Christmas - Devon and Saunton Sands

Merry Christmas and all that - formalities aside it's always nice to get out of the big smoke and see some of the country you're living in and spend some quality time with friends. This year we headed out to Devon. It was a fantastic trip and the weather was spot on the whole time. I managed to get some shots off and since I haven't had time to update this I thought I'd put them up here.

Abandoned TV tower in Russia

Source: Abandoned Places and Victorprofessor.com


This photo set just gave me the willies. It an abandoned television tower in Russia.

The blurb from the blog states:
Highest abandoned television tower on Russia - 350 meters.
It's a little bit higher than Eiffel tower in Paris. Was bult in 1990s. Used by base-jumpers.
Some photos from bottom to top and then top to ground. Wind, clouds, ice. 2 hours for going up, and 1 hour to go down.

Kogan Agora Android Phone

Source: iTWire
The second Google Android phone has surfaced and it's in the classic Blackberry shape and it comes from Down Under from a company called Kogan. It's called the Agora Pro and is on sale now for $399 AUS or £175 without lock or contract. Great news for the masses that want to get their hands on the new OS and its, from personal experience, great applications.

SPECIFICATIONS

Operating System	Android™
Google Mobile Functions	Google Search™, Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Maps™, Google Talk™, Google Calendar™.
Display	2.5-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 262K QVGA (320 X 240 pixel) resolution
Device Control	5-Way Central Navigation Key
Keyboard	QWERTY keyboard Keyboard backlighting
GPS	GPS navigation capability with Google Maps™
Connectivity	Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g
Camera	2.0 megapixel colour camera
Audio	Built-in microphone and speaker Headphone output Ring tone formats: MIDI, MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, PCM
Video	Video formats supported: MPEG2 H263, H264, MPEG4, AVI
Mail attachment support	Viewable document types: JPEG,GIF,WBMP,MIDI,AMR,MP3,WAV
Dimensions (HxWxD)	108 mm x 64 mm x 14.8 mm
Weight	130g
Battery	Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery Capacity: 1300 mAh
Talk Time	Up to approximately 400 minutes
Standby Time	Up to approximately 300 hours
Processor MHz	624 MHz
Memory	256 MB On-board + 128 MB Flash microSD™ card expansion slot
Network	UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

Features Available:

• Handsfree
• FM radio
• JAVA 2.0
• SMS
• Email
• MMS 1.0
• WAP 2.0
• WAP Push
• Web Browser
• Bookmarks
• Video Recording
• Media Player
• Instant Messaging
• Phone Book
• Ring Silencer/Quick Silent
• Scheduler/Organiser
• Mini-USB Connectivity (charging, headset)
• Phone Book
• Integrated Antenna
• Fast Text Editor
• Lunar calendar, Calculator and Alarm Clock

Mammoth Stars

It's been a while since I have updated this blog due to being a bit too busy however this caught my eye. This is imagery is from the Hubble Space Telescope. Just beautiful.

Source: WIRED Science

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two of the most massive stars in our galaxy as never before. Located 7,500 light years away from Earth in the Carina Nebula, these stars are rare ultra-hot, super-bright stars that emit primarily ultraviolet radiation, that gives them a blue hue.

WR25, the brightest of the stars near the center of the image, is actually a large star 50 times the size of our sun with another star half that size orbiting around it. To the upper left of WR25, the third brightest star in this image is really a triple star cluster. Two are so close together that telescopes with less resolution can't resolve them. The third star may take hundreds of thousands of years to orbit around them.

The second brightest star, to the left in the image, is actually a less massive star that appears bright because it is much closer to earth than the others.

Pulse Room

I love this kind of thing. Installation art can either be a lost cause of someones rather strange idea of art and in other cases be something so mesmerizing that you just have to see it again and again. The Pulse Room strikes me as one of these and is similar to some installations that have popped up on Southbank in London.

Source: Todayandtomorrow.net


Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, premiered at Plataforma exhibition in Puebla, 2006, and shown at the Venice Biennale 2007. A sensor records the pulse of the public and converts it into light flashes shown by incandescent light bulbs. At any given time the room shows the heartbeat of the 100 most recent participants.

Link to the Artist Page: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

1874 - Lunar Photography

Source: WIRED Magazine

The article in WIRED and also the video below intrigued me as much for the cleverness and ingenuity of astronomers and photographers around 1870 as the example of open mindedness and appreciation by other scientist and photographers.

Quoted from WIRED:

If you wanted close-up photos of the moon in the late 1800s, you were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them.

And that's exactly what an engineer and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim.

James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review.

"The illustrations to this book are so admirable, so far beyond those one generally gets of any celestial phenomenon, that one is tempted to refer to them first of all," the reviewer wrote. "No more truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been laid before his readers by any student of Science; and I may add that, rarely if ever, have equal pains been taken to insure such truthfulness."

GMail Skinning

Source: Google Blogscoped

Looks like GMail is getting skinning much as the iGoogle homepage has - it's always nice to get a big of colour on the subject. I wonder if you will be able to modify and create your own with pictures of your own choice...

A different perspective.

Made me smile

Made me smile.

Amazing Zoom - a bit of perspective

Source: FunForever.net

I love it when you can get some perspective on life and this is a brilliant way to look at it.

10 million light years from the Milky Way
1 million light years from the Milky Way
The Milky Way
Stars Near the Milky WayStars In the Milky Way
100 light years from Earth
10 light years from Earth

The SunOur solar systemFollow it through to it's rather mind boggling end here: Funforever

Dr... Who?

This put a silly little grin on my face this morning - We get introduced to the new Doctor.

David Morrissey is his name and to be entirely honest I've not actually seen him in anything but he seems to be keeping up the whimsy that makes the Doctor so amusing.

Further to the Flash on Android...

This is a video from YouTube demoing web content running flash on the T-Mobile G1.

...and that appears to be how it's done.

T-Mobile G1 capable of multitouch?

Source: Mobile Crunch

Whenever the G1 vs iPhone debate gets underway, iPhone purists are quick to flag the G1’s lack of multi-touch input support. Turns out, it might just be able to handle it after all -on the hardware end, at least. Whilst tearing his G1’s workings apart line-by-line, a crafty coder going by RyeBrye came across an interesting artifact. It seems the driver for the Synaptics touchscreen has some code commented out; after recompiling the kernel with said code back in, he was able to track two finger presses at once.

So if the hardware supports it, why no multi-touch on the G1? Patents, presumably. While this in no way actually enables to you to do any kind of multi-touch funnin’ immediately (nothing made for the G1 is currently coded for use with multi-touch, afterall), it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Though we probably won’t see any official support for multi-touch on the G1 any time soon, someone with a bit of spare time to tinker will probably figure out a way to make use of it before too long.

More Info:http://www.ryebrye.com/blog/2008/11/17/proving-the-g1-screen-can-handle-multi-touch/

Holy Android Flash Batman!

Quoted from Apple... "I've got that sinking feeling" (ok I'm joking but the following is a massive kick in the teeth for the iPhone)

Source: InternetNews.com

Google has a new ally in its battle for smartphone dominance: Adobe.

The companies today revealed that that Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) has made its Flash technology compatible with the Android smartphone operating system developed by the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance. As a result, the enhancement may give devices like T-Mobile's G1 smartphone and other Android-based phones access to a key feature that's lacking from the industry's darling, the Apple iPhone.

Andy Rubin, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) director of mobile platforms, and Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch announced the effort today at Adobe MAX, the company's developer conference. The two presented a demo of Flash 10 running on a G1, which is manufactured by HTC.

Other than a price drop on the mobile contracts to get the G1 adding the option of adding Flash to Android (including the G1) is going to get these handsets moving out the door quickly.

There is quite a bit of argument as to who is competing against who. Is Googles Android in competition with the Apple iPhone or are they in competition with the likes of Symbian and Windows Mobile (Microsoft).

To answer the question I think we need to look at why we are differentiating Apples iPhone from other smart phones. In my opinion the reason is that when the handset first was presented to the public is was not as the classic 'smart phone', such as the Blackberry and the MDA Vario, but as an everyday device for everyone that happened to have a very slick UI (user interface) and an extraordinary web browsing experience. Since the 2.0 OS update on the iPhone Apple have been working to change this and have integrated a massive list of enterprise capability such as push email and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and I believe that we should no longer be differentiating the iPhone from Windows Mobile or Symbian Devices.

Currently in these early days of Android it is in the same place that the iPhone was at initial release. It has no enterprise application but it holds the potential and as such it's difficult to make a 'smartphone' comparison with Windows Mobile and Symbian devices but easier against the iPhone as the majority of its users are everyday consumers.

Of course there will never be a case of Google holding their hands up and saying "yep we're directly competing against Apple on this one" for two reasons. The first is simply that they are attempting to change the mobile device landscape (no specific target) with a very different and open minded approach to development and the second is that Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) is on Apples board of directors.

The addition of flash is a fairly major differentiation against the iPhone as Apples current Terms of Agreement for developers expressly forbids the use of Flash type technology on the iPhone hardware.

Source: WIRED Mag

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise," reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

This can be fairly quickly changed but I don't see this happening any time soon, more likely Apple will develop a type of secure 'Flash player' to enable the use of specific websites and apps. Whether this will eventuate or whether it will be the best solution only time will tell. As for the other breeds of smartphones out there I think we will see them following suit sooner rather than later.

Earthrise

This image was the first ever photo of what is now iconic when we think of the moon missions - Earthrise. NASA released this image from the Lunar Orbiter 1 mission in 1966 and at the time it was of a fairly low resolution. Using some very clever technology they have regenerated the photo from the original data stored on old magnetic tapes. Click on the image to view it in it's full resolution.

Source NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/LOIRP/

T-mobile G1 – The first of the Google Android Phones. Part 4

Web Browsing

My experiences with mobile web browsing have come in several forms, the obligatory laptop, the stripped down mobile and the seriously slick iPod Touch/iPhone. Of all of them so far my favorite has to be Apples implementation. It's simple, fast and instantly intuitive. In my personal opinion this is the standard that Android and the G1 was competing with. Has it succeeded? Lets take a look.

The first thing you notice is that the web pages are generally presented in the manner that you expect from PC browsing or from the iPhone browser with the exceptions of sites that offer a stripped down version like Google.co.uk


Hitting the menu button will open the browser options. Go to URL, Search, Bookmarks, Window, Refresh and under More: Close Page, Forward, History, Downloads, Page Info, Bookmark Page, Share Page, Zoom and Settings.

Under Settings there are a myriad of options including popup blocking, Turn off image loading, Enable/Disable Javascrip, Open new windows in the background and the ones you come to expect from a browser like cookie management and cache clearing.


As with the Apple browser you navigate around the page by dragging a finger. When you interact with the screen the Zoom buttons automatically come up and clicking on them will produce the expected result. It's this function that I find a little clumsy when compared to the multi touch of the Apple devices and after having used them I still find myself pining a little for the naturally intuitive fingers out, fingers in process of zooming.

There is a second way of working your way around a web page and that is by clicking on the cross arrows in the bottom right of the screen. This maximizes the web page so that you can see almost all of it and provides you with a magnifying square which can be dragged around the page and then released when you are satisfied that this is what you want to view.


The Android browser also has a version of tabbed browsing that is accessed via the Window option. This opens a screen that displays the pages that you currently have open.


When the phone is flipped onto it's side and opened it will give you the option to add another page. I think since the last update There is now the same option when the orientation is vertical.

You can change the orientation of the browser without opening the phone by going into the Menu then the More submenu and selecting 'Flip Orientation'. This is a clumsy and counter intuitive method of using the browser interface especially considering that the phone has a fully functional accelerometer. Hopefully this will be addressed in later OS updates.

The browser has some great functionality however it does need some streamlining. The G1 touchscreen interface does lend itself to a fairly pleasant browsing experience as does the keyboard. Small things like the screen orientation responding to the accelerometer and perhaps a different way of zooming the screen would make the experience a little more intuitive.

T-mobile G1 – The first of the Google Android Phones. Part 3

I'll start off first with the basic Android phone functionality.

The phones interface is predominantly touch screen with any text input or search functions using the keyboard. There are two ways to select an option or 'click' that is a short click or a long click. The long click either allows you to move an icon for repositioning or brings up a contextual menu. Long clicking on the Home screen backdrop opens up a menu with the options to add an application, shortcut, widget or to change your wallpaper.

As I mentioned in Part 2 sliding the screen open re-orients the screen sideways. This is fairly logical but I have found many times that I would like to have been able to tilt the phone without opening the keyboard. The G1 hardware has the full gamut of accelerometers the same as the Apple iPod and as such this functionality may well be enabled in a later update.

Making a phone call.

The phone has four different menus in the calling option. The first is the dialer that can be accessed directly via the icon on the home page or indirectly by using the keyboard to start typing in a name of the contact you wish to dial.

The second is a historical method using the call log which works in the expected manner. The Third is via the Contacts list and the fourth through the favorites list.

The first of my gripes with the calling system is an inability to assign fast dials to the numbers. Holding down the 1 button will fast dial your voicemail so clearly the capability is there however at this early stage there is no facility for assigning your contacts to a number. Developers have created a nice little app called Anycut that among other things allows you to place fast dials onto your Home screen but it would be nice if there wasn't the need for a work around.

The Contacts list is in my opinion fairly well constructed. You can drag up and down to browse through the list of names, if you need to move a bit more rapidly you can use a tab on the right hand side that then displays the alpha fields as you move through them.

Clicking on a contact will then take you into the contact details and from there you can choose to Call them by either clicking on the phone number listed or hitting the dial button. From the same screen you can call any alternative numbers, email, SMS or see their online status of things like Google Talk, MSN or Yahoo Chat.

Long clicking on a contact (i.e. hold your finger on it) will bring up a menu giving you similar options as are available by clicking in but also allows you to delete them and add them to your favorites list. This is another issue that I have with the first version of this software, if you add a contact to your favorites list they are no longer in your normal contacts list. I find this frustrating as really you end up using one or the other - you shouldn't have to search through both.

The call quality on the G1 is excellent as is the reception of the handset and I'm hoping that the open nature of Android will lend itself to applications like Skype being added as it's permanently connected to the Internet.

SMS is also very straight forward and is as simple as either hitting reply to a message or going into your contacts and selecting SMS. The keyboard makes the whole process fairly painless.

Calendar

The calendar that comes with the phone is surprisingly good especially since I use the Google Calendar as does my fiancé. It automatically synchronises with both mine and hers and gives me a very good visual breakdown of busy times and daily events across the top. Creating a new appointment is as simple as holding your finger down on the day and time you wish to use and it then asks you if you'd like to add a new event, full day appointment or if you would like to view your full day/week/month agenda.

E-mail

Android comes with two packaged e-mail clients. One is the expected Gmail client and this works seamlessly with your online account. The front end is exactly the same as the one that you may have seen on the Apple iPhone, simple and intuitive. Having he G1s slide out keyboard and trackball make editing a pleasure.




The second is a generic client that you can add any online account details to and it will then integrate it into your phones alerts and functionality. I personally don't have any use for this as I use Gmail almost exclusively but for those with MSN Mail, Yahoo or another 3rd party mail shouldn't have any problems will adding this to your phone as long as there is POP3 or IMAP access. The phone will recognise which one you have set as your primary account and all e-mails will be sent from this address. You can set up as many accounts on the phone as you like. As for Enterprise access I don't believe there is sufficient security on the phone itself for this use. Again I imagine this is something that would be addressed at a later stage and as Google are aiming for their products to be used in an Enterprise situation it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

In Part 4 I will go over the Web Browser

T-Mobile G1 - The first of the Google Android Phones. Part 2

After being left disappointed by the hardware of the G1 we get onto the really interesting part; the Android OS.

So what is Google Android?

Quoted from Wikipedia: Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices, based on the Linux kernel, developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance.^[2]managed code in the Java language, controlling the phone via Google-developed Java libraries,^[3]. Applications written in C and other languages can be compiled to ARM native code and run, but this development path isn't officially supported by Google.

The intention of Google Android is to produce an open source operating system that is able to be installed on any mobile hardware and subsequently be developed for by anyone using the free developers kit from Google. There are some fairly obvious restrictions that have been put in place when it comes to what the developers can access. Specifically the end users personal data and contacts. From the Android Docs:

Security Architecture

A central design point of the Android security architecture is that no application, by default, has permission to perform any operations that would adversely impact other applications, the operating system, or the user. This includes reading or writing the user's private data (such as contacts or e-mails), reading or writing another application's files, performing network access, keeping the device awake, etc.

An application's process is a secure sandbox. It can't disrupt other applications, except by explicitly declaring the permissions it needs for additional capabilities not provided by the basic sandbox. These permissions it requests can be handled by the operating in various ways, typically by automatically allowing or disallowing based on certificates or by prompting the user. The permissions required by an application are declared statically in that application, so they can be known up-front at install time and will not change after that.

This is the core to many peoples misgivings for the OS and hopefully their intention holds in the end product. We have already seen that the initial release has a major security hole in that it executes every typed command as Super User meaning that with a couple of key presses any user can inadvertently brick their phone. Not the best way to endear peoples trust in you looking after your personal data.

All the technical information aside lets get down to the T-Mobile G1 implementation of Android.
When you turn the phone on you are presented with the expected G1/T-Mobile splash screen and then a nice little pulsing Android Logo. After that you're presented with a locked status screen.

When you press the MENU button you are presented with one of the first cool innovations on the G1. Instead of a numeric or password based security lock Android uses a user defined pattern that you then repeat to unlock the phone. The share number of variations of the patterns is pretty mind boggling. After 5 attempts it starts giving you time outs before finally requiring you to enter a PUK code to unlock the phone. I'm not looking forward to my first drunken night out trying to unlock this sucker!

We're in! The front screen is actually one of three panels that can be accessed by a sideways sweep of a finger. Each screen can be customised with folders, widgets and shortcuts to anything from fast dials to web pages and applications. These can be organised by holding your finger down on the icons or widget and dragging them around or down to the tab at the bottom of the screen which becomes a rubbish bin. The wallpapers extend across the three panels rather than repeat which makes the wallpapers of a higher resolution than the phones 320x480 to 640x480.

There are two 'blinds' on the home screen. Across the top there is a notification blind that displays any conversations, text messages, emails and download/install status for any apps that you install from the Market. This is accessed by dragging the panel down with a finger.

On the bottom there is the Application Blind that is pulled up in the same manner as the Notification Blind. It can also be extended by tapping on the tab. This tab contains all applications including any that you have installed. They are organised in an alphabetical manner and once you have installed a few apps this becomes quite cluttered. I think that in future versions of the OS they should think about being able to change the organisation of this blind to allow defining of folders and/or arranging by relevance or use. The icons are a bit small and do not allow for a rapid recognition so you do end up searching a bit. Any of these applications can be dragged up onto the home screens by holding your finger on them, the blind will automatically close, then you can place the icon where you like. When there are more icons than can fit on one page of the blind you can scroll up and down by using a finger and dragging as you would intuitively expect.

When the phone is opened sideways the screen automatically rotates to the side and the Application Blind is accessed by a sideways drag or a tap. I would've expected the contents of the Apps Blind to then be accessed by a side scrolling motion but you still scroll up and down. Personally I find this a little counter intuitive however until someone else uses it to confirm it may well just be me.


I will go into the applications and settings in Part 3.