Another Reality Fault

I love Windows Media Center. I’ve used it for a couple of years, ever since I got rid of my Sky box.

A couple of weeks back the Freeview system was “upgraded”. I got loads of difficult to remove messages on the TV telling me that I would have to re-scan and find all the channels again. What the message didn’t say was that after the “upgrade” pretty much nothing would work any more. All my TV channels are broken apart from Five.

Now I quite like CSI and Flash Forward, but there are actually other things I fancy watching as well. But I can’t. Kind of ironic really. An upgrade to improve the reception of Five has broken everything else.

Of course all my other digital tellies work fine, it is only the Media PC that is broken. Initially put it down to the TV tuner cards I’m using as they are a bit old.  So I tried playing around a bit. I managed to get the Sony PlayTV that I normally use with to the PS3 to talk to the computer and that duly found all the channels. But it would only show me channel Five. Wah.

This is very, very strange. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening I would say it was impossible. There is some muttering on the interwebs about changes to multiplexes and signal strengths, but nobody has reported the same problem I’ve got.

I call this kind of thing a “Reality Fault”, in that everything is working fine, it is just that reality around it is broken. Oh well.  If I can find a cheap enough TV card I’ll put that in and rebuild everything I suppose.

Don’t you just love progress?

True Hitch Hiker?

Strange things. In a week when a new volume in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series is released (although sadly not by Douglas Adams) a company releases this.

Makes you think.

Zune HD

I’ve just managed to get my hands on a Zune HD. It is a personal music player from Microsoft. The Zune brand has been around for a while. The first players appeared a few years ago and have been developing ever since. They are rather like ipods; but they have one or two nice extra features, including built in WIFI and radio but they have always something of also-rans when compared with the all-conquering Apple product.

However the HD version might change that. It has a superb OLED display and an all new multi-touch user interface. As the name implies, you can put high definition video onto the machine and get video output into an HDMI display.  The whole package is lovely and the hardware is beautifully made and very stylish.

It also runs XNA, so you can take C# games that you have written for the framework and they just run on the device. Your games can even take advantage of the multi-touch interface and the accelerometer inside the Zune. I managed to convert a game to use them in just a few minutes. I’m going to write some posts nest week about porting games over onto the platform, but there won’t be much to say as it is all so easy to use.

The only problem with the Zune is that you can’t get it in the UK yet.

Dulux PaintPod Review

This weekend I had a lot of wall and ceiling to paint. And the local DIY chain had an offer on the Dulux PaintPod. So, of course, I bought one. It has buttons and lights, and motors. How could I resist? The idea is that a little pump in the paint reservoir pushes the paint through a pipe to the handle, where it is transferred onto the paint roller. Then, when you have finished painting, you add some cleaning water, the process goes into reverse and the machine cleans itself and the roller.

And it mostly works. The best bit was when it was pumping the first bit of paint through the clear pipe up to the roller, I loved watching the paint travel down the clear plastic tube. I think this is where the BBC 3 people got the idea for their new logo. Once the paint gets to the handle it is then supposed to be magically transferred onto the roller and then you can paint with it.  This is where it gets a bit sticky. Put too much paint on the roller and you end up wearing it. Put too little on and you are just pushing a roller up and down a wall for no reason. If you are painting onto the same colour (as I was for the ceiling) it seemed to work fine, mainly because there wasn’t much to do. The cleaning process mostly worked too, with the bulk of the paint being removed automatically.

Life got harder when I was painting a different colour. Getting enough paint onto the wall was really tricky, and although I could paint a lot faster without having to pause and refill the roller and tray, I think it took me one more coat than I would have needed by hand. In fact, for the final coat I went back to a hand roller.

I don’t think I’d recommend one if you are planning changing the colour of your room. If you have a lot of one colour you want to refresh it might be a good idea, but I must admit I think I got on better with the old familiar roller and tray.

Zune HD is out, and it Supports XNA

Today the new Zune platform is released by Microsoft. Called the Zune HD it looks absolutely wonderful. It has solid state storage, an OLED display and a multi-touch user interface.

And, (and this is the wonderful news) it supports XNA. A set of XNA 3.1 Extensions has also been released which you can use to take your games and run them on this fantastic platform. And the extensions even provide access to the accelerometer and the multi-touch input.

If Microsoft get around to putting a phone in there too they will have their first proper iPhone beater.

The only snag is that for now it is a US only release, but with a bit of luck it will make it to us eventually.

Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard

One of the great things about being a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) is that you get a bit of money to spend at the Microsoft company store each year. This means that I can keep my keyboard up to date. I really like using the bendy ergonomic ones. They help with my wrists and I think they are the main reason I’ve never had any problems even though I type quite a lot. The other nice thing about them is that it is quite fun watching someone who has not seen one before trying to type using it…

Anyhoo, each year that goes by I worry that Microsoft might stop making bendy keyboards and so I buy another one for stock with my MVP award. Fortunately they seem to be alive and kicking, and the new keyboard I’ve just got is about the nicest I’ve seen. It has a very quiet key action and a few extra buttons and neat features including a zoom lever in the middle which you can use to change the magnification in apps like Word and PowerPoint.

If you have ever had any kind of RSI problems, or you are concerned about this aspect of computer use I’d strongly advise taking a look at such a keyboard. Once you get use to it I think you will find it very helpful.

Steam vs Robot

I was a bit late back from the tip yesterday. I went up town and bought a steam engine. As you do. The model shop in the middle of town was having a 10% off sale, and I couldn’t resist getting a little Mamod steamroller. As it happens, number one son was at home for the weekend, and I’d put him on to building a .NET Micro Framework powered robot that I’d had sent to me. Long story.

Anyhoo, when we get them both working we are going to see which is more powerful, the age of steam or the age of robots…

Place your bets..

The Micro Framework robot is great, although we had (or at least number one son) had to assemble the tracks a link at a time. I think at the end of the day it will all come down to traction, so my money is on the robot at the moment.

iPhone 3Gs

Of course I had to get the new iPhone. I feel kind of bad about this although, as I said to number one wife as I headed off to Carphone Warehouse “I don’t drink, gamble or chase women. I just get gadgets”. She may have muttered something under her breath about how much cheaper it would be if I did those things instead, but I can’t see what the problem is really. After all, I am letting her have my old iPhone…

Anyhoo, down to the shop, out with the proof of address and away we went. I was taking out a new contract, and so I had to have a new number. They actually try to charge you for “memorable” numbers. If you want repeating values, or sequences of digits in your phone number you can pay up to sixty quid for the privilege . I had this vision of a room full of “number miners” going through all possible permutations and shouting “strike” when they found a really good one. I suspect they use a computer program though. I didn’t pay extra for two reasons. Firstly I was spending enough as it was, and secondly I couldn’t see anything special about the more expensive ones anyway.

The new iPhone is very nice. The old one was nice too, but this one is nice faster. It has a compass, which means that it can orient the map relative to the way you are facing, which is massively useful. It looks pretty much exactly like the old one but the glass seems to shrug off fingerprints, which is nice.

I was quite looking forward to using the Voice Recognition feature, but unfortunately it turns out to be rubbish. Having experienced the wonder of Voice Command on Windows Mobile devices many years ago I was very keen to find out how the field had advanced on the iPhone. Turns out it has gone backwards. Voice Command used to let you do everything on your phone including play music albums by calling out their names. It never needed training and it always worked. Whereas the voice recognition on the iPhone does things like make phone calls when you want to listen to music, play music when you want to make calls and so on. I hope this is a difficultly with English accents or some other teething trouble, because at the moment it really is poor.

Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve got. I can’t see massive queues forming for this new device though, it is mostly evolutionary. When the new version of Windows Mobile comes out next year I reckon things are going to get even more interesting in the mobile space.

Simpsons 20Q is Fun

I thought I’d got a good deal getting a Simpsons 20Q for 8 quid up town. But Amazon have them even cheaper. I’ve long been a fan of the original 20Q device, which guesses what you are thinking by asking you 20 questions about it. The  original has an astonishing ability to guess random things, from lava lamps to artichokes to the air.

The Simpsons one is nowhere near as good, but it is quite fun, and does seem to have been programmed by people who really know a lot about the show.

Worth getting at the new low price, but if you haven’t got a 20Q (and everyone should have one) then get that instead.

Yet Another Robot

Briefly snuck away from writing today and bought another robot dog. I felt a bit guilty about not being sat at a keyboard all the time, but not about buying the dog, which was half price and is really good. The best part is the Remote Control, which is absolutely huge. Wrex is not really a proper piece of Artificial Intelligence, in that you mostly have to steer him around by hand. He does have an “off the leash” mode which is quite fun, along with a keypad on the back you can use to re-program him. He has a wide repertoire of remarks and special actions which are pretty amusing.

Nintendo DSi

As a reward for finishing off Chapter 14 I went up town and had a look at the new Nintendo DSi. This is an update of the Nintendo DS which has been around for a while. This has a couple of cameras, bigger screens and can play music off an SD card (although not MP3 songs). GameStation were doing a trade in deal on the old DS Lite which brought the price down to something sensible and, since I happened to have my old DS Lite and power supply with me (what are the chances of that eh?) I got a less shiny new black device.

Very nice. The new larger screens look excellent, and the camera games and audio games are great fun. I’m told that the battery life on the new devices isn’t as good, but I’ve not noticed this yet. The only real problem is that, as there are no DSi games out there yet, the machine doesn’t really represent much of an advance on the old DS, but it does have a faster processor and will also support the download of games into memory (it has 256M) and also SD card.

I downloaded a couple of games from the online DS store via the home WiFi, along with the free browser which works quite well (although it ran out of memory showing my Gmail pages) and so long term prospects are promising.

And Zoo Keeper has never looked so good.

Tag Treasure Hunt

Spend all evening setting up a Tag Treasure Hunt for our Mad March Bash tomorrow. I’m using these new fangled tags from Microsoft that let you use pretty much any mobile phone which has a camera and a network connection to read a printed tag.

The phone hooks up with the tag server which delivers a message, a business card or a web link. We’ve come up with 26 clues to 26 websites and 26 tag stickers. The idea is that you match the clue to the tag.

As an example, one clue was

"640K should be enough for anyone" But he claims he never said it

And the answer….

 

Tomorrow I’m going to print out the tags on the Pogo printer and then stick them around the department for the students to find. Should be fun.

Polaroid Pogo Printer and Microsoft Tag

I fondly remember Polaroid cameras. I even had one for a while. You forgave them their dodgy colours and blurry nature because they were so instant. They are pretty much gone now, but the desire for instant printed gratification hasn’t, so Polaroid are still making portable devices that let you print tiny pictures. Of course, the colours are still a bit dodgy, and there is a bit of blur, but they actually look pretty darned good.

The thing I’m talking about is the Polaroid Pogo. This is a device around the size of a portable hard drive, which will print out onto 2x3 inch prints, that can be made into stickers. You send the prints either from your camera using the usb PictBridge interface or via Bluetooth from any device that can transfer files that way (which includes most mobile phones but unfortunately not the iPhone for some reason).

I nearly bought one a while back, but reckoned they were a bit expensive at around 90 pounds. For some reason the price seems to have halved recently, which is either good (we’ve sold so many that we can drop the price) or bad (we’ve not sold any, and so we need to get rid of them). Either way, it worked for me and so I got one from Amazon.

It works a treat. It is particularly good at printing Microsoft Tags. These are the things that you can scan with your mobile phone to direct you to a web site, or business card or something. I can fit a couple of them onto a single 2x3 output and then stick them around the place.

Pogo and printout. You can even follow the tag from the image above, which is pretty amazing.

I can see this being a huge hit down the pub, where you might want to take lots of pictures and then let folks take a copy home. The paper is a tad pricy, working out at around 30 pence per print, but I guess that is the price that you pay for immediacy.

We are going to have a Tag Treasure Hunt in the department at the Mad March Bash (coming soon…) and now I have the perfect device for printing the tags.

Mending Laser Printers with Bubble Wrap

Some time back we got a colour laser printer. The price was amazing (cheaper than the first 9 pin dot matrix I ever bought) and we got a free set of toner cartridges too. The machine (a Samsung CLP-300) worked fine when we got it, and I thought that was that.

I was wrong.

It no longer feeds the paper in properly. The paper gets so far and then it sticks. Very annoying (a tip for printer buyers, do a search for “printername paper jam” before you buy one, just in case you get loads of hits. You do with the CLP-300…).

Anyhoo, I did some more searching and came across FixYa at http://www.fixya.com/. These people serve as collectors of self help tips for hardware owners, and there were quite a few threads about my printer, including one that said the springs in the paper tray were a bit under specified. These push the paper up against the first roller on the way into the machine, and get weak over time, leading to paper jams. The suggestion was to find some stronger springs.

Unfortunately my local spring emporium was shut for the night, and so I was forced to improvise. Turns out that a length of bubble wrap (unpopped works best) rolled into a cylinder and forced underneath the tray provides just enough extra spring power to make the printer work a treat. I’m not sure how long it will last, so I’d probably better get some springs at some point, but at the moment it works fine.

GigaPan Epic

The GigaPan is a device that will let you take huge panoramic pictures using an ordinary digital camera:

I really like that kind of picture, so getting one might be a nice idea. But I think it would be even more fun to try and make one out of Lego. On the other hand, if you have 400 dollars to spare you can find out more here.

http://gigapansystems.com/system-page.html

Doh! Some one has beaten me to the idea.

Logitech Harmony One Remote Control Review

Hmmm. What kind of fool spends the thick end of 100 quid on a remote control?

I think we both know the answer to that question.

It was one of my (many) Christmas presents to myself. I can remember when the only remote control that was available for your telly was a brick, and you could only use it once to turn the TV off.....But now we have five or so remotes floating around the living room and changing from one device to another means pressing buttons on most of them. So I thought that a programmable remote that supports multiple devices would be a good plan. And I had just got paid.....

Turns out that it works rather well. Setting it up is something you have to work at though. You run the program supplied on a disk with the device and then it goes on line and forces you to register so that you can then tell it all the devices that you own. It then downloads the control codes from the Internet and you plug the remote into a USB port so these can be squirted into it. You now have a single controller that you can use to control everything. If you have a device that it doesn't know about it has a learn function that you can use with the existing remote. I'm wondering if I could teach it to control my helicopter....

Anyhoo, once you have got all your devices identified the fun really begins. You can now create "Activities" which perform a sequence of actions across them. So, to watch TV mine now turns on the amplifier, selects the correct input, turns on the TV, selects the correct input on that and then tells the Media PC to output Live TV. When I switch to something else it makes the appropriate changes to the settings and so on. When I press the power button it turns off all the devices that it knows are turned on. You have a lot of control over precisely what each activity involves and the keys that are exposed to the user and what they do when they are pressed.

The hardware itself is very swish, and it comes with a docking cradle which also serves to charge up the built in battery. You even get a cleaning cloth (which works great on spectacles as well).

For someone like me, who quite enjoys fiddling around with things to make them work, it is wonderful. You can even make it display pictures on the tiny colour touch screen on the top. If you expect it to solve all your problems right out of the box you are in for a tough time though. 

Helicopter Sales

Went up town to the sales today and bought a helicopter. It is a twin bladed Chinook type thing, which was knocked down to fifteen quid in Red5. Number one son has shown quite a talent for flying the thing, which seems a lot more controllable than the single rotor ones that we had bouncing off the furniture earlier this week. He can actually make it hover in one place and it has this fancy way of tipping the front rotor to make very controlled turns.

I think these will sell out real quick, but if you get the chance to buy one I'd recommend you do.

PlayTV

Went up town and bought a gadget. What are the chances? Sony have released their PlayTV add-on. This turns your PS3 into digital video recorder with two tuners. It works well, although it is a bit expensive at 69 quid. Some time back I got a complete recorder for around the same price. However, if you want to watch and record TV via your PS3 and you don't want to have to put another box under your telly then it is well worth a look.

The picture is good, although they don't seem to be doing the fancy upscaling thing that the PS3 does with DVDs, which makes them look really amazing and close to Blu-Ray in quality (which probably counts as a bit of an own goal really).

You can stream video off the PS3 onto a Playstation Portable over local WiFi and even configure your router to allow you to watch home telly using your PSP from anywhere in the world. Some time ago I had a thing called a Slingbox which did something similar with a home video signal, but that could target PCs rather than the PSP.

One other thing which is nice is that the system supports Digital Teletext too, which puts it one up on the Windows Media Centre (although it won't record all the episodes of a program automatically, which probably puts it one down again).

The only thing I really don't like is the way that the device (which is a rather ugly little box) connects to the USB cable on the front of the PS3, leaving a wire trailing across the front. The Xbox 360, rather cleverly, has a USB port at the back for connecting devices like this, which is a bit neater.

If you haven't got a video recorder, but you have a PS3, this is well worth a look.

E Reader from Sony

Bought yet another gadget today. It is the new Sony e-reader. Sony have actually got around to launching the device in the UK, in conjunction with Waterstones bookstore. What made it particularly attractive to me was the way that it ships with 100 classic books on CD-ROM. I actually got the device for number one wife, who really likes the idea of having every book by Jane Austen with her at all times.

It is really nice, very shiny and the screen is lovely to read. It is based on an ink based technology which requires no power at all to retain the display. This means that battery consumption can be measured in page turns, rather than hours. The book says it is good for over 6000, which equates to quite a lot of reading.

Number one wife (and I) really like the device. I've loaded it up with pretty much everything that came with it (You can get around 120 books into the 120M ram of the device and you can also add an SD card if you want to carry a really  huge number of volumes)

The only annoyance is that the Waterstones ebook site, where you can buy DRM versions of new books, has a rather limited range of content at the moment. Also the prices are just stupid. I would expect an ebook, which has no resale value once you have bought it and costs nearly nothing to produce and distribute, to be quite a bit cheaper than the paper version. Savings of 3 quid on a sixteen pound book just don't cut it for me, particularly as these are against the advertised full price of the publication, which nobody pays anyway.  If they don't get their act together on these issues then I can see them killing off the new device before it even gets started.

Some reviews have been very sniffy, saying things like "It will never take the place of a real book.". These people are missing the point. It is not a replacement for a physical tome. I expect our shelves at home to be groaning under the weight of volumes for some time to come. What it does do though is make it much easier to have a big chunk of your library with you at all times, which is really useful. And for trips away it would be terribly good. And if they get their pricing sorted out it would be a great way to buy and read all those books that you don't really want to have in physical form. 

The device will also show monochrome pictures that actually look quite cute. And it can play audio as well, which is nice.

So nice that I got one for me as well, but you had already guessed that.

Photosynth is Groovy

I've never had the chance to be in at the ground floor of the creation of a new kind of media before. But today I found myself watching a presentation of a really neat new technology which is now available for anyone to play with.  Photosynth has the potential to provide a new way of displaying visual information and allowing you to navigate around it by combining multiple images.

At this point I was ready to yawn, in that I've played with photo-stitching programs in the past and found them to be OK, but hardly ground breaking. But what Photosynth does is a bit more than that. By analysing the content of the images, finding the same content in each and then building a "point cloud' that describes the position of these items in 3D it manages to take all your photos and combine them into a navigable scene that recreates the geometry of where they were taken.  You can move in or out of the scene, go from place to place and get a really strong sense of being there.

There are some lovely scenes on the Photosynth site that show how this can be done properly, I thought I'd have a go at the university, so this morning on the way to the office I took around 130 pictures. I've not read the documentation, I just took loads of photographs trying to make sure that there was a bit of overlap between each. And I came up with this.

You can move around by clicking on the arrows, and also on the panes as they appear. You can also zoom in and out using the scrollwheel on your mouse.

Apparently the picture is 78% "synthy", which I think means that the system couldn't figure out where some of the pictures go. However, it is quite like being on campus, and one part, where I took a load of pictures of a flowerbed, does let you actually walk around the flowers and see them from different angles. With a bit more care, and a tripod, I reckon I could have got something really impressive.

Anyone can sign up for a Photosynth account, download the program and start building synths to upload onto the Photosynth site where you have 20G of space to share your creations with the world. Microsoft are hoping to build up a community of "synthers" - a sort of "Flickr you can walk around" and I can think of all kinds of useful things we could do with this. You could put a synth of your ebay items up, so that people can take an all round look at what you are selling. When your kids leave home you could take a synth of their bedrooms to remember them by.

I'm certainly going to get into the habit of taking along another little camera when I go out for "synth shots" and posting them up here. It is really easy to embed the synths in your web pages too.

Have a go with Photosynth. It really is great fun. And free.