DIY

Amongst my stranger hobbies is my love for making strange things with paperclips. I love unwinding the paperclips, straightening them out and then rewinding them together again. Generally, this makes for some pretty strange looking sculptures, like this:

 

So anyway, for the last week or so, I discovered that I had a brand new box of paperclips on my shelf. Naturally, I wanted to make the best use of these possible, so I immediately proceeded to unwind them and make another sculpture. It ended up looking like this:

 

I noticed something interesting. My galaxy nexus seemed to fit quite well into that little triangle at the base. So after some thought, I decided that I would modify the sculpture slightly so I could actually use it as a stand for my phone. But to do that, I needed a base. After some searching, I found the stand of a broken picture frame and promptly cut a segment of it out and wedged it tightly into the sculpture so it looked like this:

You can’t see it in the picture, but there are some paperclips below the black bit which prevent it from falling out of place.

So overall, I got a pretty good stand. Here’s what it looks like with the phone on it:

 

It looks pretty cool to me. It also has the advantage of having both the screen viewable as well as having the speakers (which are on the back) not covered. I’m planning to figure out a way in which I can put the microUSB plug into the stand so it becomes a charging dock as well.

By far the best thing about this stand is the fact that I can take complete and utter ownership of it. Sure, it may be a relatively simple to make, but every single piece of the stand is there because I put it there. I was in full control of the process, and it’s because of my blood and sweat that it got to be the way it did. Literally. When I was winding one of the paperclips, it bit into my skin and drew blood. So that was fun.

The point is, it’s immensely satisfying to know that you’ve made something which you use regularly. You can look at alternatives sold in stores and scorn them, because you thing that you’ve made (most probably) suits your needs a hell of a lot better than any store bought thing.

Obviously, I’m not going to stop here. I’ve got this huge box of random crap that I’ve accumulated over a long period of time. Buttons, wires, those metal sticks that you can bend and a whole host of other assorted fiddly bits. So I’m going to see if there’s anything else I can make from them. If not, then a quick google search should show me exactly what I’m looking for.

On a related note, I found this spare external hard drive in a drawer today. It wasn’t working when I plugged it into the computer, and didn’t have much space (only 200 Gb), so I decided to salvage the wire and do away with the hard drive. But as I was gripping the hard drive to pull the wire out, I pressed a previously hidden button and the hard drive popped open to reveal all the circuitry and stuff. So as any self respecting nerd would do, I took apart the whole thing until I couldn’t find a screwdriver small enough to fit those tiny screws on a hard drive. So that’s cool.

iMeh

The iPhone 5…what can I say? One day after the 4s came out, people were already salivating over an iPhone 5. It’s easily one of the most hyped up phones in history.

But what’s it really like? Here’s my opinion.

The look: Awesome

The guts: Good enough

The software: meh

The headphones: Absolutely, gouge-your-eyes-out, disgusting. Seriously? Not commenting on sound quality or anything, but aren’t apple products supposed to look good?

But I’m not reviewing the phone here. I’ve realized something interesting. Apple isn’t the leader any more.

Think back to when the iPhone 3gs or 4 was released. They were without question, revolutionary. The design, the software, everything. I myself spent hours gushing about how awesome the calendar app was and how easy it was to sync your music onto it. The iPhone was obviously the quintessential smartphone. Apple was, without a doubt, at the forefront of innovation.

But it seems that Apple has lost that edge. The iPhone 5 doesn’t seem to innovate so much as it seems to try and catch up. All the stuff which Apple claims are revolutionary new features are pretty standard on android phones.

Passbook? It’s on android, and it’s called Google Wallet.

Panorama? Please. It’s kind of shameful not to have panorama.

Larger screen? Not really that large..

 

Here’s an ad put out by samsung that, while quite inflammatory, is actually pretty true:

Now as iPhone fans read this and begin to have a meltdown, other, more rational people can see that there’s actually an element of truth here.

What I’m trying to get at here is that the iPhone 5 isn’t an incredible phone. I don’t think it lived up to the hype.

The iPhone 5 wasn’t a gamechanger. It was more a gamesaver for apple.

 

An innovative post

So I was just randomly thinking today and I started to think about that Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit. I realized that these days, it’s difficult to do any type of innovation without being having every last penny squeezed out of you by some cutthroat company or the other.

Now, I’ve heard people say that this is actually good for innovation because companies have to find something radical, but I wholeheartedly disagree with that notion. To me, this is the worst thing that could happen to innovation.

Let me first talk about what I think innovation is. To me, innovation isn’t a guess and check process. It’s not putting random features on something and hoping they work. Sure, there have been a few examples of this sort of thing in the past, but by in large, that approach is going to get you nowhere. Innovation is, at its simplest, taking an idea that already works and leaving the fundamental core the same, but changing things above that level. And that’s where companies like Apple have excelled. For example, when they came up with the first GUI, it still did all the same things as previous CLIs had done. They had simply changed the overall look of the UI and how you accessed certain functions. The hadn’t changed the overall purpose of the UI. And that, I feel, was innovation at its finest.

But for innovation to flourish, you need a stable platform from which to innovate. You need something that you can safely refine without losing basic functionality. But when Apple, say, patents the concept of rounded rectangles, it’s taking away that platform. The idea of a rounded rectangle is so integral to a smartphone that if another shape were to be adopted by another company, the basic idea of a smartphone would stop working. And innovation would indeed be stifled.

So if you’re going to patent something, make it something that can safely be patented. Not something that will stifle innovation in all companies except your own.

:(

So you probably know that the Apple Vs. Samsung court case has ended, and the simple, sad verdict is that Samsung lost, and has to pay Apple over a billion dollars in profit.

It’s been accused of infringing copyright on software interfaces, the front of the phone, infringing patents, and a whole host of other things.

Honestly though, I think that Apple has lost something far greater than it has won. When Apple first started up, they were the rebels. Microsoft was the big, mean company. These days however, Apple has lost their title of being a cool company. These days, Apple is the bully.

Now, I’ve been incredibly subjective when talking about this trial, but let’s just look at the wide scope of this case logically.

What should you be able to do on a smartphone?

Apart from all the obvious things like texting and calling, you should be able to interact with menus in an intuitive way, display all your apps in one list, and have simple ways of securing your phone. Of course, those aren’t the only important things, but those will be the things I talk about.

Now, in a menu, all that really needs to be present is an effective way of scrolling. There really isn’t much to be innovative in. Apple sued Samsung over the bounce scroll thing, but is that really something to be sued out of billions of dollars for? It’s just a little fun twist. People don’t buy phones because lists bounce.

As for displaying all your apps in a list, is it really so big a deal that it scrolls sideways. Is it copying Apple, or is it just a matter of choice? Samsung could have just as easily chosen to do a vertical scroll. The most important difference, however, is that on an iPhone, you don’t have  any menu to see your apps. It’s all there on the homescreen. On a samsung device, and in fact any Android device, you need to call up a menu (called the App drawer) to see your apps.

Finally, the iPhone unlocking is a unidimensional slider which can’t be customized at all. However, there are a plethora of ways to unlock an Android phone, and none of them are unidimensional. So in fact, there’s nothing to sue over.

When you’re buying a phone, do you buy it because it’s made by Samsung or by Apple? Or do you buy it because it’s the best for your lifestyle? Apple’s primary inspiration for suing Samsung was fear that it would cause Apple to lose money. Honestly, people aren’t going to care if they love iPhones. They’ll continue to buy iPhones. And if they don’t, well, that’s just Apple’s cue to improve. They’ve copied features from Android before (like Notification Centre), and they didn’t seem to get sued for that. In fact, everyone loved Notification center. Why can’t they learn from that and just let innovation in all phones continue?

 

Curiosity (Not the personality trait…)

I’ve recently read this article about the Curiosity Mars Rover, and I was actually pretty interested to see how much time it would take just to move the rover  a short distance. I completely understand the intentions, though. Every so often, the Rover’s going to stop and analyze the environment around it to see if it can spot anything. This means that it will take almost a year to reach this place called Mount Sharp on Mars, which is only about 8 kilometres away. Apparently, each time the Rover stops and analyses its surroundings, it’ll take about a couple of weeks to do so.

It’s absolutely incredible to think of the scale of an operation like this. At its closest, Mars is about 56 million kilometres away, so it’s actually amazing to think that we got there in only 8 months (That’s, at it’s slowest, almost 10000 km per hour). The fact that everything was still in order after 8 months in the most hostile environment imaginable is testament to the skill of the engineers.

I was really interested to see the method with which Curiosity landed. It was a rather long and involved process, but this video explains it really well:

I can’t imagine the thought process that would go into someone coming up with that particular way of landing, but it’s very, very clever.

So obviously, there have been rovers on Mars before, Spirit and Opportunity being the most famous of these. But as amazing as Rovers are, it would be even more amazing to get a man on Mars. And one of Curiosity’s missions is to find the amount of radiation on the planet Mars to see whether humans on Mars is possible. I certainly hope so. The day we land a man on another planet will certainly be one of the most important days in human history.

By the way, if you want to see a panorama of the Martian landscape, click here

Graphics

So recently, I’ve been wondering about graphics on Video Games and in animated movies are generated. These types of media are generally played on a flat screen, with two real dimensions. So how on earth is it then, that when playing a video game, you get the impression that you’re moving around in a 3d space? I just opened up Skyrim to try and view it as a flat image, but I can’t. How disappointing.

So I did some research to find out how these things manage to fool you, and it’s actually pretty clever.

But first, let’s get one thing clear. Using 2d images is a lot simpler and faster than 3d images. Take, for example, the image of a triangle. It takes only 3 lines and 3 angles, and you’re done. By contrast, it takes 5 lines and 6 angles to generate the image of a pyramid. Keep in mind that these are both incredibly simple shapes. To generate beautiful graphics like those in Assassins Creed and Battlefield 3 takes a lot more lines. And they have thousands of different renderings since we don’t look at them from a static perspective. We’re continuously changing our perspective of it by moving around it.

So when you’re making a 3d world to move around in, there are three main steps:

1. Creating a virtual 3-D world.
2. Determining what part of the world will be shown on the screen.
3. Determining how every pixel on the screen will look so that the whole image appears as realistic as possible

To create a virtual 3d world, programmers literally have to program both the laws of physics as well as the actual world into the program. You can’t, for example, have two solid objects moving through each other. You want them to behave as they would in the real world. Everything in the 3d world is completely synthetic, and this reflects in the amount of effort it takes to get it right.

Secondly, imagine a game like Skyrim. The in-game world is absolutely enormous, and at any time, you’re only viewing a minuscule percentage of the world. So the game has to dynamically decide which part you are seeing and will constantly change that when you move around the world.Objects should still behave realistically, and so on.

Finally, the most difficult part of the entire process.Even though you’re interacting with a 3d world, it’s on a 2d surface, and so everything needs to be shown on pixels. These pixels have to be arranged in such a manner that things look both 3d and realistic. So how are these objects modelled? First, something called a ‘wireframe’ is constructed. This is constructed out of thousands of tiny polygons which join together to make an object look natural. As a general rule, the more polygons used, the more realistic an object is. Here’s an example of the wireframe of a hand- it has 3444 polygons!

howstuffworks.com

Once this wireframe is constructed, something called ‘a surface’ is applied. This basically means that colors, textures and lighting are applied to the objects. They’re mixed in such a way so as to give subconscious impressions of things like heat, hardness and lighting to the object. The two most important ways that realism is achieved through this is through realistic lighting and perspective to make the object look as though it is 3d. Here’s a picture of the hand after lighting and perspective and color have been applied:

howstuffworks.com

It makes a huge difference. The last visual trick used when generating these objects is something called Depth of Field. This basically means that as you look further away, things get blurrier. This both adds realism and focuses your attention on the foreground.

When making these objects move, something called anti-aliasing is used. Basically, computers are good at generating straight vertical and horizontal lines. But you’ve probably noticed that while making lines on things like Microsoft Word, they tend to get jagged. Anti aliasing is the process of putting graduated shades of colors around curved or slanted lines to make them look less jagged.

But of course, none of this explains how we’re able to move around objects in the game as though they really are 3d. All that basically happens is that when you ove, you are shown a series of images. These images flash by very, very quickly. However, this doesn’t fully make it look realistic. Programmers also add motion blur, which blurs the image slightly. This blur makes it harder for out eyes to separate each image from each other and look even more realistic. In fact, it’s only when a game lags that you’re able to tell which image is which.

So as you can imagine, it takes a lot of effort to make a fully realistic 3d world. I just thought that this process was really interesting and how difficult it is for us to be fooled completely.

The day of the future, part two.

So those of you with fantastic memories may remember a post I did a couple of months back with a video called ‘A day made of glass’. They’ve made a sequel to it, and this time, they’ve included a narration and explanation as well. Take a look:

It’s interesting to see how that entire digital world is controlled by each person’s tablet and how the tablet allows them to each experience the world in a different way.

It’s also really exciting to see the technology developments that will be required. I can’t believe that the technology required for something like this actually exists on a small scale.

Steve Jobs said that he liked to live on the intersection of the humanities and technology, and I think this vision of the future would have made him proud.

The smart house

When you watch movies like Iron Man and Minority Report, you marvel at the technology used, but it’s really hard to imagine something like that in your house.  And you’re right, it’s nigh on impossible to have all those holographic interfaces everywhere to interact with your environment. (Although, there are certain types of technologies that may make that a possibility in the future).

But I’ve been thinking about the possibility of having a smart house, and I’ve thought of a rather interesting system which may work. So today, I’m going to explain that system.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call the system that controls the smart home ‘HOUSE’.

So first let’s talk about what exactly HOUSE would encompass. It would control all the things like lights, fans, air cons and radiators as well as things like automating certain aspects of the house. There would probably be one master unit in an area that is accessible to everyone in the house. There’d also be separate  sub-units in each room which can be used to control that room in particular.

So what would these units look like? I was thinking just a thin slate of metal. It would just be completely blank when not being used, but as soon as it was touched, it would light up. This ‘lighting up’ would probably be achieved through hidden LEDs or something.  This type of touch-sensitive metal actually already exists, and is used in things like lift buttons and in my house, there’s even this lamp that turns on simply by a touch of the base.

Once the metal panel is touched and it lights up, you see a map of the region that that particular unit controls. You can then tap the item(s) you want to manipulate and then change the setting (for example make a particular light dimmer and the relevant things will change. Another interesting feature that it thought it could have is the ability to establish ‘zones’ within the house. You would then be able to set different settings for each zone (for example dimmer lights in a TV room).

Something else that would be really interesting is the ability to automate your house. If, for example, the house is empty between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. on school/work days, you can set it to automatically turn off all lights and fans during that period. You could also set it to turn on specific lights and fans when someone enters a room. Having your house behave on a schedule would be incredibly useful, and I think is one of the many examples when technology enhances your life.

Obviously, this isn’t a type of system that is available right now, nor will be for some time, but if you think about it, most of the technology  required already exists. It’s all just a matter of putting it together. It’s interesting to see how some relatively simple technology could vastly improve living in a house.

Random numbers

I do a lot of stuff with computers. Games, school work, image editing, and so on. And a lot of this stuff relies on the generation of Random Numbers. Games need them so the outcome is not always the same and so on.

But I got to thinking about how these random numbers are actually generated, ad I found it very difficult to think of an algorithm that would actually be able to generate random numbers. So I did some research, and the way they generate the numbers is actually pretty interesting.

The ‘random’ numbers that computers come up with aren’t actually random; they’re pseudo-random. What computers typically do is get an initial value and then apply a specific mathematical function, or multiple functions to this value to give a supposedly random number. Generally, this initial value will be taken from something that changes regularly, for example derived from the date or time.

Like I said, it would be impossible to come up with truly random numbers using just an algorithm, but a way has been found.If you were to connect a geiger counter to your computer and use it to measure the amount of radioactive decay. Since radioactive decay is a random natural event, basing something off this would generate truly random numbers.

Now that I know how to generate random numbers, I think I’m going to use it in a Java project and then share it with you guys. That’s about it for this post, I just wanted to share this process with you. I think it’s pretty cool 🙂

iTV

In Steve Job’s biography, the biographer says that Steve Jobs told him he had found the perfect formula for a TV. Was this a tantalising message that Apple would be making a TV. Apple Fans all over the world hope so, and I have to say that would be a pretty interesting TV. So today, I’m going to talk about what it is that Apple would put in their TV that would make it so different.

First, let’s talk about the hardware. Obviously, the TV will almost definitely be white. Each and every one of Apple’s computing devices is white, and so are all the accessories. Yes, iPods, iPads and iPhones do have non-white options, but things closer to the size of a TV are white. The TV will obviously also be made of one piece of aluminium, and be as slim as Apple can make it. It will be absolutely impregnable to all but Apple themselves, and the front will have nothing on it, save for a small Apple logo. The DVD slot would probably be a slot loader I wouldn’t be surprised if it was touchscreen, either.

Now that that’s done with, let’s go onto the software. The TV will most probably run some modified form of iOS ( I would be extremely disappointed if it ran the same one as iPhones and iPads). This modification would obviously be centered around playing media, and I think the central ‘apps’ would be a normal TV app, an iTunes-like app for playing digital media, an iTunes store app, a web browser app, and an App for streaming from other devices.

What would be especially interesting about this TV is two things. Number one, it would be incredibly tightly integrated with other iOS devices, and things like iTunes in the cloud, it would become a really, really good media center. Apple is really good at collating all these different elements of a media playing experience( from buying the media to watching it), and it would be interesting to see how this would be transferred onto a TV. Of course, Apple does have something like it, called Apple TV, but it’s not the same as just having a normal TV which does this.

Apple seems to be a fanatic when it comes to wires, and I haven’t seen a single Apple device which requires more than one wire.So imagine it. You would have a slate on your wall with amazing resolution, and just one, pure white cable trailing down. That’s a pretty cool TV…