I’m not a big fan of writing about “look what I found” type stuff, but this is absolutely brilliant.
The video below contains footage of various simple events shot at 5000 frames per second on a high speed camera, and therefore delivers an unusual view of the world. The karate chop is mind numbing.
Tempus II from Philip Heron
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Today I have discovered a product which is nothing short of astounding. It works like an ordinary SD card which can be used in most digital cameras, but is fitted with a wi-fi radio. Why? Well because the moment you get home the card will automatically connect to your home wi-fi and transfer your photos directly to your PC or Mac. Better still, when you’re out and about the card will monitor your local surroundings for any available wi-fi hotspots, and then use them to automatically geo-tag your photos using Skyhook wireless technology (the same technology that the iPod Touch uses to determine its position without needing a GPS module).
I’m gob-smacked - I absolutely love this as an idea, because I hate having to manually transfer photos to my Mac. Further research has revealed that a range of products are available from the same company, some of which allow you to transfer photos home from worldwide hotspots as you travel. Brilliant. Just brilliant!
Do you want one? Well why are you still reading this? Go to the eye-fi site immediately. http://uk.eye.fi/
The world is changing. When I was a child there were two options for powering an electrical device; you either plugged it into the wall socket, or put batteries in it. It worked, life was simple, and I knew where I was with it all. However it seems that we humans are starting to get bored with these two simple energy options, and we now want to power our gizmos by other means.
Back then it would have been laughable, and people would mockingly say “oh, so you just want to pluck energy out of thin air do you?”. But remarkably, it seems that we are now genuinely seeing the beginnings of some alternative solutions, which actually can pluck their power source out of thin air. This new area of technology is generally known as “Energy Harvesting”. Now you could of course argue that this is nothing new. For example, upon my wrist I have a mechanical watch which winds itself as I move around. So in that sense I suppose we have been making use of wasted energy for years. What’s more interesting is that now the world of electronics seems to be catching up. Portable solar panels are becoming more and more efficient, and now entering the arena we have something called the “RCA Airnergy”. It’s a small box about the size of a mobile phone, which uses wi-fi signals to gradually charge its internal battery. When you need to charge one of your gadgets, you simply plug them in to the Airnergy and the battery delivers the required power. Even better; the manufacturers tell us that it will cost around $40 when it is released on to the market. Bargain!
And it’s not just in the commercial world either. In industry there are now readily available solutions to harvest the energy from any piece of machinery that generates even the slightest vibration. You mount a small component to the chassis of the equipment, connect up your power leads, and hey presto you get a DC voltage to power an electronic circuit. One supplier of this technology is a company called “Perpetuum” (http://www.perpetuum.com/).
We can now even engineer clothing, made from materials which generate usable electricity as we move around during the day.
Watch out everyone, this stuff is going to change the world.
I have just three words of introduction for this post. I WANT ONE!
Sadly, there are also three words to describe why I can’t have one. CAN’T AFFORD IT.
Yes, much to my lasting regret I shall need to find the £3,500 to get my grubby paws on one, which sadly is not likely to happen any time soon. Bugger.
Well OK, it’s not entirely pointless. It’s actually quite thought provoking and really rather clever.
Geek Warning: This post contains subject matter of an extreme geeky and techie nature. Persons with no interest in matters of advanced technology should look away now. Symptoms displayed by affected persons may include yawning, glazing over, confused facial expressions, and a strange desire to hurl yourself off a cliff.
Still reading? Oh you sad git. OK, well you asked for it – we’ll start with a question. What’s this …
Not sure? You’ve probably got quite a few of them in your house right now. It’s not a crystal ball, no, but in fairness I’ve been a bit unkind to you because although it looks quite big in the photo, it’s actually very small indeed. Let’s zoom out a bit and try again …
Got it now? Yes, it’s the Infra-Red (IR) emitter on the end of a remote control. This one is for my TV as it happens, but you’ll find them adorning the end of most wireless remote controls in the world these days. So why am I bothering to tell you about all of this drivel? Well because the days of IR remotes are numbered, and they’ll probably be out of date faster than you might think. The replacement, dear reader, is likely to be something called “RF4CE”, or “Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics” to use its full name. Remote controls will no longer use Infra-Red signals, which are adversely affected by bright sunlight, and have a habit of being blocked by anything that gets in the way. Instead they will use short range radio links, so that all of the usual interference problems will magically vanish and you won’t even have to point your remote in the right direction any more.
But there’s more to it than that. RF4CE is really quite clever, and the best thing about it is that it’s bi-directional. We’ll start simple, and if we stick with the example of the television for a minute it’ll give us the basis to explore some possibilities. Using RF4CE, not only can the remote control to send commands to the TV, but the TV could also send data back to the remote. “So what?” I hear you say. Well imagine the possibilities! You’re sitting on your sofa watching your TV, and you wonder what’s on another channel. You pick up the remote control, and you browse through the TV viewing guide. But not on the TV screen, no no, on the remote. You could have a full graphics touch-screen on the remote which could provide you with all of the information that you require, and the information would be sent to the remote by the TV without interrupting the program that you were watching at the time. So then you decide to change channel using the set of virtual buttons which have been displayed on the remote by the TV, and you find yourself watching David Attenborough talking about the latest cool creature that he’s discovered in the wild. But what did he just say? Did he really just suggest that you could look at your remote control and see lots of extra information about this fantastic new creature? Surely not. But intrigued, you glance down and sure enough your TV has sent a fact-sheet for the ‘weird-o-saurus’ to the remote control in your hand. Wow!
Now here’s where things start to get seriously interesting. The remote control in your hand isn’t necessarily the one that was supplied with the TV. It could be the one for the CD player, or perhaps it was one of those One-4-All type of remotes that you bought because you got fed up with having seven of the damn things on your sofa. The bi-directional data communication allows the appliance to send information to the remote, so when you bought your new TV you simply told your remote control to download the appropriate user interface from the TV, and from that point onwards you had a fully compatible remote control. It’s a weird concept, but a very clever one.
It’s at this point that you realise that you ought to put the oven on for dinner, so once again you flick to the set of controls that were downloaded to the remote from your cooker, and select the temperature that you need. Ahhh automation, isn’t it great?
Anyway, enough of the couch-potato possibilities – how is all of this possible? Well for the ultra geeky amongst you I should explain that RF4CE uses something called IEEE 802.15.4. Now if you’re really sad you might be saying “oh, you mean Zigbee. Cool!” For the slightly less nerdy reader I should perhaps explain that Zigbee is a short range wireless mesh RF communications protocol. Were those just words? Simpler still? OK, it’s kind of like Bluetooth, but smarter.
Bluetooth has been in our lives for some years now, and it’s something that we all know and accept as a useful technology. There are one or two limitations with Bluetooth though, and strangely enough they are the ones that Zigbee was designed to solve. The first annoying limitation is that Bluetooth only allows a point-to-point link, meaning that you can only use devices in pairs, for example one Bluetooth headset with one phone. OK, admittedly some headsets allow you to pair two phones, but the end result is often a bit ropey, and you can never actually use more than a pair of devices at any one time. Zigbee allows each device to maintain a connection with a large number of other devices, all at the same time, and even in cases where the two devices in question would never actually need to talk to one another. This may seem odd, but the reasons for this will become apparent in a few moments.
The second limitation with Bluetooth is that the rather limited range of the connection can be a bit of a nuisance. If you move the two devices more than about 10 metres apart, frankly you’re really starting to push your luck. Mesh networking is different because it allows the connection to hop from one device to another, rather than maintaining a point-to-point link. So if you want to control the TV in a different room, the signal might actually be starting at the remote control in your lounge, bouncing off your microwave oven in the kitchen, then bouncing once again off your mobile phone which is sitting on the desk in the study, before being re-transmitted to the TV in the bedroom. All of this happens in the blink of an eye, and you wouldn’t know any different. Your microwave oven doesn’t have any clue what a TV is, of course. It just receives the signal and passes it on to the next node in the mesh network. The mesh of devices could actually extend over great distances if there were enough compatible bits of technology in between. So you want to control the lights in your living room from your friend’s house in the next town? Well theoretically you could, and the signal would be passed from device to device, using products belonging to other people along the way! If you’re worried about security then relax, because the data in encrypted at the two end points and so it can’t be influenced by someone in the middle.
But even if we keep the example as down to earth as possible, a mesh network would realistically allow all of the appliances in your house to talk to one another. Your TV could talk to your video recorder, telling it when to record your favourite programme. Your alarm clock could talk to your kettle, telling it when you’d woken up and you might want a brew. Your car could talk to your garage lights, telling them when you were home. The list of possibilities are endless, and it all happens without any wires.
If this all sounds like technology for the next century then think again because it’s already here. Zigbee mesh networks have been up and running for some years now (mainly used in toy projects by the geeky nerds), but the big manufacturers are just starting to catch on. Philips, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Panasonic announced a co-operation in mid 2008, and in 2009 Sony released a TV which used this new technology in their remote controls.
So keep an eye on the world, because RF4CE is here and it’s very very cool!
Incidentally; if you are a complete nerd of the highest order and you want to play with Zigbee for your own geeky projects, then I can recommend the “XBee” series of modules. They’re available from many on-line stores, including here, here, and here.
Oh dear, this could be expensive. I have just discovered something called a Kelly Kettle.
The other night I found myself completely stranded in the middle of nowhere in a snow-storm (which I will write about later) , so I am researching things to put in a survival kit for the car. The trouble is that there are so many different makes and models; “Kelly Kettles”, “Ghillie Kettles”, “Storm Kettles”, and there are lots of accessories too.
http://www.kellykettle.com/
http://www.ghillie-kettle.co.uk/
http://www.eydonkettle.com/
They’re all very similar, but now I don’t know which one I want. Agggh!
A little something for all iPod users out there who are lucky enough to own more than one iPod / iPhone. Finally someone has produced a cable with two iPod connectors which will allow two devices to be charged and sync’d from just one USB socket. The “extreme clever clogs” award therefore goes to CableJive!
Ahhh, those clever Germans. Or in this case perhaps it’s “those clever Swedes”. Here is an absolutely brilliant example of how to make a chore more fun, so that people will actually want to do it. Mary Poppins would doubtless have approved. Plus, they’ve done it in a techy way, so it gets my vote.
The more attentive amongst you may have noticed that entries to this site have been a bit scarce lately. The super keen-eyed will also have noticed that the layout of this site has changed completely. The reason for both of these changes is actually the same; it all went horribly wrong!
I had previously been using the Apple iWeb application which was supplied with my Mac, and in fairness it is was all very easy to use and made life very simple. Sadly, and for reasons that I still can’t explain, it suddenly stopped working. The error messages that I got from iWeb were not even funny, to say nothing of unhelpful, and it’s the one and only true calamity that I have ever had during my period of Mac ownership. I remember feeling genuinely shocked and dissapointed, and I described the experience to friends as being “not very Apple”. I called their support hotline and a very helpful Apple person did his absolute best to remotely coax iWeb back to life. It wasn’t a half-hearted effort either, because he really did seem to know what he was doing. I’m a techie, and some of the manual file edits that he guided me though were scaring the life out of me. But in the end it was all declared a complete failure, and seeing as it was an inexplicable one I decided that it should not be repeated.
I thought about giving the whole thing up as a bad job, but in the end I opted for a slightly less drastic alternative. So you are now reading “It’s not a blog – Rev 2″, all powered by a very clever open source widget called “WordPress”. The installation for the beginner can be a bit daunting because it requires some knowledge of how to set up SQL databases, but the instructions are good and there are plenty of people on YouTube who have made tutorials. And here is the result, and it’s bloomin’ wonderful! For me the most impressive bit is that it’s all “up in the cloud” rather than being on a my home machine, and now that it’s up and running I can write endless amounts of drivel from anywhere in the world provided that I have an internet connection. And frankly that’s a good thing, because in my job I quite often find myself in very odd parts of the world with absolutely nothing better to do than to write complete drivel. (Those of you who travel on company business will doubtless understand!)
So if you’re looking for a way to write drivel to the masses, I can highly recommend WordPress. You can find it at http://wordpress.org/ and it’s completely free.
