Daily Archives: Saturday, October 25, 2014

  • Google invents amphibious delivery truck

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Tech

    Readers who have been reading the IT press for some time will be familiar with Google’s invention of the ‘flying car’ just after the inception of Google Earth in January 2006 that was reported at the time by The Register.

    News now arrives that Google has followed this up with the invention of the amphibious, sea-going delivery truck, as shown on another Google product, Google Maps.

    image showing delivery truck out at sea

    Judging by the scale of the map and the predicted time of delivery, it would appear the amphibious delivery truck can also manage speeds of some 400 km/h. 😀

    Hat tip: Angharad Stone.

  • Overshare: Chambers word of the year

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    speech bubble with speechLanguage is dynamic, constantly mutating and changing. One sign of this dynamism is the appearance of neologisms, i.e. newly coined word, or phrases or familiar words used in a new sense.

    There are plenty of neologisms in evidence in this year’s Chambers Dictionary annual search for its word of the year, many prompted by or associated with information technology.

    Chambers has this week announced that overshare is its word of the year for 2014, The Guardian reports.

    “Overshare” topped a shortlist compiled by the Chambers editorial board, which included “bashtag”, defined as “a hashtag used for critical or abusive comments”, and “digital native” – “a person who has learned to use computers as a child”.

    And the meaning of overshare? To reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life.

  • Target for signed PDFs in LibreOffice reached in 3 days

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Wilhelm Tux logoEU open source news site Joinup reports that the crowdfunding appeal launched by Wilhelm Tux for the incorporation of signed PDF functionality in LibreOffice (posts passim) has reached its target of CHF8,000 (about €10,000) in just three days.

    To date 90 organisations, companies and individuals have contributed to the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, including Swiss Post Solutions, a division of the Swiss Post Office (isn’t it great to see the public sector supporting free and open source? Ed.).

    Once implemented, LibreOffice will be able to:

    • Create PDF documents with legally accepted digital signatures accompanied by a timestamp;
    • Conform to PDF/A signature standards;
    • Use either Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird to manage certificates using a simple interface.

    Implementation of the project has been awarded to Collabora, an open source IT service provider, and the work is expected to be completed by April 2015.

    Collabora, which is based in Cambridge, has issued a statement in connection with the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, which declares:

    The success of their campaign shows that Swiss businesses want LibreOffice, want digital signing, and, given the opportunity, are happy to pay for it. It also demonstrates the freedom that the LibreOffice ecosystem provides to businesses. Independently of The Document Foundation who steward and steer LibreOffice development, and independently of the many businesses who have stakes in the future of the application, organisations of any size can organise the addition of new features. When their needs are shared, they need not even bear the exclusive burden of cost.

    Work on adding digital signature functionality to this popular free and open source office suite was initially started in 2012, but then stagnated.