Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys

A fire may have been Kindled

As an experiment, I’ve just read a whole Kindle book on my iPod Touch. And, rather unexpectedly, I went straight back and ordered another.

It’s not that the reading experience is the best in the world… though it’s not at all bad. The benefit I hadn’t predicted came from my always having my iPod in my pocket, and therefore always having good reading matter in my pocket. Even in the loo.

It’s a library that’s smaller than any single book I own.

And it’s a book that always opens up at the place where you left off. Useful if you just want to read a few sentences while waiting for the train.

And it’s a book that you don’t need to have the light on to read. Useful if you wake up earlier than your partner.

All these factors meant that I probably got through the book rather faster on my iTouch than I would have on a proper Kindle.

Or on paper.

Not what I expected.

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Don’t knock Nokia…

My ageing Nokia E61 was, in many ways, an excellent phone – it was my TomTom, my Blackberry, a pretty good web browser, but it was starting to have occasional hiccups, and ‘out of memory errors’ once I started syncing over 1000 contacts to it from my Mac. It was time for a replacement, and an iPhone would be the natural thing for someone who loves the iTouch as much as I do, but I’m in the twilight zone at the end of a service contract and to switch suppliers would be expensive at present; besides, I won’t be surprised if there’s a new iPhone in the summer.

So I opted for a second-hand E71 from eBay, having read rave reviews for it, and I have to say it’s a very nice device. It’s familiar, being a successor to the E61, and adds a reasonable 3MP camera, a GPS – even, I discovered this morning, an FM radio – all in a much smaller and sexier package.

What many Nokia smartphone users may not know is that Nokia give out some quite interesting bits of software from time to time. Nokia Messaging makes up for the fact that I can’t install Blackberry Connect on this device, for example.

My only real disappointment was with the battery life, which was poor even by 3G smartphone standards. But even there, help was at hand in the form of the Nokia Energy Profiler – a very cool tool which can monitor all sorts of things.

If you leave this running as a background process you can try making adjustments to your configuration to see the effect. The peak in the power consumption shown on the screen was when I turned the camera on, for example.

Through this I discovered that switching off HSPDA – leaving me with 3G but not ‘3.5G’ – would give me a substantial cut in power usage, and hopefully extend my normal battery life beyond a day… we’ll see how it goes!

Update: Well, it didn’t notably extend my battery life. But what did make a difference was switching the ‘Packet data connection’ setting from ‘When available’ to ‘When needed’. Now I get a whole day and a bit more.

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Slip Slidin’ Away

My friend Ray Gordon recently gave me one of the most useful iTouch/iPhone hints I’ve had in some time. If you already know this, it is blindingly obvious, but if you don’t, you definitely want to!

On the iPhone keyboard, you can tap the shift key to switch to caps, and the symbol/numeric key to switch to the layout that includes commas, hypens, numbers etc. But did you know that you can touch those keys and then slide your finger to the character you want? When you release, the keyboard reverts back to the mode it was in before. So if you want, say, to insert a hyphen or an apostrophe in the middle of a word, you need just one click-and-slide, rather than three clicks.

Try it and you’ll never look back!

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C18th, meet C21st

Amazon have just released the Kindle software for the iPhone/iTouch. It’s only available to US customers, but I have a US credit card so was able to download it. This means I can now get any of 240,000 books on my iPod, within a few seconds.

And the reading experience is pretty good: there’s not much text visible at once in the standard font size, but a slight swipe of thumb or finger is all that’s needed to turn the page. Mmm. This could prove expensive.

No prizes for guessing which book I downloaded first, though! (Kindle version)

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The pen is mightier… than it used to be

My favourite recent gadget is a Livescribe Pulse. Described in their Architecture Overview as ‘a Montblanc-sized computer’, it’s a pen which incorporates the Anoto technology – there’s a small camera which points at the tip, and a very faint dot pattern on the paper which allows it to recognise its position. The upshot is that it records what you write and can transfer it to the computer when you put it in its USB dock.

2009-02-14_10-38-00

The technology has been around for some time… you can get similar pens from Nokia and Logitech, and the paper is quite widely available. But there are a few things that persuaded me it was the right time to try one:

  • The pen is aesthetically more pleasing, I think, than its predecessors.
  • There is support for the Mac. Decidedly beta quality at present, but the 1.0 release is out on Tuesday.
  • The coolest bit of all: it has a microphone built in. If you’re in a meeting, making notes, you can also be recording the audio. Later, you can tap on some text you wrote – or click on it if you’ve transferred it to your PC – and it will play back what was being said at the time you wrote the text. Quite brilliant.

There are quite a few fun things you can do with this beyond simple note-taking, and they’ve even got an SDK so, if you want to, you can write your own ‘penlet’ applications for it.

I got mine from a UK supplier, Magicomm. Livescribe have just announced another round of investment funding. They deserve to do well, I think.

Update: Bother… they’ve postponed the Mac release for a month or so.

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Expanding your horizons

My friend Phil Endecott has just released a rather interesting iPhone app: Panoramascope.

It can identify the various peaks visible from your current location, which, if you start to think carefully about what that involves, is actually quite clever. And, if you take a photo with your phone, you can overlay the app’s view on your photo.

If, like me, you live in a place where peaks are things you dream of going to see on holiday, it can have more prosaic uses, like telling you where nearby pubs or tourist attractions can be found. You can also save locations, so you can look fondly back at the view you had last summer from the top of the Matterhorn.

Start by loading some overlay sets – in my case, European placenames, peaks, and pubs – and then you can search for a location, which is generally much easier than entering latitude and longitude. Here’s part of the view from Coniston Old Man:

This will work on an iPod Touch, but you really want an iPhone for the GPS and camera facilities.

Available from The iTunes store, of course, but there’s a lot more information available at Panoramascope.com.

Update: Ha! If the thought of viewing all those glorious peaks makes you feel exhausted, and you’re more interested in the pub-finding options, Phil also has something just for you!

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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 2008

Thanks to Claes-Fredrik for pointing me at another toy I can’t afford! This is supposedly the world’s first viable flying car – well, flying buggy, really – but they’re planning to ‘drive’ it from London to Timbuktu to prove it works.

More information in this Times article, and more pictures on the expedition’s website.

Now, it seems to me that, as an expeditionary vehicle, this isn’t quite complete until you put some floats on the side and make it amphibious. That must be the ultimate – when you combine it with one of these. Then I might have to remortgage the house…

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Focus on the time

A hint for photographers…

One of the things that encouraged me to switch to digital photography in the early days was the simple fact that all my photos were time-stamped. Now I can always sort images into the order in which they were taken – often the easiest way to find something – but I also have a rough chronological record of my life which can sometimes be very useful. If I want to remember when I was last in Paris, for example, I’ll almost certainly go and browse my photos to find out.

Usually, the timestamp doesn’t need to be very exact. I always have the camera set to GMT, wherever I am – changing timezones is too much trouble – but a few minutes of clock drift is not important. Recently, however, I’ve been geotagging my photos – a big post coming about that sometime soon – and precise timing can then be much more useful.

So if I’m about to upload photos from a camera on which I haven’t recently set the time, I’ll sometimes take a photo of the clock on my screen. This is synchronised with Apple’s NTP servers and so is one of the most accurate clocks in the house, and will be nicely in sync with the timestamps on my GPS receiver. Once the batch of photos is uploaded, I can use the difference between the camera’s timestamp and the time shown in the image to fix the timestamps on all the photos in the batch.

What’s more, once I’ve done the batch adjustment, I can refer back to the new timestamp on this image to make sure that it matches what’s on the screen and so confirm that I didn’t make a mistake.

Regularly setting the time on the camera is even better, but this is a fix for when you take the photos before remembering it!

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Toy of the day

A quadrotor, or quadrocopter, seems to be the cool new thing at the moment for remote-control enthusiasts.

They look a bit like this:

They seem to be very stable, so are a popular camera platform:

I must find an affordable one of these somewhere! And they’re wonderful things if you want to fake a UFO sighting:

Lots more videos out there if you search YouTube – or have a look here.

You can make one yourself, of course, if you have the time, or you can buy them from someone like Draganfly if you have the money. Me, I don’t have either 🙁

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Falling markets

My first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, cost £69.95. Since then, every computer I’ve owned has cost more – usually substantially more. Until today.

Today I bought a new laptop for £179 inc. VAT, which in real terms is less than my ZX81 of 27 years ago. Progress at last! And this one I didn’t have to plug into a cassette deck and an elderly black-and-white TV!

It’s an Acer Aspire One, and I have to say that, so far, I’m really impressed. It runs OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and Skype very nicely, and it includes a few things like a camera and microphone that work remarkably well – I’ve just had a video-Skype call with my pal Jason while walking around the house.

2008-10-24_20-25-16

Of course, it has some limitations – it boots up very much faster than any Windows machine I’ve ever seen but it’s not like a Mac’s almost instantaneous wake-up from sleep. I couldn’t write this post on it but only because it can’t read the RAW-format images from my SLR, and I couldn’t watch movie trailers on the Apple site because you can’t get Quicktime for Linux. But the number of things it can do rather well are remarkable, and I could happily survive with it for a weekend when I didn’t want to carry anything heavier, or use it to catch up on news at the breakfast table.

It may not be a Mac, but it’s certainly not a ZX81!

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The landscape keyboard is mightier than… the portrait one

TouchType is a handy little iPhone/iTouch utility if you compose many email messages on your phone. That’s all it does – lets you compose or reply to emails – but it does it with a landscape-format keyboard.

By default, the standard keyboard will only switch into landscape mode in the web browser. (It’s well worth rotating your phone before typing into a web form field.) This utility can’t quite add that facility to other apps, but it creates a separate app into which you can enter larger quantities of text and then tap a button to fire them into the main mail program. If you rotate your phone and then put it down on the desk, you can just about type with two fingers.

Worthwhile, I think, considering it’s only 59p.

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Ahead of its time?

In 2001 at the AT&T Labs in Cambridge, we created a system we called the Broadband Phone:

Basically, it was a Linux-based VOIP phone with a VNC viewer and touch screen built in to it, and we built a GUI toolkit which rendered directly over the network in VNC. A standard Dell PC operated as the phone exchange (I wish we’d had Asterisk then!) and also provided the graphics for a variety of specially-written applications. It drove about 100 phones without any trouble, and we used this as our internal phone system in the lab for some time. The plan was to spin out a company based around the technology, but this was 2001, and you couldn’t get funding for new companies, whatever you did!

Anyway, at one point I created a cordless version based around a Compaq iPaq. I came across a publicity photo of it recently, and it took me a moment to realise why it looked so familiar:


Perhaps we were just too far ahead of the curve… 🙂

You can find my original pages about the Broadband Phone project here on the Internet Archive.

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