A far superior alternative to Klout – Klouchebag.com
hat-tip to Chris Byrne.
Klouchebag score for @conoro: 36, or ‘a bit of a prat’
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Happy 30th Birthday ZX Spectrum – Here’s mine, still in action
Of course I write too much about the ZX Spectrum. Heck look at the header image. But when a tiny little computer has such an impact on your life, it deserves your attention, even 30 years later. I hope all of you who built the first iPhone Apps have held on to your first device and do the same in 25 years time.
My only disappointment today is that I don’t have a Raspberry Pi yet to sit alongside it as its spiritual successor. I honestly think, with the right support, the Raspberry Pi could be this generation’s ZX Spectrum. Affordable by most people in the midst of a worldwide recession.
Why don’t the BBC, RTE, DR and all the other taxpayer-supported European TV stations come together and do a 2012 version of The Computer Programme, based around a boxed version of the RPi? Heck, make it part of the school curriculum. Yeah, really showing my age there.
I put together this video today showing my old Speccy (vintage late-1982) still working, still making me smile. I had to cheat and use a laptop to do the game loading as I can’t find any of my old tapes and the Aiwa walkman isn’t even 1980s vintage anyway. My old Lloytron mono tape recorder is AWOL too. Otherwise, all totally authentic stuff.
Note, if anyone has any idea why the colour is off on the TV output and how I might fix it, please leave a comment.
Have a read of this great interview with some of the Spectrum’s designers over on the BBC.
Thanks again Sir Clive. And an ever bigger thanks to my parents.
Thank you Google – You’ve just made my year
Finally MHL to TV and Bluetooth to Wiimote on HTC Sensation
Yes I know it’s a stupid thing to want to do but dammit, if it’s technically possible, we should at least try.
One of the most annoying things about the HTC Sensation is how HTC has hamstrung it with a brain-dead Bluetooth stack instead of the one provided by the chipset provider. This means it cannot do the HID profile to support keyboards, mice and Wiimotes. The only reason they do this is to shoehorn the horror that is HTC Sense on top of Android. Sense can’t even do landscape orientation of the home screen FFS!
If you switch to one of the AOSP-based ROMs like Cyanogen, you gain a proper Bluetooth stack but, for the moment, you lose MHL, which means you cannot connect the phone via HDMI to your TV to play movies/games.
But something changed recently with the latest HTC ROMs and I learned that the Android Revolution HD ROM, which I have used many times in the past, now supports both MHL and HID. It is a community variation of the official Sensation ROM so it still has the Sense crap but it seems to be rock solid otherwise and has lots of benefits you miss with the official ROMs.
So this is why I wanted to get both working:
Not my best ever video work, to put it mildly. But you get the idea.
To do the same you need:
- An MHL adapter
- A HDMI cable
- A Wiimote
- The Android Revolution HD ROM
- Xpectroid ZX Spectrum Emulator
- Wiimote Android App
Enjoy!
UPDATE: I also started investigating USB OTG on the Sensation this week. This is where you can use the USB interface to plug USB sticks, cameras, hard disks etc into the Sensation rather than the usual reverse. Yet again the hardware is capable of it, the standard drivers support it, but HTC has messed up the implementation.
Why the hell would you create devices with such amazing technical specs and then disable those features due to an obsession with a shitty software skin that offers no added-value to the end-user and which no-one has ever bought a phone for? Don’t get me started on the fact that the CPU in my phone is actually designed for 1.5GHz but ships clocked at 1.2GHz.
Facebook kicks Geni’s butt for real family histories
A few years back, quite a few of us put effort into building our family tree on Geni. For a while I was a fan. Then someone connected two big trees via marriage and it has been a disaster of irrelevant birthday notifications about people I have never heard of since.
Also, the constant upsells mean I haven’t logged in for a very long time except to check the odd birthday. More importantly, all of the activity I have seen has been by my generation and younger. It is simply not on the radar of my parents.
For her 70th birthday, my Mum got an iPad from my Dad. After years of saying she would use computers when she could no longer do the garden, she is now online. She still gardens 
She uses the iPad for two things. One is the obvious family emails, usually links to pictures. The other I found out about last Christmas and is the real starting point for the title of this post.
She grew up in Ratoath, Co Meath, just outside Dublin. I lived there until I was 6. When we left in the early 70s, it was still a village. Over the past ten years it became the fastest growing town/village in Ireland. Despite the massive influx of people, there is still a core of the old villagers there, including my aunts/uncles and many of my cousins.
A few years back the Ratoath Heritage Society did a wonderful book called Ratoath Past and Present. I have a copy and loved trying to recognise people from my youth in it. There is a treasure trove of information in there but it naturally has a very limited distribution.
Back to last Christmas – Mum found out that there was now a Facebook Group dedicated to old pictures and stories about Ratoath. We spent ages trying to find it on the garbage Facebook iPad App and finally got to it using Safari.
The two of us spent the entire evening scrolling through all the pictures and seeing so many of my uncles as young men and my cousins playing GAA. It was an absolute delight. Huge kudos to Finian Darby who manages the group.
Now here’s the really interesting bit for non-Ratoathers. My Mum now has a Facebook account. She has no friends on there and doesn’t want any. The only reason for joining was so that she could join the group and see everything.
But it gets better. Over Easter I showed her how to Like a picture. Then I showed her how to comment. My Mum, commenting on Facebook. I swear I never thought I’d see the day.
Finally, the bit that made me realise just how important Facebook has become for this type of history logging and community building. That group has many people in the US and beyond asking questions about their ancestors and who they might be related to. I see real joy when connections are made and information gleaned. They are both receiving and contributing to the knowledgebase around Ratoath.
A picture was posted recently on the Group which included my granduncle Oliver. His wife Ita died a while back, aged 90. No-one knew where the picture had been taken. Oliver, aged 92, was at death’s door when Ita died but has somehow rallied and is now ok. Both his eyesight and hearing are failing. But someone decided to describe the picture to him and he was able to tell them exactly when and where it was taken!
A man who will never be on Facebook is feeding information to future generations which would otherwise be lost forever.
What Finian and all the locals are creating is an amazing repository of knowledge, memories and images. The open-systems person in me wishes they were doing it on a blog but it would never have happened that way. It’s the people and connections on Facebook that make wonderful things like this possible and easy.
One of my regrets is that we never got my grandparents to talk about their youth and the past. Whether that oral history had been recorded in writing or tape, it would have been so valuable. On my Dad’s side, all of the War of Independence stories would have been riveting. On my Mum’s side, all of the stories around Fairyhouse and Glascarn would have had many gems too.
If Facebook is the tool that facilitates this, then so be it. If they added some genealogical overlay features on the Social Graph, it would be curtains for Geni.
I look forward to lots more interesting pictures and stories being adding to Ratoath Past and Present. I hope someone is doing similar for your home town.
Ita Doran, RIP.
Google (and all of us) should revolutionise the interview process using @Sugru
I’ve interviewed many many people myself over the years and only hired two real duds in that time. Mostly I did it with gut rather than asking people to write code on a whiteboard or drilling them on software lifecycle. My aim was to get a sense of “can I work with this person?”, “does it look like they have a creative streak?” and “have they any interest in software outside of work?”.
Years ago, I even passed on the number one person in their year in Comp Sci in TCD because they ticked none of those boxes. They were just very smart, and I need a lot more.
I don’t know anything about the Google interview process apart from what I’ve heard about the crazy number of sessions and the silly logic puzzles. If true, I’d worry that you end up with a ton of people who all have a very similar profile.
Sugru’s post today about how Google commissioned them to do branded Sugru for Hiring Fairs suddenly made me realise that Sugru could totally change the way we all do interviews.
After the usual CV trawl with the person, hand them a few packets of sugru and a box of bits and pieces. Give them 20 minutes to do something interesting. If they come up with nothing, don’t hire.
What better way to see if someone really does have the type of creativity that is critical in this business?
ZX Spectrum 16k adjusted for inflation was €461
Yesterday I finally got both MHL to the TV and Bluetooth to the Wiimote working with a ZX Spectrum Emulator on my HTC Sensation (video coming over the weeked). I was amused by the fact that I was emulating a cheap old computer with an expensive mobile phone.
Then I wondered – How cheap was the Spectrum compared to the Sensation? Some googling for inflation adjusters later and I realised I was completely wrong. It wasn’t cheap at all.
My original 1982 16K Spectrum cost £125 in WH Smith. Adjusted for inflation that’s £377.50 which is €461! Ouch, I really had no idea. An unsubsidised Sensation on Expansys is cheaper at €439.
If my parents hadn’t paid that serious chunk of money back then, who knows where I would have ended up in life…….
UPDATE: All of which makes the Raspberry Pi a staggering bargain and utterly transformational. Seeing someone on their site beg for early samples so he could show them to a African country’s government is just one example of how important RPi is. Far beyond its technical specs or size.
ZX Plectrum – The Greatest iPad App of ALL TIME
End of an Era – Philips switches off TV production
Whilst this story passed by mainly unnoticed, I was very sad to hear that Philips is exiting the TV business. I have a lot of wonderful memories of working with the TV guys in Eindhoven and it pains me to see everything move to a JV in China.
My first degree-related summer-job in college in 1989 was in Eindhoven. My Dad knew a Dutch businessman who had connections in Philips and he got me a job in the Overseas TV department. The people I worked with were just amazing. They made TVs for places like South America where they had to handle every crappy signal that was thrown at them. This included not just poor TV signals, but rubbish power quality too. Those Philips TVs were the Toyota Landcruisers of the television world. Where everything else curled up into a ball and cried, your Philips kept on truckin’.
I spent that summer running circuit simulations on a giant Computervision Workstation. Funnily enough, that was the summer I realised I’d never be a hardware guy and totally moved my focus to software.
Come graduation in 1990 and I couldn’t find a decent job so I went back into UCD and did a Masters in Speech Processing. In 1992, I emerged looking for a job once again. Luckily the first place I applied to was S3 in Dublin, 90% owned by Philips.
Mossie Whelan was intrigued that I had done summer work in Philips since he assumed every Irish person who did so, did it through him, as a Prof of Comp Sci in Trinity! In any case, the Philips thing must have helped and I got a job as a Software Engineer.
My first couple of years were spent working on GSM basestation software but then I landed a fantastic project, building the software for the first generation of Philips own MPEG-2 chipset. Up until then they had used SGS-Thomson chips. The work was tough as hell and we spent months in Eindhoven trying to get buggy silicon to display moving images. Finally, we cracked it and got the thing working. One of the happiest working days of my life.
I’ll never forget a meeting a few weeks later where some Sony execs came in for a demo of the system in action. They were looking to use Philips as a chipset provider, despite being competitors in the TV space. Little did they know that we were manually restarting the software every 30 seconds or so from our giant Lauterbach emulator, just to keep everything moving!
After that we kicked off a much bigger project for the next generation of silicon but I never saw it deployed as I moved to Integral Design to spend the next 4 years working on Toshiba’s MPEG-2 software.
But my admiration for Philips never subsided and the first big TV we ever bought with money from our wedding was a 32″ Matchline. Still my favourite TV ever.
So to everyone in Philips TV in Eindhoven, my lifelong respect.
XBMC running on Raspberry Pi. I may faint with the anticipation
The kids’ non-360 XBOX running XBMC has been an amazing piece of kit. We’ve had it for over 4 years and got it second-hand for approx €60 but it maxes out at 480p content. I had thought that getting a replacement like the Patriot or WD Live TV would cost north of €80. But some geniuses have got XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. A streaming media player with HDMI, LAN and 1080p support for £31 including VAT and delivery? Yes please.
Also, someone has already beaten me to the punch by getting a ZX Spectrum emulator running on it. We need someone to make cases that look exactly like 48K Spectrums, including a working keyboard, that the RPi can slot into. Do it!