I was thrilled to see that Kinsale has kicked one off too and they had 103 kids at their first one. Well done!

Annnd I’ve just spotted that they now have one on Sundays in Blackrock Observatory.

If you are anywhere even vaguely close to either club I would encourage you to go with your children. I am absolutely convinced that early exposure to “computers” in a creative setting (not as consumers reading web pages or playing games) gives children a swathe of new opportunities in life that they would otherwise miss out on. They may never be programmers but they may become designers, engineers, scientists or artists.

This is also absolutely not a thing only for middle class, technical parents. The clubs have plenty of spare computers and people there who can help/guide the kids. You just have to be there to mind them

The contact details for the City one are here. It is on every Saturday morning in the NSC in Mahon.

Kinsale details here.

The Kinsale one is on this evening at 7pm in The Trident Hotel. Please contact them if you are intending to go so they have an idea of numbers. They use an SMS system to gauge numbers each week where you just send Y/N in reply to a text message.

Blackrock details here.

Munster Programming Training

I should also mention the granddaddy of them all, the brilliant Munster Programming Training course which has been going for many years in UCC. Coder Dojo founder James Whelton attended it himself so it must be good! It is targeted at Transition Year students as preparation for participation in the “All Irish Schools Programming Competition”. Full details here.

However, it it critically important that anyone who relies on their standard roof aerial to get RTE, TV3 etc knows what is happening on Dec 31st 2012. Whilst there have been Saorview flyers in the post and the Dept of Communications has put together this horror of a web-site, I have severe doubts that those whom it will affect most are even aware of the analogue TV shutdown. My biggest concern is that older people are the ones most likely to be still using non-digital TV and they simply won’t know that the switchover is happening.

I strongly recommend that if you know anyone who is not on Sky/UPC/etc and is still using a roof aerial to get their small set of channels, let them know they need to move to a digital receiver in the next 12 months. In fact they can move now, since the Saorview service is working really well.

Given the dire financial situation in the country, any extra cost on people is going to be a strain so I was thrilled when Barry from tvtrade.ie contacted me about the Xoro DTV-M5 Digital TV Receiver. He had read my review of the Ariva and wondered if I would review their inexpensive Xoro box for them. At €49 for a fully-functional Irish Terrestrial DTV box, of course I said yes. He shot me down a review unit for free a couple of days later and I’ve been beating it up for the past few weeks.

Short aside: I need to clarify the difference between “Saorview” and Irish DTT. You will see a lot of boxes on the market like the Xoro that are labelled Irish DTT or Irish Digital TV but which are not Saorview-certified. You shouldn’t worry about this in the slightest. Either the boxes obey the relevant standards that Saorview uses or they don’t. If they don’t, you simply return the box for a full refund. It’s a bit like saying your PC is certified to access the internet. That’s why we have Standards in the tech world. The key thing with Saorview is that the box can decode MPEG-4 video and can display the Programme Guide (EPG). The Xoro does both perfectly.

First the basics. The really nice thing about Saorview is that if you have an alright RTE aerial signal now, you literally unplug the aerial lead from the back of your TV, plug it into the Xoro box, plug a Scart or HDMI lead from the Xoro back to your TV and you should now be receiving RTE, TV3, TG4 and some other stations (not UK) in crystal clear digital. You also get a bunch of Irish radio stations in digital too. It really is that simple. In fact, even if you have a buzzy RTE signal, it’ll probably work perfectly and fuzz-free for Saorview.

Now on to the Xoro box itself. It’s tiny! I love getting neat units like this which can fit into the smallest nook or cranny. The front panel has just Power, Channnel+, Channel- and USB. I really wish all the box manufacturers would put the USB on the side or the back but most have it on the front. More on USB later.

This picture shows its size compared to an XBOX (excuse the messy cable setup, I moved it quickly between rooms last night so the kids could watch the Toy Show):

Usage is dead simple simple and the box goes from off to showing a TV programme in a couple of seconds. You can channel change up/down as you’d expect and Saorview has a 7-day Programme Guide, so you can see what’s coming-up on-screen. You can use Scart (for older TVs) or HDMI (for LCD/Plasma) to connect to the TV. It handles all the various picture resolutions up to 1080p but I’m pretty sure nothing on Saorview is at that high-res yet. There is teletext handling there too but as it’s not 1987, I didn’t bother check. The remote is fiddly compared to a Sky+ one but is fine and you get used to it in a few minutes.

Like all Irish DTT boxes, the TV channel list is as follows:

• RTE One
• RTE Two HD
• TV3
• TG4
• 3e
• RTE News Now
• RTE Jr
• RTE One +1
• RTE Aertel

Radio is as follows:

• RTE Radio 1
• RTE 2fm
• RTE Lyric fm
• RTE Radio na Gaeltachta
• RTE 2XM
• RTE Choice
• RTEjr
• RTE Gold
• RTE Pulse
• RTE Radio 1 Extra

The bit that really impresses me with the Xoro is the USB/PVR. Basically you plug a portable USB harddisk into it and you now have the ability to pause/play/record/timer-record anything that is being broadcast. The overall setup is similar to Sky+ but obviously isn’t going to be as slick. Unlike the hell that is the Ariva 120, it all works really well including getting the programme name right (helllllo Ferguson, can you sort that out?).

I did have issues with one harddisk but it turns out that this is a very common problem. Harddisks of around 500GB capacity that are USB-powered struggle to get enough juice from many USB ports. In fact my troublesome one doesn’t work on any of my PC’s USB hubs either, I have to use a split-cable for it. The same split-cable trick worked on the Xoro. In general (not Xoro specific) you should either use a smaller less power-hungry HDD, which are hard to get, or use one that has it’s own power supply. Also these set-top-boxes prefer to format the harddrive themselves. It only takes a second.

If you have a bunch of media files (movies, tv, music), you can copy them onto the harddisk and the media player on the Xoro should be able to handle them no matter what the format. I tried an SD AVI, a 720p x264 MKV and a 1080p AVI and they all worked perfectly.

There’s not much more to say. It’s a very impressive piece of kit at a shockingly low price and no-one should have any hassle figuring out how to use it. If anyone asks me to recommend an Irish DTT box from now on, I’ll point them to the Xoro.

And please, let older relatives and neighbours know that the switchover is coming and they need to get a DTT box. In the UK they are doing information days and a travelling roadshow across the country to let people know. What are they doing here?

13 minutes really just left me wanting more. Given that the Late Late cannot compete for “celebrity” guests with the UK chatshows, how about more time on fewer meatier guests like this from now on?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sc_i-5FivE

One fantastic outcome from yesterday’s blogpost was John Handelaar and others pointing out that I’d given up too easily on trying to extract the river level data from the Bandon FEWS web-site. And it turns out they were right. A small amount of messing around and I was able to extract out the water level and the date/time.

I’ve been meaning to do more with Google Fusion Tables for ages and this seemed like a good opportunity. It’s like a Google Docs online spreadsheet but with knobs on. So  you can populate, query, visualise etc using an API. I decided to use that to make the FEWS data available to everyone. Of course then I ran into the horror that is OAuth2. But a fair bit of messing and stomach cramps later, and I got that working too.

So we now have the hourly Bandon river level data available to use for whatever purpose your fiendish minds can come up with. I’m thinking trends, analytics, charts, maps, mashups with weather data, other alerting methods (email, Twitter DMs, iPhone Alerts), a Facebook Fan Page, widgets for other Bandon-related sites. What other ideas do you all have?

If you want to embed that live graph on your own site or blog, just paste this code in:

<iframe width="500px" height="300px" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?gco_allowHtml=true&gco_displayAnnotations=true&gco_wmode=opaque&gco_chartArea=%7B%22top%22%3A%2230%22%7D&containerId=gviz_canvas&rmax=250&q=select+col1%2C+col0+from+2191951+&qrs=where+col1+%3E%3D+&qre=+and+col1+%3C%3D+&qe=+order+by+col1+asc&viz=GVIZ&t=TIMELINE&width=500&height=300"></iframe>

You can export the data to CSV and play with it offline in Excel etc or you can go fancy and query it live over the API.

e.g. this API call grabs all of the data in one go (you can test with your browser): https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=SELECT+ROWID,+riverlevel,+datetime+FROM+2191951

But of course you will be able to do far more complex queries than that, once we have a decent body of data. See the Google Fusion Tables Guide here.

Note that I was forced to use that awkward date format to make the timeline feature in Fusion Tables work correctly.

I don’t know if anyone wants the data or will find a use for it but this first step was critical to enabling them to do so. Hopefully this will be a trigger for others to liberate locked-in non-private data on other public sector sites.

Or it could be an opportunity for County Councils to take this tough time we are all living in, where Capex projects are few and far between, and start a Data Liberation Project in every Council department in the country. Nothing I did over the past 24hrs cost a single solitary cent apart from people’s time. And based on recent conversations with old college friends, time is one thing a lot of Council Engineers have on their hands. If any Council people are interested in reading more they should have a look at the links in this post I did at the start of the year.

Comments? Thoughts? Improvements?

I have had a few thoughts on other things we could do with that live river-level data for the community. Web-apps, Twitter integration, Analytics, Trends etc etc.

However, despite several communications, I have been unable to get any response from Cork County Council about getting access to the live data. All the OpenData initiatives around the world (including Ireland) are obviously passing them by.

Even something as simple as a Twitter Account could be useful and interesting. So I created one called @BandonFEWS. Of course then I had to get at the data despite the CoCo’s silence. I dug around the Bandon Flood Warning site but it is built in such a way that the data is not machine visible or scrapable.

I discussed this problem with fellow tech-person Gordon Murray of Murrion Software just up the road in Carrigadrohid and of course he had a solution!

Gordon’s company has a very smart SMS service which can both send SMSes and receive them in order to act upon them. By signing up his service’s “phone” number to the FEWS SMS alerts, he can then do something with them. In this case, he takes the SMS, interprets it and then posts it automatically to the @BandonFEWS Twitter account.

Nice one Gordon! If you have any need of inbound or outbound SMS services, give him a shout.

Now if only Cork CoCo would give us access to all of the live data, we could do some really interesting things for the community for free. Anyone got any influence in there to make this happen?

Until yesterday I had only used the satellite bit which gives you BBC etc. It works very well except for the lack of a programme guide. I recorded Doctor Who onto a portable hard-disk using it yesterday! But I really wanted to try out the terrestrial bit. The other night we watched Masterchef Ireland using the RTE Player on a 37″ TV in a browser, full-screen. Not recommended if you value your eyesight or sanity. Sidenote: Dylan surprisingly non-infuriating but I had a big belly laugh when I heard a guy who serves steaks on paving slabs calling someone’s food “contrived”.

Our old roof aerial hasn’t been working right for years and I wasn’t sure where the problem was. So yesterday I cut the cable in the attic near the ingress hole and wired it straight into a old TV I hoisted into the attic. It confirmed that the aerial itself was banjaxed but there was no way I was doing a Rod Hull on it. I grabbed a pair of rabbit ears and then tried them to discover that I could get traditional analogue RTE1 and RTE2 reasonably ok with a bit of noise but not TG4 or TV3.

I wondered if that signal was enough to get the new Saorview Digital Terrestrial working on the Ariva box so I brought the box up into the attic and amazingly it worked instantly! Perfect digital picture on RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 with full on-screen programme guide too. I had some interactions with people on Twitter last night who confirmed that even if your old analogue signal is poor, you may still be able to get Saorview.

Unfortunately the rabbit ears don’t have enough welly to feed a splitter box so today I’m popping into Dwyers Electrical to get this aerial and I’ll fit it in the attic. This type of aerial may be necessary for a lot of people in West Cork due to all the hills. But check using your old aerial first. Hopefully this will work with the splitter so we can have old analogue TV in most rooms and then Saorview in the room with the Ariva box. If they drop in price even more, we may buy another one.

So if you are tired of buzzy noisy old-school analogue TV in West Cork or if you are tired of paying the Rupert tax and can live without Sky Sports, you can save yourself a fortune by going down this route.

I have been very bitchy about Saorview since it was announced. It has taken Ireland 13 years to catch-up with the UK’s OnDigital/Freeview. I worked in a company that talked to RTE about building a Digital TV box in 1998! Celtic Tiger my arse, more like Celtic fat tabby sitting in front of the fire for a decade, scratching its hole. But now that it is here, I have to say it’s very well executed. And €99 for that box is a complete steal.

Go on, you know you won’t be able to help yourself. I immediately zoomed into Bandon to see what was there. Surprisingly few properties actually.

Head on over to the site and click on any dot of interest to see what property it is. Some of the locations will be off as they rely on Google accurately converting text addresses to lat/long. Of course if we had a Post Code system in Ireland, we wouldn’t have that problem. What’s the current prediction for that? 2015?

The internet is one place where we see a wonderful synthesis of creativity in design and engineering. I believe you can teach anyone the basics of web development to a level where they can contribute in some way to web applications and mobile applications. Some of the greatest web-apps were built by self-taught people, not Computer Science graduates.

The key, again, is the word “creativity”. We need to take back ownership of that word from those we would traditionally call “the creatives”; artists, sculptors, authors and actors. Just look at something like Facebook and think about all of the people involved in the creation of that. Creative coders, user interface designers, product managers and Ops people all working together to build an amazing system which impacts 700 million people in a positive way.

Yesterday I attended an event which may be one of the most important initiatives ever in changing the mind-set of Irish parents. Cork Coder Dojo was put together by James Whelton and Bill Liao. You probably know that Bill is a serial entrepreneur but you may not know James. He just finished his Leaving Cert.

The Coder Dojo is a weekly meetup where young people can learn the basics of web development and build sites/apps with the help of the volunteers there. Yesterday was the first one and it felt to me like I was taking part in the beginning of something huge. The room in the NSC was jammed with kids of all ages and their parents. James gave a basic intro to some simple HTML and then he and others went around to help.

I was there with our 12 y/o who has just finished primary school. He is a geek but not a coder. We have built Google AppInventor mobile apps but he has never seen HTML. Within 20 minutes, he “got it”. We had fun embedding images and videos and changing colours. We also did some basic styling with CSS. The next step is to look at JavaScript and JQuery to make a site that does something.

The reason I feel James and Bill are on to something is that I could see many of the parents were not remotely technical. This is not geek parents turning their kids into programmers (well, except for me maybe ), this is smart parents understanding that their kids can re-build this country with their creativity and the right skill-sets. I was pleased to see that Simon Coveney popped in too.

Whilst I know that many secondary schools teach some basic web skills to kids, I think it has to start earlier and be driven by people who build Apps themselves. I see no reason why my 9 y/o or even 7 y/o could not learn simple development. They may never use it, but they will always have an appreciation for it. Maybe in some ways not that different to sending your kids to piano lessons.

The intention is that The Coder Dojo will be on every Saturday. I strongly recommend that you bring your children to at least one. Don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop, the guys have spares (and I can bring a spare too). They will also be rolling it out in other parts of the country.

Head on over to the site to find out the details and register your child. You can also follow them on Twitter. I’ll hopefully see you at the next one.

We continue to struggle as a small Internet business with 6 Mbs ADSL (512kbs up). If we were slightly closer to the exchange we might get 12Mbs. Those responsible for allowing Fibre connectivity to bypass Bandon have ensured that there will never be a technology cluster in the town. It was a catastrophic oversight and will damage the town for years to come. No business requiring serious levels of bandwidth can set themselves up here.

But even with Fibre in Clon, there are no Hot-Desks in the Technology Park. If you go looking for small business offices in West Cork you either find something over  a shop or you can have an entire building.

So I was thrilled to see that Bantry now has Hot-Desking in Bantry Enterprise Centre, supported by WCEB. You can rent by the month and get:

• Individual desk area – fully serviced and partitioned
• Access to broadband
• Direct dial telephone number
• Access to canteen facilities and Meeting Room
• Generous car parking
• Linkages to support bodies for start-up assistance

I really welcome this but there are a few small issues:

• Pricing is “on application”. This should be public and on a web-site somewhere
• No mention of what type of Broadband. It needs to be a lot more than ADSL
• It’d be better if weekly options were available too (and even drop-in daily rates)

Enquiries/Expressions of Interest should be forwarded to:

Cork County Council,
Economic Development Section, Floor 14, County Hall, Cork.
Tel: 021 4285560; Fax: 021 4343164
Email: development.section@corkcoco.ie

I’m going to contact them now about pricing/broadband and will update when I hear back. Obviously it is too far for me to go regularly but if it’s a success, maybe WCEB could look at some of the empty buildings with Fibre in Clon? I’d be down like a shot if they did.

I’ve been shortlisted in the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards as front-man for LouderVoice. It’s in the Innovation category. If you have a spare minute, pop on over to the site and vote for all your favourite Irish web businesses. Your support is appreciated by us all.

I’ll do the odd cross-reference when it makes sense. And hopefully the volume here will improve over the Spring as I get into a gardening groove. next post up is one on Jimmy Doherty’s “From Crop to Shop” which may be one of the most educational programmes about food broadcast in the past ten years.

The PsiXpda handheld computer in action at Le Web from Conor O'Neill on Vimeo.

Can I suggest a Cork Computer History Museum?

What’s one of the biggest attractions in Silicon Valley? The Computer History Museum

What’s one of the biggest tourist draws in London? The Science Museum.

What’s one of Cork’s main tourist attractions now? The Butter Museum.

Where is the biggest cluster of successful tech companies outside of Dublin? Cork.

Randy Jordan has assembled one of the most incredible collections of classic computers anywhere. From IMSAI to Osborne to DEC PDP and Apple Lisa, he has it. Randy has offered the collection to be housed by those who should jump at the chance. They didn’t get it.

Those of us who do _get_ it have despaired when talking to Randy about his computers and the fact that they are almost never seen. The mini-collection he showed today at BarCamp Cork III blew our minds.

Watch this video:

Then think about the thousands of people who fly in and out of Cork every week and work for tech companies. Think about the brilliant but now sadly delayed idea of transforming the Cork docklands into a new tech hub. Think about all those tourists looking for something different. This could be the first step. A building full of technology that shows us the past so we can figure out the future.

Do you have a building lying idle and a vision for where you want Cork to be in 10 years time? Step up to the plate.

Ewan Spence is another regular at it and it’s pretty much the only time we see each other every year. He has a great post over on his blog about what computer to bring this year. It seems like we are all going more and more lightweight each time (well our computers are anyway).

It inspired me to take this set of photos.

Le Web 2006:

Le Web 2007/2008:

Le Web 2009:

Le Web 2010?:

Whilst I initially didn’t have much time for it, coming from the open blogging world, bit by bit its value for me has grown. Even at the simplest level, it is the only site where many people I know from school and college ever congregate online.

In our business, LouderVoice, we have hooked ourselves into Facebook so that when people review products/services on our clients’ web-sites, those reviews can be published to Facebook too. It’s an amazingly powerful marketing tool. You can see it in action here. That system can be placed on any web-site in as little as 10 minutes.

If you are on Facebook or you are thinking of joining, why not become a fan of LouderVoice there? You’ll see a sample of the best content from our site and customers posted there along with questions, ideas, polls and competitions.

If you are a small business, then you should really consider creating a Facebook Fan page. It only takes a few minutes and can be a great way of interacting with customers and fans. You only have to look at the success of the Hairy Baby one to see how well it can go!

One of the nice aspects of Twitter is that it leads to real-world interactions too. There are regular meet-ups called Tweetups where people can have a few drinks, maybe a bite to eat and have a bit of proper social interaction.

Ann Donnelly is organising West Cork’s first ever Tweetup in Clonakilty this Friday. It’s on in the Courtyard Bar in Clon from 8pm. If you are on Twitter or want to find out more about it or just want to meet with some friendly people then why not head on over? All details are on the blog.

Here are some of the West Cork (I’m including up to Ballincollig and Macroom in West) Twits that I know about: Ann, Mike Kane, Matt Kane, Anthony Creswell, Catherine, Simon Whelband, Calvin Jones, Walter Higgins, Me, Randy, Margaret Jordan, Gordon Murray. If I’ve missed you, leave a comment with a link to your profile!

That’s why I consider online backup a must-have. I only recommend two services and the one at the top of my list is PutPlace. This low-cost solution by an Irish company is simple to set-up and then you just forget about it. All of your important files are kept safe on Amazon’s amazing storage system S3 and you can recover what you need with a few clicks.

The important thing about PutPlace is that it for consumers. So whilst HP gives up and shutters Upline, PutPlace goes from strength to strength.

Backup is boring but the day you lose those files is the day you wish you’d signed up for PutPlace.  My buddy Joe, the founder, will even give you 3 months free. Just use the discount code “joe”!

But Twitter has a ton of practical uses too, one of which is saving money. My buddies in Nooked have created a ryanair_ork account there which publishes some great special offers regularly on Ryanair flights from Cork.

Signing up on Twitter only takes a moment, then just “follow” ryanair_ork and enjoy the savings.

Foodtalk is hosted by one of the best food bloggers anywhere, Caroline Hennessy from Bibliocook.

If you want to listen online and subscribe so that you get each broadcast, then there are a bunch of different ways of doing it.

On your PC, one of the best tools is MediaMonkey. Install it, tell it about Foodtalk, leave it running in the background and it’ll automatically download the new episodes so you can listen at your desk.

If you have a newer car stereo or (like us) one of the replacement Lidl/Aldi ones, then you can copy those audio files onto a memory card or USB stick and play them in the car when you like.

Lots of the newer phones with Wifi also have podcasting capabilities. The Nokia N95, N95-8GB, N96 etc come with the software built in. Owners of the E51, E63, E71 etc can download it from here. You have to manually tell the application to check for new episodes but it takes care of the download etc once you do that. You can listen directly on the phone or plug it into the line-in on your stereo or car-stereo.

If you have an iPod, I’m sure it’s all very similar.

Note that most of the radio stations, in particular RTE, have a ton of podcasts you can get like this. I recently listened to all of a year-old series about De Valera I grabbed from the RTE site on my N95-8GB.