grannies with mobiles

How to get a 360 degree panoramic shot

2011-10-27T08:43:00.000+01:00

Now this is a very clever invention developed from phd work by Jonas Pfeil, a student in Berlin. He has built a 'Throwable panoramic camera' which has 36 mobile phone cameras embedded in a ball that you throw in the air and it takes a 360 degree picture at its highest point. There's a video on his website that explains it and there's a link to this panoramic shot to show what it can do.

This reminded me of a wedding in Winchester about 16 years ago, when the Brother of the Bride attached a camera to a rocket - a firework style rocket - and sent it up over the wedding party as we stood on the mizmaze at st catherine's hill, an old pagan site. We all dutifully looked up and smiled for the birdie, then watched in amusement as the rocket did not come straight back down but got blown off course into the brambles, with Brother of the Bride in hot pursuit regardless of his bare legs. After a good half hour of searching he did not come back triumphant, just scratched. He probably shouldn't have worn shorts to a wedding. I do wonder if the camera was ever found. This ball camera would have been more reliable, though possibly not as spectacular and harder to hide in a pocket during the ceremony.

The other drawback is that you have to catch the ball before it lands, not my strong point. Though jostling to catch the camera ball at a wedding would have more point to it than trying to catch the bride's bouquet.

little fishes

2011-10-17T10:37:00.003+01:00

Oh, and if you're reading this on an iPad then that big blank space at the top of the page is meant to have cute little goldfish swimming around who come to your mouse cursor. But not for iPad users.

now, where was I?

2011-10-17T10:26:00.003+01:00

I haven't been away, just sidetracked by life. Things have been happening - work, conferences, family. I have made dates in my diary to try and catch up on writing here. First I need to backtrack and check what I have and haven't shared about what was happening back in May - I hate not working in chronological order. So that's at least five months of posts if I can remember what was interesting. It may be bullet points. Just need to mark the spot and remind myself to come back regularly. Currently getting back into swing after three weeks of feeling decrepit. That may just have been post-funding-application exhaustion or possibly a virus. One of those can't-be-bothered-to-get-up-off-the-floor-and-lie-on-the- bed viruses. The application was about trying to get funding to work with Grandparent Carers and their families on a storytelling project. More of that in November as that is when I will hear if I have the funding. If not, then I will no doubt rant about it here before I have to develop plan B for paying for my flat white soy decafs in 2012

CHI2011

2011-05-08T02:46:00.002+01:00

I promised Il Professore that I would blog on my trip to CHI, and as yet have not found time to sit down and think about what I have been doing. It is always easiest just to do trip logging in chronological order, little and often, but I have been loathe to lug my macbook around with me as it is just that bit too heavy when you have a poorly shoulder. So, I have almost a week to catch up with. I did make notes in my little red book so I wouldn't forget the highlights, but there is more and more happening that I want to share and I am way way behind. I did think that maybe I would try and separate out the sociable parts of the trip from the work related parts of the trip.

And now I am getting distracted by talk of hoarded computer equipment by Bill Buxton at CHI, Must stop and listen.

3D film in the palm of your hand

2011-01-17T11:38:00.007Z

Today I stumbled across yet another reason for getting an iphone in 2011: palmtop theater

This is a device that fits onto your iphone/ipod touch and enables you to watch films and animations that have been built in 3D. Well, the image is split into three sections so some parts are foregrounded and some backgrounded, the device has mirrors that reflect it up and hey presto a cinematic experience in the palm of your hand.

V2_Institute for Unstable Media is showcasing some works made specially for this, curated by Maki Ueda. The video explains how the technology works - how to prepare your images so they appear on screen as 3D.

V2_ seems like an interesting organisation to keep an eye on. If I were in Rotterdam I would try and get along to the showcase. It looks like several artists are developing work for the palmtop theatre following the artists workshops at V2_last year.

Palm Top Theater_i3DG, by Jitsuro Mase, Tom Nagae (JP) / DIRECTIONS, Inc.

As I can't get there I shall have to content myself with the videos and write-ups of the event.

I did notice when watching the youtube video that a couple of people have posted instructions on how they made their own versions of the viewer. Could be an interesting thing to try - a bit more complicated and time-consuming than making your own kaleidoscope perhaps.

immaterials: making rfid beautiful

2010-11-23T11:03:00.004Z

I stumbled across a very interesting video about a clever idea from Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze - people worth watching if you are interested in novel and thoughtful design. I was following a link recommended to me by Sam Kinsley about the Making Future Magic project from Berg London, using ipads to create light animations. That work is well worth a look too.
But this video that I want to point people at, Immaterials: the ghost in the field, is all about "exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation" Basically that means they used a little LED light attached to an rfid tag and held it near an rfid reader to see when the tag and reader talked to each other, thus mapping out the edges of the range of the rfid. The video has a very clear explanation of why this is important for designers using rfid, and is intriguing enough to watch even if you aren't using rfid in your own work.
They are visualising the shape of the readable volume of different rfid tag readers - you can't see this footprint of rfid any other way, which can be a problem if you are a designer who needs to know where and at what angle to embed tags in relation to readers. Making a visual representation makes it easier for the designers to know where to place the components. And even if you aren't that bothered by any of that it's still worth watching.

trip to concordia

2010-11-01T19:00:00.007Z

As is often the way I have a backlog of things that I want to write about that seem to have happened quite a long time ago tho really it's been only a few weeks.
I had a very interesting trip to Montreal, only my second visit to Canada and very different from my experience of Vancouver.
I was invited to visit the Oral History Research Centre at Concordia University, who were interested in work i have done in the past on locating oral histories using mscape. It was very flattering to be asked, and even more exciting to be paid to go. I cheekily asked if Dr Clodagh Miskelly could come with me too, as we worked together on the community based projects that seemed most relevant to talk about this time. So I had the benefit of catching up with Clodagh as well as getting the chance to meet some great people running some really interesting projects. Should have guessed that from their slogan "the stories people tell matter."
Special mention to Steve HIgh, Stacey Zembrzycki, Jessica Mills and Laurel Hart - who did a brilliant job of pointing us at interesting places to go and wander, and the best places to eat.

Apart from some interesting discussions on oral history, digital storytelling, locative media and so on, we gave a public talk and ran two workshops for people currently working on community based oral history projects with them. I hope we gave them an interesting introduction to some of the possibilities, perils and pitfalls of working with gps and pervasive media projects.

It was also good to revisit past work and realise that it was still interesting, and to try and map the spin offs in terms of people who got into mscape type projects through their involvement with the Southville CLASS group project on Wartime Childhoods.

Unrelated highlights of the trip were....

.....the best soya cappucino I have ever tasted, at café Myriade just over the road from Concordia university on rue Mackay

.....stumbling across Aux Vivres with Clodagh, an amazing vegan restaurant, a lucky break on my first night in a wet and windy Montreal, that we had to visit on our last day as we hadn't had space to eat their gateau fauxmage - the most fab cheesecake I have had in a while, even tho (or possibly because) it contained no cheese, milk, cream or butter. More of that in another post.

.....finding the co-operative book store on bishop street and enjoying the tshirt slogans, buying presents for family.

.....strawberry daiquiris at Mesa14. I've never had one before, well, not that I remember, so can't compare them but these were great - a very good way of taking the taste away of the worst meal I have had in years at some overpriced downtown jazz club in the touristy area.

more from branchage

2010-10-22T11:14:00.005+01:00

It's a bit late but all this running around took a while to get over. Just thought I would share some more about working and socialising at Branchage

I was there to deliver a piece of pervasive media by Duncan Speakman, Always Something Somewhere Else, originally commissioned by HP labs as an mscape piece that could be applied anywhere in the world, as long as there is a tree to start from.....
The work was well received, on a sunny Sunday morning outside the Spiegeltent by St Helier harbour, even though a lot of us had been up partying the night before at the Bordée de Branchage with the lovely french gypsy orchestra (brought back memories of Negresses Vertes).
As always with mscape sessions, people want to talk afterwards about how they could see the potential for pervasive media as a way of delivering all sorts of things - I had interesting conversations with documentary makers, architects, town planners,from Jersey and elsewhere, about locating content in different contexts, and developing projects with various levels of participation. I pointed interested and enthusiastic people at the DCRC site and some of the work that past and present MA students have done with mscape, not least Jackie Calderwood and Dan Frodsham, and then I was off again sharing a taxi to the airport with two of the documentary filmmakers who had been showing work at the festival, Liz Mermin and Chloe Ruthven. Next year I want to hang around long enough to see some of the films!

Next stop Montreal

ipaq wrangling

2010-09-25T18:35:00.003+01:00

Am sitting here in a hotel room in Jersey, sorting out ipaqs for tomorrow's demo at Branchage International Film Festival. I thought I would double check them all again becuase I had to take the batteries out to travel here - I hate the idea of the little buggers switching themselves on when they rub against each other in my hand luggage. I had the usual double check from security staff at the airport when twenty handheld devices popped up on the x-ray machine. Then I sat in the airport cafe removing all the batteries just to be on the safe side. It was a bit of a late night last night getting ready to come here - so much on top of the usual chaos! Carpet fitters laying carpet and taking off bathroom doors - which is a problem when you have paying guests, elderly mother in law passing out when shopping and being in hospital for heart tests, children being generally uncooperative with stessed parents etc etc But enough whinging.
I got here, had cream tea (well, coffee and walnut cake, and watched my daughter and her partner eat creamcakes, then headded to the hotel to get sorted. I put the batteries in the ipaqs, checked the settings (you have to make sure the devices don't go into powersave mode and dim their own screens or switch off). It was all going swimmingly 'til FOUR out of the 20 started complaining that they couldn't locate the file they wanted. Presumable the last user had set them to automatically load the mscape software and go to one particular experience, which I had deleted last night because I didn't need a music tour of Leeds city centre for this demo.
I tried clicking ok - no effect - then pushing buttons (hard buttons presumably disable) whinged out loud a little, and then texted Tom Melamed as he is usually quite helpful even out of hours when he senses desperation. Then I thought of factory reset trick - where you hold down the two outer buttons and stick the pen in the reset hole. Hurrah! It worked, but I had to then reload the mscape player as the reset to factory settings wipes out added bits and pieces (technical term). I'm glad I thought to check that, as I vaguely remembered being caught out before with that one. I was in full flow when text came from Tom, telling me to check the ipaq file store for a folder probably called 2577 and to delete or rename it and see if that works. I am writing that down for next time.

wordpress blogs

2010-09-23T21:15:00.003+01:00

I have been using wordpress for a couple of different blogs, and have been finding it relatively easy to use. One irritation though was that wordpress automatically added a link that generated "possibly related links" This seems to mean that it trawls your posts for keywords, even if you don't tag them, and puts links to random blogs underneath your post. I had switched it off on the pervasive media blog a while ago, only with help from Sam Kinsley, but needless to say I had forgotten how to do this. I spent some time this evening clicking around and finally spotted Appearance > Extras > Hide related links.
Phew. No more uncontrollable links popping up on Today I threw out.

popcorn video

2010-09-22T23:41:00.005+01:00

Just realised I forgot to promote the fab fashion popcorn video courtesy of Crispy Duck Productions. Great piece that explains what we were doing at the Fashion Popcorn launch at London College of Fashion. Currently beginning to cook up Fashion Popcorn 2. Will keep everyone posted

Fashion Popcorn Launch from Fashion Popcorn on Vimeo.

smug smug smug

2010-09-22T22:44:00.004+01:00

Am feeling pleased with myself this evening for having finally solved a problem which had meant my home wireless network was not letting me access my featherhouse website and email server. I could get on to other websites, except for ones that were hosted by the same provider. The email server was an especial problem as a lot of my email comes vis the featherhouse address, and I send all my email using featherhouse as I can't use the uwe mail server to send mail.

Most irritating, as it took me a while to work out what was happening.

At first I thought that the service provider was down or flaky, as I managed to log on and send emails intermittently. Then I thought the server was just down in the evenings because I could access it all at work. I tried three different laptops, pc and mac. In desperation I tried plugging the laptop directly into the blueyonder box, ignoring the wireless router, and lo and behold I could access featherhouse.

This meant that the service provider couldn't have blocked me.

I talked it through with a very helpful friend and colleague, Richard Hull, who suggested I look at the wireless router and try putting it back to the factory settings. He told me that the IP address is dynamically assigned, so if I was blocked then all blueyonder IP addresses would be blocked, and he even tested it out for me that evening by accessing the same non-working sites from his blueyonder address when he got home.

So this evening I sat upstairs, connected my laptop to the wireless router, and started playing around with the settings for the router. I googled "connecting to wireless router to change login" to find the address to type in to access the settings page for the router : 192.168.2.1

And then I played around, reset the router to the default factory settings, then had to rename it, decide what security ( I went for WPA but need to check what is best and what works for mac and pc) put in a password, reboot a couple of times, and YAY! I can now lounge on the sofa downstairs, access my website, and send and receive emails.

I do like it when something works.

back at the end of july

2010-09-01T20:36:00.001+01:00

Love this video, of the grandbabies meeting the guinea-pigs

august

2010-08-31T09:44:00.002+01:00

It's going to take me some time to think about what has happened in August. Will mull it over and work out where the month went while I try to get my act together for the new academic year.

I have been doing some reorganising, trying to clear home and headspace but it's slow going. I haven't begun to tackle the small mountain of old sick electrical equipment and cables......

popcorn!

2010-07-25T18:33:00.004+01:00

Had a great evening at Fashion Popcorn, and have been sent some pics to prove it....

(There was free Martini, what can I say?)

Check out the fashionpopcorn blog for more info about who was there, what they said, when the next event will be.

In the meantime, here's a great pic from Andrea Vladova, which shows Harriet Fleuriot reacting to something I am saying to the nice young man from Peccadillo. At least I think that's what he said.

and another thing

2010-07-23T22:16:00.004+01:00

The summer school for pervasive media producers has been running all week. Am sat at home recovering. Some of my time has been spent developing the blog to document the course, both for the students and us at the DCRC. I need to decide which blog to keep up and which ones to put on ice...

Mobiles and World Cup

2010-07-23T10:19:00.006+01:00

I have hardly had time to write in here. Full time work and a month of Him Indoors being off at the world Cup in South Africa, so solo parenting for the first time in ages. I did a lot of rushing around trying to sort him a phone that wouldn't die while he was away. He was very attached to his old one (doesn't like change) which was a very old Nokia of mine that I'd given him to replace the first Nokia I bought him that he put through the washing machine. I went to the Orange store trying to find a Nokia with buttons, preferably biggish ones, but they don't exist. It had to be Nokia so he didn't have to learn a whole new way of interacting with a phone, needed a camera because occasionally he takes pictures, and as he was off to watch football & travel round South Africa meeting lots of old and new friends and take our son on safari I thought I might get to see some pictures.

But in the event he hardly used it anyway. What I didn't realise was that the sim card he had been given to use in South Africa wouldn't work with a phone that was designed to only be used with Orange phone cards. So there was still some remote organising to do; phoning Orange, getting the international roaming added in an attempt to cut the cost of communicating.

In the end he just borrowed a phone from someone who lives out there so he could organise his trip and make contacts. And we only got the occasional text back to the UK anyway - mostly about disputed referee decisions.

Oh! And I just realised I need to switch the international roaming off now they are back!

young women on facebook

2010-07-09T07:40:00.004+01:00

Taking time out from getting to grips with philosophies I read this on mashable.com It's a study of about 1605 young women, presumably in the USA, and their facebook habits. I was impressed that some young women manage to check facebook first thing in the morning before they have even gone to the bathroom.

None of the other highlights on mashable seemed particularly surprising. The article writers seemed disturbed that:

"42% think it’s okay to post photos of themselves intoxicated
79% are fine with kissing in photos"

which all seems so normal now, and hardly worrying, as I have watched my nieces' exploits online for a while. I am glad that my own daughters did not have the ability to publish pictures of their teenage exploits, leading me to stay unaware of exactly what they were up to.

The Experimental Society

2010-07-08T17:39:00.015+01:00

I am sitting on my bed in a student room on Lancaster University's disorienting campus, where I am attending the last event of Experimentality at the Institute for Advanced Studies, trying to assimilate just a little of what I have been hearing for the last two days. I should be sitting in the plenary session on Science, Art & Religion but I wasn't sure that I would be able to take it in. It's an interesting conference, but is making me feel as though there must be a lot of books out there that I haven't read or maybe have read but haven't remembered.

Day One started with a brain-frying opening address from Scott Lash, called "To infinity and beyond: experiment/experience". His talk included references to Kant, Derrida, Stiegler, Aristotle, Francis Bacon (not the artist), Philip K. Dick, Michel Callon and Thomas Heatherwick, with Latour and Foucault popping up in the questions. I am sure there was a Mathematician in there too but can't find it in my notes.

Scott was bouncing around and explaining so many things that it's going to take me a while to work it out, but here's a rough version from my frantically scribbled notes. I'll take you through step by step but can't guarantee it will make any sense, as I only got about 10% of it. I'm sure it's just a question of concentrating, and perhaps doing a degree in modern philosophies.

Kant's Critique of Reason (apparently the second edition is the one to read) was first up. I recently read an essay of his, thanks to Patrick explaining something to me about Enlightenment as "man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity" so thought, phew, am recognising some names here. Derrida and Stiegler were mentioned, as was technological phenomenology, so I made a note that I really need to read some of that, as I have in the past and found it interesting.

OK:

Francis Bacon: the first empiricist; he wrote about experiments; defined his experimentation against the church dogma of the time.
He wrote about moving from the situation of experience to the situation of experiment; from subjectivity and experience to subjectivity and experiment
Bacon wanted to put experiment in the place of logic; logic is a tool that disagrees with metaphysics
(I ♥ wikipedia)
Bacon said there are two types of experience - accident & experience
a posteriori knowledge is what we get from experiment/experience
we need to keep a posteriori knowledge in our notions of experiment

I think that means that we experiment with open minds and only take from the experiment that which we learn from it.

Kant puts experience at the centre of knowledge; there is no knowledge without experience
we perceive the world, intuit the world, through transcendental aesthetic - space & time
Nowadays we do have knowledge with direct experience

(I did want to ask if they had books in Kant's day because surely that is not direct experience but thought I was probably missing the point somewhere)

Badiou (aha! here's the mathematician) says that knowledge has nothing to do with experience

Now I am confused - will have to check that out, but it is something to do with that in modern geometry the figure disappears, contemporary mathematics we have knowledge without direct experience, proving we have secular infinities, some infinities are bigger than others.
At this point I was wondering if Scott had disproved the existence of God, which would be handy.

Back to the theme.
What is an experiment?

I'm going to go read the rest of the notes now and come back to this when my brain is slightly less fried

robots and avatars

2010-06-30T21:28:00.002+01:00

I was invited to a lunchtime discussion in London at NESTA: Robots and Avatars – our colleagues and playmates of the future organised and chaired by Ghislaine Boddington of body>data>space
The conversation was kicked off by provocateur Noel Sharkey who is Professor of AI, Robotics and Public Engagement. Lovely combination! It was an interesting and wide ranging conversation with input from people from different disciplines, including Hazel Grian who has been developing her own robot project as part of an artist's residency at the Pervasive Media Studio,
The lunchtime talk was documented and will be disseminated online as part of Robots and Avatars ongoing research. It's a great site to look at for finding out more about what's going on in the world of robots and avatars, and how these developments might affect the future of work and education.

playing with QR codes again

2010-05-07T12:10:00.003+01:00

To find out what this is about, go and download a QR code reader to your cameraphone. The QR code reader is a piece of software that you open up on your phone and it will use the camera to take a picture of this funny square and then display what information is embedded in the pixels.

I use a reader from i-nigma.com
They have a long list of supported devices, i.e. gadgets you can use to run the QR code reader. I found it better to search for the right software on my laptop and then download it to my phone.
I have found that I tend to stop and scan QR codes now just to see what's there.

smugness and 'free' software

2010-05-06T13:10:00.003+01:00

So, today I had to try and transcribe a sound file that was recorded on my mobile phone. Needless to say it was in a format the windows media player could not understand, so I downloaded Audacity to listen to it. I have been meaning to do this for a while because Audacity is a really useful piece of free (or make a donation) software that I like to show to groups that I work with so they don't think they have to fork out huge amounts of their budget for microsoft/apple software. I also like to show people another suite of 'free' software; Open Office, which I use instead of Microsoft Office. Open Office will open and save to most other common formats, whether it's text, spreadsheet or presentation (eg .doc, .xls, .ppt) and I use it all the time for work. you can export to .pdf from it too.

Back to sound editing: I did have to download the beta (ie not entirely predictable) version of Audacity so that it would run on windows 7 on my netbook, and with the beta version I could also download a plug in to get Audacity to recognise .amr files (the format to which my phone records sounds). This plug in will recognise various file formats that I have had trouble opening in the past, so fingers crossed, next time I have a range of sound files to work with it will be easier.

And it works, it seems. So now I am feeling pretty smug. And I had better go finish the transcription.

fashion and technology

2010-04-21T11:26:00.002+01:00

The fashion world seems to be embracing technology more and more - loved this fashionpopcorn blog post about an Oasis launch that used quite a simple device to engage people, with specially commissioned poetry running on MP3 players for the audience. Artistically presented. I like that they also produced paper-based versions for people to take away as souvenirs.

Will be keeping an eye on this.

launch of the DCRC

2010-04-14T23:01:00.002+01:00

Had a great time yesterday at the official launch of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. I met some interesting people and reconnected with old friends and collaborators who had come down to see what we are planning to do. It's an exciting time for all of us at the DCRC, and I am really pleased to be part of a great team of people. I even joined in with my colleagues, to draw with Tine Bech's lights, but refused the lure of the karaoke salon. I have seen the photos...............

don't forget your fiducial

2010-03-25T12:54:00.002Z

I just popped out in my lunchbreak to watch some colleagues having fun playing with the Sancho Plan's new project on the BBC Big Screen outside the Pervasive Media Studio. They had to wave big cards with patterns on that triggered animated characters to appear on the screen and sing together in harmony.

Apologies for the flicker effect

Ada Lovelace Day

2010-03-24T14:20:00.003Z

So here we are and it's Ada Lovelace Day again, when we are meant to blog about women we admire who are working in technology. Last year I wrote about my youngest daughter, admiring her tenaciousness at getting equal time to play with technology. This year in a spirit of shameless self-promotion I want to celebrate my two older daughters, who are now working together, and with me, developing ideas for new media/technology projects and cooking up plans for an interesting joint future

mini projector fun

2010-03-23T21:23:00.004Z

I saw one of these in action at the BBC Blue Room that had travelled to Bristol to show people some nice bits of future technology at New Tools New Ways of Working.
It's an Optoma Pico PK 101 DLP mini projector, about the size of a mobile phone, that connects via video input to your device. The one I saw was projecting video from an iPhone, at roughly the same size as a 13" monitor. It says it can display up to 60". I have a vision of football matches being projected onto all available surfaces at family events. Needless to say I wanted one.
You can find out more here

babies do skype

2010-03-23T20:13:00.006Z

clean speech

2010-01-24T22:07:00.003Z

and speaking of phones, love this idea, that the phone can spot swear words in speech to text and replace them with a row of symbols. It reminded me of the story I was told by someone who was happily playing with his child's toy that translated text to speech, seeing how far he could go with typing in obscenities for the toy to declaim. He managed to get quite a few but there were some words that must have been deemed so foul by the designers that the toy would not even attempt to speak them out loud.

I am not sure whether I would want a piece of software to edit swearing out of speech, although on reflection, I can think of a few people I would like to nominate for permanent use of something similar, everytime they open their mouths.

breaking the unbreakable phone

2010-01-11T10:17:00.005Z

I did feel sorry for the poor man from the company that makes the unbreakable phone that gets broken in this clip by the reporter from the BBC. Boys do like a challenge don't they?
This phone is obviously unbreakable in the same way that the Titanic was unsinkable, or that the shoes my son went through in three days were kidproof

hardcore gaming granny

2010-01-08T17:23:00.004Z

I am hoping that 2010 is the year when I catch up with all the things I have started and couldn't finish, partly because of family stuff and partly because I am so easily distracted.
I am hoping to spend a little more time on sorting my blogs this year, and thought that posting something about a hardcore gamer in her seventies was a good start. I read this blog and loved it. Not the stuff about the games, but the great way the blogger talks about grandma. I also love that grandma confounds expectations of how grandmas are meant to behave, as she is so foul-mouthed, speaking as someone who is trying not to swear in front of kids and grandbabies. This women could be a role model for Catherine Tate's Nan.

its all gone a bit wrong

2009-11-19T21:25:00.003Z

techno meltdown here in my neck of the woods, with laptops that wanted to shock me, not with content but with electricity, and phones that were burning my ear. Sigh. So on the one hand I am watching videos on TED which demonstrate how phones of the future will be projections onto fingertips, while in Real Life I am trying to transfer contacts from sony to samsung. Am cursing sony rather a lot this week as they have their own size of storage cards that don't fit into the laptop that I am borrowing. So, for example, earlier this week we had a visiting nicaraguan who came with a mobile charger that I had no adapter for ( we needed nicaraguan to uk, I only had the other way round) and a sony camera that he could charge but had no connector cable. If my sony laptop hadn't been sent off for assessment for repair (it failed, and that's a whole other whinge) then we would have been able to transfer all his photos and burn a cd. But as I had a bog standard HP laptop none of the cards from any of his kit fitted any of mine. And now I am having the same problem trying to get my contacts off the sony phone and into the new samsung.
On a plus side I Am Liking the new screen and text size of the samsung i8910 - won't need my glasses to read messages when I have worked out what I am doing. And I am looking forward to using the high def video to record small family members for their new youtube channel

that damn dvd player

2009-08-18T00:34:00.002+01:00

So, am at mother's, drinking wine with my sister, attempting to watch dvd, which involved reassuring my sister that I knew which buttons to press: 4 or 5 remotes for three bits of equipment. After five minutes of cursing and pressing, I thought I had it sussed. Then I got this on screen
At least it wasn't dinosaurs

where to start?

2009-08-13T21:34:00.002+01:00

It seems an age since I looked at this blog. Nothing to do with having lots of work to do, far from it, but more likely because I have been fannying around on facebook and dealing with Family Life. I did hear the vague babbling of some bishop about how facebook ruins social life etc etc but managed to avoid reading too closely - I tend not to agree with catholic bishops.
And then I found this sensible comment in the guardian by Roz Kaveney which I enjoyed.
About a day after the ramblings of the bishop were made public, #2 child turned up online and even let me be his friend. He was disappointed that I wouldn't write the comments on his wall that he wanted me to write, I had to point out that you aren't meant to have that level of control over others.
I wondered whether the need to be contrary to a bishop was the main reason he joined facebook, or whether he was feeling left out in all the family discussions that were going on between me, his sisters, his aunts, his cousins usw. We tend to have rambling late night and rather public support sessions, as well as call-outs for "Who is going to go granny sit this weekend?" So facebook is bringing our family closer, as we get to know each other in more depth through seeing what each other are up to and one-to-one messaging, and it all makes for better conversations when we meet up. I think the bishop might even approve - scary thought!

Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-24T15:48:00.005Z

Late late late as ever, but I did want to make a note of this day, celebrating Ada Lovelace by blogging about women and technology, so this fits, sort of :) I have been running around a lot in the past few weeks, using my mobile to keep in touch with children and siblings and hospital, answering work calls while visiting mum in hospital, trying to keep it all going and find time to go and eat cake with friends who can only leave the office if they bring their blackberry....
I was wondering today which is most useful, the mobile phone or the washing machine? If I had to choose between the two I would probably find it quite hard, because I can remember the sheer drudgery of washing everyone's clothes by hand, not to mention the nappies....then that got me thinking about the MSc in IT that I did back in 1993, and the tutor who used washing machines as an example of technology that we women might understand. Funnily enough, these days my partner seems to have taken control of the laundry, and its not even a dyson.
So, back to the point - happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone :)
I am meant to write about a woman in technology that I admire, and I don't know where to start. I have met too many interesting women who work as designers and developers to be able to point to just one. I shall have to make a list of all the women in technology I have come across over the last 15 years (!) So for today, I would like to nominate my 9 year old daughter, who always makes sure that she gets her fair share of time using the computer, the ps2, the nintendo DS and so on, and more importantly also knows that she can use technology to be a creative producer, not just a consumer.

And on a bizarre note I just had to mention that I read a Mills & Boon historical romance this week where the heroine was a mathematician and it mentioned Ada too. Brains and Bodices. Brilliant!

in tune with radio 4

2009-03-17T14:01:00.002Z

Driving down to the island on monday I stumbled across a radio 4 snippet on Age Concern projects where they drive round a bus stuffed with computers to show older people how to use new technology. Sort of like a playbus for silver surfers. While trying to find this piece online to share with anyone who bothers to read this I found a wonderful article by Katharine Whitehorn, which made me wonder whether I need to define grannies, but then I decided that sod it, the sort of about-thirty-BYT who I had in mind when I started whining aren't able to tell the difference between women over 40 and women over 60 or 80 anyway. They just used granny as a term to dismiss older women who weren't as wonderfully technical as themselves. So I shall carry on using Granny to encompass all ages of women who may be otherwise dismissed by BYTs.
Cos I can :)

2009-03-15T22:47:00.001Z

Am wondering whether to invest in a monocle now that my arms aren't long enough for the text size on my screen - this picture was pre-optician explaining that there is nothing you can do about eyesight, it just starts changing when we are born and keeps going. I now have two pairs of glasses (x1magnification) so that I can read trash fiction, one pair from the pound shop and one from a charity chop - but they were new. Just need to bite the bullet and pay for the prescription pair. I think I am avoiding all that 'choosing frames to suit face' malarkey, as well as knowing I wil probably lose them and have to berate myself in the way that I berated the 4/5ths of my kids that used to lose their glasses.

showing off again

2009-03-15T21:36:00.002Z

Just had a quick phone conversation with my big brother about meeting up at the hospital tomorrow to see mum. I sent him a text so I could talk through how to open and read them on his phone, in the course of which he discovered he had 22 text messages in his inbox that he didn't know were there. I haven't ever had a siemens phone so I don't know how easy they are to use. I used to stick to Nokia, these days I have Sony phones, only since someone was showing off their walkman phone so when I was offered one with my contract I took it. I gave my nokia to him indoors, as it seems the simplest interface for him to get to grips with. I got him the phone after one particularly irritating family day out when we lost each other in a kids theme park, and I had the small grumpy child and the picnic and he had the laid back child and all the cash. So we were wandering around separately for nearly three hours, by the end of which I wanted to kill him for not going to the agreed meeting point earlier. As punishment I made him go on the pirate swing boat with the kids. And that Xmas I got him a mobile phone of his very own. He only saw the benefit of having his own mobile when he realised he could be up a mountain in France and still get the football results.

somebody told me

2009-03-14T22:04:00.005Z

I have been gathering quotes today from people who noticed I was starting this ramble. Here are a few posts to my facebook page from people whose research I respect (I just had to mention that I use facebook as well as predictive text. Easiest way of keeping in touch with physically distant children. Maybe I should start listing the technologies I can use?) Anyway, here are the quotes:

The assumption is always that old ladies are part of some techno wasteland. But grannies are not as old as people think they are :) And pretty soon most grannies will be part of the techno generation

and

http://www.thenotquiteyet.net/?page_id=9 Grannies and grandads doing stuff with tech and networks..

and

Half the population of western europe predicted over 50 by 2030 - we'd better change expectations of 'old people' and tech by then, or we're buggered....

My mum finds remote controls tricky, because she now has a freeview box, a dvd player and a tv with integral video player, so she has three remotes to juggle. Most of the time she manages by not using the dvd and not attempting to use on-screen menus - who needs to when you have the Radio Times? When I stayed there I managed to work out how to use the different remotes, which was handy when my sisters were there a week later and had problems getting mum's dvd player to work. I had to talk them through it over the phone, pointing out that one handy way you can tell which remote goes with what, is if you check the manufacturer name on both the remote and the tv/box/player and match them. Maybe my sisters were having problems because they'd been drinking a little.... At one point I was desperately trying to remember if the dvd they were attempting to watch had a trailer at the beginning with a giraffe on it. Didn't want to attempt getting them to fast forward. Was about to give up when we realised there was a video running that they had switched on by accident.
Next time I went down I retuned the freeview box so now mum can get ITV2 when she comes out of hospital. She was getting frustrated with seeing adverts for things that she couldn't watch. Hopefully she won't stumble across some of the other more laddish channels that arrived too. Maybe I should have sat down and worked out parental guidance settings on the channels so as not to perturb my parent.

why?

2009-03-13T22:21:00.001Z

Inspired by hearing bright young things (BYT) refer to older women as grannies who know nowt about technology. Just thought it would be good to start collecting examples of research and articles which are surprised that women of a certain age know how to use predictive text. Possibly inspired by the nice bottle of fair trade wine that I have been drinking this evening.....Also by a tale recounted to me by a friend (Jackie C) where a BYT publicly announced that "We can't assume that grannies will get on their bicycles and use their mobiles to send us information".

So I don't cycle very often, but I use my mobile, and I am about to become a granny....