Category Archives: Hardware

Wireless Skate Speedometer – a solution looking for a problem?

Finally, a Wireless Skate Speedometer, so now you can know how fast you’re skating. As an added bonus, it’s water resistant at up to 30ft/10m, for when you accidentally skate into a swimming pool.

You have to turn it on and off, because the batteries will only last 300hrs. I can’t imagine that would be hard to do, given where the wheel is – on the bottom of your shoe. And heaven help you if you forget, two weeks later your speedo will be knackered.

Of course, the wheels and bearings wear out, but they thought of that. Just buy your wheels and bearings from them! An electronics company! They’ll also sell you a battery kit, I guess because it uses special batteries or something. Or perhaps because they know you’re going to forget to turn the darn thing off.

They’ve got a big write-up on their site about how pushbikes have the wheel in contact with the ground all the time, but skates don’t, so their computer has to do all sorts of tricks to figure out the right answer. Perhaps hooking up a GPS might have been a better idea?

And of course, you have to consider the privacy implications or wireless transmission of personal data like your velocity…

Handsfree Bluetooth

For those who don’t find mobile phones annoying enough, and don’t find speakerphones annoying enough, there’s now a bunch of Bluetooh Speakerphones on the market, like this one.

Egads.

I understand it’s meant for use in a car, but we all know what they’ll really be used for: “Quick” calls taken in the office, or maybe yammering to your friend on the train about her infectious disease.

Considering graphics tablets

Wacom graphics tabletI’m considering buying a graphics tablet — a Wacom or similar — to stave off any hint of mouse-related RSI. I know I use computers a lot, at work and at home, and recently I have had noticeable wrist pain on occasions. Accordingly my work mouse is now on the left, and my home mouse is on the right, taking advantage of my mouse-ambidexterousnous. (Is that even a word?)

I don’t even know if there are any brands other than Wacom to look at. No others appear to distribute these kinds of products in Australia. (I think I recall Wacom being around in the 80s… they must be doing something right.)

From the looks of it, using the pen/tablet is relatively straightforward, with the only gotcha being that right clicking is marginally more difficult. Left click, double click, drag and drop, all easy. Some of the Wacom packages actually come with a mouse, but I wouldn’t see the point of this; I’d assume I’d keep my old mouse.

They do appear to be primarily aimed at graphics use, which is not my primary concern, though from time to time I do graphics work which would benefit from it. Wacom do have some information on tablets reducing RSI. The smallest size has an A6-sized pad, which on paper provides enough accuracy to handle even big screens.

Two ranges, the Intuos3, which appears to be aimed at professional use, starting at AU$349 ($305 street), or the Graphire4, aimed at domestic use, starting at AU$149 ($139 street). The Intuos does have a number of extra features and better performance.

Will go shopping at some stage and try them out, I think.

I’ve also been told that a few minutes daily squeezing a tennis ball is a good way to help ease any mouse pain. Will try that too. A tennis ball is cheaper than a tablet (though probably less geeky fun).

Windows on Mac

Apple launches Boot Camp, to allow Intel Macs to run Windows. There’s already some screen grabs of it running.

As one commenter said: Wow – this is GREAT! Now I can combine the overpriced hardware with the inferior software!

As Ed Bott points out running Windows through virtualisation would be even better. MS’s Virtual PC doesn’t currently run on Intel Macs, but evidently they’re working on it.

Economics of Digital Cameras

I was reading a backissue of Money magazine where Paul Clitheroe made a remarkably insightful analysis of film vs digital cameras (Money, June 2005, pg 20 am I better off With a digital or film camera?).

One thing he noted is that acquiring a digital camera turns you into a shutterbug; I would suggest spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a camera has that effect, but the zero-cost of each individual photo certainly does help. He notes that in bangs-per-buck, film beats digital – and he’s right. Not only are digital cameras more expensive to acquire for the features you get, but (at the time of the article) processing costs were higher too. Couple that with the poorer image resolution you get from digital images (super high-end digital cameras are only now approaching the image resolution of $20 compact cameras) and you would have to be nuts to go digital.

Unless you don’t actually process your images. As a general rule, I don’t. In the last eleven months I’ve taken… let’s see… 10,327 images (I was wondering what would happen to the camera when it rolled over 10K images, because the manual hints that you might have to re-format your media; turns out that’s not the case). Recently Cathy and I took advantage of a Harvey Norman promotion and trebbled the number of images we’d printed, to a total of 200. We might have spent $50 on printing all up. That would have bough 240 frames of analogue film in processing costs, but we only printed out the winners. If the full 10K images had been processed we may have spent $2000 on processing. That’s a bunch of money. I suspect I would have husbanded my shots more if I’d spent the same amount of money on a film camera. In fact, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would have spent that much money on a film camera. Something about perceived value differences. Anyways, the camera has been fun, and I think given the thrashing it’s been getting, I’ve been getting value for money from it. Which I’m a little surprised by, because it was a lot of money.

For me, the big advantage of digital is that I can learn to be a better photographer at no marginal cost. And Paul says that at National Geographic, photographers average 350 rolls of film (almost 12600 frames) per story, with an average of 10 published. So, if I was a professional grade photographer using professional equipment, one in twenty of the photos I’ve printed would be magazine quality.

Matrix displays bite arse

Sure, CRT displays are bulky, consume piles of power and are heavy. But they can change resolution without a loss of … resolution.

See, High Definition TV runs at 1920 x 1080 – which, incidentally, a vanishingly small number of TV sets run at (ignore advertising about sets being HD-ready – all it means is the TV will understand a HD signal and happily convert it down to it’s native resolution). But converting a raster image from it’s native resolution down involves a loss of information; worse yet, if that resolution isn’t an integer multiple of source resolution, the downconversion algorithm has to make some judgement calls about which new pixel to push the old pixel’s information – so you can have some odd looking images, like horizonal or diagonal lines going… funny. Colour transitions can become forced too with a visible loss of colour depth. Converting up can also be a little strange, with some pixels odd colours (making the image look blurry) or straight lines becoming jagged. Given that signals might also appear in 704 × 480 (Standard Defintion) or 1280 × 720 (a high quality high definition signal not broadcast in Oztralia), aspect ratios on the pixels involved mean you need a native resolution not likely to be obtained for many years to get clean conversion between the resolutions.

CRTs don’t give a rat’s arse about conversion algorithms, and happily change the number of lines they throw on the screen in response to the number they’re given. The only difficulty you might encounter is the shadow mask or aperture grille.

LCD and Plasma display screens – generally TV monitors, and LCD projectors (and for that matter, any other matrix-based projection technology) have a failure mode that analogue CRT displays don’t exhibit:

Dead pixels.

Stuck on or stuck off, dead pixels are a one way street. You don’t see that kind of failure in CRTs. And I’m not aware of any TV manufacturers who guarantee their product against this particularly annoying failure. No-one is told about it at purchase time, but I’m predicting in three to five years time there’s going to be an uproar about it.

Anyone bought a new matrix TV lately? Happy about it?

Friday quickies

What if Microsoft was marketing the iPod? (Article about the origins of the video here.)

In case you’ve been living in a virtual cave, VMWare’s basic VMServer product is now free.

Google is beta trialling GMail from your own domain, primarily aimed at organisations to start with. (via Patrick)

Found an old quote of mine:
To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things – essentials like “Help!” or “Hello” – I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook. (Quoted here, originally posted here.)