#“Sugru + Old Mondeo = Yay”

My ancient old Ford Mondeo (2001) is still going strong. In some ways I hate it for doing so. It’s an appliance and I don’t like appliances, I like things with character. Prior to it I only bought Citroens (BX, AX, Xantia) and I loved them dearly. But they were unreliable piles of junk assembled by drunks. Then, once we had kids, an appliance became necessary.

The “New” Mondeo was the second car in the renaissance of Ford. The first was the Focus in 1999. My wife had a Focus and it was as close to perfect a car as you could get. Interesting shapes inside and out, totally reliable and not a generic over-priced BMW. Her sister drove it for a few years after her and loved it too. The Mondeo kept the reliability of the Focus but was dead boring to look at, inside and out.

In 11 years, the only problems it has had are a badly designed handbrake and grab handles which pop out of the ceiling. It also loses the gas in the aircon too quickly and it needed a suspension joint replaced a few years ago. It gets one service a year across the road for 100+ and that’s it.

120,000 miles later and it bombs up and down the M7/M8 like a new car.

But in all this time, one thing has bugged me every day. The dashboard has a stippled effect which is a magnet for dust but is also impossible to attach anything too. Particularly phone holders. So I’ve always had to attach them to the windscreen. The problem there is that the angle of the screen is so severe, it is always awkward, in landscape-mode, far away and murdered by glare. In France, on holidays in July, the HTC Sensation overheated so badly using Google Maps Navigation that a 2 Amp charger couldn’t keep the battery charged!

Then yesterday, 11 years later, I had a brainwave. Sugru:

And ye know what? It flippin works!

Here’s to another 120,000 miles.

#”\“Games You May Like on Facebook\“. That’d be None. Why are Ads so broken in 2012?”

If Facebook paid even a minutes notice to the intention graph rather than the social graph, they’d see that I relentlessly click Hide on all mentions of games. Then maybe they could avoid wasting their valuable screen real-estate pimping something I will never ever ever click on.

I also had a look at some of the ads on FB today. Bloody hell, not a single solitary thing I’m remotely interested in. Just because I’m friends/family with someone on Facebook does not mean I share any of their interests. But when we talk about a movie/TV show/book/product, then you’ve got some useful data.

Given the amount of Likes and Shares I do on Facebook, it really is shocking that they can’t find one thing to recommend to me that I’d actually buy. It doesn’t surprise me at all that their Ad revenue has flattened out.

I really hope someone out there is working on an all new Ads system. I don’t mind Ads, I really don’t, but I haven’t clicked on one in a very long time.

With the amount of “stuff” I generate online, someone should be able to nail me with ads I can’t resist. Yet here we are in 2012 and I still find out about most of the products I buy from people I follow on Twitter/Facebook/Google+, Blogs and Friends. Personal recommendations plus a selection of online reviews seals the deal. There must be a way of packaging that up algorithmic-ally without turning everyone into shills.

Whilst I’m on the subject, can all the re-marketing systems please add a button to their Ads called “I’ve already bloody bought it, stop hounding me.”? Also another one for all the deals Ads which says “I’m a man, I don’t need an upper lip electrolysis deal of the day”

In fact, if an Ad system was announced which said “Give us access to your Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Reader/Amazon/4SQ/Yelp accounts and we promise to only show you Ads/Deals for stuff you and your friends talk about positively”, I’d opt-in tomorrow.

Meanwhile here’s a sponsored Tweet from Coke.

#“Running a business in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services #AWS”

These are the slides from a talk I gave back in March to the UCC SME Cloud Incubator Workshop. It goes through all the details of our use of Amazon Web Services with some mentions of other cloud providers too.

#“Google using Google+ to up-sell Google Apps”

I saw this in the control panel for one of my Google Apps for Your Domain accounts today.

The value-add for paid accounts on Google Apps has always been very poor. $50 per user for a few tweaks most people don’t need. This could change things, particularly for those who want to use Google+ as a replacement for Yammer.

#“The Greatest Electronic Music Video of All Time?”

I think so.

Old Spice Muscle Music from Terry Crews on Vimeo.

#“Nerdy Derby - Looks like a blast”

The Nerdy Derby is a no-rules* miniature car building and racing competition inspired by the Cub Scouts’ Pinewood Derby. With a larger, more undulating track and no restrictions on the size of the cars or materials participants can use, the Nerdy Derby rewards creativity, cleverness and ingenuity.

The first-ever Nerdy Derby will take place at World Maker Faire New York on September 29th and 30th at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. Visitors can bring their own cars to race, choose from a selection of pre-built cars, or make their cars on site in our workshop.

#“My mind is blown - Met Eireann\u0092s radar image converted to #OpenData”

Brendan Cunningham has just left the most exciting comment this blog has ever received. He has thrown some serious smarts at the Met Eireann radar image of rain and converted in to actual numbers you can use!

That vector data with rainfall values is now up on Google Fusion Tablesand is updated every 15 minutes so now it can be integrated with GIS and other location based services.

As he points out, with national coverage like this, you can watch for rainfall trends. Heck, you could even do predictions. He mentions that previous flood data may be available from the OPW and a Benefitting Lands layer from the OSi.

I pointed out to Brendan that this data may be perfect for Open Weather Map which has a radar layer for the US and Canada already. Hopefully there are no rights issues with the data (which I assume the Irish taxpayer has paid for). His follow-up comment seems to indicate that all is ok as long as it’s not for profit.

It’s projects like this that give me hope for Ireland. Where the State is unwilling, unable or simply lacking in knowledge to release #OpenData, we can step in. Motivated, knowledgeable people with a community spirit can make the data we have already paid for, do more for the country.

I’m working on a small project in this area at the moment and have just received all of the hardware. Once it’s ready, I’ll publish the PoC here. I hope it will be of benefit to a lot of people.

#“In honour of Peter Cook, Nike announces new line of running clothing - Clivestrong”

#“Sib\u00e9al, Fionn and S\u00edofra use littleBits for the first time”

Last night, just before bedtime, I handed over littleBits to our three younger kids. They had never seen or used it before and I wanted to gauge their reaction to it.

Overall they loved it and it was the first thing Fionn looked for when he got up this morning. Sibal also snuk off with it for a while on her own last night after the others had gone to bed.

The two favourite parts for all of them are the pressure sensor and the buzzer.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33AcI1gnwBE

The first is the most obvious - the price is 3x to 4x too high. We just could not justify paying $89 (Starter Kit) for something that will probably not be used beyond tomorrow. Sibal’s Android tablet was only slightly more expensive and will last her for a year or two. For a schoolroom, where it gets passed around, that price might be ok, but we honestly wouldn’t buy it unless it was in the $20 to $30 range. Given that they have raised a bunch of VC, I hope they use it to re-align the price. I just can’t see it getting mainstream adoption at the current level.

The second concern is more technical. There is only so much you can do with non-programmable analogue circuits (analogue engineers, please leave abuse in the comments :-) ). At some point it’s going to need a digital controller and digital blocks. I don’t know if this is in the plan or even in the design already. As an ex-Philips guy, I love seeing the adoption of I2C (I-squared-C, not I-two-C) by the Maker community many years after I used it in nearly every project. It strikes me as ideal for littleBits due to the minimal pin count and low speed.

The third issue is easy to fix. The head of the screwdriver is too big for the pots. Kids found it really hard to get it working. An extra 5 cents needed there I think!

Sibal is the main “Maker” in our house. She has that great combination of an interest in tech and an interest in art. Her plans for Halloween involve creating zombie costumes and using toggleable LEDs in ping-pong balls to scare people. I hope littleBits will encourage her two younger siblings to get equally interested.

One final note - at the start of the video I mention that littleBits is probably two simplistic for our older two boys but when Oisn (aged 10) saw littleBits last night, he insisted he had a go on his own today.

#“Amazon Glacier looks ideal for cheaper long-term storage/backup”

Amazon just announced Glacier:

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

We use variety of backup and online storage approaches. Dropbox for commonly accessed data for individuals, S3 for backups/archival and S3+Cloudfront for CDN. There has been the option of reduced redundacy S3 for quite a while but we haven’t bothered as we want the extra comfort level.

But looking at our S3 usage, the bulk of it is never accessed, it is only there for long-term archival. Old code, old server images, old documents etc. Some of it hasn’t been touched in over 4 years. That’s perfect for Glacier, which, based on its description, seems to be tape storage?

Just to give a simple comparison on pricing (storage only, not transfer):

S3: $0.125 per GB / month S3 reduced Redundancy: $0.093 per GB / month Glacier: $0.01 per GB / month

We’ll start the move in the next week or so.