Wed, 28 Feb 2007

Sneaky spy camera pen snaps shots

A couple of weeks ago I discovered one of these spy camera pens at the local Jaycar Electronics store (image courtesy of this pen camera product listing):

The device was in the clearance bin and a purchase was pretty tempting—it was discounted from $NZ144 to just $NZ20! (I did actually manage to hold off buying it until the next day when I returned to the store for another purchase—such restraint!)

I'd be interested to know when someone last paid anything close to $NZ150 for the device as the specs aren't anything flash by today's standards (Engadget has a review from early 2005 and links to more product details):

Further product details can be seen at the product listings linked above. In terms of practical use I can't imagine it being much help to the average spy as its user interface consists of pushing a single button in response to audible voice prompts! ("*Click*, I am now photographing your soopa-secret documents." Okay, so it's not quite as bad as that: listen to the spy pen voice prompts [~1.2MB WAV].)

An unique feature of the RS232 serial connection is the cable (see left side of photo above) with a female DB9 connector to a 2.5mm stereo audio jack that fits into a socket at the top of the pen.

Here is an initial and—coincidentally—suitably spy-related snapshot taken under poor incandescent lighting conditions (converted from BMP):

There was actually another of the devices in the clearance bin but by the time I got back there today it had been sold—I'll just have to make sure my explorations are non-destructive then...

The more observant of you may have noticed the Windows-only compatibility "feature"—my main laptop is non-Windows but I thought "Hey, it's a serial device, how difficult can it be to get the data?".

And that, dear reader, was the beginning...

Posted at: 03:45 | category: / | Tags: , | Comments ()

Tue, 27 Feb 2007

New Community Manager for Ubuntu soon?

I see Ubuntu might be looking for a new Community Manager soon as its current appointee has embarked on what some may call a fool's errand to record an entire album with 7 tracks in 24 hours on his own! For charity! Someone must STOP this madness! I mean, you must SUPPORT this madness. I'm so conflicted.

While it's a good cause I am concerned for his well-being. What am I talking about? This is The Internet's Jono Bacon!!! He'll be kicking names and taking...wait, no, something like that.

This pimpage brought to you thanks to the New Zealand exchange rate meaning any donation I make would equate to about three British pence. Or I might just be cheap. :-)

(Heh, I bet Jono will be glad when Jokosher is further along so he doesn't keep getting this question.)

Posted at: 23:05 | category: / | Comments ()

Blog software update

I finally got around to adding some features to this here blog:

So, that's it for tonight's upgrades. Spending time doing this does make me wonder if life would be simpler with a more off-the-shelf/hosted solution but, oh well.

Oh, I don't think I mentioned when I was putting this blog together originally that I *cough*stole*cough* the style-sheet from Andrew J Todd of halfcooked.com. I've meant to add an attribution to the source which I have now done and have finally emailed to check my use is okay with him. Such terrible netiquette on my behalf, just shameful. [Update: Andy replied and apparently the theme is now available from the MainlyGreen page of the PyBlosxom flavour repository.]

I wasn't planning on doing all this when I started tonight, but I guess it's done now. :-)

Oh, yes, and thanks to all the coders who made this new functionality possible.

Posted at: 03:30 | category: / | Tags: , | Comments ()

Sun, 25 Feb 2007

More TextMarks

After my initial foray into creating a TextMark and with my newly created login under my belt I cooked up a couple more simple examples:

IWANTPI

Suitable for when you're hungry or just looking for the first 124-odd digits, simply text IWANTPI to 41411. This (oddly enough) has no dynamic content and only required a cut and paste into the response field.

DECIDE

Have trouble making decisions? Want to shift the blame for bad decisions? Text DECIDE to 41411 and receive a "YES" or "NO" in reply, easy as! The dynamic response is generated by a very short script that (pseudo)-randomly makes your decision for you.

As seen on Digg?

As a little experiment I put a link to the IMDB rating by SMS MOOVINFO details and "how to" as a digg submission, feel free to digg up MOOVINFO.

Posted at: 03:50 | category: / | Comments ()

Wed, 21 Feb 2007

Movie ratings by SMS

There seem to be many more items pushed onto my stack than popped off at the moment, but here's one that didn't stay on untouched for too long...

Sid Yadav's recent TextMarks post introduced me to the company and their "user generated" SMS content service. I was intrigued by the service as I've had a simple "premium SMS" idea in my mind for at least a year but wouldn't have a clue about how to actually provide such a service. I now realise that should have made me think "Hmmm, maybe there's a business in making it easy for people to provide premium SMS content"--but it didn't, TextMarks however seem to be more in tune with such thoughts. :-)

The idea

How many times have you stood in a video store or at a movie theatre lacking inspiration, looked at the your viewing options and wondered which movie to take a risk seeing? And how many times have you gotten home and discovered the movie you ended up seeing rated a 2.1 on the Internet Movie Database?

So how about SMSing a text message: 

MOOVINFO Norbit
to a information number and getting the IMDB rating back in response? Well, that was my idea and I began to wonder if TextMark would enable me to implement it in a basic form.

Getting started

The good news is I'm impressed how easy it is to set up a simple "Hello World" automated response on the TextMark site: Two form fields, no sign-up and a simple button press later and it's all set up. You don't even need a phone to test it as they offer a cellphone simulator to try the service out--unfortunately that's just as well because it's a US-only service at present.

You can also set up more sophisticated responses including causing the TextMark system to retrieve the content of a URL that can include parameters supplied in the original SMS message. Any TextMark created by an unregistered user expires after 24 hours. I'm assuming registration is also limited to US carriers at present as it requires a SMS confirmation message.

Setting up a movie rating TextMark

It's really not much more effort (on the TextMark side of things at least) to set up a more dynamic response, here's a screenshot of the setup:

The URL has a \0 at the end to indicate the user's message should be appended to the query: http://words.rancidbacon.com/moovinfo/index.cgi?\0

Checking out the result

Using the phone simulator we can send the required text message (left) and see the response (right):

 
I think I'll be steering clear of Norbit...

On the backend

Unfortunately setting up the backend involved a fair bit of yak-shaving due to needing to install sqlite on the server and having some issues with making it staticly linked but I got it sorted eventually.

The IMDB rating information was grabbed from one of the mirror servers--more details on the IMDB data are available. I pulled the flat text file into a sqlite database to speed things up and make querying easier. A simple Python script glues it all together and Bob's your uncle.

(I should mention this proof of concept probably isn't actually following the IMDB data terms of use but hopefully noone's feathers will be ruffled.)

Verdict

I'm impressed how easy it is to get started and implement a useful service in a fairly simple manner. Once registration and availability is expanded to more areas TextMarks will be worth another visit.

Obviously the "success" of any user-created TextMark (and it looks like there is shared revenue potential) will be a combination of utility and promotion--it'll be interested to see what develops.

If any US-based readers can try the MOOVINFO service out on a real cell before the TextMark expires I'd be interested in hearing from you. :-)

Update: I'm still impressed--within a couple of hours of posting to the TextMarks support forums (again, no rego required) I had email from the support team offering to enable me to get a registered account.

Update 2: And mere minutes after that I'm all set up with an account and MOOVINFO is now somewhat permanent.

Posted at: 06:30 | category: / | Comments ()

Fri, 16 Feb 2007

Planet NZTech upgrade and design refresh

We interrupt this silence to mention Planet NZTech has had a software upgrade and a little bit of a design refresh. It's now running the 2.0 release of Planet, meaning--among other things--we can now handle Atom feeds correctly. There have been other feed processing fixups in the code too so hopefully we'll end up seeing less spurious HTML on the page.

I've also given the page a bit of a design refresh--less than what I had planned a while ago but more than what had actually been achieved prior to now. I don't claim the new look is necessarily an improvement but unless it makes you violently ill or leads to incapacitating spasms in the audience the design is probably here to stay for the moment.

The new design de-emphasises the grouping by author and focuses on the post titles. The change in emphasis is a bit of an experiment partly inspired by the look of the recently launched Planet OpenMoko. I think the approach has promise and if nothing else hopefully the inspiration will lead to me getting a Neo1973 phone to play with. (I wish!)

If you notice any issues as a result of the changes I'd appreciate you letting me know.

Posted at: 05:57 | category: / | Comments ()

Sat, 03 Feb 2007

NZ Woo-Foo Baa Camp

Wow. Going to sleep last night was a little difficult as the the first night of Baa Camp (a.k.a NZ Foo Camp) was surprisingly and extremely stimulating.

The surprise was not that something at Baa was stimulating but the fact that the two sessions I went to yesterday both included the two New Zealand politicians attending the event (David Cunliffe and Judith Tizard) and rather than meeting my cynical expectations the two sessions were great. Implementation is a whole other thing of course but it was nice to see the views, concerns and ideas raised be listened to.

Sitting in the first session of the evening and listening to David Cunliffe discuss the New Zealand telecommunications issues and then hearing the conversations between him and others in the room left me with the distinct impression that Nat and Russell have done a fantastic job of getting the right people in the right place at the same time.

By the end of the evening I was feeling suprisingly optimistic...

Free Stuff!

Of course, the good mood might also have had something to do with the Free Stuff(TM) I picked up along the way too... :-)

First up, I managed to fight my way through the hordes of stampeding geeks to pick up a copy of Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks which from first glance looks interesting.

A while later I was scanning the schwag table for new stuff and spotted "A Piece of Hardware"(TM) with a note scrawled on the packaging essentially saying "b0rked, yours if you want to fix". So, my eyes lit up and quickly disappeared it off the table into my hands. Turns out the product in question is a Roku Soundbridge M500 network music player. The b0rkness in question was that greater than half the LCD display is non-working. I discovered the device has both wired and WiFi (by way of a removable CompactFlash card) and...a telnet-able command-line interface--all still functional. There's a whole bunch of accessible functionality but some of the coolest stuff includes access to the remote control and the remaining functional area of the display.

Day two continues....

P.S. Thanks Nat. :-)

Posted at: 11:56 | category: / | Comments ()