut siege until I read this article yesterday. Fascinating.

Farhad Manjoo explains how Opera and Symbian might yet outflank Microsoft away from the desktop. (This would, needless to say, be a positive outcome for pretty well everyone but Microsoft.)

Dan Bricklin has been playing with one of the new Tablet PCs.

A decade ago Bricklin did a lot of work producing software for earlier attempts to produce a mass-market tablet PC device, so it's interesting to read his first impressions of Microsoft's latest effort.

Bricklin's major insight is that the time might just be right for the Tablet PC because nowadays so many of us primarily use PC-type devices to read information (be it email, the web or reference materials), rather than to do a lot of writing and content creation as was the case a decade ago. If you're in a position to lug around an A4-sized unit, a Tablet PC with a wireless network connection is much more useful for those purposes than a laptop.

It seems to me that there are two big questions about the Tablet PC:

• How many people – or businesses, more to the point – will be prepared to spend money on a Tablet PC when it's clearly much better suited to taking brief notes than heavy-duty report writing?
• How quickly will Tablet PC makers reach a consensus as to the best inking technique, button placement and so on? This is important because users won't appreciate having to retrain themselves every time they switch laptop models, and businesses won't want to have to support three or four systems of user input.

Once the answers to these questions become apparent, we'll know whether this time the Tablet PC is here to stay. I rather hope it is: I like the idea of doing my web, email and Usenet reading on a Tablet PC via a wireless network connection.

Jury Service, a new novella by Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow, is going up at SciFi.com next month. Excellent…

PornCheck will reveal the awful truth.

Pamie goes to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

A beautiful image of a red biplane high above the blue, blue sea.

Just what I needed to see on another grey, chilly day in England.

Jamie's Kitchen continues to be one of the more interesting shows on TV. Considering how much Jamie Oliver has on the line, he's being admirably understanding about how much support his trainees require.

What's slightly frustrating is the way that hints are dropped that there are things going on in the background which we're not being shown but which affect the trainees. For example, single parent Michelle complained to Jamie this evening that she'd been promised help with child support but none had been forthcoming until almost the end of the college course when it was too late. Was it really that whatever administrative backup was in place screwed up, or was she making excuses? It's a rather significant distinction.

Having read the second half of Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, I can now confirm that I quite definitely wasn't a Hip Young Thing in my late teens and my twenties. As was the case yesterday, on average I own about 1 album in 10 of the Top 50. If I hadn't been a huge Prince fan in the 1980s then I'd have done a lot worse.

(For what it's worth, I think they should have reversed the order of Sign 'O' The Times and Purple Rain in the list. The latter was a great album, but SOTT was a great double album. Making a genuinely great double album is a major achievement. Making a truly essential double album should have been enough to earn Prince the top slot on the list.)

Over at Lots of Co., Max has found a rather wonderful recorded message high school teachers voted that their school should use:

Hello! You have reached the automated answering service of your school. In order to assist you in connecting to the right staff member, please listen
to all your options before making a selection:

* To lie about why your child is absent – Press 1

* To make excuses for why your child did not do his work – Press 2

[...]

As Max notes, it's probably an urban legend, but it's very funny nonetheless.

I was only half-watching TV a few minutes ago when an ad for some soft rock compilation album came on. Then my subconscious grabbed me and drew my attention to the screen, which showed none other than Britain's most famous astronomer, playing air guitar.

I very much doubt I'll see a more bizarre sight on TV all year.

According to Bob Sullivan, James Bond helped teach the world to trust gadgetry.

As more of 007's gadgetry turns out to be contemporary technology, introduced for reasons of product placement, will audiences find it more difficult to suspend disbelief because they know from personal experience that, say, mobile phone connections just aren't that reliable? I think the gadgetry in the James Bond films needs to be quite a bit more advanced than what's available to the audience if it's to impress us.

[Via Techdirt.]