Having a Ripping Time

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When I was abroad I picked up a pair of Ultimate Ears headphones which sound amazing. Andy put me on to them, and he was dead right about how good they are. Whilst they don't have a huge amount of bass they produce the clearest sound I've ever heard. I'm actually listening to tracks and hearing instruments that I've not noticed before.  They are a bit pricey, but I do listen to music via headphones rather a lot, and so I reckon they were worth it. Unfortunately they also show up shortcomings in badly recorded or highly compressed music, and so I'm now having to get better copies of all my tunes. I'm putting them onto my new Zune, which has a nice big 80Gb disk and puts out really nice quality.

I really hope that Microsoft bring out the Zune in the UK. I'd love to be able to use their music service as well.

GDC Update

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I went to a couple of other sessions yesterday which were of note. The first was an Xbox Live session. This really has taken off in a big way. There was much description of how to improve "conversion", which is where you persuade someone to take their trial version of the game and pay money to convert it into the full game. As the presenter said, most of this is common sense, but it was nice to see it backed up by statistics and set down in one place. The key things are:

  1. Make sure that the trial gives a good impression of the best bits. If the game takes a while to get going, don't just give the player the first level. Make something special for the trial game that gives the whole experience.
  2. Make sure that you don't give the farm away with your trial. People playing the trial version for 5 hours is a problem, they should have bought the game a long time ago. This is hard to do without conflicting with rule 1 of course. Time limited play is a good plan.
  3. Make the game really, really, easy to pick up. Someone who has paid good money for a game will be motivated to invest their own time in learning the controls and gameplay. If they have paid nothing to get started they are much more inclined to ditch your game if they find it hard to understand at the start.
  4. Have a natural end point for the trial that leads nicely into the full game.

Another thing that came out of the discussion was that Xbox Live are very amenable to highly original ideas, much more so than "proper" game developers. If you have an idea this is a good place to take it. And with XNA games now appearing on Live, and a means for getting a following using the community stuff that is coming soon, things can only get more interesting.

The final presentation I went to was from Nintendo. Takao Sawano had come over from Japan to explain how the Wii Fit platform came about. This is the latest in the sequence of "disruptive technologies" that the Wii and the DS have brought to gaming. The presentation was simultaneously translated from Mr Sawano's Japanese text, but none the worse for this, with the translator keeping up admirably. The Wii Fit game took as its' starting point a pair of bathroom scales. Mr. Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo producer reckoned that people might like the idea of tracking their weight using the Wii. The presentation showed how they developed prototype hardware using rotary encoders to measure the weight before finally fixing on the use of four strain gauges fitted at each corner of the platform.

I know a lot about strain gauges. I used them to weigh fish in a motion compensated weighing machine that I helped build a few years back. They are very accurate and highly sensitive. Using them means that the platform can measure changes in weight in the tens of grams, even being able to detect when you raise and lower your hand. They are also fast, so the game can get fresh readings 60 times a second. This has led to all kinds of games based on weight shifting and aerobics. In the exhibition they have some set up with a skiing game that looks ace.  In Japan they've sold well over a million so far and the game comes to Europe in late April. Of course I'm going to get one. It might even help me get a bit fitter...

Living History

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In the afternoon another amazing presentation. Two people who created the field of computer games.

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Allan Alcorn and Ralph H. Baer - you owe these guys

Ralph made the first ever home video game. First ever. It was entirely analogue and made up of discrete transistors. He patented it (along with 150 or so other ideas that he had) and got everything started. Allan Alcorn designed and built the first ever Pong game for Nolan Bushnell at Atari. Then he went on to create the hardware for the first Atari VCS.  That we have the video game industry in its present form is down to these two people.

In One Ear

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Since my early experiments with speech recognition I had been looking out for a decent head set. I was really pleased when I discovered some Logitech headphones at a knockdown price in our local Staples store.  I took them home and plugged them in and started talking.  And they didn't work very well. 

The sound was indistinct and the recognition was very poor.  I spent a while fiddling with the settings and re-training but it was nowhere near as good as it used to be.  At this point I decided that I might have bought a duff device so I did a little investigating.

Rather surprisingly, results seemed to be equally bad with the headset microphone switched off or even unplugged.  After some investigation I discovered the speech recognition software was still using the microphone inside the computer.  It seems that it doesn't always automatically select the headset microphone.

However, now I've managed to make the switch must handle the speech recognition works an awful lot better.

A tip, you can disable and enable sound devices by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and clicking Manage audio devices.  This opens up the Sound dialogue. When you disable a device it rather annoyingly vanishes from the list of devices. You can get a device back again, so you can re-enable it, by right clicking in the device window and selecting show disabled devices from the context menu that appears.

Vista Speak Easy

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I'm listening...

I'm presently marking loads of software submissions from our second year course. This involves looking at some designs, making some comments, coming up with a mark and them moving on to the next one.

A hundred times.

I thought that rather than type everything I'd try speaking it instead. So, for the first time, I hooked a microphone up to the computer and fired up Vista's speech recognition.

I didn't have particularly high hopes. The last time I saw it being used was when a hapless presenter tried to show off a beta version of windows at a talk they were giving. The results were highly amusing, and probably the product of beta code and a dodgy microphone setup. However, they did serve to put me off trying to use the system (although it is very funning when the presenter says "delete sentence" and the system dutifully puts "delete sentence" into the text).

The training session is interesting. You go through learning how to control the program whilst at the same time the system is learning how you speak. This means that you can say profoundly wrong things as you train it, and it still seems to work (although this will come back and haunt you later when it uses the trained data to try and make sense of your real speech).

It took a while to complete all the training tasks, but there are a large number of options and you really could use the speech interface to control pretty much all of the machine. The text correction stuff is very clever, and makes it easy to correct particular errors.

Then it was time to use the system in anger. And it worked pretty well. I could just dictate comments and they are decoded and fed them into the window where the cursor happens to be. I didn't find any particular need to speak more slowly, the system actually seems to work better if you throw a whole load of text at it rather than single words - probably because it uses a lot of extra context information from the text to decode the sounds. I knew I was on to something when I started using the voice input to write and send an email. The only problem is that you have to compose the whole sentence in your head before saying it, and this is not usually how I write.

Having said all this, I'm definitely going to get a proper microphone and start using the speech input as part of the way I work. If you've never tried it I'd recommend it, I'm not sure which versions of Vista it is supplied with (I'm using Ultimate - which seems to have everything) but if it is there it is definitely worth a go.

...or you could buy an iPhone

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I love my iPhone. It is a highly covetable device which is a genuine pleasure to use. It is just a pity that it is not quite as useful as I'd like. I end up having to put the sim into my Smartphone when I want to do something useful like manage my email or work with Word documents.

But I've been doing some sums and playing with other toys and I've fallen over something very interesting. An iPhone costs around 270 quid, and you have to sign up for a scary 18 month contract that will cost you at least 35 quid a month. Scary money. For roughly the same outlay you can get a SkypePhone, an eeePC and a cheap USB Bluetooth adapter. You get all the internet you can eat for around 10 pounds a month and you can walk away when you like. And the eeePC is not the same as an iPhone from the style point of view, but it is a whole shed load of useful.  It works a treat over Bluetooth with the Skypephone to give a proper 3G browsing experience. You don't have quite the posing power, but you can do everything that the iPhone can do, plus an awful lot more.  Worth a thought I reckon.

EeePC Tiny Computer

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I really must stop doing this. Whenever I come into some money (in this case some modest royalties for a CD-ROM I wrote some time back with number one son) I spend it on a computer.

This time though I've got a little peach. It is an Asus EeePC.  I'd heard these were hard to get hold of. That's like a red rag to a bull where I'm concerned. If you want one, and they are really neat, I'd recommend trying your nearest Toys'R'Us, where I managed to pick one up, after considerable agonising, yesterday. They cost around 220 pounds. For your money you get a tiny laptop with a little 7 inch display. Of course you can get "proper" laptops for only a few pounds more, but the EeePC is interesting for a number of reasons.

For a start it really is small. If you want a proper laptop as small as the Asus you would be hard pushed to get one for less than seven or eight hundred pounds, and it has a battery life of over three hours, which is again very promising for the price and size. It also has no moving parts to break, unless you count a little fan and the keys, and uses an internal 4GB solid state drive for storage. There is an SD slot for additional memory, three USB slots for external devices, WIFI, a webcam, a wired network connection and even an external monitor socket. It feels very robust and is powered by an Intel Celeron processor tied to 512Mb of memory.

It can run Windows XP, but it is supplied running a variant of Linux which contains all the bundled applications that you would need to make the machine useful, including Open Office 2.0, Firefox for web browsing, a collection of Picture, Music and Media utilities, some teaching applications and a few games. The user experience is very like Windows, with just a few rough edges here and there.  It booted up, connected to our WIFI and worked a treat. The only scary bit was getting it to print, which involved compiling a printer driver and installing it (good job that Number One Son was around to do that bit).

If you want a tiny PC to take with you on trips, and would like something that won't break the bank and you won't fret about too much, then I strongly recommend it. If you are thinking of getting your kids a notebook PC, but are worried about their fragility and price(the notebook that is, not the kids), I'd recommend it very strongly. It is also a hackers delight. It is essentially a PC platform, but small and cheap and very easy to develop for. I'm going to put Mono on mine so I can keep writing C# goodness. Number one son wants to put one on a robot. There are stories of an Eeepc that has been made to run Vista (quite well so they say) and an XP version will be available in 2008 which will be very interesting.

What I want to do next is couple it up to the SkypePhone so that I've got a portable, high performance, network terminal. If I put XP on it I could do this tomorrow. The machine is supplied with a set of XP driver disks and I really am tempted to do this.

Bag Yourself a SkypePhone

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I wish I had more friends. Or more people who wanted to talk to me. The two free Skypephones that were very kindly sent to me for testing have languished on my office desk for the last week, whilst my iPhone keeps reminding me that I've not actually made a call for several days. I'm obviously not the kind of person who will go for the Skype part of the Skypephone, but the way that it provides cheap mobile network access for my notebook is attractive.

Today I saw someone up town offering the phones for 85 quid a pair, which is a very enticing price. And you can get them in white too.

If you want one for free you can take part in a little competition here. The idea is you pitch just how much you really want one, how it will change your life etc etc. The best pitches get a phones. My suggestion is not to go too far overboard on this though. A big production number with dancers and a sky-written message at the end would probably cost more to produce than the 49 quid or so you have to lay out for a phone of your own. But a cheap, heartfelt, plea might hit the spot.

By mentioning this I suppose that this means I'm actually taking part in some kind of viral marketing but what the hey, I like the product.

Vista Time Travel

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I love it when systems are designed to accommodate my own stupidity. Like when I half remove a bunch of camera drivers, fully install the new ones and then find that, not surprisingly, things don't work any more.

Previously there would have been a lot of cursing and muttering and attempts to get the system back to a "known good state" (i.e. before I started fiddling with it).

But with Vista I just fire up the recovery menu and step back in time to the good old days, when things worked, and try again. And I made an interesting discovery, which is that if I don't do stupid things it works a lot better....

Roam the world with Skype

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A nice man from 3 sent me a couple of phones to play with this week.  They are Skypephones. This is a very clever idea. The mobile works as a mobile, but because it has 3G, and is therefore connected to a nice fast network, it can use Skype as well.

Skype is an network based telephony solution. I find it very useful when I travel abroad and want to call home, because the bulk of the time a call uses the Internet to deliver the data, I only have to pay for the short hop from Skype to the actual phone in at the other end. It means I can phone Hull from anywhere in the world for around 2p a minute.

If the person I'm calling is on Skype too, rather than on their home phone, then the call is free. Up until now one snag has been that there is that there has been no mobile solution. Until now, and the 3 Skypephone. If your 3 contract includes free internet access then you can call other Skype users (or other Skypephone owners) for nothing. Anywhere in the world. Very clever. If you must call a "proper" phone the call will not cost much either.

The only snag that I can think of is those magic three words "Fair Use Policy". I've not been able to find out what constitutes reasonable use of your 3 "unlimited" internet connection. Voice shouldn't take up too much bandwidth, and it should allow for reasonable levels of use, but I wouldn't expect completely unlimited talk time.

The phone hardware is neat, very small and works. There is even a browser (although you can't use it to read this hallowed blog). The price (even for pay as you go) is very good. It will even support Microsoft Live Messenger at some point, and there is a Skype messaging service too. I think you can use a Skype phone as a modem on your computer (although I've not made that work yet and 3 might not see that as appropriate use). The phone has a little camera and supports Bluetooth, and you can plug in memory cards with music and media on them.  All in all a good device.

If I had loads of people abroad that I wanted to be in regular contact (say I was an overseas student) this would be an ideal solution. Dad could use his computer at home to call my Skype mobile at no cost to him, or me.

If you're at Hull and you want to see my Skype phones, give me a yell. I've only got them for a few more weeks, but they are worth a look.

Super Zune

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If you've got a Zune (and why not - they are neat devices) then congratulations. You've just got a new one, thanks to a spiffy new version of the firmware that has just been released for all the Zune devices.

I picked a Zune up in the 'states while I was out there earlier this year and they are rather neat. Kind of an ipod with a wifi twist and a nicer (to me anyway) music management tool. And they let you rent your music, which I really like.

If you are signed up with Zune you should be hearing about the upgrade soon.  The biggest improvement concerns the wifi support in the Zune device, which previously limited me to sharing audio files with the only other Zune owner I know in the UK, who lives in Wales. You can now sync over wifi which means that I should now be able to wirelessly sync content with my home network. I'm looking forward to playing with this, with a bit of luck I'll be able to move recorded TV programs onto my Zune to watch when I'm out and about. There are also some very stylish changes to the user interface and the Zune marketplace has started to sprout free, unprotected MP3 files for your Zune too.

And the new PC based Zune player program is just beautiful.

In fact the only thing about the Zune I don't like is that it isn't on sale in the UK yet.....

Wide Screen Pain

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My new notebook has a wide screen display which, over the week away, I'd rather learnt to like. So, bearing in mind that I spend a lot of time staring at a monitor screen I thought I'd get a new wider one. So I did.

The new monitor has a fantastic, jaw dropping display of amazing quality. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have chucked it through the window by now. It is a 22 inch HP job, with an HDMI input as well as VGA and a lovely glossy finish. However, it and Vista just don't get on.

I know exactly how this should work. I know because I've read the White Paper "Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) Ver. 1.1" by Yu-Kuan Lin Program Manager, Mobile PC Business Unit. This is well written, comprehensive and has some nice scenarios that explain just what should happen. Essentially, the whole thing has been designed so that you set a monitor up once, Vista remembers that setup and then replicates it each time you plug that monitor in again.

This does not happen.

What happens is that you set it up once, and next time you plug it in the system does what the heck it likes, with a range of implausible and hard to select display options. Should you be stupid enough to let the screen saver kick in it then does something else. And if you are such an idiot as to put the machine to sleep you can look forward to no screen, a black screen with a cursor, a screen that you can't do anything with because the window is on the other screen or the blue screen of death when you come back depending on the whim of the system.

I'm not sure who to blame here. The monitor has the habit of reporting itself to Vista as one of a number of devices. The HP monitor control program refuses to believe that an HP monitor is plugged in. The Nvidia display driver doesn't even let me change options and Vista seems quite happy that nothing is wrong.

As for me, the picture is so good that I'm just about prepared to live with it for now. But I've lost a couple of hours trying to find out why something which should just be plug and play is nothing of the sort.

iPhone

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The HTC S710 Smartphone is the best phone I've ever had. The synchronisation with Exchange still blows me away, with email, contacts and appointments moving seamlessly from my desktop to my portable device. The screen is beautiful, the slide out keyboard superb and the call quality is always good. I can use it to watch movies, listen to music and make it into a modem for my Vista computer. Battery life is excellent. I can write and run C# programs on it from Visual Studio 2005. Truly it is the most effective mobile device I own. There is only one thing wrong with it.

It is not an iPhone.

The iPhone is not a particularly wonderful phone to be honest. It needs quite a strong signal before it will talk to people. The voice quality is OK, but nothing special. The camera is quite good in spite of the limited resolution, but won't take movies, and it can't send a picture in an MMS. The iPhone doesn't have that lovely "type in a bit of the name and I'll find the rest from Contacts" thing that the Smartphone has. Exchange sycnchronisation is non-existent and the synchronisation with Outlook is OK but I have to do it by hand now. I have to use the (in my opinion) horrible and counter intuitive iTunes to get music on it. I can't put my programs into it. It won't connect with a Bluetooth stereo headset. I can't plug my favourite headphones in because the socket is stupidly designed. Thing is, even with all these faults, I love it.

The touch interface is wonderful. Rather than faffing around with a stylus, you can use those things on the end of your hands called "fingers" to control everything. Because the surface is glass, rather than a flimsy plastic membrane, I have no issue with touching it because I'm fairly sure I won't damage it and I can always wipe fingermarks off. The screen is enormous and the browser superb, put it together with the intuitive design of the software and you have the first proper mobile web experience that I can live with. The music player delivers the goods and actually makes album artwork interesting again.

I've been using it for a while now and it is so nice to use that for the moment I've decided I can live without all the useful bits of the best phone I've ever had.

As someone with a huge respect and affection for Microsoft stuff I sincerely hope that somewhere in a lab. in Redmond there is a Smartphone looking something similar to this. The Deepfish project certainly gives me hope for the future, as does the Microsoft Surface.  At TechEd I was waving the iPhone around and telling people that this is the way that phones are going, like it or not.If there is something like this coming along, please, please, please get it into the shops as soon as you can. An iPhone that does all the things that my S710 can do would be the stuff of legends.

Apple devices are always surrounded by hype which I've always taken with a big pinch of salt. However, in the case of the iPhone I think that it is pretty much justified. One thing is certain, and that's that you will be able to split mobile phone history into "before Apple" and "after Apple".

WebGuide Goes Global

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Some time ago I mentioned WebGuide. This is a wonderful tool for Windows Media Centre that lets you share your media all round the house, and indeed the world.

It seems that somebody in Redmond reads my blog (Hi, Bill!) because Microsoft have recently hired Doug Berret, the man who wrote the program, and will be making it part of future versions of Media Centre. This is great news, except for the fact that I bought mine (for the princely sum of ten pounds).

Then again, I did earn some money writing about it for Windows Vista magazine, so I guess we are about square on this.

My media PC is well past half way to paying for itself at the moment. Earlier this year we realised that the only bit of Sky+ that we actually used was the "record all EastEnders episodes" facility for number one wife. So we dumped it and got a Media Center PC which does the same thing and also lets me make DVDs of Shaun the Sheep, at a saving of 36 pounds a month.

Promiscuity in Amsterdam

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After rising bright and early we set off from Europort to the city. I don't know Amsterdam very well and there were some places I wanted to visit. Fortunately I had a plan.

I was going to use my Nokia 770 (a neat little web-terminal thing that I bought cheap a week or so ago) and its matching sat-nav, which was fully loaded with Netherlands maps and had all my destinations carefully favourited. All I had to do was kick the thing into life when we arrived and never be lost. Well, that was the plan.

On the bus as we approached the city I fired up the 770 and the GPS device. Because of the rather stupid software it seems you have to pair the GPS device and the 770 each time you try to use it. On first attempt the navigation software found a Bluetooth device called "Dave" and then crashed. After a reset, and with the faint inklings of foreboding I tried again. This time I found a veritable plethora of Bluetooth partners who all wanted to talk to me. One was called "Land Rover". I looked out of the bus window and sure enough, there it was in the traffic alongside us. Of course the GPS device was nowhere to be found.

By now we had arrived at our dropping off point. My plan was to add this as a favourite so we could easily find our way back to the bus, but things were not going well. The GPS device finally paired with the 770 and told me I was standing in a canal before losing the signal. Not good.

I tried to find my favourites and set the destination, but of course I couldn't see the screen in daylight and the stylus was a pain to use. By now the patience of number one wife was starting to fray a bit. We started walking in order to try and get a better signal and now the direction indicate pointed back the way we'd come and it started to rain on the screen. So that was game over for Mr. Satnav. As I put the whole thing back in my pocket I heard a muffed "At the next intersection turn left.." We bought a map (price 2.5 euros) and used that very successfully for the rest of the day.

The good news is that the GPS device happily paired with my Smartphone and works a treat with Live Search (but I was not going to pay roaming GPRS prices to find my way around Amsterdam).

I'm going to upgrade the Nokia software first chance I get, with a bit of luck this should improve things.

Of course, I'd taken the cameras.

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Early morning ships

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Actually, these are made of wood

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satnav, pah!

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Beer marketing with horses

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Canal mural

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Multi-storey bike park

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Container stacking

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Industrial Skyline

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Down the decks

There are more pictures on Flickr.

Raw Power

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My biggish camera can take pictures in RAW format. This means that rather than compressing and processing the image data when it takes a picture, the camera simply dumps the output of the photo sensor into a file. It results in rather large files (around 14Mb in my case) for each picture but it does represent the epitome of quality, as you get all the data from the picture. It also means that you can do things like white balance compensation (making sure that things don't look yellow, or blue or whatever) after taking the picture, rather than at the time.

I was taking pictures of Seoul at night, and unsure about the white balance, so I took a few RAW pictures as well. The bad news was that when I got home, I now had to convert them into proper images. Fuji, who made my camera, supply a truly horrid set of programs to do this. They don't work very well on Vista, and I've lost the disks, so I thought I was stuffed. Until I found this.

These folks have written an image decoder for Finepix cameras that does everything I want. It is free and it works. If you want to play with RAW images and get the maximum quality from your camera, you should download the program and have a play.

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Raw Seoul

Museum, Palace and Lunch

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(This is a very graphics heavy post. And there are literally hundreds more pictures on Flicker if you want to see them)

Today was culture day. So early in the morning we headed off to the Seoul Museum of History in a bus with very funky ceiling

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Rather sadly it was raining heavily, but fortunately we had each been provided with an umbrella. When we got to the museum they had set up a super little machine which provides you with a little bag to put your wet umbrella in, which was very cute.

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Students in search of culture (shurely shome mishtake?)

The museum was great, although we didn't really have time to do it justice. In Europe we like to lord it over our American cousins, because we have stuff which is hundreds, nay thousands of years older than most of the history that they've got. Well, the Koreans have got us beat hands down. On the evidence of the museum they were building rich and complex civilizations whilst us brits were living in caves and running around painted blue.   

Next stop was Gyeong Bok Gung. This is a royal palace of the Jaseon Dynasty (it says here). All I know is that it was fantastic, and I got some lovely pictures.

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Mist on the mountains

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The team with their new best friend

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Courtyard

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Perhaps my favourite picture so far

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I don't know what they are, but they look nice

After the palace we moved on to Bibimbob Olympic Stadium for lunch.

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Big place....

The food was prepared in an enormous wok, big enough for the chef to actually get into.

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I cooking with a step ladder...

Then some of the competitors were invited to have a stir with the biggest wooden spoons I've ever seen.

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Stirring stuff

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While we waited for the food too cook the Egyptian team managed amazing feats of balance...

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Big Wok Lunch

Now, anyone who knows me well will have encountered my massive conservatism where food is concerned. I'm just not adventurous when it comes to eating habits. Steak and chips is about as exotic as I get most of the time. Having said that, I did my best and Matt Steeples from our team managed to excel himself by just about clearing his plate. Then it was on to the boat trip.