WiFi Fun and Games

The WIFI connection downstairs has been a bit dodgy ever since I “upgraded” it with a device I got for an amazing price (can you tell what is going to happen here?). I’m pretty sure the discount was because someone had bought it, found it didn’t work and taken it back to the shop. It used to connect quickly enough, and then drop the connection at some random point in the future, just often enough to be really annoying. Its in the bin now. I can’t think of anyone I dislike enough to give it to them to use.

Anyhoo, I’ve recently come across these Tenda routers that you can get from eBuyer for the bonkers price of 12.48 pence:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169923 

They don’t replace the venerable Netgear DSL device that links me to the awesome power of Karoo, but then again I don’t want them to. What I want them for is to spread some WIFI around the house. They are designed to sit on the end of a broadband modem and provide WIFI and four more 10 base T ports. However, by ignoring the modem connection you can use them as WIFI access points. You can also use them to extend and bridge a wireless network if you are happy twiddling with the settings.

I just turned off their DHCP support (so they don’t go around offering network addresses to all and sundry) and set them up as WIFI access points hanging off the wire running around the place. I initially used one as a repeater to extend the coverage, but since that means I end up with a bunch of stations sharing one channel I decided to just make a new network instead. There is a nice little HowTo in amongst the reviews if you are new to this kind of thing.

So far so good, with speed and range nicely improved. 

Bought a New Zune HD

There has been a bit of talk lately about Microsoft discontinuing the Zune hardware. I hope they don’t. Although they have not been on sale in Europe I’ve been using the devices pretty much since they came out.

The Zune HD was released a little while back and is a truly lovely device.  I’ve played with iPods and other music players, but I prefer the sound of the Zune device, and really like the user interface. I can also use the lovely Zune Pass to get all I can eat music for nine quid a month.

The other thing about the Zune that I like is that it doesn’t seem to age.  I’ve got a first generation device and it looks pretty much like it did when I bought it. My iPod on the other hand looks somewhat battle scarred.

Some Apple products seem designed to age badly. The ultra-shiny backs really attract scratches and drive someone like me, who is somewhat obsessive about keeping his stuff looking new, up the wall. They also don’t get the same software support when they grow old.  My iPod can’t do lots of things simply because Apple don’t release firmware upgrades for it. In contrast my early Zunes can do everything the brand new ones can, because they have been upgradable all the time.

I’ve just managed to pick up a 64G Zune at a very good price for such a capacious best. It looks lovely and works a treat. If you are looking for a music player with really good sound quality and a nice user interface you could do a lot worse.

Use Micro Fibre for Shiny Gadgets

I reckon the Scotch ones are the best.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time with Scott Hanselman over the DevDays conferences. Scott is one of these folks who have technology running through their veins. It was great to see his eyes light up whenever he was showing off a cool new program or discussing the future of computing. However, I did actually have a gadget that managed to impress him, which was nice.

At one point during our chat I produced the micro-fibre cloth that I carry round to make my Windows Phone shiny bright before each demo. This went down very well, and was promptly put to work shining up all the devices we used for the keynote.

If you want to get rid of all the pesky fingerprints that these devices seem to accumulate then I recommend that you get one or two. You can get really good ones from the Pound Shops in the UK and places like Tesco also do multi-packs at a good price. But if you are properly rich you can get the original Scotch versions above.

Parrot Drone Flying

The Parrot AR Drone is an amazing device. It contains a whole bunch of digital technology, including a WIFI access point, two cameras, an ultrasonic rangefinder and four computer controlled rotors. You can fly it from your iPhone and you see a view from the camera in the front of the device as you remotely pilot it around. Today we had a go at flying it, and it works really well, once you have told it that it is flying outdoors. This takes some limits off the behaviours, making it more able to cope with the small headwind.

It really is impressive to watch. It just hangs in the air waiting for commands, and it is very easy to control. In fact, in some ways it is too easy. If you leave it along it just flies, if you give it directions it just follows them, and then waits for some more. Even landing is mostly boring, except for once or twice when it flipped upside down for no reason. There are some augmented reality games you can get, and of course it gets really fun if you have someone else with a drone to fight against.

They are a bit pricey (fortunately I didn’t pay for this one, we use it in the department) but the biggest problem is the battery life. You can get around 10-12 minutes of flying time before the lithium ion battery needs a top up. I’d definitely get a couple of spares if I was going to get serious about flying a drone.

Rube Goldberg and the Micro Framework at Mix

I’m going to try and watch the local news over the next few days. I’ll be looking for reports of folks performing strange contortions under street lights and near air conditioning vents. If I do see any, I’ll know what it is about though. They’ll be people taking part in the Rube Coldberg Curious Cloud Contest. The idea is simple enough. You get a magic device that responds to temperature, light and motion. By getting the right conditions of these you can get three lights on the device to come on. This makes you a winner.

It turns out that, with a bit of experimentation, anyone can get the lights to come on (particularly if they take a look at the C# code that powers this .NET Micro Framework based contraption). So the biggest prizes go to those who can make them come on in the most interesting way. Dressed as a chicken perhaps, or using a robot, or on the street. Or all three.

The hardware doing all this is pretty impressive. A netDuino board sits at the bottom, talking with a WIFI adapter and a sensor/display board. It captures readings from the sensors to an on-board memory card. When the device is able to detect a WIFI signal it will upload all the recent readings to the Cloud, where anyone can take a look. So, in a package around the size of a cigarette pack we have a .NET capable processor, sensors, data logging and wireless networking.

I got to have an early play with one of the kits, you can find my sensor readings here:

I’ve not found the magic values yet, but I reckon the fun is in the journey.

Colin Miller, of the .NET Micro Framework team, is dishing out complete kits to lucky Mix delegates who want to form a team and want to have a go. He will be on hand from tomorrow in the Connect Lounge (at Shorelines A) dishing out kits for you to play with.

The kits are beautifully presented, with all you need to get started, including a battery pack so you can take your sensors out and about.  You could even use a Windows Phone app to visualise your results.

Find out more at http://curiouscloudcontest.com when the competition opens tomorrow.

Keeping a Cool Lap

I’ve never been that bothered about laptop coolers. These tray type things sit underneath the laptop and have fans that help your portable computer nice and cool. However, I picked up a Microsoft one recently and it actually turns out to be quite useful. Not so much for the fan, which I don’t really think a properly designed computer should need, but for the way it keeps the machine off your lap. The Microsoft one also has a foot that you can use to bring a portable to a better angle to use on a desk.

All things considered  there are worse ways to spend 13 pounds or so.

Over Compressed Audio

These images don’t tell you you bad it is going to sound…..

This evening I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking some of my old records and making them into MP3 tracks. I’m not sure about the legal issues here, but since I’m not going to actually sell the recordings I think I should be OK. Years ago I recorded some albums by just recording the entire record and converting it into MP3.  What I wanted to do now was just pull out individual tracks. I used Audacity, the best audio editing program you can get. It is free and works a treat.  If you want to play with audio, get a copy here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

A tip, the latest beta (1.3.12) is the one that you should use for Windows 7 and works fine. It also seems to have the MP3 encode/decode built in.

Anyhoo, I opened up each large MP3 file and then laboriously saved the sections that held each track. And was rewarded with some recordings that sounded, well, horrible. Horrible, horrible. Then I realised what I’d just done. I’d taken a compressed signal, decompressed it and then recompressed it again. They tell you not to do this, and blimey they are right.

Next step is to dig out “Ye Olde Recorde Deqque” and re-record uncompressed (wav files I guess) of the records and then save sections of these to compressed form. Oh well.

One of the records I was converting was Andrew Gold, “What’s wrong with this picture” which has one of the best record sleeves ever:

See if you can find a high resolution copy of the image and find all 32 mistakes in it…..

What Computer should I get for University?

We got an email last week asking what kind of computer works best at university. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Netbook

Netbooks based on the Atom processor are very cheap and great for web surfing, email and writing essays but they are a bit underpowered for the more demanding stuff like image editing and HD video. While you can use large tools like Visual Studio on an Atom powered Netbook it will not be a particularly enjoyable experience, particularly if you only have 1G of RAM in the machine.  However, they are great for taking notes, very portable and their batteries should see out a day on campus if you are careful. And they are so cheap you won’t suffer an enormous loss if you drop or lose yours.

Laptop

If you are buying a laptop I would go for at least a Core 2 of some kind. Machines based on the i3 processor are becoming affordable and are worth a look. If you are buying a laptop make sure that it has (or you can upgrade it to) at least 4G of RAM. If you want to write games with the machine it really needs a separate graphics adapter, those with built in graphics might work, but their performance will not be good. Take a look here for details of requirements to write XNA games:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203925.aspx

Such a machine need not cost too much, I got an Dell Studio 15 with ATI graphics for around the 600 pound mark last year, and I’m sure things have moved on since then. Of course the snag with buying a “proper” portable computer is that it is properly heavy and scarily expensive to cart round with you.   This might mean that it gets left back at your house most of the time, which kind of negates the purpose of a laptop.

You should also look very carefully at the battery life. Bear in mind that although there are some charging stations on campus these are the exception rather than the rule and so a machine that can last all day is a good plan. I used to have a rule of thumb that I would take the manufacturers’ claimed life and halve it, so a machine that was supposed to be good for 3 hours would actually give only 90 minutes. However, I think things are improving a bit. My latest little machine claims 9 hours of use, and pretty much gets there.

Desktop

I’m in the process of returning to my desktop roots at the moment. I moved onto a laptop a while back because I loved the idea of having all my data with me at all times. It meant that I could pretty much work anywhere.  However, I can now have my data anywhere by using Live Mesh and Dropbox, and I fancy having a go with two monitors, so moving back to desktop makes sense. If you are buying a desktop now you should take a look at the new Intel “SandyBridge” I5 processor, which is not that expensive and provides a big leap in performance terms. Such a machine with at least 4G of ram and a 1T hard disk  and a reasonable graphics card should come in at around that magic 600 pounds (if you shop carefully)  and will provide a big leap in performance over a laptop of similar price. 

Some students have a great big hulking desktop at home and carry a tiny cheap netbook around during the day to take notes. This can work very well, particular if you use one of the cloud services (see backup below) to keep everything synchronised.

Apple

Apple seem to have figured out what makes something a pleasure to own and use, and then bottled it and sold it. All their machines run Windows really well, although the native OS X operating system has a lot to commend it and gives you access to wonderful programs like Garageband which come free with each Mac. And of course if you have a Mac you can write programs for the iPhone. 

I would place a slight question mark over the reliability and longevity of their hardware though. My MacBook Pro has been through two batteries, a power supply and a main board since I got it, and my little MacBook is on its second battery. I've bought machines from lots of other suppliers, Dell, Sony, Toshiba and Acer, and never had this failure rate with them.

If you are in academia make sure that you buy using the Apple academic discount scheme, you will save a little money but you will also get three years of Applecare warranty, which is well worth having. 

Software

Don’t forget software when you are pricing your systems. All our students get Microsoft Academic Alliance usernames shortly after they arrive with us and you can get Microsoft Operating systems and development tools for free from this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/academic/default

The only thing that you will miss from this is Microsoft Office, which you can get quite cheaply from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/

If you want to try Linux I’d recommend taking a look at Ubuntu, which provides one of the best turnkey Unix experiences.

Backup

It seems that you have to lose a big chunk of work before you appreciate the importance of making backups of your data. One of my project students had their hard disk crash the night after they had just finished writing a very important report. Of course they hadn’t backed up the files…. 

These days, rather than remembering take a backup I use Dropbox and LiveMesh to make sure that files on my computers are all synchronised. During a working day I’ll probably move between two or three different platforms and these technologies make sure that the data on all of them always lines up. They are also provide browser based interfaces, so that you can get at all your important files anywhere you can find a web connection. 

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh

http://dropbox.com/

The main problem with these services is the limited amount of space they offer. Live Mesh will give you 5G of online storage for free, with Dropbox you have to make do with 2G for free, although you can have more if you pay. However, this is not an issue for me. I don’t put any of my music or video on them, I simply use them to store “work in progress”, which for all the taught content and presentations that I gave last year only amounts to around 2 or so gig.

Insurance

If you do buy lots of fancy hardware do make sure that it is insured. Sometimes home insurance needs to be modified to cover expensive single items and if you move away from home you may need to get a policy of your own to cover your gadgets.

Final Words

Don’t spend too much on a computer. You don’t need a huge powerful machine to do our courses at Hull, actually most of the work (apart from 3D game writing) could be performed on a fairly basic system costing less than 300 pounds. We do have machines on campus which you can use, including some really powerful ones in the games lab which are available to students who need a lot of horsepower. Remember that anyone who tells you that you need the most expensive and powerful system they have is probably a computer salesman….

Boggle Flash Game Review

Found this today on sale cheap and just had to buy a copy (although I prefer the phrase “invest in” rather than “buy”.

Very clever hardware has been shoehorned into five little battery powered boxes. Each shows a particular letter and when you put them in a row that makes a valid word you hear a beep and the game gives you some points. There must be a bunch of little radio serial ports and some RFID devices inside that let the blocks work out where they are, along with quite a reasonable sized dictionary.

Of course number one wife cares little about how it works, but she does enjoy playing the game, as do I. Well worth the investment. Comes with a nice little box you can carry the letters round in, along with some rather good party play modes.

Update on 2011-01-11 09:45 by Rob

One slight issue that we have noticed though is that the game seems to be fitted with an american dictionary. Which means that it is happy to accept words like "favor" and the like. This is a tad annoying, in that we bought what we thought was an english product (in all senses of the word).

Still fun though.

PS3 Disk Upgrade

I’m having some quality time off work this week. And by quality I mean messing around with technical things. Today I upgraded the hard disk in the PS3. I’ve had this console since the day of release, when 60G was quite a large amount of storage (as opposed to about enough to put in a phone). Anyhoo, the upgrade process looked easy enough. Buy a new disk, back up the old one, drop in the new one and do a quick restore.

And that’s how it turned out. The only real problem was finding a FAT formatted disk for the PS3 backup (the program in the PS3 is a bit fussy about this). However, having set up a disk appropriately everything went well. The only tricky thing apart from that was getting the bracket off the old drive. It had been fitted with screws that seemed to  have been tightened by Superman’s stronger brother. And of course I’d hidden the only screwdriver that stood a chance of not destroying the heads of the screws. But with a bit of care and a Swiss Army pen knife (apparently Swiss Navy ones are much harder to come by) we prevailed.

If you fancy giving yourself a bit more space for media and stuff on your PS3 I strongly recommend going for the upgrade.

Definitely not delayed

Headed back today, after a very busy week. When I checked in at the airport the girl at the desk made a few phone calls and then assured me that my flight was not going to be delayed.

I took this as a warning sign.

Turns out the flight was delayed, but fortunately for me I had such a long wait for the next one that I arrived home at the proper time.  Bad weather in Holland meant that the landing at Schipol, on the only runway they were using, was a bit more interesting than usual. Suffice it to say that the pilot earned his round of applause at the end.

When I got back we had fish and chips and then shot up town to pick up a Kinect. Had a very quick play. First impressions? It works, amazingly well.

Makerbot Thing-o-Matic

I would really (and I mean really) like one of these. It might be the last gadget I ever buy because, in theory, I could use it to make every other gadget I want for myself.  And I could make rabbits as well.

Cheap Ring Light

Some time ago I bought a ring light for my camera. This puts a bunch of super bright LEDs around the lens for illumination with no shadows. Works very well and wasn’t that expensive.  It is great for taking pictures of small items. I’ve just discovered that you can get something very similar for well under a fiver.

The Wilko Multi-purpose LED light is actually a very good light. We are going to use one to light up our summerhouse in these dark winter nights. However, it also has a hole in the middle where you can put a small camera lens, and so it also makes a rather good ring light. At less than a fiver it is well worth a look.

Worth tracking down, whether you are after lighting up underneath the stairs or taking interesting close-ups.

Playstation Move Fun and Games

Of course I got a Playstation Move. I shot up down on the way back from work and had a quick play with the system before packing for Seattle tomorrow.(It is very annoying to be going away just as I get a new toy. I’ve just found out that the Xbox Kinect is released when I’m away in Berlin at TechEd 2010 too. Oh well.)

The controllers themselves are very well made, and feel great in the hand. They use internal rechargeable batteries and you need to have a bunch of mini-usb cables to charge them all up. The ball on the end which lights up is all squidgy, which doesn’t affect the gameplay much, but does make it less painful if you happen to hit anyone with that bit. Each controller is supplied with a sturdy looking wrist strap which you are strongly advised to use.

I happened to already have a Playstation Eye webcam which I plugged in and then spent a while getting lined up correctly. First thing I noticed was that you need quite a big room to play this properly. They say you should stand around 8 feet from the screen, which might be a problem in some bedrooms.

Then I had a go at the table tennis game, which I regard as the benchmark application for this kind of technology. Having lined up camera I got started. It really is impressive. The bat on the screen matched exactly how I was holding the controller. I could twist my wrist and move forward and back and the bat followed me exactly. Better yet, the things I did when hitting the ball (applying top spin and back spin etc) translated exactly onto what happens in the game. I was actually able to leverage my existing table tennis skills and use them to beat one of the computer opponents. I can see myself spending a lot of time with this game. Given the amount of jumping about that I ended up doing  it might even be good for me.

Finally there was just time to have a quick go with the party game. This is a bunch of deeply silly mini-games which are quite engaging for a single player and would probably be a riot for a bunch of people. Again, the on screen rendition of whatever I was holding (my favourite was the mole whacking mallet) was exactly fitted into the picture of my hand on the screen.

Final impressions, very good. It has the controller abilities of the Wii hooked up to the greater rendering power of a PS3. It is a bit expensive though, to get a webcam, two controllers and a couple of games you are nudging up to the price of a complete Wii system. The games that are presently available are OK, but a bit slight. It will be really interesting when some of the more hard core games get the Playstation Move makeover.

Travels with a Kindle

I took my Kindle on holiday with me last week. Turned out to be a good decision. I loaded it up with a few books (and it also took a few PDF files, including the manual for the camera) and off we went. The Kindle I’ve got has the Whispernet feature, which means that it connects over the 3G phone network and fetches content that way. It also has an experimental web browser. While waiting for a train in Milan last week I fired it up, just to see what would happen.

It worked fine. It looked to me like I was getting free web access abroad (which is usually very expensive). I then bought a travel guide from the Amazon store and this downloaded fine as well. It looks like a Kindle gives you a way of surfing the web for free anywhere in europe, which is interesting. Then again, when the feature stops being experimental it might start being expensive.

As for the travel guide, what I’ve learnt is that for books that you just read straight through a Kindle is great. For things that you want to refer to and flip between pages, like a travel guide, not so great. It made a reasonable job of the pictures and some of the material was useful, but for pure ease of use a real book wins in this situation.

Rob Miles is not on Kindle Yet

Who, me?

I got my new Kindle from Amazon today .  Of course, the first thing I did was search for myself in the Kindle store. Imagine my surprise when I found that I’d put three books on there and was charging over seven pounds each for them (that’s more than they are asking for Tony Blair’s memoirs – so they got that bit right). Either I’ve uploaded them and set the price in my sleep, or there is something strange going on here. I’ve asked Amazon to find out what is going on.

As for the Kindle  itself. It is a perfectly formed device that is going to spell the death knell for a lot of paper books. I got a Sony E-Reader some time back and quite liked it, but loading books was  a pain and the display was useless for anything interactive.

The Kindle fixes both these problems. You can even use it to browse to my blog and the pictures look strangely wonderful in grey scale. As a paperback replacement it is fantastic. It is ultra-portable (at the moment I’m using an A5 envelope as a case) and the screen is really easy to read. The integration with Amazon is impressive to the point of scary. I got the one with the built in 3G phone and stuff just arrives as though by magic. It also has WiFi which works fine at home but not on the university campus. This is because the Kindle doesn’t support the WPA2 Enterprise security that we use at Hull.

It is a bit glib to say that the Kindle will do for books what the ipod did for music. But I don’t think that it is far from the truth.

One reason for getting the Kindle was to experiment with page layouts that work best on the small screen. I’ll be putting properly a formatted version of the Yellow Book on the Kindle store soon.

But the ones there are the moment are not from me.

Ring Light Fun and Games

The ring light does give your pictures a strange set of shadows I quite like.

A ring flash is a flash gun that fits around the lens of your camera. It is noted for taking photographs that contain no shadows (since the light source is around the lens) and being very expensive.

A ring light on the other hand is a ring of LED lights which fit around the lens and is much cheaper than a flash. It is a steady light, which means you can use it for movies as well as stills. The major disadvantage is that it is not as bright as a flash. As far as I’m concerned this is not a huge problem, since I really want to use the light for close ups.

If you want something for your SLR that will give your pictures a bit of extra pop, and is great for portraits (no shadows means no wrinkles) then I’d recommend that you take a look.

Got Cube

Picked up my shiny, new-ish, Nissan Cube today. It is every bit as great as I thought it would be. And it has footwells that light up in different colours.

Rob and the Cube

I wasn’t looking to buy a new car. I never am. Particularly after just having had the current one serviced. But they had some Cubes at the Nissan dealership and I just had to go and have a look. And I think the Cube looks great. (Although opinions differ).

Inside it is a bit like driving a conservatory and I don’t think it will win any speed races. But I really like it. My definition of great car is “A vehicle that transports a really good SatNav and sound system around, along with space for gadgets”. The Cube does all that.  And it has a rear view camera. In colour. The plan is for some trickle down action, with number one wife getting my car so every body wins.

If you are looking to by something mini-MPV’ish with a really distinctive style (the only car I’ve ever owned that I would probably be able to draw a recognisable picture of) then there are some amazing deals on the Cube at the moment.

Helicopter Repair Day

I love the phrase “Big Size”.

A neat little package arrived today from Hong Kong. This contained an unbroken version of the bit of my helicopter I smashed a week or so ago. I thought it would take a minute or so to fit the replacement. Not so. We had to remove a little metal pin from a little plastic thing, and then put it back without any damage.

We got one out of two, but it the craft is now mostly mended. It doesn’t quite hang in the air like it used to, but that is because the stabiliser bar is now stiffer than it use to be and so I’ll have to loosen that bit. But it is a lot more mended than it was.