Category: Uncategorized

Sorting through a pile of old links on my desktop, I find this story at O’Grady’s PowerPage about a new Crumpler store in New York, which will do custom builds of their already-barking range of bags. I’ll confess to being somewhat jealous that this service isn’t (yet) available in the UK, even though I already have two Crumpler bags and very likely don’t need any more just now, thanks.

Short review; they’re brilliant bags. Longer review; I have a cycle courier bag of theirs (a Seedy Three), and one of their laptop bags (a Whack-o-Phone). They’re both extremely well-designed, superbly made, and have stood up to ridiculous levels of abuse in the time I’ve had them. Plus there’s this whole ‘ah, you know‘ thing that goes on between two Crumpler owners when they pass in the street. It’s like Mini drivers waving at each other… only with shoulder bags.

There’s a bonkersly-large range of bags, all with baffling names, and never available all in the same place to look at, dammit. Computer stores sell (some of the) computer bags, camera shops (some of the) camera bags, and bicycle shops… what’s that? Oh, you’ve spotted the pattern, huh? OK. Check online at the mad, confusing, oh just face it irritating as hell Crumpler ‘corporate’ site, or maybe this UK-based online retailer makes a bit more sense. I bought my Whack-o-Phone from an Apple shop, but the Seedy Three came direct from the UK importer, following an extremely amusing conversation with one of the staff as she unpacked her colleague’s example to give me an idea of how big the thing was. And what he was having for lunch. And exactly how far through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas he’d got.

Highly recommended. There might be better bags around, but Crumplers would beat them up, then go out and get hammered before picking up a Fendi and taking her back to a swanky hotel.

It’s apparently now possible to fit a Hummer with some form of infra-red camera mated to a projection display (Engadget, Egopedia). Unusually, this display isn’t projected to overlap the view through the windscreen; it sounds like it’s not a true head-up display, which augments the normal view with the enhanced-contrast infra-red image. Ironically, I suspect this may fix one of the problems with conventional aerospace-derived HUD designs when they’re applied to cars. Let me tell you a story…

A few years ago (2000?), I toddled to the NEC for one of the Tomorrow’s World Live events, a slightly bizarre mix of high-tech trade show and… well, bear in mind that TW was in the depths of naffness at the time, so you can probably work it out. There was some interesting stuff kicking around, however, and I ended up with several items for How2 out of it.

One thing that attracted my interest was a demonstration on the Jaguar stand. They had an XJ rigged up with a full-on military-style holographic projection HUD, neatly mounted in the roof head lining. The system was, I was told, essentially ripped out of a Harrier jet, most of the work involved being in integrating it with the car in a neat fashion. You can bolt things to a military jet, but Jaguar owners demand that they be fitted, I suppose. This was a prototype, but the PR flack proudly proclaimed that it was intended for full-on production ‘within two years.’

The demonstration involved climbing into the car and gazing at a huge (and impressive) projection TV showing a recording of a night-time drive down twisting country lanes. You lined up the HUD to your seating position, and a switch allowed you to turn the infra red view on and off at will. The difference was spectacular. Night vision systems are a little grainy, but that nonsense you see in the movies? They’re actually not that dissimilar in practice. The really clever thing is the holographic technique that allows the projected image to hang far enough away that you don’t have to shift focus, since it appears to be overlaid on the world outside in all three dimensions. Very clever, and very effective.

But one thing troubled me. The HUD screen was large, as HUDs go, but still small compared to the car windscreen. It amply covered the road ahead, but peripheral vision was outside its limits. I knew that situational awareness for jet pilots was an issue when using fixed IR devices, and I mentioned that the headlight beam spread was much wider than the area covered by the HUD.

The PR flack shifted uncomfortably, which was odd, so I continued the train of thought. What effect does enhancing the central field of view have on one’s attention to peripheral vision? By offering a better view of the road, does the driver end up paying less attention to the roadside? Literally ‘out of sight, out of mind’? More squirming from the PR flack.

With impeccable timing a lone pedestrian wandered into view at the side of the road. Completely unseen by the HUD system, he popped into my awareness roughly a dozen metres away. Instinctively I flicked the wheel and tried to steer away, which was stupid on several fronts. Firstly because I was watching a pre-recorded movie in a stationary car, and secondly because the car was going to miss him anyway, and swerving like that could easily have steered me into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

I looked at the PR flack. ‘How well has this system been tested? And not technically, I mean for human factors? Can you demonstrate that it actually makes night driving any safer?’

At which point, I was asked to leave the stand. Incredulous, I pressed the question, only for two very large security guards to show up. The request to leave was repeated, politely but very firmly. I was clearly no longer welcome at the Jaguar stand. The PR flack refused to even give me his name, but I like to think that this was the last bad decision he made in that job.

You see, I was at the show on a press pass. So I toddled off to the media centre and snagged the Jaguar release covering the HUD system. Lots of proud mention of how it was going to be available in XJs in a year or two, and of how thoroughly tested it was, but no mention of human factors at all. It looked like they simply hadn’t done their homework.

At which point, I spied a chap from the Telegraph who I vaguely knew via New Scientist bashes at British Association meetings. I showed him the release, and told him my tale. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed, as he ran to the Jaguar stand to see for himself.

I never did find out if he ran the story, but Jaguar never delivered the system. Cadillac, apparently, do offer something similar – I wonder how well-tested it is?

That is, when Hollywood makes trailers for things they just don’t ‘get’: the trailer for Wallace and Gromit – Curse of the Were Rabbit is up. I lost count of all the Thunderbirds references, but it’s a duff trailer thanks mostly to the appalling soundtrack. I refuse to believe it had anything to do with Nick Park.

Still, I can hardly wait for October 7th. There’s blurb and stuff at the official website to keep us going until then.

But before I do – this post from Gus Mueller reports on new stuff in the .Mac software development kit 2.0, due any day now. Anyone’s who’s used Coding Monkey’s SubEthaEdit in anger will appreciate just what a significant development this is: if you haven’t, let me briefly explain:

SubEthaEdit is a text editor. That’s all it does. But it lets several people type in the document at the same time, and each person sees everyone else’s changes, in real time. It was designed for pair programming tasks, but it’s found favour for taking conference notes collaboratively, and on the couple of occasions I’ve used it for writing scripts it’s been unbelievably cool. What’s clever isn’t so much the concept – other similar systems do exist, I’m told – as the simplicity. SubEthaEdit automatically discovers other copies of itself over the network, and allowing other users access to your document is as easy as dragging their icon from a list.

It sounds like the .Mac SDK will allow similar sorts of operations over the net. Better, as Mueller points out, it should take a problem that’s been theoretically possible – but plain hard – and make it relatively straightforward. This is a big deal, because now the problem becomes: what do we do with this stuff?

I’m starting to think that Apple’s real risk in the Intel transition is nothing to do with the processors at all. It’s long been the case that once you’ve got over the joy of unpacking your glorious new Mac and actually started it up, it’s… well… it’s exactly the same as your crufty old Mac. Desktop, laptop, whatever – all Macs are basically identical, which is one heck of an achievement. If Intel-based Macs are discernibly different, then frankly Apple will have failed and it’s game over. Many Mac users won’t even know if they’re on PPC or Intel, and nor should they have to.

No, the risk is that we, Mac users, will be so distracted by the coming Third Age of Mac-Kind that we forget what the Mac is supposed to be about. Which is: making previously-impossible stuff easy. Stuff like typesetting pages, image manipulation, video editing, cataloguing, and real-time collaborative document editing.

When we ask ‘what’s next?’, we should not – must not – be referring to Intel CPUs.

While this new phone might crash rather a lot, the camera is genuinely impressive. To give you some idea; this snap of my dining table festooned with accounts paperwork (ugh!) was taken with my old Z600. That’s the full-quality output from its camera. Click it for a popup of the K750i’s results (250k JPEG that’s about twice the size of your screen; save it and open it in something that scales pictures, like Preview). Note that I’ve dropped the JPEG quality somewhat to make the file smaller.

There are, of course, much better cameras – but this is good enough for mucking about shots. I still hanker after a digital SLR, but digital compacts can go hang, frankly.

[update Jan 2015, whilst rebuilding this site. I can’t be bothered to do the popup thing, so I’ve just put the two pictures side-by-side. From the current perspective it seems quaint we ever found cameraphones surprising.]

So I had a huge and somewhat witty post mostly written about my escapades trying to convince Orange that I (a.) exist, (b.) am who I claim to be, and (c.) should be allowed back into their big happy family despite (d.) confusing them mightily because they failed to close my account properly eighteen months ago, and according to their database I was already a customer with the same number I was now attempting to transfer back to them. All of which was complicated by my (e.) not being able to proffer the requisite thirteen separate sources of identity and address confirmation, on account of my gas and electricity being provided by the same supplier, despite the fact that they are – much to my ongoing irritation – treated entirely independently by unsaid supplier, to the extent that not only are the bill layouts entirely different, but both arms of the supplier send multiple inspectors to read the meters. Often on the same day. On occasion, at the same time. Once, it was the same person… with different appointments on his job sheet, the poor lad. He’d been walking in circles all day.

However, since I seem to have written a précis, I shall spare you the long version. The bottom line is that I finally have a new mobile phone, replacing my decrepit-to-the-point-of-being-held-together-with-gaffer-tape Z600 (and the not-even-gaffer-tape-can-save-them-O2) with a shiny new K750i and Orange.

The K750, then. It is, quite frankly, an object of tremendous marvelousness. If you’ve seen the immensely-popular K700… it’s not like one of those, only with a 2 megapixel autofocus camera and a Memory Stick Duo slot. In terms of solidity, design coherency and general oozing of classiness, it’s right up there with the T610. I’ve even managed to hack something in some OS X plist somewhere to get it working with Address Book and iSync while Apple get their act together, which makes me sufficiently happy I can almost put up with it not being a clamshell or flip design. Ah well, one can’t have everything.

One also can’t have, apparently, stability. The daft thing keeps locking up on the screensaver, currently with a half-life of around four hours. Yes, you read that right: it crashes several times a day. Turns out, I’m not alone: one thread, and another, and a third.

Dear Steve: can we get that Apple iPhone now, please? Thanks.

Some random linkbloggery; so, I’m trying to find out what the developer gossip is from WWDC – whether people’s code really has compiled to Mac OS X on Intel. Cocoalicious came over, as did NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, and Delicious Library too. Yay! Expect to see a crowing Apple press release about how marvelously it’s all going, any day now. Anyway, along the way I read about a chap called Eric Albert, who’s revealed to have been working on the Intel transition at Apple. Now, I’m sure I used to read his blog, but I’m stuffed if I can find it in my subscriptions, so I head over to Eric’s site. I skim through and my eye alights on a link to this story about doing laundry at Google.

Where do I want to go today? Oh, you know, I’m just meandering around.

I’ve worked out the whole ‘Bad Wolf‘ thing. Obviously, the TARDIS is going to run on Intel.

[ba-da-bum]

In lieu of iTunes 4.9 and its integrated podcast directory, here’s the BBC’s links page for their own feeds. So you can now snag From Our Own Correspondent as well as In Our Time.

A reminder for anyone confused or otherwise distracted by all the Mac crap flying around on this page of late: Radio 3’s Beethoven downloads have started to appear. Symphonies one through five available as I type.

[update 10/6: iTunes users might like to explore ctrl-clicking (or right-clicking) on the tracks once they’re in iTunes. Get Info then click the Options tab: you can set the track start time, which allows you to skip the three minutes of the Radio 3 announcer’s introduction. I’d imagine something similar is possible in other mp3 players. Note also that the downloads are only 128kbps stereo, and don’t have full tag information. Notably, the ‘Composer’ line isn’t set – you can add that information in the same info panel in iTunes.]

[Edit 12/6/2005: link fixed]