Skyroam Solis – a hotspot that takes the hassle out of international mobile data access (130 countries)

As a freelancer, a lot of my work is done at odd hours in odd places. The one constant is that most of it requires online access to contact clients, upload edited video, publish written content and push out social media updates at events.

Coffeeshop wifi is, for the most part, shockingly unreliable – particularly if the venue is using a domestic router – and is sometimes insecure without a VPN. Wireless access in hotels and airports is very patchy. And while many conference centres have invested heavily in flooding their spaces with robust wifi, spending a day in some spaces can feel like travelling back in time to the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Mobile phone networks are often more stable, and can be a lot faster for download, than broadband. They’re usually much faster for upload in my experience as someone who needs to share edited video files that can be more than a couple of gigabytes in size. But it can also be a lot more expensive, though an unlimited data SIM can be sourced for £20/month in the UK.

In years gone by, I carried an unlocked Huawei mifi hotspot (branded as Three) with me wherever I went. One of the first things I’d do in a new country was to buy a Pay As You Go SIM card and slot it in. (Easier said than done in the US where I first needed to buy a prepaid credit card in order to satisfy – or bypass – the identity rules to buy the SIM card as cash and foreign credit cards weren’t allowed.)

The elimination of mobile roaming charges across EU countries has been a godsend for travellers, both business and pleasure. But stray outside the magic list of ‘free’ countries and you’ll be paying a fixed daily fee for data and calls if you’re lucky, or an arm and a leg every few emails if you’re not.

On a recent work trip to Cape Town to attend Global Fact 6, the International Fact Checking Network annual meetup, with a colleague from FactCheckNI, I brought along a Skyroam Solis (loaded to me by their PR team) to see how it would work.

Not much larger or heavier than an ice hockey puck, the distinctive round orange hotspot will hook into mobile networks across 130 countries and allow up to five of your devices to connect over secure wifi. There are sizeable batteries inside – 6,200mAh (about four times the capacity of my Huawei mifi) – which can both power the Solis for hours on end, but also top up your phone’s battery with the provided cable.

The orange puck is small and robust enough to survive being thrown into my backpack and carted around airports, hotels and a conference for a week. A bus from Belfast (UK) to Dublin (Ireland), flight to Istanbul (Turkey) and another to Cape Town (South Africa) were all good tests for the Solis. There’s no physical SIM inside, only a virtual one, leaving Skyroam free to do deals with mobile operators around the world.

Holding the small power button in turns on the hotspot and the lights begins to flash as it figures out where in the world it is and how to get online. So no despite the fact every time I switched it on it was in a new country with a new set of mobile networks to choose from, the Solis figured it out every time without any intervention on my part.

A companion app (available for iOS and Android devices) uses a QR code on the base of the unit to pair up a phone to its wifi (finally a practical use for QR codes!) and lets you see details about the connection and your data usage. You can also connect to the Solis by typing in the wifi password printed on the base by hand.

In the last month, Skyroam have announced a new model, the Solis X which is marginally smaller, has a slightly smaller battery, but allows 10 devices to connect and includes a built-in camera, bluetooth microphone/speaker and can act as a smart assistant.

What does it cost?

One of the immutable rules of the universe is that data is never free! (The corollary is that any free data should assumed to be insecure, limited in bandwidth, and very frustrating to use.) So it should be no surprise that Skyroam offer a number of different ways to prepay for data on the Solis unit which can be bought outright or just rented for the duration of your travel.

Daypass – £7/day ($9) provides 24 hours of unlimited wifi in 130 or so countries. Outside of the friendly roam-free countries, this price point compares well with my current provider who charge £6/day to use my UK tariff’s existing data in an additional 58 countries outside ‘Europe’.

GoData – £7/month ($9) for 1GB of data that can be used over a month, with additional data available by top-up for £7/GB. While the subscription is set to roll over every month, there’s no contract period and as long as you cancel 4 days before the end of your current period. So you can subscribe for a single trip, then cancel and pick it up again a few months later and re-subscribe. I notice that there’s currently a deal to pay up front for 12 months of GoData and get a third off the price of the hotspot (£165 total for Solis+wifi).

Unlimited monthly subscription – £79/month (£99) for unlimited global data over 30 days. Again it rolls over, but there’s no contract and you can cancel up to 4 days before the end of any month. I reckon you’d need to be quite the road warrior doing a lot of international travel and a consuming a lot of data (video) for the Unlimited subscription to cost in. But having spent a month or so working in Macedonia this time last year – outside the EU roaming scheme – the Solis would have been quite competitive and less hassle than hours on the phone to Vodafone trying to rectify a problem with my ‘old’ tariff that wasn’t behaving internationally as their customer service had advised before I travelled.

Using it in anger

The Solis worked well on the bus down to Dublin airport and was a boon when the Cape Town hotel wanted to charge for wifi access. (Turns out that hotels charging for internet access is still a thing in 2019 … madness.)

Sitting at two o’clock in the morning in Istabul’s brand spanking new airport waiting for my flight home to Dublin, I was able to pull the Solis out of my backpack and get online within less than a minute. Dropbox synced up the changes I’d made on the previous flight and I spent a couple of hours editing Google Docs and dissecting people’s Twitter and Facebook usage for social media healthchecks I was running the next week.

Solis’ strength is that it’s hassle free, and given the colour, you’ll unlikely to leave it behind.

Saving an image badged as 1.2Mb on a website, I was surprised that the filesize turned out to be only a few kilobytes, and the picture seemed grainy when I opened it on my laptop. A similar problem can happen on any mobile network, with carriers offering some APNs that push traffic through invisible proxies that compress image sizes to reduce bandwidth (and data usage, often a good thing) as well as APNs that don’t tamper with the content being browsed. A quick conversation with Skyroam online chat resolved the issue and following their instruction to turn the Solis off and on again, it picked up a less restrictive configuration and the internet went back to normal. (Impressive support at 2am on a Sunday morning!)

The Solis is charged by USB-C, so there’s no chance of damaging the unit by trying to plug the charging cable in the wrong way around. It’s slightly annoying that the Solis refuses to be charged by my rather powerful 61W Apple MacBook charger (which would reduce the need to bring a separate charger plug), though it will happily charge off the laptop directly.

The larger the access point, the (potentially) larger the antennae that will be built in. Battery-powered hotspots from Huawei and Netgear (whose Nighthawk M1 is very effective if you have a physical SIM) tend to have small ports that allow a larger external antenna to be attached. I’ve one that comes with suckers that allows it to be stuck to an external window and typically boosts mobile signal strength by 25-40%. However, for air travellers, the lack of the option of an external antenna on the Solis won’t be a big minus.

Livestreaming

As someone who regularly records and livestream conferences, lectures and events using wifi-connected cameras (iPhones on remote gimbals) and Switcher Studio’s software, I’m always on the lookout for flexible connectivity solutions, particularly if working overseas and wanting to slim down the amount of kit that needs to travel.

Recording would just use its ability to connect up to five devices together (with the traffic between the devices staying within the room and none of it going out over mobile network). The Solis wouldn’t quite have the sensitivity of the larger Google Wi-Fi access point I trail around in my case which has multiple internal antennae. But in small venues with good line of sight between devices, the Solis could be a good option.

Streaming would not only rely on the five devices connecting together via wireless, but would take advantage of Solis’ 4G connectivity. It would be cost restrictive at home. And for streamers, Skyroam’s Fair Use Policy warns about bandwidth being reduced if a user consumes a disproportionately high amount of data, which makes this hotspot less attractive as a streaming solution, given the likelihood that an hour or more of an HD stream to Facebook Live or YouTube could trigger a service-restricting action.

But for short bursts while travelling, it could still be very effective.

Conclusion

Frequent travellers will enjoy the wide coverage and no-nonsense price plans that Skyroam offer. I found the loaned Solis unit to be robust and the technical support was speedy and, importantly, available when I needed it. The Skyroam Solis is a big time saver that avoids the hassle of buying a local SIM card if your mobile tariff back at home is going to prove too expensive. And the ability to go away for a few weeks outside Europe with a few GB of data loaded through GoData and know that it’ll work across a family is a very attractive option for regular travellers needing data on the move.

Thanks to Skyroam PR team for the loan of the hotspot.

Test drive an electric car at ecar DRIVESHOWs touring Northern Ireland in February & March

Last March I test drove an electric car around Titanic Quarter as part of the eDRIVE roadshow. The Nissan Leaf was a stealthy drive.

Foot on the brake, press in the button on top of the stumpy gear stick and pull back into ‘drive’. Press down on the accelerator and the car silently glides forward. Step on it a bit more and the speed cranks up. Steadily. No jerking through the gears like an ordinary automatic. In fact, stamp on the accelerator and the car takes off – instant torque – down the road with an alarming sense of urgency. Yet inside the car, all is calm and quiet.

Donnelly Group had fitted a couple of cameras to the car, so some of my wittering - and gesticulating with both hands instead of holding the wheel - was preserved for posterity.



The Department for Regional Development together with the Department of the Environment have teamed up to take the ecar DRIVESHOW to another six venues across Northern Ireland. Each roadshow starts at 10am and finishes at noon with lunch provided.

• 5 February in Enniskillen Castle
• 12 February in Coleraine Council Civic Headquarters
• 19 February in the Burnavon Arts and Cultural Centre, Cookstown
• 26 February in the Omniplex at the Quays Shopping Centre, Armagh
• 12 March in Larne Townhall
• 26 March in the Guildhall, Derry/Londonderry

You can register your attendance … and don’t forget to bring both parts of your driving licence if you want a test drive.

There are an increasing number of charging points dotted across the island, and there are charge points in many DRD and some private car parks. In Lisburn there's a charge point in the DRD car park in Benson Street, and another at Dobbies Garden Centre.



Last week DRD, DETI and DOE ministers launched a competition to design an Electric Days Out app to “assist existing and future Electric Vehicle drivers to plan their journeys across Northern Ireland, particularly visitor attractions promoted by NI Environment Agency and NI Tourist Board.

Last March, I concluded the blog post about the test drive saying:

In my opinion, getting an electric car would have to be a lifestyle choice as well as a economic one.

I was impressed with the short test drive: the Nissan Leaf was a lovely car. I like the concept of an emission-free vehicle. I love the idea of never having to fill up at a petrol station. And since I’ve no sense of smell, I won’t even miss the pleasant whiff of petrol fumes. I commute nine miles in and back out of work each day, so range would fine. I could get to Ballymena and back on a single charge. However, a round trip to Coleraine or Cookstown would require recharging along the way. So it would be impractical to have an electric car as the only vehicle in the household. Which makes it an expensive dodgem.

As a small car fan, I can’t ever see myself forking out £20,000+ for a car that size. At current specs and prices, it will be a long time before there is a sub-£10,000 two or four seater electric car on the market. That would be the tipping point for me.

For some people the economics, the eco-credentials and the driving range will make sense.

For me, I think I’ll stick with my three-cylinder, low spec Aygo. Even if it is incredibly noisy inside the car compared with the tranquil Leaf.

The future’s electric. But not for a while.

Update - The Belfast Telegraph has uncovered an anomaly between some parking conditions and the time to charge particular cars.

What's your favourite gadget from the last 100 years? The best invention or physical innovation?

When Radio Ulster's Talkback got in touch mid-morning with the question it set my mind racing. (With Wikipedia – and using an old-fashioned Google search as backup – it’s very straightforward to find out their history and uptake.)

A lot of the gadgets that immediately come to mind fell into the category of entertainment. Yet the ones that make most impact are those that are labour saving. Many early inventions have opened up the possibilities for further innovation.

A Channel 5 Gadget Show survey found zips to be the number one gadget. (Patented in 1917, though invented fifty years before.) Via the burr, zips have morphed into another fastener: Velcro, the zipperless zip.

My personal top three home-related gadgets (in no particular order and subject to change!) would be:

• electric kettle (1922): fast access to tea, and freeing up the need to keep a stove lit;
• electric blanket (1912): a real luxury, yet avoids the need of pouring boiling water into a hot water bottle;
• smoke detectors (lower cost battery models only started to become available in 1965): saving lives with radioisotopes screwed to your ceiling.

The internet, Excel and more recent techie gadgets are deliberately absent from my list! But it also still overlooks:

• Cats eyes (1933 and still going strong);
• Push button phones introduced by AT&T in the US in 1963 have led to all kinds of other push button devices;
• Cordless phones (remember those dodgy innovative pre-DECT analogue handsets) and baby monitors (allowing doors to be closed and sound to come out but not enter a room);
• Wireless doorbell – we’ve lived in a string of houses where the mains doorbell didn’t work;
• Double glazing took off in the US in the 1950s yet it was the 1870s and 1980s before it started saving heating bills in the UK;
• Credit Cards (plastic cards appeared in 1950s) and networked cash machines/ATMs (1969) have not only changed how we access money but have also changed how we think about spending;
• the Walkman freed people from listening to music in a particular room; the MP3 player freed them from having to owning physical content;
• for me, the MP3 player offers time-shifted radio (podcasts) in the same way Tivo first offered time shifted TV without having to juggle tapes;
• Space invader games (popular in the early 1980s) that ate batteries or required a DC adapter, led to Game Boy and Nintendo DS, and now game apps on phones;
• Soap dispensers eliminating messy, slippery soap bars from sinks;
• the Brownie camera in the first half of the twentieth century, Polaroid instant photos (1948) and now digital cameras everywhere (taking picture with the freedom to neither print them nor look at them again);
• Cardiac pacemakers, external in the 1930s-1950s, but implantable from 1958;
• the Mouse … which is slowly being replaced with the Finger!

I wonder if Talkback could cope if the digital clock hadn’t been invented?

3D TV? France 24 trialled 360 degree TV during its election coverage

I’ve discovered the English language France 24 about six months too late to enjoy its coverage of the French presidential election. (There are also French and Arabic language versions of France 24.)

Compared with UK-based 24 hour news, it has none of the stuffiness and oozes quirkiness and endearing informality. It’s regular Tech 24 and Webnews slots are perhaps closer to BBC World Service Click (the radio show formerly known as Digital Planet and presented by Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson) than the TV equivalent.

For its French Presidential election result coverage, the French-language version of France 24 needed a larger set! And as a gimmick trial, they streamed video from a 360 degree camera mounted in the middle of a circular table around which the presenters and commentators sat. (The technology was provided by Digital Immersion.)

You can replay some of the coverage and swivel around, up and down and zoom in and out. On the night of the election results, France 24 offered an iPhone/iPad app that allowed viewers to use their fingers to scroll around rather than the stabbing with a mouse on their PC.

Try the second clip under VOD2 on the Direct 360 webpage for a good example.

It’s a fascinating insight into a live production. While one person talks, those opposite are shuffling their scripts, whispering in each other’s ears and texting. During speeches from the candidates and segments from reports outside the studio, there’s much hand waving to the gallery, conducting as the crowds rhythmically cheer for their candidate, and members of the crew race around to refill glasses and bottles of water.

The always-on nature of France 24’s panoramic view means that the slick production values of the director and vision mixer up in the gallery are completely eliminated. Instead the visual cues, the normally unseen negotiation between presenters and guests are exposed, not to mention the lighting rig which for this temporary studio was not mounted overhead.

The innovation is discussed briefly on the English language Tech 24 show where presenter Eric Olander describes it as “the next step in interactive television”.

Other than the benefit of improving media literacy and allowing more people to understand what goes on behind the scenes, I’m not sure that the 360 degree actually improved the coverage of the election results.

But given the relatively low cost of setting it up, I’m sure a local broadcaster will try it at some stage!

Newt Gingrich: a space cadet with ideas that are out of this world?

By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American. (Newt Gingrich)

It certainly qualifies as a BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goal for anyone lucky enough to be steeped in management speak. An injection of ambition and cash into the state space industry would be a big sweetener to people listening to Newt Gingrich's message at his Florida campaign rally.

We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching.

But does the US have that kind of money to spare given the economic conditions and the problems it faces down on Earth? In the Telegraph, Ed West argues that Newt Skywalker's idea is inspired rather than foolish:

Then there is the money; a manned mission to Mars, which would be the next logical step, is estimated to cost in the region of $450 billion, which is quite a lot. But put it in perspective: the total cost for American taxpayers of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was recently estimated to be between $3.2 and $4 trillion. And on welfare, one think-tank estimates that Barack Obama’s various programmes will cost a staggering $10.3 trillion over a decade.

However, the return on investment of establishing a moonbase is going to be small ... unless someone opens a tuck shop and alien species queue up to buy coke and fries! Monetising the research discoveries made in space is likely to be slow. And eight years is a short time in which to develop, design and test an enormous range of kit to create a moonbase, never mid transport it up there. As Ed West notes:

... after the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet, NASA can’t even get to the International Space Station alone, let alone 250,000 miles away.

Perhaps Newt's answer to his doubters - which include fellow candidate Mitt Romney - should be to look across the border and enlist the help of two Canadian 17 year olds.

Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad sent a Styrofoam capsule carrying a Lego figure holding a Canadian flag 24km up into space - that's "three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft". Lifted by a weather balloon and carrying four cameras (including a GoPro) and a mobile phone that sent out its GPS position when it was within 7km of the ground - particularly critical to help find the device when it returned 97 minutes later! - the home made space vehicle even had a home-made parachute to soften its landing. Check out the article in the Toronto Star for more details.

Maybe a couple of teenage Canadians could inspire the US to the moon ... and beyond?

Cross posted on Slugger O'Toole.

UK Thomson TiVo on its last legs

Back to the theme of the downside of technology refresh. This time it's TiVo.

Years before Sky+ and PVRs built into Freeview boxes, TiVo introduced the quantum leap beyond programming a VHS video recorder with Videoplus codes.

A silver box with an analogue tuner inside, a 40Gb hard drive that could store up to 40 hours of basic quality video, and a phone connect that allowed it to dial a freephone number in the middle of the night to update its electronic programme guide. The big benefit was that you could set it to record all the episodes of a particular series rather than having to remember to programme the video each week. And there was a handy button on the remote that jumped 30 seconds forward: six clicks would bypass a normal ITV three minute ad break. Ground-breaking in its day.

In the UK, the Thomson manufactured units were marketed to Sky customers starting in Autumn 2000 before Sky fell out of bed with TiVo and launched their own (rival) Sky+ box. Shortly after, online electrical retailers picked up and sold off the surplus stock. Confession: I bought two, kept one for myself, and sold the other after six months (by which time they were a bit rarer and attracted a keener price) and used the money to fund a lifetime subscription to the dial-up EPG updates.

Over the last two months, various informational messages have been popping up to explain that TiVo would soon be integrated into Virgin cable boxes. And finally last week the dreaded message arrived explaining that the "lifetime subscription" service would be finishing on 1 June.

Without the updated EPG, the boxes are pretty useless. Manually setting record times would be a backwards step! Along with other bloggers, I'm surprised that TiVo and Sky have kept the EPG information available for so long.

The closure of analogue terrestrial transmission in Northern Ireland towards the end of 2012 as part of the UK's digital switchover programme was always going to lead to the obsolescence of the TiVo. But Virgin's deal has hastened its demise. And with the delay in the launch of Canvas YouView - internet enabled Freeview TVs and set top boxes allowing you to roll the EPG backwards and stream old programmes on-demand - until early 2012, TiVo's withdrawal is is at least six months too soon.

So after 9 years, the silver box with its original hard drive that has been spinning nearly continuously, hardly ever missing a recording. Bet its replacement consumes less power but doesn't live to its 9th birthday!

TiVo's website explains:

Beginning in 2011, customers of Virgin Media will be able to purchase Virgin Media TV, powered by TiVo. For further product information, please see www.virginmedia.com/tivo.

TiVo Series1 DVRs were manufactured for sale in the UK from 2000 to 2002 and were available exclusively to customers of BSkyB. This box has not been actively sold since this time and new accounts are not being activated. If UK Series1 customers have product or technical questions, they can receive support via email to bskyb-support@tivo.com.

After over 10 years of operation, the UK Series1 TiVo service will be discontinued as of June 1, 2011. Since November 2010, monthly Series1 customers have not been billed and will continue to receive free service until June 1, 2011.

Without the program guide data provided by the TiVo service, Series1 boxes will have limited - if any - functionality. They can still be used to view previously recorded programs and, under certain circumstances, may be used to record programs manually.

The newest generation of TiVo PVR and service is now available from Virgin Media. Virgin Media is extending a special offer to current TiVo Series1 customers within a Virgin Media cabled area so that they can take advantage of the Virgin Media TV powered by TiVo.

The ups and downs of my Snow Leopard upgrade experience

Working in the IT industry, you learn to be nervous of software upgrades. Whether it’s a browser, a database, an application or the whole operating system, running bleeding edge software exposes you to bugs and misbehaving features.

And so it was on my Mac Mini. The Leopard version of the Mac OSX operating system had been installed for years. And when the next version, Snow Leopard, was released, I reckoned that the devil I knew was better than the devil I didn’t. All that risk for a predicted 10% speed increase and some new features like facial recognition in iPhoto. Why touch something that wasn’t broken?

So I waited. But with the next upgrade, Lion, only months away and a double upgrade bypassing Snow Leopard unlikely to be supported … and with the new App Store available, enough time had passed.

The operating system upgrade itself went smoothly. Put the DVD in, run the upgrade, reboot and there it was. Tried a few applications and they started up ok.

So what went wrong?

Turns out my trusty seven year old HP Business Inkjet is no longer being supported by HP. What’s the typical lifespan of a printer these days? The drivers for Leopard don’t work under Snow Leopard, and HP didn’t produce new ones.

I could have found this out 18 months ago if I’d jumped to Snow Leopard early, but instead I discovered 10 days ago that I’d be on the look out for a new printer. Lucky enough I was using the last of my supply of ink cartridges, and the duplex unit has been chewing paper recently.

At the moment I recommend the HP Officejet 6500A Plus ... particularly it’s ability to upgrade itself over the web in less than half the time it takes to load its drivers onto the Mac! While it has a USB port, it's much more flexible to use it plugged into your broadband router. Then it's accessible by any computer at home. Just don’t try to buy it from Amazon as they won’t deliver it to Northern Ireland despite the “Free SuperSaver Delivery across the UK” on the product webpage. You can add it to your shopping basket, but when you reach the checkout, it will refuse any Northern Ireland delivery address.

The Drobo NAS connected via USB seemed to be working ok until a period of sustained reading and writing (EyeTV recording programmes and then transcoding them into iTunes) when it would declare an Error -36 and promptly disconnect itself from the Mac. Under the same conditions, it worked perfectly under Leopard. But something’s changed: maybe the tolerance on the USB power. Reconnecting the Drobo via Firewire (of course, needing a FW800 to FW400 lead) has fixed the issue, though has the consequence of slowing down OSX startup.

Over the past few years I’ve been very impressed with the Drobo. For those not familiar with its brilliance, it houses a number of SATA hard drives (up to 4 in my model) and uses its proprietary BeyondRAID technology to offer storage across the pool of physical drives, building in enough redundancy for one drive to fail. (BeyondRAID can be thought of as a combination of RAID1 and RAID5.)

One of the main problems with RAID disk arrays is that while they can protect your data in the eventuality of a disk failure, they are often difficult for mere mortals to reconfigure when you want to add more capacity. The Drobo’s unique selling point is that it allows you to pull drives out (if they’re dead or too small) and replace them with larger ones. All this drive swapping happens while the unit is running and connected to your computer. The speed of light and hard drive technology means that it still takes a long time to mirror your existing storage onto a new drive and regain redundancy – from memory 1TB took about 13 hours to replicate – but you don’t lose the use of your storage while you’re waiting. Idiot proof.

Older Drobos – like mine – only connect to one computer at a time. A thin DroboShare unit was bundled with my purchase that sat underneath the Drobo and allowed its storage to be shared over your home network. But the speed was slow, and the benefits of hosting an iTunes library on the directly-connected Drobo far outweighed the sharing of the storage across the LAN. (Newer Drobos model support protocols such as iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet.)

The Error -36 errors somewhat dented my confidence in Drobo. Thankfully connecting by Firewire seems to have solved the problem, but I’m surprised not to find similar tales mentioning Drobo, EyeTV, USB and Error -36 on Google.

The next question will be how long to wait before installing Lion. 6 months? 18 months? Certainly I’ll know to check and wait for printer drivers to become available before upgrading!

My Blackberry's not working ...

I may have been the last person on the planet to see this ... but just in case I wasn't, sit back and enjoy Ronnie Corbett, Harry Enfield and this preview clip from The One Ronnie show.

Frisbee inventor dies - Walter Fredrick "Fred" Morrison

Two years ago I blogged about the death of marketing giant Richard Knerr. His obituary in the Times explained:

When [Knerr and his business partner] saw Fred Morrison playing with a plastic flying disc he called the “Pluto Platter” they bought the idea from him, modified the design and, as the Frisbee, it sold in millions in the late 1950s.

A “professional” model was developed in the 1960s, and the team sport Ultimate Frisbee is still popular among students in the US and the UK.

Today the news broke of the death of Frisbee inventor Walter Fredrick "Fred" Morrison (pictured above). That ever-authoritative source Wikipedia explains the origin of the Frisbee.

“Fred claimed that the original idea came to him while throwing a popcorn can lid with his girlfriend, Lu, whom he later married. The popcorn lid soon dented which led to the discovery that cake pans flew better and were more common.”

Microsoft Courier prototype? A bit like a OLPC XO-2?

I'm a huge fan of the concept of tablet computers (or eBook readers) with two facing pages.

The One Laptop Per Child concept photo of its OLPC XO-2 has tantalised my since the moment I saw it. There's such potential for intuitive use of this format of device.

Real books have facing pages - and that's something the Kindle doesn't achieve it its current form factor.

But the concept is no longer confined to OLPC. Rumours are circulating about the Courier - what looks like an internal prototype that Microsoft are building. Perhaps getting their heads around the possibilities before tuning a Windows variant to work over the two touch screens.

Below the fold - if the fold works! - is a video from Gizmondo.

Bewildered by the buttons on your remote control?

Some of my favourite TV and video remote controls have been the ones with flaps that cover the more arcane and esoteric features.

But for remotes that insist on showing off a bewildering assortment of buttons, Andrea has a DIY solution over on More Stupid Than The Others.

Flip Mino HD review

So I’ve been living with a little Flip Mono HD for the last week and a bit. It’s just the size of a candy bar phone, slips in your jacket pocket weighs only 3.3oz (around 95g) and can capture an hour of HD quality footage.

At the flick of a button on the side, the USB plug flips out from the top ready to download your video onto PC/Mac and recharge the built in battery. Being the latest model available in Europe (the US have just launched the Flip Ultra HD which I guess will hit these shores before Christmas) it comes with the latest simple editing software already on the internal drive – for both PC and Mac, so you can install without downloading.

Technically it’s capturing HD at 720p resolution, 30 frames per second, 16:9 widescreen (1280 x 720) onto it’s built in 4GB flash memory. The battery powers the unit for around two hours, and it takes three hours to fully recharge via USB.

I loved its handy form factor. It’s smaller and lighter than it’s main rival, the Kodak Zi6. From the point you hold in the power button, it’s ready to record inside a couple of seconds. The screen on the back is never going to be clear enough to check if an HD image is in focus! But it’s good enough to browse through clips and delete the dud ones.

Let’s look at a real life application. I used the Mino HD to capture footage at BarCamp Belfast.

Snippets of talks, voxpops with attendees and speakers, general background footage of the venue and surroundings. It coped well. It’s discrete enough that its presence isn’t as off-putting as a camcorder or professional broadcast camera.

I’d half expected that I'd be able to hook the Mino HD up to a computer with a USB extension lead to power it, and allow me to beat the two hour battery life. But no: once hooked up to a computer, it switches over to being a USB drive, and the camera function is disabled.

The audio it captured was of good quality (mono), but at a very low level. So you’ll have to boost the level in your editing software if combining with louder footage from other sources.

It’s a small, lightweight handheld (fingerheld) camera – so it wobbles. It doesn’t have built in image stabilisation, so unless you jam yourself against a wall, or mount the Mino HD on a camera tripod (it does have a standard tripod mount on the bottom) expect the pictures to be a little shaky. But packages like iMovie 09 can come to the rescue offering video stabilisation of imported clips.

The BarCamp Belfast video was shot entirely on the Flip Mino HD, and edited in the older iMovie HD. Nothing fancier required.

I was surprised when I paused the imported content just how sharp a still from a clip could be. I pointed the Flip out a train window on a sunny day in London and realised that I’d be able to use a still from the footage as a background image (at 1280 x 720 anyway). Good vibrant colour. If you pan around from a very bright scene to much darker scene, you’ll notice the white balance correcting and adjusting. And I was impressed with the quality of lower light shots.

To transfer the images off the camera and onto your computer, just plug it into a USB2 socket. The built in FlipShare software allows you transfer clips on and off the camera, trim clips and then sequence them, before adding a title and credit, and exporting the finished movie as a .MOV (H.264, AAC). It can upload directly to Youtube and MySpace, though doesn’t have the settings for Flickr yet! The software ran quite happily on my Atom-powered Dell Mini 9 (running XP) and Mac Mini. For more sophisticated productions, just import the clips into iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Pinnacle etc.

Part of me would love the Mino HD to boost its gain and capture audio at a louder level – or offer a jack to plug in an external mic. It takes a surprisingly long time to transfer footage off the Flip and onto your computer. Even using USB2, 1GB is a lot of storage to shift around. If pushed for time, popping out an SD card and replacing it with a fresh one would have been faster. Given that the camera recording HD, it’s a shame that the video out (cable supplied) is only a Component video feed.

But for most of the scenarios that you’d want to use a pocket sized HD camera ... you can live without those features.

It’s not really intended for shooting a feature film – though some enterprising filmmaker will try! It would be ideal for voxpopping – short head shots, no need for zoom and close enough to the subject to use the built-in mic and not get too much background nose. Would love to have a go in the summer with Tech Camp and send out one group with the normal shoulder-mounted DV camera, the other with a Flip, and then compare the results.

An hour of footage is normally plenty. And I quickly got used to the shake and the audio. Years ago, people took perfectly good photos with Kodak Brownie cameras. And today, it’s possible to capture excellent video footage with a Flip. While I found that it did reduce the number of photos I took, the size and usability of the Mino HD balanced out some of its constraints and downsides. Retailing for £169.99, it seems pretty good value.

Any bigger or any heavier, and I don’t think I’d carry it around! So for me the Kodak Zi6 and even the promised Ultra HD (with its AA batteries, stereo mic and two hours recording) would be too big and heavy for my pocket.

But for now, the Flip Mino HD is back in its box, wrapped up, and speeding back to London in a padded envelope. I’ve never owned a camcorder – no embarrassing home movies for Littl’un to worry about! – but I’d seriously think about getting a Flip. It appealed to my (normally well hidden) inner filmmaker.

BarCamp Belfast 2009 - reflections

BarCamp Belfast hit the Belfast Campus of the University of Ulster on Saturday.

BarCamp Belfast is a user-generated unconference for designers, developers, startups and geeks to share and learn in an open environment.

Unconference means that there are no fees to register and attend, food and caffeine are freely provided, there are no invited speakers but instead the attendees volunteer to give talks, organising the schedule on the day.

BarCampBelfast - some highlights from Alan in Belfast on Vimeo shot entirely on a Flip Mini HD.

Andy McMillan is the driving force behind the Belfast event, and along with a team of capable and obedient slaves, pulled off the event which had over 350 people registered before it started, thirty or more talks given across the day, and hundreds of networking opportunities for the participants who came from all across Ireland as well as a few from further afield.

Traditionally, BarCamps are ... well, it’s difficult to use the word “traditionally” when it comes to a free-form event. So let’s say that many other BarCamp events are a hotbed of technobabble and rapid prototyping. But there were few hackers strutting - or even mashing - their stuff in Belfast on Saturday.

Other than a few references to APIs, the majority of what I could hear was focussed on business development in the world of web design, project management, life coaching, managing clients to maximise satisfaction and profit. There were a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of networking, and a teeny bit of self-promotion by some speakers!

Of course none of that’s bad. In fact, the quality of the talks was incredibly good. It reflects the local market and those of us who are engaged with the event and its wider ecosystem. Looks like it’s a social island after all!

While the geek stereotype tends towards introversion, fear of daylight and inability to communicate except by means of a keyboard, you wouldn’t have known on Saturday. Amongst others ...

• Lee Munroe squeezed in a great opening session on the seven deadly sins of Wordpress and how to beat them - accessible and applicable to non-Wordpress bloggers too. Then he flew off to run the London Marathon!
  
• Paul Mcenhill talked about improving how we take, process and organise photographs: he’s still at school, but that didn’t reflect in the insight and tips he provided.
  
• Dee Harvey and John Campbell escaped from the darkened recesses of the BBC NI news room to start a conversation about the semi-permeable newsroom.
  
• 4iP’s Ewan McIntosh made it across from Edinburgh to educate more people about Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public fund, and share some of the progress on existing commissions (most notably, Audioboo).
  
• David Braziel looked at the top reasons that IT projects failed.
  
• Tracy Dempsey shared some insights into presentational techniques and threw in some NLP magic.
  
• And I left before ex-twitter-now-BT (or is that ex-San-Francisco-now-Whitehead?) Blaine Cook closed the day with a storming session that eschewed Keynote and Powerpoint in favour for the overhead projector (well, the modern lecture theatre equivalent) and hand-written slides.

Even the coffee was geeky with Bean and Gone’s alien brewing kit providing tea and coffee on a scale worthy of an army field kitchen, but at a quality you’d find at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Not having wifi proved quite liberating for the event, encouraging real life conversations and keeping people’s heads up from their laptops! An improvement - and one that can only come from within - would have been to have more talks. A shame that the four rooms weren’t booked solid all day, with talks overflowing into corners of the public spaces. (The bridge would make a great location!) More talks would have shrunk the numbers in some rooms, and perhaps allowed more interaction and conversation and less talk from the front.

Maybe next time we need to encourage all of us amateurs to make sure that we pitch in with alternatives to the less-amateur outfits. I promise to think harder next year and come up with something to talk about.

Davy Sims has already posted a podcast featuring interviews with attendees. And I’ll add a link to Davy McDonald’s video when it’s released over the next day or so.

Not content with running a flourishing web design business of his own, promoting monthly gigs, representing the industry on the Digital Circle steering group and single-handedly keeping Charlies Coffee Shop’s profits healthy, Andy McMillan is organising Build Conference in the autumn: a “proper” conference with invited speakers, to be followed the next day by an unconference where the attendees get a chance to feed back to the speakers. And perhaps that’s where Northern Ireland will get to bring their TLAs out of their closets and talk openly about REST, SOAP, Ruby and arrange a vi-is-better-than-emacs re-enactment!

Between London Blackfriars and London Bridge ...

Playing with a Flip Mino HD pocket-sized video camera.

Between London Blackfriars and London Bridge from Alan in Belfast on Vimeo.

Three things I learnt about 3 mobile broadband

Moving house and being without a network connection for an indeterminable length of time seemed like a good opportunity to check out 3’s PAYG mobile data dongles.

The first thing to know is that although 3 are still advertising the Huawei D100 home routers on their website and in their stores, there haven’t been any in stock in Northern Ireland (Belfast stores and Lisburn at least) since Christmas, and the stores are holding waiting lists of keen customers.

Second thing is that the data download speeds I experienced in Lisburn with the 3 dongle (Huawei E156G) were basically dial-up speeds – you could watch the BBC News home page downloading over half a minute or so. And downloading a short audio podcast was taking twenty minutes. Nothing like the suggested coverage. Only three bars out of eight on the GUI ... and it was killing all the USB ports on the Mac Mini after twenty minutes or so use, forcing a reboot.

The third thing to know is that there’s a three day return period for 3 mobile broadband equipment. (Unlike Orange which offer a more generous 14 days.) If you’re not happy with coverage, you can return the mobile dongle to any 3 store to get a full refund, not just the one you bought it from. (Though they had to ring up to check.)

So while I know some readers of AiB that have had very positive experiences with 3’s mobile dongles, I was unable to join the club.

And one last bonus learning point. 3’s PR team don’t seem to answer their emails ... well, the ones sent by bloggers anyway! Maybe they’ll get in touch after this post?

Dear <electronics industry> ... and a new laptop

About five or more years ago, I remember mobile and PDA magazines running articles questioning whether it was better to have a PDA with a mobile function or a mobile that supported some PDA functions. Nowadays the convergence is nearly complete. Today, there's hardly a PDA on the market that doesn't have a phone built-in.

And it'll not be long before the more recent arguments on whether cameras and MP3 players can be successfully integrated will have moved on too.

But in living rooms and bedrooms across the country, there are an increasing number of boxes piled up on each other with a TV/monitor sitting on top. There's a need to reduce the clutter of boxes sitting under household TVs. DVD players no longer deserve an inch and a half of space.

Why doesn't the Nintendo Wii double up as a DVD player? It can read DVD discs. It can be hacked to add mplayer software to play films. But why isn't it supplied as standard from the factory?

Why does a product like an Apple TV not include a Blu-ray player? Then it could truly become a home media centre - providing access to media imported into or downloaded to iTunes as well as HD quality output and surround sound. And if on-demand content was available and well integrated - perhaps through something like iPlayer - and USB dongles providing access to Freeview (DTT) and Freesat (DSat) could complete the options.

(In case I haven't mentioned it before, I'm very impressed with EyeTV's USB DTT hardware, as well as the useful and usable bundled software. Just wish it would occasionally use an idle moment to scan through little watched channels/multiplexes to grab the schedules and keep its schedule database as up-to-date as possible - as the live schedules are so much more complete that the tvtv website ones.)

Dear {electronics industry}, Please converge some more in 2009. Thanks, Alan

Yet my argument for convergence breaks down a little if we look at the 2008 phenomenon of netbooks. Screen resolution, keyboard size and DVD drives all ditched for weight and dimensions. Portability, battery life and wifi/3G accessibility more important. Though they do throw in a camera, mic and expandability via USB.

A few days before Christmas, a friend dropped in with a card and a laptop case. Inside was a prehistoric Mac laptop - a PowerBook 150. Sold between July 1994 and October 1995.

Pre-dates USB. Pre-dates CD drives. Pre-dates Apple abandoning AppleTalk networking and adopting standard Ethernet ports and protocols. Comes with a trackerball, black and white 640x400 display and a floppy drive!

Beam be down Scotty - CNN’s hologram

If you were flicking around their satellite or cable channels during the US election count last week, or surfing online and reading reports of the coverage, you’ll have come across CNN’s gimmick of the night.

The BBC’s Jeremy Vine had a green screen studio and stabbed his invisible touch screen. ITV had Jon Culshaw to mimic any guests they were unable to get in front of a camera. But CNN projected their Chicago reporter Jessica Yellin into their New York election centre studio by hologram! (Worth remembering that CNN was being broadcast in high def.)

It was CNN senior vice president David Bohrman’s idea, and much of the technical nous came from Vizrt and SportVU.

Take 1 green screen tent (called “Casper” after the friendly ghost), 35 HD cameras in a 220 degree arc, telemetry from the main studio cameras sent to Chicago so that a suitable angled image of Jessica could be stitched together and sent back for insertion into the main feed. Oh, and a 3 second delay for the segments of the show featuring the hologram to cut out the delay. Then break for an ad and reset the delay to nil.

SportVU originally started to develop their technology to allow instant replays to “orbit” goals at major sporting events and see the action from a range of perspectives. And in the end, the second holodeck built in Arizona near John McCain’s election night rally wasn’t used.

For technically interested or curious readers, Broadcast Engineering have uploaded a podcast interview with Vizrt’s director of usability Nir Goshen, discussing the mechanics of how they pulled off the hologram.

Turns out that the quality of the “hologram” was deliberately diminished. It could have been a close-to-HD image looking like the reporter was actually standing in the studio. But CNN took the editorial decision to make sure that viewers understood that it was a hack, and they followed the pattern of Obi-wan in Star Wars by adding white noise, faded edges and even gave it a glow.

The US are going through a Digital Switchover exercise at the moment, switching off analogue terrestrial signals (or replacing them with a test card message explaining where all the moving pictures have gone). Subscribe to the Broadcast Engineering Podcasts if you want to follow DSO progress in the US ... and they sometimes mention the UK too.

Can you tell what [day of the week] it is yet?

Clearing out some old junk stuff in work, I came across a fifty year calendar. With one of these and an empty notebook, you could make yourself a diary!

You simply match the month up to the year at the top, and then the days of the week will correspond to the dates below. And by the time you’ve done that, you’ll have launched Outlook, done a Ctrl-Shift-A to make a new appointment, typed in the date, and it’ll have come back with the day ...

The eternal flutter ... Beijing Olympics

Having been away over the weekend, I've just got around to watching through some bits of the Olympic closing ceremony. The over-riding impression I was left with as I watched was the sheer organisation and discipline of the Chinese organisers.

Huge numbers of performers, working in low light, with few cues. Beyond military timing. But close to perfect.

And taking chances with high wire jinks and acrobatics, light wheels (gyro-cycles) and synchronised fireworks.

Fireworks that can spell out numbers. That can be fired by cannon into the air. That make the coloured Olympic rings.

With no way of practising the closing ceremony in the stadium after the sporting events had started, there was no opportunity for a last minute dress rehearsal. (Maybe explains why the camera work around the London eight-minute segment was so poor. Though I did like the mellow National Anthem ... better than Whole Lotta Love.)

But perhaps the clearest example of organisation and leaving nothing to chance were the flagpoles, with compressed air blowing out near the top to keep the huge heavy flags fluttering inside the windless stadium.

Bringing high tech to your living room and kitchen worktop - the Pixel Couch and the ZUSE toaster

Style is so often in the eye of the beholder.

And so it is with pixelated soft furnishings like the Pixel Couch. Designed by Cristian Zuzunaga who spent time in the Royal College of Art - and graduated too - and now being manufactured by Kvadrat (a Danish firm). But keep your Post-It pad in your hand in case you lose it when you set it down! Moroso will be selling them.

Reminds me a bit of the Post-It wall art that a guy did over the weekend in his office ... so popular that it’s now become a permanent, approved feature. And then there was the write on, peel away Post-It wallpaper from last March.

Toaster stamps have been around for a while, to put quick Happy Birthday messages or Hearts on your childrens’ (or older loved ones’) breakfast.

But the ZUSE compact toaster aims to take that one stage further, mimicking a rather crude dot matrix printer, burning 12 x 12 images onto the bread as it passes through.

Still in the concept stage, it’s just about one step up from the dot matrix printers that squirt the red best before dates onto eggs as they fly past on conveyor belts on their way into egg cartons.

The designers have a high-concept way of expressing their creation:

“With its candid intention of providing happiness to its owner ZUSE can randomly draw from its repertoire of images encoded in its memory chip. ZUSE custom-toasts for a fresh start of the day.”

(As usual, via Shiny Shiny.)