The Discover Radio App is available in the Android Market Place

One thing that I find irritating about internet radio, is the fact that it is well designed to be listened to on your computer, but not on your phone.  Smartphones actually play internet radio very well, the issue is that for most, it is a little tricky to first of all, find a media player that can play streaming audio but then, it’s even more tricky to find out the internet radio address for the station you need.  These addresses are rarely publicised visually and require digging through website or playlist code to track down.

The station that I was having issues with was Dundee University’s own Discover Radio.  After tracking down the address for the radio stream, I found it tricky to find an easy to use player on Android that I could just feed this address.  This seemed odd to me as the Android MediaPlayer class can play these streams natively.

So I decided to make an Android App to do this for me.  The Discover Radio App is now available to download from the Android Market Place.

A few tweaks of the code and the Strathclyde Fusion app was made available too.

With a friend of mine being a DJ at Strathclyde University’s Strathclyde Fusion, I’d already become irritated by the lack of web player on their website, the link provided to listen to their station only produced a windows media player playlist which, when I’m working on my Mac, is not natively supported.  So with a few tweaks to the code, out came the Strathclyde Fusion app too.

Now Discover Radio, being a student radio station, has a habit of going off air, mainly at night or on Sundays when there aren’t enough students on campus to keep it running.  With this in mind, I wanted to listen to my other local radio stations, TayFM, Wave102 and TayAM.

The Dundee Radio App lets you listen to all four of Dundee's radio stations.

Once again, no apps existed for these stations and so I compiled all of my efforts into one single app, Dundee Radio for Android will allow you to listen to all four radio stations native to the fair city of Dundee.

Being a bit of a fanatic for HCI (Human Computer Interaction) I’m often spotting little ways that an interface can be improved.  Today it was Google’s Image Search.

When we search for an image on Google, after entering the keyword for what we’re searching for, our eyes instantly go to the pictures offered to us.  Often though, a more refined search is required and while Google does offer an selection of related searches sometimes, I feel that the image search should be a more visual experience, so why not offer these suggestions in a visual way too?

The video above shows my idea for how this could be done, it would be nice to see Google doing something like this in the future.

P.S.  Google, I am looking for a job and I do like warm weather -wink wink-

Spot that little book button near the top? Wonder what's in there.

While most of us are enjoying the new email system at Dundee Uni hosted by the nice folk at Microsoft’s Office 365, many of us are noticing something else new… the spam!

I may have a theory as to why this spam has suddenly started pushing its way through to us in loads like we have never had before.  Many of us have chosen to syncronise our online Outlook account with Outlook on our PCs, it’s simple to do and it means our emails are available on our computers offline, but it’s not just syncing your emails.

The complete address book of Dundee University.

If you are using Outlook on your PC right now, click the Address Book button on your toolbar, what do you see?

That’s right, the entire address book including emails of students and phone numbers of staff is synced directly onto your computer, not such a big deal right?  Think again.

There are litterally thousands of people who are potentially using Microsoft Outlook to read their Dundee University emails.  What happens when just one of them gets a virus?

One of the major characteristics of a virus is that it spreads itself.  The most common method of doing this is through spam and if you have a virus on your computer, where’s the first place it’s going to look for people to send emails to?  In Outlook’s Address book.

It just takes one person using Outlook to get a virus and thus give away every single email address of Dundee University Students and Staff.  I’m not just saying it’s going to happen, I’m saying it almost certainly has happened and it’s a fair bet that somewhere out there, there’s a complete list of our email address on someone’s server ready to use for whatever they want to send us.

You know what, I use the public boards feature that I created on www.myagilityboard.com too much.  I think it’s far to useful to withhold from users.

In my previous post I mentioned that the Free Public boards would only be available for a limited time, I’ve changed my mind.  These will always be a feature available to every signup on My Agility Board as standard, enjoy.

I’ve found myself using My Agility Board more and more for projects. It started as just a quick website to fix an issue with the assortment of Stickies apps that come with various operating systems by putting them online (in the cloud for those of you who fall for that kind of sales speak) so that I could get hold of them anywhere, on my PC, My Mac, my Smartphone and my Tablet.

But I’ve discovered that I’m using it for my own projects. My Honours Project for instance has had all the tasks that I had to do on it transferred onto My Agility Board. This pet project has suddenly become something actually useful.

And it’s not just me, I have friends in my class who have done the same, they’ve started using the site to keep track of their own projects and to keep notes, therefore I have updated the database to encrypt everything, make sure it’s private should anyone manage to get a glimpse of the data stored. My friends also managed to suggest an important new feature too, the ability to pick note colours.

One thing I decided would be useful would be the ability to share my board with people without having to give them the password, this would be really handy for showing how a project is progressing or just for taking notes and showing them to friends and colleagues.

Of course, I wouldn’t want everything to be public, just the notes I wanted to share. I’m so sure that this would be useful that I think that people would be willing to pay for the feature, however, for now, I’m giving it away to everyone who signs up so that I can get some understanding of how much people use it. An example of the public board for the username “myagilityboard” can be found at www.myagilityboard.com/myagilityboard.

So to summarise the new features since my previous post:

• Ability to make boards public, limited time only free lifetime pro accounts to all new users.
• Colour coded stickies, choose from 8 different colours.
• Compatibility with Internet Explorer, it’s not pretty but it works.
• Encryption, your notes cannot be read should someone manage to get into the database.
• Various bug fixes.

Just sign up to get your own free sticky notes board.

One of the most basic techniques of Agile is the use of a board with sticky notes on it to represent things that are to be done, in progress or have been completed.

I wanted something that could represent this Agile Board online, something free and simple, so I’ve created www.myagilityboard.com.

To get your own free sticky notes board online that even works on touch screen devices, just go and register and get going.

Update:  I’ve added the ability to change note colours and will soon be launching a feature that allows for you make your notes public to the world if you want.

In 1998 Apple released what in my opinion, saved the Apple Computer market, they released the iMac.  This computer started a huge change in the computer market and introduced powerful but beautiful machines into our homes and created a fair few, brand new Apple fanboys… and girls.  What a shame they’re 11 years old now and really no use to us now… or are they?

I was 10 years old when the iMac was released and I was already a computer nerd so could appreciate a great many things about the iMac that were real game changers.  The first point was obvious.

A computer was always easily identified by two large beige boxes.  One of those boxes would be a large CRT monitor (as flat screen monitors were too expensive and under developed to be the norm) and one would be the actual computer which either sat under the monitor on the desk, or stood as a tower on the floor.  Even now, most desktop computers consist as this tower and monitor style though you’ll find it difficult to find one in beige, in fact, if I gave you a thousand pounds and sent you out into the city to buy a new model beige desktop PC, I’d let you keep the change and the PC if you found one.

The iMac contained the whole computer in one unit, in fact, at first glance most people assumed it to be just a monitor with speakers built in.  At closer inspection though, this monitor had a CD drive on the front of it and ports for the keyboard and mouse to plug into on the sides.  There was no tower.  And this thing was anything but beige.

This thing was anything but beige.

While Apple claimed that the i in iMac stood for Internet and also I as in the pronoun, the real meaning for this letter was not missed by the design community, the i in iMac stood for Jonathan Ive, the head designer at Apple who as it happens, is now Sir Jonathan Ive after being knighted as part of the Queen’s New Year Honours list and it was Ive’s design that really opened people’s eyes to Apple.

Having a whole machine in one unit wasn’t new to Apple, in fact, the first Apple Macintosh computer was an all in one.  What Ive did was to make the damn thing look good!  iMacs were colourful, rounded, even the mouse was circular, these things looked good.  This was a game changer but one of many.  That sexy looking body caught your attention, now look closer and take a look at what else is new.  I remember the total shock that people had when they realised there was no floppy disk drive.  Apple knew that these things were not going to be needed soon and so did what many were avoiding, they took it out of their computer.  Then they did something big, USB.  Every iMac came with two USB ports with an extra one on your keyboard and that was it, Apple had set the standard.  These computers were great, they didn’t take up as much room as a conventional computer and they didn’t need to be hidden away from your interior designer.

Now of course, we all have a good looking computer, whether you’re running PC or mac.  Hell, my desktop computer is golden, the front of it designed to resemble a classic Nokia mobile phone.  We all learnt a lesson in design with the iMac but it was a daring step, they did look pretty radical and perhaps, after several different versions, the current iMacs on the market aren’t quite as exciting to look at.  But then, times have changed haven’t they, 1998 was fourteen years ago and now it’s 2012.  Well I’ve still got my old iMac, and I don’t want to throw it out.

Bringing the iMac G3 back to life

New iMacs are a very different creature now, they have Intel processors in them just like Windows computers.  Those old original iMacs had PowerPC G3 processors.  These are a very different chip, they run differently, they’re built differently.  Today, you can install Windows on an Apple computer, back then, you couldn’t, the PowerPC chip just isn’t able to run it.  That isn’t because it wasn’t a good chip, it’s because it just runs in a different way than what Windows was made for.  But as things have moved on, now even Apple’s own software won’t run on it either.

The last three versions of Apple’s Mac OS X have been for Intel computers only, Apple turned its back on all those people who had bought computers from them in the past and told them, “if you want to keep up with us, you’ve got to buy a whole new computer.”

My iMac G3 was left with Mac OS X Tiger as it’s final upgrade, after that, it was left to rot, abandoned.  Apple kept making new operating systems: Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion… my iMac got nothing.  People made software for new Apple Operating Systems, Firefox, Microsoft Office… my iMac started gathering dust as I started using newer machines that could run software that it was too old for.

Firefox doesn't get made for old Mac OSX

And why should they make software for it?  There’s no good reason for a software company like Mozilla to bring out it’s brand new Firefox 9 for Mac OS X Tiger or earlier when everyone is using newer computers.  But I’ll tell you something, Firefox 9 can still run on my iMac G3, just as long as it’s running something better than Tiger, it’s just not made by Apple.

There are still modern, up to date operating systems being made that work just fine on the PowerPC architecture and if you’re feeling brave, you should take a look at them because through Linux, you can recycle that old computer that you had given up on and give it a new lease of life!

This weekend gone, I’ve given my iMac a copy of Ubuntu and I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not just running programs that Tiger couldn’t run, it’s running faster!

My iMac G3 Running Firefox 9 on Ubuntu 10.04

Installing Ubuntu on iMac G3

Installing Ubuntu Linux on these machine is actually pretty straight forward thanks to the Ubuntu Community who see to the release of PowerPC compatible Live CDs for it.  Though there are more up to date versions you can get (and feel free to try them), I chose to use version 10.04 which is the official Long Term Support version.  In other words, the only one that the folks who make Ubuntu feel is as bug free as it should be.

You can download yourself a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at this here link that will work on your iMac’s Power PC G3 processor.

There is a bug!

Ubuntu won’t work straight off the disk with the iMac G3 as it can’t quite cope with the graphics on board, resulting in a blank screen.  It’s easy to fix though, just make sure that at the first prompt after booting your machine from the CD, you don’t just type “live” like it suggests, type “live video=ofonly” and then hit enter.

This will start Ubuntu in Low Graphics mode.  Once you’re in, double click to install Ubuntu on the hard drive.  Once you’re done, you’ll want to fix that graphics problem properly, it’s easy to do, just create a text file and copy the text found at this little linky into it.  Now save that file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot your machine.  Done, you can now get installing all your new software like Firefox 9.  Be warned, there’s a few things that won’t want to be installed on a PowerPC chip, like Chrome for instance but you’ll still get a lot more on there then you were able to before.  Happy recycling.

Chip Counter is a free app, now available in the Android Market Place, that lets you set the values of different coloured poker chips and then simply say how many of each one you have, giving you a quick and instant total of how much you have.

Update: Chip Counter now has a handy Poker Hand Ranking Screen for people who struggle to remember them all.

Just say how many of each chip you have and touch the "Calculate" button.

Recently I’ve started playing poker with my friends and every time we do this we get to the end and as you do, we start counting up our chips.  Problem is, we always made mistakes and would end up counting and recounting our chips, adding up the total in our head or digging out pieces of paper to keep track of our progress.

Ok so maybe we’re just not that fantastic at mental maths, I’m a computer scientist, not a mathematician, so I thought “surely there’s an app for that?”  I grabbed my phone and searched, there was not!  Or at least, not one that matched my search terms.

Now we have just been working on a project at uni which resulted in us deciding to make an Android app so I had literally just taught myself how to make Android apps and seeing as the idea of counting chips like this was really, ridiculously simple, I figured I’d just write it.  So here it is, Chip Counter for Android.

When you open it, you’ll see a selection of eleven different coloured chips, just put the value of the chips that you want to use (I only needed four of them) and hit save.  Now, when ever you open the app, you’ll see your selected chips, just type in how many of each chip you have and touch the “Calculate” button.

I hope you like it, I may make it look prettier later but for now, it does the trick.  (Update: have now made the buttons and title bar have a gradient and curved corners.)

Chip Counter now has a handy screen to show you different poker hands that can be reached through your menu button.

Getting in the Market Place

I’ve only very recently switched to Android and of course one thing I knew about the Android Market Place compared to the Apple App Store that I’ve been using for three years is that it is a lot easier for developers to get in.

The first and most obvious thing is that to become an Apple iOS developer, I have to pay $99… every year.  Android on the other hand is a $25 one off registration fee.

There is something that bothers me about Android though.  In the Apple App Store, I know that every app has been checked and approved by Apple.  This means that Apple believe it is safe for me to use it.  When I submitted my App to the market however, it was instantly available to download!

Now on some level, they don’t need to be as thorough as I have to place in my code exactly what permissions my app needs (in this case, none) and so there’s not as much risk, people know what they’re getting into, i.e. they know that an app will be looking at their contacts or that an app needs location data.  But that’s not stopping me from lying about everything else.  My app might not have been a chip counter, what if it had been filled with hardcore pornography?  (it is not).  It does make me take a second take though, I’m sure I’ll be more careful about what I do and don’t install on my phone in future, now that I know that anything can get in the market place without people looking at it.  Or perhaps I’m missing something obvious.

What do you think?  Should the Android Market screen all apps?  What if it raised the cost to developers?

I’m trying something new, last night I was bored and like so many at a loss for something to do, I ended up on Google, typing random words and clicking through the results.  I happened upon a game in which I clicked the link for results page numbered seven then tapped the down arrow key seven times then hit enter (seven is a favourite number of mine).  Soon my boredom became so chronic that I could no longer think of random words so, like so many at a loss for words, I ended up typing out QWERTY.  Upon playing my game of sevens, I became engrossed in a site, over a decade untouched, about the Dvorak keyboard layout.

Note: Before starting this post, I started a stopwatch.

My Macbook after a bit of surgery to convert it to Dvorak.

I remember my first day at secondary school.  I was just twelve years old (though my aspergers gave me a mental age of around 10 I think) and I hadn’t even left primary school yet.  It was an “induction day” in which we were given tours of the school and samples of different classes.  I of course remember the Information Technology class.  I couldn’t tell you what was said, needless to say, it was all very basic stuff that I already knew; what I remember is my fascination of the room.

The most computers I had seen in one room up until that point had been two… in my living room.  But here before me was a room with easily thirty computers in it and amazingly they were all, every single one of them, on the internet!  We didn’t have internet at home, Dad said that it was “too expensive,” it would be a few months yet that I would convince him otherwise and perform my first PC surgery to install a dial up modem.  But it was not the internet that caught my fancy that day, I knew that the internet was far, far too big for me to read through in a fifty minute class, I would need a whole day to do that, no, it was the posters on the wall that caught my attention.

It was really one specific poster, a picture of a computer keyboard.  Different columns of keys were colour coded and numbered between 2 and 5 with the space bar numbered 1.  I knew instantly what this meant from my books at home for learning piano.  This was the secret to touch typing.  This was very exciting to me as I so very wanted to be able to type without having to stare at my own fingers, then up to the screen then down again and so on.  It was tedious and knowing that others out there could type without this strain filled me with envy.

That night, I went home to my computer and started practising.  Very quickly I realised that the F and the J had little bumps to tell me where to place my index fingers on the middle row as a kind of starting point.  I later learnt that these bumped keys are known as the “home keys” and the middle row, the “home row.”  By the end of the summer holidays and before my real first day of secondary school had even arrived, I had taught my self to touch type.  The tedious IT classes using the horrid ‘Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor’ software were used mainly as a race than anything else to see how quickly I could escape them as by this point, these classes were not needed on me.  Few others in my class seemed even interested in learning to type and eleven years later, I still meet people who act like I’m some kind of magician when I turn my head to look at them and my fingers continue to tap away over the keys.

A quick test today using this site tells me that I can type at 62 words per minute.  Not lightening fast I’ll admit but I’m pleased with it.  But reading through the articles I found last night told me that this could be improved by using the Dvorak Keyboard layout.  Assuming I avoid switching between the two too much, it promised that I would be back to my normal typing speed within two to three weeks, if not, faster.  A major benefit boasted was that I would also be less likely to find my hands cramping up, an issue that plagues me on a regular basis.  I set about with my pen knife at hand, modifying my keyboard.

My Macbook halfway through Dvorak conversion.

This took about an hour to do and I’m sure anyone who has ever had to  replace just one of the keys on a laptop keyboard can guess why.

Now I’ve always found typing tutors to be more a hindrance than anything else so I’d chosen to use my original tactic of diving right in to touch typing.  After around five minutes, I discovered that this was not going to work.  I was wrong, when I started typing on Qwerty, I didn’t start just touch typing, no, I had to spend a long part of my early computer days hunting and jabbing at letters; only when I’d learnt where the letters were was I then able to start learning to type at any real speed.  So that’s how you find me now, my first day of Dvorak, back to my computer childhood, hunting for my letters and jabbing them with frustration when I finally find them.  I’ll keep you updated.

Time to type this post: 1 hour 31 minutes.

As many of you may know, as well as a computer scientist, I’m also a YouTuber.  Last summer I tried an experiment, I wanted to see if I could make a daily show during my time off from uni, of course, any daily show needs a topic and I didn’t much like the idea of doing a daily vlog again.

Well as it happened, channel four’s final series of Big Brother was about to begin and so, with a topic at hand, I had my show.  The Alternative Big Brother Show or ABBS as it became known on Twitter, was a minor success.  With most shows acquiring at least a few hundred to thousands of views in 24 hours and Channel 4 flying me down to appear on magazine show Big Brother’s Little Brother after winning a video competition which I can now reveal, they contacted me directly and told me to enter as they wanted me on the show!

One reason for its appeal was that my show gave a summary of the events in the house for that day at the end of the day.  The difference being that Channel Four’s own show, wouldn’t cover it until the next day.  So what you saw on TV was actually the round up of the day before.  Makes sense considering it would take time to edit it all together, something I discovered myself.  Another reason is probably the fact that I didn’t actually like Big Brother and so much of what I said in my show involved making fun of the house mates.  That said, even after calling on everybody to evict Sunshine Martyn from the house, Sunshine and I have remained in friendly contact through Twitter.

As it has turned out, this was not the UK’s final series of Big Brother as Channel Five has now gone and bought the rights to the series and the twelth series will air very soon indeed.

Return of Alternative Big Brother Show?

So I’ve received several messages recently, either through Twitter, FormSpring, Facebook and YouTube, asking me if I will be bringing back The Alternative Big Brother Show, even Sunshine herself has offered to co-host the series with me.  The answer I’m afraid is no.

As much as I loved making ABBS, it was probably the most exhausting thing I have done.  Each episode required a 24 hour live feed of The House in my living room which was watched as much as possible with notes being taken.  I would trawl Twitter and Big Brother sites looking for news.  Then, at midnight every day, I would write the script, film it, edit it, write the description for it, upload it and market it on Facebook and Twitter.  Each night I would get to bed at 03:00 and need to be up again in the morning to do it all over again.

So why can’t I do this again now in 2011?  I coped before after all and I did enjoy doing it.  Well the answer is rather dull I’m afraid.  I have a job, I’m now working on a Student Internship.  To top it off, the new Big Brother hasn’t started yet so if I were to cover it in my evenings, I’d likely still be covering it in my University time.

Anything else from Wormholer693?

The good news is, I’m not gone from YouTube, for those of you who have stuck around, you will have seen lots of new videos done in my free time and now, I’m pleased to announce a new web series from us at Wormholer693!

While not on the same scale as ABBS, Postcards From Eddy is a less regular animated web series which illustrates the postcards I receive from my Brother Eddy which are, to say the least, unusual.  The first episode has premièred on the Wormholer693 YouTube channel today.  I hope that, while not as fast paced as ABBS, you’ll appreciate the comedy in these as Eddy explains his turmoils with The Hordes of Consutramang, Seduction of Tribal girls and even, where sheep come from!

In the mean time, thank you for your support and I hope you enjoy Big Brother on channel five.