Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - mobile

App Review: Smart Alarm Clock

2010-03-05T11:10:00+00:00

One of the reasons to own a smart phone is to run applications on it. There are some fantastic ideas out there and given the relative youth of the mobile app explosion I'm sure there is plenty more to come. Today I thought I would offer my thoughts on Smart Alarm Clock.

The concept is fairly simple. When you go to bed you place your phone on your bed. It uses the built in accelerometers to monitor your movements as you move about in the bed. By analysing the magnitude of your movements it attempts to deduce what part of the sleep cycle you are in. Once your within range of when you want to wake up it and it detects you exiting the REM cycle of your sleep it will gently wake you up.

There are some problems with some models of phones that require the phone doesn't go to sleep for the sampling of the accelerometer. However the workaround of leaving the phone on is fairly benign as it's the time the phone is attached to the charging cable. Also there has been an update in the last few days which increases the accuracy of movement detection. You even get a nice graph of your movements over the night.

The app also has a number of other features including a useful muting of all ringtones while you are asleep as well a feature I haven't tried that attempts to stop you snoring by giving you an acoustic nudge.

As I've gotten older I've often found myself waking before the alarm, however when I don't the waking I've gotten from the gentle increasing alarm sound has been a lot less jaring than John Humphrys suddenly berating some politician. I have noticed I'm remembering my dreams more vividly the last few days but I suspect I need a few more data points to see if it is due to the app. Either way the trail version is free and I can heartily recommend giving it a try.

Bandwidth

2008-06-09T21:27:00+01:00

I had suspected it for a while but I've just confirmed it. T-Mobile is altering my web-pages. I suspect in this case it's nothing overly sinister like Phorm but it is still un-announced tampering with web-pages I request from 3rd party servers.

Transparent proxies have existed almost as long as consumer internet. Usually they just cache frequently accessed files (like the Google logo) and pass them to the browser directly rather than pulling it over the expensive backbone network again. Since a lot of the worlds content doesn't change and popular sites are visited by the majority of your customers this can make a significant saving to an ISP's bandwidth costs.

In the case of T-Mobile the proxy is inserting the line:
<script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js" language="javascript">
into every web-page that is served. Further more every image displayed is replaced with a link to an image server somewhere on the 1.2.3.* network and a piece of JavaScript that adds the hover text "Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page." which works as advertised. On the limited resources of a mobile wireless connection this probably makes sense although I'm still a little wary of the fact T-Mobile is modifying my web-pages.

It looks like we won't be able to get broadband via the company (landlords not liking holes in walls) so I'm currently hunting round for broadband deals. I'm beginning to worry about some of the things Virgin Media is up to so I don't think cable is a given.

I've also set-up my virtual server firewall so I can run torrents as and when required. Although I pay per GB it's a fairly honest arrangement (the basic plan starts at 100Gb per month) which is a fair amount to get through. Of course I double the bandwidth usage when I pull the final file to my home machine but I'm fairly sure the ISP's cannot inspect the data thanks to ssh. In fact once connected I may set-up a few Tor nodes just to avoid my ISP tracking my every move. It's not that I don't trust them to abuse the data, oh hang on, that's right, I don't trust them....

Life without Broadband

2008-06-03T17:39:00+01:00

Since the move down we have been without broadband. In fact without a fixed line we are subject to the whims of the mobile phone networks. Hopefully (landlords assent and trees permitting) I'll be able to get super-fast broadband through my works test network in Cambridge. However we have managed in the meantime with other alternatives.

I currently have the T-Mobile's "Unlimited"^* Web'n'Walk package which adds about ï¿½7.50 a month to my monthly contract. I predominately used it for phone browsing using the rather excellent Opera Mini. However it is possible to connect to my phone over a PAN. Once paired you can simply hop on an off at will. On the Mac it's a pretty easy drop down menu "Join Alex's K800i Network" and only slightly more involved from my Linux box. Once connected to the PAN and running a normal dhcp client you get assigned an RFC1918 10.0.0.0 address which I assume it NATed somewhere in the mobile network.

The network filters some ports (typically the ones used by IM clients) but normal web browsing works fine as does ssh which I use to access my email host. In the house we get a 3G signal so we can stream stuff from the BBC's Listen Again service. Measuring a download on my machine I maxed out at around 20kb/s which is perfectly good for audio streams and can handle low res YouTube if you pause it and give it a bit of time to buffer up. I suspect however iPlayer will prove too much for it.

* The only real downside is the persistent use of the word unlimited for a service that quite blatantly is. Since I reset my data counters a few days ago we have already clocked up around 113Mb of data downstream so I can see us hitting the 1Gb "Fair Use" limit if we are not careful. The next price point is 3Gb which doesn't seem much better. Having said that I have yet to get a warning so it could be T-Mobile aren't yet enforcing these limits.

New Shiny

2005-11-30T17:04:00+00:00

My new phone arrived yesterday, I'm quite pleased with it.

First of all the basics. It's a d750i which is a development of my old k700i. I'm pretty brand loyal with phones and while most of the world seems to be Nokia fans I've generally found Sony-Ericsson phones capable (and geek friendly). The basic layout is much the same although navigation is snappier indicating more processor power. Even Java doesn't suck!

A couple of welcome additions include a more sturdy connector for the hands free kit as well improvements to the Radio. The FM tuner is now RDS aware and seems to be more resilient picking up more stations than the k700 did. The volume the radio is capable of seems to be better as well (unless this mornings metro was a quite one). They lose marks for using the proprietary Sony Memory Stick Duo format although it is nice to have a way to boost the phones memory.

The thing I'm most pleased with is the built in camera. I've never been a fan of the concept of phone camera's. I generally regarded them (and the associated MMS photo messaging) as rather gimmicky. However the quality of the images on the 2.0 mega-pixel camera is quite good. Instead of the fixed lense the camera will focus. It has several shoot modes including a rapid 4 in a row mode that gives you more chance of catching a good picture in rapidly moving action. Most importantly the lense is covered so you don't have to clean the lint from your pocket off the lense before you take a photo. It's certainly entering the quick snap capable territory that means I'd be comfortable using it instead of a "real" digital camera.

This of course means the next real camera I get will have to be a decent SLR style digital ;-)