My friend Gary Goddard turned me onto Tom Igoe’s book Making Things Talk this weekend. I’ve only looked at the first chapter O’Reilly has online, but it looks like a very useful resource for the aiosphere. Gary says it basically eliminates the need for the aiosphere project, but the first chapter sugests that it is completely at the other end of the spectrum: how to use expensive and complicated hardware, with rudimentary knowledge and very high level languages, to do point-to-point communications experiments. The aiosphere, on the other hand, will create a global hardware and software architecture for networked ambient devices. Anyway, this promises to be a good read.

I am addicted to BackPack, a pretty nice W2.0 service for making lists and notes and etc. However, it is easy to create a million pages and have to keep upgrading your account, or start deleting. Counter to the future of data: never delete. So this model basically sucks. I’m looking for a good open source replacement that I can host myself. Use something nice? Let me know!

TaskFreak looks interesting, if more rigid/anal than BackPack. Having said that, BackPack’s strength, it’s simplicity, is also its great weakness. It is pretty bad at most everything else than simple lists. So in that regard one is not really giving up that much by using a more list-centric tool.

Aside from the rapidly escalating cost of the BackPack service as pages mount, I also really wish they would figure out how to mask features instead of eliminate them. They follow the Apple model of strict control of user choice. I would prefer taking the bloat approach of, say MS Word, then using skins, or complexity switches, to turn sets of features on and off. Kind of like adding features to FireFox, but there I wish one could group add-ons and their configurations into sets that can be applied all at once.

I may as well jump on the bandwagon and recommend the code editor everyone else in the world does. UltraEdit is cool. I especially like the bundle of UEStudio (which adds a version control system, among other nice features) and UltraCompare (which finds differences between similar files). Has a compiler plugin for the PIC C compiler from CCS. Much more flexible than MPLAB. Great for HTML, PHP etc. too.