#“If the internet is remembered for one thing in 2012, let it be Nail Clippers with 10X Magnifier”

Now that you know they exist, you have to buy them, don’t you? I did.

#“Lunchtime review of Eken T02 7\” Android Tablet for \u008088”

This quick n dirty video covers most of it, but in summary:

Pros:

1. It’s 88, in total, including EMS shipping
2. Android ICS
3. Capacitive Screen
4. Full Android Market
5. HDMI/USB/SDCard
6. 1080p video
7. Strong GPU for all games
8. It’s 88, in total, including EMS shipping
9. It’s 88, in total, including EMS shipping

1. Screen is only 800x480
2. Touch can be unresponsive at times
3. CPU may struggle on heavy-duty games
4. Some current strangeness with Android Market means apps incorrectly absent
5. Upgrading OS a bit fiddly
6. No Bluetooth

Did I mention that it’s88, in total, including EMS shipping?

httpv://youtu.be/F2fXHlFTi6E

#“First two trivial parts of getting App Inventor working on Raspberry Pi done”

I’ve been playing a small bit with the Raspberry Pi VM on VMware to see what’s possible and what isn’t. One thing I am eager to try when it arrives on the week of May 14th (YAY!), is to get App Inventor working on it.

There are three basic user parts to App Inventor. The browser-based Designer, the Java-based Blocks Editor and the Phone Emulator (if you don’t have a phone).

Yesterday I got the first two bits working with about 2 minutes work. All you need to do is install the OpenJDK. SUNOracle Java is not available yet.

The bit that will need more work is the emulator. I think. Ye see, I grabbed the code for the Linux version of the emulator and followed the simple instructions to build it. Then I saw it was building for i386 and of course the RPi is ARM-based. Damn.

A bit of poking around and I realised we were almost in a recursive loop. I was running ARM Linux in qemu i386 emulator on a Virtual Machine and I was trying to run an ARM emulator inside a another qemu i386 emulator inside that. Yes my head exploded too.

But then sense prevailed and I realised that Android is ARM and RPi is ARM, so do we need an emulator at all, or just an Android image compiled for ARM11 inside some sort of wrapper/container?

As an old Embedded guy I should be all over this but I’ve forgotten more than I ever learned about cross-compiling and building OS images. Anyone have any ideas on where to start? I popped a question on the relevant App Inventor Google Group too.

Of course all of this may be moot if the 256MB of RAM and 700MHz CPU is not enough to support all of this. But it’s worth a try.

#“Klouchebag score for @conoro: 36, or ‘a bit of a prat’”

A far superior alternative to Klout - Klouchebag.com

hat-tip to Chris Byrne.

#“Happy 30th Birthday ZX Spectrum - Here’s mine, still in action”

Of course I write too much about the ZX Spectrum. Heck look at the header image. But when a tiny little computer has such an impact on your life, it deserves your attention, even 30 years later. I hope all of you who built the first iPhone Apps have held on to your first device and do the same in 25 years time.

My only disappointment today is that I don’t have a Raspberry Pi yet to sit alongside it as its spiritual successor.I honestly think, with the right support, the Raspberry Pi could be this generation’s ZX Spectrum. Affordable by most people in the midst of a worldwide recession.

Why don’t the BBC, RTE, DR and all the other taxpayer-supported European TV stations come together and do a 2012 version of The Computer Programme, based around a boxed version of the RPi? Heck, make it part of the school curriculum. Yeah, really showing my age there.

I put together this video today showing my old Speccy (vintage late-1982) still working, still making me smile. I had to cheat and use a laptop to do the game loading as I can’t find any of my old tapes and the Aiwa walkman isn’t even 1980s vintage anyway. My old Lloytron mono tape recorder is AWOL too. Otherwise, all totally authentic stuff.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqpFDG5n4tc

Note, if anyone has any idea why the colour is off on the TV output and how I might fix it, please leave a comment.

Have a read of this great interview with some of the Spectrum’s designers over on the BBC.

Thanks again Sir Clive. And an ever bigger thanks to my parents.

#“Thank you Google - You’ve just made my year”

My tribute to the Speccy on its 30th birthday coming later today :-)

#“Finally MHL to TV and Bluetooth to Wiimote on HTC Sensation”

Yes I know it’s a stupid thing to want to do but dammit, if it’s technically possible, we should at least try.

One of the most annoying things about the HTC Sensation is how HTC has hamstrung it with a brain-dead Bluetooth stack instead of the one provided by the chipset provider. This means it cannot do the HID profile to support keyboards, mice and Wiimotes. The only reason they do this is to shoehorn the horror that is HTC Sense on top of Android. Sense can’t even do landscape orientation of the home screen FFS!

If you switch to one of the AOSP-based ROMs like Cyanogen, you gain a proper Bluetooth stack but, for the moment, you lose MHL, which means you cannot connect the phone via HDMI to your TV to play movies/games.

But something changed recently with the latest HTC ROMs and I learned that the Android Revolution HD ROM, which I have used many times in the past, now supports both MHL and HID. It is a community variation of the official Sensation ROM so it still has the Sense crap but it seems to be rock solid otherwise and has lots of benefits you miss with the official ROMs.

So this is why I wanted to get both working:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWTkRwlhcM&feature=youtu.be

Not my best ever video work, to put it mildly. But you get the idea.

To do the same you need:

1. An MHL adapter
2. A HDMI cable
3. A Wiimote
4. The Android Revolution HD ROM
5. Xpectroid ZX Spectrum Emulator
6. Wiimote Android App

UPDATE: I also started investigating USB OTG on the Sensation this week. This is where you can use the USB interface to plug USB sticks, cameras, hard disks etc into the Sensation rather than the usual reverse. Yet again the hardware is capable of it, the standard drivers support it, but HTC has messed up the implementation.

Why the hell would you create devices with such amazing technical specs and then disable those features due to an obsession with a shitty software skin that offers no added-value to the end-user and which no-one has ever bought a phone for? Don’t get me started on the fact that the CPU in my phone is actually designed for 1.5GHz but ships clocked at 1.2GHz.

#“Facebook kicks Geni’s butt for real family histories”

A few years back, quite a few of us put effort into building our family tree on Geni. For a while I was a fan. Then someone connected two big trees via marriage and it has been a disaster ofirrelevant birthday notifications about people I have never heard of since.

Also, the constant upsells mean I haven’t logged in for a very long time except to check the odd birthday.More importantly, all of the activity I have seen has been by my generation and younger. It is simply not on the radar of my parents.

For her 70th birthday, my Mum got an iPad from my Dad. After years of saying she would use computers when she could no longer do the garden, she is now online. She still gardens :-)

She uses the iPad for two things. One is the obvious family emails, usually links to pictures. The other I found out about last Christmas and is the real starting point for the title of this post.

She grew up in Ratoath, Co Meath, just outside Dublin. I lived there until I was 6. When we left in the early 70s, it was still a village. Over the past ten years it became the fastest growing town/village in Ireland. Despite the massive influx of people, there is still a core of the old villagers there, including my aunts/uncles and many of my cousins.

A few years back the Ratoath Heritage Society did a wonderful book called Ratoath Past and Present. I have a copy and loved trying to recognise people from my youth in it. There is a treasure trove of information in there but it naturally has a very limited distribution.

Back to last Christmas - Mum found out that there was now a Facebook Group dedicated to old pictures and stories about Ratoath. We spent ages trying to find it on the garbage Facebook iPad App and finally got to it using Safari.

The two of us spent the entire evening scrolling through all the pictures and seeing so many of my uncles as young men and my cousins playing GAA. It was an absolute delight. Huge kudos to Finian Darby who manages the group.

Now here’s the really interesting bit for non-Ratoathers. My Mum now has a Facebook account. She has no friends on there and doesn’t want any. The only reason for joining was so that she could join the group and see everything.

But it gets better. Over Easter I showed her how to Like a picture. Then I showed her how to comment. My Mum, commenting on Facebook. I swear I never thought I’d see the day.

Finally, the bit that made me realise just how important Facebook has become for this type of history logging and community building. That group has many people in the US and beyond asking questions about their ancestors and who they might be related to. I see real joy when connections are made and information gleaned. They are both receiving and contributing to the knowledgebase around Ratoath.

A picture was posted recently on the Group which included my granduncle Oliver. His wife Ita died a while back, aged 90. No-one knew where the picture had been taken. Oliver, aged 92, was at death’s door when Ita died but has somehow rallied and is now ok. Both his eyesight and hearing are failing. But someone decided to describe the picture to him and he was able to tell them exactly when and where it was taken!

A man who will never be on Facebook is feeding information to future generations which would otherwise be lost forever.

What Finian and all the locals are creating is an amazing repository of knowledge, memories and images. The open-systems person in me wishes they were doing it on a blog but it would never have happened that way. It’s the people and connections on Facebook that make wonderful things like this possible and easy.

One of my regrets is that we never got my grandparents to talk about their youth and the past. Whether that oral history had been recorded in writing or tape, it would have been so valuable. On my Dad’s side, all of the War of Independence stories would have beenriveting. On my Mum’s side, all of the stories around Fairyhouse and Glascarn would have had many gems too.

If Facebook is the tool that facilitates this, then so be it. If they added some genealogical overlay features on the Social Graph, it would be curtains for Geni.

I look forward to lots more interesting pictures and stories being adding to Ratoath Past and Present. I hope someone is doing similar for your home town.

Ita Doran, RIP.

#“Google (and all of us) should revolutionise the interview process using @Sugru”

I’ve interviewed many many people myself over the years and only hired two real duds in that time. Mostly I did it with gut rather than asking people to write code on a whiteboard or drilling them on software lifecycle. My aim was to get a sense of “can I work with this person?”, “does it look like they have a creative streak?” and “have they any interest in software outside of work?”.

Years ago, I even passed on the number one person in their year in Comp Sci in TCD because they ticked none of those boxes. They were just very smart, and I need a lot more.

I don’t know anything about the Google interview process apart from what I’ve heard about the crazy number of sessions and the silly logic puzzles. If true, I’d worry that you end up with a ton of people who all have a very similar profile.

Sugru’s post todayabout how Google commissioned them to do branded Sugru for Hiring Fairs suddenly made me realise that Sugru could totally change the way we all do interviews.

After the usual CV trawl with the person, hand them a few packets of sugru and a box of bits and pieces. Give them 20 minutes to do something interesting. If they come up with nothing, don’t hire.

What better way to see if someone really does have the type of creativity that is critical in this business?

#“ZX Spectrum 16k adjusted for inflation was \u0080461”

Yesterday I finally got both MHL to the TV and Bluetooth to the Wiimote working with a ZX Spectrum Emulator on my HTC Sensation (video coming over the weeked). I was amused by the fact that I was emulating a cheap old computer with an expensive mobile phone.

Then I wondered - How cheap was the Spectrum compared to the Sensation? Some googling for inflation adjusters later and I realised I was completely wrong. It wasn’t cheap at all.

My original 1982 16K Spectrum cost 125 in WH Smith. Adjusted for inflation that’s 377.50 which is 461! Ouch, I really had no idea. An unsubsidised Sensation on Expansys ischeaperat 439.

If my parents hadn’t paid that serious chunk of money back then, who knows where I would have ended up in life…….

UPDATE: All of which makes the Raspberry Pi a staggering bargain and utterlytransformational. Seeing someone on their site beg for early samples so he could show them to a African country’s government is just one example of how important RPi is. Far beyond its technical specs or size.