Am I Getting Better At The Waitrose Self Check-Outs?
I seem to be getting at working the self check-outs in Waitrose. Could my left hand be getting better?
I doubt it. But I’m just learning to use it better!
It is certainly more use in typing!
The British Secret In The Velodrome – Round Wheels
The French are getting a bit uppity about the British bikes in the velodrome.
The British have joked that they use round wheels and the French have swallowed the story, hook, line and sinker. Read about it here in the Standard.
But I doubt, that the story is very far from the truth. Even your car from humble run-arounds upwards, has its wheels properly balanced, at manufacture and when new tyres are fitted. We’ve all been in cars, where there has been vibration because of out-of-balance wheels.
So I suspect that British cycling has borrowed from Formula One and other industries that spin things fast, and developed extremely accurate roundness and balance sensing for bicycle wheels. So they run straighter and truer than the best the French can do!
I didn’t do the work myself, but forty years ago, I worked in a department at Plastics Division of ICI, that did a lot of calculations in this area, to try to stop vibrations in chemical vessels. So the theory is nothing new.
It is the application of technology to bicycles, helmets and other things, that have given the British the edge. I doubt that cycling is the only sport to have benefited either!
Did You See That One Sepp?
I would suspect that Sepp Blatter may have seen the Ukrainian ghost goal last night for two reasons.
Firstly, even it had been scored, it wouldn’t have changed who went through to the next round.
But of course, he did see it, as it was against England, his bete-noir, who are always complaining about the suspender-loving Swiss idiot.
To be charitable to the England players and officials, they have not denied it was a goal. After all, we have a lot to gain from the Hawk Eye technology to check these problems. as it is developed by a company, based in Winchester. But after seeing Sepp’s judgements on this matter over the last few years, I suspect he’ll give his seal of approval to anybody but this company. Although it is rumoured that the company are working on a system especially for Sepp, that detects if women are wearing Stockings.
But what was the extra linesman doing on the goal-line? Answers on the back of a postage stamp please. He certainly wasn’t looking.
Goodbye to my Junkberry
Despite a lot of help from O2, I’ve decided to chuck my Junkberry. Not sure what I’ll do yet, as a lot depends what happens to my life. I will keep it for a bit as my son is a fan and someone might nick his.
On the other hand, I might strike up a relationship with a gorgeous redhead, who is an absolute expert at the whys and wherefores of a Junkberry and I could have fun learning how to use it. Some hope!
So today, I did the first thing to get it out of my life. I sent the two Nokia 6310i, that I own to those clever refurbishment people at Tonik, to get them as-newed! It’ll cost me a few pounds, that I can well afford.
So what do I find wrong with the Junkberry?
1. It’s Incompatible With My Experience
I’ve been programming for nearly fifty years and using a mobile phone for nearly forty. In fact, I was one of the first people to have a mobile phone in Suffolk. My first problem with the Junkberry, is that it does everything in a different way to my computer and my past experience. It would be like putting me in Moscow and trying to find my way to the Olympic stadium. I actually did the Moscow task incidentally, as I had a map of the city and even in cyrillic some things are understandable. But the Junkberry uses icons, I have no knowledge of. Yesterday, I looked at a Samsung phone, which didn’t break any of the rules of the past.
2. My Left Hand Isn’t Good, But My Right Hand Is Superb
Because my left humerus was broken by a school bully and I’ve had a stroke, my left hand at present is little more than something to hold something with. I do use it whilst typing for the Shift key sometimes, but often, I span the fingers of my right hand and use the thumb on the Shift key and a finger on the other key. I have a feeling, I’ve done this for years and because of that my right hand is extremely agile. It always was very good and I put that down to making Meccano models extensively as a child.
Since, I stopped biting my nails, I’ve also tended to use my mobile phone or an ordinary phone for that matter, by holding it in the palm of my hand and dialling with my thumb, or on a mobile, the thumb nail. On a Junkberry, this means entering numbers is difficult, as it’s either a double keystroke or hold one down and hit another. Try doing the latter with just one hand.
3. I Can’t Send the Bus Text Message With a Junkberry
In London to find out, when the next bus is coming, you just type a five digit code to 87287. I talked about the system here. With my Nokia 6310i, it is a very simple operation, I can do with one hand. With the Junkberry, I’ve not actually been able to do it yet, as the phone tries to be clever and gives me the last of-date message. In other words, it gives me wrong information. That’s all you need at eleven o’clock on a cold, rainy night.
4. I Miss All My Messages and Incoming Phone Calls
Every time I get the phone out, someone has rung it and I’ve missed them. I have to recover the messages by phoning my phone with a land-line and then accessing the mailbox. Not very useful for a mobile phone.
5. I Can Only Send Phone Calls By Dialing The Number In or Selecting a Previously-Called One
This is because, I’ve not found out how to select a number from the address book.
6. The Address Book Doesn’t Work
My son’s phone number is in the phone in two places; under his name and also as the ICE number.
It always picks him up as the ICE number and ignores his name completely.
Obviously, they don’t have serious emergencies in Canada.
7. It Doesn’t Like Weak Signals
Going up to Liverpool today, it didn’t seem to be getting a good signal on the train. Certainly, the Nokia 6310i didn’t drop out as much.
8. Appalling Battery Life
By the time I got to Liverpool, the battery was dead and I charged it overnight. My Nokia 6310i generally lasts at least a week. That is the real problem, in that I expect it to last days from previous experience and it lasts just hours. Imagine buying a new modern car and finding the fuel consumption was much worst than your old one. Would you be pleased? No! You’d be straight round the dealer to tell him where to put his motor.
At least the guy in O2 let me make an urgent phone call. But finding helpful O2 shops every hour or so to make a call isn’t always practical.
I’ll leave it now, but I’ll come back to this topic later.
Hopefully my Nokia 631oi will be back in a few days. I’ve just heard, that Tonik has received the phone and hopefully, it will be back next week.
Made In Eccles and Protecting The Olympic Flame
The problem is how do you transport an Olympic flame from Greece to the UK.
The answer is you use a version of the Davy lamp, developed by Sir Humphry Davy and others in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
A Miners Safety Lamp Made in Eccles
All proper Davy lamps are made in Eccles and my version in the picture is an earlier version of that used for the Olympics. They use a modified version of the 6S lamp. Mine is a version 6 and it was bought in a junk shop in Liverpool.
If you want to find out more about the lamp used, there’s a lot of information here on the maker’s web site.
Sir Humphry must be laughing his socks off in his grave. Especially, as this year’s Olympic Torch Relay will start in Cornwall, the county of his birth.
Fracking May be Good for You
There is a great deal of opposition to the use of fracking to extract gas from shale in this country.
I went to a lecture at the Royal Geograhical Society yesterday called Unconventional Gas. It was very enlightening and I can draw various conclusions from the lecture. You can find out more about the lecture here.
The first is that there is a very large amount of gas available to be extracted using fracking and a lot of it is in countries, with pretty stable regimes, like Australia, Canada and the United States.
The second is that gas prices in North America are falling fast, because of the large amounts of gas now available. I believe, that Canada has far too much gas for its own use and will soon start to export.
So it is not inconceivable, that Europe will start to import gas from North America rather than from regimes like Russia and Qatar.
Am I wrong to therefore suggest that because of fracking, we may well find that our gas prices start to drop?
I have deliberately not discussed the use of fracking in the UK and Europe.
The technologies employed are still very much under development and have been used mainly in the very underpopulated parts of the United States and Canada. The extraction is now moving towards more populous states, like Pennsylvania, and only when it is totally accepted by the inhabitants there, will it be time to use it in Europe.
In the meantime we should keep a strong watching brief, investing in resarch in the best universities, as I outlined here.
But as with many things, there are many against the technology, when it starts to be used, but now it is totally accepted. Just look at the opposition Brunel, Stephenson and others had when they started building railways!
Made In Stevenage and Congleton
The Times today has an article about how a large proportion of the satellites we need are made in Stevenage.
Our space presence may be small in media terms, but in the bits that matter like jobs, money and technology it’s rather large.
The paper also has an article about how a company called Senior is doing rather well, by selling high-tech bits and pieces to Boeing, Airbus and Rolls-Royce.
So don’t write-off the manufacturing sector of the economy. Find out the truth!
Has ARM Cracked the Internet of Things?
Probably not yet, but reports like this one are circulating on the Web, that they’ve made a good start on the problem of solving the Internet of Things.
To crack the problem, you need a very small chip, which uses virtually no power. Both of these are ARM‘s specialities.
A Swiss Proposal To Clean Up Space
The Swiss has put forward a proposal for a satellite to clean up space junk. Read about it here.
I can remember reading a similar proposal in the Meccano Magazine over fifty years ago.
A lot of ideas are not new, but just recycled using better technology. Perhaps the designer was clearing out his loft or wherever the Swiss put their junk and found the magazine.
The Anonymous Widower 