Ealing Council Says You Need To Pay To Recycle Garden Waste

The above photo shows the current garden waste recycling bags that are used within Ealing. You fill these with your garden waste and each week you put them out with your rubbish, and other recycling, and Ealing council comes along and picks it all up for you. Brilliant! The recycling options in Ealing are great. In fact when I moved here a year ago, I found you could recycle so much that I found it confusing!

• A white bag for plastics
• Orange bags for garden waste
• A small green bin for food scraps
• A larger green storage container for paper and metals
• and then general rubbish if indeed you had any after al of that recycling!

OK so you don't need to have a PhD to manage all of that recycling but it certainly helps! ;-) Below is a picture of my standard recycling ... although admittedly in the height of Summer there are usually more garden waste recycling bags, as the above image shows!

In 2012 however this is all going to change. Well the garden waste recycling will at least. Ealing Council highlights that putting garden waste in landfill is not an option. In the long run this leads to green house gas creation which is clearly not a great thing, and it is a needless impact on landfill sites. It just doesn't make sense to dump reusable garden waste into landfill sites. Besides councils in the UK have recycling targets that they need to meet. Although I am not certain I assume there are financial impacts if these recycling targets are not met? I need to research this some more.

So there simply should not be a barrier to entry for people to recycle as much of their waste as possible. Previously, the only barrier to entry for Ealing residents was the need to have a PhD to understand the options ;-). In April 2012 though this all changes. Ealing council have announced a subscription service for the collection of garden waste. It will cost residents another £40 a year on top of their council tax. This for a service that is currently covered by council tax in Ealing. Residents will be able to get a wheelie bin, or bags, for their garden waste - however collections will only be every 2nd week.

Lets add a barrier to entry to recycling! That'll help residents help the council to meet their recycling targets! This is simply not a good idea in my view. If people see a perceived cost for a service, they are less likely to use it. OK we already pay for the garden waste recycling, but this comes out of our council tax bill now. Now on top of this I have to pay for a service that I already get for free. What's more I pay and its only available every 2nd week as opposed to every week? Crazy.

Ealing prides itself on being a green borough. There are fantastic parklands and fantastic gardens that make Ealing a desirable place to live. Why are people who maintain their gardens going to be penalised for making Ealing an enjoyable place to live? OK this might sound a little extreme, but this is what it equates to. If you are an avid gardener you will have to pay a little more each year to keep your garden tidy. 

Oh and don't try and dispose of your garden waste in your regular rubbish (not that you should). In their FAQ Ealing Council highlight that this is not an option.

I certainly hope this doesn't lead to an increase in fly tipping :-(

Councils should be doing everything in their power to encourage residents to recycle correctly. They should not be charging for the privilege. 

Cheers

Murray

Jawbone Up Review

So I did receive a Jawbone Up wristband for Christmas! Yay! So far it has not suffered a fate of death as experienced by some people. Apparently issues have arisen after 10 or so days of use - more info about the Jawbone Up issues and no questions asked refund. I have only had it for just under a week but I have charged it fully and it appears to be maintaining its charge so fingers crossed it keeps on working!

Initial impressions from me are that it is a lot bulkier than I thought it would be. OK it's not massive but I notice it. When putting on long sleeved shirts or jackets, or gloves - again I notice it. It gets in the way. I am getting more used to it, and I have been wearing pretty much well 100% of the time but initially, as I don't wear a watch, I think I have noticed it more than I should have. Rest assured this is not a show stopper ;-). My personal issue only!

In terms of functionality. You put it on, you walk about, or sleep, and then you sync the data to you iPhone so it can be used within the free Jawbone app that you install on your phone. It couldn't be simpler. You can set goals, such as the number of hours you wish to sleep, or the number of steps you wish to take in a day, and after syncing data with your phone it then provides you nice daily graphs of your daily activity, as can be seen below.



The above screen shot shows you the daily breakdown of your sleep, activity and food consumption. I find the food section of the app a little limiting so I don't actually use it. You can basically track the food you are eating by taking photographs of it and uploading. I would use the food consumption functionality if there was a little more science behind it, as an example highlighting the number of calories you have probably consumed. Below is a more detailed breakdown of the daily activity graph. This is only until 11:02 am as I was testing the accuracy of distance within the app against RunKeeper. More on this later.



Battery life seems really good, assuming that it continues to maintain it's charge! It takes roughly 80 minutes to fully charge and so far I think I should get about 7 days on a single charge.

What is really missing from the application though, or a browser based interface, is access to export your data so you can track trends and reports across time. Within the application you only have access to a timeline where you can scroll left and right to see your previous days activity. It I want to compare the activities I did 4 weeks ago with what I am doing now, there is simply not an easy way to do this. It would really be great if I had access to reports over time, such that I could really see that I was becoming more active, or whether or not I have activity spikes that drop back in time. This should not be the goal of the Jawbone Up, rather it should encourage you to remain active and become increasingly more active. Weekly reports and monthly reports, highlighting continued progress, would allow me to do this. I think this is really lacking from the application.

I have been a huge fan of RunKeeper for a year and a half now. In fact RunKeeper was the first thing I blogged about on this blog. I don't use it as regularly as I have previously, but I did use it the other day to test the accuracy of the Jawbone Up. I performed the following walk:



Along the following route: (as RunKeeper uses the GPS they can provide very nice route maps in the summary reports of your activity)



and as it turns out, even though the Jawbone Up doesn't use GPS it is pretty accurate with respect to distance travelled. The above Jawbone Up activity picture shows 4.85 kilometers distance travelled and RunKeeper shows 5.25 kilometers. The Jawbone report is for the whole day up until 11am, however most of the activity is from the walk measured by RunKeepr as well. So distance covered is reasonably accurate. I much prefer the under reporting within Jawbone Up compared to if it reported figures more than they were!

Another odd thing about the Jawbone application is that your activity data is stored in the cloud as opposed to within the app. OK so there are community features with the Jawbone Up App, so I can understand that data will have to maintained on a server somewhere in order to share it with others, but why on earth, if I scroll back through my time line of activity does the app have to download data from a server. Surely the data should be cached within the application so I can look at my activity without any data access? Not sure why they would have designed the app this way? But if I put my iPhone into flight mode I cannot look at any of my historical data within the app. The data has been there previously as it is synced from the wristband itself. This is really odd.

This may have sounded negative on the whole, however all in all I am a fan of the Jawbone Up. Once on your wrist you don't have to do anything for it to track your activity. Unlike RunKeeper where you have to activity start and stop the application prior to, and after, each activity. The Jawbone App just silently collects data. however what it does need to make it far better and a much stronger product on the whole is:

• Offline access to your data! Why on earth do I need a data connection to look at my timeline within the application?
• Far better reporting options to allow me to monitor my health progress.
• Better food resources. Allow people to track calories consumed as opposed to simply photograph food and tag restaurant locations.

So I am a fan and I will continue to use it. I hope to see product improvements moving forwards, but given the Jawbone Up hardware issues, they might be a while away! 

So definitely worth a try if they fix the hardware problems! Right now I definitely would not be buying one off eBay or the like. you have no idea if you would be getting a broken one or not. If you want to try, wait until they start shipping them again and get one from a retailer with a returns policy, just in case!

Cheers

m

Gowalla Goes To Facebook

It was announced on December 5th, on the Gowalla blog, that Gowalla was going to Facebook. It's a talent acquisition and not a product acquisition, so unfortunately the Gowalla app will be put to bed early in 2012. You will be able to export your data but early next year the app will be closed down.

This is a real shame. I really love Gowalla. For me it was always a different user experience to Foursquare. Gowalla, for me, was always more about discover-ability rather than simply checking into a place to become mayor. For each check-in you made you received a stamp in your passport. some places were featured and had their own icons and there was always a challenge to get these graphically stunning icons into your passport. The UI designers at Gowalla are great. It's no wonder Facebook have acquired them.

There was always the comparison with Foursquare, but for me Gowalla stands out above Foursquare on the usability and ascetically pleasing stakes. Possibly to avoid the comparisons, Gowalla re-launched itself as a crowd sourced city travel guide service in September. I loved the look and feel of this re-launch as well, however for me there were two issues with the re-launched service:

1. Roaming Data costs! Having a crowd sourced travel guide is fantastic (it's an idea very close to heart), however when I am going to need this most (In Europe) is when I am in another country, so when I am roaming! It's going to be a nasty shock when I discover all these cool places on Gowalla, then get home and see my roaming data bill. Cue severe holiday hangover! A mechanism around this of course would be able to download the city guides to your device prior to going and then allow offline usage. Check-ins could simply be queued until you are back on WiFi, or back on your home network. Guess we unfortunately won't be seeing this feature :-(
2. Also with the re-launch they removed access to your passport page! This was the page where you could see all of the stamps of places you had visited and the count of your passport stamps! this was a small feature that I actually really missed. It's not really the point of a travel guide service but when I was growing up I was always fascinated with travel and looking back through my passport at all the stamps I had collected along the way. Living in Europe now there are no stamps! Confound the EU I say! ;-). The Gowalla passport icons were a visually stunning way to look back at your recent trips you had made. As I say it's no wonder Facebook want the Gowalla UI team.

These (personal) issues aside, Gowalla you will be missed. for several years you held a prominent place on my mobile phone idle screen.

Good luck.

cheers

m 

My 9 Most Viewed 2011 Flickr Photos

Before you get insanely bored of Top in 2011 lists here are my most viewed Flickr photos of 2011. I am getting in ealry before the rot sets in! ;-) These are not necessarily my favorite photos that I have taken this year, in fact some are not even mine, however by views these are the most popular photos on my Flickr photo stream this year. If I find the time I think I shall go through and pick out my favorites from this past year as well.

The first, above, seems appropriate. In the early 1980's Nintendo Game and Watches were really the first introduction I had to any form of mobile technology. These are the collection that I have left. I don't have batteries at the moment but they are still a nice collectible.

Steve Jobs comes in at second. Clearly not my photo but at the time I questioned if he was launching the iPad2, his last product launch, or whether or not he was in fact launching a very old Ericsson mobile. After all this is what he is holding in his right hand! Click through to the flickr photo if you want to see his latest mobile. It's in the comments ;-)

Then it seems as though the English Cricket team managed to break the Ashes urn in their wild celebrations after beating Australia in the last Ashes test match series in Australia. Something to celebrate for sure, but breaking the Ashes urn seems wildly inappropriate!

My next most viewed photo is on corporate message! I posted theis just after T-Mobile in the UK launched their iPhone Customer Care App. Amazing what interest a single person can generate by posting a photo. Imagine what interest you could create if you used Social Media to engage with all of your Customers on all of your products. The options are limitless.

Finally some photos of value! :-) This was the first photo I posted of Peter after his birth. This is probably Peter at 2 hours old. He looks a little tired!

Peter at 1 day old. Pretty gorgeous! Him not me! ;-) Dad looks rather chuffed though! :-)

This is a picture of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone, with one of his first creations. As far as I am aware the choice of apps on this phone is limited. Apparently they have been used to build houses though. After all they are the size and weight of bricks!

This is Peter striking his first Blue Steel pose. Quality! ;-)

And the finally, Mon meeting Peter for the first time!

A very momentous year for us really! :-)

Anyway, thats the most viewed. In the next week or so I will try to post my favorites. Some might be on both lists ;-)

Cheers

m

Jawbone Up! Hmm Perhaps Jawbone Down?

The Jawbone UP bracelet had a lot of potential. Containing an accelerometer the bracelet will track your movement and sleep patterns. In conjunction with an iPhone, and soon an Android, app you can then download and track your data. Arguably this should show you how inactive you are and allow you to adjust your lifestyle to actually try to be healthy!

It has various other features as well, such as a vibration alert if you have been stationary too long. This should tell you to get off your backside and do some exercise.

Sounds ideal. In fact so ideal I have been reliably informed that I should be getting one for Christmas. Yay!

Only one small problem. They don't seem to work :-(. In an email from the CEO of Jawbone, Hosain Rahman explains that a production defect, in some instances, means that the bracelet cannot hold a charge. Some units also are unable to download any data therefore removing any usefulness in the product!

Jawbone are offering a full refund to anyone who has brought the UP bracelet, even if you are not experiencing any problems. To me this suggests there is not a lot of confidence in the production process of any of the initial build of the bracelets! I don't think any of this initial build will be lasting too long :-( I hope the one I get does work, but I am not entirely confident! If you have purchased a Jawbone UP and want your no questions asked refund click here.

Such a shame as I think it is a great idea! I hope they sort their production issues and I hope they release a version that actually works. There are some limitations to the product e.g. how they integrate details about food you have eaten. I think this is flaky and offers nothing more than a diary feature. It would be nice to add a bit more food science to the service as opposed to simply letting you upload images of unhealthy snacks you have eaten!

I think Jawbone have done the only thing they can do in the circumstance. They are stressing that quality of their product and service is of utmost importance. The hit they must be taking, in what I am sure would have been a Christmas surge of sales, must be huge. I hope that they pull through and are able to get a quality product out the door. Hey I still want to try it!

Cheers

m

Product Design Gone Mad - The Enviro 3000

Welcome the all new and all improved "Enviro 3000". This is not the bin for this generation but the bin for generations to come! Just listen to the features we have packed into this Enviro model:

• Conveniently placed push button's to allow you to automatically open and then close the bin. One button for each action! These are situated right at the rim of the bin to ensure if there is any nasty bacteria lurking there you are 100% guaranteed to get it all over your hands! This feature is specifically designed to improve your immune system. Once it has made you ill you will never be ill again!
• It has an on/off switch on the back of the bin, again conveniently located so if the bin is up against a wall you have no access to it what so ever! Yes folks you need electricity to make this bin work!
• There is a charging outlet so you can recharge your bin. That's right this bin is also battery powered folks! Sure you can use it without power, but it's seal tight lid has been conveniently designed to make usage without power really quite difficult. Don't worry though see the accessories described in further detail below.
• It will work for possibly 12 hours on a single charge! If that's not convenient then you can leave it plugged into the wall! That's right why not consume electricity and make more carbon dioxide while disposing of your waste! Why does it only possibly work for 12 hours on a single charge? Well we are not sure how long a single charge really works as the bin is always broken within the first hour. It works really well on a single charge for that hour though.
• Open's automatically if you wave your hand over the lid! Yay! This feature is sensitive enough to work after about the 5th wave over the lid, by which time it would have been more efficient manually clawing your way into the lid with a screwdriver. The screwdriver is possibly the easiest way into the bin if there is no power as you can prise the lid open easily with this. This then leads onto Enviro 3000 accessories!
• Yes folks when you buy the Enviro 3000 all good stockists will also be willing to sell you screwdrivers so you can still conveniently dispose of rubbish if the Enviro 3000 loses its charge or indeed there is a blackout. Never be left with the worry that you won't be able to use your bin again. there is also an additional paid for attachment that will allow you to strap your screw driver to the bins side, just so you never misplace your screwdriver again!

But wait you want more!? Wow you are a hard lot to please! Well... wait for it, there is an app to open the bin as well! Yay for apps! What I hear you say? you cannot find the Enviro 3000 app in the app store? Well guess what you don't need to. Just have your phone in your hand when you wave you hand over the lid, and if the auto open lid is still working, after the 5th wave the lid will open! It works with any phone, or indeed any object that you might have to hand! Does Angry Birds work on a wooden spoon? No it doesn't! The Enviro 3000 app does though. You don't believe me? Simply wave a wooden spoon over the lid and presto, after the 5th wave, if the auto open lid is still working, guaranteed the lid will open!

But Wait you still want more? Wow this is a seriously hard sell! You guys really are top Consumers! Well if it's more you want then it's more you will get! As the picture below shows, the Enviro 3000 is guaranteed to break within the first hour or so of usage! It's lid will be permanently stuck in the open position thus rendering it quite useless! But don't let that worry you as we have the perfect solution! For another slightly larger price than you piad for the Enviro 3000, you can buy the Enviro 4000!!!! The 4000 offers the same brilliant features as the 3000 but it's just slightly bigger than the 3000, hence making it the perfect rubbish disposal device to dispose of your broken Enviro 3000's! Yay for forward thinking!

Never let it be said that the Enviro brand isn't all about the Customer and serving your needs best. Our motto is: 'If it's not rubbish then it's not worth selling! Shabba!'

For more information on the Enviro brand and range of products please get in touch! Also please stay tuned for impending announcements about the even larger, and therefore more power hungry, Enviro 5000! It'll be perfect for getting rid of your broken 4000's!

Remember if you are not consuming your are a Communist!! Make rubbish and buy bins folks.

Peace, Out

The Enviro Product team wishes you a Happy and waste filled Christmas!!

Voting ... It's A Serious Business!

Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle the concept of voting, democracy et al! the above picture is of someone protesting in Russia about Putin and how he's not a very nice chap. For some reason though it really had me thinking of this chap, pictured on TV behind a presenter on a show during the last national election in the UK.



In this case this chap hasn't decided who he is going to vote for as politicians, at the time, were far too scared to ask him!

Don't know why I linked the two, my brain is functioning oddly at the moment.

Two Glaring iPhone Design Flaws.

The first: It really would not be fair to say that using the iPhone is child's play. Sure it's simple to use out of the box and yeah it just works .... well it does in all but the hands of a child. As can be seen in the photo above, I let my son have a whirl of my trusty old iPhone 3GS war horse. It was so difficult to use that he simple resorted to attempting to eat it! OK it could be said that given half a chance he will try to eat anything that finds its way into his hands, however in a scientific experiment, conducted soon after this iOS usability testing experiment, I gave him a HTC Desire S Android device. This is just as shiny as an iPhone 3GS, however he did NOT try and consume this! So although it might not be child's play the iPhone still clearly tastes better than Android devices.

The Second Design Flaw of the iPhone: Well soon after Peter's smartphone taste testing experiments my iPhone 3GS displayed the following error:



Seriously. I mean this accessory is not optimized for this iPhone? What?! Are they suggesting that my son is an accessory? Crazy stuff. I had not thought that a child was the latest fashion craze. It seems that my son is either too modern, or far too old school and as a result has a compatibility issue with a phone that is after all only just over 2 years old! It's a real scam. When a new phone comes out all the interfaces are changed so the old accessories don't work! So when you buy your new phone you have to upgrade all your accessories as well. I tell you it's a cynical money making exercise! Make sure your new design is subtly different that everything needs upgrading if you want shinier stuff! ;-)

Cheers

m

TFL's SMS Alerts For Next Bus Times

I love inventive uses for SMS. A communication mechanism that is now pretty much well universal. Sure smart phones may be taking over , but the only thing in common that runs across almost every single mobile phone is SMS. It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone, Android, WP7 or any phone what so ever. SMS just works and people just know how to use it. SMS is not dead! ;-) Arguably voice also runs on every mobile. When was the last time you made a call on your mobile though? ;-)

Earlier this year The Postal service in Denmark announced that you could use SMS to purchase a stamp. Fantastic! In Copenhagen you can also use SMS to purchase klippekort, which provide you with 10 bus and train tickets. So no more strips of paper tickets, simply a SMS with your ticket details.

Transport For London have now implemented a nice use case, albeit a blindingly obvious one (although you do need the accurate data to provide the service), whereby you text the code of a bus stop to 87287 and they will send you back a text with the arrival times of the next bus to your stop. The detail on each bus stop can be seen on the above photo.

In central London this information is typically displayed on most bus stops via a dot matrix display, however when you get to the sticks few bus stops actually have the displays. SMS is the next most obvious solution to provide the service! Sure you could provide a link to use in your mobile's web browser, or create an app that will automatically detect your location and then provide bus timetable information, but then you have to develop for iPhone, Android, WP7, etc... When SMS is ubiquitous why not provide such a simple use case via it. Then it simply works everywhere for everyone. Tidy.

The response from TFL's service can be seen below



When I used the service it was absolutely spot on. A minute after receiving the above text, along came the E2. Excellent.

Cheers

m

Battery Life Issues Have Turned The iPhone 4S Into A Real Lemon

Sorry I couldn't resist. For some reason it made me smile. I am of small mind nowadays and very tired ;-)

Photos Of Pitshanger Park

In April I blogged about Pitshanger Park and how much I loved it. I still spend a load of time in the park, although due to the fact it is now dark when I get home of an evening, typically visits are now limited to the weekend when we walk Peter around in his pram during one of his sleeps!

This past weekend was no different. On Sunday the fog really made the park feel quite mystical, as the above photo shows. It was not actually possible to see from one side of the park to the other, as can be seen below. It made for a great walk.



Also spotted on the weekend, on Saturday before the fog, one of the many Pistshanger Parakeets burrowing away in a tree branch. Although a little hard to see the photo below shows the birds backside as it digs away! I have never seen a parakeet do this but they clearly do. The amount of digging into the branch was pretty significant given the amount of wood chips on the ground below.



Although the following photo was taken last Autumn, I have seen the 50% off Autumn scene again this year as well. How is it possible for the leaves to be so neatly separated? I guess only the person with the leaf blower knows! ;-)



Another Autumn carnage photo from last year!



Have fun

Cheers

m

The Cost Of Petrol And Diesel - Who Gets What?

The above diagram which was from a BBC news article shows the breakdown of the cost of a litre of petrol and the cost of a litre of diesel, in the UK, during October 2011.

Looking at Diesel, as it's what I use, the total average cost is 138.4p/litre. Of this there is 58p duty and 23.1p VAT, so a total of 81.1p goes to the government. that equates to 58.6% ending up in government coffers. This is a pretty nice little earner for the government!

That being said I can see how it's really not enough and I think, come the new year, they really should increase the duty by another 3 pence per litre. I think that at all costs the Government should be getting at least 60% of the cost of a litre of diesel and petrol. Really how else will we ever recover from the banking fiasco of 2008. I think everyone should have to pay for this as everyone is responsible for it...... oh hang on no that might not be right.

Cheers

m

Yahoo! Fail! Removes! Pulse! Blogs! Doesn't! Tell! Users!

The above picture, titled "Is This What Happens When Redundancies Attack", was taken at Yahoo! when the international mobile team in London were closed down for delivering the award winning FIFA World Cup 2006 mobile site. Not soon after the announcement this wall caved in!

It now seems appropriate again when talking about Yahoo! After all they have been going down the toilet for sometime now. Shareholders must still be cringing about not being taken over by Microsoft, for 40 USD, a share a couple of years ago! Ho hum. On the other hand Microsoft shareholders are probably still celebrating!

The latest piece of news about Yahoo! that has annoyed me greatly is the fact that they seem to have removed all blogs from their Yahoo! Pulse product. This has affected me directly and they didn't have the courtesy to actually let me know they were going to do this!

Sometime around 2005, Yahoo! launched their social product - 360 in Europe. I was an avid user and over the course of a couple of years blogged about 400 times using it. When Yahoo! 360 closed down (seriously how could Yahoo! fail at a social product with 500 million users in an era when social web sites were exploding? It's beyond me - but that's another story) Yahoo! allowed users to migrate their 360 blogs to Yahoo! Pulse. I gladly did as I didn't want to lose all of the work I had put into my blog. My 360 blog sat quite happily within Pulse until recently.

Today when I looked I found that it was no longer there. After a quick look on the internet a couple of Yahoo! answer users had pointed out that the blogs have simply been removed. Apparently Pulse users were alerted by a banner ad. OK as far as I am aware one of Yahoo!'s biggest products is email. They couldn't spend the time to actually let Pulse users know this would happen via email? Shocking!

I Guess not? Communicating with your Customers via your biggest distribution mechanism seems to be a step too far for some companies! ;-)

Yahoo! Should learn from the mobile carriers of this world. I mean even Vodafone can alert their users via SMS when they are closing, oddly coincidentally, their 360 product!



I am not sure how much longer I can support the ever flagging Yahoo! After this I think I am going to move permanently away from their email service as well. Not sure what to do about Flickr. I really love that product. Maybe that's the only tie I will have to Yahoo! Who knows. Next thing you know that'll be closed down without notification!

I loved working for Yahoo! and loved their products. That love has waned dramatically since they lost seemingly all creativity. It's a real shame they are going the way of the above pictured toilet.

Cheers

m

The Garden Is Slowing Down For Winter Hibernation

So right now the garden is really slowing down for its winter hibernation. I finished the lawn scarifying and trimmed the hedges the other weekend. I think that will be the last attention that the hedges get until next Spring. I probably have to mow the lawn and do the edges one more time. Then the odd piece of clean up of dead perennials, but that's it. Things have really started to time out for winter.

I should probably protect my hedge trimmings from the cold and possible snow, but I didn't do this last year and all of them made it through the coldest winter in living memory, so probably won't do anything different this year either! If I know that it is going to hit -18 degrees Celsius again this winter I might move them inside the garage for the cold spell ;-)

So all in all the gardening blog entries will probably diminish for a while. Never mind there will be mobile related blogs! Yay! Well maybe not. I am sort of on a small hiatus with the mobile stuff right now. Things aren't inspiring me to write about mobile currently. It's not that I am over mobile technology, I think that it is just at the moment I feel so far removed from it that I don't get day to day inspiration from it. Currently I feel about as far away from mobile development as I have in a long time! Possibly since I started working in mobile almost 20 years ago! Crazy .... almost 20 years is a long time!

So for the time being, until inspired again, mobile blogs will possibly be thin on the ground as well for a little while.

I still love writing though. I find it to be a great escape and it is probably my largest hobby. I might not do it well but I have done a lot of it! ;-) So I think this blog might well become a little more eclectic over the coming months. Think I will blog about stuff in general as opposed to a specific category, or possibly categories of content. I was looking through a book I wrote in 2004/5. I might even rehash some of the content from there. Might at least rehash some of the photos.

So I guess for the next while you had better watch out for random crap as opposed to mobile crap and gardening crap ;-)

Cheers

m

The Garden Still Thinks It's Spring

It has been so warm and dry in the UK in September and October that a load of plants think it is Spring rather than Autumn. In September the temperatures were regularly hovering at or above 20 degrees celsius. Things have cooled down in October but we are still getting 18 degrees during the day, on occasion, although the nights are considerably cooler. We almost had a frost out at Ealing but only on the parked cars ;-)

The hollyhocks in our garden are all sprouting as if it's Spring. The picture above shows the new growth. Also the hedging plant in the front of the house is also starting to flower again, as seen below. They are in for a rude shock I think as summer time ends this weekend!



Not only has it been warm it has also been super dry in London. The only serious rain I can remember was last Wednesday early morning where we had 14mm of rain. Apart from that almost nothing. My water tanks are empty now. The fact I have to water at all seems very odd at this stage of the year. My pot plants would have been long gone dead and bloated if I hadn't kept up the watering regime. As it stands last years Christmas tree is still going strong ;-)

Due to the lack of rain the ground is simply too hard to complete the Autumn lawn care. No chance for me to aerate the lawn as it is almost impossible to get a pitch fork in the ground! It's a hard job when the ground is moist so forget it when it's dry!

Still a manic Saturday morning of gardening saw various shrubs cut back and the Chilean Potato Tree and the Climbing Roses on the back fence cut back. Not sure this is an Autumn task. It should probably have been done earlier in autumn at least, but again the Spring like weather has them growing manically. The results below.



The results for the council are four bags of garden cuttings to take away when the garbage is picked up ;-)



Maybe if it rains in the next week or so I will get to finish aerating the lawn but if I don't get it done soon I won't be using any Autumn fertiliser. Deadline for this is apparently mid November! Ah well can always aerate in the new year ;-)

Cheers

M

How Can You Save 20% Off Your Diesel Costs?

OK so Diesel in the UK is pretty much well at the highest cost it has ever been. Seems to hover around the 139 - 140 pence per liter where I fill up. That equates to about $2.20 a liter in US dollars and (this is where I would usually make a joke about the Australian Peso. Unfortunately the Australian Peso has soared ahead against the UK pound, making working for pounds effectively meaningless ;-) ) roughly $2.15 AUD. So quite a bit per liter.

I have to drive to work. Well that is not entirely true. I could get public transport which would take 90 minutes at minimum each way, or drive which takes 30 minutes of a morning and about 45 on the way home. It's a no brainer, I drive. Guess I could get a job that was accessible by public transport or move to Hatfield. The latter is not an option ;-).

So due to diesel costs driving is seriously costing a fortune. It's basically £70 a tank, give or take, to fill a VW Golf. Yes a hatchback. Cripes knows what it costs to fill a real car! So to cut down on driving costs I decided to drive incredibly conservatively, e.g. like a big girls blouse ;-), to see what the difference in fuel consumption would be.

Conservative driving for me means:

• driving the speed limit or just under
• keeping the engine revs incredibly low. I try not to rev the engine what so ever and change gears incredibly early. Basically until I reach higher gears the engine barely gets above 1000 RPM
• thats it.

This doesn't really significantly increase driving time so much. Sure it does a little but in the overall scheme of things do you really need to rush to work? Yeah rushing home sure but the other way ;-). However in a one tank test it has dramatically decreased fuel consumption. Or should that be increased? Not sure ;-). What I mean is that I get more MPG and therefore spend less. Got that?

So since having my car I have averaged about 45 MPG. Not to shabby from a combination of both urban and rural driving. Not exactly what the VW Golf TDI 1.9 spec claims but all in all not too shabby. This past tank however, with the conservative driving approach adopted above, I averaged 55 MPG. Thats a 22% increase in MPG.

OK its a one tank test, but that tank did cover both rural and urban driving as I pretty much well always do. It's not quite a scientific study yet, but it clearly demonstrates that conservative driving will save you a bomb. For simplicity lets say I am 20% better off. Thats roughly £14 per tank thank you very much. With this kind of saving I could almost afford to take up smoking! ;-)

Anyways, if your car fuel bills are soaring, it might just be worth chilling out behind the wheel. You will still get to where you are going and you will probably be richer off karmically as well. It's difficult to get road raged up if you hover at the speed limit. Try it out, it's guaranteed to make you feel better! ;-)

Cheers

m

Time For Autumn Lawn Scarifying

As with last Autumn, it's time to scarify the lawn again. It's a time consuming, and arduous, job if done manually. I tried to complete this evening, but didn't quite make it due to the lack of rain making the ground too hard. Steps are:

1. Mow the lawn and rake up the cuttings
2. Then with a spring tine rake, rake again length wise and cross wise. Give this some real wellie as well. The more effort you put in the more thatch you get out. As can be seen from the picture above I actually got more thatch out of the lawn than grass from cutting
3. After this aerate the lawn. Take your pitch fork and every ten centimetres dig in and slightly lift the turf. This is the real hard piece of the work. If it hasn't rained properly for two months, as it hasn't in London, simply do not do this. The ground is simply too hard to make much ground work. I didn't manage this today. Will wait until after it rains a little.
4.  Sprinkle on some Autumn lawn food and water in. I also didn't complete this step as will wait until the aeration done.
5. If suffering from bare patches sprinkle with lawn seed and rake in. It should still be warm enough for these to take hold. Don't let this go for too much longer though. 

Looking at the lawn this year below, and comparing it to last year, following, it looks as though the lawn has stood up a little better this year

and from last year

Last year when I scarified for the first time the lawn looked so bad I thought I had done permanent damage to it! I was cursing the folks at Gardeners' World ;-)! Having gone a full year though and seen how good the lawn was this year I am hoping to be happy with the results next Spring as I was this one just past.

Below are the results of this Autumn's scarifying. It really is surprising how much dead grass you have in your lawn!

A shame that I am only half done though. As mentioned it is a rather arduous task and to be honest I have only done the easy bit! The aeration using the pitch fork is always fun!

That's all for now.

Cheers

m

Peter's Thoughts On David Cameron And The Conservative Party Conference

Hot on the heals of Peter's solution to save the euro, he provides his frank assessment of David Cameron, the Conservative Party in the UK and the current Conservative Party Conference in Manchester.

Please view the video above for his assessment. I asked him for further comment but he was so mad he was not prepared to comment further after ripping the Economist to bits.

More assessment of the economy and politics in general once Peter is ready to comment further ;-)

Cheers

m

Flickr Photo Sessions - Great!

Yesterday Flickr finally launched their Android app. This two years after launching their iPhone app. Yay! I have been looking for this app for ages and it is actually a really nice app. It allows you to do all of the standard stuff, I.e. upload photos and look at yours and your contacts photos. It also has access to filters to allow you to add different filter settings to your photo before upload. This is not a real selling point for me but for Instagram fans it might work. The filters don't have quite as many options as are available within Instagram, but if they are used, I could see future versions adding to the selection of effects you can add to your photo prior to upload.

I actually think the viewing of your contacts photos feature is far better in the android app than that which is available in the iPhone app. On Android you can see a selection of photos that each of your contacts has uploaded on a single screen. In the iPhone app you can only see photos that have been uploaded recently and you cannot see the relevant contact who uploaded the image until you click through. Might not sound like a big issue? When you are on a mobile network and it takes a good while to actually download an image to find out who the contact is it becomes one ;-)

So aside for the fact that finally having an Android app for Flickr is great, Flickr also announced the Flickr Photo Session product. More about this product here. This is really a fantastic Flickr feature and allows the user to share a Flickr set in real time with their friends. There is a chat window to allow your friends to comment on your photos, but best of all there are drawing tools that allow you to draw on the photos you are sharing. This can be seen on the title image of this blog.


Starting a photo session is simple. Open one of your sets and from the sharing menu select start session. Then you can share the link specified in the session settings with your friends so they can access the content. the photo below shows this.




Seriously I really love collaboration tool. I cannot wait to try it out in anger. Combining this feature with voice will be killer! OK for now you would have to do this with a Skype session on the side, but who knows with two product launches in a day, maybe there might be life in the old Flickr yet! I certainly hope so!

Well done Flickr folks. this is the beginning of a great innovation. I hope you continue to push updates to this and many other features!

Thanks

cheers

m

ADDITION: Honestly I cannot help myself. Give me the tools to add a smile and some hair and I cannot but help abuse the power! :-)

The iPad Will Always Be A Safer Consumer Choice Than Any Android Tablet

The iPad will always be a better consumer choice than any Android Tablet. The reason is simple - the UI is so simple to navigate that even a child can use it.

;-)

Have fun

cheers

m

ADDITION: The not so entirely interesting thing about this post is that if you read it on an iPhone or iPad it doesn't actually work! For those poor bastards who are accessing it from one of these devices (well you may not have been poor before you purchased your iPad, but you are now ;-) ) you can access the video that this post was all about here. It was sort of supposed to be a joke ;-)

Gowalla 4.0 Review - Crowd Sourced City Guides

I have been very keen to try out Gowalla 4.0, ever since it was announced the other week at TechCrunch Disrupt, described at the time as a crowd sourced city guide or a social atlas, the opportunity to be more than  a simple check in app sounded very promising.

I really love the concept of crowd sourced city guides, in fact it is a product close to heart as we were planning developing something very similar to this in my final days at Yahoo! Whatever happened to that Yahoo!? If you check you have several patents on something very similar ;-)



So now in Gowalla, instead of simply checking into a location you can view a city guide containing locations of specific interest, I am assuming based on number of check-ins, or as it may be now - stories shared. This gives you an instant overview of the must see locations in the city you are looking at.

Each city guide also contains a set of lists of things you can do. for example in London:

• pub crawl
• tourist trot
• best markets
• etc ...

These equate to the trips in the pre v4.0 of Gowalla, and as a tourist guide offer a great overview of collections of locations, or activities, that may be of interest.

Instead of simply checking in at a location, Gowalla now asks you to start a story at a location. I like this concept of starting a story. A location all of a sudden grows a life, with this feature, as opposed to being simply a number of check-ins. A story can contain a number of people, photos and comments. So a history of a location can be created. 

As part of the revamp of Gowalla, a users passport has had the number of locations visited removed. I must admit that I do miss this. The concept of the number of passport stamps for locations visited was great. Now you can only see a feed of places that you have been that you can scroll back through. However I found that this meant that I would only use Gowalla when I went to new locations as opposed to locations that I went to regularly. If I already had a stamp for a location there seemed to be little need to check in there again the next time I went. So now, with story creation, as opposed to simply checking in to get a stamp, I can see that users will be encouraged to check in to create a new addition to the history of a location. I love that you can now see a location and view what has gone on there.

One thing that might impact usage though. I really like exploring the city guides. However would I do this when visiting another country? With data roaming rates so high I don't think I would. I could see myself reading up on a city before I got there, which in itself is still a great use for Gowalla, but I am not sure I could afford to use it real time when I am in the city! Previously I would definitely have checked into a few places to ensure I got the country pin of the country I was in, and it appears that country badges are still available, although all other badges have been removed. So this I would still do. not sure I would be surfing, except of course on WiFi, while in the city I was visiting in a foreign land ;-). Guess the WiFi use case still works though, but it does limit your usage of the app as a true city guide you refer to regularly during the day as you wander around in tourist mode.

A small gripe with the Android app. I am using it on a HTC Desire S and after shutting down the application the GPS is not switched off. This is a battery drainer at the best of times! When you are wandering about in a foreign city the last thing you want is to have to recharge your phone every 3 hours! I expect this is a bug as opposed to a feature and hope it is fixed soon, so as I say a small gripe. I will test on the iPhone later on, as I have to upgrade to iOS 4.2 before I can!

What I would love to see in an upcoming release of Gowalla, and now as it is modelled as a collection of city guides, I feel these features would work really well,

• In the lists section actually have maps which provide navigation, maybe walking, driving and public transport, between the locations in each list. This would be great as it would allow users to find their way between points of interest. Social navigation for tourists! Perfect.
• Allow users to specify how much time they have, and based in their current location, and based on the number of stories within the area, actually map a route of interest that the user can follow to get the most out of the area they are in.
• Add time into the routes mentioned above. Based on the stories that are nearby take time in to account for the best tourist walk through a city. As an example Buckingham Palace is a building, but when you add the changing of the guard to it, it it a quintessential London tourist destination! Also a bar that loads of people have created stories for might be completely dead before 11pm. Why as a tourist would I want to end up at an empty dive at 9pm, when it doesn't kick off before 11?

There is seriously loads that can be done with the data that Gowalla are collecting. Will be interesting to see what they do with it. The above features I have described are all very close to my heart as I was trying to do these 5 years ago now! To my knowledge none of the LBS apps are yet to introduce the concept of time into the mix as well.

All that being said I really like what Gowalla are trying to do with their revamped app. It has the chance to become so much more than a collection of numbers in a location. It gives the chance to add a social context and history to all of the locations that it's users visit. Shame about the removal of passport stamps but I am sure I will get over it ;-)

Have fun

Cheers

M