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.

I’ve always taken the time to prepare carefully for Valentines Day, custom hand picked bouquets of flowers, gifts, beds covered in rose petals, romantic meals, perhaps made by myself, perhaps at a restaurant. Well, with this being another year where I appear single on this day I had resigned myself with the statement, “Fuck girls! Fuck them all!” (Ironically, this also remains one of my life goals).

As you can imagine, I prepared myself for the day this morning in depression and preemptive disgust at the romantic events I would no doubt witness throughout the day. I showered and I dressed and put loud music in my ear and opened my door, my path was blocked!

I observed in front of me something I instantly recognised, a box. No not just any box but a delivery box for flowers! Sitting just outside my door was a large box of flowers! Dismissing the oddity of someone giving a man some flowers, all my feelings of disgust and depression melted away, some secret admirer had bought ME flowers for valentines day.

Or were they a secret admirer? Perhaps not, I leaned over to investigate the label, perhaps a return address, that’s when I saw it, there, written under the field of Recipient… my flatmate’s name.  The delivery guy had put the box outside the wrong door.

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.

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.

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.

The good news is, they’re using Microsoft Exchange Active Sync which means instant emails, calendar and contact syncing directly to your phone. There’s also IMAP if your phone or computer doesn’t want to do Exchange.

On Android
These settings should also work on iPhone but I haven’t had a chance to try them out on one yet so will update this blog post when I do :)

1. Go to Settings, Accounts & Sync, Add Account, Exchange ActiveSync, Manual Setup
2. Enter settings like so:

Email Address	apbarratt@dundee.ac.uk
Server Address	pod51014.outlook.com
Domain	dundee.ac.uk
Username	apbarratt@dundee.ac.uk
Password	This is the password you use for all things uni.
This server requires an encrypted SSL connection	Yes

3. Now you’ll be asked what you want to sync, I’ve chosen to sync my Mail, Contacts and Calendar though I’m sure many people will only want their mail.
4. You’ll also be asked how you want your mail to arrive. If you choose Push, your mail will be pushed onto your phone the moment it arrives on the server, this is the most convenient but may not be good for your phone’s battery life. You can also choose to have your phone check every 15 minutes or indeed, only check when you ask it to.
5. You’ll be asked for an account name, you can call it anything you want, I called mine “University.”

Windows (Outlook) and Apple Mac Mail
I know what you’re thinking, why would I group these two computers in the same place? Because, setting them up is identical!

1. On Windows, open “Control Panel”, on Mac, open “System Preferences”.
2. On Windows, choose “Mail”, on Mac, choose “Mail, Contacts and Calendars”.
3. On Windows, choose “Mail Accounts” then “New…” and click Next, on Mac, click the + button and choose “Microsoft Exchange.”
4. Guess what, Macs and Windows are equally clever, just type your email address and password, it’ll figure out the rest, YAY!

Everything Else (including Blackberry) – IMAP Settings
Many devices and programs do not support Microsoft Exchange, but don’t worry, you can still use IMAP settings, this is the same system that the old Groupwise system used except, because it’s run by microsoft, it should be more reliable.

So in what ever you’re setting up on, choose to create your new account and when prompted for the account type, choose imap, you could also choose POP but I do not recommend POP, I’ll explain why further down.

And that’s it, enjoy.

If your phone was slightly different, leave a comment below to let others know.

Why not POP???
I said further up to not to use POP, why not though? After all, most email addresses you get from companies like Tiscali will use POP. Well, POP is designed for getting your emails at home, on your computer. But once you download your emails, they are deleted from the server, meaning you can only get them on one device, once. So you download your emails on your phone, you can’t get them on your computer. Which ever device downloads the emails first, that’s the one those emails are on. That even means you couldn’t see them on the web mail website once you download them on something else.

IMAP and Exchange are a different matter, the emails stay on the server meaning no matter what device downloads them, other devices can look at them too, even on the website, see why that is better? If not, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can make it clearer :)

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.

So this post is more for people at Dundee University.

One of the most irritating things about the email system at Dundee University, is setting it up on your own computer.  With a little enquiry you might find out that this can be done using IMAP and by just Google searching for “Dundee IMAP” you’ll find a page with settings on how to do this.

These settings are wrong!

The IMAP settings on the Dundee University website have been incorrect for the entirety of the three and a bit years that I have been here so to save you some pain, here are the correct ones to be able to receive but also send emails on any device (this includes your email enabled smartphone).

Dundee University IMAP Settings

Incoming

• Email Address: Your dundee email address, i.e. abexample@dundee.ac.uk
• Username and Password:  The username and password you use to log into groupwise normally.
  (this is often the same as what you log into uni computers with)
• IMAP Server: imap.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: SSL
• Server Port: 993
  (This is usually set automatically by your device)

Outgoing

• Username and Password: Same as above
• SMTP Server: smtp.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: TLS (yes, TLS, not SSL)
• Server Port: 25

This is what works for me, leave a comment below if it doesn’t for you or to tell us about your other Dundee University Email woes, of which I’m sure we all have many.