We started talking about geeky things, and somehow ended up discussing a compression algorithm, where you would alphabetise each character of a message, and then replacing the number of instances of a character with a number, thereby drastically compressing how much space it takes up.

The first paragraph of Lorem Ipsum, which looks a little something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nulla at neque. Maecenas id velit id lacus volutpat dictum. Sed tellus erat, semper eget, euismod ac, feugiat vitae, nisi. Integer eget purus vel nulla adipiscing commodo. Ut id ante. Nullam lobortis mollis lacus. Quisque ac sem eu lectus scelerisque molestie. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Fusce urna. Ut a felis et est hendrerit hendrerit.

Could be expressed as:

a24 b4 c20 d12 e51 f4 g6 h2 i38 l27 m16 n16 o15 p9 q4 r19 s32 t32 u35 v5

Which is a reduction of 457 to 60 characters - or a 86.9% reduction in space.

Of course, this version is quite crude, and puts all text into lower case, and destroys spacing, which means that you lose all readability. We can easily add 3 more characters, for space, comma and full stop, which adds a bit of length to the compressed data, but makes the post-uncompressed data easier to read:

a24 b4 c20 d12 e51 f4 g6 h2 i38 l27 m16 n16 o15 p9 q4 r19 s32 t32 u35 v5 A70 B5 C10

If you wanted to, you could also allow for more characters and capital letters, but this would immediately double the length of the compressed string, which ruins the point a bit.

Some compression examples

100,000 words of Lorem Ipsum:

a4530 b660 c2406 d1675 e6456 f377 g706 h312 i5462 j71 l3332 m2594 n3478 o2417 p1466 q772 r3045 s4848 t4437 u4983 v863 A9890 B1328 C1630

MD5 hash is 4a1a63d4b2b17733cc64422d77eaa496
SHA1 hash is d063ea401b508e2a8b0467bdb2be67f6e5c6d693

Encoding took about 13 milliseconds.

That’s a compression rate from 67643 to 114 characters, or a reduction of 99.8%

The entire King James V bible:

a282602 b50007 c58750 d159527 e422235 f83096 g57191 h286915 i196033 j13754 k25476 l132226 m85246 n227142 o247290 p46617 q953 r175732 s197573 t318954 u86542 v32428 w65213 x2663 y58249 z4784 A789645 B70684 C26147

MD5 hash is 6336aff90949d987ae7c36ee4c868399
SHA1 hash is 13b0391b632f4300eed7d77a6fc6719fba1832b0

Encoding took just over a second.

Compressing the King James bible like this reduces it from 4,404,445 characters down to 184 characters… In comparison, TAR/GZ, which is one of the industry standards of file compression, gets the same text file down to 1,316,216 characters…

Uncompressing this algorithm

Of course, it’s no good only being able to compress something: you need to be able to decompress it as well. By its very nature, the above compression is lossy (you lose all capitalisation plus special characters, for example), and by the time you alphabetise a string by character, all hope is lost… Right?

The discussion around the lunch table continued. I came up with the suggestion of using a hash of the original file, taken before the file is sorted, but after it has had all its lossy conversions applied. In theory, if you had a good enough strong one-way hash, you could tell a computer the hash and the number of times each character needs to appear, and the computer could brute-force the message, eventually finding the correct message. The process would be like so:

The computer…

1. takes the compressed message and decompresses it by replacing ‘a3b2′ with aaabb
2. generates the first possibility of the order of these letters
3. confirms whether this particular possibility is correct.

If the hash matches, you have, in theory, uncompressed and decoded the message.

But how can you be sure that you have the right message, and not a freak hash collision?

Gwyn came up with the suggestions of using two hashes - if you hash the final file with, say, MD5 and SHA1, it becomes extremely unlikely that a solution which matches with both hashes would be a false positive.

Laurie suggested to, instead, add the first, say, 30 characters of the message in plaintext - this would be about as secure as using two hashes, but a lot less expensive in terms of processing power. In addition, it’d be a cool nod to what Alan Turing’s team did when they were breaking the Enigma codes of World War 2, as we’re essentially using a crib.

So, in effect, the computer…

1. takes the compressed message and decompresses it by replacing ‘a3 b2′ with aaabb
2. generates the first possibility of the order of these letters
3. checks the possibility against the hash
4. if the hash matches, checks the second hash
5. if the second hash matches, checks the crib text
6. if all three match up, we’ve successfully decompressed the original text

Wow, that’s amazing! Have you guys revolutionised the world of text compression?

Why thank you. To be honest, probably not.

The problem is that brute-forcing through large swathes of text is bloody difficult: The string like the Lorem Ipsum example above has 457 characters. To put them in the right order, there are 457²⁹ different combinations - that’s a 1 with 77 zeroes behind it. (and this is also the reason why capital letters is a bad idea. If we were to allow capitals, the number would grow to 457⁵⁵, which is an even more ludicrously large number of possibilities)

Under ideal circumstances, we can check about 5 million hashes per second, which sounds pretty good, but to re-organise the simple 457 character item, it would still take one of today’s computers 8*10⁵⁶ million years.

So the great news is that we’ve found a way of drastically reducing the size of plaintext. The second item of great news is that it’s relatively easy to decompress this compression algorithm. The massive red flag of bad news is that, while decompression is easy, it takes an unfathomable amount of time to do so, which makes the whole exercise prohibitively difficult.

So is all of this a waste of time?

Well, yes and no. There’s a competition out there which aims to compress a 100MB plain text version of Wikipedia. The current record stands at about 16MB, which is about twice as efficient as the commonly-used ZIP compression format. The GLH compression algorithm outlined here trounces the record - instead of taking up 16,481,655 bytes, we can describe all of the Hutter Prize data in only 225 bytes:

a6051355 b1212851 c2624828 d2569957 e8178365 f1509695 g1611390 h2988658 i5479606 j159395 k458992 l3169420 m2129600 n5028882 o5266127 p1724317 q270967 r4648610 s4643363 t6463244 u2095880 v739642 w1032926 x234215 y1088981 z124570 A13519824 B787826 C794548

Now if only we could find a way of decompressing this again in under 10 hours (hahahahahah), we could claim the 50,000 euro bounty!

(of course, none of this is new… But it does make me happy that we managed to come up with this stuff on our own!)

Fancy having a go yourself?

No problem, head to the GLH compression booth!

I want to see your code!

Sure thing. It cleans up a string called $toencode, and passes it to this function:

	$encoding = strtolower($toencode); // all to lower case

	$avoid   = array(" ", ",", "."); // Replace whitespace w/ A,B,C
	$replace = array("A", "B", "C");
	$encoding = str_replace($avoid, $replace, $encoding);

// strip all non-alphanumerics
	$encoding = preg_replace("/[^ABCa-z]/", "", $encoding); 

	$checkchars = array("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h",
	"i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u",
	"v", "w", "x", "y", "z", "A", "B", "C");

	foreach ($checkchars as &$character) {
	    $numberfound = substr_count($encoding, $character);
		if ($numberfound) { $outputstring .= $character . $numberfound . " "; }
		unset ($number);
	}

Now, $outputstring contains the compressed data, and all you need to do is to md5($encoding) and sha1($encoding) to get the hashes for both of them.

This piece of code is all you need to compress stuff. The bible and the 100MB of Wikipedia were done with this code too, taking about 1 second and 27 seconds, respectively, but this needed quite a serious amount of memory and processing power, so in the interest of keeping slicehost happy, maximum upload is a lot less than those two files

Could this be improved any further?

Well, yes, you could, in fact, in theory, remove the original text altogether. Take the original text and hash it against a series of different hashing mechanisms. To help it out, tell it a) how many characters there were in the original text, b) what the first 50 characters are, and c) what the character set is (i.e. only lower-case letters). You could then brute-force the whole message, which means that you could compress a message even further, down to just a series of hashes.

The problem here is that your reconstitution of the message goes from being silly to ludicrous: You’re now, in effect, taking blind guesses at the message, and checking it against a series of hashes. The bigger the message, the longer it will take. I predict it’s going to take a very long time before we can start using hashes-only to compress our data.

… Unless we get those quantum computers, of course.

So, this week-end, I’ve spent a lot of time riding around on a motorcycle (Honda XR, to be exact, which is a 125cc, road-legal, 5-speed trail bike). This morning I handed it in and stepped straight back onto my scooter (Gilera Runner VX Special – twist and go continuous variable transmission (CVT), 125cc). The difference between the two bikes are so vast that it’s almost unbelievable that they both share some traits (2 wheels and a 125cc engine)…

Gears – Scooter is better

One of the main reasons why I wanted to learn how to ride ‘proper’ bikes, is that I want to learn the extra skill involved with changing gears etc. To be honest, I don’t really see the advantage of having a set of gears on a motorbike – CVT is a far superior technology. I realise that it isn’t great for especially powerful engines, but for anything up to 250cc or so, I don’t really see the need.

Comfort – Tie

A bit of a mixed evaluation on this one. The engine on the motorbike causes a LOT of vibrations, which means that the seat and steering wheel is constantly shuddering. I’ve ridden my scooter for 3 hours without getting rider’s fatigue, but after 3 hours on the MC, I was exhausted, largely because of the vibrations.

Having said that, though, the bigger wheels and vastly superior suspension system on the MC (it’s an off-road bike at heart, after all), means that it’s a much better match to London pot-holed roads. If I’m leaning over in a turn and hit a pothole on my scooter, I can pretty much guarantee a hairy moment. On the MC, the suspension just laps up the bumps, and you carry on with a smile.

… And don’t even get me started on cobblestones.

Noise - Tie

This is an interesting one as well. I have to admit that the MC is quite a noisy beast (It’s a 4-stroke carburettor engine), and the scooter is a technological masterpiece in comparison – it’s much, MUCH quieter, and has practically no vibration coming from the engine at all.

All of this sounds good, right? Surely, quiet is better? Well, to be honest, I’m wearing a helmet and earplugs anyway, so the noise doesn’t make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. In fact, motorcycle drivers – especially in rush hour traffic – have the advantage of being able to make people aware of their presence without using the horn, simply by declutching and giving some gas. The engine makes a loud, very easily recognisable sound (“I’m a motorcycle, I’m over here, don’t hit me, please”). In everyday traffic, you often see motorcyclists use their engines to draw attention to themselves, and it works really well. So the noise is more annoying, but if it may end up saving your skin…

Weight – MC is better / Tie

The point of gravity of the scooter is extremely low, but it’s also much heavier than the motorcycle. The MC, I could fling into tight corners, and keep it under tight control even when doing extremely small figure-eights and circles. Part of this is that the steering lock of the MC is much further from the centre than that of the scooter, but when stepping back on the scooter after having ridden the MC, I couldn’t help but dislike how un-manoeverable it is.

Having said that, though, most people don’t ride motorcycles with 125cc – I loved the XR, but I wouldn’t buy one myself – so the weight saving of riding an MC would probably be counteracted by choosing one with a bigger engine, which will almost certainly mean it’s heavier than the scooter again.

Handling – MC is better

Quite simply, the bigger wheels and huuuge suspension travel on the trail bike make it vastly superior than the scooter – it goes over speed bumps as if they weren’t there, it laps up potholes as if they were butter, and can even take on the occasional kerb if necessary. (Ride into a kerb with the scooter, and you’ll do damage to the scooter and probably fly off. Do the same with the MC, and it’ll complain, but you’ll probably end up being safe)

Filtering in tight traffic – Scooter is better

Going between two narrow rows of cars, there’s no competition whatsoever – riding slowly on a scooter is much easier than on a motorbike (although I’ve obviously ridden my scooter for nearly 10 months, while I have only ridden an MC for a few days in total), and learning to ride slowly is also significantly easier when there’s no clutch to worry about. The fact that it’s impossible to stall a scooter (unless there’s something physically wrong with the engine, or you’re out of fuel or something)

Fuel consumption – Scooter is better / Tie

The scooter has a fuel-injected 4-stroke, and is an altogether better put together engine than the carb-engined Honda. Having said that though, I don’t think the fuel efficiency is all that different – especially considering that the scooter is heavier. Besides, if I were to buy one, I’d probably go for a fuel-injected V-twin, which would help a lot with the vibrations (discussed above) and the fuel consumption relative to engine size.

Overall - I don’t know…

Honestly, I don’t know which one is the best. They’re both mighty fine machines, but with difficult capabilities. I like the high-tech looks and the technologically advantages of the scooter, but I prefer the handling and feeling of safety of the MC.

In addition, you can set up your own Shelf Server, which allows you to copy any books you want to your iPhone / iPod Touch, in myriad formats.

Bargain, and it works really well. Fantastic stuff. And with a 16gb iThing, you can carry well in excess of 20,000 books with you at any time. Which, come to think of it, is roughly the number of free books available in Project Gutenberg. You’re welcome.

Take that, Amazon Kindle!

The movie that wasn’t shown in the UK until recently (or rather, it’s about to have its cinema release) because of its similarities with the Madeleine McCann case, where a young girl was allegedly abducted from a holiday resort in Portugal. The delay, it has to be said, was understandable, as it would probably have been rather insensitive to show it earlier - not least because the actress playing the kidnapped Amanda McCready in the movie is called Madeleine, too…

Gone baby Gone is a truly phenomenal film, thrown into extra relief due to its uncanny timing. This movie is simple in many different ways, but it is also deeply complicated and distressing. It’s one of the few recent Hollywood movies that have embraced the deep, confusing gamut of emotions and choices that people take.

The movie takes on a number of interesting story plots, including good people doing bad things for good reasons. Bad people doing good things for bad reasons. And most importantly: Good people doing the wrong thing for the right reasons - but with an unfortunate outcome.

It’s a vastly disturbing movie in many ways, but it’s also incredibly beautiful, in a strange way.

The subject matter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the topics and themes that run throughout are well worth dragging yourself to the cinema for.

Is this even my house?

Yeah, it looks familiar. What was I doing again. Oh. Darkness. Where’s the light. Wait a minute, I think I have a mobile phone. Yes. In my pocket. Ooh, new message! Hmm, that’s strange, I can’t quite put my finger on what it means. I really should call my mom. I hope she’s in my phone book.

Why is it dark?

Oh, I can shine my way to a light switch with my mobile. There. No, nothing happens. Why? Is the power… Oh, there we go. Damn energy saving light bulbs. The room fades into view slowly. C’mon! C’mon!

Why am I holding a mobile? “Hello? Anybody there?” Hmm. Back in my pocket.

I’m in a bedroom. I think. There’s a bed here. No windows though. That’s peculiar. If only the dripping would stop. The room is fading into view. God, my head hurts. Did I drink last night? No, I don’t think so. Breath smells fresh. What day is it? Should I be at work?

What am I…

Ah. This room. There’s somebody on the bed. She’s beautiful. I wonder if I know her. She looks like strawberries smell. I need to remember to call… Who am I calling again?

Must go closer. She’s not moving. Asleep. No. Not breathing. I pull back the duvet. The rain must have stopped outside. I can’t hear it hitting the roof anymore. Could I ever? The dripping continues onto the floor, gradually turning the floorboards a deep maroon.

Oh. My knife.

The iPhone. It’s not perfect. Far from it. In fact, it’s so fatally flawed, that it’s a bloody miracle Apple decided to market it at all. And it is even stranger that so many gullible fuckers keep buying them. I’m one of those gullible fuckers. Here’s my story.

A tidbit of background: I work as a tech journalist. I see most gadgets before they hit the streets, and I occasionally catch myself having to wipe my drool off tech that hasn’t even been seen by anyone but the R&D boffins tech companies keep locked in the basement.

It’s completely baffling to me, how Apple have managed to ignore some of the most basic functions you can find on a modern cell. This is particularly true when it comes to SMS/MMS services. I’m fully aware that the US is firmly stuck on the short bus when it comes to SMS payments, MMS services etc, but seriously - if you’re going to market a phone to an UK audience, SMS and MMS should be at the top of your priority list. It’s unfortunate, then, that the iPhone isn’t even a dinosaur: It’s an amoeba. My very first mobile phone - the oh-so-humble Ericsson GH388, with a 2-line green-and-black text screen - had a functions that are lacking altogether from Apple’s halo-wearing speaking stick.

In the past 5 years, consumers have been so used to being able to send and receive picture messages, that you’d be hard pushed to find any phone in the marked that can’t deal with them. Apple’s finest? Not so much. Send a MMS to it, and it goes ‘huh?’. Needless to say, it doesn’t fare much better when you try and send one either.

Ask Apple, and they’ll tell you that they don’t like MMS, because they prefer pictures to be gloriously high-resolution. ‘You can e-mail them to people!’, is the official line. Which is all good and well, but is that a good excuse to deprive people of technology which stems from 1998? Consider this: the iPhone is only offered with ‘unlimited’ data-plans. Because of this, to the network operators, data-usage is a cost. MMS messages are pure profit. Apple get a cut of the profits. I don’t want to get too technical and business-analyst on your collective asses here, but what we’re looking at here is akin to shooting yourself in the foot with a vial of Phone-lonium-210.

Talking about high resolution images. Dear Apple: If you’re going to hide behind the piss-poor excuse of preferring your users to send high-resolution images, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to actually include a high-resolution camera? 2 megapixels just isn’t going to cut it among today’s megapixel-hungry consumer hordes - you get cameras with more megapixels with a happy-meal at McDonald’s these days.

I can hear the counter-argument already: “but Haje, you always say that a great 2-megapixel camera is far better than a bad 6-megapixel camera!”. It’s true, of course, but truth be told, the camera on the iPhone isn’t all that great either. For one, it’s a scanning camera (it reads line by line, storing the information as it totters along), which means it’s useless for taking photos of quick-moving objects, or when taking photos out of a car or train window. This sort of technology is perfectly fine on a web-cam, but when the iPhone is pitched against its competitors such as the highly capable K-series (K for Kamera, see? No, me neither. Weird people, those Swedes) from Sony-Ericsson, it’s set for a beating: The Scandinavian-nipponese eye-phone wipes the floor with the iPhone, wrings it over a bucket, and subsequently uses it to clean the windows, while whistling the Postman Pat theme song.

Every camera phone I’ve owned over the past 3 years have had some sort of lighting (Mostly LED, but newer camera phones, like the rather quite phenomenal SE K850i, have Xenon flashes built-in), auto-focus and macro-modes. The top fringe of camera phones are starting to be serious replacements for the digital compacts that were on the market only a few years ago - and Apple’s first attempt makes a poor comparison.

So surely, if people want to waste their cash sending tiny photos and video clips to each other via MMS, Apple should let them?

Well yes. They should. Apple obviously missed a trick there. Except on the Apple iPhone, you couldn’t send video clips either - the phone has no way of recording video. Never mind that just about every cameraphone has been able to record video since the dawn of time (that’s around 2002 or so, in case you were wondering). For a phone that is trying to position itself as the ultimate multimedia device, this is just embarrassing. With 8GB of built-in memory, it’s hardly storage that’s the issue…

Even ignoring the lack of MMS, the other milking cow for the european wireless mobile cellular telecommunication giants - SMS - is also lacking. In some ways, the iPhone’s take on the topic: I love how the iPhone threads SMS conversations much like an iChat conversation, for example. But a pretty face fails to save Apple’s skin here as well.

Things you can’t do with the iPhone include seeing how many characters you have typed so far: It doesn’t stop you from typing looooong text messages, but fails to remind you when you go over the magical 160 character limit, at which point you are actually sending two SMS messages - or more, if you go over the next 160 character block. Not a problem if you’re on an unlimited message plan, but god forbid you’re on a pay-as-you go contract or regularly send messages abroad - texting 161 characters by accident means you get billed twice, and at 14 pence per text (to Spain from the UK, on T-mobile), it can quickly become expensive.

There are other grievances as well. For example, the iPhone doesn’t allow you to send the same SMS message to more than one recipient at once. Seems innocuous enough at first, because there are other ways to do this, right? Wrong. On all phones I’ve owned in the past ten years, it has been possible to forward a text-message somehow. Not on the iPhone. “Ah”, I hear you cry, “But it’s a smart-phone! Why don’t you just copy and paste the text into a new SMS conversation?”. Good thinking, but there’s no way of copying and pasting text on the iPhone either. So, if I want to send a message ‘Hey, guys, have we covered the launch of the new Samsung G800′ to all of my colleagues, I have to re-type the message every time. Inviting all your mates to the pub (which, let’s be honest, is the only real use of group SMS messages) becomes a rather tedious affair as well.

It doesn’t end with the text messaging, though - the phone-bit has some stupid flaws as well: I tend to save all my contacts with international prefixes (+44 for the UK, +31 for the Netherlands, etc), but if someone calls or sends me a text message from an UK phone which doesn’t identify with the international prefix (i.e. 07940… instead of +447940), the phone doesn’t understand that the person is in my phone book, and refuses to identify them. Why, I ask of you? WHY?

When using Google Maps on the iPhone, it helpfully lets you select a contact in your address book as a ‘to’ or ‘from’ address. Which is amazing, apart from the fact that Google Maps somehow doesn’t parse ‘2 Balcombe Street, London, NW1 6NW’ as a valid address, so you’re reduced to typing it all in yourself. That’s annoying enough in itself, but it gets worse: A cool function in Google Maps is that it uses web search to tie in with the maps. So if you search for The Apple, Bristol, it finds my favourite Cider-imbibing venue. It even gives you the exact address and their phone number. It then, helpfully, offers you to store all this information in your address book, as a contact. Fantastic! However, if you then select ‘The Apple’ from your address book as a destination for Google Maps, the phone goes ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about, mate’, and refuses to navigate you to the right location, despite the fact that it stored the location information itself, from a location it knows about. The mind plays a hat-trick of boggle.

The rest of the apps aren’t as well integrated as I’d like either. If you, for example, set up a meeting in your calendar - let’s for the sake of argument say that this meeting takes place at The Apple in Bristol, the ‘location’ field isn’t clickable. This means that if you’re not sure where ‘The Apple, Bristol’ is, you have to type it into Google Maps yourself. Surely, having a field called ‘location’ is begging for a clickable link? Or a ’see location on map’?

The list of niggles goes on for miles. A non-exhaustive list: Why can’t I select an image from the web as my wallpaper? Why doesn’t it automatically play the next podcast in a series when the first one finishes? Why does the calculator not have a square root button? Why do Notes not sync with anything, despite the fact that Leopard has Notes built into mail.app? Why is there no free-text search in the address book, so I can search for ‘Evesham’ to call their PR company, rather than having to remember it’s Kerri? Why can’t I delete or move photos from one folder to another in the Photos programme? Why does iTunes automatically downsize my photos before they are uploaded to my iPhone? Why can’t I use multi-touch to zoom in the ’stocks’ application? Why can’t I log in and leave comments in the YouTube application? Why can’t I tap somewhere on a Google map and select ‘navigate to here’? Why isn’t ‘Port of Spain’ (the capital of Trinidad) a valid time-zone city?

And yet, despite that this phone has more for me to bitch about than any other mobile phone I’ve ever owned, I would never go back. It’s the first phone that syncs perfectly first time, every time, with my mac. It’s got the most amazing screen I’ve ever seen. You can tap-type faster on this screen than any other mobile phone I’ve ever used. Despite all its flaws, the Google Maps app is a seriously cool piece of software. And - I’ve said it a few times, but it bears repeating: It’s gorgeous.

I’ve had an Apple iPhone for about a month or so. I’ve pulled 10-people crowds for a quick demo on more than one occasion. It has the best mobile internet browser I’ve ever used, the calendar application is fantastic, and the Google Maps is a sure-fire crowdpleaser.

Would I pay £300 for it? Well yes. In fact, I did. But Apple can pull the other one if they think I’m prepared to sign up for an 18 month £35-quid-a-month contract with O2 for the privilege of using their raprod. Besides, by show of hands, who here thinks that the iPhone will still be relevant in 18 months? Of course it won’t - there’ll be a much slimmer, better, 32GB version available by then. And, as a proper little gadget whore, it is my duty to update to the next-gen iPhone as soon as it becomes available. At which point, I’ll probably whinge about it some more.

I wouldn’t swap it for anything, though. I guess it’s just one of those relationship that’s worth taking the occasional beating for.

This article was researched and written on an 8GB Apple iPhone with firmware 1.0.2, bought from the US via eBay, hacked by yours truly, accidentally bricked during an update to 1.1.1, painstakingly un-bricked and returned to 1.0.2, before numerous days of futile hacking resulted in a (nearly) working 1.1.1 install. Currently, only one thing isn’t working. Probably for the best of my bandwidth bill and productivity, to be fair: Oh YouTube, why do you taunt me so.

- Kamps / Jacobsen

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, it’s been rather hectic in Haje-World recently: I’ve recently moved, and I’ve got a new job, so I’ve been a bit stacked with stuff to do. Finally, I haven’t got the internet sorted at home yet, so I’m typing this from an internet cafe with sticky keys, bad coffee and worse music.

Read more here!

How come an item can be a gadget one week, and not the next? What makes one mobile phone a gadget, while another isn’t? Does something have to be high-tech to be a gadget? What draws people to gadgets?

What, exactly, is a gadget?

Wikipedia defines a gadget as “a device that has a specific practical purpose and function. Gadgets tend to be more unusual or cleverly designed than normal technology”, which is probably a somewhat vague definition, which doesn’t touch on any of the connotations of the word, nor explains how one man’s gadget might be another man’s everyday technology.

Gadgets are devices that enrich your life in one way or another, usually in a way that can be perceived to be more elegant than another way of solving the same problem. One example is keys with built-in lights: Strictly speaking, you could do perfectly fine without, or you could carry a torch with you, but if you live in an area with little lighting, and find yourself struggling to find the key hole to your house frequently, a key with a LED light built in has added benefit. Whilst not particularly high-tech, this could be considered a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem, and it can be argued that this device could be a gadget.

The ur-gadget: Apple iPod

Another definition of a gadget is a device that does something that another device does as well, but does it better, or differently for aesthetic reasons. The iPod, for example, started off as a gadget: ‘why the hell would I want to pay stupid amounts of money to carry 10 GB of songs around’, was the question that resounded during its launch. Around the same time, Creative had an MP3 player on the market roughly the size as an early Discman, which stored twice as much music and cost a lot less. On paper, the player from Creative should be the definite winner. In practice, however, people were drawn to the clean design and ease of use of the iPod. To this day, synchronising your tunes with an iPod, for example, is easier than with any other music player, largely due to the genious that is iTunes.

Whilst an iPod can be used for ’serious’ things (examples include transporting the daily rushes of footage from the Lord of the Rings films, and doctors training to listen to different heartbeat patterns on their iPods, in an effort to be able to recognise different heart ailments by their sound alone), the vast majority of iPods are frivolous investments: There are cheaper MP3 players out there, there are players with more capacity, better video capabilities, and things that do all of this while still being cheaper than iPods.

In fact, if you compare MP3 players based on specifications alone, nobody in their right mind would buy an iPod. And yet… the iPod is the best-selling portable music player in the world today (with a 70% market share), and has been since its launch in 2001.

So why, exactly, is the iPod such a stormingly popular personal music player? In most civilised societies, if you ask anybody on the street what an iPod is, over 98 per cent will reply something to the effect of ‘isn’t that a music player?’, reconfirming the ubiquitous nature of the Apple iPod.

A lot of explanations are possible, but mainly, its popularity due to the fact that its iconic, instantly recognisable design — not least due to the white earbuds that have become symbolic of the iPod, something that has been re-iterated again and again in the now-famous iPod silhouette advertisements — has turned it into a cult icon and a fashion statement.

The fact that someone chooses a music player which is ostensibly inferior, at a higher price, is testament to the gadget-ness of an iPod.

Paying extra for a lick of paint

Staying in the realms of Apple just for a second, the next example is the MacBook. At launch, Apple presented us with a white MacBook, and a black version, which rapidly gained the rather obvious nickname ‘BlackBook’. The black version of this computer was identical to its white counterpart, but came with a nearly 10% premium for its colour. And yet, people are buying BlackBooks.

The argument of what a gadget is, then, is ’something that you want, but don’t necessarily need, but are willing to spend more money on than something else that does the same job’. If you never take your computer anywhere, buying a laptop over a desktop computer could be argued to be a gadget purchase. The choice of buying a MacBook over a Dell laptop, for example, could be argued to be a gadget purchase, if the Dell would do the same task as well, at a lower price.

If we for a moment ignore the discussion as to whether Windows Vista or Mac OS X is a better operation system. For most people (who use a computer for writing letters, browsing the internet), a cheaper Dell laptop would fulfil the task just as well as a MacBook, and yet people make a conscious choice to buy into what columnists have dubbed the cult of Mac. The choice of purchasing an Apple laptop over a Dell, all other things being equal, could be argued to be a gadget purchase. The further choice of purchasing a black MacBook over a white one — a choice which is exclusively based on aesthetics, is definitely a gadget purchase.

Mobile phones

It is believed that, in a world where you really have to fight to stand out from the crowd, gadgets have become fashion items in their own rights. People have grown to enjoy the added benefits and aesthetic advantage of pretty, nifty things in their lives. Ten years ago, mobile phones barely existed and were ridiculously expensive. Today, the vast majority of people carry around, and rely on, the mobile phone entirely. A mobile phone has a real, tangible advantage (having a phone number that follows you, and being instantly contactable), and while mobile telephones were definite gadgets in the time of the yuppies in the 1980s, their ubiquity means that arguing that a mobile phone still is a gadget is difficult.

There are hundreds of different mobile telephones out there, however, from the most basic ‘phone with a phone book and sms messaging’ to the bleeding edge smartphones of today which can run operating systems, can print directly to printers, use WiFi to get on the internet, can run software and games, and have sleek, modern looks to boot. It is hard to draw a line between mobile phones that are purely functional devices and ones that could be considered as ‘gadgets’, but everybody can agree that some phones are high-tech fashion and technology devices, while others are tools. As an example, only a few years ago, mobile phones with cameras were a novelty gadget, now nearly all mobile phones come with a camera — is it still a gimmick, or are people using the mobile phone cameras as tools?

Bleeding edge technology

iPods, mobile phones, laptops — the pattern continues in tons of consumer electronics, and the most recent revolutions are Hi-Def television, latest-generation gaming consoles, and satellite navigation equipment. Especially the latter, which was initially met with ‘haha, paying £300 for that? you’re having a laugh, I’ll use a fookin’ map, thankyouverymuch’, GPS-based SatNav systems are taking over in a big way, carving its way from obscure tech gadget to mainstream accessory.

Most new consumer electronics products that push the boundary of commonly implemented technology can be argued to be gadgets, but some lose their gadget status more rapidly than others. Digital cameras, for example, were the must-have gadget of the mid-1990s, yet today, retailers barely sell film-based compact cameras any more, and camera manufacturers would be hard pushed to launch a camera that would be perceived as a ‘gadget’. The new compact cameras with built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for direct printing were the latest innovations, but because the people buying them bought them for their sheer usefulness, the gadget-factor of these cameras faded rapidly.

Digital SLR cameras are another great example of an area where technology has developed rapidly: The market segment has developed from the 3 megapixel consumer dSLR to the 17 mpx behemoths in only a few years, but digital SLR cameras were never quite gadgets in their own right, mostly because the technology was marketed as a serious tool for serious (and amateur) photographers: Prices for entry level dSLRs dropped to a ninth of the price (from US$3,000 for the Canon D30 to US$400 for the Canon D350), while features and power has increased drastically, and yet nobody bought a dSLR because it was a ‘nifty toy’.

The popularity of ‘nifty toys’, incidentally, is highlighted by the existence of online retailers such as Think Geek, Firebox, IWantOneOfThose, and boysstuff. Focusing exclusively on selling nifty stuff (books for hiding bottles of booze in, mini kebab grills, micro brewery equipment, bluetooth speakers — a whole range of products ranging from novelty items to full-on gadgets), these retailers are fuelled by the craze for clever technology and gadgets.

A whole cottage industry has grown out of people’s urges to have the latest, newest, and most high-tech gadgets. A handful of monthly magazines (T3 and Stuff being the most prominent in the UK) and more than 50 blogs (Engadget, Gizmodo, The Gadgeteer, T3.co.uk and Ubergizmo being the most notable) aimed specifically at gadgets have popped up.

So, what exactly is the appeal of gadgets?

In many way, gadgets are the culmination of a consumerist society. There’s not just the urge to buy things, but to buy the newest, best, and fastest, and demanding a great design to boot. Combined with all of this, the items you surround yourself with — be it High Definition televisions, portable gaming gadgets, or high-tech sporting equipment — project a lot about who you are to the outside world.

Apart from the pleasure derived directly from using technology that just… works. To me, well-designed technology that makes life easier is something that really excites me. If it, in addition to making my life more effective, also offers entertainment and helps project the image of me as a tasteful, successful individual, then those are great bonuses.

In a way, personal technology — or gadgets, if you like — have become the extension of your personality in some circles. Are you the sleek, efficient, luxurious and gorgeous black MacBook, or are you a bargain-bin, last-generation Windows 95 laptop? I don’t know about you, but I know which one I’d rather be…

MacBook photograph and iPod silhouette advert courtesy of and © Apple. Photo of the photographer ©Photocritic. All other photos ©iStockPhoto.

Also, I know you wondered about the nearly naked chick who is obviously listening to headphones, but without an iPod or any other gadget in sight. I know it’s got nothing to do with the article, but I figured you’d be more likely to digg this article if it had a picture of tits in it. Hey, at least I’m being honest about it.

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits.

Apart from that I believe that the pay-outs are ridiculous (323 average annual wages? Preposterous and selfish, in my opinion), I also think that it is stupid that the top litigants were all in birth-related cases. Giving birth has for the bulk of history been the most dangerous thing a woman can do, and being born has historically been the most dangerous time for a child as well. There are just too many things that can go wrong. It seems as if the high pay-outs are connected with the strong feeling of entitlement to have kids, which I feel is just completely ridiculous. Quite apart from the fact that most children born these days are unplanned (not unwanted, which is an important distinction), I think that perhaps it is worth reflecting upon that when people have babies nowadays, there’s a damn good chance that both the mother and the baby emerges at the other end of the process alive and well. This is a relatively recent development, too.

C’mon, folks. Seriously. The NHS is people taking care of each other by paying taxes. Suing the hell out of the organisation is the quickest way to kill off one of the best ‘free’ health-care systems in the world.

Accountability and responsibility is a good thing. But high-payout litigation is not the way to go about it.