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Observations from Uppsala Computer Simulation, Virtual Platforms, Embedded Programming, Multicore and More (by Jakob Engblom)

Category Archives: Gadgets

Phones, music players, etc.

Buying High Technology

2012 August 8 02:19 / 1 Comment / Jakob

Selling and marketing high technology is what I do for a living. My counterpart is the customer or buyer, and I help design, build, explain, an market these products.  In this role, I am most usually the expert on the domain, helping potential customers understand what we sell and why it will help them.  Both at the high-level value proposition and the details behind it.  Some people focus most of the their energy on the high-level value proposition, but I feel that youoften need a bit detail backing that as well.

I recently had the enlightening experience of being on the buying side instead, experiencing the transition from high-level value proposition to low-level details.  It struck me as being quite similar to what the customers for our virtual platforms would experience when coming in new to the field.

I bought a camera.

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Posted in: business issues, gadgets / Tagged: camera, Canon, lens, marketing, Nikon, Pentax, sales, Sony

Touch the Screen vs Press a Button

2011 December 26 11:02 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Is the touchscreen the end-all of user interfaces for mobile devices? There were rumors in early 2011 that the iPad2 would lose all physical buttons (which did not come true, obviously).  To me, that sounds like a really good and bad idea. Good, in the sense that a device that is all a big screen certainly looks nice. Bad, since it would be much less user-friendly than a device with some real physical buttons to press.

I have been thinking about this subject lately, after using a BlackBerry Torch 9800 as my work phone for a few months.  I like the device a lot, but there are certainly some rough edges and some places where there is a UI conflict between touching the screen and pressing the buttons. At the same time, I am using both an iPod Nano 3G, and a couple of iPod Touches. I used to have SonyEricsson Symbian-based P900, P990i, and G900 smart phones which also were combined touch/press devices with a stylus.

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Posted in: gadgets / Tagged: Blackberry, BlackBerry Torch, G900, GUI design, iPod, iPod Nano, iPod Touch, keyboard, SonyEricsson, touch screen, UIQ

Off-Topic: Set Own Number on BlackBerry

2010 December 29 12:00 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Ever since I got my BlackBerry smartphone, I was annoyed that the display said “My Number: Unknown number” in a number of places. I assumed that this would be automatic, just like everything else information-related on this device. However, I finally worked out how to “fix” the problem by manually setting my phone number.

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Posted in: gadgets, off-topic / Tagged: Blackberry, mobile phones

Product Holes: Greatest Hits break iPod Cover Flow

2010 July 18 20:20 / 3 Comments / Jakob

Following on my previous posts about broken phone browsers, phones, and cars, here is another case of “why didn’t they catch this in testing?”

We recently got ourselves an iPod Touch, to entertain our oldest child on long trips. It is a brilliant device in many ways, I can understand why people love their iPhones (even though I am very happy with the very different style of the Blackberry phone that I was given by my employer). However, I have found one weird behavior in the music player that leaves me wondering how it got through into the shipping product.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing / Tagged: Billy Idol, Bruce Springsteen, coverflow, iPhone, iPod, Robbie Williams

Product Holes: Tesla Roadster & iPhone 4

2010 July 17 12:57 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Continuing on the thread from my previous post about the testing of products that fail to find problems that become obvious to (some) users after a very short time, I just read an article (in Swedish) about how the famed Tesla roadster cars behaved when they were confronted with Scandinavian winters.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing, transportation / Tagged: bug, cars, iPhone, software testing, Tesla, testing

Off-Topic: Old and New Lego

2010 January 8 19:09 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

During the Christmas holidays, I got the chance to compare my oldest child’s brand new Lego set with some from the mid-1980s. It is quite striking how much larger the things in the sets have become, and how much more affordable (in relative terms) Lego has become since then.

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Posted in: gadgets, general history, history, off-topic / Tagged: lego

A Toast to Abstraction Layers

2009 August 13 20:41 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

toasterI just found “The Toaster Project“, a Royal College of Art project where Thomas Twaites built a simple toaster from scratch. Really from scratch, going all they way back to iron ore and raw petroleum. In the process, he had to smelt ore, create plastic from petroleum, etc. It is a very interesting observation about the immense industrial complexity behind the very simple everyday items of our lives. I also think it has something to tell us computer scientists about abstraction.

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, gadgets, general research, virtual machines, virtual platforms / Tagged: abstraction, abstraction levels, DAC 2009, information hiding, TheToasterProject, Thomas Thwaites

Off-Topic: My Phone wants a vacation in Greece

2009 April 12 19:06 / 1 Comment / Jakob

maps-48x48I have installed Google Maps on my trusty SonyEricsson G900 (last of its kind, unfortunately, as UIQ is shut down and SE is moving to Nokia S60 etc.), and I find it an almost too fun and useful toy-tool. However, today, something really funny happened. For some reason, when asked to display my current location, it decided that I was in Northern Greece — to within 5000 m.

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Posted in: funny, gadgets / Tagged: 3G, G900, Google Maps, GPRS, mobile phones, SonyEricsson

Biking Topic: Chariot Carrier Baby Seat

2009 March 14 21:08 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

corsaire-smallThis is a follow-up to last year’s post on the Chariot Corsaire XL bike trailer we have. Now that we have a baby girl as well as our older boy, we have upgraded the trailer with a baby seat. Works very well, even though it was quite a bit of work to install it.

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Posted in: biking, gadgets / Tagged: biking, chariot carrier, children

Yubikey Follow-Up

2009 March 7 22:11 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

yubico-imageNow I have had my yubikey for about a week, and I have put it on my keychain. It really works extremely well! The only small issue is that I tend not to have my keys immediately within reach while at home in the house or on travel, so there is a step of “go retrieve the keys” before I can use it for login.

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Posted in: gadgets, security / Tagged: ICA, login, online banking, Yubikey

I Got a Yubikey!

2009 February 27 10:13 / 1 Comment / Jakob

yubico-imageI been listening to the SecurityNow! podcast raving about the coolness of the Yubikey, created by Swedish startup Yubico. It seems like the device has captured the imagination of quite a few people, and I have been kind of curious about it. So I was quite pleasantly surprised when I got one a few days ago, since we are testing it as a new way to authenticate to our VPN at work.

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Posted in: gadgets, security / Tagged: ICA, SecurityNow, Yubico, Yubikey

Off-Topic: Moving an iTunes Library to a New Machine

2009 January 10 09:12 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

ituneslogoI just got myself a new home PC, to replace my no longer very trusty five-year old Athlon-based PC. In the process, I realized I had to move my iTunes library from the old machine to the new. Reading on the web and the Apple support area made me somewhat skeptical as to the feasibility of this operation… would all my cover art, podcast subscriptions, playlists and ratings survive the move? There are many stories of failed moves and lost data out there… and moving from Windows XP to Vista 64-bit did not make the dread less.

In the end, it turned out it was really dead easy!

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Posted in: desktop software, gadgets / Tagged: iLounge, iPod, iTunes, music, video, Vista, Windows

Off-Topic: Custom RSS Feed Icon

2009 January 4 20:32 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

flowerI don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I have finally managed to put a custom icon on the RSS feed for this blog. It is a larger version of the icon used as “favicon” for this blog and www.engbloms.se. I got the idea from the RSS feeds reader on my SonyEricsson G900 phone, which showed a few feeds with icons, but most with a generic icon.

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Posted in: blogging, gadgets / Tagged: custom icon, Feed Image, flower, G900, mobile phones, RSS, wordpress

In Defence of MMS

2008 December 27 12:50 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

I just read Stephen Fry’s latest blog post about smartphones in general and the Apple iPhone in particular. He really loves the iPhone, but the interesting thing to me was the wish list of future improvements to the device. In particular, support for MMS. That was one of the things that made the iPhone unacceptable to me and not really to be considered a serious mobile phone (along with no bluetooth modem).

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Posted in: business issues, gadgets / Tagged: G900, iPhone, MMS, mobile phones

Some surprisingly good embedded systems

2008 October 25 21:37 / 3 Comments / Jakob

I am a skeptic when it comes to technology. Despite working in the tech field — or maybe because I am — I always expect technology to fail or at least disappoint. But sometimes that instinct is actually wrong! Here are two recent examples when I felt “wow, that was pretty good” about some fairly mundane pieces of computerized equipment.

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Posted in: biking, embedded systeme, gadgets / Tagged: bike light, embedded, self-checkout, shopping

SonyEricsson G900 ActiveSync and PCSuite – Solved!

2008 October 25 21:25 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

I should have known to expect trouble when I tried out DataViz ActiveSync on my new G900… the first thing it said was that “in order to avoid problems, we will deactivate the synchronization towards PC Suite”. Ah well. I assumed you could get it back…

But that was not so easy. I quickly realized that ActiveSync was pointless for me, since the setup I have for my data is not “everything on the corporate server, period”, which is the usecase ActiveSync is built for. But when I told ActiveSync to stop synchronizing certain categories of data, that lock it had put up still applied it turned out. With no way I could find to turn it off. So suddenly my phone just did not want to synchronize with my PC.

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Posted in: desktop software, gadgets / Tagged: ActiveSync, Dataviz, G900, mobile phones, PC software, SonyEricsson

SonyEricsson G900 – My New Phone, a Review (updated)

2008 October 23 22:07 / 1 Comment / Jakob

I just got myself a new phone, having tired of my old P990i getting a bit unreliable. It was only about two years old, but I guess I was pretty rough on it. My new phone a the SonyEricsson G900, and I am actually very happy about it.

Edit: inserted a couple of updates after a couple of more days of use.

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Posted in: gadgets / Tagged: G900, mobile phones, SonyEricsson, UIQ

Off-topic: The Pause Generation

2008 October 12 20:23 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

I am a skeptic in many ways, especially considering talk on how things are “different” now compared to some “then” (that often happen to be my own generation’s frame of reference). In particular, I react quite skeptically to news that the “kids of today” are completely different from their parents in how they use communications devices and their expectations of work and how the world works. For some reason, I just think “ah well, in the end people tend to be pretty much alike”. Also, I would like to believe that I also use modern communications devices just like the kids do (but looking closely, obviously I do not).

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Posted in: gadgets / Tagged: kids, pause generation, pvr, video

Off-Topic: Colder Weather and (Consumer) Electronics

2008 September 26 23:05 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

The colder season is coming fast here in Uppsala, and it is time to bring out gloves and warmer jackets. Even if we have had some nice sunny pretty warm days (up to 15 degrees Celsius!), we are getting into October soon, a month where there is usually some day of freak snow fall.

Another sign that it is getting colder is the reaction of consumer electronics.

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Posted in: business issues, gadgets / Tagged: iPod, rant, winter

Biking topic 2: Bike mounts for cars with no towbar!

2008 August 7 22:38 / 2 Comments / Jakob

One thing that has always annoyed me is that you seemed to have to have a tow bar (dragkrok in Swedish) on your car to be able to fit a bike mount. And tow bars are not that common, there are several good reasons not to get one, like added cost, not usually available on used cars, and that they compromise crash safety to some extent. But to put my bike on a car it seemed that I had to get one. I was thinking about how to build a bike mount that could actually work on a regular station wagon by making use of the cargo rails, in some clever way.

But it seems I do not have to invent and build and market this thing myself: it is already available! I found a whole set of varieties from a company called Thule when I browsed a biking catalogue recently. Seems to fit quite a few varieties of cars including even the odd sedan! Good to know that they exist if I ever need to carry bikes regularly.

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Posted in: biking, gadgets / Tagged: bike mount, biking, Thule

Biking topic 1: I should have a commission on these!

2008 August 7 22:31 / 1 Comment / Jakob

Last year, we got ourselves one of the best child-related products we have ever seen: a Chariot Carriers Corsaire XL bike carriers. This might sound like marketing hype from their marketing department, but it really is a brilliantly designed product (mostly). At core, it is a carrier with two wheels, seating two children, and which can be quickly turned from a bike carrier into a regular city stroller. For us, this really means freedom! In particular, the freedom to quickly pop down town using the bike, and then not have to carry our son but rather have a decent stroller to push him around in (and to load up with shopped stuff).

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Posted in: biking, gadgets, transportation / Tagged: chariot carrier, corsaire xl

Off-topic: P990i Sync Working at Last

2008 June 24 08:23 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

At long last, the sync software for my SonyEricsson P990i mobile phone has started to work as it should. I have had an issue with synching of contacts since back in the days of my P900, where for some reason it would delete most of the contacts from my phone when synchronizing. I never managed to quite work out why, but I suspect it had something to do with a combination of contacts being in an unusual place in Outlook, and there being some 1600 of them when I was also synchronizing Outlook with a Salesforce install we used to have.

There were workarounds like forced sync in place that kept the phone very useful. But now, with version 1.5.8 of the PCSuite for Smartphones, it has started to work as it should have all along. Nice. Too bad this is coming pretty late in the life of this phone, got it almost two years ago and after the summer it is time to see what they have got to replace it. The P1i is too similar to the P990i to be worthwhile, waiting for the next-gen UIQ phone after that.

And yes, I do like the UIQ phones. They have their quirks, sure, but they also have lots of nice features. And for me, they tend to just work as you expect. Since I have learnt to use them, I guess. But in any case, next phone is likely also a SonyEricsson P-something.

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Posted in: desktop software, gadgets / Tagged: P990i, SonyEricsson

Off-Topic: Video in the iPod Nano (Update, updated once)

2007 September 19 20:06 / 3 Comments / Jakob

A short update to the previous posting on how to compress video for the nano.

Black iPod NanoIt turns out that the “iPod video” profile of Nero Recode is half aimed at showing video from your iPod on external devices. That’s the only good reason for the “high” resolution. I typically got a video size of 15MB per minute with these settings, which quickly fills up even gigabytes of space.

Using the “iPod Video-AVC” profile instead is optimized for viewing on the Nano itself and not on some external device. The resolution is down to 320×200-240 depending on source aspect ratio. And the resulting files are only about 5MB per minute, much more manageable for carrying a large video library on an iPod. I cannot see any difference in the quality of the output…

Update (2007-September-23): The default iPod-AVC setting has some issue with rapid cross-fades between scenes. To get around this, I set the quality settings to “2-pass” and “highest quality” in the detailed settings you can make in the second screen before moving on to actually encode things. This created very nice looking video that had no problems handling even the previously broken fades.

The cost was even more compute time. I think the current settings takes some 5 to 10 hours per material hour to encode (on my Athlon XP 2700+, not exactly a screamer by current standards).

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Posted in: desktop software, gadgets / Tagged: iPod, Nero, video

Off-Topic: Getting video onto an iPod Nano (3G/Video)

2007 September 16 12:32 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Black iPod NanoThis is not in my self-assigned range of topics, but I like when other people put up their helpful notes of how to accomplish some task that I am researching. Thus, I feel obliged to do the same when I have tested something reasonably new.

The task at hand here is “how to get video into an iPod Nano”.

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Posted in: desktop software, gadgets / Tagged: H-264, iPod, video

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