Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

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Why I use vdr for TV

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Both here and on twitter, I’ve mentioned a few of the things I’ve done with my vdr-based media computer. In this post, I want to quickly take a step back and explain what made me go for this setup in the first place.

By way of quick background, we’ve now got an Asrock Ion 330 living under the TV as a set-top box, connected to the TV via an HDMI cable, and receiving a digital freeview signal over USB from the twin tuners in a Sony Play-TV. It’s quiet, has reasonably low power requirements, is small and pretty, can be controlled by a remote control using a small infra-red receiver plugged into a USB port, and has plenty of storage between it’s own hard-drive and the 500 GB on the Western Digital My Book attached over USB.

This isn’t a “why I use vdr instead of MythTV (or any other open-source HTPC software” post. Mainly because I don’t know enough about the alternatives to talk about them intelligently.

Instead, I wanted to explain why I went for setting up a Linux computer with a TV card instead of just buying another set-top box appliance when ours died last year. It’s not as simple (set-top boxes pretty much set themselves up nowadays) and certainly wasn’t cheaper (largely because I was starting from scratch – if I already had a server to use, that’d be different). So what was the incentive?

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What will Smart Metering look like in the UK?

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

This week, the UK government published their response to the consultation that ran over the summer. Basically, they asked how smart metering should be implemented in the UK, offered some proposals, and invited anyone to tell them what they think.

In case I hadn’t already convinced people that I was a geek, I read through the Government response paper. It basically reiterates the proposals that were outlined before the summer, summarises the responses that they received, and states the decisions that they have reached as a result.

Is it really very geeky that I found this interesting?

I wanted to highlight a few bits in particular…

… mandate a roll out of electricity and gas smart meters to all homes in Great Britain with the aim of completing the roll out by the end 2020 …

In case you missed all the press about this in the past week, the plan is still that we’re all getting smart meters, and it’ll happen in the next ten years.

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Posted in politics, tech | 8 Comments »

What happened to the integration?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

A bunch of social networking updates arrived tonight for the Xbox 360. There has been talk of twitter integration in the Xbox 360 since E3 last summer. And after all the wait… I was a little disappointed.

Because it isn’t integration.

It’s a simple stand-alone twitter client app, that you can run on the Xbox. It joins the main menu becoming something else you can run, instead of play a game or media.

That’s not integration.

If they’d added the ability to receive replies/mentions and direct messages through the Xbox messaging platform while you’re in a game (as it does already with MSN Messenger messages)… that would be integrated.

If they’d built it in to Xbox’s Achievements system, so that when you complete an achievement it offered the chance to let your followers know what you’ve achieved… say by popping up a text box prefilled with a message and a link to more info about the game you’re playing… that would be integrated.

If they’d added the ability to capture a screenshot of what you’re doing, upload it to twitpic (or some similar service) and tweet to show your followers something cool… that would be integrated.

If they’d added the chance to see compare your twitter friends list with your Xbox friends list, and add any that aren’t on both… that would be integrated.

If they’d included a twitterfone-type service to let you tweet without typing, just by talking into the Xbox headset… that would be integrated.

I’m not saying that any of these are good ideas (they’re just the first few things off the top of my head), but the point is that this sort of thing would make twitter feel like it has been integrated into the “Xbox Experience“.

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Your data. Mobile. (a hackday hack)

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

screenshot stored on PhotobucketWhat do the following have in common?

Weather Channel Max – an iPhone weather app. StockWatch – an iPhone stock prices app. CNN Mobile – an iPhone news app. FlightTrack – an iPhone flight updates app. Tweetie – an iPhone twitter app.

They are all apps which provide users with updates to their phone when some information changes. The information in question is different. But they’re all ways for users to get information that they are interested in, while they are on the move.

Having a dedicated hard-coded app for each type of data is great for information that a large number of people are interested in.

For example, there are enough people who are interested in the weather that it’s worth having an app dedicated to it.

But what if you want updates for information that isn’t so widely needed? What about niche interests?

We’re all different. There is going to be something that you’re interested in that not everyone else is. Or at least a particular set of interests that noone else exactly shares.

People’s needs and interests are almost infinitely varied, so we can’t come up with enough applications to meet everyone’s unique needs. Particularly for more esoteric topics, which are too long tail to each justify a specific mobile app.

For these situations, we need something generic that individual users can customise.

This was an idea I played with on the last IBM HackDay. I managed to get a proof-of-concept working on the day, but not had the chance to share it before now.

What I tried to create was:

  • a generic mobile application – something that can display an arbitrary number of bits of information
  • a browser extension approach – some way that a user can pick any bit of any webpage, adding it to their list of information that will be pushed to their mobile

I’ve recorded a video of it running. (Difficult to see without full-screen – sorry!)

To summarise, the steps involved are:

  1. User visits a webpage at their computer
  2. User highlights a portion of the page, and uses a Firefox extension to register this with my notifications server
  3. The notifications server informs the mobile app of the new topic of interest
  4. The notifications server continues to monitor the webpage
  5. When the highlighted portion of the webpage changes, the updated contents are pushed to the phone
  6. The mobile app notifies the user of the change

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Posted in tech | 4 Comments »

Palm Pre

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

I’ve had the Palm Pre for nearly a week now, so I thought that it was worth a quick post!

If you want to save yourself reading the rest of the post, I can summarise it for you here: the Pre is an awesome, pocket-sized piece of loveliness.

I love it. 🙂

I should probably qualify this, though – I am a longtime Palm fan… having previously bought a Palm Pilot, Palm IIIx, Sony Clie UX50 (which ran Palm OS), Palm Treo 650, Palm Treo 750 and Palm Treo Pro.

And if they hadn’t killed the Foleo before launch, I was gonna get that, too.

I was always going to want the Pre. But it really has met my expectations. It’s the device I wanted them to produce so I could justify my Palm devotion to the naysayers who were only recently predicting Palm’s demise.

There are already a ton of Pre reviews out there, so I probably shouldn’t duplicate too much of what has already been said. But there are so many things to highlight…

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Posted in tech | 8 Comments »

Pushing, pulling, or leaving the door open

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

This weekend is barcamplondon, so another chance for me to ramble incoherently about a technical topic of my choice. 🙂

My presentation started as a bit of a cop-out. I was ill last week and weekend when I was planning to prepare a new presentation, so I decided to give the same talk I did at Over The Air last month and hope that I didn’t get any of the same attendees.

But then I started tweaking it to suit the different audience. Over The Air is an event for mobile developers, so my presentation was pretty much aimed at mobile devs, which wasn’t quite right for a general event like barcamplondon.

Then I started updating it to reflect the feedback I got, both on the day at Over The Air, and through comments and tweets since.

My talk at OTA was a technical “Introduction to MQTT” session.

My presentation for barcamplondon became a broader look at mobile apps that rely on data from the Internet, and the challenges and choices facing mobile app developers who write them.

And I think it’s better for it. I hope it didn’t come across as pimping MQTT. I still talked about MQTT, but this time it was to use it as an example of one of a broader set of choices:

The aim of the talk was to discuss the pros and cons of each approach.

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Mobile Widgets – the new hotness?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Over The Air was a month ago now, so this post has been sat in draft for way too long. But I thought it was still worth quickly sharing something noticeable from the event.

By way of quick background for those who aren’t familiar with it, it is an event for mobile developers – a couple of days filled with talks and presentations on all things mobile.

And this year, the big thing seemed to be widgets. There were a lot of talks on widgets. So many, in fact that you could choose a session in every time slot that was about widgets.

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Writing an offline wiki client

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Friday was the seventh IBM Hack Day, and I again got the chance to spend a day playing with some random ideas.

As Hack Days go, I had a surprisingly productive day! I had four ideas on the day:

  • two mobile hacks (both of which I wrote a chunk of code for),
  • a twitter hack (which never got off the scribbled diagram stage, but it’s an idea I definitely want to come back to), and
  • a hack to extend an IBM product (which I created an alpha version of)

In this post, I’ll describe what I did for the last of these ideas: writing a client app for the wiki that comes with IBM’s Lotus Connections.

The idea

In the same way that I am writing this post in an offline blogging client, I wanted the same for using wikis: read and make changes to a wiki while offline, with changes uploaded to the online wiki the next time you are online.

This wasn’t a new idea. In fact, I tried it at IBM HackDay 4 back in 2007 but the wiki we used at work at the time had no API access for retrieving or updating wiki pages. So I sort of gave up and forgot about the idea.

But now I use Lotus Connections wikis at work. And Lotus Connections does have an API – an AtomPub API that gives you feeds to know when pages are changed, and a way to publish changes.

So I decided to revisit the idea.

The “finished” (ish) hack

It’s still very rough around the edges (this was a HackDay – I wrote the client code in under a day!) but it already shows the basic idea.

Offline wiki client

The top left view shows the list of your wikis.

Clicking on this fills the list below – a list of pages in the selected wiki. Clicking on a page in that list opens the contents of the page in the main view on the right.

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Posted in tech | 7 Comments »

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