Making a Nest

April 14th, 2012

I’ve been researching thermostats, and the market was starting to make me get annoyed, the thermostats on the market seem to be very basic, and then they are expensive, for what appears to be a clock with a relay attached, which is very analogue technology, Some of them have a magic BOOST button, which sounds like its been taken off a “hot rod car” but from what I understand its actually a bypass on the timer for 30 minutes or so.

Then I was have a little read on the web and along comes nest. This company was set up a group of apple engineers, so hence the shininess of the device, but basically is a device that has, wireless, proximity sensor and it usises this to understand how hot and how often you need heat, and also when you are in. So it actually turns on the heat when you actually need heat, when you are in the house, so we shall be doing a little more investigation and I can see a Nest being bought.

 

Using old phone booths

April 11th, 2012

In New York they are doing something with the old phone booths, there seems to be a good idea taking shape, This is transforming all the phone booths in to Tablet notice boards, that can give you information on what, where and where to get etc. Maybe now that some of our phone companies could talk a idea from new york and put this in motion in Ireland. so rather then ringing some one, your could look something up But that brings up the question do we need phone booths at all, if we all have mobiles! Or could we use the phone booths as a sensor technology to get an better understanding of street traffic, noise levels, after all they are a hardwired link to a exchange, in almost every street and city in the world.

You can read the link here

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/city_new_phone_booths_VFGNinvlcNX30nlD7ibKDK#.T4GweFOovlY.link

 

Getting you tweets in a twist and the curse of validating your sources

March 13th, 2012

Poor RTE the Irish national (Dublin based) broadcaster, It’s finding it tough these days, there all twittered out up there in RTE, Unfortunately the have discovered that, All it takes to get a twitter account is a e-mail and a free twitter handle, and anyone can be a user, even some one who is not who they really are! Its a pity that social media is actually social and just like the caller at the door that says he’s from the “Gas company” and he isn’t and he robs your house, the same can occur on the Internet. Only this time the fun is that you don’t need a fake ID card or a face, you just need a twitter and some journalists that don’t investigate their sources, and a presidential debate by a Dublin based “national broadcaster” station.

 

RTE should probably look at Twitter’s support page titled “About Verified Accounts” (https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/111-features/articles/119135-about-verified-accounts#) there is a section there about getting a verified account, it sounds like RTE didn’t do this. They could have Googled “how to create a fake twitter account” and it would have given them an insight in to how people can fake twitter accounts. I just worry that news sources are starting to use social media for reporting instead of using reporters for reporting, Or even worse that the reporters are not now doing the reporting work, or starting to become “social media experts”.

Paper and printing in the Dail (Parliament)… just how far could you go?

February 28th, 2012

Reading the Irish times it seems we have a member of parliament that managed to use 434 ink cartridges in two years, that is pretty substantial ink use, and just to put numbers into the real world

So looking in to this, I took a pretty standard A4 Pinter and looked at the A4 cartridge and how much it could print a HP Laser-jet 4200 (http://www.printerworks.com/DataSheets/laserjet4200_4300.html) it manages on the big cartridges 18000 sheets, which is pretty good.

So that’s 434 ink cartridges multiply by 18000 to give us number of sheets printed 7812000 sheets, now taking the standard A4 sheet length of .297m

Then we multiply 7812000 by .297m gives us 2320164m of paper used, so 2320 Km of paper, that’s enough to get to Poznan in Poland for the European soccer championships which is 1900 Km from dublin! and you could do nearly 400Km of touring!

up comming phones of 2012

February 27th, 2012

Before buying this new shiny phone, read this! All those industry execs have been in Barcelona at theMobile World Congress 2012 where they have been chatting about new phones, some of those industry execs have even been launching new phones, so before you go rushing off to buy a phone have a look at whats coming, before you shift your hard cash to one of those industry exec types!

So whats coming

well Samsung have a projector phone coming out.

Huawei have a tablet called a MediaPad 10 coming out, so it going the tablet market very cheap.

Huawei have also addressed the elephant in the room with Androids having poor battery life with a phone that may give 3 days of a charge

Sony’s has divorce’s its self from Ericsson and is looking to show its new branded models

 

It seems to be all android OS phones at the moment that are showing up …. at the moment

 

Clouds and when they go bust or etc.!

February 6th, 2012

So Megaupload users face data deletion according to the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16787486) so we are now in to the “fun” of the start of cloud services going bust, or being stopped operating by litigation. so it looks like you have to keep a copy of your data, before you go on to the cloud, but it also looks like you are going to have to synchronize your data with the clouds copy, that is assuming that you have a interface to that data. The example used could be GMail where users have all there data on google servers but if something happens to google, then your email data maybe gone, you can always set up a client to back up your data, see http://support.google.com/mail/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=ts.cs&ts=1668960&rd=1 and connect up evolution or thunderbird to copy your data out of the GMail cloud. It gets more interesting when you can’t get ftp access or no common standard is used for getting data out of the cloud. So there could be fun times ahead for people and companies that have gone too fast to cloud services, the may have to start looking in to how they synchronise there data with the cloud to maintain a local copy of there data.

Symantec Opps!

January 27th, 2012

Well if your in the computer security business and you get hacked, its bad, it’s even worse if your a computer security company and your source code gets hacked, its even worse if the code that may have been got at is “pcAnywhere”, it looks like Symantec may have turned there pcAnywhere in to a pcEverywhere!

More from Symantec below

http://www.symantec.com/theme.jsp?themeid=anonymous-code-claims&inid=us_ghp_banner1_anonymous

 

Tablets, and deal hunting

December 5th, 2011

I’m looking at Android devices, as there seems to be too much “lock in” on apple and amazon devices.

Talking to Harvey Norman today Monday 5th of December I’ve came across the following:
€449
Toshiba at100 (sold as the Toshiba Thrive in the US)
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/toshiba-at100-1003950/review
The Toshiba, Has got a SDXC card, memory card and has mini USB and replaceable battery, Its also got proper USB ports and a proper HDMI port.

€399
Acer icona
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/26/acer-iconia-tab-a500-review/
3.5mm headphone jack, a mini-HDMI port.dedicated power jack (Means having to have another charger!) and a pair of USB slots: one micro-USB to transfer data to the tablet, and one full-size USB port which connects with both your storage drives and keyboards, just connect this to a usb hub and you be grand.

More reviews are here:

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/266915/the-best-android-tablets/

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/13-best-android-tablets-in-the-world-905504

Kindle fire a users tale

December 1st, 2011

Before you rush out and buy a kindle this xmas have a read of this http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/19/kindle_fire_google_apps/ it tells of a user discovering how locked in to the amazon ecosystem he was after buying a kindle fire. you have been warned!

Blue-Ray and lack of copy protection!

November 29th, 2011

So Blue-Ray has now been hacked,  but you will need a bit of hardware to do it. A few PHD students in Germany have managed to put a few chips together for about €200 and you can now get past the copy protection using a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to crack the copy protection system used by HDMI ports with relatively little effort.

more here http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Researchers-conduct-successful-MITM-attack-on-HDCP-copy-protection-1384543.html