Scientific research (well, kind of!)

I’m getting ready to move to a new house, and part of my new lifestyle will include getting a laptop to do some work on the move. So today, I head over to PC World to check out a few laptops. 

I had a big surprise. However, it was a bad surprise. Laptops are bloody heavy!

Check what your laptop is designed for 

I noticed that PC World divided laptops in two categories: laptops for the home and office, and laptops on the move. Needless to say, those in the latter category were lighter but there were few and far between.

The lighter laptops are usually designed for the entertainment market, principally for the use of watching DVDs or playing games while travelling. 

The results 

Following the criteria that a laptop should weight under 2 kilos, i started searching across many websites and i found the following:

• brands like Dell, HP and Toshiba offer laptops just under 2 kilos for about £600-£700; these laptops are marketed at people wanting to divert themselves while travelling
• brands like Compaq didn’t seem to have any
• the lightest laptop is Sony TZ series, at 1.2 kg (that’s inclusive of the battery!), at about £1,500; this laptop is marketed at businessmen on the move, hence the price tag

Additional resources:
Notebook As Indispensable Tool For Modern Executives
The search for a light-weight and small laptop
First Impressions of the EeePC as a Travel Laptop

The suggestion goes that, in the same manner that we have dropped the “www(dot)” when we say or write a website address, we could drop the end of the address as well.

Seth disagrees with the suggestion, using the good argument that the (dot)com has become a way to say “this is my website address”.

However, the most obvious argument for not dropping the “(dot)com” when telling people your website address is that… many website addresses do not end with ”com”! 

My own website is “.org”, which is a pretty common website extension, as is “.net”, not to mention all the non-american websites with local site extensions, such as “.co.uk”, “.fr” and many others.

My take is this: if you don’t want to appear like an uneducated and domeering american website owner, don’t drop the “.com” when marketing your website address! Ackowledge that the rest of the world exists and you might get more readers/visitors from the World Wide Web

 Additional resources:

 Seth Godin’s “drop the dot?” http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/drop-the-dot.html

You can access it by going to Tools—>Customize—>Edit Program Parameters (acad.pgp)

It’s a text file containing user-defined keyboard shortcuts for any AutoCAD command you want to use. It comes with some default shortcuts but you are free to change them, or add to them.

The syntax is pretty simple and self explanatory; just copy an existing line and adapt as appropriate.

When setting up a new version of AutoCAD or moving to a different computer around the office, i always customise my pgp file before doing anything else.

If you haven’t done it before, i suggest you take one hour to think about how you work and the commands you use a lot.

Next, you have to think about your physical position, relative to the keyboard, so you can pick the best shortcuts for you. Do you use your mouse a lot?

If you are like me and use it a lot, a good trick is to keep the shortcuts in the left side of the keyboard, so you can have your left hand on the keyboard and your right hand on your mouse.

My most used shorcuts include only one letter, such as “a”, ”c” and so on. 

The next level includes shorcuts with two of the same letters, such as “aa”, “cc” and so on.

Then, i go up to three of the same letters, such as “aaa”.

I find it easier to type two of the same letter, such as “aa”, than “ae” for example, but it’s a personal choice. Do what works for you

Additional resources:

Improved productivity in AutoCAD from cadmonkey.com at http://www.cadmonkey.com/tut4.htm

Not only it provides you with a neat table detailing the various options (walking, cycling, public transport, car), but it also gives estimated cost, estimated carbon emissions, and the amount of calories you would burn.

And if all this information above wasn’t enough, it also provides you with an altitude profile for the cycling option, which is really useful as Brighton is very hilly.

The design is simple and effective.  The main colours are black and white, with an additional touch of purple pink used for links and part of the logo. Additionally, while the website carries out the search, it displays a funny or surprising anecdote or statistics about transport underneath the customary “loading” icon.

An example of simple, beautiful, user friendly and efficient design for all other journey planners websites to be benchmarked against.

Edit (17th April 2008):

Following comments from reader Mark Aberdour from Bricycles (Brighton, Hove and District Cycling Group at http://www.bricycles.org.uk/), it appears that there is a problem with the backend of the website, whereby it doesn’t always display the best cycling route, and recommends cycling routes similar to the car routes. This is clearly an issue and indicates that all the design efforts have gone into the front end, which is really neat and user friendly, but isn’t actually efficient at delivering the information people go there for in the first place.

What about your city’s journey planner? Is it user friendly and accurate?

Additional resources:

Brighton’s Journey Planner http://www.journeyon.co.uk/ 

Legible London http://www.legiblelondon.info

It is a sign of the times that, for marketing reasons, Apple has decided this was a good campaign. Apple is in the initial phase of the marketing campaign, going after the potential “early adopters”. When you see the ad, you are induced into thinking that yes, it would be cool if you could check your Facebook account wherever you were. I’m not a huge Facebook user (I login a few times a week) but it almost worked on me!

Now, forward two years, when all the competing mobile phone brands will have developped handsets similar to the iPhone. Are we all going to log into our Facebook account at every spare second we have?

This morning, i got an email from a musician and producer, suggesting that we collaborate on a song together (along with writing this blog, i write songs). I was in two minds about it for various reasons, so i turned to my partner, asking for advice. My partner pointed out that i didn’t have to answer straight away, that i could think about it for a few days. This answer almost shocked me, because i had somehow convinced myself that i had to reply straight away because i was sitting in front of my computer reading my emails.

I love communication gadgets, i was an early adopter of email, i’m on MySpace, Facebook and many other social networking websites, and i tend to reply to texts and emails as soon as i get them. But it’s good to remind yourself that you don’t have to.

It’s OK to take time to think about things. It’s OK to take time to enjoy what you are doing, be it reading a book, watching a film, having a conversation with your friends, without checking your email, your mobile phone and your numerous social networking accounts. It’s OK to enjoy what is physically around you and live in the moment.

Additional resources:

You wind the device up and then it works for a certain amount of time. When it runs out, you can wind it up again.

Since then, a few other devices have been developped based on a similar design. Wind-up torches are now very popular, wind-up mobile chargers are starting to emerge, and Tevor Baylis’ company, Freeplay, has announced the wind-up media player.

I might be asking for too much technically but i’d like it if someone came up with a design for a wind-up kettle, a wind-up digital camera, and a wind-up alarm-clock. 

Additional resources:

 Wind-up radio http://keetsa.com/blog/eco-friendly/wind-up-radio/

Eco media player cranks up the volume http://stephenfry.com/blog/?p=28

The bollards use solar energy to generate lighting for pedestrian walkways. Not only are they good for the environment, they are also quicker and cheaper to install, as they require no digging of ducting trenches into the ground.

While this solution might not be adequate in countries with low sunlight, more and more companies provide such devices.

Solion is one of them, and is based in the UK. Their website does not give details of who their clients are but there is a picture of a curved sollar cell for street furniture attached to the top of a London bus stop flag. As a londoner, i cannot say i have noticed them so far but i will keep my eyes open

Additional resources:

Source article on Redlang Shire Council  http://www.infolink.com.au/articles/Solar-power-lights-up-the-Sunshine-State_z159353.htm

Solion http://www.solion.co.uk/commercial.htm

The options are to either select a less dense scale for the hatch or to split the hatch area in two smaller areas, hatching each of them separately.

Well, there is no need to compromise on the scale you want or to do any extra work!

You can fix this if you type the following in the command line:

(setenv “MaxHatch” “10000000″)

MaxHatch is an environment variable that determines the maximum number of entities in a hatch area. In the case of the “dots” hatch, if you use a small scale, you will have many dots. If you reach the maximum allowed by your setting, you will get the “hatch spacing too dense” error message.

Luckily, you are able to change the value of this environment variable. Set it to 10000000 and you’ll be sorted

Additional resources:

AutoCAD 2004 customization tutorial: environment variables http://www.caddigest.com/subjects/autocad/tutorials/select/parsai_environment_variables.htm

Working with environment variables through AutoLISP http://hyperpics.blogs.com/beyond_the_ui/2005/12/working_with_en.html 

Before, it was pretty straight-forward. You picked up a physical instrument, you learnt how to play by practising scales and so on to improve your finger dexterity, you went into a studio, you played your bit, someone pressed the record button and presto, the single was ready for release.

Then, synths and samplers arrived. Synths could produce sounds an acoustic instrument was incapable of and samplers would allow a new generation of musicians to manipulate audio without being restricted to thinking in terms of notes and chords, physical instruments and finger dexterity.

Later, computers arrived. So synths and samplers became “soft”, people could record at home and mix and edit in a way much easier than the old way, when you had to slice a tape to make an edit.

Well, here comes the new audio revolution.

Almost a decade ago, AutoTune took the world of recording by storm. It was a bit of software that allowed people to change the pitch of audio. Let’s say your singer couldn’t sing in tune - well, run it through AutoTune and you could fix it! At least, it was the theory. Various companies launched similar products, and Celemony came to dominate the market with “Melodyne”, which could not only change the pitch but also the length and the position of a note.

Celemony is about to unleash the next musical revolution. Up until now, their product was only able to work with monophonic audio; that means, audio that only contains one note at a time. So it would work with the human voice, or a flute, or a trumpet, but not with guitar chords or a piano.  

Well, they have just announced Melodyne 2, to be released in October. It will be able to recognise each note within an audio recording, and you will be able to change their pitch, length and position individually!

Samplers and synths created new ways of working and new musical styles, such as dance music, electro, and hip-hop. Will Celemony Melodyne 2 do the same?

 Additional resources:

Watch Celemony video about their new technology http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

Music Thing article on Peter Neubacker, the man behind Celemony http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2008/03/celemony-melodyne-dna-has-this-man-done.html

Following a trip to Kenya, the student was inspired by the energy of the children and kept thinking about ways to use this to generate electricity.

He hit upon the idea of a see-saw and started work on his design. He has since won two grants, which will enable him to develop and test his see-saw design. His dream now is to design a whole energy-generating playground.

Simple inventions are often the best. For me, this is in the same category as wind-up radios and torches. So simple, yet so effective.

Additional resources:

BBC News article on Dan Sheridan http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7301354.stm

Coventry University news item on Dan Sheridan http://www.coventry.ac.uk/latestnewsandevents/a/4352