Like many people, my sole experience of floatation tanks is from the Simpsons episode "Make Room for Lisa". I was looking for something unusual to do on my birthday when I received an offer from Groupon for a £14 session at Floatworks - a short walk from my office. How bad could it be? Almost exactly what I looked like.... I am slightly suspicious of any "New Age" claims - but the Floatworks site is remarkably clear of dubious claims and mostly sticks to the facts. And I seriously doubt …
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There seems to be a lot of talk at the moment about how marketing can make use of QR codes. I wanted to highlight a few ways in which 2D codes can be used for slightly more practical usage. There's nothing wrong with selling more cheese - but I think that only scratches the surface of these little squares of brilliance. You may have seen these Ringo.co.uk ticket machines. They are meant to be a convenient way to pay for parking tickets - but could QR codes make them more useful? The…
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Designer Ming Ling has created the most wonderful QR code constructed out of Tetris pieces. The full size version is a work of beauty. As I've explained before, this works because the QR scanner sees the image in black and white - so light colours disappear. Anything else is covered by the fairly generous error correction. I'm nowhere nearly as talented as the above artist, but she has inspired me to continue with my Space Invaders QR Code. It could do with a more game like layout -…
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Here's the captured video from MobileMonday's Trends in mHealth panel. Presented in glorious HTML5 and hosted on Archive.org Part 1 (more…) …
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One of the most influential books I have ever read is Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". In the book, Norman rails against the usability flaws which seek to undermine our comfort and sanity. Everything from lightswitches which never seem to have a consistent state, to to alarm clocks with impossible to figure out controls. It really is a must read for anyone who cares about usability - on computers or in the real world. I travel a lot for business - and occasionally for…
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British Gas has announced its latest price rise to near universal dismay. So it seams a little odd that they're running a campaign based around how much you could save if you switch to them. Still, what concerns me in this Mobile Badvertising series is not the content, but the execution and usability. Let's see what happens when we click on it. Clicking the advert takes you to your phone's dial screen with British Gas's phone number ready to dial. (This goes via an ad network so they can…
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Oh! Woe is me! I can't make BarCampLondon 8. This will be the first BarCamp I've not been able to get to in ages. Following hashtags is fun, if a little disjointed. What I really need is some way I could attend virtually..... .social-embed {all: unset;display: block;}.social-embed * {all: unset;display: revert;}.social-embed::after {all: unset;}.social-embed::before {all: unset;}blockquote:not(*) {all: unset;}.social-embed a {cursor: pointer;}blockquote.social-embed {box-sizing:…
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A few updates on the Video Recording Sunglasses I blogged about earlier in the week. I stuck in an 8GB microSD card and let the glasses record indefinitely. I was curious what would happen when the size of the video went over the 4GB limit imposed by FAT32 - and what happened when the memory card ran out of space. (more…) …
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One of the lovely aspects of QR codes is the variable levels of error correction built in. On even the most basic code you can obscure or deform up to 7% of the code and most readers will still decode it. This leads us in to the amusing territory of "hiding" human readable data in the code. I say "hiding" because we are hiding it from the scanner - not from the human. One of the more famous examples of this is Duncan Robertson's BBC logo. What works particularly well is the fact that the B…
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I've recently released a couple of audio widgets. Inspired by the Instant Rimshot and Sad Trombone sites, these are "single serving" widget. For the "Family Fortunes" buzzer widget, you click the icon and you'll hear the famous "EURGH-ERRRR" noise. I'm also selling a "Dramatic Sound Effect" Widget - download it by scanning this code. Go on, it's a mere 50p! This is a quick tutorial showing how to build a sound playing widget in Android. It assumes you've already set up Eclipse and know…
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So much has already been written about the N8's atrocious software. It's a popular (and fair) stick to beat Nokia and Symbian with. One thing that is always mentioned is how amazing the hardware is. I disagree. The hardware is as poor as the software. I think this picture symbolises that problem. N8 and HDMI lead The N8 has an HDMI port. A mini HDMI port. The image is of a full sized HDMI plug trying to fit into the mini port. It won't fit, of course. But what you can see is that…
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For a little while, I've been lusting after the Immortal Video Glasses. Sunglasses with a built in video camera - perfect for recording all my action/adventure exploits! But, at £300, I thought they were a bit out of my price range. Undoubtedly fun, yes, but not 100-pints-of-beer fun (or however you choose to measure your fun). I wondered if anyone was selling them second-hand on eBay. They weren't. But there were a whole load of clones. "Spy Sunglasses DVR" and the like. Some were …
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