My eye has been caught by a stunning new gadget - the Immortal Video Eye Gear. Head mounted 3-megapixel video camera. Seamlessly embedded within a pair of innocuous looking sun glasses. At £250, they're not cheap. While battery life looks good at 2.5 hours, they can only record one hour of video. No method of playback means no deletion, so you're stuck until you can find a laptop. No expandable memory. Would it have been so hard to take microSD cards? Regardless of any shortcomings, ta…
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Mobile QR codes are fantastic. They're real-life hyperlinks. Snap them with your phone and go direct to a website. What could be better? The BBC, however, need a few lessons in how to optimise the experience. As part of their Prisoner Zero page - the BBC have an awesome "Wanted Poster". Here's the teaser image. Prisoner Zero - QR Code Let's take a look at the full QR code. This is about the size it would be if the poster were printed on A4. QR Code There are three problems with this…
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It shouldn't come as a surprise to any reader of this blog that I'm a phone geek. And a Doctor Who geek. So, image my utter nerdgasm when we got to see the 11th Doctor using a mobile he'd nicked. The burning question is which phone? Touchscreen It's quite hard to see throughout the episode. It just looks like a standard touchscreen device in a rubber casing. I had wondered if the props team had created a dummy phone to be used. What Phone? Annoyingly, the phone is almost always out of fo…
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I'm a shameless Doctor Who geek. I loved the first episode of the new series. But I wanted to point out a (minor?) plot hole in the episode. Slight spoilers here, so wait until you've seen the show. Towards the end, the Doctor is having a stand off with the Atari. He's discussing the planet Earth and asks... Is this world protected? The Atari play a montage of various baddies the Doctor has seen off including the Silurians / Sea Devils!) - but take a look at these three images. Ood Ev…
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Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger, I bought a TARDIS. Sadly, it turned out to be made of cardboard and only suitable for storing DVDs. No flying through time for me :-( Also, it turns out that it wasn't bigger on the insider than on the outside. Meaning, it's now full. Does anyone know where I can get another one? …
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Weeks before Britons go to the polls, there's still no comprehensive list of candidates. Four citizens' initiatives have joined forces to tackle the problem. They've been gathering basic information about thousands of candidates and making the data public. "It may seem surprising but there simply is no single listing for all prospective parliamentary candidates. We want people to make an informed choice and that's difficult because so many new people are standing this time - and a record…
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I want to tell you a story about really appalling industrial design. This isn't about a nuclear reactor melting down due to covered switches, or even lethal doses of radiation - but of a much more sinister threat.... Pair and Go's battery pack for the Wii Fit! Take a look at their promotional image - it seems like a nice, drop in replacement for 4 AA batteries. What could possibly go wrong? Pair & Go Fit Kit 6 Pack (click to buy from Amazon) As it happens, the battery pack is ginormous. I…
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The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter's style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a URL and automatically create a hyperlink. Considering that dropping the "http://" represents 5% saving on Twitter's 140 character limit for messages, this is great. …
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While on the anti-Digital-Economy-Bill protest, I bumped into Denny de la Haye. I've known Denny virtually for a while - and he's commented on this blog a number of times. Denny is standing for parliament in Hackney South and Shoreditch. He is standing on a platform of Direct Digital Democracy. If he is elected, he will run an online poll for his constituents. Whichever way they vote, he votes. Why This Is a Dumb Idea The wisdom of the crowds relies on an informed crowd. Asking pe…
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On Wednesday, I attended the "Stop Disconnection Demo" to protest the Digital Economy Bill outside parliament. Protestors I've been on a few protests in my time. Anti-war, anti-nukes, anti-tuition fees and the like. This was one of the most cheerful protests I've ever attended. The protesters were friendly and erudite. Passers-by seemed happy to take our literature. The speakers - while hard to hear - spoke with knowledge ad passion. Even the police (!) were charming and even took some of…
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If you're outside of the UK, you will see adverts on the BBC site. This also happens on the mobile site. Here's a typical example. BBC Advert Intercontinental are a premium brand. No doubt their mobile advertising is really good. Right? First Impression Intercontinental Advert Page 1 We start off with a mobile friendly page. Almost. There are five flaws here. Large image. While visually appealing, consider that not everyone has a fast mobile Internet connection. They may also h…
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People have been very excited to see some new functionality in Dabr - the mobile Twitter client I develop for. But what is it and how does it work? @@ and geotag Reply to All The @@ symbol allows you to reply to all the people mentioned within the tweet. It only shows up on tweets which mention other users - so you should only ever see it when it can be used. Hitting @@ on the above tweet will pre-populate the text box with "@topgold @whatleydude @dabr". It should remove any duplicates…
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