Archive for October, 2006
October 25, 2006 at 7:04 pm · Categorised under Blog
Wired has an article on "Building a Better Battery". They mainly discuss Laptops but at the end of the day everyone wants their gadgets to have an unlimited supply of power. Whether it be a digital camera, a mobile phone or the iPod, no length of time is enough. What I’m surprised about is the fact that many of the devices we have are not very energy effecient. Laptops have a great deal of software built in and now have, with centrino, a hardware piece too, but phones for example have no need to display the screen at all when they are in your pocket.
We need some sort of clever system to put all of our apps on standby when they are idle but without waiting long for bootup. Consumers will always go for ease and comfort than energy saving measures so this system needs a balance of the two. Most mobiles I think have got it right with periods going into days before the battery runs out. Laptops, digital cameras, and other gadgets need to start becoming smarter about battery usage.
· Posted by Utills
October 24, 2006 at 3:57 pm · Categorised under Blog
A distributed approach to the problem of flooding. "During dry times sensors conserve power, but when the water starts flowing, they crank up their data stream. This involves waking up a bridge-mounted digital camera and shifting from Bluetooth to higher-bandwidth Wi-Fi so GridStix can take part in processing photos of the rising river.
By tracking ripples and flotsam, the network can estimate flow rates — an economical alternative to ultrasound flow sensors — and relay a single number back to Met along with an update to local residents."
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 4:31 pm · Categorised under Blog
Not made for human eyes yet! This device only masks microwaves for the time being. Why can’t they have a camera that just takes a snapshot of the place it is occupying and then have a high res screen to mask it like a gecko does. [gecko 1, 2, 3]
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 4:30 pm · Categorised under Blog
If you enjoy football/sport then this is a funny show. You can podcast the show or listen live on Saturdays at 11am.
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 2:54 pm · Categorised under Blog
A real alternative for basic photoshop techniques without the cost. Its 3.59Mb without .NET framework and 49Mb with framework.
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 2:53 pm · Categorised under Blog
A useful tool for remembering the chronological ordering of events. Especially good for small project notes to remember when coming to writing a final report. [ An example of a timeline]
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 12:29 pm · Categorised under Blog
Lifehacker tips on how to avoid getting shoved into the place where the sun don’t shine ….err…. I mean the spam folder. A few tips I would add:
- Use the recipients first name if possible
- Use plaintext (Change to plaintext if using Outlook/Thunderbird)
- DONT attach docs, wmv’s, gifs. Try to get them hosted on something like YouSendIt so if they wish they can download.
- Have a "to the point" subject line. That way even if it does get consigned to the spam folder it can easily to seen.
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 12:28 pm · Categorised under Blog
Interesting. One way of avoiding getting sued is to make a music label dependant on your success. This way if they sue you they know they are just losing out in the long run. Of course they could just sell up and then sue you but at least you can see the selling of shares as a warning.
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 11:21 am · Categorised under Blog
Google Blogoscoped talks about how YouTube may be losing its appeal after being bought by Google. It may be accurate but its nothing to do with who has bought it that will be the downfall of YouTube. The more YouTube starts to be aggressive against copyright infringers the more people will move away.
It is Google’s responsibility to try and balance the desire of the user to view clips of films, football goals, news items, funny "oops" moments and whatever else that comes from copyrighted material but is considered in general society as being fair use, with the desire of big business to shut out their content for all but those who pay money.
For me a 30 secs highlight clip of a football (soccer) match is fair use since it is just showing a minimal amount compared to the original. Furthermore, it is more of an advert for the network that shows the original live. The same goes for a film clip or a music video.
As was the case with Napster, Kazaa and others, if a company puts obstacles in the way then people will just shift and move elsewhere. The only way to keep people in is to add value to a system whereby people are fearful of moving elsewhere due to the amount of effort required to transfer that value that has been added over time. The best case in this day and age is what Microsoft have done with Windows. Due to the amound of applications build for windows it is more or less impossible for many businesses to move to Linux or Mac due to the costs of finding alternative software or of rewriting in-house software.
I don’t think that YouTube does this yet. Often if I see an embedded video on a site it takes an effort to discern which service the video comes from. For the publisher to change service is as easy as just uploading the video to a different provider.
One possible way of adding value is to provide functionality that no one else provides. This is getting more and more difficult. On the other hand, locking in the user is counter-productive as it drives away your users to more liberal sites.
I would recommend to Google to spend as much money as possible to try and convince the companies whose copyright is being infringed to place links/adverts next to the vidoes to an alternative service which has better quality and is provided much more immediately than the short clip.
By directly being the cause of sales will Google be able to keep both users and BigBadBusiness happy.
· Posted by Utills
October 23, 2006 at 10:33 am · Categorised under Blog
Isn’t it time that Gmail added a simple thesaurus to their email client. I don’t know why but for some reason it is very difficult to find dictionaries in applications on a desktop or within Web Applications. I know one can just use something like Answers.com or Dictionary.com but what if I am working offline?
So much so that even MS Word, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a means of finding the meaning of a word (the true essence of a dictionary) by default. Google through social networking techniques may even be able to come up with what I would call a social dictionary whereby it learns from people’s language like the search function’s ability to suggest correct spellings.
· Posted by Utills
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