Posted by hpyle on May 11th, 2008 — Posted in Uncategorized
Second Tuesday evening of each month, there’s a fun and informal get-together of the Mass Tech Leadership Council, at the Skellig Pub in Waltham.
I went along to the first of these and thoroughly enjoyed it. People had brought all sorts of things to play with and demo — several versions of the OLPC XO (and a JavaScript spreadsheet), some kind of roof-robot, and various web things. It was a fun and chattery gathering of interesting people from all over the Boston area. I couldn’t make last month’s, even though it would have been fun to compare the Linn thing with the Logitech thing.
So I’d recommend anyone with a passing interest to come along. I’ll probably talk in some depth about Mesh (unless the Cambridge people beat me to it).
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Posted by hpyle on April 4th, 2008 — Posted in Uncategorized
Dad was buried today, in the churchyard at St Mary’s Ambleside — on surely the most beautiful spring day imaginable, surrounded by daffodils, looking over to Loughrigg. Many good people in attendance. I can’t write much, but want to at least record something of the day.
At the funeral Mass, Chris (my little bro!) gave a wonderful, funny, moving tribute to Dad. I still don’t know how he did it, but this set the tone for the service.
Here’s one of Dad’s pictures of the Langdale Pikes.
Links: a short writeup (x) and obituary (x) from the local newspapers.
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Posted by hpyle on March 17th, 2008 — Posted in Uncategorized
I’m not an economist. But look at the banks, what’s left of them.
Banks borrowing from their lender of last resort, graphed over the last 50 years:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BORROW
Non-borrowed reserves (real money in the banks), over the last 50 years:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BOGNONBR
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Posted by hpyle on January 1st, 2008 — Posted in Uncategorized
I am so not a gadget person. Maybe I’m allergic to them, or that having a parsimonious history and no real excuse to buy or encourage silly electronic toys, I’ve just resisted for a long time. But a couple years ago I got a Squeezebox, and that’s very neat. And this year I got a new toy, and it’s very neat too.
Slim Devices Jive is I guess the codename or something; they haven’t really talked about that on the forums, that I’m aware of. It’s “beta hardware” and definitely beta software. So walk on over there talk to them about how to get one, I suppose. These will probably appear on the shelves at Best Buy some time in 2008, and I’m guessing it’s a V1 of an expanding market line, beyond Squeezebox and Transporter, into two or three new products in quick succession. But to be honest I have no idea what the next things are, and my guesses would be pretty lame. (Update: It’s called the Squeezebox Duet Controller, and ships this month!)
But guesswork aside, here’s a little overview what Jive is, and why it’s interesting.
The Squeezebox is a nice little audio player. It has a little CPU, fluorescent display, and WiFi connection – to your server, or to SqueezeNetwork or network radio – with a good sound. It has a backlit remote control, and you scroll forward and back through a menu system to pick things to listen to. Transporter is basically the same thing, only it sounds really really good.
Jive controls the Squeezebox or Transporter. It’s a remote control, with a little LCD display, a half-dozen buttons; volume, fast-forward, back, pause, and a spinner wheel thing. You scroll back and forward through a menu system to pick things to listen to. They play through the stereo, and sound quite good.
But now, instead of peering into the distance at a little display panel, or the indignity of raising myself the few feet across the room in search of more cool tunes, the jive has a little LCD screen. And the display is only eighteen inches from my face, which is exactly as far as I can see clearly on a good day. So, there, it’s an interesting device for the myopic among us.
That’s the theory, at least. There are some practical things we’ll get to in a minute. But let’s keep going on the technology and the implications for a minute. Because this thing is nearly-open-source (open enough to hack with, but not open enough to re-badge), and runs Linux, has an application framework built on Lua, and connects using JSON over WiFi to a very open server (Perl, yuk… but I have some new respect for Perl these days), and runs on a 200MHz ARM9 processor. It has a 3D accelerometer. A 240×320 color display. 4 gigabytes of storage or more, if you plug in an SD card to the back (it only ships with I think 64MB onboard storage). An IR LED. A little speaker on the back, and a headphone jack. An expansion dock with USB, analog out, and analog in. You can SSH to the darn thing, but it isn’t running Apache yet. (It maybe should).
That’s quite powerful, for a remote control. I have an EQ plugin for Squeezebox, and this would be a really cool thing to control it from (in fact, it’s essential). But there are also lots of interesting uses looking outward beyond the living room.
Jive is quite a good way to browse news headlines (on the built-in Information Browser, which is a simple RSS reader). I can imagine a wonderful lyrics plugin and music explorer. With those things, it becomes something to pick up and focus on for a few minutes, then put down. Or rather, something to focus through, in the same way we focus “through” a telephone connection and the mechanical devices between us fade out of the way. Good sound systems do that, and so should the remote control.
And then the way a well-designed device like this will degrade becomes part of the “system” – we all know how crappy phone calls sound, and tolerate them to some extent — rather than a failure of the device necessarily. (My treo is crap by the way. Give me an example of a good useful transparent gadget, please, other than really dumb ones which have fallen so far back on the bell curve that they finally work properly. Maybe I should buy an iPhone and be done with it. But I don’t want one of those, it’s stupid and probably addictive if it’s good enough. I don’t want any addictive gadgets in the house, thanks – a cat-like vacuum cleaner and a stereo and an oven are quite unobtrusive enough).
And that’s where the Jive right now falls down, too. Jive is Beta hardware (which looks pretty good altogether, apart from battery life) and Beta software. The software is still changing fairly quickly (moving menus around, and so on) and still has a few big ugly faults. Those faults – general performance in a way, but performance issues on the things that matter: spinning the wheel to go up and down a menu has so much hysteresis, it’s easier to jump two menu items than one. Browsing large lists, for example albums, can take forever to download the list (first time, or at least more often than it should) and then doesn’t “accelerate” the way an iPod or a black-and-white fifties movie flicking through the calendar moves forward. I’m hoping these things are fixed, and lots more fit-and-finish thought put into the overall usability of the software. It’s not quite good enough to be my main control, just yet.
The screensavers are neat. “Now Playing” is a screensaver, with album art if you have it. There’s a Flickr screensaver which cycles through your photos, or your friends’, or all the interesting photos in the world.
The menus are a bit hard to find your way around; it’s not completely intuitive where to find things. That can be fixed on Squeezebox with a plugin, if you want to rearrange your menus to your heart’s content; I’m hoping this and other third-party plugins for SlimServer I hope will be ported to Jive in interesting ways. But that extensibility shouldn’t excuse any lack of polish on the defaults.
And finally, it plays music. Or rather, the Squeezebox or Transporter client(s) it’s connected to via the SlimServer play music, which comes out through the speakers and sounds good, and for some reason REM needs attention right now, so let’s put the remote control down again.
The display dims after a few seconds. It goes quietly to sleep until you decide to use it again. This is a very unobtrusive gadget, and that’s part of its charm. And maybe part of its downfall, too, unless there’s enough slickness to make it really transparently usable, and maybe also some real Net-leveraging applications or even games which could make the experience more of a slippery slope into focusing through the device.
The development /deployment environment for extensions seems pretty clunky – lots of unfamiliar mechanical things to deal with, and an unfamiliar language, and Perl too, and this thing really could use a web server interface the way my router has. That might de-clutter the “advanced settings” menu stuff too.
So, to wrap up: this little thing is not quite ready for prime-time yet, but it’s really fascinating. It’s the most powerful remote control I’ve seen short of clumsy multi-purpose devices, which don’t work for me. It’s a single-purpose thing, only a remote control. Just a handy little black lump, full of stars.
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