I’ve always been fascinated by the work my friend Peter Robinson and his team have been doing at the University’s Computer Lab, in trying to make computers both understand, and express, emotions.
But I hadn’t seen this very nice little video they made just over a year ago.
In 1994, Knight Ridder’s Information Design Lab produced a video which was their vision of the future of newspapers: The Tablet Newspaper. Have a look at around 2:20, and see if it looks at all familiar!
(I guess my nearest equivalent in gadget prediction is shown here.)
Tucked away on a backup disk yesterday, I discovered a few thousand of my emails from the 1990s. And in the folder from late Feb 1992, I found something I thought was lost forever. Bob Metcalfe was visiting Cambridge, on sabbatical to the University Computer Lab, just as we were setting up the Trojan Room Coffee Pot camera. He wrote about it in his column in Communications Week, a publication which, sadly, closed down not long afterwards (roughly at the time when the camera was connected to the web and became quite famous). This original article was therefore, unknowingly, the first published reference to what was to become the world’s first webcam.
But I didn’t have a copy, and nor did Bob – the old Mac floppy on which he saved it would have been hard to read now even if he could have found it – and if anyone kept an archive of CommWeek articles, I haven’t found it on the web. (Few people in 1992 would have heard of the World Wide Web, even those reading this kind of technical article.) But, as it went to press, Bob sent me a copy by email, and, sure enough, just over 20 years later, there it was, easily readable by my Apple Mail program.
There’s probably some useful lesson there about the longevity of different data formats… Anyway, while it may have little interest to anyone not closely involved with networking technologies at the time, I’m still very glad that, with Bob’s kind permission, I can now make the article available here. And I must take more care of my email archives in future…
The phenomenal success of SMS text messages is a fascinating example of many things – the need for an asynchronous communications mechanism between humans, the surprising adoption of what was originally a test facility for engineers, the merits of enforced brevity in communications, and our voluntary blindness to some costs when they’re expressed in a certain way.
Let me explain that last point. Let’s say that a text message, once outside your allowance, costs you 7p, and that the average text is maybe 70 characters long, so a character costs you 0.1p. On this basis, a megabyte of data costs £1000. About $1600. (A little more, actually, since SMS characters are only 7-bits). Or, to put it another way: to send a floppy disk’s worth of data would probably cost you a lot more than the computer from which you sent it. To send an MP3 track would cost you about the same as a car. And in my case, if I happen to be in the States when I send a text, it costs seven times as much. Seven cars.
Now, you could argue that everybody gets lots of texts in their calling plan, which is of course true, at least in your home country – I never get close to exhausting my allowance – but it’s this theoretical underlying price that allows the networks to charge for this as a bonus. Suppose you pay £3 more per month for a plan that gives you 300 texts instead of 100 texts. It looks like a bargain – you’re getting those texts for just 1.5p each! That’s only £220 or so for a megabyte, or, in music terms, a thousand quid per track.
Now, if you have a smartphone, consider the data portion of your plan. I’m looking at two Vodafone SIM-only schemes here, and the only difference between them is 500MB of data per month. The price difference is £5 – i.e. one penny per megabyte.
This factor of twenty thousand in the two different ways of sending data, over the same network, from the same device, has always amazed me. There are lots of approximations in the above calculations, of course. You could point out that IP-based traffic has lots of overheads, which of course it does, for small amounts of data, but that’s mostly because we often see that data wrapped in a web page. I also assumed that people on average only type 10 words per text; if you always used your full 160 characters you’d save a fair amount per byte. So perhaps the true cost factor is more like 5000, or even 1000. But can you think of any other aspects of your life where choosing that alternative wouldn’t make you pause for thought?
Now, this only exists at all, of course, because in the past there was no choice. Phones were simple devices without a full IP software stack, they had small keyboards and limited ability to create or display any other kind of media. But once you had phones that could run apps like iMessage or WhatsApp, which could efficiently send messages using protocols of their own, the picture changed.
So it’s no surprise that a recent study suggests mobile operators lost $14bn last year because of such apps. It was only a matter of time.
A handy tip for those who don’t have expensive fluid video tripod heads.
…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.
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…
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.
I’ve been having fun with my new Panasonic GH2. A very nice toy.
All this and it shoots 1080p too 🙂
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..)
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.
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.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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