Marc Bohlen: Finding the Intersection of Art and Technology

Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Masters in Art History. Bohlen's projects explore how people and technology interact, ranging from the bickering robots Amy and Klara, to his latest project, the Glass Bottom Float. In advance of his appearance at the Emerging Technology Conference in March, Bohlen talked to us about how he approaches art, and just what art is.

James Turner: This is James Turner for O'Reily Media. I am speaking today with Marc Bohlen, who seems to collect degrees like some people collect comic books. He has a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado, a Masters in Art History from the University of Zürich, a Masters in Robotics from CMU, and a MFA, also from CMU. He's been a visiting professor in universities from Zürich to California. His work explores the boundaries between Machine Intelligence, technology, art and society. He will be speaking at O'Reily's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Marc Bohlen: My pleasure.

JT: So let me begin by asking: do you consider yourself an artist, an engineer, a social commentator or a melange of all of them?

MB: A melange of all of them, but I think artist-engineer is quite precise actually.

JT: What led you to that fusion of art and technology?

MB: Well, I was working in Art History, on Marcel Duchan and Joseph Beuys at the time, trying to figure out how the materials that they used in their work generated meaning. So the traditional art historian methodology just didn't work anymore. I was forced to start to look into domains of knowledge that were not part of artist textbooks or repertoire. So I wandered off into engineering, trying to solve those problems, and in the process of doing that I jumped into this field which, at the time of the late 80's and early 90's, started to formulate itself as an art technology complex, art technology endeavors, and I never looked back since then.

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ETech Preview: Inside Factory China, An Interview with Andrew Huang

China has become the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew "bunnie" Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new internet appliance. He'll be speaking about the experience at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. In an exclusive interview with Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase.

JAMES TURNER: Andrew "bunnie" Huang is the Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Founder of Chumby Industries. He's pretty much the consummate hardware geek who has used his doctorate from MIT in electrical engineering to do everything from designing opto-electronics to hacking the Xbox. The Chumby, an internet appliance that delivers a cornucopia of information, is his latest endeavor. And he'll be talking about the process of getting it manufactured in China at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

ANDREW HUANG: No problem.

JT: So I have to start by asking, were you one of those kids who took everything apart in your house?

AH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. My parents had a problem with that. There was lots of stuff taken apart. Not everything got back together again. Most things did. But there's definitely a few things that got hidden underneath the couch for a few days hoping my parents wouldn't notice, while I tried to find the last few screws and whatnot. They eventually figured out that the best way to try and contain me was to just give me other things to play with. So I got a computer and they got one of those 201 kits from Radio Shack for me to play with, so I would stop taking apart all of their alarm clocks and stuff.

JT: You know, you can't get those kits at Radio Shack anymore. It's very disappointing.

AH: I know. That is really sad. I mean those were really good kits. I mean I really learned a lot from the one that I had, and a couple other ones that were donated to me through friends or my friends' parents also were really engaging.

JT: So you used to spend a lot of your time deconstructing the security infrastructure that manufacturers put in place. What in particular drives you in that direction?

AH: The deconstruction of security infrastructure?

JT: Yeah.

AH: I mean a lot of it is just -- it's more like if you just put a Rubik's Cube in front of me, I'll play with it. It's kind of the same thing. A lot of it comes from the fact that I've actually been taking apart consumer electronic devices for decades now. And I always look at the construction and how it's built to learn something from it, because that's basically what I read to figure out the latest techniques for constructioning and costing and part selection.

And when I start seeing someone mentioning security features that have some relevance to the hardware level, I start poking at it some more just because it's really interesting and you can learn something from it.

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Developer Interest in the iPhone, Android, and Symbian

With several hundred applications now available in the iTunes App store, I decided to consider alternate ways of gauging interest in the platform. Using MarkMail, one can quickly scan thousands of mailing lists and restrict the results to those related to software development. Based on the number of posts to (MarkMail) mailing lists, Linux-based alternatives generate considerably more email chatter than the iPhone:

Staying with the previous metric (posts to mailing lists), there does seem to be growing interest in the iPhone among developers. Since the launch of Android (November 2007), the number of iPhone related messages has grown at a faster rate than those for its competitors:

Other online tools suggest growth in the number of job postings that mention the iPhone. But while a majority of the most recent iPhone related job postings were posted by Apple (making the recent growth in job postings less impressive), Android jobs postings came mostly from outside Google.

For now the launch of the iPhone puts the spotlight on Apple's App store and platform. The reality is that the mobile landscape is evolving rapidly and with Android yet to launch, the previous numbers will change dramatically over the next months. We will continue to monitor developer interest in the different mobile platforms using a variety of indicators.

Yet another option lurks, one already familiar to web developers and users. At last weekend's Foo camp, I attended a session on the mobile web and left convinced that with access to the right hooks into mobile devices, web developers can deliver equally cool apps through mobile browsers. Which mobile platform are you most excited about?

Hacking TCP/IP To Support Location Aware Services

I just received a simple proposal (which is usually the best type) from Brian McConnell, an O'Reilly author and old phone hand who has founded several telecom companies. His proposal, which follows, represents a creative linking of the GPS/location domain and TCP/IP. If you thought there was no use for IPv6, read on (but it could work with IPv4 now).

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Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

Update: Paul Currion posted a big list of other projects now underway to the humanitarian.info blog:

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet).
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that - with regards to early warning - IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

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You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

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Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running

Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement:

Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and on iPhones that will soon be running Apple's next version of firmware based on the official SDK. Jonathan will demonstrate on a Mac running Leopard.

Introducing Jonathan will be Brian Jepson, executive editor for Make Magazine's Make:Books series, co-author of Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks and a number of other geeky books, and iPhone hacker at large.

This is your opportunity to hear expert advice on building applications for the iPhone and ask questions of the experts themselves.

Attendance is limited, so register now. We'll send you a reminder before the webcast.

Date: Thursday, April 3 at 10am PDT (17:00 GMT)
Cost: Free
Duration: 30-45 minutes
Meeting link: oreilly.com/go/webcast-iphone
Teleconference dial-in:
(select the number that is closest to your location)
East Coast US: +1 617 231-0350 and pin 8136507
West Coast US: +1 213-455-0500 and pin 8136507

Some people might wonder why we published a book on the open source toolchain when an official SDK has already been announced. (I wondered that myself :-) We started the book before Apple had learned from the first hackers that people wanted more out of the phone and announced the open API. But why didn't we just hold off on publishing it, modify it for the official API, and release it when the time comes (supposedly sometime in June) when the official API is open for business? The answer is threefold.

1. We believe strongly that hackers mark off the natural paths that official developer programs later pave over and make safe for the less adventurous. Smart companies know this, and pay attention to their hackers. (Google Maps is a great case in point. It became the mapping platform of choice because, rather than shutting down the early mashup hackers, it quickly figured how to pour fuel on the fire that they'd started.) We think that despite the official disapproval, Apple knows that the hacker interest in the iPhone is a great boost to their program and their goals. (Witness the fact that the Apple store in Cambridge MA allowed Jonathan to present on open iPhone development in a meeting at the store.)

2. The open API has a great deal of overlap with the official API. So getting up and running with the open toolchain will help developers get a head start. But it's also more powerful than the official toolchain, and will let developers continue to push Apple in interesting new directions. Jonathan wrote:

   With the introduction of the Apple SDK, developers gauged its functionality based on a comparison to the unofficial, open source SDK released last August. In the process of building this custom, open source compiler for the iPhone, the development community exposed the many low-level APIs (application programming interfaces) available on the device. Using tools such as class-dump, nm, and just plain old trial-and-error gave developers access to the full breadth of functionality available deep within the iPhone's frameworks. It was used to write applications that could look and act just like Apple's preloaded software, so when Apple announced that their SDK was "the same set of tools," many expected that it would look and feel like the open tool chain. Very few had anticipated the many restrictions they've come to find in the official SDK. While roughly 75% of the two SDKs do overlap, the remaining 25% has shown to be very restrictive, removing the developer's ability to do "the real fun stuff" with their application.

3. The demand was there. The number of slots in the official API program is far smaller than the apparent demand. We published the book, and it sold out immediately, indicating that we were right. We do plan to update the book with information about the official API as soon as the Apple NDA is lifted, but for now, we are eager to fuel the fire, since we believe that the iPhone is one of the most important new platforms in the market today, and one that developers should be exploring as deeply (and as soon) as possible.

See also Jonathan's article on the O'Reilly Network about open API development for the iPhone for more information about the difference between the two APIs, and why developers need to know about both. We're also planning to have a strong open mobile development track at OScon.

US Judge censors WikiLeaks.org by ordering DNS records removed

The BBC and many others report that the international whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org has been taken down as of this morning. Judge Jeffery White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org domain be removed at the request of Julius Baer Bank & Trust. Not only does the judge order that the site be removed, he orders that the whois privacy protections be turned off and, of course, that the log files be handed over.

Court Orders can be used as an effective Denial of Service attack and can circumvent otherwise strong privacy protections.

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Mainstream acceptance of Twitter for disaster communication...

I'm stuck at San Francisco Airport due to delays from the big storm yesterday. A few minutes ago a plane was struck by lightning at the gate which caused quite a bit of excitement. Planes are designed to take a lightning strike and apparently it happens all the time. They took off after a quick check by the pilot and ground crew. (I hope the rest of their flight is otherwise uneventful!)

I wanted to pass on a few disaster preparedness tips from fellow Emergency Manager W. David Stephenson (earlier Radar post). David is working to educate the mainstream public about using services like Twitter during disasters with a series of YouTube videos like this one:

I have many thoughts about this, but they just started boarding my flight (24 hours late!)... more to come.

'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University - January 14-15

Marc Hedlund and I will be speaking at the 'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton on January 14-15. The sessions look very interesting and registration is free.

Panel 1: Possession and ownership of data - In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users own this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?

• Joel Reidenberg, (home page), Professor of Law, Fordham University
• Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
• Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

Panel 2: Security and risk in the cloud - How does the move to centralized services affect the security and reliability of users interactions with technology? What new threats are likely to emerge? How might provider behavior, user behavior, or government policy need to change in response to those threats? How does the open source ethos work in a cloud computing environment?

• Marc Hedlund, founder and chief product officer, Wesabe.com
• Mihai Christodorescu (home page), researcher at IBM TJ Watson Research Center
• Benjamin Mako Hill researcher at MIT Media Lab and Free Software Foundation

Panel 3: Civics in the cloud - How and where can cloud computing best improve public knowledge and engagement in political issues? What has been achieved so far? What is possible in the long run? What moves by private actors, and what policy changes, might do the most to harness the power of cloud computing for civic engagement?

• Josh Tauberer (home page), founder of Govtrack.us
• Andrew Page, associate director, MAPLight.org
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation

Panel 4: What’s next? What new services might develop, and how will today’s services evolve? How well will cloud computing be likely to serve users, companies, investors, government, and the public over the longer run? Which social and policy problems will get worse due to cloud computing, and which will get better?

• Andrea LaPaugh (home page) Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University
• Reihan Salam The Atlantic Monthtly
• Jesse Robbins O'Reilly Radar

Updated on 1/21/08. Here is the the video of my panel:

"Privacy is protected because it is essential to liberty" - Senator Dodd blocks Telco Immunity

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) has temporarily defeated an attempt to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which would have provided immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program.

"After nearly a full day spent on the Senate floor, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) defeated an attempt to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform legislation that would grant immunity to telecommunications companies who cooperated with the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program. Dodd objected to the motion to proceed to the bill early this morning and remained on the floor for almost ten hours, taking a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution with his statements throughout the day. At approximately 7:30 P.M. Majority Leader Reid announced the FISA reform bill would be pulled from the Senate calendar and reconsidered in January."

Update: Cory Doctorow explains why this issue is important:

Here's the thing: EFF and others are suing the telecoms for participating in the wiretapping program. These lawsuits are the best chance we have of getting the details of the program into the public, so we can finally find out what the NSA have been doing to us all these years. The reason the government wants to grant the telecoms immunity is to keep the dirty laundry in the closet -- to keep us from finding out how they've been breaking the law.

Coverage: Wired News, The EFF, AP, New York Times, ZDnet, Slashdot, Cnet News, Huffington Post, BoingBoing

Technorati Tags: att, chrisdodd, data, eff, fisa, infrastructure, lawsuit, politics, privacy, surveillance, wiretapping

Lazyweb: I want an Upcoming Call Queue in my Phone

Partly as a result of Jaiku smart address book, I've been thinking about more features I'd like to see in my phone, if it were an open platform rather than a walled garden. Here's one that occurred to me yesterday: I'd love to be able to send (or sync via my calendar) a set of phone numbers for upcoming calls. Let's say I have an hour and a half drive to Silicon Valley. It's usually packed with scheduled calls. Since I'm driving, I either ask people to call me, or try to dial while I'm at a stop light, or write the number on a piece of paper that I can dial from, but it's all too often a death-defying feat to look up the number in my address book. How nice it would be to have a "scheduled calls" tab in my phone memory -- not just recently made, received, or missed calls, but planned calls.

Ideally, on my open phone platform, I could email the numbers to my phone, or SMS them, or sync them from my calendar. But however they got there, they'd show up in this convenient one-touch calling queue.

This is all part of my quest for "Address Book 2.0," a personal CRM system that would turn the crude address book offered by most products today into a smart platform that learns from my call history (yes, Mr. Phone Carrier, we need APIs to our call history database), lets me annotate it and manage it via an iTunes-like application (which also integrates email history a la xobni), automatic address book extraction for all calls, emails and IM, and so on.

Google & IBM giving students a distributed systems lab using Hadoop

Google & IBM have partnered to give university students hands-on experience developing software for large-scale distributed systems. This initiative focuses on parallel processing for large data sets using Hadoop, an open source implementation of Google's MapReduce. (See Tim's earlier post about Yahoo & Hadoop)

“The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. With their combined resources, the companies hope to lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore this emerging model of computing.”

The project currently includes the University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and the University of Maryland. Students in participating classes will have access to a dedicated cluster of "several hundred computers" running Linux under XEN virtualization. The project is expected to expand to thousands of processors and eventually be open to researchers and students at other institutions.

As part of this effort, Google and the University of Washington have released a Creative Commons licensed curriculum to help teach distributed systems concepts and techniques. IBM is also providing Hadoop plug-ins for Eclipse.

Note: You can also build similar systems using Hadoop with Amazon EC2. Tom White recently posted an excellent guide and Powerset has been using this in production for quite some time.

You Become what You Disrupt

An idea we've been exploring in advance of the Web2.0 Summit is "You become what you disrupt":

1. What changes occur when you win a platform play, when you go from disruptive technology to a public utility?
2. Where are the opportunities to innovate instead of regulate?
3. What parts of "eTel" are becoming "Tel"?
4. Where else will this happen?

For example, the ongoing US VoIP/911 debacle was a missed opportunity to improve a life-saving technology. There have been years of delays, lawsuits, and regulatory standoffs while emergency calls go unanswered. Yes, the fine print says that VoIP isn't a replacement for your phone line, and suggests that you educate "anybody that might be in your home" about how to call 911. At some point in the adoption curve that kind of disclaimer becomes unacceptable... but where?

The 911 Modernization and Public Safety Act (H.R. 3403) is now being considered by Congress. This bill is intended to give VoIP providers the same access to the 911 system as wireless carriers. It appears to have broad support from both public safety officials and VoIP providers. However, according to internetnews.com, it's opposed by established operators because it "provides more access to 911 infrastructure than wireless carriers have and therefore an unfair advantage".

How do we avoid this kind of problem in the future? Where should we be looking now?

Services like Skype are classified as "data services", meaning they don't have to provide 911 access for now. It's unclear how services like SkypeOut and Skype embedded handsets change this, although their terms of service say:

"7.4.2 No Compulsion to Offer Emergency Services. You recognize and agree that Skype is not required to offer Emergency Services pursuant to any applicable local and or national rules, regulation or law. You further recognize that Skype is not a replacement for Your primary telephone service."

Perhaps this Skype job posting provides clues as to how this will play out:

Director of Government and Regulatory Affairs, North America
Goals: (...edited...)
* Influence legislative and regulatory developments in the North American region
* Minimize exposure to political and regulatory risk
* Develop specific expertise in the area of public safety and state telecommunications public policy
* Act as educator to government and regulatory stakeholders
* Promote Skype's interests through various coalitions, trade associations and public safety groups in particular the state government affairs groups inside the VON Coalition and other industry trade associations
* Act as early warning system for regulatory risks

These questions take us far beyond 911. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 states that "consumers in all regions of the nation, including low income consumers should have access to telecommunications and information services". Will the Universal Service Fund subsidize internet and VoIP? Should it?

Similarly, new "utilities" are emerging from the web as a platform. Will utility computing services like 3tera Applogic or Amazon EC2 eventually become regulated? What about identity services, or even "social utilities" like Facebook?

Your thoughts and feedback are most welcome!

WiFi: Record Range Now 382 KM

The record for point-2-point WiFi transmission is now 382 kilometers (pdf). The transmission was made from Platillon to Aguila in Venezuela. This news comes to us via The Foundation Latin American School of Networks website.

The researchers behind the project used the WRT54 Linksys router in their experiment. If they are able to make long distance connectivity work in a stable manner and are able to keep the equipment cheap this could make a huge difference in connecting emerging markets.

Connectivity will make the OLPC even more important and make the use of SMS servers (Radar post) even more interesting. Hacker Friendly Books (Radar post) has continued releasing books that aid emerging markets in building out effective networking infrastructure.

According to Internet World Stats, only 12.8% of Venezuela's population is connected. It's not surprising that the record was broken in a country that is still finding its internet footing. The dominant US method of most people paying for their connectivity will not work in an emerging market.

[via Gadget Lab]

SMS Servers Replacing PCs in India

Sean Blagsvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan of Microsoft Research India (blog) presented at ETel last week. They told us about some amazing work they have been doing with mobile phones and SMS servers.

The SMS servers are being used to power an MSR project designed to test replacing PCs with SMS servers in the village of Warana (map). Mobile phones are used by farmers to access their data. In their system mobile phones become the client and SMS is used to communicate with the server.

The project is named Warana Unwired. Since the project has gone live it has processed 6000 SMS from 1238 different farmers (80% were data requests about sugarcane output). The time for farmers to get their data has dropped from 15 days originally, 2 days with a PC to immediate.

At ETel they also announced the launch of their SMS toolkit.

The SDK allows any Windows Mobile 5 phone to be used in conjunction with a PC to act as an SMS Server, allowing developers to easily write SMS applications, using just their phone and a PC. Additionally, we also provide a collection of samples that among other things, allow non-programmers to use Excel to send bulk SMSs and to build simple information lookup applications.

I asked Sean Blagsvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan to do a write-up of their project for Radar. Click-through to read it.

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Best Phone Review. Ever.

Charlie Brooker (creator of the acidly brilliant Nathan Barley and the tart and profane parody of television programming TV Go Home) has a column for the Guardian and his most recent piece savages his Samsung E900, which he describes as "twittering handheld crapstones". An absolute must-read for anyone struggling to voice their dissatisfaction with the incumbent mobile phone industry's insipid offerings.