#“JOYSTICK-IT Tablet Arcade Stick - Have to have!”
via thinkgeek.com
This device on its own could convince me to buy a tablet as soon as Android Honeycomb comes out.
16 Jan 2011, 19:15
08 Jan 2011, 11:03
#“Parrot ASTEROID \u0096 I want something even simpler again”
via eurodroid.com
One of the best tech purchases I made over the past few years was a Lidl Bluetooth car stereo. My old built-in Ford RDS6000 no longer played CDs and never had a line-in so it had to go.
The Lidl (and Aldi equivalent) units are fantastic. They have line-in, USB, SD Card, CD Player, Radio, A2DP Bluetooth and a hands-free kit. All for about €80.
But I was thinking a few months back that the Germans (and thousands of Chinese manufacturers) could build something better and cheaper.
The thing is, I have never used the CD player in that head-unit. I either plug in a USB stick with music, an SD card with music, or, most commonly, I pair my Android phone using Bluetooth and stream all my music and podcasts from that.
The CD player adds unnecessary weight, cost and complexity. What we need are better Bluetooth controls on these head-units. My wife's one can instruct my phone to go up and down a track but mine can't. I don't want a touch screen like the Parrot above, I want maybe 5 or 6 giant chunky buttons and/or a dial and I want the display to tell me the folder/artist/album/song being played on Bluetooth.
Basically something like that Sony Ericsson LiveView but on a much bigger scale with the usual speaker connections etc at the back. I just find that messing with a touch-screen phone to change tracks/albums etc is a nightmare/dangerous when you are driving.
p.s. I recently discovered that my HTC Desire (and I'm sure many other phones) can pair separately for media and calls. So I have media going to the car stereo but I have calls going to a bog-standard Plantronics headset. I just find that those I am talking to get better sound quality with the Plantronics. The phone is smart enough to mute media when a call is in progress.
07 Jan 2011, 19:58
#“Die Die Die, Discussion Board Software, Die.”
There is one area where the internet has gone backwards in the past 10 years and that’s discussion sites. From 1992 to probably 2003, I got a huge amount of information using Usenet, more than I got on the web. Unfortunately, despite still existing in 2011, Usenet has become a spam hellhole and most discussions have moved to the web.
If you go onto most of these sites, you’ll probably see vBulletin, phpBB, BBPress or some other crime against humanity powering it. I must be one of the few technical people in Ireland who has made less than 10 posts on boards.ie since it started. Possibly less than 5. I only ever end up there if it’s a google result. I value my sanity and time too much.
The usability on all of those sites is truly shocking. I am stunned that people put up with it. Back in the day…….hold on whilst I get my pipe and slippers…….we had incredibly powerful desktop apps called newsreaders. Emacs had a great one called Gnus but my favourite was Forte Agent. This was a tool built for managing a deluge of intricately threaded messages and it did so brilliantly. You could monitor, find, filter and score everything you were interested in so that you could get in and out as quickly as possible.
Here’s a sample screenshot:
Now let’s have a look at the crap people are putting up with in 2011. Over on XDA-Developers, there is a discussion about DeFroST which is a superb community firmware for the HTC Desire. It’s what I run. Here’s a screenshot:
Note what it says: Page 1 of 1812. 1……of…….1812. That’s state of the art for discussion software. One thousand eight hundred and 12 pages of unorganised messages about a single subject.
As for threading. Hah! The best attempt I’ve seen is a reply to a reply.
All of this stuff was figured out in the 90s. Can someone please please please build a webapp version of Agent or Gnus or even the ropey one in Thunderbird and finally make all these dinosaurs extinct? And the first person who mentions Quora gets a clip around the ear.
07 Jan 2011, 17:50
#“Play your video files in Google Docs”
Once you’ve uploaded your video to Google Docs, you can watch it with the Google Docs video player. Simply click the file from your Documents List and the player opens in a new page.
Files that you can play
Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB. These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:
- WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
- .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
- .AVI (many cameras use this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
- .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
- .WMV
- .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)
via docs.google.com
This is news to me. Trying it out now.
I assume I can't then embed the player in another page like a blog?
Will be interesting to see if it streams and buffers well.
07 Jan 2011, 10:18
#“Sorting out the \“On Behalf Of\” Nonsense on GMail with AuthSMTP”
I have long been pained by GMails handling of multiple "From" accounts. We use Google Apps For Your Domain which we generally like apart from that one feature.
Obviously we have accounts like sales@ and support@ which are accessed by more than one of us. On the face of it GMail allows you to send from these addresses using your main account. So I can send a mail when logged in as conor@ but have it appear to be From sales@.
But Google insists on sticking an additional header called "Sender" which identifies that it really was conor@ who sent the mail. That then appears in the recipients Outlook Inbox as "From conor@blah on behalf of sales@blah". This completely defeats the purpose of having generic group addresses. It means we can't have seamless "tonight Matthew I'm going to be Support".
But it turns out Google does have a solution for it and you can continue to use the web interface. When you are setting up those extra accounts you can tell Google not to use their servers to send but to use another SMTP server. They generally expect that to be your own mail server but we actually use AuthSMTP for all our automated sending from EC2 and it works perfectly here too. It's a very inexpensive solution which has never let us down. Highly recommended. (Note - enable SSL on your AuthSMTP account but don't on GMail).
Job done!
06 Jan 2011, 19:16
#“Time for some car gadgets on this blog. Pneumatics FTW.”
I hate hate hate going to garages to pump up my tyres. And the gauges are always wrong in any case. And now some of the chancers want money for air!
This beauty is only 19 on Amazon.co.uk and works like a charm. Built-in light too.
30 Dec 2010, 15:09
#“Time for TERROR”
Twitter Emergency Rapid Response On-Site Reporting = TERROR
No, acronyms have never been my strength.
My CorkProbs idea on Twitter back in 2007 never got any traction. Mainly because there were possibly 10 people in Cork on Twitter at the time. The idea was simply that locals would tweet @CorkProbs about problems related to roads, electricity, gas, water etc and the account would re-tweet them. It was prompted by a water outage in Bandon where no-one in the Council could tell us what theproblemwas or take responsibility for finding out. The Twitter SMS interface was a big reason I thought it would catch on with normal people. Ah well.
I wasremindedof it again during the floods and freezing of November 2009. But it was really this winter where Twitter became the de-facto reporting system for weather, roads, floods and water outages. Irish Weather Online almost made Met Eireann redundant in the past few weeks as we watched live reporting of the movement of snow across the country on #IWO.
I genuinely think Twitter has made the leap to being a Public Service Utility and should become a mandatory reporting system for all County Councils around the country.Of course being Ireland, we'll probably hire Bearing Point and pay them 100m to build a bad Irish knock-off of it instead.
I've been building my list ofrequirementsfor anypoliticalparty to get my vote in 2011. I've just added this to the list.
29 Dec 2010, 13:43
#“What the hell ever happened to Twitter Annotations?”
I got very excited earlier in the year when Twitter announced the Annotations feature. It's a way of adding metadata to a tweet such that it doesn't have to be user-visible. Of course the one use case that many of us thought of was reviews. You could add the rating, url etc as metadata and use the tweet for the summary. Then twitter clients could potentially interpret that and show reviews in Twitter with stars etc.
But that's just one simple use case. Two others I was thinking of over Christmas were filters and hashtags.
I know I know, my Filter Fetish continues unabated. But you could build a really effective filter tool if all of the Apps that posted to Twitter added some Annotations about themselves. So rather than clients trying to figure out that certain tweets are from Foursquare or Mafia Wars, apps would flag this in the attributes and you could mask all tweets from those sources with a single click. Like, cough, Facebook.
Hashtags are a wonderfully useful abomination. Such a simple "feature" provides incredible power for tracking topics but bloody hell, it can make Twitter an unreadable mess at times. Wouldn't it be so much better if hashtags went under the hood? The person or app generating the tweet would add the hashtags in a separate field (like tags in Wordpress) and they would be stored as annotations. Twitter clients could then hide them by default but make them visible if users wanted to see them.
There are so many useful ways Twitter could be improved using Annotations. It was announced at the Chirp Conference in April but is still listed as "not released to production" on the wiki.
So what's the story Twitter? I find it hard to believe it is low priority, given how powerful a feature it could be. It would also allow a lot more normal people to feel ascomfortablewith Twitter as they do with Facebook. Is it proving hard to implement or scale?
22 Dec 2010, 21:01
#“Could Skype build a Twitter competitor?”
Random brain-fart time. I jokingly suggested earlier that Twitter was just a front-end on the Skype IM system which is why both of them are down.
Now I'm sitting here thinking "well ye know………."
Skype has the infrastructure, the contact lists and the userbase.
Could they build both a single-threaded global system like Twitter with asymmetrical relationships and also a variation on their Groups feature, again where people can join rather than being invited?
I always remember that stupid but brilliantly compact line by Thesaurus Gillmor that Twitter was the new dialtone. Shouldn't that really be Skype's job?
22 Dec 2010, 19:10
#“New Hedge Fund Uses Twitter To Pick Stocks”
Well, you knew this was coming eventually. A new $39 million hedge fund will use sentiment analysis on Twitter to pick its trades, Bloomberg says.
What did I just ask a few weeks ago?