Stuff and Nonsense

So, I took delivery of a Microvision ShowWX today. Yes, it’s every bit as good as Microvision’s site makes out.

I’ve tried it from an iPod and iPhone which both worked a treat though annoyingly of course, without jailbreaking the iPhone only the iPod video functions actually output a picture. Such a silly limitation from Apple this one. It makes photo slideshow/video workarounds for presentations necessary that really shouldn’t be.

Anyway, I’ve come up with the following ideas so far, none of which I’m likely to have time to pursue but part of the fun is thinking these things up. I’ll edit this post as things occur.

• Fasten it under the seat of your bike and project an enormous red triangle or other graphic or message onto the road behind you so approaching motorists get that extra clue… anamorphic translations on the image (read all about anamorphosis) could come in useful as at some point the image would appear to stand upright from the driver’s POV. (for some drivers/road positions anyway).
• Combined with an iPhone 3GS – or indeed any computer/camera combination, though the iPhone+SHOWWX is a particularly elegant duo – it should be possible to display an image and film it on the camera simultaneously. With someone moving an arm/finger around  it should be possible to produce an effective “interactive whiteboard” type result.
• Shadow puppetry light source. Presumably because of the laser light source and scanning motion and lack of focussing lenses, when the image is obscured by a hand the shadow cast is pin sharp. No penumbral shadows at all regardless of distance from projection surface. Combined with some creative images to start with and shadow puppetry skills, shadow puppetry could take a leap appearing to interact with full color environments.
• Head up displays for cars etc. Easy one to try for myself to check it won’t dazzle passers by but you could easily I suspect project messages/footage onto the back windscreen (or on a strip of thin paper beneath it) and have a clearly readable image displayed at night. There are already many HUD apps for the iPhone. Projected via this thing you could have a HUD across your whole windscreen!
• Freaking out kids at Halloween. Movie running on a loop, projects ghostly images onto the wall/door/gate etc. Could be particularly useful combined with an anamorphic image to make the ghost look like it’s coming from a hole in the ground etc.
• In fact, its portability combined with a tripod and an app to apply anamorphic translations to images could be used to project onto the floor enabling the artistically challenged (like me) to cheat by projecting onto the pavement then doing a paint-by-numbers type job on it. Yes, it’s possible I’m becoming slightly obsessed by anamorphosis.
• 3D mapping. The methods are nothing new. Shine  a laser in a line while rotating the subject, capture the line deviations in a camera set at an angle an infer the subject’s profile from the way the line is warped. The SHOWWX essentially puts a laser in everyone’s hand at a fraction of the cost of usual solutions. Just project a picture with only one vertical line on it. Or, project a grid and do the same thing using a camera to record the deformation of the grid and thereby infer the contours of the subject.
• I wonder if it’s possible to get photo sensitive paints/inks that once exposed for a given time keep their arrived-at colour without recourse to developing chemicals? What a great way to do murals. Line up the image, black out the room, coat the wall, turn on the projector and leave for a while, allow it to cure and you have a “painted” mural.
• My kids have each got those glow in the dark wall hangings where you ‘paint’ on them using a light pen and they persists for a while. Great fun. I think I’l try projecting a line image tonight in a blacked out room and see whether the showwx puts enough light onto these things to leave an image.
• I wonder if a reflective dome on the floor and the showwx from above could give a home-made planetarium?
• Christmas message? shine it from inside to a window.

So many ideas, so little time… ah well. Am quite looking forward to the dead of night so I can try this thing in the garden and see just how big an image is actually visible on the side of the house. Also aiming to try it in the lounge tonight where I have an empty wall and see just how well it stacks up when the movie is 8 feet wide!

I received the following email from undoubtedly well-intentioned email contacts.

4 THINGS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW YOUR MOBILE PHONE COULD DO
There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies.
Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival.
Check out the things that you can do with it:
FIRST Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112.
If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the key pad is locked. Try it out.
SECOND Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry?
This may come in handy someday.
Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spa re keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!’
THIRD Hidden Battery Power
Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370 #
Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50 % increase in battery.
This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.
FOURTH How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #
A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset.
Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. When your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code.
They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless.
You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either.
If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.
ATM – PIN Number Reversal – Good to Know
If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse.
For example, if your pin number is 1234, then you would put in 4321.
The ATM system recognizes that your PIN number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine.
The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the police will be immediately dispatched to the location.
This information was recently broadcast on CTV by Crime Stoppers however it is seldom used because people just don’t know about it.

The first three should be obviously bollocks to most people with enough IQ to actually use a mobile phone number but in case not, here is a link to some folks who did bother to research rather than mislead others into potentially dangerous beliefs.

On the crimestoppers mention, which has been subtly changed to be UK centric from a well known US hoax mail, the crime stoppers website contains a response about it.

The only one that is correct and useful is item 4. Everyone should record their IMEI number in case of phone theft. Calling your network to block your SIM will stop you getting call charges but blocking the handset itself makes it worthless to the thief. However, for an IMEI blocked by your network to become known to the police and all other networks takes up to 48 hours. If you simply goto Immobilise and register your details and your phones (you can do all the family’s phones and other property too and it’s FREE.) Then in the event of theft you can obtain the IMEI easily to report to your network. But you can also mark it as stolen on your account (in addition to calling the police of course) and this will mean that your details as the apparent owner and the fact that it is stolen will show up on the Police National Mobile Property Register INSTANTLY. Additionally, the phone will not be able to be traded in at most second hand stores because they use CheckMEND which is also notified instantly.

Please, do us all a favour folks and do not forward on warnings that you have not verified.

• Do you want a traveller to a foreign country to feel threatened and dialing some stupid number that they found out from you instead of finding out the REAL local emergency number before travel?
• Do you want a sick infant on holiday to die because the stupid ignorant unprepared parents assumed that what you forwarded was real instead of checking?
• Do you want to be responsible for the ATM holdup victim who gets stabbed because they entered their pin backwards 3 times and the assailant couldn’t get any money? They then bleed to death in the mistaken beliefe that the police or an ambulance is going to show up before they check out?

These are real situations with real dangers.

I’ve had email for 20 years just about and can honestly say that I have NEVER received an email like this one that was substantially real. These days, you can debunk these with 30 seconds effort on Google. If you can’t be arsed to do that, just keep them to yourselves.

Total time to do a little research and type the above? 15 minutes. Google found the crimestoppers and hoax debunk pages in a little under 1.3 seconds. You see? you could check before forwarding.

Declaration of Interest: I’m a director of Recipero Ltd that owns and runs Immobilise and CheckMEND and provides the National Mobile Property Register to the Police and other government agencies. This doesn’t colour my advice though, merely explains why I make it my job to know this stuff. Of course this blog and all the comments on it are my personal comments and views and not those of Recipero Ltd, as if you needed telling.

I watched ‘Shrek the Halls’ tonight with the family. I think the story was based on my life and I’m not seeing a penny in royalties. Can I sue?

Lets examine the evidence..

First, there is more than a passing physical resemblence between Shrek and I. Anyone who knows me could attest.

Like me, Shrek has three offspring who confuse him with some invincible young person with boundless energy who is impervious to pain inflicted while ‘play’ fighting.

Like me, Shrek has a best friend who is annoyingly optimistic and has to be told quite clearly when his visit is over and it’s time to go home. Sorry Si – you know it’s true.

Like me, Shrek lives in a house that has too much stuff in for its size.

Like mine, Shrek’s house is in a swamp. Not literally of course. But I think of the swamp as a metaphor for living on a modern estate – despite this one being very pleasant by many measures.

There’s another similarity. Shrek likes his swamp too.

Shrek knows the only bastion of peace is the toilet. An Englishman’s home may be his castle but a Dad’s sanctuary is the loo.

Like me, Shrek has an appalling diet. This is because we both know that anything that lengthens the time we can plausibly remain in the throne room is a good thing.

When Shrek shouts, the family listen… then ignore him anyway.

Princess Fiona was a babe before he met her and now she’s an ogress. This is a statement of fact and unlike all the others above bears no resemblance to my life whatsoever.

Shrek is not at all scared of his wife.

“Facebaulk.com”. A social network to make you vomit with boredom.

It’s great. It’s basically the same as Facebook but instead of the ability to type status updates you are only able to select from the following list.

• “I’m bored”
• “I’m drunk”
• “I’m going to get drunk”
• “I’m going to be bored”
• “I was bored, now I’m drunk and bored”
• “Facebaulk is so boring I want to vomit”
• “I wish I was drunk”
• “I’m going out”
• “I went out, it was boring, I’m drunk”
• “OMG I’m so bored!”

It also has an option to automatically pick one of the above and post it at 3am for those nights when you are just too bored or too drunk to actually type.

I think it’s a winner.

Sometimes when you need to go see a customer the travelling rather than the customer can fill you with a certain reluctance. Not so today’s meeting though. I had to visit my most delightful customer today and the travelling was a joy! The customer is in Leeds so I was able to drive to my mum’s in Warrington and spend a quiet evening with her before an early start to get the Transpennine Express to Leeds.

I like Leeds city centre (as a place to visit for business anyway). Out of the station a ten minute walk to another pleasant meeting, a few hours meeting then, thanks to the magical iRail application on my iPhone a gentle walk to the station in good time for a cup of tea and a short wait for the return train.

Getting out of the office doesn’t get much better. Leeds rail station is clean, simple and efficient, the announcements regular, accurate and clear. I had a 3G data signal for most of the journey so managed to catch up on email and project updates.

In fact the only slight downside on the train as I write this is the group of middle managers in the next bay noisily justifying their existence by making as many pointless phone calls as possible. The management babble is hysterical! Perhaps it’s a game to see how many synonyms they can use in a single sentence so they can avoid agreeing to, asking for, or actually doing,  anything at all while trying to sound as though the world rests on their flabby shoulders.

Since I’m people watching I may mention also the cool guy in the good suit. Immaculately dressed, he wears a slight frown and tensely grips his coffee cup as if it’s the only restraint preventing him from getting up and tearing the muddle [sic] managers limb from limb. I have the iPhone video app ready to go. If it all kicks off it’ll be on YouTube before we get to Warrington.

There is a geek sat to my right. He is typing something on his phone. He’s been at it a while. Looks familiar, fat bloke, no hair, seems to be enamoured of his iPhone. Wait, he looked at me! It’s ok, he’s gone back to his typing. I wonder if he is looking over my shoulder? Damn, he must be psychic. Every time I glance up to check on him, he’s already looking at me. He’s good at this. Scarily good; I think I’ll move seats…

…it’s no good, I’m on the other side of the train now and he’s moved too! He’s quick for a fat bloke. He’s still on my right though, he’s typing again! is he writing about me… “Saw this fat bloke who kept moving I think he thinks I’m typing about him”.

Hang on! Where’d he go? We came out of the tunnel and he just evaporated in front of my eyes!

Oh wait… I’ve been writing about my reflection. I knew he must have been cheating! No-one is really that fast.

So, I go to bed late and plan to begin work today at a respectable 9am. Usually I consider myself very fortunate to live so close (15 mins drive) to the office. But this brings with it key holder responsibilities and this morning I get a call at 3.30am – just 3 hours after heading off to bed – telling me that the intruder alarm has been triggered at the office.

We’ve had false alarms before so it did cross my mind not to bother going down. I was barely conscious after all. If I go, by the time I checked it out and come back it was going to be almost 5 and the kids would be up between 5.30 and 6 making real sleep impossible at home. So, I tell my wife I will work early and come home early. The house will be empty for a couple of hours after lunch so I can catch up on my sleep and perhaps get some more work done before the evening play/dinner/bath/stories/bed routine.

Well, conscience got the better of me and I decided to go down. If two zones had been triggered, the police get notified automatically but for one, it’s just me. The most likely scenario is a false alarm, the next most likely, kids who would have been scared off by the alarm and wouldn’t hang around. But they might leave the building insecure so I have to go.

At this point one can’t help wondering what if there IS an intruder? Well on balance of probability I think it’s very unlikely someone set off one zone and subsequently disabled the alarm but nonetheless, caution is in order so my Wife sets an alarm for 30 minutes hence. If I don’t text to say all is well before the alarm goes off then she calls the police. At least if I’ve been left for dead or am otherwise incapacitated help should arrive very soon after. My wife isn’t going to sleep until I text anyway so this seems like a sensible precaution.

Well, as expected it appears to be a false alarm. I can’t figure out the alarm to tell me which zone it was so I decide to stay and begin the working day early. It’s useful, I have another server migration to do, this one can be done without notification to customers so I begin. The few minutes I have to write this post arises from the backup/restore/cycle that takes a while and starting any other meaningful work that will be interrupted a few minutes from now by a completed restore is foolish, resulting only in something else that will be delayed by interruption (llike my sleep).

Disruption to one’s slumber can have odd effects on the morning brain. Almost since I arrived here pre-dawn I have had the song “The Model” by KraftWerk playing in my head. You know the one, “She’s a model and she’s loo-king good… da dum, da da da da da da de dum”. This is often my “song for the day”, that often good but frequently dreadful tune that you have running around in the noggin all day long. This morning though, it’s so pernicious that on returning from tea-making a moment ago I sat at my desk, noticed the restore wasn’t finished but that my PC was strangely silent and wondered where is Kraftwerk? why has the music stopped? What crashed?

Several minutes of frantic clicking wondering why iTunes has closed -or was it a radio station I was listening to? or BBC iPlayer perhaps? has resulted in the eventual realisation that this song was only EVER in my head today. I’m at work. I don’t have an iTunes library here. That’s at home. iTunes didn’t close down. iPlayer or the radio didn’t close down. I wasn’t listening to anything other than my own sleep-deprived brain. “da dum, da da da da da da da dum”.

That’s all for now. It looks like the restore is nearly finished and I must also yawn repeatedly for a few minutes. As no doubt will you after reading this tosh.

To my youngest two children, twin 3 year old boys.

• Toothpaste is not paint. The bathroom is white enough.
• Toothpaste is not glue, no matter how well it appears to function in this regard.
• Toothpaste is not a lubricant. Doors work less well when toothpaste is present on the hinges.
• Toothpaste is not food. You cannot live indefinitely on it. You are going to have to eat your dinner some day soon.
• Toothpaste is not face paint.
• Toothpaste is not sunblock.
• Toothpaste may be an effective restorer of tiling grout but this is a job Daddy will do.
• Toothpaste is not known to be fatal to tooth fairies regardless of what your big brother says.

This car achieves many world firsts.

Screen capture taken from the page linked to above.

The instant (and therefore, infinite) acceleration means it must have zero mass. Since even the lightest engine blocks have mass this MUST be the first example of a production car powered by a flux capacitor, achieving the FC’s predicted ability to offset its own mass precisely by using an anti-matter exhaust system. Even Clarkson would be excited by this.

In light of this drive train, the fuel consumption figure is disappointing. My calculations (approximate) lead me to believe that this mpg figure was arrived at when carrying four adults amounting to a payload of just over 1 ton. Assuming that the adults are human, and hence the MBF (Muscle Bone Fat) density relatively constant, they would each need a volume to achieve this mass of just over 2.7 cubic metres. Clearly (I’m coming to the point) it is ridiculous to suggest that four adults, each larger than the car itself could fit inside it. The logical and only conclusion therefore is that this “car” is actually a tardis.

Since we’ve established that the “car” is actually a tardis (and clearly fully functional, as it is cloaked as a small car rather than a police call box), the “mpg” probably means MINUTES per gallon. This is a common cosmological measure that links time travelled to gallons of baked bean juice consumed by your typical time lord.

This is good news for the frugal motorist. Tardi come with the universe’s best warranty package since if they break down after the 4 millennia or 22 million light year warranty period you simply travel back in time and get the problem fixed under warranty before it occurs. How can it travel back in time you say if it is broken? Well, that’s the beauty of time-travel paradoxes. It never breaks down BECAUSE you went back once and fixed everything. This notion makes a tardis purchase extremely easy on the wallet though carries clear mental health risks if you think about it too much.

I’m going to order one. Oops, it seems I already have. Clearly it’s working well. Oh no, wait. It’s stopped. It’s not broken, it’s just on strike.
Damn. It’s French.