Weekly Links #2

Time for another bunch of random links to stuff that I heard about this week.

Historic watermill on the Thames reinstates an old turbine to create electricity for the National Grid. - An awesome story. It reads as if they used to have a turbine decades ago, which fell into disuse, and they had to dig it up from the riverbed in order to get it working again. I'd love to know more details, so at some point I'll go and quiz them to do a proper write-up as they're very local to where I live.

Microsoft create a "HoloDesk" - Microsoft have developed a prototype 3D projection interface. Can you imagine the gaming applications for this?  Perhaps their ultimate goal is something like their "Productivity Future Vision" video that was also released this week.

A farm in a shop - FARM:shop in London challenges the traditional nature of agriculture. It's a farm in a disused shop, complete with chickens on the roof. Not really a very technology based hack, but still awesome..

Commodore PET in an FPGA - FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array and really basically is a chip that can be configured however you want, and can be used to create "soft processor cores" - or to simulate other CPU chips.  In this case, they've decided to simulate the original 6502 that was present in the Commodore PET, and then get it running as if it were the real machine.  Looks like they've got some games running on it already too.

Snow-ball cross-bow.   Yes, you read it correctly. It's a cross bow that fires snow balls. What more could you want this winter?

Nokia OLED flex-screen phone - Nokia have unveiled a concept phone using flexible OLED display technology, where you flex the screen to control some functions. I'm not sure about how useful that is, but at least it's innovative.

Skype steals port 80!

I spent about an hour this morning trying to fix someone's PC that was behaving very much like it had malware, running really slow and their local copy of Apache wouldn't run..

Turns out that it was Skype port-hogging, stealing port 80. Killed the process and took Skype out of startup so it only gets run when it needs to be - problem solved.

Apparently it does this to "get around firewall issues" - presumable with the whole grid-networking nature of Skype it needs to be able to get access to a node, and port 80 is the easiest way to do it.

Anyway, rant over.   Just thought I'd mention it as a heads-up so that hopefully people don't waste time like I did.

Weekly links #1 - Sites I read all the time

So, in an effort to actually update stuff on here, I'm going to try to do a bunch of interesting tech links every Friday..  I am under no illusion about how regularly I will *actually* do this, but it's a nice idea.

First up, some sites that I read all the time:

• http://hackaday.com/ - Awesome site full of lots of random hacks. Everything from upgrading the memory in a WRT300N Router to converting a Gameboy to be solar powered.  

• http://lifehacker.com/ - Not just hardware hacks, lots of software information and sometimes "mind hacks", recipes, fixing furnature..  All sorts really, just the site for a tinkerer and putterer and fixer of broken things.
• http://www.gizmag.com/ - Gizmag is an emerging and new technology blog.  All sorts of tech, from new kinds of nanobot to spacecraft, from e-paper to super-yachts. Very interesting if you want to see what's happening on the bleeding edge of technology.
• http://www.retrothing.com/ - Retrothing - lots of lovely retro stuff. 

• http://benheck.com/ - The official blog of Ben Heckendorm, creator of the original XBox360p laptop, and portable Atari 2600. 

The dangers for Celebs who TwitPic

I've known about EXIF GPS location tags for a long time, but only in the last few days have I realised that most people don't know they exist.

EXIF is a little set of information, almost like a mini database, built into JPG photo files from digital cameras and some scanners.  It says things like what make and model the camera are, how long the exposure was, whether the flash fired..  On some phones and cameras, it also logs GPS co-ordinates.

This, on the surface, is a really nice, useful feature.  But, imagine you are a celebrity on Twitter and you post a few photos taken at home of your pet dog / new hat / whatever.  Suddenly, without realising it, you've broadcast your home address to the world. Then later on, you broadcast that you're out for dinner - now people know where you live, and the fact that you're not there right now.  That's just asking for trouble.

I thought, surely, Twitpic probably strips this info off of a photo - right?

Nope.

I've randomly clicked five celeb photos over the last two days, and three of them have EXIF location data attached.

The way around this - you can switch the feature off on the camera, or edit and resave the picture on a computer, making sure to filter the info out.

Just a heads up..

Surprisingly good game on very cheap mobile

Because of the massive problems with Vodafone this morning I went out and bought a very cheap Samsung  GT-E1150i on TMobile at lunchtime because I need a working mobile for work, and of course my main mobile is network locked to Vodafone, so I can't just pop in a different SIM.

Anyway.  While waiting for a package manager update to install on a linux box (yawn) I had a fiddle with the new phone and discovered that even though it's really really cheap (£12) it has apps, and even games!

There's Suduku, which I am awful at so didn't even attempt, and Super Jewel Quest - an actually rather good version of the classic Jewels game.

RandomTech: Echo 500 Electronic Organ Watch

I'm fascinated by random tech, always have been.  It's the sort of odd electronic things that you get in those tacky shops on holiday that have always intrigued me.   I figured, as I have this blog now, I could actually review some of them.

So, first up - the Echo 500 Electronic Organ Watch.  

Trying out Twitterfeed

I've decided to try out Twitterfeed to auto-tweet about these blog posts.  So this is kind of a test, I suppose.

Frankenspeccy

First of all, not really a hack, just a repair job.  

A friend had a ZX Spectrum which had a badly corroded circuit board, and the keyboard membrane had fallen apart. Aesthetically it looked good though.  I had a working Speccy, but it was all cracked and beat up, so basically I did a case-transfusion to make one good, working one. 

My beaten up, but still working old Spectrum

Hello World

10 Print "Hello World"
20 Go to 10