Category: technology

Here are some pictures taken from my digital shoplifting in Borders. I was tempted to reduce them but what the hell, sorry to all 56k users. 172k is kinda of large but check out the quality of the shots.

Heard so much about the 3 above, need to read them really.



Looks ok, but the content is told in a nice way. Perfect for lending to friends.



How ironic.


The book i was trying to decide if I should get. About how realitivity and quantium physics are linked in this superstring theory.

Yep and a few programming books which I'll just link to

Apache – the best apache book I found. I want to get rid of iis now and i'm going to install apache 2.0 for sure. This would be a great start…
RSS by Oreilly, maybe a bit out of date but still good

XML-RPC by Oreilly, enough said once again
XML databases – Just what i need to compare xquery to xpath and it has a really decent look at xbase, xlink and xpointer
Wireless security, end to end. Thinking of setting up a radius server on my wireless access point.

I was thinking to myself while posting these, if I could get pop3 to blog working. I would be able to post directly to my blog from my 3g phone.
Now that would be something, maybe this is the outline of mobblogging, but i've only seen mms to blog and java app to blog. Not email to blog.
This gets me thinking again that the motorola phone is more useful than this nec e808. It also does 640×480 pictures I believe? Unlike this piece of crap. Need to do more research into this and quickly before i cant return the phone to 3.

Ok I've had a pretty good time walking around Cambridge today. Very Pee'd off that the conference wasnt on, yeah g thanks apple. And I was very tempted to jump on the train back to work. But nope I thought well i spent the time going to cambridge I might as well have a wonder around.

Cambridge reminds me of bath alot. Old building built around a central hub and tiny roads no one can go down. Its got element of Amsterdam with the amount of people on bicycles wobbling all over the place. But I'm not here to bore you about this.

I poped into superdrug mainly to check out the 3g stand 3 have now setup throught-out different stores.
Here in england superdrug is a odd place to put a stand about selling 3g. But I've learned that superdrug and 3 share a parent company, so it all makes alot more sense.

Anyways, yeah I was checking out the stand with these two women on it. The phones were in glass cases and it all looked pretty good for a non pernimant stand. The kinda of quality you expect when you go to a exhitbion.
ok, so 3 have now realeased there 4th phone and its basicly the same as mine but it has no flip and the screen is larger too.

But what they were talking to me about was, if i dont like my phone i can return it within 14 days and get another one. Hummm i thought, maybe i dont like this phone as much as i first thought i would.

So I have choices now, the Nec 606 is the one most people are going for, it does video calling, has bluetooth, and 32meg. Its pretty much like mine but with no keyboard and only 32meg. oh and its smaller of course. But the battery dies like nothing you've ever seen before.
The motorola on the other hand does everything i want, but it has no video calling at all. So i'm missing out on the main reason for 3g if i get that one?
Of course i have the nec 808 already and the 808y seems to be pretty much the same as the 808.

So the question really is, is video calling important to me? If so i should stay with the nec, if not i should go to the motorola.

See at this moment, there is only 2 people i can call on video calling plus the fact its free for me to call, so that makes a big difference in terms of using it. If i had to pay 50 pence a minute to use it, i wouldnt use it straight forward as that. Maybe if it as low as 20p I would consider it. one pound for 5mins of video calling, mmmmm maybe.
So to the greater question, i would say i should change it. But another thing worries me. If i change it, will it take 3 a another 5 months to deliver a phone to me? There is no douht in my mind once i get 3g working as a modem (hoping to do this today) for my laptop, i will be laughing.
It will be basicly free isdn to midband speed internet on the go when ever i want and all for free till October.

But i can do that with the motorola plus it will be bluetooth so i can do the same with my ipaq as well as tabletpc. Now that would be joy for sure. And god help me and my ipaq if they increase the bandwidth to 2meg as umts can support.
The power drain on the ipaq and phone will be stupid. Really stupid…

Ok so digital shoplifting, yes i commited the unthinkable. I went into borders in cambridge sat down in there inbuilt starbucks and masterminded my plan while drinking a strong mocha and laughing to myself in little giggles.

I then went from book to book just taking pictures of the book covers i found interesting. So i can then go on the web and find them. Of course on Amazon.co.uk. What did you think i ment?
But seriously i took a picture of the cover and the index page or the page which explains why i'm interested and then wrote a comment on the camera to go with the picture. Now thats a smart feature of the phone. I'll have to check the motorola does that before signing up.
Also need to see if that information is transfered to the pc as is or in another way. would be kinda of cool if it was pushed into the image as metadata or from my point much better if it was a text file with just the same file name.

Anyhow, i did end up buying a book for the grand sum of 20 pounds and not shoplifiting it. so the opposite worked for me. But I did want to do something while i was in the store.
Something which is more like the digital shop lifting you hear about in japan. I wanted to send miles a picture and some text of a book about quantum physics, because i wasnt sure if it was any good or not. Now I could have phoned him, but what a waste of time that would have been for him, specially if he was in the middle of something. Also a long text would have been really long because the front cover said it all. A mms would have been perfect really. Humm maybe theres something good about picture messaging after all.
But back to the shoplifting, the camera dont yet have the storage or the speed yet to do a whole book or even a magazine. Its all about that one thing you need rather than the whole thing.

So at long last I got my 3g phone talking to my Tabletpc. And it was so my fault, I was going to external connect rather than data transfer. Come on guys you know that was a honest mistake that anyone would have made.
Anyhow my problems are not over yet. I tried transfering some java files while doing my music for the long trip up to cambridge (dont ask). And it would transfer them fine, but i go to the java app to run one and nothing. It doesnt see a single of them.
Nightmare for sure…

So whats the plan of action? well i'm going to try downloading 3's own java apps to see what there named as. Because i think its as simple as that really. If not, i'll have to into the specs to see what it does and doesnt support.

I have to say this phone is driving me bloody nuts. The battery lasts umm, one day at the most. Hence why 3 put two chargers in the pack. If there was a usb sync cable which also supplied power at the same time then yeah i'll be happy. But oh no, this cable they give you only syncs and nothing else.
Which is damm ignoying because for example i was transfering music (will come on to that in a bit) and it was so slow, but i couldnt leave it o ver night because the battery would die. Yes you guessed it the power and the usb connection are the same port.
But i dont get it because ericsson have been doing this for years and there cables are split. So you can charge the ohone while syncing. Why does nec have to be different? Maybe because there eastern.

Ok good and bad news on media.
It does indeed play music and video from external source which is great but only a selected amount.
Mpeg4 and 3gp on the video front, note it captures up to 12secs of mpeg4 too. And on the music front were talking ogg, 3ga and wma. Yeah what a suprise, no mp3 at all. But I have yet to actually upload any mp3s to it just to check it doesnt do it for sure. Ogg is also a suprise specially alongside windows media.

Ok i'm little pee'd off with my 3g phone at the moment. I have quickly realised that the Nec e606 has bluetooth and not my e808. So I have to sync everything over a pain in the arse usb cable.

And that would be great if it actually worked. But at this moment it doesnt. It moans that the phone is locked and I will not beable to transfer anything. So even after looking through the pdf which are the cd, and following the procedure to the exact letter, it still does not work.

Has anyone had this problem before? It doesnt look like it, but its a new phone and 3g is only in a few countrys at the moment. So I could be waiting ages for help.

What also drives me nuts is that there are very few specs on the phone its self, is the browser a wap, xhtml, chtml browser? I have no idea, all i know is that I cant seem to connect to any other websites or wap sites. Maybe its a walled garden, but why would they provide a enter url option?

I have no idea, all I know is I cant install any j2me files at this moment.

I'm now looking for a blogging application for my 3g phone. Quick browse through google and what do you know.
The java libary which makes it possible
Kablog
Azure

Also reminds me I need one of these for my ipaq too.
Pocket blog

So finally I got my 3g mobile phone yesterday. Its from three and I picked the NEC e808 which has 2 full motion cameras, 64meg and a full qwerty keyboard. Hence why its quite big, everyone yesterday said Its too big, its far too big. But come on guys its got a full keyboard and its the first set of 3g phones, what do you expect? More information to come, specially if i can get mobblogging working with it.

By the way this was posted via Chronicle Lite, a java application which works on all platforms which blogs via xmlrpc perfectly. Now if I only get textism working inside of it.

Japan's Digital Shoplifting Plague – Fantastic use of camera phones, I love it!

It's becoming increasingly clear that we live in a world where the majority of people simply don't understand “digital”. Over in Japan, the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association is on the warpath trying to stop browsers in bookstores from taking camera-phone photos of their magazines, calling it “digital shoplifting”.
As an example, they say that a woman may flip through a magazine and see a new dress or hairstyle, and snap a photo to send to their friends to ask what they think. The magazine publishers are angry that this is (they believe) taking money out of their pockets. Of course, that assumes (probably incorrectly) that the person would have bought the magazine in the first place or that they wouldn't then go and buy the magazine anyway.
Meanwhile, bookshop employees say they'll have trouble stopping this activity, since they can't tell whether someone is just sending a text message or if they're using the camera phone.

Based on this idea, shouldn't we be forced to claw our own eyes out? Or, at the very least, have all magazines and books wrapped in black shrink wrap to prevent someone from (gasp!) actually seeing any part of it before buying. Perhaps it really is time for someone to invent the DRM helmet and make sure that anytime you see anything, you get charged for it.

I've just attended a show about mobile life, it was your usual come look at my new phones style thing. Pretty boring but I found a couple of things which make me think. All from Nokia too

First thing I saw was the Nokia obsavation camera. Ok its basicly a camera-phone but in the shape of a camera. It is like those Axis network cameras but this one has no network socket only a 9pin serial socket and a SIM slot.
So how do you control it? Well once its got AC power, it acts like a phone waiting for a phone call (more on this later) or text message. Once it recieves a text message it will reply with a MMS message, included in the body of the message will be a photo of what the camera currently saw.
But it gets better, you can adjust its internal settings to send you a MMS when it detects movement over a user specified livel or over a set period of time. You can even get it to stop sending depending on howm any you specify.

Its a first of its kind and we are interested in getting some on the cheap and setting them up in college as a useful way of connecting new students to there courses and the college as a whole.
We could offer new students the ability to get pictures of the college before they come in on the first day. Just by giving out the mobile number of the camera.
I believe its also possible to have a access list, so if the number becomes widely known, we can block all except for those who we put in the access list?
If they sort out reverse billing for this, we could open it to all no problem.

Another neat little feature is that if you phone it, you can hear what the camera hears! Now thats clever stuff. Specially if you get the reverse billing working…
Anyway I'm thinking if I can grab a nice VGA quality copy for the website over serial and let students at the number for MMS. Maybe setup 5 cams, one for each area in college and one for reception? Pricing seems ok, about 150 pounds online with contract. Shame theres no ip to gsm bridge though… oh nokia reckon within a month we can buy it. Just in time for next college year I would say… could be a interesting project for this summer?

Ok the next very very interesting thing from Nokia. I'm not actually ment to talk about too much because its not be shown in the uk yet. So they say…
When they explained what this device does, I was blown away. My legs turned to jelly and I collapsed. In my mind of course…

So what does Nokia SU2 do? Yes I got the model number when they let me look at it. Well its basiclly allows anyone to send a picture to it over a bluetooth connection and display it on a device which accepts composite.
Yes its that simple. Unfortually I never got a demo of it because they were not allowed too, but I'm gonna do some searching when I get home this weekend for sure.

How would this work for Ravensbourne? Well any student can do a presentation from there bluetooth enabled laptop without plugg-in a vga cable. Doesnt sound like anything amazing except when you imagine a small group of around 5-10 students who can each send there photos to the large screen. You can imagine them sending concepts and talking about it, while someone else grabs that image and adds there own take on it, while there talking. I'm guessing the SU2 does allow uploading and downloading over bluetooth?

Anyway I was thinking, we could do the same with the bluetooth hub and a computer. The hub is the bluetooth to network bridge and if you place a image in a certain folder it would pick that up and display it through a vga card which supports svideo or composite. Its kinda wasteful but it does allow you to deal with not only images but video and audio.
But then again, we have wireless, why use bluetooth when all there laptops have wireless anyway? The advantage of the SU2 is that it works with mobile devices not laptops, stupid Me.
So maybe its not so good for ravensbourne, specially if we sort out webdav access and shared folders. Oh well it was a good thought wasted on us.
Now if the camera was bluetooth…

So I've been seriously thinking about my net holiday idea again.
The main problem is the power of laptops, there battery are pretty crap, even my tabletpc lasts around about 3.5 hours with wireless on. Never tried it with just the Lan connection on, or thinking about it now, with just bluetooth on.

Anyway once you put the brightness of the screen up, your 3hours becomes a very sickly 2hrs and if you want to read the screen outside in the sun your gonna need all the brightness your laptop can deliver.
Even while I write this post on the coach ride from Bristol to London, the sun is giving me grief, so much that I had to draw the make shift curtains.
Anyhow, if you plug in power your fine. You can drain all the power you like and still have the brightness on maximum. However, on a net holiday would you want to be confined to one area in which you can have power? Not really, no.

The solutions

Why not have extra thick power packs which will increase the life of the laptops? Yes I guess it would work, but no one wants to carry around a brick of a laptop on holiday? And lets not forget most people will bring there own laptops rather than rent one.

Why not have power blocks everywhere, so people can plugin everywhere? It would kind of work except we would have to once again supply mains power for every type of laptop. We could tell people before hand to take extra power blocks?
Another issue with always on mains power is if one falls in the swimming pool, everyone dies of a nasty electric shock, where if just the laptop everyone gets stunk no one dies. I'm guessing because obvioulsy I've never tried it myself.

Why not use solar power? Ah you hit the nail on the head. If we use solar power in a hot sunny place like south spain, we could easily get the charge of a main supply. But its safer and can be moved around alot more than mains adapters.
So ok theres two ways to do this. Some kind of large one which will power a set of laptops or little mini ones which you put on the outer side of the laptop. Maybe theres some kind of mounting like you get on those usb laptop cameras?
Once you got that sorted and powering the laptop, there should be enough sunshine to power the laptop thought-out the day. because if I'm right in saying, it only really requires daylight not bright and hot sunshine. Maybe it generates charge quicker if its brighter?

This kinda makes me think why cant the hotel be solar powered? And indeed, why not?
What self confessing geek wouldnt want to come on a net holiday? I'm sorry but I wouldnt beable to resist it.

Good-Bye 3G – Hello Wi-Fi Frappuccino