HomeCamp

November 30th, 2008

Yesterday was HomeCamp:

…an unconference about using technology to monitor and automate the home for greener resource use and to save costs. This is about low energy devices and servers, reducing your electricity bills, monitoring your mouse traps, home automation, monitoring your water usage, using solar power…

Fifty or so people came together at Imperial College to talk about how we can reduce our energy usage.

The format was different to other barcamps and unconferences I’ve been to – rather than separate rooms, most of the time was spent with everyone together in a single room. And the talks flowed on from each other – it felt more like a single day-long conversation than a series of separate presentations.

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Developing for Android

November 26th, 2008

I wrote an admittedly gushing post a few weeks ago about my first impressions of the new “Google phone”, the Android-powered T-Mobile G1. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play with it, I thought I’d add a comment about some frustrations with it as a developer.

None of this is to retract what I said before – I still agree with what I said before. But it’s worth adding a couple of comments.

I’ve not written any code for Android yet, but I’ve had a couple of tentative looks into how I might. And in general, it seems to be a combination of being really impressed by the theory, followed by being frustrated by the practice.

This is perhaps best described with a couple of examples.

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Social TV

November 18th, 2008

At the BBC hackday “Mashed” earlier this year, I went to a talk explaining how to write applications that can be delivered to televisions through Freeview set-top boxes. For our CurrentCost-themed hack, we reused (that is to say, shamelessly stole!) some code from a colleague to get CurrentCost notifications onto a TV channel. The idea was that it’d be a ‘press the red button’ kind of thing where you could have results of CurrentCost challenges from you and your friends pop up as text overlaid onto the bottom of the screen while you watch TV.

I loved this idea, and it’s been bouncing around at the back of my head since. There is a lot of social network data on the web that I think would be well suited to notifications via a TV. Rather than needing to have a separate computer on, or send stuff to mobile phones, or use stand-alone ambient type devices like Nabaztags or Chumbys, why not have stuff popping up while you watch TV?

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Thinking about Home Camp

November 17th, 2008

This is a quick post to spread the word about Home Camp to anyone who follows my blog but doesn’t follow Chris Dalby (aka @yellowpark).

I’ve posted a lot about CurrentCost since I got the meter back in May, but in the past few months it seems like lots of people are giving it a try – I’m seeing more tweets and blog posts about the potential of CurrentCost, and I’m getting more and more emails about my Python CurrentCost app.

So I’m really looking forward to Home Camp – Chris’ idea for a CurrentCost-themed unconference, and a chance to discuss and try ideas relating to monitoring our energy use.

Although it’s CurrentCost-inspired, it wont be limited to CurrentCost or even only electricity monitoring. For example, I’ve prepared a short presentation on monitoring home gas usage in a CurrentCost-type way, which I hope will get some ideas going. And I’ve started thinking about how we could monitor personal car petrol usage – probably my most expensive energy bill!

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Posting to Twitter… carefully

November 13th, 2008

I’ve recently picked up my the code for my Windows Mobile Twitter client again.

It was originally written back in April as a hackday idea. The code posts Twitter updates using a variation on the twitter-from-curl approach of HTTP POSTing “status=MyTweet” to the twitter update url.

I started with the update URL, and appended the message I wanted to tweet. This is fine for a quick hackday demo, but it did mean that you could end up with a URL like:

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=Hello (twitter) world! Special chars = a problem?

Which fails if you want to post characters such as accents or characters which have special meaning in URLs, like + ? / & etc.

I was encouraged by a number of users to have another look at this, which I’ve done now, and hopefully version 1.1 solves the problems.

A quick Google turned up that a number of other Twitter apps share at least some of the same problems that mine had, so thought I’d share the fix here.

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Android

November 4th, 2008

As a true early-adopting mobile geek, I was one of the people in my local T-Mobile store last week on the launch day for the new Android phone, the G1.

I’ve had a few days to play with it now, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it so far.

If you want a considered review which discusses specific features, it’s worth checking out Engadget, Ars Technica, or CNET. Rather than duplicate proper reviews like that, I thought I’d share a less coherent post of my feelings about the device. 🙂

In short, I don’t regret buying it. I like it. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it.

I’ll try and explain why…

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Bye-bye USB syncing, Hello cloud syncing!

November 2nd, 2008

I’ve mentioned a few times before that I use a personal wiki-based notetaking app to keep myself organised.

In GTD-speak, I use it to store project information, track my actions, store reference info, and lots more. Everything I’m working on will have a set of wiki pages where I’ve written up what I’ve done so far, linked in to my other work and where it fits in with my goals.

So it’s useful to have it with me even when I’m not at my desk. I’ve got the wiki app installed on my ThinkPad and three of my mobiles (HTC Advantage, HTC Universal, and the Treo Pro).

The problem is keeping them all in sync.

The old way

cables, cables, cablesThe wiki stores the pages as normal text files. So I have a copy of all of these text files on each device.

Using a freeware app called MobSync, I can sync a directory of files on my desktop with a directory on the mobile.

If I want to use the Treo Pro, I need to make sure I get an up-to-date copy of the files on there first by booting up my PC, connecting them by USB cable, and running the sync app.

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My HackDay hack – see where your friends are

October 24th, 2008

Today was IBM HackDay 6 – an internal HackDay run across IBM‘s many labs – and I managed to spend a bit of today hacking something together.

PhotobucketIn a nutshell, it’s kinda like Plazes, brightkite, dodgeball and others… find out where your friends currently are. And see where they are from your mobile.

The twist is that it gives you quite precise locations for friends within a known indoor campus – such as Hursley Park.

Hursley, like many IBM locations, is a campus, with thousands of employees in a 100 acre site.

What if you’re trying to find someone? Say you’re in a meeting, and a colleague hasn’t turned up yet. Where are they? Are they on their way?

Or you’ve arranged to meet a colleague for lunch or a coffee, and you seem to keep missing each other.

The idea of this hack was to build on the Hursley Maps tool to come up with some way for you to be able to quickly check where your friends are while you’re at work.

Okay… so it’s a fairly flimsy scenario. 🙂

But I’ve enjoyed playing with location-based services ideas before, and thought this would be an interesting twist. Plus, it was an excuse to play with Django which I’ve wanted to try since hearing about it at BathCamp.

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