Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys

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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iRex digital reader

Slowly but surely, e-paper-based digital book readers are going from strength to strength.
I’ve written before about the Iliad and several times about my Sony PRS.

iRex have now released their Digital Reader series – ‘the largest, yet thinnest e-reader ever’ – with a 10.2-inch display, and 1024×1280 resolution.

Starting at £469, though – that’s quite a lot of paperbacks…

Update: Plastic Logic have been showing off the prototype of their new reader at DEMO, as well.

Thanks to Stephen De Gabrielle for the links.

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Disk Dock

After having a couple of hard disks do slightly wobbly things recently, I’ve been thinking about backups again, and have just treated myself to a Drobo – a wonderful, if somewhat pricey gadget. Storage Supplies had the best UK pricing I could find for the Firewire version, if anyone else is considering one…

This device looks like an interesting option for making backups to be taken offsite, though:

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Datacase

It’s fascinating to watch people discover new ways of using the iPhone/iTouch. The fun, I’m sure, is only just starting. It’s the first widely-deployed device that has a multi-touch interface. It’s the first mobile device with really good accelerometers in it. It’s the first thing you can drop easily into your pocket that has such a beautiful screen. It has good connectivity and location-based services. It’s really easy to install new applications. And, significantly, it’s the first to combine all of these with a sophisticated GUI and operating system.

Sometimes, though, it’s the simple things that can be the most useful. People have just started realising that you can make your phone into a fileserver on the local network, which means (a) you can transfer stuff to and from your phone without using iTunes if wanted, and (b) you can do it from any machine on the network, not just the one you normally sync with, and (c) you can also just ask your family or colleagues to drop files onto your phone. Do you remember how, in the old days, we would carry around memory sticks that had to be plugged in?

The application I’m playing with, DataCase, appears on your network as an AFP and FTP server, which means you can just open it in the Finder or in Windows, and, as an aside, it makes the contents available over HTTP. Yes, it’s a web server. And we’ve certainly only just started to imagine the full implications of carrying a web server in your pocket…

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Joiku to the world

In the past (here and here) I’ve written about how I really wanted my 3G phone to operate as a mobile wifi basestation. I got excited when I discovered the early versions of JoikuSpot, and played with it, but it was very flaky.

Well, I’ve just JoikuSpot Premium is out, supports full connectivity and doesn’t depend on the web proxy that the ‘lite’ version used. I can now get 3G connectivity to my iTouch and my laptop at the same time. If you have one of the supported Nokia or Samsung phones, it’s well worth the €15.

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Rock (and roll)

If your neighbours share your musical tastes, or are very distant, this might be just what you need:

Now, wouldn’t a little light Vivaldi add the finishing touch to that garden party you were planning? You can pretend that the string quartet are hiding behind the rockery…

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Remotely Possible

One of the neatest apps to be released for the new iPhone/iTouch software is Apple’s Remote, which connects to a copy of iTunes running on a machine on your network and allows you to control it from the iPod.

This is great, but I seldom feel the need to control my computer from across the room. It lives in a very small study and, from across the room, I can reach the keyboard! I did, however, have an old Airport Express hanging about, and an idea occurred to me today… I plugged it into the back of my stereo downstairs:

and configured my iTunes upstairs to play through the Airport Express, and suddenly I had wireless control of my entire music collection at my fingertips.

But wait, it gets better… I found the Settings panel on the Remote application and it had grown a new feature: the ability to select the speakers you want to use:

So now, sitting on the sofa, I can browse my music located in another room, and send it to the big speakers in this one.

Very cool. Mmm… Those Airport Expresses on eBay start to look much more attractive…

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F.I.B

Oh boy! I so want one of these:

Flying inflatable boat

Arfon has a beautiful photo of one in action here, and there are lots more in the gallery on the Polaris site.

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The charger of the heavy brigade

I’ve just bought a new battery charger, which recharges standard AAs or AAAs in 15 minutes. You may be able to see the grill behind the batteries – for ventilation. Yes, this is a charger with a 60W power supply and a built-in fan, which cools the batteries as they charge.

It certainly seems to work as advertised, but does anyone know if there are implications, good or bad, for the life of your batteries if you charge them this way?

I bought it here, by the way.

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Homer page?

Neil Davidson from Red Gate software was visiting the other day, and since he’d seen my interest in the Iliad, he brought his along:

My brief experiments left me quite impressed. It’s beautifully manufactured and has the best e-ink-type screen I’ve seen yet. It has wifi, too, and I gather from friends that it’s rather more ‘hackable’ than some of the competition. And unusually, you can also write on it with a stylus:

Nice for notes & sketching, but you can also annotate PDFs.

Of course, there are downsides. Joe Newman tells me that it’s slow to boot, and the battery life is around 5 hours of reading… both of which are markedly different from my Sony. I guess you have to keep more bits powered up on the Iliad, to detect stylus contact etc, whereas the Sony uses almost no power at all until you turn a page. I felt it really needed a processor with double the speed, which no doubt would swallow a battery even faster. And, of course, the biggest problem is the price: at £400, it costs more than two Kindles.

Nonetheless, I think this, and not the Kindle, is really the shape of things to come.

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