Image courtesy of Daniel Iversen

Cloud computing is the distribution of services like information storage and processing as if they were utilities, rather like electricity sold over a power grid. The idea is that people use and pay for only as much as they need.

Oh man! The heat proof glass from the front of the oven disintegrated while I was cleaning it. The crack was like a bullet, cat poo’d itself (shame). Power supply in my main server went pop (wish I was in the Cloud for everything, so expensive when you have 6 servers, yes I know…), now iPlayer has expired the Dr Who Christmas special before I had a chance to watch it! Unimpressed! I’ve opened another bottle of wine and ordered my power supply, and some other random bits from Overclockers to make me feel better. Yes I know move to the Cloud… Blah! (practical, sensible, the future yes all true…not as much fun as unwrapping boxes the post man brings :0))

MAKE | Predictions For 2012 – Add Yours!

blog.makezine.com12/28/11

I wonder what will happen when the maker movement starts to threaten some established corporate interests. Makers trying to commercialize a product can’t afford to defend themselves against even the most trivial corporate …

Siberia’s Lena Delta
The protected wilderness area of the Lena River, some 2,800 miles long and one of the largest rivers in the world, is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean.

Here taken from space courtesy of NASA , more at NASA – The Home Planet: Exploring the Whole Earth

The Water Planet
Viewed from space, the most striking feature of our planet is the water. In both liquid and frozen form, it covers 75% of the Earth’s surface. It fills the sky with clouds. Water is practically everywhere on Earth, from inside the planet’s rocky crust to inside the cells of the human body.

To celebrate Earth Day, NASA released some of its most beautiful and surprising images of our planet.

The entire collection features dozens of images and photographs of a wide variety of subjects–from hurricanes to volcano eruptions to data visualizations of things like average rainfalls and terrain height.

hackerspaces | flux | Hackerspaces – The Beginning (the book)

This book documents where the Hacker Space movement was in December of 2008 when most 2011?s Hacker Spaces were still in their infancy.

Noisebridge founder Mitch Altman interviewed at CCC Camp, in 2007 about Europe’s second-wave hackerspaces. The resulting wave of hundreds of hackerspaces has swept the world. [Via Adafruit]

The amazing schedule of workshops held in the summer of 2011 at the five-day open-air Chaos Communication Camp event for hackers Workshops – Camp 2011 Public Wiki.

Web innovation is being applied to the “real world” It is easy to laugh at the idea that hobbyists will change the world. But the original industrial revolution grew out of piecework done at home, and look what became of the personal computers of the 1970s.

The tools we have to go after a problem are changing and becoming more commoditised; they are  becoming easier to use, more broadly distributed, and more democratic. The broader market is helping to create successful companies, which in turn is attracting interest from bigger fish.

The Maker Movement is coming and worth watching.

More on the Maker Movement at:

More than just digital quilting, The Economist

Moving the Economy: The Future of the Maker Movement

Autodesk’s Carl Bass on The New Industrial Revolution:

Chris Swan has two solid predictions for Raspberry Pi. For the same reasons The BBC Micro and Home Brew computers inspired a generation, and hackers continue to realise more potential than manufacturers in their own technology.

RaspPi is a whole computer on a tiny circuit board – not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. Plug a keyboard into one end, and hook the other into a TV.

The result, a working computer running on a Linux operating system for around £20; cheap enough that one could be handed to every child in Britain.

Prediction 1 - one of the first things to be disrupted will be the hardware thin client business. I expect that within a day of release (maybe even before mainstream release) somebody will put together a package that turns a Raspberry Pi into a client for screen remoting protocols like RDP, ICA, VNC etc. For way too long the hardware thin clients have been too big and too near to the cost of a real PC. $25 and the size of a credit card changes that game. It will then be a matter of months before some enterprising monitor maker decides to build Raspberry Pi into the box – the ecosystem will be irresistible to them.

Prediction 2 - lots of things that have dedicated microcontrollers in them now will start to have a Raspberry Pi instead. I liked the idea of ‘Arduino inside’ that I read about in this story of a guy who hacked his dishwasher. The microcontroller on theArduino is pretty ancient though. Yes, there are plenty of cheap dedicated microcontrollers out there that are more powerful (I’ve done some tinkering myself with the TI MSP-430), but in the end the flexibility of software normally trumps an efficiency of hardware. At first it will be the hackers and makers putting their Raspberry Pis into ordinary kit, but then manufacturers will catch on that the community will be able to add value to products after they’re launched – making them more desirable.

More on RasPi at Wikipedia entry, BBC Micro, CEO guide to hacking the Kinect.

Dublin airport has never looked so good with it’s new terminal. Almost a shame to leave.