What's this? A diary entry? Quick, turn it up, it's been a while!

About 3 years ago, Motorola announced the Motofone F3, an all-new, ground up design of a mobile phone specifically tailored for the second and third world markets.

It had an "e-paper" screen, extended battery life, twin antennas and an astonishingly low price tag (£10 with no network subsidies). The technology was rolled back to a par with the first mobile I got, in 2000. It had no internal memory, using the SIM for contacts and SMS storage. With no camera, no MP3 player and no fancy graphics it was, in short, a phone.

The developing world consumes a mind-boggling number of mobile phones. Ever wondered where all the old upgrades go? Motorola hit gold with the realisation that many in those markets (particularly the Indian sub-continent and Africa) would pay reasonable money for a new, stylish, well designed phone with features that suited them, rather than some passed on, outdated phone with features designed for an entirely alien market.

I bought one in Kenya soon after they came out, and quickly fell in love/hate with it. The limited features were perfect, entrenching my preferences of one device for one purpose. However there were several things which irritated me and, last week, led me into a mobile phone shop for the first time in my life. The astute reader will notice text messages cropping up a few times:

1. The limited SMS storage means the inbox could frequently be jammed for a day or more, especially by "friends" in the generation that doesn't understand the 160 character limit. Receiving "Sunny tomorrow, free for climbs?" 24 hours late is aggravating.
2. Text message handling is generally infuriating. Left the compose screen? The text is gone. Failed to send? No way to re-try, you have to re-write it. Want to check what you wrote? Nope. Want to change what you wrote? Nope, need to delete and re-start. Want to send the same text to more than one person? Dream on.
3. Joint third, the small phone book (90 numbers) quickly fills up, leaving no room for the 30 members of the youth club that occasionally text, and the screen, though it looks cool and uses no energy to hold a display, makes reading incoming text messages slow and laborious.

So, experiment over.

Two final comments. With the network subsidy, a very good mobile is now only £40. This is a big price drop in 3 years. Secondly, Motorola's replacement for the F3 (see here), while it seems to have addressed many of these problems, is a right fatty. It's like the hot girl at school realised she was thick, so went to night classes all summer to get clever but ate nothing but marshmallows and chips and then wondered why nobody was interested any more.

I'll write something more on my thoughts about one-gadget-per-job in this brave new world of phone/camera/mp3player/calendar/diary/web portal communications platforms in due course.

While 'Delicious' seems an odd way to describe Obama, it's nice to see students making serious political statements.

Following the absolutely tragic news of Fred Goodwin's house being attacked last week, I've been thinking about how the bank (and us, since we now own it) can show our appreciation for his service to our country.

Since it seems impossible to demonstrate our gratitude by the simple route of altering his mere £700,000 pension, I've been thinking of alternative methods of showing how much this money means to us.

For example, by hiring a courier company to deliver his money to him, as cash, each day, in 1p coins.

That would be a total of 191,781p per day. At 3.5 grams each, it would come in at 671kg, or about the weight of a mini. It would probably need packaged on a couple of decent pallets, so it might even take a few runs each day to get it all delivered. Of course, by the time the courier has been paid, it will be slightly less, but let's not worry about that just now.

To offer maximum security, the delivery would need to be made at a random time of day. Or in fact a random time of night, when there would be less people around to potentially steal it. And to prevent that happening, the pallets could be lowered over his security fence, directly onto his driveway, maybe behind his beloved Mercedes S600 (he won't be using it at the moment anyway, it needs a bit of repair. Hope he took out the glass cover!).

I might be missing some important arrangements, but to be honest I can't think of any problems. I wouldn't like to rule out extending the scheme to cover other suitable state employees, so feel free to make further suggestions.

Edit - just realised how wasteful this whole thing is. The coins should of course be delivered packaging free, to save on wood and other materials.

Just back from a lecture by John Ging, the head of UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) in Gaza. He's been highly critical of the response of Europe and the US to the lack of respect for law in both the ongoing tit-for-tat conflict of assassinations and rockets/bombs between Israel and the Palestinian areas it occupies, and the occasional blood-bath onslaughts let out by Israel.

Some interesting comments, from his talk (quotes are bold, the rest is paraphrase):

The first casualty of war is the truth. The stated aim of the recent attack by Israel was to Destroy the infrastructure of terror and stop the rocket fire into Israel. The infrastructure destroyed was almost entirely civilian - schools, hospitals, etc. In the last 3 days of the bombardment, once the end was being negotiated, Palestinian government offices, the ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs and the President's offices were all flattened. Deliberate attempt to prevent functioning Palestinian authority.

At the end of the destruction, tunnels used to smuggle weapons (along with food, medicines, cement etc) from Egypt are still open.

For 5 months at the end of 2008, there were few or no rockets. Every day of the onslaught and every day since, rockets have been fired at Israel.

There is clear disconnect between the stated objectives and the reality on the ground [nice bit of diplomat talk for "they were lying through their teeth"].

Israel's response to cease of rocket attacks was to tighten the siege on Gaza, causing the UN to run out of food for the first time in their 60 year operation there. 5 months of few/no rockets (none by Hamas) led to desperation (with no reciprocation from Israel in sight), resumption of attacks and unleashing of disproportionate force from Israel.

The complexity of the Middle East problem is not going to be solved in a sound bite.

Been doing two sets of tests recently. I'm currently in Millbrook, one of the big proving grounds in England, staring through a window at a London double decker bus sitting on a proper big dynamometer (bit like a treadmill for exercising your car the lazy way).

The bus is finally getting a nice big, fat single digit mpg figure, slightly higher than a Ferrari but slightly lower than a Range Rover. Which we're pretty pleased with, considering it's 14 tonnes and loaded to represent 60 passengers.

In a hybrid like this, the wheels are driven by an electric motor, which is fed by a battery and/or diesel generator. Ours uses a 2.4 litre ford engine - the same one as the Transit van or Land Rover TD5, along with a wardrobe full of lithium ion batteries. The efficiency gain comes from two places: Firstly when the vehicle brakes, instead of simply throwing the energy away through friction brake pads (the usual way), the motor acts as a generator, recovering the energy to recharges the batteries. Secondly the engine usage may be dislocated from the vehicle's current operation - the engine speed doesn't need to be related to vehicle speed, but can constantly operate at a range of sweet, efficient spots (or turn off altogether when it's not needed).

The second set of tests I've been running are slightly less technical:

I've hacked together a circuit on a breadboard to allow manual over-riding of the automatic gearbox in our lovely, but sadly automatic, Hilux. Combined with a volume changing paddle off an old Renault Laguna, a very nervous Louise and myself managed to drive to the baker at the weekend with probably the only tiptronic Hilux Surf in the UK.

There's a few features that I'm pretty pleased with, including a big, clunky switch that makes a solid, reliable 'clunk' when you change between auto and manual. Oh, and a 7-segment display to tell you what gear you're in (top left in the image), synchronising between the auto and manual gear selection when changing between them or starting the vehicle, and automatic dropping to first gear when the vehicle stops, even when in manual. And lots of relays that click satisfyingly to let you know something's happening.

After a bit more testing, this will hopefully become a permanent feature. If I understand the potential benefits correctly (unlikely, but hey, I can dream) then it may be able to improve fuel efficiency by 5-10%, along side looking cool.

Which will make it use a mere 1/3 of the fuel per mile of the bus currently vibrating the floor.

In mid January, Louise and I decided to stop using large supermarkets, initially for a one month period.

There are many reasons for this, but here's a few:

1. Food transport: Supermarkets source fresh produce from every corner of the globe throughout the year to ensure you can always have exactly what you want, in or out of season. This importing quickly becomes habit; on one trip to Tesco last autumn, at the height of the British apple season, the nearest country of origin for any apple in the store was South Africa. Over transport of food is an appalling polluter and is often entirely necessary unnecessary.
2. Community impact: Small shops are often priced out of the market by large supermarkets, leaving previously active town centres and local shops struggling. Like most people, we'd rather have the active town centre and useful local shops.
3. Money: Although the shopping list costs less in Asda, you leave with twice as much as was on it, much of it expensive luxuary goods. A fortnighly shop in a supermarket normally cost us between £60-£100, in Supervalu (our local mini-market) it came to just under £40 the other day. The link on the picture says 40% of everything bought in a supermarket are impulse buys.
4. Convenience: The once a week shop is good and well, but it's time (and fuel) consuming. We have 2 butchers, a corner shop, a mini supermarket, a Chinese takeaway, 2 chip shops, a chemist, post office and an off licence all under 4 minutes walk from our house. We both pass all of them twice a day, every single day. In theory, that should be easier than making a special 2 hour trip in the car to the far side of town every week.
5. Consumer power: Small and local businesses pay more attention to consumers than large multi-nationals. For some things the multi-nationals are perhaps require, but is buying food one of them? Supervalu, for example, makes a point of stocking Northern Irish or British/Irish produce wherever possible.

It's now been about 5 weeks, and in many ways the experiment's just starting. We're now running out of things we normally keep cupboards full of. The bread maker is still running, but on a 50/50 mix of bread flour and plain flour, since we've not been able to find bread flour anywhere else. Fruit juice has gone from 30p to 80p per litre, cooking chocolate is virtually impossible to get, but meat from the local butcher is cheaper and tastes noticeably better than vacuum packed from a shelf, and comes with a wink and witty remark.

I'll keep this diary updated about the experiment, especially if we decide to make any exceptions. I'm going to go and write a letter to Supervalu now asking them if they would consider stocking bread flour.