In case you didn’t know, I run a little toy called GhanaBee for you news junkies to receive the latest Ghana news headlines on your cellphones. Every 30 minutes, this little toy steps out to automagically grab the latest news headlines from major Ghanaian news websites, and renders them for proper display on mobile devices. It also sends free SMS alerts via the Twitter API. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first and only website of its kind out there.

I have a small but loyal (and growing!) users, and I’ve received really great feedback from these folks. But the funny thing is that I’ve never owned a phone capable of accessing the Internet before! So I’ve relied on various cellphone emulators to optimize the display.

Anyway, today I discovered this little free software called iPhoney which brands itself as a “pixel-accurate” iPhone emulator. This is how GhanaBee displays on the iPhone. Cool, huh?

I had been waiting impatiently to try Jotspot, the wiki application that was bought by Google, after which new registrations were closed. Now, it looks like they’ve finished integrating Jotspot into Google’s infrastructure, and the service has re-surfaced as Google Sites — available exclusively in Google Apps.

This is not your typical wiki application with its cryptic markup though. I gave it a quick try, found it extremely easy to use. Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you can easily bring together all kinds of media including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments — in a single page.

The one question on my mind now is how Google Pages fits into all of this, especially as Pages is still a Google Labs experiment. Below is a screenshot of a demo site built with the new Google Sites service.

Apparently the braking mechanism that limits the speed of this 200-foot tall wind turbine broke during a storm in Denmark, and the turbine kept speeding and speeding and eventually shearing itself to into pieces. Click the arrow to play the video below.

What’s really interesting to me here is just how low-cost video capture devices and the Internet are bringing the world closer than ever. I certainly could not have imagined seeing something like this in video — while sitting here in my apartment in the sunny city of Accra, Ghana.

Here’s a related article from a Danish website (in English): Minister demands explanation for windmill collapse

This morning, after a cup of hot coffee, I successfully upgraded my MacBook’s keyboard firmware. This fixes a nasty problem where the first key press is ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. This was really a quick and easy update.

In other news, I’m getting more and more Firefox crashes now, after the first. But I can’t live without my plugins, so upgrading to Firefox 3 pre-release version is NOT an option for me.

How did this one totally escape me? Apparently there was a total eclipse of the heart moon on the night of the 20^th of February — with our dear little planet Earth passing between the sun and a full moon.

The next total eclipse of the moon will take place sometime in 2010. Until then, you can visit Wired for more photos of the recent total eclipse of the moon submitted by users.

In a classic display of our total lack of creativity and disregard for copyright laws in Ghana, the folks re-designing the official website of the Parliament of the Republic of Ghana have blatantly copied the UK Parliament’s website.

Take a look: Here’s the “new” Parliament of Ghana website: http://www.parliament.gh. If you visit the website, you’ll observe most links don’t work. Please forgive us… our copycats are busy carrying the images and links all the way from the UK to Ghana!

And here’s the official website of the UK Parliament: http://www.parliament.uk

And finally, here is the previous website of the Parliament of Ghana (from the Way Back Machine:

Thanks to my friend Remy Edmundson for the tip.

Photo: Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein — taken by fellow Physicist Paul Ehrenfest during their visit to Leiden in December 1925.

A friend forwarded this list of Einstein quotes to me some long time ago. Since then I’ve seen this list of quotes supposedly all from Einstein all over the Internet and being discussed on some mailing lists. While I am familiar with a few of these quotes from some of Einstein’s writings I’ve read, I’m afraid I can’t vouch for the authenticity of all of them.

I also don’t know this Kevin Harris who supposedly compiled this list. I’m sharing these Einstein quotes with you, because I think they are interesting and enlightening. Here we go…

• “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
• “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
• “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”
• “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
• “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
• “The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
• “A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”
• “I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.”
• “God is subtle but he is not malicious.”
• “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
• “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
• “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
• “Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”
• “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
• “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
• “Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.”
• “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
• “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
• “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.”
• “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
• “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
• “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
• “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
• “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
• “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
• “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
• “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
• “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
• “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
• “Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”
• “Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.”
• “If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”
• “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
• “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
• “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
• “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
• “In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.”
• “The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.”
• “Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.”
• “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”
• “No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”
• “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
• “Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.”
• “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
• “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
• “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
• “A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
• “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
• “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
• “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull histail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
• “One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
• “…one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
• “He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace
  to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
• “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical
  delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
• “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton)

Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)

Here’s Josephine Akyeampong with her little son, Kwame. Josephine was one of the few really great friends I had, until I lost her friendship to… eh… marriage. She hooked up with another good friend of mine, Donne Darku, about a year ago. The two are currently based in Nigeria.

We’re still in touch, and I spoke to her less than a week ago. But our conversations are not like they used to be anymore. Our conversations cannot be the way they used to be. Our conversations should not be the way they used to be… not anymore.

All the best, Jossie. Miss you dearly, Jossie.

No, I’ve not been involved in any accident, and I’ve not had a crush on any girl. But this is even more important to me: on the 21st of February 2008, at exactly 13:56GMT, I witness an application crash on my Mac for the first time. The application? Firefox 2.0.0.12.

But before you jump on Firefox, note that I really live in my browser, and that’s the application I’m working with about 80% of the time I spend behind my Mac. It’s also likely some background services may have been crashing and restarting “automagically” — who knows?

To paraphrase Victor Cajiao from the Typical Mac Users Podcast: No, it’s not perfect. It’s just way better than anything out there.

Here’s a top top top (enough?) secrete for all my readers: if, for whatever reason, you feel you must embarrass me, here’s the easiest way to go about it: simply hand me a gift! Yeah, I know that sounds weird… but ’tis true nonetheless. This is one of the last few bits of my past life that still lingers on.

Growing up, I really lived in my own little world. I was completely all to myself, always deeply stuck in my own little world full of fantasies. I wouldn’t hurt a soul, not even the killer ants that often invaded our bedrooms at night.

And I wouldn’t let people go out of their way to give me stuff that, at the time, meant absolutely nothing to me. Indeed, my first real gift I ever accepted was a hand-crafted booklet, The Book of Love, given by my sister on my twenty-something-th birthday — way back at college.

I don’t know about you, but for me, if I had my way, I’d give it all… and take nothing back. But I understand I can’t always have it my way. To live is to let help live. So why must I prevent others from living?

Thank you Richard Matovu — my good friend from Uganda.