Why your camera phone will outperform your compact camera – bigtime!

eirikso6 Comments

The companies making mobile phones know it. They have a huge advantage over all other gadget vendors. The mobile phone has become the device that you really can’t do without. If you forget your iPod while heading off for work it’s not that serious. If you forget your digital camera, you’ll not return unless you really, really need it that day. It is the phone that makes you turn around and travel all the way back home to get it. So, they have a very valuable place in your pocket.

The only reasons for not having all your gadgets in the same device are:
1. Size
2. Price
3. Quality
4. Usability

There is absolutely nothing that indicates that it should be impossible to make a device that has a reasonable price, good usability, perfect size and includes the functionallity of my phone, MP3-player and digital camera in the near future. However, there is another huge difference between my Sony Digital Camera and the one in my Nokia Phone.

The operating system
The camera in my Nokia is a camera with an operating system. Basically that gives endless possibilities to system developers and third parties making additions and extra functionallity. Marking my pictures with data from my bluetooth GPS. Giving my camera advanced direct blogging functionallity. Supporting new image formats. Analyzing and recognizing patterns in the picture. Combining the camera with the networking functionallity of UMTS, GPRS and bluetooth.

All of this is impossible in my Sony Cybershot DSC-P150. I need to buy a new camera to give it new functionallity.

The same goes for my MP3-player. The stupid dependence on firmware from Creative is an example. With an open API in my MP3-player someone would have fixed that before Creative could put down their first meeting in the group that makes firmware.

So, even if you don’t want all your gadgets in the same device, gadgets without an operating system are sooo last century…

Why your camera phone will outperform your compact camera – bigtime!

Did you know..

eirikso2 Comments

….that the flowers on the cucumber plant smells wonderful?

Now you know. There will definitely never be any cucumbers on our balcony, but at least we have had the pleasure of some flowers with a very nice fragrance.

And you have also learnt that it is impossible to know what to expect on eirikso.com

Is that a good thing? Will I loose my regular readers if I start to write about stuff that is not about home media technologies?

I guess you’ll speak up if you hate posts like this?

Did you know..

Biggest Flop of 2005: The Media Center PC

eirikso6 Comments

Jon Bøhmer just pointed me to this. I can’t let that one go without a comment. But, I’ll make it a short one.

1. Yes, I totally agree that the ugly, noisy, unstable and $1000 PC will not be a success in everyone’s living room

2. But this one can turn into a classic:

“…the vast majority of Americans will never — I will repeat that — never think of the PC as an entertainment device. The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation. End of story.”

The media center is not about a noisy $1000 PC in your living room. It’s about an architecture that lets you access your media in a user friendly and convenient way. It’s about the fact that young people can not think of music, video and pictures that is stored anywhere else than on a computer or on a network. It’s about a platform that accepts content and services from flexible feeds and different content creators. It’s about the fact that the computer eventually will be more user friendly and convenient than loads of different boxes, cables, remotes and user manuals.

“The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation.”

That is if you have a time machine that can drag you back to the ninties and let you stay there.

Biggest Flop of 2005: The Media Center PC

A coincidence or are the people over at Engadget a bunch of cheap copycats?

eirikso3 Comments

Edit: For the people not reading comments, the brilliant Peter Rojas of Engadget just assured that this is a 100% coincidence. And I believe him. Case closed.

Edit2:
And now the writer of the guide over at Engadget, Barb Dybwad has contacted me as well. No doubt about the fact that we worked on these articles in parallel.

Keep up the good work over at Engadget. A coincidence does not make you copycats. But those pictures where a bit blurry, wheren’t they? 🙂

I posted this how-to on my blog on August 14th. I was quite satisfied with the guide so I sent a message to Engadget notifying them about my post in case they wanted to link to it.

No answer from Engadget, but two days later this article shows up. Dangerously close to mine, but with bad pictures… Maybe a pure coincidence. I shure hope so, taking suggestions from users and just copy them without even mentioning where the original could be found seems too unprofessional for one of my favourite web sites.

A coincidence or are the people over at Engadget a bunch of cheap copycats?

Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London

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I am going to speak at the Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London at the 29th of September. It will be an interesting conference. My presentation starts at 1050:

The mobile phone as a remote, television set and production tool
Eirik Solheim, Programme Manger of
Interactive Television, NRK, Norway
• NRK’s experience in distribution to mobiles
• Using the mobile phone as an interactive remote for enhanced TV
• The mobile in the production chain for both professional and user generated content

If you plan to be there, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Enhanced TV Show & Mobile TV Forum in London

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?

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A while ago, I read about The Global Consciousness Project over at RedNova News. Being a quite sceptical engeneer I usually don’t find experiments like these very interesting, but this one tickled my brain…

From RedNova:

“One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers – a one and a zero – in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts – ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ as it were – could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros – which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine’s usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, ‘forcing it’ to produce unequal numbers of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.”

Read the story at RedNova and think about it. If you find it even remotely interesting then start experimenting with the idea that the data from random number generators could actually say something about global events when analyzed properly.

If the nodes are simple random number generators then you could easily turn your computer into a node. Someone should make a project like Seti out of this. A software that you could download to your computer and turn it into a node for this project. You would have millions of computers generating data to the project. It would be possible to add location to the data and see if changes are greater near the events that will make a change in the flow of numbers.

I also immediately start thinking about another wild project that I have suggested here before:
Everything you would ever want to see

Even for a sceptical engeneer it is important to sometimes let go of physics and what I base on current knowledge. If not for anything else, for creativity alone…

Could YOUR computer help scientists look into the future?

How to modify your Nokia headset to accept your favourite headphones

eirikso33 Comments

I am syncing my podcasts onto my mobile. I have found the perfect software MP3-player. The final step in my quest to make a good device for podcast listening out of my Nokia 6630. I am now modifying my Nokia Handsfree set to accept standard headphones. All I have to do is to open the little box containing the mic and mount a standard minijack connector.

By doing it that way I will keep both the mic and the button that lets you answer calls.

Note
All the pictures in this guide can be clicked to give you a closer look. And, for readers in countries with stupid legal systems I will have to mention that I do not take any responsibility for you destroying your new hansdfee while trying to apply what I have described here. That said, if you have ever laid your hands on a soldering iron, this is as easy as drinking a good dry martini.

Ericsson
This guide was inspired by this post in the HowardForums. If you have an Ericsson headset that post will help you out.

Let’s start

Use a small screwdriver to open the cover. On my headset it was tightened with a small amount of glue. It was no problem to carefully open it without destroying it.


Open it carefully. You will clearly see the mic and the switch. The interesting stuff is on the back of the board. Flip it back carefully from the top.


Now you can see where the headphones are connected. The four cables are connected to points clearly marked: L+, L-, R+ and R-.


Pick up your soldering iron and remove the old headphones.


I used an extension cable for headsets that also featured a volume control with a small clip so that I can clip the device onto my jacket. This will let the mic be placed in a useful position as well. The pin layout for a minijack is: tip=left, ring=right, sleve=ground. You can of course use any female minijack. Just make sure you know what cables is left, right and ground.


I made a hole in the plastic to be able to insert the new cable. Solder the cable connected to the tip contact point to the place on the board marked L+, the cable connected to the ring to R+ and the ground cable to one of the negative connections, left or right. Here you can see that I have used L+, R+ and only L- for the ground connection.


Depending on what kind of cable there is on your new connection you might want to throw in a drop of glue at the spot where it leaves the box. You want it to sit tight so this baby will last through all the extreme sports you do while listening to the Engadget podcast on your mobile.. You might also want to use some drops of glue on the case itself.

It will clip nicely back together, but you know – that 360 mute grab on your new pair of skis might put some strain on your equipment…


Now I can connect my Creative Travelsound to transform my Nokia into a ghettoblaster. I can connect my Sony noise cancelling earbuds and I can even borrow my wife’s PortaPro and look cool in the park. Or, how about using an FM SoundFeeder to listen to whatever I want to from my mobile in my car?

The mic still works fine, and when using the phone as a …phone, all the people I talk to sound great as well!

How to modify your Nokia headset to accept your favourite headphones

The increase of pages indexed by Yahoo shows on Trendmapper?

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I have followed parts of the discussions around the fact that Yahoo claimed to have increased its index to include about 20 billion web pages.

A claim that several people questions. I am not in the position to have qualified theories about that, but I am running a web site that reflects that something clearly has happened to the engine over at Yahoo.

In Trendmapper nearly all the charts searching for phrases with a significant amount of hits had a big jump in its Yahoo curve earlier this month.

Actually, a search that looked useless at first have become quite useful for me. Every night Trendmapper searches for several thousand phrases and records the amount of hits. The word “the” has been added in the system, and is in itself not interesting. However, the word is so common that the charts actually reflects something about the performance of the engines themselves.

As you can see in the thumbnail here in my post, something happened to the red Yahoo curve in the beginning of August. If you click the thumbnail you are taken to the page for the chart.

To be precise, at the second of August Yahoo reported 1 978 791 943 hits on “the”. On the third of August this jumped to 9 583 745 268.

Hera are some example charts showing the Yahoo-jump:
Trendmap: “kottke”
Trendmap: “Xbox 360”
Trendmap: “DVD-Jon”

The increase of pages indexed by Yahoo shows on Trendmapper?