A handy tip for those who don’t have expensive fluid video tripod heads.
Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys
Mounting phone costs…
…not very much!
I’ve just received one of my cheapest eBay purchases in a while and was pleasantly surprised.
It gives your iPhone or HTC a standard 1/4″ tripod mount socket. Not the most robust construction, but not as plasticky as I’d expected, either. It ships from Hong Kong, so takes a little while to arrive, but here’s why it’s worthwhile…
The price is about £1.40 (about $US 2.20). Including postage.
Silicon heating
In the study/shed at the end of my garden, I’ve just turned off an elderly Pentium-based PC which consumed about 200-300W.
The result is that I now need to turn up the heating.
Is this foolish? I mean, the vast majority of energy used by CPUs, RAM, hard disks and PSU emerges in the form of heat in the room in which they’re located. Will my underfloor heating be more efficient? In the same way, I’ve been replacing my nice old filament lightbulbs with expensive and less-pretty LEDs. I know it makes sense in the summer, but in the winter…?
Of course, the problem with the PC was that it was indiscriminate in its heating tendencies – for the last few months I’ve often been sitting in here with the door or window open – whereas the real heating is thermostatically controlled. On the other hand, the PC could actually do useful work as a side effect – run backups, for example.
I’ve often thought that in houses of the future, computing power should be combined with the heating and air-conditioning systems: it would make much more sense to have them in the same room and then distribute pixels and heat from the same source. (Which is partly why I’m looking forward to future DisplayLink chips with full ethernet support).
In the meantime, how about a thermostatically-controlled PC? Has anyone done this? It would be off on hot summer days, come on as the temperature dropped, and you could schedule certain tasks – backups, downloads, compressing the TV programs you’ve captured, ripping DVDs, re-indexing document collections, uploading photos to the cloud – to run at times based at least to some degree on the usefulness of the energy consumption involved.
I feel a patent coming on…
A tale of two iPhones
I know that several people have been buying iPhones recently, but I wonder how many bought two in one day?
I have. Well, to be fair, I did have to take one back. I initially purchased the iPhone 4S from Three. But unfortunately, the Three network has almost no coverage in my home, as I discovered when I got it back there. (The moral of this story is to make sure that you haven’t transferred your previous phone number to your new network until you’ve tested aspects of it that are important to you. Fortunately, I hadn’t.) Here’s the Three coverage map of Cambridge:
You see that little light-coloured hole in the bottom left corner with no coverage? That’s where I live. Which is a bummer, because Three’s bandwidth, customer support, and prices are all really quite good.
However, I’m working at home now, and so being able to receive calls on my mobile while at home is really quite important.
And so I took my phone back into town, sorted out all the refunds and cancellation of contracts, and got another one. I was actually quite amazed that two shops in the centre of Cambridge both had availability of the iPhone I wanted. But sure enough, there was another 64GB 4S in black at Vodafone. And Vodafone, I did know, had good coverage at my home. Their data plans suck. At least, in comparison to Three or some of the other carriers. But, when I got it home, the coverage was fine.
And with Vodafone, there is an interesting twist, which is that if the coverage hadn’t been good, I could have bought a femtocell to improve it. I gather that these are not really very good, but since, if you have a contract, you can get the box from Vodafone for only £20, it seems as if ‘not very good’ might be much better than ‘nothing at all’ which is what some of the other carriers were able to give me.
Anyway, I’m loving this new phone. The camera is excellent, though I’ve only just started playing with it. Here’s a quick low-light shot from my kitchen:
But the Siri voice recognition system also seems to be splendid. In fact, this entire post was dictated into my iPhone, with only very minor corrections, and the insertion of links and images, afterwards. Writing something of this length, using a small phone keyboard, would have been a real pain. I am exceedingly impressed, especially considering the problems I’ve had with speech recognition systems in the past. The only downside is that it will only work when you have a good network signal because it relies on cloud-based services. But otherwise the implementation is great: there is a little microphone key next to the on the keyboard, and so almost anywhere the keyboard pops up, you can decide to dictate rather than type.
And so this has just been dictated into my WordPress blog page and I’m now going to hit save.
New toy
I’ve been having fun with my new Panasonic GH2. A very nice toy.
All this and it shoots 1080p too 🙂
QR-code size envy
I normally use QR codes to communicate small amounts of information: URLs or phone numbers, typically.
But I discovered today that the spec allows them to be really quite large. This is the biggest I could manage, and I have successfully scanned this from the screen using Optiscan on my iPhone 3GS, but I had to hold the phone very still and make sure the code filled the image.
(You can click it for the same thing at a larger scale)
It defeated the other two apps I have – QR App and QuickMark. But at this scale the resolution of the camera starts to be significant – you don’t get very many pixels per block – so the same apps might work on an iPhone 4.
Can anyone else read it? (Using a camera from the screen, that is..)
Progressing parallelograms
Pretty abstract for me, eh?
There’s an app called ‘Camera for iPad’ which allows your iPhone to be used as a remote camera for an iPad, which doesn’t have a camera of its own. Quite fun. It shows a ‘viewfinder’ on the iPad, so of course I pointed the camera at that.
So this is a view, taken on an iPhone, of a view on an iPad of what an iPhone is seeing when the iPhone camera is pointed at the iPad. The kitchen ceiling light is reflected in the iPad screen.
Capturing the coolness
The coldest moment in my part of Cambridge recently was at 6.50 on the morning of Dec 19th, when the temperature in my back garden reached -10.5 deg C. Phawww!… Pretty chilly for here…
I know this interesting fact because one of last year’s toys was a Hobo Datalogger and an external temperature probe, which I bought because I suspected the thermostat on my hot water boiler of misbehaving. It wasn’t – but there are all sorts of situations where it’s quite fun to be able to record temperatures over an extended period.
The Hobo’s a lovely device, not much bigger than a matchbox, and you can configure it to capture data over a specified time period and at a particular frequency, and it’ll run almost for ever on a very small battery.
Click for a bigger version.
I hesitated for a while because I didn’t feel like paying for the HOBOware software, which, even in its ‘lite’ variety, costs 40 quid. It seemed like a lot when all I wanted was a list of numbers: why couldn’t they just let me get at the raw data? But I have to admit it does its job rather well, and it lets you configure the unit and navigate around any graphs produced. Also, I realised, the output of some of the sensor devices is not linear, so it’s doing rather more than simply recording voltages.
The unit I bought has built-in humidity and temperature detectors, and sockets where you can plug in a couple of other sensors – my external probe let me record the temperature both inside the studio and outside. I’m now trying to resist buying accessories like current clamps, which would let me record the power going to the under-floor heating system…
All in all, a fun toy.
Having the plastic to go paperless
Keen though I am to reduce the amount of paper in my life, I am still hesitant about switching all of my utility bills to electronic form because they are often useful, in the UK, as proof of your residential address.
Mobile phone bills, however, tend to be excluded, and since almost every gadget I buy comes with a SIM, I now have quite a few of these! But there’s a different problem when it comes to switching many of these to paperless billing, as illustrated just now by my iPad contract with Vodafone. How do you do it?
Well, you go to Vodafone’s site, and register for an online account. The first thing you need to do is enter your phone number. What is the phone number of my iPhone? Fortunately I had a recent bill handy, so I could look it up, never having needed it for anything other than this before.
Then you hit a second problem. They send you a text message with a security code in it, which you need to enter into the web site. Except, as they well know, this is an iPad, on a special iPad-only contract, and it sadly has no way of reading text messages. (Nor does my Mifi. Nor my 3G dongle, at least with a Mac.) Mmm….
OK, well, SMS messages are sent to the number identified by the SIM, not the device, so I can take the SIM out of the iPad and put it in a phone. (As a matter of course, I always have all my devices unlocked whenever I possibly can, just to make this sort of thing possible.)
Then you hit the third problem. My whopping great iPad has a micro-SIM, while my decidedly smaller iPhone has a regular sized SIM. Fortunately, you can buy adapters which convert one to the other. (If you need to go the other way, you can do so with a pair of scissors, or with a special cutter.)
So the process becomes: move SIM from non-SMS-receiving device to receiving device, having previously unlocked the latter if they’re on different networks, and making use of cutters or adapters as required, then register on first device’s network website, noting and entering any codes that may be texted to you, then restore everything to its previous state afterwards. In the States, where there’s a reasonable chance that your different devices wouldn’t have compatible radio circuitry, it would be even worse.
One feels that this might be a bit of an oversight on the part of the service providers…
Old and Creeky?
One of my treasured possessions is my old Creek Audio CAS 4040 amplifier, which I bought as an undergraduate. It was something of a classic for low-budget hi-fi enthusiasts like me when it was launched in the eighties. For £99 it had an excellent sound, and it was from a small and little-known British company, which gave owners a pleasant feeling of being cognoscenti discovering a fine wine at a budget price. You can get a feel for its vintage from the fact that all the audio connections are made via DIN sockets – remember them?
A decade and a half later, when I started delving into DVDs and surround sound, I paid a very great deal more for an all-singing, all-dancing Sony amp, which weighs about the same as a small truck, and which has optical fibre and coax digital inputs, but doesn’t sound as good as the Creek. The Creek gets less use now, though, because it’s in the sitting room and connected to a CD player, and, like most people, that’s not how I listen to most music these days.
Skip forward to the present day, when I’m setting up my new study, have fixed some nice Tannoy speakers to the wall, and am wondering how to connect my iMac to them. I’ve experimented in the past with small computer audio amps from people like Griffin, often powered from USB or Firewire, but have never been really happy with them. I don’t want to go out and buy a shiny, flashy, expensive modern amp – remember, I only need to amplify one single line-level output. Someone, I thought, must make a small monitor amp for this sort of thing, but I couldn’t find one, and certainly not at a reasonable price.
What I really need, I thought one day, is something like the old Creek: that would be perfect! So I headed over to eBay and did a search, and sure enough, manage to find some Creek amps and a few days later was the proud owner of a second CAS 4040. This is the newer Series 3 model, with phono sockets(!), and dates, I think, from about 1990. It sounds great, does just what I wanted, and even fits neatly under the iMac.
And the price I paid on eBay? £99. So my two Creek amps cost the same, despite quarter of a century between purchases! I couldn’t be happier.
‘iPad (and low keyboard)
On the London train recently I was using a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad, and it was a very good match for the limited space in the seat. The iPad sat on the little table-shelf thing and the keyboard on my lap, partly under the shelf.
It may not look it, but it was really comfortable, and the Vodafone 3G connection held up well. There is no way I could have done productive work in this space on my laptop, but I managed to fire off quite a few emails and Skype messages on the iPad, and, of course, it had enough battery for the journey there and back and quite a lot of use in-between…
A master stroke
I’ve just seen a very inspiring gadget: the Pool-Mate, from a small UK company called Swimovate. It’s a watch designed for swimmers, which will count your strokes, laps, etc and provide a variety of statistics about your swimming. It’s an elegant design, simple and affordable – nothing flashy.
This may be of limited interest to those who aren’t serious swimmers, but the bits that inspired me were twofold: Firstly, the watch contains a simple two-axis accelerometer. By analysing the movement of your wrist, it can tell all sorts of things about your swimming. This is a lovely bit of signal processing done with very limited CPU power, and with no calibration required. Remember, the signals will be different for each person, and also for each different stroke, arm movements for breaststroke being very different from those used for front crawl.
The second thing that inspired me was meeting the CEO, Lisa Irlam, and hearing how she and her husband built the prototype and then the product with their own funding on a very limited budget. They deserve to be proud, both as technologists and as business people.
All my spare energy is going on dog-walking at present, but if I ever get back to swimming, I’ll have to get one of these!
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