Any writing is better than no writing, so here are some things I’ve been thinking about and doing lately:

I have a new camera – a simple Canon Ixus 100 to replace my old point and shoot which got dust in the lens. It has HDMI out for the 720p video it takes, face tracking, auto scene selection (such that if I point it at something close it switches into macro mode automatically), and is slightly bigger than a credit card. I keep touching the screen to try and interact with it.

I’ve been reading all about the Young Rewired State, which is something I’d not heard about until after it had happened, but is really inspiring.

I’ve been going back and re-reading some of Matt Jones’s old blog posts, and getting some book recommendations – mainly Neal Stephenson. I’m no longer sure what is meant by “the Internet of Things” – it made sense a few years ago but isn’t it now just “the Internet” and we’ve changed our perception of what is and can be connected?

This week I bought a pen. It has 8GB storage, a microphone, a speaker, basic handwriting recognition, comes with special paper which has playback controls on it, and it has its own app store. The SDK is freely available. I will be bringing it to OpenTech 2010 on the 11th September.

Another cool pen that’s just launched is the Sharpie Liquid Pencil which contains liquid graphite. I like the idea of this a lot.

All the Java bloggers I read are posting about Clojure, a dialect of Lisp that runs on the JVM, and have been for months. I have no particular inclination to actually try it out.

I didn’t originally think I’d care, but I increasingly want to be able to back up all the data I enter into Twitter and Facebook. For twitter there is an easy API and plenty of code for doing that. For Facebook there seem to be sites that will do it for you, but that requires giving them your login details, or full access to your account, which isn’t something I’m massively prepared to do.