Detection, not Prevention

Posted: Thu 9 December, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, People, Technology, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

In Birmingham, the police are installing microphones/sensors to detect the sound of gunshots. It’s being marketed as a way of reducing/preventing gun crime. And I don’t quite get that.

As an overview in the BBC story says,

West Midlands Police seem sure this initiative will help cut gun crime and give officers more confidence heading into unpredictable situations.

Despite this being a pilot there is a belief that if successful this will be rolled out to other UK cities.

But it’s not going to cut gun crime.

These sensors work on the sound of a gunshot. So they’re maybe – maybe – going to detect that a gun’s been fired, and roughly where. (A 25m (80-odd feet) radius in a city is a pretty big location) But the gun’s got to be fired before it can be detected.   It has issues (obviously) detecting gunshots from inside a building, or where a silencer is used.

And the detection method? Again from the BBC story,

The £150,000 system records an audio clip and sends police a GPS location.

A police officer trained to listen to the clips then makes a judgement on what they have heard before deploying officers.

So the sound has to be detected/recorded, then sent to the control room, then listened to by a trained officer, then the police get deployed.

Not really preventative at all then, is it?

Synapse Phones

Posted: Tue 26 October, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Business, Geeky, iPhone, Technology | Leave a comment »

If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill “standard” smartphones, it looks like this may be something that’s of interest.

Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011

Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.

Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.

Xmarks is closing

Posted: Tue 28 September, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.

So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.

For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.

A very sad day.

Loss of Sync

Posted: Wed 15 September, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts | 4 Comments »

When I got the iPhone (and on previous phones before that) one of the best things I used was a service called Zyb.com, which allowed you to synchronise contacts to their online database from your old phone, and then pull them down to the new phone. It made life *so* much easier, allowing you to do in ten minutes what otherwise turned into a dragged out and nightmarish process of copying contacts across one by one.

When Herself’s mother got an iPhone recently, I planned to do the same thing using Zyb, but I couldn’t. Because Zyb.com is no more.

A couple of years back now, Vodafone bought out Zyb, because it was such a good service. At the time they said it would carry on being available, and they’d got no plans to shut it down. Now though, they’ve closed down Zyb, and relaunched it (kind of) as part of Vodafone 360°. It’s nowhere near as good, fast or useful as it was as Zyb.

I’m really annoyed by this – despite having been a subscribed/signed-up user to Zyb, I didn’t get any notifications about the service closing down. It’s only having done other research about it that I find Zyb closed on 31st July.

As yet I haven’t found a decent replacement for Zyb that was as smooth and painless (and fast) as Zyb. Vodafone 360 took nearly three hours to sync things, and even then it’s not as good. Any suggestions?

Facebook Users

Posted: Thu 29 July, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Charm School, People, Technology, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

I love all the garbage being spouted about the ‘leak’ of 100million Facebook users publically-available details.

Radio One’s headline on this was “Facebook users details are available online” – which elicited a “Well, duh!” response from me. They’ve always been available online – at Facebook. All of the information held in this file was already available at Facebook – it’s just it would’ve taken a bit more effort to get it all.

Every one of the people listed in the file hadn’t set their privacy settings properly. That’s more of an indictment about either

  1. how complex Facebook made their privacy settings
  2. how stupid / lazy people are when it comes to those settings
  3. how people really don’t think about their privacy and security at all

And that’s it.

If you can’t be bothered to check your privacy settings, you deserve to have your details published. After all, if one person can do it, so can others.

App-Less

Posted: Tue 6 July, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Since getting the iPhone a while back, while I’ve been surprised by some of the apps that are available, I’m also occasionally surprised by the apps that aren’t available, particularly when it seems like such a good idea.

Among those have been :

  1. National Lottery.  You’d have thought that an app for sending out the numbers to iPhones (and other phones) every week would be a no-brainer. Particularly if you could also put in the numbers you regularly use, so it could check automatically for whether you’ve got any matches. I don’t think it even needs the ability to buy numbers etc., as there are plenty of other avenues for doing this already.
  2. Eurodisney. Herself’s off to Eurodisney soon, and we both thought that an app would be really useful for this. Being able to (for example) have a map – including “You are here” through the GPS, and a list of the rides/attractions you really want to see, plus being able to see what’s closest to your current position. Again, that seems like a no-brainer. (The really cool version would include ‘augmented reality’, and let you use the phone to see what’s around you, along with labels, routes etc.)

They’re the main two that surprise me. There’s a few others too that I haven’t totally thought through yet, but I’m sure I’ll write about those as and when I get round to it.

iPhone

Posted: Sat 17 April, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Technology | 4 Comments »

After 18 months with my Sony Ericsson C905, it’s time to update my phone again. The Sony Ericsson has been a good phone, and there’s lots of bits I like with it. It’s getting some problems with its keypad and so on now, but it’s been an OK phone all round. I haven’t used the camera on it as much as I thought/hoped I would, and really it’s been mainly used (as are most of my phones in the end) for the basics – calls, text messages and emails, and internet access.

So with camera-resolution being less of an issue, I’ve decided to take the leap and get an iPhone. Herself swears by hers, and the other people I know with one also swear by it. I’m still unconvinced by the touchscreen – I’m used to touchtyping text messages on the normal phone keypad, and it seems a bit weird to not have that possibility with the iPhone. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

It’s going to be an interesting experience. I’ve got reservations about it, but the iPhone is the best of the bunch at the moment, and there was absolutely nothing else that appealed at all, nor anything that’s coming out in the near future. Should be entertaining, anyway.

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