Category Archives: Tech

Psychology, Society, Tech

Stealth Advertising

English: QWERTY keyboard, on 2007 Sony Vaio la...

English: QWERTY keyboard, on 2007 Sony Vaio laptop computer. Français : Le clavier QWERTY d’un ordinateur portable Sony Vaio de 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In magazines you see “features” which are in fact adverts, you can tell what they are because they will say “advertisement feature” somewhere, yet on the internet some advertisers seem to be able to get away with insidious tactics.

Download pages are often a minefield of big colourful buttons marked “download” only one of which will be the actual thing you want to download, the others being adverts for security scanners, toolbars and other such extraneous stuff that end up clogging up the computer at best and costing the unsuspecting user cash at worst.  I have noticed that these stealth ads have leaked out onto other parts of the web, I saw one that was designed to look exactly like the placeholder box you see when a browser plug-in has crashed, complete with worrying words like “your computer needs an upgrade”.  Being an old hand at this computing malarkey I recognised it for what it was and ignored it but someone less knowledgable might click on it and download the scanning tool or whatever it was, again often paying for it too – even if it was simply by it being ad-supported, thinking that it was essential.

This is the same tactic used by virus writers, using authentic looking error messages to panic un-knowledgable users into a download.  This rarely works in the real world, if you saw in a magazine a box that said “your heating has failed, you need to upgrade it now or your house will explode” you’d know instantly it was absolute bull, the tactics in that world are to plant seeds of doubt “has your boiler been serviced recently?  Could it be a potential killer?  Bwah ha ha ha ha.”  But the immediacy of computers and the internet, combined with the still mysterious nature of how they work to some people makes getting the sale that much simpler.

The message is clear; be careful what you click on.  Unless ad-funded toolbars are your thing, of course.

Disclaimer – I know not what adverts appear below this post as I have no control over them but it would be supremely ironic if there’s a box down there, right now urging you to click it to fix errors with your pc…

Standard
Music, Psychology, Tech

The Joys and Perils of the MP3 Shuffle

mixtape

mixtape (Photo credit: miss_rogue)

Before digital music you’d select your evening’s musical entertainment based on your mood, selecting an appropriate album or maybe even a mixtape.  If you’re unfamiliar with what a mixtape is ask a grown-up, and by the way you’re making me feel old.

Anyway, for the last decade we’ve been increasingly able to digitally store our hundreds of albums in one place and play them at our convenience without once having to get up and change the disc though up until very recently the devices that could store literally everything you have were expensive.  Now though things have changed, personally I have my entire 6,300 track collection taking up one-third of my Google Play Music store even if it did take a couple of weeks, on-and-off to upload.

Modern MP3 players now have decent, large displays, and of course phones and tablets have music player apps so you can idly scroll though lists of albums and tracks and then feel the unbridled joy of seeing a track you haven’t heard for ages and instantly enjoying it.  Having your entire collection there at your fingertips can rekindle your love of the music and bring back, Proust-like, memories of summers listening endlessly to a favourite album.

Then, if you’re brave, there’s the ability to not just shuffle tracks on an album or a playlist or the limited selection on a device, a selection carefully, er, selected for a particular mood or whatever stage in your life you’re at, but your entire musical history.  It has been said that MP3 players have a mystical ability to choose appropriate music for your situation, my car stereo has done that to me many times – played a song that has reminded me of lost love or given me hope when I’m down, and when it has thousands of tracks, all personal to you, to choose from anything can happen.

You sit down to listen to some tunes, your device plays some great songs, many you’d forgotten about, you feel fantastic.  Then it happens, the first bars of a song play and before you can hit “skip” you’ve got tears pouring down your face as the song so intimately linked to a person or event, to feelings of loss and grief come flooding back.  I’ll be honest it happens to me, “My Immortal” by Evanescence does it to me every time.  Sometimes though even this can be cathartic, reminding you of the good times too.

Standard
Blog on The Landscape, Politics, Psychology, Society, Tech

Waste to Watts

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Have...

Teesside Waste to Energy Power Station at Haverton Hill near Billingham. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the UK there have been regular plans to build waste incinerators which have always failed because locals near where they were planned always made the same arguments “what if they burn something hazardous”  “the smell will be unbearable” and so on.  Often it seems to be just a case of “not in my back yard” a phrase that afflicts so many development plans in our country.  Though in the past many incinerators in this country haven’t had the best record for cleanliness.

Such plants were generally only for waste disposal but in northern mainland Europe they think differently about their waste.

As Gizmodo reports Norway’s capital, Oslo, has a waste problem – they don’t have enough.  Half of the city’s population is powered and warmed by rubbish.  In the area there are 400 waste-to-energy plants converting household waste, industrial scrap and even medical waste into power.  Northern Europe produces about 150 millions tonnes of burnable waste to feed plants that were built to take 700 million tonnes and now they’re looking to import waste from other countries – the UK for example exports about 1,000 tonnes annually.

The plants operate in a similar way to fossil fuel power stations: burning fuel to heat water into steam to drive turbines and they’re between 14 to 28 percent electrically efficient but they also use the waste gasses to heat water and then condense the fumes to produce biogas used in metro busses.  What remains is ash and some remaining gas, contaminants and toxins tend to be destroyed in the process.

The system clearly works yet were still cramming more and more waste into landfills.  Our local councils’ recycling schemes help with reducing the level of dumped waste but actually using the waste as a resource instead of something to be buried, out of sight, out of mind until the area is eventually redeveloped into a combined recreation area/ticking time bomb of methane-fuelled fury would be even better.  There are waste-to-energy plants in this country, such as the one pictured above, but really we need to get behind this concept on a wider scale.

But again we come up against the nimbys who want power plants to be out of sight, out of mind too, preferably large, fossil fuelled, pollution spewing and far, far away, in someone else’s back yard.  The thing is that many smaller plants, although costly in setup, could eventually reap benefits for us all – cheaper electricity, cheaper heating and less trash heaps.

We’re demanding more and more power but we’re not willing to pay the price financially or in terms of our urban landscape.  Designers can make even the most industrial of buildings look attractive so the argument against the plants comes back to the idea that “they’re burning dirty waste near my home” – but as the Oslo example shows that argument is becoming, well, rubbish.

Standard
Gadgets, Tech, Uncategorized

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Case on It

Case Mate iPhone case

Case Mate iPhone case (Photo credit: The Style PA)  

My first mobile phone was a Motorola in 1998, it was about the same size and shape as a hot-dog bun but weighed significantly more, it had a single line display and a pull-out aerial that the instructions warned you not to touch in use for reasons that seemed unnecessarily sinister at the time and was so solid that it felt like if you dropped it the surface onto which it fell would suffer more than the phone.

Today though advances in materials and phone technology have given us phones that we cosset and cradle like tiny woodland creatures.  Just a couple of days ago my belt buckle, for reasons only known to it, decided to attack my Xperia which was in my pocket, I heard the metal hit the glass screen.  I winced as I pulled the phone out.  Thankfully it wasn’t damaged, working in the glass industry I should have had a bit more confidence in its direct impact resistance but had it been hit from the side it might have been a different story.

We hear stories of iPhones’ metal bodies scratching and the anodization flaking off, of screens being cracked by light falls onto floors and so on, often very soon after getting the thing.  Product designers for Apple, Samsung, HTC, Sony etc spend months meticulously researching and creating these shiny devices and the first thing people feel the need to do is clamp them inside cases meticulously created in parallel by case designers.  It is a bizarre paradox that people buy something and the appearance of it is part of the decision but then have to hide it away to maintain its integrity.  I put my phone in a fleece-lined sleeve when it’s in my bag or in a pocket sans-keys etc otherwise but I still feel anxious when it’s in my hand, constantly thinking of how much a new screen would be.  This anxiety has also created the new market of gadget insurance.

Fashions don’t help, so many phones are now made with shiny, glossy materials which are not exactly the best at adhering to either your hand or a surface.  At this point I will defer to the commenters of Gizmodo UK:

ollypercival “I CANNOT BELIEVE how slippery the N4 is. I put it down on what I swear is a flat surface and 5 minutes later I hear the clunk of it hitting the floor. I actually got the spirit level out to check I wasn’t going mental.  If it’s on my bedside table and someone calls me, it’s practically in the bathroom before I can catch up with it.”

hyperspacey “My manager warned me to keep an eye on it seeing as it’s like an air-hockey puck with a death wish.”

Ebbysantos “I’ve not got a case for it, I just can’t get used to the things, plus what’s the point of covering such a pretty thing with a utilitarian bit of plastic?  Would be like putting Jennifer Lawrence in a bright yellow waterproof onesie!”

Quite.

Standard
Tech

Cat Tracking

cat on wooden fence

cat on wooden fence (Photo credit: (Sascha Uding) Arternative-Design)

Smaller GPS chips have made it possible for even the cheapest smartphone to be a satnav, locator of local takeaways and be able to give its location away to its owner if stolen or, if the proverbial tin-foil-hat wearers turn out to be right, the government.

They’ve also allowed us to plot our runs or cycle rides, places we’ve been, seen, been seen in, rather we’d not been seen in or forgotten we’d been to.

Cats though have been feeling left out of this techy tracky Endomodo-y goodness.  Until now.  This month’s T3 magazine reports on a device invented by Dave Evans called G-Paws which enables your furry friend to be tracked day and night.  Though with you average cat there would be much time spent located “on the sofa/most desirable chair in the living room” or “in the sun by the french doors”.  For about £50 you get an 11g multi-channel GPS with flash memory which can attach to any standard collar.  There’s even a social network so humans can share their cat’s wanderings online.

Combine this with a small camera and your moggy could be geotagging its way around your neighbourhood from sometime in May.

[G-Paws]

Standard
Business, Marketing, Psychology, Society, Tech

Material Love

English: Apple iPhone (left) vs HTC Hero (righ...

English: Apple iPhone (left) vs HTC Hero (right). Adapted from original source, to scramble screenshot of non-free software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My phone’s outer shell is made from plastic and a piece of thin glass.  My car’s made of metal.  If the car was made of carbon fibre it would be seen as premium and special, yet the new Samsung Galaxy S4 has been criticised for being made of plastic, because it’s not metal like the iPhone 5.

It’s not the first time the tech industry has had a metal fetish, in the seventies and eighties everything “premium” had to have a brushed aluminium fascia, then we went through the period where clear coloured plastic was fashionable, a fad caused in a large part by Apple again with the original iMac and its guts-and-all on show design approach.  Sleek black plastic in exotic moulded shapes was the future.  For a while.

Today it doesn’t matter how good quality the plastic, or more accurately in expensive phones, polycarbonate is the legions of gadget blog and mag writers and commenters will whinge that it feels cheap compared to the metal iPhone or new HTC One purely because it isn’t metal.  The idea that metal is premium comes from the sense that it’s more resilient, like high-end granite kitchen worktops, and that it takes more effort, more craftsmanship to make, hewn from blocks of aluminium by bespectacled artisans.  A CNC milling machine in reality is a little less romantic and premium.

The strange thing is that the metal phones are more prone to the screen cracking, easier to scratch and more likely to be permanently dented when dropped.  But despite this and despite the fact that the plastics in even my sub-£100 phone feel solid and quality as far as I’m concerned metal is the thing to have.  But it’s all image, until the iPhone gained a metal body no-one cared about it, there were plastic phones that felt sturdy and plastic phones that felt like they were made out of microwave meal cartons and the iPhone 3G was one of the former (for better signal strength).  In fact many old phones had metal backplates that many people probably didn’t even think about.  It’s also marketing, use a different material for the case, tell people its revolutionary and so much cooler and better and people will snap it up.

The next big thing?  I’ve heard it’s going to be ceramic phones*, you know shiny, glossy, tough enamelled ceramics.  It’ll be the thing to have.   “Aluminium?  The same stuff they make Coke cans out of?  So cheap feeling, so cold, look at my new phone, it’s ceramic.”

(* – I may have imagined this.)

Standard
Society, Tech

The Speed of Social Networks

Old News - canon rebel t2i

Old News – canon rebel t2i (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Once upon a time news travelled at the speed of the fastest runner, as the story of the battle of Marathon demonstrated, with the information being eventually wheezed out to a gathered crowd.  Later news from abroad depended on the speed of a ship and the reliability of the wind.  Eventually many people received news by newspapers or weekly newsreels.  Even with the advent of Wire Services one thing still delayed the news – the need to get reporters and photographers to where the witnesses are.

Now though this has all changed.  News services monitor Twitter and anyone with a modern smartphone and decent data connection can be an on-the-spot reporter.  The recent Russian meteorite was not only one of the most well recorded in history, with the wealth of dashcam footage available rapidly on YouTube and the like but it was also very quickly reported on via the internet.  The BBC’s Horizon programme described the possible chain of events surrounding the future collapse of La Cumbre Vieja on La Palma, an event that could cause an Atlantic-wide mega-tsunami.  One aspect was the way the news of the event would be transmitted – within moments of the collapse beginning there would inevitably be a torrent of Tweets and photos on Twitter and Facebook.

The near instantaneous sharing of news worldwide is an unexpected side effect of services that are regarded generally as just a way to let your friends know, instantaneously, what you had for breakfast.  In the future governments as well as the news agencies will be watching out for keywords in public tweets and Facebook posts to gain early notifications that something serious is happening, from natural disasters to man-made tragedies.  This early warning can enable emergency plans to be activated sooner, and more lives be saved.

News has changed forever, from the speed of sail to the speed of light.

Standard
Business, Marketing, Society, Tech

Smart Uses for Dumbphones

Nokia 8250

Nokia 8250 (Photo credit: xcode)

Smartphones are everywhere now it seems, especially as they become increasingly intuitive to use, more powerful and as such multi-functional.  However what are now referred to as dumbphones still have uses.  People who just want something for making and receiving phone calls or texts appreciate them, one iPhone user turned his into a dumbphone by removing all the apps except the SMS and dialer and found the experience refreshing – I wonder if he’d have found it as easy to sell the shiny, touchy-feely one and buy a £20 Nokia.

In much of the world though dumbphones are the most used phones, often for reasons of cost – both the hardware and the costs of data which make smartphones unviable.  As an article in Wired said amongst our world population of seven billion there are six billion mobile-phone subscriptions, in Columbia, Egypt and Indonesia the mobile penetration is over 90 percent and it’s more than 100 percent in Brazil, Vietnam and Russia.  The same article is about how marketers are using the ubiquity of basic mobiles to reach new markets.  The cost of mobile minutes in emerging markets are high and as such are a precious commodity, or currency.  The article author, Nathan Eagle’s company Jana provides services whereby mobile users can be rewarded with airtime for trying new products, filling in surveys and looking at adverts.  74 percent of users in Brazil would be happy to receive adverts in return for airtime.  Multinationals are catching on, P&G have launched a campaign and Jana helped Danone doubled sales of yogurt via a similar campaign.  This kind of targeted marketing that we’re used to with our smartphones is now reaching more emerging markets and according to Nathan Eagle using advertising budgets to give emerging markets consumers these airtime bonuses would give them more disposable income.

Also, in Wired’s April 13 edition is a piece about an Indian startup called Innoz and its service SMSGyan which is a search engine without the internet – again perfect for basic mobiles.  Founded by Deepak Ravindran, Mohammed Hisamuddin, Ashwin Nath and Abhinav Sree who dropped out of the Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Engineering in Kerala to persue the project to give more people access to information, and answers.  “Gyan” means “knowledge” in Hindi and the service has partnered with Wikipedia, Bing, Wolfram Alpha and others to enable the system to answer questions sent to their servers by text message.  Costing the equivalent of 1p per query it returns an answer as a text message.  The networks gain revenue, the service’s 120 million active users gain information.  The next step is expansion of the service beyond India, as the ability to gain access to info when you have no data service can be vital just about anywhere.

As Wired’s Jana article pointed out this is the second time basic mobiles have created a communications revolution in emerging markets.  The dumbphone’s not that dumb after all.

Standard
Tech

How The Net Saved Me £300

English: A close up of a Toshiba Satellite L30...

English: A close up of a Toshiba Satellite L305D-S5900 Laptop Computer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am a bit of a techie though the trauma of trying to resurrect an uncooperative network or computer caused me to stop being a computer geek for a while though even now I don’t keep up with the differences between Core i3s, Core i5s, Phemons and memory specs, I thankfully don’t really need to.

I do though recognise when my computer’s doing something odd.  In the past the LCD monitor attached to my laptop has started flickering, little irritating horizontal bars, and as I recognised this as electrical noise I rerouted the cables away from noisy power cables, or in one instance plugged the laptop’s power lead in properly and all was well but over the last few months the problem has returned and nothing seemed to work, I couldn’t get the leads any further apart without the aid of scaffolding.

My immediate thought was that the external monitor output was on its way out, I connected my netbook to the monitor to check that it wasn’t that or the lead to it that was faulty.  Nope.  My heart sank, as much as I’d like a shiny new laptop, namely a Lenovo one in blue at a significant discount on Amazon Warehouse, not that I’d looked in any detail, I couldn’t justify it.  I have an old desktop PC that with £50 of upgrades to its memory and an adaptor for the laptop’s big hard drive would also do the job but I thought I’d try asking the massed geeks of the net for assistance first.

Having typed “toshiba satellite vga output flickering” into Google (other search engines are available) and clicked through a few links I found that many people had solved the problem by plugging the laptop and monitor into separate mains sockets.  Sceptical as I was I tried it and blow me it worked.  There’s still some faint flickering and the fact that it’s a recent problem makes me think the adaptor could still be on its last legs but replacing that’s the cheapest option of all, if and when I need to.

That’s one of the greatest benefits of the internet, for all the naysayers proclamations that it’s just a hole of filth and misinformation – if you cast your net wide enough you can find an answer to just about anything.

Standard
Business, Marketing, Tech

Cheeky Marketing

apples

apples (Photo credit: msr)

My parents will tell you that when I was little, as in younger not shorter, I watched the adverts on TV more than the programmes.  back then there were many amusing and memorable ads, these days though too many try to be clever or ironic but fail to be funny – notable exceptions being the current Fosters “Good Call” campaign and Three’s Dancing Pony.  Some of the pseudo-science can be hilarious if you’re of a scientific persuasion but that’s for another post on another day.

One recent advert immediately caught my eye and made me laugh, then had me wondering whether they’d get away with it.  No, I thought, their lawyers must have checked it.  It’ll be fine.  The ad in question is, of course, the Somersby Cider parody of the excitement that surrounds the product launches of a certain fruitily named purveyor of shiny gadgetry.  I was impressed with the creativity and just how many gadget puns they managed “single core, dual core” and the “less apps, more apples” tagline.  The fact that it’s cider just added to the enjoyment of it.

But it’s not just Carlsberg who have been a tad cheeky recently, in the days preceding Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch LG placed an ad for their Nexus 4 on their Times Square billboard above Samsung’s “be ready 4 the next Galaxy”  which read “ready 4 you now”.  Cunning.

Then on the launch day while journalists were waiting to enter the venue and feeling rather chilly in the midst of the New York winter HTC thoughtfully laid on complimentary hot chocolate.  So yet more tasty marketing.

It’s good to see that in our times of vicious patent lawsuits and arguments over who invented rectangles with rounded corners companies can indulge in some light-hearted competition.

Standard