Ben Nuttall

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Tuesday, 30 June 2009

FutureMe.org

Today I received an email.

From: Me
To: Me
Subject: 30.06.08

A year ago today I read about a website called FutureMe.org on my friend Joe's blog (now discontinued but still archived). He said that his friend had told him about the site - the idea is that you send an email to your future self, stating the date you wish the email to be sent, and they hold on to it until that date when they release it. I commented on this blog post, saying:

I think I've seen this before. I wonder if I sent myself an email before. I can't remember receiving one, so either didn't send one or I set it for a time that hasn't happened yet. It'd be funny if it was soon!

I sent one to the Future Me, a year from today. I hope I get it. I gave myself some good advice.

Thanks for sharing that!

Ben

The email I sent myself contained advice, hope, targets and ambitions. I wrote about what I was up to around that time and asked the future me how certain things were going (studies, relationships, business/career, etc.), here's an extract:

How's uni going? At the moment you're waiting for your A-level results and are hoping for [grades]. You'll be gutted if you missed out on that B in Maths you worked so hard for. You're also currently intending on doing a degree in Information Systems and Maths. Did you stick with it or change? You're currently worried that IS will turn out to be shit and are thinking of looking into some other courses.

I did narrowly miss out on that B in Maths, and I was gutted. And I did decide to change from Information Systems to Computing, which I'm much happier with.

I'm happy with where I am now and pleased with where I'm going, even though it's not exactly what I was aiming for a year ago, but many doors have opened to me since then, I've worked hard and tried my best to send myself in a good direction. I know I'm much wiser than I was when I sent that last email, and I know I'll be much wiser in a year's time when I receive the one I'll write now.

I'm too lazy to write much more. I hope you're not. Write another one to the you of 2010.

Haha. I'd better not put it off too long then.

You're currently working on your new website, and are about to start coding it again from scratch because IE won't render it properly. How's the site going these days? How many blog posts are you at?

This will be my 69th blog post. It's funny to see that I was frustrated by Internet Explorer back then - some things never change! To answer my own question, I'm happy with the site now, and can see it going well over the next year, opening up more opportunities for me as well as just documenting life and keeping my journal running. I wanted to make sure I posted this today - I hate to see a month go by with no blog post! Probably one more at the beginning of July I've got an idea for an interesting subject to write about, and then one when I get back from my trip to the Alps.

Anyway, I didn't want this to go on too long so I'm leaving it here. If you're looking for something good to read, my good friend Jin has just returned from Nigeria where he's been building things out of Bamboo for the poverty-stricken children and families in the Niger Delta, such as climbing frames and canoes. It makes you think just how lucky we are. Thanks to people like Jin who do their bit to make a huge difference to the people in need who dream of the things we take for granted - and here we are worrying too much about money and other essentials in our culture. Here's Jin's blog post: jinetics.blogspot.com/2009/07/niger-delta-june-2009.html

Oh and I told myself to thank Joe for introducing me to FutureMe.org - thanks Joe! See you when you get back from Japan!

Labels: Internet

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 22:00

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Friday, 29 May 2009

My First Two Weeks with Android

Two weeks ago I received my new HTC Magic smartphone - it's powered by Google's open-source operating system, Android. This means the source code for the system the phone runs on is freely available to download, which means any developer can write their own applications and tweaks for Android phones.

With switching from mobile provider 3 to Vodafone, I managed to negotiate a good deal on the contract - it's £40/month instore and I managed to get it for £20/month - that includes 600 minutes, unlimited texts and internet, as well as the free phone (worth £500). Also I have the option of starting a new contract after 15 months, obviously only if I stay with Vodafone (but my plan is to do so, as they're probably the best provider and loyalty is rewarded in this economic crisis - or at least if you tell them you're leaving it is!).

This is only the second Android phone on the market so far (with plans for about another 18 by the end of the year), following the G1 (aka HTC Dream) which was exclusive to T-Mobile. I was going to go for the G1 until I heard about its successor - a better phone on a better nework!

Within minutes of having the Magic perform simple tasks at the touch of my finger, I was enraptured by its user interface and functionality. The first thing I was asked to do was sign into my Google Account - this, I discovered a couple of minutes later, had automatically loaded my Gmail contact list into the phonebook - not particularly handy as I had no phone numbers in there, only email addresses - until I realised that once I transferred my numbers from my old SIM card - it automatically synchronised my contacts! Say I had Joe Bloggs stored as a phone number in my old nokia phone, and Joe Bloggs stored as an email address in my Gmail contacts - once I put them together I had one entry for Joe Bloggs with a phone number and an email address! And best of all - this contact list is constantly synchronised with my Gmail account so not only does it update both if I update one or the other, but it also means that I can never lose my contacts as they're always backed up automatically! It's the same for Google Calendar. Magic!

Apps

Once I'd got my head round how amazing the usability of the phone was, it was time to dip into the Android Market and see what apps were out there - I'd heard of a few good ones and wanted to see what else was available. It came loaded with Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Talk and a bar code scanner (I'll come to that later) and these are the ones I've downloaded in the last two weeks (all for free):

Shazam

Hear a song and want to know the name/artist/album - this recognises songs and shows you the info

Bubble

Spirit Level - hold the phone horizontally, vertically or flat on a surface and the on-screen bubble "floats" to the centre of gravity

handyCalc

Scientific calculator (damn right!)

Compass

A dynamic navigational compass

Metal Detector

Yes, you heard right. This app actually analyses what you place the phone near and buzzes more the closer it gets to metal. It's not practical at all, as you pretty much have to know where to position the phone in relation to the metallic object to get it to buzz, but it is novelty

Google Sky Map

Point the phone at a part of the sky and it shows you the stars, planets and constellations - you can also search for them and it tells you which way to point the phone to find it

The Schwartz Saber

A light saber that makes the noise when you move the phone

0870

Uses the database of SayNoTo0870.com to find geographical numbers to dial when you ring premium rate numbers

My personal favourite - Where's My Android?

You know when you misplace your phone, have to ring it to find it, then realise it's on silent? Well those days are over for Android users - with this app you set a particular word, and then when you can't find your phone you text it that word, and when it receives the text it turns silent off and starts ringing! Genius or what?

There are many more I have installed, little things like stopwatch, voice recorder, notepad, which come with phones as standard - but this way you get to pick and choose which one you use (like I did when I found out the standard calculator had only basic operations). There's also a good Facebook mobile app, as there is for Twitter, and a good multi-account IM client - ebuddy.

I've also got a few games I downloaded from the app market - sudoku, solitaire, ping pong, air hockey - the usual stuff - and also some brain training ones: MathPractice; Maths Workout; Iconic Memory; Slide Puzzle.

There are also widget apps you can download for the home screen - time & date, calendar, battery percentage, music player, etc.

The camera

How many mega pixels?? If I got a quid for every time I was asked that - as if the resolution of the picture is the only feature you can judge a camera on. It's like when people compare a high-res phone camera to a not-quite-so-high-res digital camera as if the phone will take a better quality picture, which it won't because it's not got the quality lens and focus of a digital camera. Anyway, rant aside, the camera's a 3.2mpx but it has a fantastic lens and focus! Nothing compared to a decent digital camera but very good quality for a phone.

The camera's focus quality comes into play for the aforementioned bar code scanner app - you can use the camera to scan the bar code of a product in a shop, research the product and compare prices online! You literally see and hear the lens focus in on the bar code in order to read it - it does the same when you're taking a normal photo - it adjusts focus automatically. If you scan a book, CD, game or something like that, you can read reviews, research information about it, as well as compare prices.

The video's ok. Nothing special but good enough (phone cameras are never going to replace digital cameras - their only purpose is for taking a picture or video when you don't have your camera on you).

Touchscreen

I love it. You can literally 'throw' icons, menus and page content to where you want it to go. Say with a web browser on a computer, to scroll down the page you would scroll down with the scroll bar or the mouse scroller, but on the web browser on the Android, to go further down the page, you touch the page and drag, or even flick, it upwards and out of view, bringing the below into view, as the same for up, left and right.

There's a menu bar along the top of the screen all the time (except in apps that use the full screen), this shows if you have any notifications (missed calls, texts, emails, downloads, etc.) on one side, and the time, your battery level, phone signal, 3G signal, and wifi signal and sync status when appropriate. If, say, you see you have a new text message, you touch the bar at the top and drag or flick it downwards to open it up and reveal the details. As for the tab at the bottom of the home screen, which you tap or drag/flick upwards to open, which shows all your installed apps.

When I talk about dragging or flicking things about, that's literally what it fells like when you touch something and move it - it feels like you're actually physically moving it with your fingertips, and when you drag the menu up or the notification bar down, it feels like you're actually holding it, pulling it up or down. On the home screen you have a selection of app shortcuts and widgets to start with, but this is 100% customisable - you can place icons wherever you want (none are locked), remove them, add new ones and add widgets. You have three screens: one central one, and one either side to the left and right. To get to each side you simply drag the screen to one side like you would with web content, move it out of the way to access another area. Each of the three screens has 4x4 grid for you to use as your canvas - icons take up a single 1x1 space and apps take up varying rectangular areas.

There's an interesting innovative unlock feature - you set a 'pattern' by dragging your finger over a sequence of nine pins on the screen, and you have to use that pattern/combination in order to unlock and gain access to the phone - this is in place of a PIN or password.

Google Maps

Other bits

Starred Contacts - in my opinion this is a much better, easier and more flexible function compared to standard Speed Dial, which requires you to assign up to 8 contacts to a number 2-9 (1 is voicemail) and memorise them. This is just a feature which allows you to 'star' a contact - like starring an email in Gmail, the empty star silhouette is there for you to tap to make them a starred contact - and then you open your list of starred contacts and pick from the list. I have a shortcut to my starred contacts on my home screen.

Buttons - this particular phone has 6 buttons on the front below the screen (green phone, red phone, home, menu, back & search), a tracker ball for precision (e.g. go back two spaces in a block of text while composing a text message), which is also a button (you can also use it to navigate but that's no fun!), and there's a volume up/down long button along one side.

Typing/Texting - this phone's predecessor, the G1, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard but this one just has on-screen touch typing, which only took me a few days to get used to typing quickly on. I'm not perfect yet, I sometimes hit the full stop key which is next to the space bar. Occasionally I'll hit the wrong letter, where it'll usually pick up on the typo and automatically correct it. You can either type with it up-right (compromising keyboard width for extra viewing space) or rotate the screen to hold it horizontally in two hands like a PSP, using your thumbs to type).

It's good for suggesting/predicting words when you start typing them which is really useful for longer words, just saves you typing them in full - and it gives as many suggestions as it can fit along the screen (with an arrow to view the next ones). I was stumped for a few days on how to add new words to the user dictionary while typing them so that it could predict them in future, but I posted the question to the Android Community forum and the answer came within minutes - you just long press the word and it saves it.

One of the best things about this phone as a phone (as apposed to a palmtop gadget) is its conversation-view for text messages, similar to that of Gmail, whereby you see each part of a conversation rather than one message at a time, so if there's a text conversation between me and Joe Bloggs, it shows my message, then Joe's reply, then my reply, and back and forth following the conversation.

Menu Button & Long Press - long press (pressing and holding) is a really useful way of adding extra functionality without the use of buttons (on-screen or physical) - like if you're viewing a text message conversation you can long press a text message and it shows you a menu of options specific to the text message you pressed - call the sender, save the number, forward the text message, copy the content of the message, view the time & date of the message, etc.

The menu button (a physical button) is there so you can view the menu or settings of whatever you're viewing at the time (to save taking away space on the screen from what you're doing/viewing)

Music Player - the phone comes with a 1GB micro-SD card (which you can obviously replace with a bigger one) which is the ideal medium for data storage for pictures and videos (taken with the camera or transferred from your computer) and music. The music player is great as it organises your music into artists, albums, etc. and you can easily search for an artist or song or whatever. It's generally much more sophisticated than the previous generation of phone media players which usually only let you play, pause and skip - whereas this phone lets you drag across the timer to manually skip further on or back through the current song.

It comes with a nice smart little white leather case you can slip the phone in to to keep it protected in your pocket. This is great except for one tiny flaw - if I want to simply check the time (we all do it - who wears a watch these days?) I have to remove the phone from my pocket, slide it all the way out of the leather case to touch the menu button to turn the screen on to see the time.

For people like me, who use all the Google services anyway, and make full use of them - I can't see us ever going back from Android. Now I've lived like this I can't imagine going back! Not having my contacts synchronised with Gmail? Or my calendar? Or not being able to locate my phone with a single text message when it's on silent? Or not being able to pull a light saber out of my pocket at any time?

I've been following (in the Twitter sense as well as the normal sense) the development of Android and what to expect next from the project. Loads of phone companies are realising its potential and announcing launches of new Android-powered phones throughout 2009. Even some laptop manufacturers are playing around with it is an operating system for mini-notebooks - and before long I imagine we'll be seeing it on more powerful laptop machines. With any luck it could develop to much greater things and, I may be getting way ahead of myself here, it could be the dawn of the overtake of Microsoft Windows as the standard computer operating system, which would rid the world of dependency on hidden-source bug-ridden corporate systems and programs and give us the option to use (and develop) open source programs.

I've written about dozens of features of the phone but that's only a tiny proportion of what it can do. I honestly could have written twice that much again and still not touch the limits of the phone!

...Oh and I almost forgot - it makes and receives phone calls too!

Labels: Android, Featured, Geek, Google, Internet, Java, Programming

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 22:21

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Monday, 27 April 2009

Lots of Training and a Session with the BBC

I've had a weekend full of training, which followed two days of programming with parkour training in the afternoons, and today is my rest day. Thursday I went out training as a break from Java; Friday I met up with my good friends Gordon & Scott for some afternoon parkour in the sun; Saturday I went along to the usual jam and then attended a session with the BBC; Sunday was the monthly pole jam followed by weekly gym (as is -nastics) session.

One of the things I've wanted to do for a while is to wallflip outside. I've done them in the gym on at least one occasion but never bothered or had the guts do try them outside. During a gym session back at home I tried them to see if I could pull one off first time, which I could. I practised for a while and decided I was going to try them outside at first opportunity. This opportunity came to me on Friday when I was at UMIST with Gordon & Scott. I did it fine. That was over grass, and at first opportunity I tried it over concrete, also fine. It's not a huge achievement but I'm glad it's out of the way. I can feel much more confident about them now. As most to you know I'm more into pure parkour than flips, but I think it's important for everyone to have the capability to comfortably perform the basic flip movements: front; back; side and wall flips.

I can do backflips (standing on floor and off smallish objects) fine, fronts I probably could do if I tried but I've lost comfortability with them so it's a target to get them back. Sides I have only ever done in the gym and I've not really any idea if I'm doing them right or not, but they seem to be very comfortable when people do them, and seem to be a natural flip movement once familiar so probably worth getting. Once my flips arsenal contains those four I'll be happy with them and will ensure to maintain them. Some pictures of me wallflipping:

Then came the Saturday jam; Gordon & I arrived at Castlefield to find Dave leading the group through an exhausting push-up exercise using triangle numbers (*not factorials! as we sometimes call them. Triangle numbers are simply a sequence of numbers starting at 1, increasing by 1 each time, and used in such exercises in that you do 1 repetition of something, then 2, then 3, then 4, and so on until you reach your physical limit. They'd done it slowly up to about 15 and ordered us to catch up, so we got straight down to it and did 1 then 2 more then 3 more then 4 more, right up to about 8 without stopping (which would be 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8=36), then I took a short rest before doing the 9th set, then the 10th, then the 11th, and leaving it there.

*Factorials are multiples, not sums. i.e. 5! (5 factorial) = 5x4x3x2x1 = 120

After the jam, five of us (Dave, Paul, Scott, Dean and myself) headed of to the McDonald Hotel in Manchester to meet up with some people from the BBC who had contacted us the week before to see if we would be interested in auditioing for a TV programme they were making. The programme would aim to prove that intelligence comes in many forms, not just the Oxbridge / Rocket Science type, and that people who practised parkour, for example, were intelligent in other ways to rocket scientists. They were getting groups of people (some of the ones they mentioned were rocket scientists, hairdressers and drag queens) to audition to see which groups they would like to take part in the programme itself.

They filmed some interviews with us to try and get us to prove our intelligence in a variety of forms: listing the similarities between a dog and a cat; giving advice in a hypothetical relationship scenario; working out a problem-solving riddle; putting together a cardboard box from flat; etc. It was clear that sme of us were very good at certain bits and not so good at others, for instance Scott was spot-on with the problem-solving task, Scott & Dean were very quick with their cardboard boxes, Scott, Dave and I seemed quite helpful with the relationship issue while the others stayed quiet, and Paul & Dave were very imaginitive with listing the similarities between a dog and a cat.

Then came the hardest bit, which turned out to be very interesting: we had to state the strengths and weaknesses of each other in the group, so Paul listed Dean's, Scott's, mine and Dave's and we would all, in turn, list each other's. It was very hard to think of something constructive for both of these, but very interesting to hear what everyone had to say. My general stengths mentioned were that I 'have my finger in many pies' (Dave) saying that I am keen to be involved in many things in life and not just stick to one thing, that I make good websites (Paul - want to stick to your judgement now you've seen this?), that I am generally good at certain movements in parkour. Weaknesses were that I don't train hard enough (Scott), that I don't do enough variety of training (Dave), that I am a stickler for spelling and punctuation (Paul), oh and Dean didn't like my shirt. I did my best to say things that were constructive to people, and that were fair and just. Then they asked us to say our own strengths and weaknesses and give ourselves a mark out of ten for intelligence (1 being Paris Hilton; 10 being Stephen Hawking); I said that what I liked about myself was that I never just concentrated one one thing in life and that I keep my options open and try to be good at a wide range of things rather than just really good in one thing, and that my main weakness was that I make excuses for things I know I ought to do, like if I know I ought to do some conditioning I'll often find a lame excuse for not doing it, and explained that I am aware of this and am working on it. As for the score out of ten, I hardly think of myself as a genius, and refused to place myself anywhere near Stephen Hawking (I have so much respect for how intelligent he is) so I put myself on 6, but Dave convinced me I had drawn myself short so I upped it to 6.5, which probably should have been 7 really. We were all between 6 and 7 (except Dean who placed himself on about 3). They filmed everything and will show all the footage to their executives for them to decide who will be featured.

They also filmed a private interview with each of us individually where we were asked to give 3 words to describe ourselves (I really stuggled with this as I didn't like the idea of branding myself so lavishly! Ended up going for Determined, motivating and dedicated), say the alphabet backwards (I got stuck at t-s, or is it s-t?), but when I got stuck I said "Ok I can't, but I can recite pi to 35 decimal places!" and she was like "What, really? Go on then - you mean like pythagoras and that?" and I said it was Archimedes who really distinguished it, and then said "Ok, pi is 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288" and she was astounded and said "So would you say you were more mathematical than linguistic - but you're a stickler for spelling and punctuation! So are you good at memorising things?" and I said "Not really, I was just determined, motivated and dedicated enough to learn that!".

Then we had to fill out some questions and do an IQ test of which some parts were dead easy, others were dead hard. One question was what is the missing number: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,...,34 (It's the Fibonnacci Sequence: a term is given by the sum of the previous two terms, so the answer is 21 as 8+13=21 and 13+21=34).

Then on Sunday we went to the pole jam which was interesting as usual, followed by the gym session which was fun. I'm going to try to make it to the gym every week now.

Hopefully the BBC executives will think we'll make a good match for rocket scientists and cast us for the show, but who knows? It could be the drag queens or the hair dressers.

Labels: Featured, Parkour

Posted by Ben Nuttall at 16:37

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