Archive for the 'Classic' Category

1.5.4.2 to 2.1.6.9 in Under 30 Minutes

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Ed
2 years, 8 months ago
in Classic and Tech
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heh, cryptic title eh?…

Yesterday was not a good day for the xda mini s. Every time I reloaded the contacts/software on to the phone, it simply refused to boot up…this did become pretty annoying after the formatting it for the 3rd time.

While hunting for possible solutions, I happened upon the HTC Wizard Blog, through the entry on wikipedia. I was intrigued as the wiki entry had instructions of how you could get the wifi card to run at 802.11g instead of .11b (meaning to the non-techies among-us: makes the wireless connection about 5-times faster). Seems it is just disabled (wtf?) in the phones, but the hardware is there…this is kind of like making a porsche with a fixed speed limit of 30mph. Also, who the hell thought it would be a good idea for a phone to have a registry…gah!

So after hunting around the blog for a while, it seemed that most of the techie types who had this phone are extolling the virtues of upgrading the rom (the operating system). Of course, o2 have only released one rom version, which I am already running…and seems to suck! But this doesn’t seem to faze the phone-techs, as the o2 xda mini s is really the htc wizard phone, as is the i-mate k-jam (rom released last week), the Qtek 9100 (also newer rom than o2 available) and the Orange SPV M3000. Same phone, slightly different shells…

So, the question is…Can I install one of these updated roms, designed for a different flavour of the same phone on my phone…the answer is Yes! But it isn’t for the feint hearted…

Following the instructions here (and here), I begun the process in the early hours (ahh…week-off-bliss!). First installing the little prog on the phone, then running the batch file to remove the phones block on running software designed for other (identical) models. Then, the big rom update itself which chugs away for about 10 mins or so…it is actually pretty simple, but a little hairy when you remember that if it fails the phone really is dead…

First impressions of the updated software are good…although the i-mate loading screen is plug-ugly, when compared with the very nice o2 bubble image…I can live with that, at least until I find a way to add my own. The operating system is slightly tweaked here and there, it does all feel a little smoother too. Noticeable differences include a rather slick skin for the phone application, a couple of new system icons and a very nice new connections dialogue. As well as the illusive upgrade to 802.11g.

I will let you know if it all falls apart next week, I have all the software installed that killed the last one…so I am kinda asking for trouble…

After 2 Weeks The Xda Mini S is Dead…

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Ed
2 years, 8 months ago
in Classic, Rants and Tech
. 1 Comment

This is pretty ridiculous…the phone is dead after two weeks of usage. It would seem to be a software problem (surprise, surprise) as the phone simply refuses to boot.

It crashed quite spectacularly last night while using internet explorer (yea…who’d have thunk it), to the extent that it required the battery to be removed to power down. As obviously the power button doesn’t work when it is crashed (gah!).

Then when you turn it on, it brings up the o2 screen (normally takes about 30 seconds or so to boot) then the backlight goes off…the o2 screen is still visible, so I am assuming it is crashing sometime during the boot process.

Just on a sidenote, I noticed the lens has already been knackered ipod nano style…guess they made it out of the softest plastic known to man. oh well, guess the camera lens cant get much worse. By the way, it is not like I play catch or knife games with the phone…it goes from my pocket to the pc to charge and back to my pocket, thats it…

Anyway, I am performing a factory reset which I found on this page, hopefully it will be fixed…will update.

UPDATE - 2 minutes later The factory reset worked nicely, I now have to reconfigure windows mobile, install the applications necessary to make it useable, add all my contacts again (thank god I had only added three since the last sync), morn the loss of the first images the phone took and first documents I tried writing with it.

Playing the Digital Video

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Ed
2 years, 8 months ago
in Classic
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Ok, This is a pretty n00b thing…but sooo many people (not techs) ask me ‘how do i play videos off the internet?’.  Well, I have been watching TV (pretty much exclusivly) on the pc for about 5 yrs now…and I can say that all you need is two programs.

Media Player Classic to open the files in, and ffdshow to decypher the contents.

Thats pretty much it…you obviously need the files too, but they arent too tough to find ;)

Choosing a Mobile (pt.3)

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Ed
2 years, 9 months ago
in Classic, Rants and Tech
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(pt.1 here)
(pt.2 here)

After many hours of research (ha!) it really came down to two choices which could potentially fulfill my needs for style and capability. The first choice was the Nokia N91, including its own 4Gb hdd, mp3 player, wifi etc…unfortunately Nokia have a tendency of announcing their products years in advance of their actual release dates. Then not telling anyone when the release date actually is, or simply lying or being vague about it…I had actually been waiting for this phone since early june, the release date that had been announced back in april came and went, my patience wore out…

The o2 xda mini s was the next choice, more of a pda than a phone it resembled my old 7650 and seemed to do everything I wanted. The only problem is that it runs Windows Mobile 5, do I really need another version of windows in my life? I am seriously thinking about installing osx86 on my pc so I can avoid windows and microsoft altogether (techie bliss!). So would getting a mobile phone which runs windows be a huge mistake? Will it inevitably lead to many hours of hair pulling and shouting at the inanimate gadgetry.

Nah, cant be that bad I thought…so I ordered the xda.

(to be continued)

Choosing a Mobile (pt.2)

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Ed
2 years, 9 months ago
in Classic, Rants and Tech
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(pt.1 here)

So anyway, I have been thinking of getting a new phone…Well, it is probably upgraded to planning to get a new phone. I have compiled a short list of the things I would really like to be able to do with this new piece of technology (apart from phone, txt and image).

It would be nice if…

  • I could connect to wireless (WiFi) networks and use the internet connection without paying through the nose for a mobile internet connection.
  • I could (probably paying through the nose) use the phone as a wireless modem for my laptop. No reason why this shouldn’t be possible using bluetooth. Preferably without having to remove the phone from my pocket…
  • Store a reasonable amount of stuff. Why carry a usb key as well as a phone? Again, being able to access this wirelessly is a benefit, there are already too many cables in my life!
  • Take photos and upload to my ftp server or Flickr, would be nice to have a moblog.
  • Actually, while I am at it…would be nice to be able to blog from the phone too…
  • Basic control of my other computers, for example my current mobile can make my PC play music (using bemused) as well as control keynote presentations on the powerbook (well, it did once anyway). Would be neat to be able to run vnc, although a 1600×1200 resolution might be a little tough on a mobile screen.
  • Have an alarm that works!! and does not simply give-up after 30 minutes, or just fail altogether leaving my body-clock to fend for itself (ala Handy Clock).
  • Vibrate!…ring tones are for northerners :P
  • perhaps have Tetris, you can see I am expanding the horizons of mobile usage here…
  • Would be nice if the phone had an in-built httpd, so it could be administered from any computer, perhaps serve content to other phones
  • oooo…voip, the majority of calls I make are either in my house or in my office, both of which have wireless networks. mmm…money saving.
  • OCR, I don’t really understand why any phone with a camera cant do this…would be useful to have, kinda like the cross-over cat5 cable I have had in my bag for 3 years…gotta be useful at some point.
  • A ToDo list which can be updated offline then synchronised with my Mac at work, the powerbook and the PC.
  • That also goes for a calendar. Preferably something which will sync with iCal and Sunbird
  • Video? Music? not really a priority, I am yet to be convinced by the joys of watching video on a 2″ screen.

That pretty much wraps it up for the time-being, it actually boils down to a few distinct features. The phone has to have an operating system which can run applications (duh), as well as Bluetooth and WiFi capability…The rest is just a case of finding the software to do it.

(to be continued)

Choosing a Mobile (pt.1)

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Ed
2 years, 9 months ago
in Classic, Rants and Tech
. 2 Comments

Anyone that knows me probably knows that my classic old 7650 is not exactly the most reliable phone on the market. It has about 6hrs battery life (if not used), meaning that most afternoons I am out of contact.

I have kept it so long because I remember how long it took to set it up and get it working the way I wanted…that was in my student days, so I had a lot of time to budget for such frivols. Now it is not quite the same…but it is also really time to upgrade.

So, what do I need in a mobile phone?

Top priority should be to make phone calls…one would think anyway, I have actually survived about 8 months with a phone that doesn’t work in the afternoons, but being able to talk to people is of reasonably high importance. Tri-band?, Quad-band?…blah, working in Goodwood seems to be tough enough…

Next one down should be txting, although whether it is through querty or 1abc, I don’t really mind…

As much as I originally disliked the concept of having a camera attached to the phone, it has become something which I actually do use quite a bit (when the phone has batteries). It is nice for those inebriated situations where having a digital slr is simply un-realistic. Hence my mobile phone image collection conjures up somewhat blurry memories of evenings gone by. Which I don’t want to loose the ability to do.

I would, however, prefer the camera to be as discreet as possible…no irritating digital *click* sound, no eye-piercing white light and no strobe-like flash should be features written in big letters on the front of the box.

(to be continued)

YaGoohoo!gle Widget

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Ed
3 years, 6 months ago
in Classic and Design
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This is what I spent most of yesterday doing…a simple widget which performs a search on my favourite engine.

Much like the firefox plugin it was the graphics which took the time, rather than working out how to get it to work. In the outset it was supposed to just be a simple search box with logo and no frills, but i guess i got carried away and simply had to add something to allow the user to flip it over like a proper widget.

For anyone interested in creating them, they are really simple (although the following paragraph might not be).

The base code is done using xhtml and css to design a layout, this uses javascript for functionality coupled with some dashboard specific functions and librarys. The graphics are simply 24-bit png's and you need one for the front and one for the back…it really is very simple, especially once you find that apple give you most of the code for flipping etc. Then you chuck in a couple of property lists (equivelent of ini's for PC) and an icon image, rename the directory so it has an extension of .wdgt and bobs-your-uncle. You can also referance unix commands, shell scripts and applescript with a widget too…but I didnt really need to head into that jungle for this.

The only really complex bit was making the graphics look ok when surrounded by slick apple-made widgets…oh yeah, and debugging the javascript to make it flip. I later found the problem was in the css…doh!

Download the Widget (.zip, 37kb)
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Tiger Thoughts

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Ed
3 years, 6 months ago
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Well, every other blogger is rapidly installing the new OSX and blogging about it, so I thought I would do the same?nothing like conformity is there? Just for those non-geeky or Windows fanatics who really cant understand what the fuss is about, I couldn?t either when I when I was a PC-only person, the OSX tiger upgrade is kinda the reverse of Windows SP2 downgrade. Instead of breaking a bunch of stuff and removing functionality and compatibility with their own applications, apple chose to actually improve their system…and did it pretty well.

Install was a little worrying (since my original panther disks are over 100miles away) especially when it locked up on the first boot, then hung for a few minutes on the second. I am guessing now, since it is working fine that this was spotlight doing the rounds. Spotlight is a native search which is hardcoded into the os and filesystem, rather than hunting through your disk file by file every time you want to find something, it keeps a metadata-base which allows for far faster searching. For example, I have 1,2013 files which contain the characters ?and?…it listed them in just under 20 seconds. I think this was sort of what windows was aiming at when they put disk indexing into ntfs volumes, except like most windows ideas, it didn?t really work.

Dashboard is great fun, and the widgets are painfully easy to make, made my first one on the same day I installed the os…this does lead me to believe that there are going to be a plethora of superb widget ideas by this time next year, at the moment they are really just going through the standard ideas which konfabulator has had for a while. I do have some ideas for widgets I would like to make in the future, although for the most part they are simply to make my life easier, rather than be useful to others…but who knows…

Haven?t played with automator yet (a kind of macro-maker for os/program actions), although I have heard it is pretty powerful. I expect my first one will be something to take this text out of word and plug it on the blog, cant imagine that would be terribly difficult…

I do think that apple has been a little cynical is generally replacing popular applications with in-built ones. konfabulator is the obvious one, dashboard completely blows it out of the water in terms of speed, as well as ease of creating widgets. Spotlight really seems to replace Quicksilver, especially since it took it?s keyboard shortcut too. I am still not sure whether I prefer quicksilver for finding applications though, it is a little faster than spotlight for this, as spotlight looks for everything.

I also have some peeves with tiger, generally most people love it and I haven?t really seen many negative comments about it. Well…I am gonna be negative for a while…first, and most irritating, every time I switch to the mac using the kvm switch a little wizard pops up asking me to identify my keyboard, this is horribly windows-esq. panther seemed to recognise it fine…the new iSync util is bugging too, it now demands that I install an application on my phone to sync with it, and the application is HUGE (in phone terms) and is now the biggest app on there, 4 times bigger than the one which controls winamp and all it does is allow for functionality which I already had. The Wi-Fi seems more unstable than before, after sleeping it sometimes cant find my adhoc network. Actually I cant really think of any other significant peevs, other than the fact that everything is slightly slower and I seem to be able to crash firefox much more easily than before…I am putting both of those down to my lazy upgrade installation, rather than a prim and proper format install.

All in all, I would say that tiger does pretty much everything that a paid-for operating system upgrade should do. It adds enough features to put a bit of a thrill into using it, as well as lays the groundwork for some very innovative ideas and ways of working.

Imagine if windows was this exciting…

Adobe / Macromedia Views

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Ed
3 years, 7 months ago
in Classic and Culture
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Well, I am probably the billionth blogger to mention the $3.4bn buyout of macromedia by adobe, as well as being a day late to blog it…

This has it's advantages though, it means I am able to reflect on many peoples views about the whole thing.

Most people online seem to think it is reasonably stragegic and designed to boost profits rather than services. Many see the death of freehand, fireworks and golive…killed by illustrator, photoshop and dreamweaver. One view which I almost side with is that these are simply two dinosours joining forces to battle another dinosour (m$), as there is little room for the patented software-in-a-box business model in a socially constructed internet with Online apps such as picasa and flickr free for anyone to use.

Anyway, there is a really good (much better than mine) round up on a-list blogger [strike” alt=”">Leo[/strike” alt=”"> Jason Kottke's site. Might be worth a look if u r into the graphical tools world.

Roundup Here

media-sculpture.com : presentation video

Published
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Ed
3 years, 7 months ago
in Classic, Portfolio and Video
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YaGoohoo!gle Firefox Search Plugin

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Ed
3 years, 7 months ago
in Classic and Design
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Been using this search engine alot recently, so much in fact that I decided to write a firefox search plugin for it. There wasnt one on the mosdev page…so why wait for someone else to do it?

It really wasnt very difficult at all, I just took the one for yahoo and re-wrote it to fit :)

Install Firefox Plugin Here
Featured on the YaGoohoo!gle Blog

Both Sides Of The Argument

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Ed
3 years, 7 months ago
in Classic and Design
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Ok, I heard about this about three days ago…that of course being april 1st when it really isnt wise to believe anything on any blog.

But low and behold, it wasnt a gag it is actually true and pretty cool too :)

YaGooHoo!gle Here

expresso

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Ed
3 years, 7 months ago
in Classic, Portfolio and Video
. 2 Comments

The final year 3d project was something I had been looking forward to for the previous three years of my university course. It was the project which generated the movies which were shown to promote the course to all newcomers and I remember being pretty impressed with the ones I saw when I was just starting.

Using 3d Studio Max as the primary creation tool, the expresso short uses a composite of two different rendering techniques to achieve the cartoony feel of the character, yet still based in the (relatively) realistic setting of a coffee shop. The background scene contained over 1,000,000 polygons in over 5,000 objects, and was a true test of my computer…which wasn’t really powerful enough, it ended up being a true test of only working on one or two objects at a time.

The character took heavy inspiration from Blur’s Coffee & TV video, looking back, perhaps too much. The character animation was done using original motion capture data from the talent of Fiona Cosgrove and is certainly one of the crucial factors for determining the feel of the movie. The process of adding the motion capture data to the biped bone structure for the cup was long and time-consuming, as typically about half of the movements needed to be manually corrected to avoid problems with the skin clipping itself (usually the arms going inside of the body), this had to be fixed very carefully so as not to make the movement look unrealistic.

The project took 5 weeks from conception to hand-in, two weeks of that time was taken up by rendering the video. At the time I was very un-sure as to whether it was going to be ready in time. I setup a small render-farm in my flat utilising the other three computers owned by my house mates, the combined power was about 6GHz and 4Gb RAM. First the background scenes had to be rendered to a set of tiffs (for improved quality) using the default 3dsmax renderer, then the animation renderer was used to create another set showing only the character(s). The shots in which the character interacts with the cocktail umbrella were probably the most challenging, as they required three layers for the composite and a keen eye to make sure there were no arrangement errors (ie. The umbrella appearing to be above the character when it should be behind).

Finally the scenes were composited and the video sequenced to music…enjoy!

What Have I Been Upto?

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Ed
3 years, 8 months ago
in Blog and Classic
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This…and a 10,000 word document on a simple database driven web application.

expresso is a short 3d animation made using 3dsmax and a cartoon renderer called illustrate!. It took about 300hrs to do although many more than that if you include planning and sketching etc…

Overall I think it came out well, although there are still some mistakes which seem pretty obvious to me (although luckily few other people), including the classic scene where the character has no face (see if you can spot it) and a couple of animation jitters here and there caused by some dodgy mixing of motion capture data.

See The Animation Here (Quicktime, 7.8Mb)
See The Project Journal Here

Sony Admits DRM Mistake

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Ed
3 years, 10 months ago
in Classic and Culture
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It is pretty rare that this happens, so i thought it worth noting that Ken Kutaragi (president of sony computer entertainment) has blamed DRM-based restrictions on their mp3 electronics (enforced by the music arm of sony) for their loss of the walkman market to smaller players (such as creative, apple, diamond etc.)

Interesting…perhaps some internal issues need looking at in sony

Article Here