Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

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CurrentCost – first impressions

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

CurrentCostCurrentCost 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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Posted in ibm, school, tech | 20 Comments »

XBox Live anyone?

Monday, May 5th, 2008

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…

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Posted in tech | 4 Comments »

Mobile broadband – USB dongle modems

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

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 🙂

Huawei E169 modemThe 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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Posted in tech | 2 Comments »

Snap Circuits Jr

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

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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playing with gPhoto2

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

There was no putting it off any longer – the grass needed cutting.

The first cutting of the year is always a bit of a pain. So I thought I’d make it more interesting by setting up my camera to take pictures of it for a time-lapse video. I found some good instructions to get started here – the idea being to keep the camera connected to a Linux laptop in the garden, with a shell script using gPhoto2 to periodically take pictures.

Stitching some of the pics together with Camtasia produces:

I was planning on using this as a first chance to play with Flickr Video, but it turns out you need to have a pro account to upload video. Spoilsports. 🙁

Update: Looks like I’m not the only one who made the most of a sunny afternoon 🙂

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Posted in tech | 1 Comment »

Using a 3 mobile broadband dongle with the EEE PC

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

I’ve been loaned a USB mobile broadband modem by 3 to try out for a few months. I’ll write a proper post about why I’ve got it and what I think of it later. First, I wanted to share how I got it working with my EEE PC.

What am I talking about?
The modem is a small USB dongle – not dissimilar in appearance from a USB memory stick. You put a SIM card in, and the small mobile phone radio inside gives an Internet connection to any computer that it’s plugged into.

The dongle is a Huawei E169G.

So what’s the problem?
The dongle is supported on Windows and Mac OS. Not Linux. My EEE PC still runs the original Xandros Linux.

Should it work on Linux?
Posts on the eeeuser forum suggested that it wouldn’t be possible.

Other dongles seem to have caused less trouble, but the E169 wouldn’t work.

The consensus seemed to be that:

Huawei 169 requires a patch to usb-storage driver to recognize the hardware similarly to 220… I think that ASUS is on a way to produce a small upgrade package to fix the issue for E169.

And a little Googling failed to turn up anyone who has got the Huawei E169 to work with an EEE PC on Linux.

Still… how hard could it really be, eh? 🙂

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Posted in tech | 139 Comments »

Over The Air… it’s all over

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

heading home from Over The Air with our BBC bean bagsHeading home from Over The Air with our BBC bean bags!

Over The Air is all over, and I’m back home again (in time for the first proper snow I’ve seen in years, but I digress… 🙂 ). Just time to jot down a few quick thoughts.

It was talks and presentations in the day, with a hackday competition in the evening.

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Mobile translation – an unfinished hack!

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Fourth of the random ideas for Over The Air hacks – a mobile service that lets you translate foreign text that you come across from your mobile phone.

The plan was to:

  • reuse some old code from last year to control my cameraphone and take a picture
  • upload the image to LeadTools, using their OCR web service to get the text back from the picture
  • translate the text into English using the Google translate API web service
  • display the English text on the phone screen

Unfortunately, too much time spent drinking beer, listening to talks, and generally slacking, meant that I didn’t finish this one.

But I thought it still might be interesting to share my experiences with the LeadTools service.

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Posted in tech | 2 Comments »

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