Archive for 'Technology'
Retro Fans Rejoice
Posted on April 27, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Technology.
I just heard about this site yesterday and it’s absolutely wonderful. They have a ton of the old ZX Spectrum games available to play online and your scores are included in various league tables. A perfect 21st Century improvement to 20th Century games.
Most of your old faves are there, I’ve just been playing the ever-brilliant Jet Set Willy. I love just clicking around and being reminded of many happy hours as a teenager in the 80’s.
Sure it’s nostalgic but it’s also bloody good fun. When the graphics were that bad, playability became the number one aim and that hasn’t diminished over the years.
So are you the best ZX Spectrum player in the world?
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Recipe and Gardening advice by SMS and Web
Posted on March 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Food, Gardening, Technology.
We’re just playing around with a few ideas on a site called Jaiku this morning (they were bought by Google a few months back). The idea is that you can have discussion channels on particular topics like technology, politics, Bandon GAA, whatever. What makes it (and other great sites like Twitter) so powerful is that you can interact with it entirely through SMS on your phone.
So this morning I created two non-techie ones that I thought might appeal to my more foodie readers. The first is #recipes and the second is #gardening. In both cases the idea was that they could be used for requesting advice (in addition to general chitchat).
The #recipes one was suggested by Michael Kiely and he thought it would be great if you were out shopping and spotted an ingredient and wanted suggestions for mini-recipes so you’d know what else to buy whilst you were there. A quick SMS, a bit more shopping and you might get some suggestions back by SMS.
I thought of the #gardening one and it could also be used in a similar way to #recipes when in a Garden Centre and wondering e.g. is X worth buying, it Y over-priced etc.
Of course you can use both channels on the web too (and obviously type a lot more than 140 characters!).
There are two flies in the ointment. The first is that it’ll need more people on these channels to make them work and the second is that joining Jaiku is officially closed at the minute. Both can be solved in one fell swoop by heading over to Jaiku Invites, setup by Ciarán Rooney and requesting an invite to join.
Give it a go. It’s just a bit of fun and I’ve already had two suggestions on how to cook the fennel bulbs I bought on a whim in Lidl during the week. Any problems using it, just pop a comment here.
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Have a Small Business and need IT help?
Posted on March 19, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Technology.
I know there are tons of small businesses out there struggling with IT, even basics like anti-virus and e-mail. Unfortunately, lack of knowledge can often mean you aren’t even aware that there are better and cheaper ways of doing what you are doing.
Last Autumn, the County Enterprise Boards launched Tech-Check to address this widespread problem. It’s a simple but highly effective initiative to help businesses sort out their most pressing technology problems.
For €150, you get up to two 3-hour sessions with an IT expert who will go through every aspect of your IT usage and needs. They then come back with a report highlighting your highs and lows and a small set of specific recommendations to improve things.
Disclaimer: I am one of the people used by the Cork CEBs to provide this service.
Unfortunately, the uptake on Tech-Check has not met expectations. I think there are a few reasons for this and I hope I can clarify things a bit.
- It’s not for IT companies, it’s for any small business (from 1-50 people) who needs guidance on any aspect of technology whether it’s mobile phone usage, internet access, security or even getting a small web-site up for less than €250
- You are getting far more than €150 worth of consultancy, it is very heavily subsidised and I think the value for money is amazing
- The CEBs are very sensitive to conflicts of interest and the consultants cannot offer their services to actually implement the suggestions they make
- The feedback I have received from clients so far has been phenomenal. I’ve advised everything from one man training businesses and solicitors to multi person sports centres and they have all ended up with better setups and in some cases, saving lots of money.
- You do not need to know the first thing about IT or technology to apply for a Tech-Check. The less you know, the more help we can provide.
Ignoring the fact that I help provide Tech-Checks, I genuinely think this is the smartest thing to come out of the public service in years. There are thousands of businesses who can benefit and your entire investment can be just €150. I think you’d be nuts not to sign up, even if you think you don’t need it!
Contact:
- West Cork Enterprise Board
- South Cork Enterprise Board
- Cork City Enterprise Board
- North Cork Enterprise Board
5 Comments
Creative Camp comes to Kilkenny
Posted on March 6, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
As someone who grew up in Kilkenny from the age of 6-18, I was very excited to see that Creative Camp is on this weekend. Not only that, but it’s on in the wonderful Kilkenny Castle where I spent many a day trying to find secret tunnels as a kid.
If you are wondering what it is all about, the idea is that the attendees are the presenters. It is in the BarCamp tradition of “unconferences” where the agenda for the day is very much made up on the day. You might think this is a recipe for disaster but the success of BarCamps in Cork, Waterford, Dublin, Belfast, Galway and PodCamp would suggest otherwise.
PodCamp was held a few months back in Kilkenny and was particularly interesting since it broke out of the “techie geeky” community and had many attendees and contributors from the world of media and the arts.
The aim of Creative Camp is to continue on in that vein and really get a broad cross-section of those in technology, arts, media and creativity to meet and exchange ideas and experiences.
If you are in the South East on Saturday, I highly recommend that you attend. It is completely free but it would be polite to register so they have some idea of numbers. The success of each *Camp is dependent on active participation by all who attend.
Some of the topics that have already been suggested for the day include:
- Outsourcing your development workload to free your creative time
- Branding an Arts organisation from the inside
- GPS For Developers
- Writing and promoting your book with social media
- How To Blog Like A Boy
- The Art Of Software Development
- Creating a vibrant, connected Arts Community in the South East
- How Friends Communicate
- GPS Drawing
- Building and working in a distributed startup
- Creative Ways To Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
- Personalisation and the Social Web
- Women & Technology - grabbing the blogosphere by the balls
Why not wander down and see what it is all about?
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Final Science Week Post: Best Invention of 2007?
Posted on November 17, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Health, Technology.
How many people are going to plump for the jesusphone in their posts? If Steve Jobs is responsible,it must be magic. Except it’s not, it’s a very nice UI on a phone design that was out of date in 2006 in Europe. So if not a fashion accessory then what? I think the Science Week people really mean “new product” when they say “invention”, otherwise I’m going to have to go a read some science journals to find the latest cure for cancer.
2007 hasn’t been a great year for ground-breaking innovation since most things I’m familiar with have just really been refined. I haven’t heard about one thing that make me stop and go “wow that’s incredible”. I might do so when CUH stop sending out hand-written appointments and use a fancy thing called a computer and Microsoft Outlook to schedule x-rays.
I mentioned BiancaMed in a previous post and I’m going to nominate one of their developments as the Invention of 2007. In fact their whole product line should get the gong. I don’t just say this because I was in college with Conor Hanley and Conor Heneghan, their developments are the first step in an entirely new approach to medicine. Expect these guys to exit for a huge amount of money in the coming years (or buy GE Healthcare!).
The BiancaMed Overnight Sleep Monitor sits on your bed-side locker and measures your breathing patterns with no contact whatsoever. It can provide critical data to diagnose sleep apnea and other sleep disorders and medical conditions. It will be able to send that information via mobile phone to a back-end system that your medical practitioner can log on to and analyse. It is genuinely revolutionary and there will be a multitude of spin-off products from this including baby monitors and fitness equipment.
As someone who has slept badly since he was 6 years old I’d love to get access to this and maybe finally get to the bottom of it. As a parent, I know many people will pay a LOT of money for a baby monitor which may help avoid SIDS.
A bit more impressive than a poxy phone, isn’t it?
4 Comments
Science Week: Invention which helps work
Posted on November 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Today’s Science Week Question is an easy one “Which invention has helped you most with your working life?“. Of course it is the internet. The highlights of my history with it are as follows:
- 1990: Learned it existed when I started Masters in UCD
- 1991: Figured out email, Usenet news, Gopher. Discovered ftp.funet.fi and the world of shareware
- 1992: First job in S3. Email only. Figured out ftpmail to download programs overnight on 14.4k modem
- 1994: Found out about the web. Used Mosaic for the first time
- 1995: Discovered Free software, FSF, GPL, Open Source OS called RTEMS and GCC.Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos
- 1996-2000: Web developed and so did I. Online purchasing, Google, Yahoo mail, IOL, indigo, eircom.net, ISDN, Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Geocities, homepages, animated gifs
- 2001-2003: Startup with ISDN only. Discovered SEO, dmoz, blogging, RSS
- 2003-now: Live it and breath it 16 hours a day. DSL, mobile, ATOM, Reviews, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Social Networking, IM, Skype, Firefox, Widgets, Flash
The greatest invention in my lifetime and my job would not exist without it.
4 Comments
Science Week: Next gadget purchase
Posted on November 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Today’s Science Week Question is “What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?”
The next gadget I buy hasn’t been created yet. It’ll be when Nokia take the N95 and the N810 and merge them into one product.
This:
plus this:
It will have:
- Quad Band Phone
- 5MP Camera with xenon flash
- HSDPA 3G Data
- Wifi
- Bluetooth
- Stereo Bluetooth Audio
- GPS
- Touch Screen
- Slide Out Keyboard
- Run a variant of Linux
- TV Out
- Accelerometer
- Massive Battery
- Take massive memory cards
- Offer full PDA functionality and sync with both desktop apps like Outlook and online apps like Goog Calendar
- A music player designed for podcasts (remember last spot, bookmark, speedy seek within track)
- VOIP
- SIP
- the same dimensions as the N810
- A price tag of less than €400
I don’t ask for much really, do I? Actually, this device would make me the ultimate “mobile warrior”. The need for a laptop would almost disappear for a lot of my travel and I would have a swiss-army penknife of gadget functionality.
2 Comments
Science Week: Invention of the future
Posted on November 14, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Health, Technology.
Today’s Science Week question is “What invention do you want to see most in the future“. This is an easy one to describe but it’ll be a long time coming. I want to see an inexpensive non-invasive home medical diagnostic machine that can detect and diagnose a wide range of problems on its own and via a data-feed to the relevant medical experts.
The benefits of such a machine could be enormous
- Massive reduction in GP queues
- Reduction in incorrect self-medication (e.g. anti-biotics for viral infections)
- Prompt addressing of potentially dangerous conditions
- Diagnosis by subject-area experts globally rather than by potentially incompetent local hospitals
- Blue Sky: Your own portable MRI with “lump” detection
We are starting to see this sort of thing appear here and there, from equipment for diabetics to portable defibrilators to the awesome sleep-apnea equipment by the BiancaMed guys. Some day we’ll get to the point where your health isn’t in the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy and you’ll control your own destiny.
5 Comments
More Science Week Stuff
Posted on November 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Technology.
Looks like the Science Week guys are hardcore! They’ve hired Edelman to help with PR. I like the idea they came up with. Basically Irish Bloggers have to answer some stuff about their favourite inventions as blog posts during the coming week and we might win a Wii.
Today’s question is “What was the favourite invention from your childhood”.
This is an easy one. The home computer, specifically the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
An entire generation of software developers and electronic engineers exist because of this awesome machine and competitors like the BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, Oric 1, Atari 400/800, TI 99/a etc
Until the arrival of the Spectrum (and slightly earlier ones like the ZX81, ZX80, TRS-80), the most advanced thing most people had seen was electronic tennis on the telly. I still remember heading up on a school tour to Dublin, going into Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade and touching a ZX81 for the first time. My parents then bought me a 16K Spectrum for Christmas 1982 and my world changed forever.
Forget all the games we used play and copy using a precursor of bittorrent called tape-to-tape-recording. For me, the Spectrum experience was about programming and building add-on cards. I learned Basic, then Forth and then Z80 Assembler.
I had my 15 seconds of fame by having three games published in Sinclair magazines. I was half way through my masterpiece when college intervened. I did Electronics in UCD because of the Spectrum (I didn’t like the look of Cobol and RPG on the Comp Sci syllabus) and here I am now, still working in tech and still getting excited every day by the incredible things people build.
I enjoy seeing kids using gaming consoles and playing flash games on the web but I wonder will they ever have the excitement we did back in the 80’s when we saw the output of this:
10 FOR n=0 TO 255
20 PLOT n,88+80*SIN(n/128*PI)
30 NEXT n
Who knows, maybe the OLPC aka XO will do the same for Africa. I still have my doubts.
12 Comments
3G Doctor Signals the Return of House Visits
Posted on November 7, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Health, Technology.
I don’t normally mention posts that I write on blognation over here but I think this one is probably of great interest to many of my local readers and those in more rural locations in Ireland and the UK.
A company called 3G Doctor in Kerry provides a service whereby you can get a video consultantion with a qualified doctor using your 3G phone.
I’ve written all about it here. I’d be interested to hear what you think and whether the 3G coverage is good enough yet so that it is useful to the people who need it most.
For those who think 3G phones are outside their budget, the fabulous Sony Ericsson K800i is little more than €100 on pay monthly upgrade. That’s barely two visits to the doctor.
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How to feel just a bit stupid
Posted on August 25, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Technology.
I’m very technical, I can figure most things out given sufficient time, but sometimes I just don’t get it. Take for example my recent purchase of a Nokia N770 Internet Tablet.
It is a fabulous piece of kit at an incredible knock-down price of €107 plus VAT and P&P. I believe it was over €400 when it was released. It’s basically a little hand-held computer with a touch screen that works over Wifi or your mobile connection (via bluetooth). I’ve totally got the hang of it and use it every day.
Except it came with this:
And I just couldn’t figure it out. I decided it was part of a stand of some sort but appeared to be missing the other parts.
So I gave up and left it at the edge of the desk. Yesterday I was on a phone call and was playing with it absent mindedly. Then this happened:
Oh for the love of god:
I blame Nokia 
26 Comments
Oh and votes please
Posted on August 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Wordpress.
For the new blog theme. Like or no like? Like but would prefer a Cork specific image in the header? Don’t like cos it looks like mud?
And while I’m here, we launched blognation Ireland on Monday. It is part of a fast growing global tech news network called blognation and it covers Web 2.0 and Mobile in Ireland. So if you are a techie or in a start-up and you read this blog but not Argolon (you nutter), check out the new site.
17 Comments
Favour from my “foreign” language expert readers
Posted on July 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Reviews, Technology.
We’re playing around with some stuff on LouderVoice and we need as many translations as possible for the word “review” in the sense of “a review of a movie” or “a review of a restaurant”.
Ideally it should be a generic word that works in most situations. It would also be better if the words did not have accented characters (I’ll explain that in a later post) and they must be in latin alphabet. We would like to get as many languages as possible but at the very least:
- German (bericht?, meinung?)
- French (revue? critique?)
- Spanish (revision?)
- Italian (rassegna?)
- Portuguese
- Danish
- Dutch
- Swedish
- Norwegian
- Finnish (viesti)
- Estonian
- Russian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Polish
- Hungarian
- Greek
Feel free to suggest others. Just use the comments box on this post to provide the words so that there can be discussion on them.
22 Comments
Think you can review something in 140 characters or less?
Posted on June 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Reviews, Technology, Tweets.
Then LouderTweets are for you.
After a few late nights we’re now ready to let you send reviews from Twitter to LouderVoice. We’re calling them LouderTweets and they are 140 character mini-reviews you can send using Web, SMS or IM via Twitter to LouderVoice.
So far we’ve had reviews of chocolate, couscous, a conference, a lawnmower and many others. Make your Tweets Louder!
An important point is that you don’t have to be a LouderVoice member to send LouderTweets but you should join if you want to rate, bookmark and build/share useful collections of reviews and mini-reviews.
And how do you send LouderTweets as a Twitter user? It’s very simple:
- Add the Twitter “review” user as a friend here
- Wait until you get a confirmation that you have been added back as a friend
- Post reviews using this format on Twitter: @review RATING ITEM. REVIEW
- Example: @review 4 The Apprentice UK. A stonkingly good series that has thrown up plenty of surprises
- That format is very specific otherwise we won’t pick up the review. Rating is in the range 1-5. Full-stop/Period mandatory.
- Shortly afterwards that review can be found by searching on www.loudervoice.com (in an open community microformat called hreview)
You can see an example here:
Tweet: http://twitter.com/oldchapel/statuses/101344802
LouderVoice: http://www.loudervoice.com/search?q=tesco+chocolate
As with all tweets, you can send your review tweet using whatever tool you like: web-page, Google GTalk, SMS, Tweetr etc
Let us know what you think.
2 Comments
Great new Art Gallery in West Cork
Posted on May 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Pictures, Technology.
Haydn Shaughnessy is opening a new art gallery in the Pink Elephant in Harbour View overlooking the sea. As its name suggests it is dedicated to Innovative Contemporary Art.
The official launch is on May 31st but you can see some of the exhibitors over at the web-site which is really beautifully designed. Haydn has blogged it here and mentions that two of my favourite photo-bloggers, Ryan and Donncha should be exhibiting there soon.
I love what Haydn is trying to do with the gallery - highlighting those who are trying push things forward and use new technologies and tools in art.
Great art in a breathtaking location, what more could you ask for?
You’ll find it on the coast road from Kinsale to Clonakilty near Kilbrittain.
5 Comments
Greatest Wordpress Theme Ever!
Posted on April 29, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
If you are not a geek, stop reading now. Factory Joe (aka Chris Messina) did a Tweet earlier pointing to a theme for Wordpress. I just checked it out. I am so in awe of this person.
It is a Commodore 64 Command Line Interface to a blog.
Try typing last, next, current, help or cat
Someone somewhere please please do a ZX Spectrum version of this.
UPDATE 1: Ach, just realised Chris must have seen it on Boing Boing.
1 Comment
Wondering how to reading lots of web-sites quickly and what RSS is?
Posted on April 24, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology.
If you are one of my many non-technical readers you may have heard me and others mention things like RSS and words like “subscribe” and you may have wondered what it is all about. Well the lovely people over at The Common Craft Show have put together a great 3.5 minute video called “RSS in Plain English” which explains it all. If you check more than one or two sites/blogs per day to see if they have any updates then you need to watch this video and save yourself hassle.
NOTE: If the video/audio stutters a lot just pause it, wait a minute and then start again.
4 Comments
ZX Spectrum launched 25 years ago today!
Posted on April 23, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Personal, Technology.
This mightn’t be a big deal to most people but it’s a huge deal to me. If my parents hadn’t got me a ZX Spectrum in 1982, I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had. No exaggeration. Every single college and career choice I’ve made stems from the skills I learned on that machine, which I still have (the machine, not the skills ).
Sure 50% of the time I was playing Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf but on the Speccy I learned BASIC, Forth and Z80 assembler. I also learned the basic architecture of computers and basic electronics circuits.
I still crank up emulators on my PCs, phone and Palm and still get annoyed over the bugs in the games I wrote!
Thanks to my parents for realising how important computer skills might be to me and to Sir Clive Sinclair for having the clarity of vision to create the ZX series of computers. I’m actually surprised he didn’t come up with the OLPC as it is right in line with his thinking.
Happy Anniversary Speccy!
p.s and just in time, the 1988 Edition of the Your Sinclair Rock n Roll Years has just been released!
UPDATE 1: Colin Woodcock has also just released a Special 25th Anniversary Edition of the wonderful ZXF online magazine.
5 Comments
Sign the RTE Digital Free-to-Air Petition
Posted on April 22, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Entertainment, Ireland, Technology.
As a lot of you know, you can get a Digital version of RTÉ (including Widescreen) on Sky Digital and NTL. However you must have a Sky/NTL subscription to see it. Many people, including myself, believe this is fundamentally wrong as we already support RTÉ through the mandatory TV licence.
Please sign the petition from Brian Greene demanding that RTE make digital broadcasts of their programming available for “free”. If you are a blogger, consider adding the badge in support.
Whilst I’m at it, maybe someone can tell me why I was talking to RTE about Digital Terrestrial TV in 1998 and we still don’t have it? RTÉ is another taxpayer funded organisation in dire need of a good kicking.
24 Comments
Quicker than I thought
Posted on April 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
I’ve set-up a new blog which consists entirely of daily digests of my tweets. So rather than seeing every tweet as a separate feed item, this groups them together into more manageable chunks. You can get to it either via www.conoroneill.com/twitter or www.conoroneill.name
