A controlled crowd

The new iPad had just been released and as I passed the computer shop just by the Tube exit I saw that they had prepared for the onslaught: A bolshy guard stood and glared at the queue of prospective buyers. All five of them.

Things that work

A colleague had installed some software on his Mac: “…and it worked, just out of the box. And the most disgusting part is that I was totally unprepared for that!”

Honeybuns and I had long discussed upgrading to a proper system camera. So, being an aware consumer I went to the Råd & Rön website and looked up their test of system cameras. Now, this is one of the tests behind the paywall, so I was requested to send a text message containing a code to a given number. I did so, and within seconds the browser magically updated and brought me to the test spreadsheet. The best-performing camera was easy to pick out: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2. Clicking on it I was brought to Pricerunner, where I got a list of suppliers and the prices they charged. Amazon UK turned out to be the cheapest by a wide margin, so I clicked on that link, was brought to the Amazon page for the camera, added it to the basket and checked it out. A couple of days later I had a package to retrieve at the nearest Coop and there was the new camera. I noted that it had been cheaper than the compact camera I bought seven years ago.

First obstacle: the battery charger was supplied with a British-style plug, but the charger itself had a standard two-pole connector, so half a minute of rummaging in my cable drawer brought out the right kind of cable.
Second obstacle: the camera was delivered without any memory card at all. That I thought was pretty stupid. So I had to buy a separate card. A life of experience strongly suggested one should always buy as much memory as can be fit into the device—it will soon be used up. So, a 64 GiB card should be the thing. Back to Amazon. After a bit of back and forth I came to the conclusion that no supplier will deliver 64 GiB cards to Sweden. Weird. So, let’s try a 32 GiB card then. Here I found a supplier, but as I am checking it out the price is suddenly doubled. What? Hm, they’ve slapped on 99 quid in postage & packing! OK, no sale for them. Finally I found a supplier who sells cheap, delivers to Sweden, and doesn’t charge ridiculous amounts for the postage and then I had a new package a couple of days later. Camera complete!

NOTPU

Recently my Palm stopped sounding alarms. Very strange, the audio unit and everything else was functioning well, but scheduled alarms just didn’t appear. I decided to reset the Palm. To be safe, I synched it first. On synching, about two weeks’ worth of unacknowledged alarms raised a raucous ruckus. OK, so when I get up before the alarm rings and then don’t acknowledge it due to being in the shower or whatever, the alarm eventually times out, but gets stored in a buffer somewhere, and when this buffer fills up, no more alarms can be issued? I'm not sure I understand the logic of the implementation, but at least the solution to the problem was simple.

Upgrade tradeoffs

The Palm Zire I bought as a dissertation present for myself has been getting on a bit in years, so as a late Christmas present my friend J gave me a Palm Tungsten C that he’d had lying about without ever using.

Now I have transferred the data from the old machine to the new and am suffering from mixed feelings. The new machine is a lot faster, has a colour screen and lots more memory, but the old one is still working, weighs a lot less, and, in particular, has been riding in my pocket for almost six years. (It’s had several predecessors back to the first Palm I got in 1997, but this is the individual I’ve had the longest.) It feels a bit like taking an old and well-beloved dog out behind the shed. For the nonce, I have topped up its batteries and let it rest on the desk. (Where in another drawer lies the Sharp PC-1401 I bought in 1984.)

My dreams arrived…now?

I went to Norrköping today to visit the Norrköping Visualization and Interaction Studio. Ow, how performance has increased since I myself worked in the area.

We were treated to a demo of the Uniview interactive planetarium software. Our guide put us in space somewhere above the Earth, and then zoomed in on the International Space Station, its real-time position computed, but then time sped up and we could see ISS move around the Earth and then various other classes of satellites were added until the Earth was wrapped in a dense cloud of orbiting dots with an almost equally dense torus of geostationary satellites further out. Then they were gone and the surface of the Earth was mapped with economic indicators for all countries, but soon we left Earth for Mars, having a look at its surface before we sped out of the solar system, the Oort cloud enveloping it, continuing out of the galaxy and on and on until we passed the boundary of the visible universe. To my surprise space was hour-glass-shaped, an artefact due to the disk of our galaxy hiding most of the universe from our telescopes—clearly there is so much more to find out for us!

In the next room, another surprise: a Mitsubishi television screen, 73" across and perhaps 0.4 m deep. The screen was back-projected from a DLP projector inside the housing and not only did it do $1920\; \times \; 1080$ pixels progressive display, but it could be switched into active stereo 3D mode, displaying a crystal-crisp image. (The skydiving video really made me consider taking up skydiving.)

How cool that all the things we dreamed of then finally have appeared!

After taking leave of the NVIS people I returned to the station by way of Hobbyhörnan, where Håkan was in such a garrulous mood that I had to all but gnaw my leg off an hour later in order to catch the bus home. (Yes, bus. Due to track repairs, rail communications between Stockholm and Norrköping are limited at the moment.)

I foresee ergonomics issues

My first idea when I got the opportunity to work with the VPL DataGlove was to create a virtual keyboard. My plan was that it should be able to edit all aspects of the keyboard layout—the precise keys, where they were located in space and to have nifty functions to edit the layout so that one didn't necessarily have to lay out each key individually. To my disappointment the position sensors on the glove had neither the resolution nor speed necessary for typing, nor did the software handle collision detection well for so many objects, so when I realised that even a numerical keypad would require keys several centimetres across that could be pressed only once every few seconds or so, I gave up the idea.

Now I'm sorely tempted by the Virtual Laser Keyboard. Just the thing—a perfectly “soft” keyboard with optical tracking and wireless connection to your computer/PDA/mobile phone. Unfortunately the specs only say state that it has a QWERTY layout, so the risk is that the keyboard layout is locked in ROM, rather than being configurable, which would be a pity.

Then of course, there is the issue of typing on an unyielding surface, which brings down speed and accuracy, but I still could imagine trying it out.

Dioder!

Squeee! I'm a hoppity-happy IKEA customer! I found Dioder LED strips—four 250 mm segments with nine white LEDs in each, with the included connectors they can be connected in series or in parallel, straight or at various angles, screwed or glued to any flat surface. They seem to be a bit of an experiment, you have to ask a shop assistant to bring them out from their secret store. (And they are a bit expensive at 400 SEK. On the other hand I suspect they will never burn out.)

The Only-begotten Son and I played around with them in various configurations but finally ended up with a quite straight-forward linear strip in the ceiling lighting up the bookcases. Wooh, they are so cool!