dale lane

CurrentCost has been a bit of a buzz going round Hursley for a few weeks now.

I’ve been resisting the temptation to get involved, because I know how obsessive I get about stuff, and I’m a bit busy at the moment to take on another new obsession!

But last week, I weakened. It was all looking a bit too cool, so I figured I had to give it a go.

I’m a few weeks behind the other guys at Hursley, so I’ve not got much to add that hasn’t already been said yet. Still, I have a few readers from outside the IBM group, so thought I’d share links to posts I’ve been following about what other IBMers have been up to, and add my first impressions.

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I’ve twittered this already, but for those people not following the inane minutiae of my life, here is another call.

I got an XBox 360 for my birthday (woot!) and am really getting into XBox Live games. If you know me and play on XBox Live, feel free to add me as a friend. My gamertag is dalelane.

And don’t be surprised if I become massively unproductive for the next few weeks…

It’s my birthday today, and one of my presents was a Flickr subscription. How cool is that?!

There’s lots that I want to play with, but my first experiment with Flickr was to upload the same AVI video file that I uploaded to YouTube last week. I was curious to see the difference in picture quality between the two.

I’ve embedded them both below so you can see for yourself. This isn’t meant to be a representative or scientific test, but as first impressions go, I much prefer Flickr video. The interface feels cleaner, and the video quality is better.

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I’ve been playing with a mobile broadband for the past few weeks, with a USB modem dongle courtesy of 3mobilebuzz. In return for a three months free trial - free loan of the hardware, with free (unlimited) data usage - the deal is that I have to post my thoughts about it. So here goes

The idea
The EEE PC, and the slew of EEE PC alternatives that have followed it, have started to get more people thinking about mobile computing. It’s now possible (and not too expensive!) to have a fully-fledged personal computer that is so small that you can leave it in the bottom of a bag and have it with you all the time on the off-chance that it might come in useful. And so light that you’ll barely notice.

I love the EEE PC. You can do a surprising amount of work on such a small machine. With the built-in wifi, if I’m at home or in a coffee shop, I can get online and do even more.

But that leaves a lot of places where I can’t get it online.

And that’s what appealed about the idea of mobile broadband dongles. Because for the size and weight of something like a USB memory key in the bottom of my bag, the EEE PC can now be online (pretty much) anywhere.

Plug it in, wait a few seconds, and it’s online. Internet access anywhere, anytime. Proper Internet. That is a very cool thing.

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Although a lot of people seem to be finding my Twitter widget for Windows Mobile useful, it seems that there are also a few people who noticed that it was hacked together in a few hours overnight!

One of the more noticed issues was the fact that the widget reused the mobile’s existing Internet connection.

It was described in emails such as:

Some times I have to invoke a data session with PIE or another networked app before it will let me send a twit. Anyway to make it start it’s own network session if one doesn’t already exist?

and in tweets such as

The issue is that when you use the web services APIs, this is all handled for you. But I rolled my own HTTP POST code using the wininet API. And these low-level calls aren’t so helpful.

It wasn’t a problem for me, because my phone is always connected anyway. But enough people have mentioned it, so I figured it was worth looking into!

If anyone is interested in how you start a connection programmatically in C++, read on.

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My first experience as an eBay seller is nearing an end. I stopped off at the Post Office on my way home this afternoon, and put the item I was selling in the post.

I knew there would be a cost involved, but had no idea what to expect as to how much it’d be.

For those people like me who have never sold anything on eBay before, here is an entirely unscientific and unrepresentative anecdote. Make of it what you will.

I was selling an unwanted gift. It was new, still boxed and in it’s original shink wrap. It sold for £730.

• Fees to eBay - £46.23
• Fees to Paypal - 25.02
• Postage - £5.80
• Packing - £1.00

Total fees : £78.05

Nearly 11% of the sales value. Feels like a lot.

I dunno… I guess it’s hard to justify sounding too aggrieved. I was selling something that I’d not spent any money on, so even after 11% in costs, I’m still getting a lot of money (a sum that will be a *big* help).

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As I said on Friday, Friday was IBM Hackday 5. I didn’t really explain what HackDay is, but if you’re not familiar with it, Kelly has posted a good description.

I made all my excuses in my last post, so with them out of the way, here is my hack.

The idea is an old one - but I’ll summarise it again here.

The hack was to extend the twitter.com website to provide additional context for people’s tweets.

Every twitter user can maintain their own personal dictionary of terms, that describe their personal significance when they use them in tweets. When one of these terms is used in a tweet, it is highlighted in some way, and if the user hovers their mouse over them, the full description is shown in a pop-up.

For example, my twitter dictionary might include entries like:

• Grace - my three-year old daughter
• Faith - my baby girl
• Hursley - IBM Hursley Park, the site where I work
• SYA - a youth charity that I started and am now on the board of trustees for

The idea isn’t to say what something means (why try and replace people’s ability to use Google?) but to say what it means to the tweeter.

Other uses could include to provide ‘disclosure’. For example, when I see posts by James Governor, I often see a few lines at the end such as:

…IBM is a client. RedMonk runs Google Docs. Google and Salesforce are not clients. We don’t currently use Salesforce apps…

But in the twitter world where thoughts fit into 140 characters, there isn’t the space to include this sort of context with every tweet. So James’ twitter glossary might include entries like:

• IBM - IBM is a client

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My latest Maplin purchase - an electronics set for Grace. My plan to turn her into a mini-geek continues!

I still remember my first electronics set. It was good, but this one - ‘Snap Circuits Jr‘ - is so much better.

Firstly - the ease in which the bits snap together. Each component is mounted on thick chunky pieces of plastic, that snap onto a plastic board. The pieces clip together very easily - the idea is that you can connect stuff without needing fine motor controls, so my three-year old can put the pieces in roughly the right place and give them a push to click them together.

Secondly - the quality of the kit. It all feels very solid - you don’t get the feel that it’s cheap plastic or spend your time worrying that Grace is going to break it.

The manual that comes with it includes 101 different project ideas, with large colour diagrams that she was able to copy. Before long, she was putting together circuits by herself just from the plans - which was so cool!

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