November 17th, 2009

The weirdest Easter egg ever seen on Facebook

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:58 pm

Categories: Social networking, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Arrow, Easter Egg, Keyboards, E-mail, Web Browsers, Hardware, Peripherals, Online Communications, Internet

I am truly stunned and baffled. How many times do you get emails or messages which say something along the lines of, “if you press Alt+F4 then you get a secret menu”, or similar?

This was exactly the case when I saw a friend’s status message on Facebook. I’m still struggling to cope with this as the sheer surprise of it actually working has taken my breath away. But what’s more peculiar is to why it is even there in the first place.

Here’s what you do.

1. Go to any Facebook page and click once in a white area just to get a blank timeline to do this with.
2. Press up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, B, A, then the Return key.

For those who are confused, the key layout is below:

If you left-click or right-click, scroll or push any keyboard key after that, a strange shining set of circular rings will appear on your screen. To get rid of it, simply refresh the page or failing that, close the browser and start again.

Why? I have no idea. How this was even found? Perhaps this is the stranger mystery.

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November 4th, 2009

Google Maps and the mystery of the non-existent town

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:05 pm

Categories: Google, Security, Space, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Google Inc., Google Maps, Argleton, Document Management, Internet, Blogging, Branding, Enterprise Software, Software, Finance

A small village in the north of England, Argleton, has been causing confusion with an air of mystery. The simple reason is, is that the village simply doesn’t exist except in the world of Google.

The above image is from Google Maps, displaying the village of Argleton, Lancashire, in the north of the UK.

The above image is from Bing Maps, displaying the exact same area but without any reference to Argleton in the map.

The above image is from the birds-eye view from Bing Maps, which shows an aerial, high-resolution image of the area, which I have stitched together (click to enlarge into full scale; warning: 7MB). As you can see, there is nothing but a load of fields and certainly no buildings, let alone a whole village in the area.

So why does Google display this village - which I’ll point out now, categorically does not exist - and other mapping services don’t?

Some believe that the added name is due to a measure to prevent copyright violations, but Tele Atlas provide the imaging and name data and have said they provide accurate information and Google deny that they have altered it in any way. It seems in this area, Google Maps is the looking glass to external information.

The local blogosphere is already taking advantage of this “Internet sensation” with this spoof site. Yet even after months of knowing about it plus users reporting it as an error, it still hasn’t disappeared — branding Google’s mapping service as potentially inaccurate.

Mike Nolan, head of web services at Edge Hill University, wrote:

“I grew up in the area and spotted on the map one day that it said ‘Argleton’,” he says. “But it’s just a farmer’s field close to the village hall and playing fields. I think a footpath goes across the field, but that’s all. The name ‘Argleton’ is similar to ‘Aughton’. Maybe someone made a mistake when keying in the name?”

Yet the president of the Society of Cartographers, Prof. Danny Dorling, suggested that perhaps this was an additional element to a map to hide secret locations, as some may well be forced to do.

The only thing I can think of, and after trying out the name in an anagram solver which provided little except slight amusement, is that it’s a tiny Easter egg which has taken all this time to discover.

What’s your theory? Surely it can’t be as crazy as, say, a fictional village existing only within the realms of Google, can it?

November 4th, 2009

Best use for touch hardware yet? FarmVille

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:13 am

Categories: Hardware, Mobile computing, Multimedia, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Mouse, Multi-touch, FarmVille, Mice, Games, Hardware, Peripherals, Personal Technology, Zack Whittaker

Day in and day out here I write articles spanning all kinds of relatively boring topics to the untrained eye. Today, after my previous article analysing the business model (yawn) of online game phenomenon, FarmVille, I discovered a rather interesting twist to the gameplay.

FarmVille is grid based, similar to SImCity in the way that every item uses up a number of squares on the canvas you have. A chicken will take up one square, a plantation patch will take up 4×4 squares, and buildings take up far more.

Considering the game is so hefty on the computer’s resources through Flash consumption and CPU usage, even with scaling the graphics down a notch, even moving the mouse can be laggy, slow and sluggish.

But throw in the multi-touch capabilities of my laptop, I can simply tap away using multiple fingers at a time and plough, plant and harvest my entire canvas of crops in a fraction of the time simply by not using the mouse cursor.

Flash doesn’t support multi-touch just yet, but perhaps with the help of the iPhone popularity, it will soon be around the corner. But for gaming purposes, a single finger at a time is still far quicker than the mouse.

Is this the only practical use I have found for multi-touch computing? Perhaps so, yes.

October 25th, 2009

Universities in hot water over students' peer-to-peer sharing

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:42 pm

Categories: Breaking news, Downloads, Government, Legal and political, Money, Piracy and file-sharing, University, University fun

Tags: Network, P2P, British Broadcasting Corp., Student, File-sharing, Peer To Peer (P2P), Government, Internet, Zack Whittaker

The battle against online piracy is heating up: a new artist led initiative is taking on the diplomatic and negotiation approach whereas governments and legislators are hitting down punitive policies on their citizens.

Jon Newton of p2pnet, alongside Billy Bragg, musician and director of the Featured Artists Coalition, have begun work on a2f2a.com, a campaign started to discuss how artists can cut out the middleman - such as the suicide inducing RIAA - and ensure artists are fairly remunerated.

Along with their mission statement, the efforts seem to be focused towards not only admitting there is no technological solution to the problems artists already face, but that users would be “willing to pay for music if they can be sure that the money is going to the artists whose work they enjoy.”

File sharing itself is not illegal; what is shared, exactly, could be. With BitTorrent being used to distribute emerging artists’ music on a wide and free scale, or services such as BBC iPlayer which rely on peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on the central services - file sharing technology cannot be simply eradicated.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 5th, 2009

The best $100 you've spent on killer tech?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 8:07 am

Categories: Discussion, Hardware, Money, Productivity, University fun

Tags: TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Monitors & Displays, Home Networking, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Hardware, Components, Networking, Zack Whittaker

I look around at the technology I have bought over the years and every single item performs a specific purpose for a specific event. More often than not it is the technology which costs the least, or the gadget which weighs the less or is smallest in size.

With student loans slowly working their way into bank accounts across the country and the rest of the world, overdrafts are paid off and students find themselves in credit for the first time in months. It is this time of year where we often take a step back and think, “if I hadn’t bought this or that, how much would I have in there now?”. While we can always sell the technology and gadgetry that we have, it never balances out to the full amount you first paid out for it.

$100 isn’t much to spend in the grand scheme of things, so I’ll allow the currency to be interchangeable. It could be €100 or £100. (Perhaps not ¥100 as you really wouldn’t get anything for this.)

What is the best $100 you’ve ever spent on technology?

For me it would have to be the Linksys Media Center Extender DMA2100 which I wrote about back in August. Though it isn’t available for purchase online anymore, I bought another of the same extenders over the weekend for my television in my bedroom, alongside the 32″ LCD television I have downstairs in my living room. At the cost of £84.99 at my local computer store, I wouldn’t say that’s too bad.

But I’m intrigued. Everybody is different - different jobs, needs, desires and preferences - so the floodgates to this are truly open. It can be anything from a new phone, a software licence key, something pointless and purely aesthetic, or a device which has saved a life.

Submit away; besides which, it’ll be a great way to pick out things to buy for Christmas.

October 1st, 2009

FOWA 2009: Microsoft Surface 'proof of concept' actually pointless

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 3:49 am

Categories: Events, FOWA London 2009, Hardware, Microsoft, Multimedia, Next-generation technology, Skills development, University fun, e-Learning

Tags: Microsoft Surface, Device, Microsoft Corp., Education Authority, Projectors, Taxes, Hardware, Components, Financial Planning, Finance

The young whipper-snapper I spoke to, a computer science-studying university student at Nottingham Trent University, showed me a demonstration of the Surface table. I had seen it before and while I was initially impressed with the technology, we seemed to hit a defining moment when we both realised that the device was utterly useless.

The device itself is quite impressive, to the point where you gaze upon its innards and see the projector and the vast amount of cabling. But to be fair it is fairly simplistic for what I thought was a breakthrough device. For a camera, a few cables, a projector lamp and perhaps a few little bits and bobs here and there - as well as the outer casing which I believe was perspex - this device cannot justifiably cost $15,000.

This Microsoft intern, the student, like me yet nothing like me, seemed to be pushing his way desperately through the one-on-one talk we were having. He was showing me the feedback from the table and using interactive objects, which are essentially ordinary objects with a barcode on the underside. While I can see this as an interesting way to input data from an object to the device, it still has flaws and doesn’t work every time. It stumbles on things it doesn’t know or see properly

After a few interesting (and pushing) questions from myself, he threw in the educational factor on the defence. By claiming that schools can use the Surface device as a tool to engage with students, make and build applications and learn in the process, the Surface device is a perfect piece of kit for schools.

Wrong. As the same with universities and other educational establishments, if they can make it cheaper, then they will do. One of the games involved rearranging tiles with letters on to create a word. Local education authorities are not going to shell out the vast proportion of their IT budget on a single, damned glorified table which they could access the same learning process from using cut out card and pens.

When I told him this fact, he looked baffled and thrown away for a short time. His mind switched over to “PR Mode” and carried on discussing other points about the device. Nevertheless, after numerous blows to his ego and his knowledge and understanding, I saw in his eyes that he gave in to the journalistic pressure of an educational equal.

Not only did he admit that it was a mere proof of concept device, he couldn’t honestly pick a genuine use for the Surface table. Regardless of this, a number of hotels and big corporations in the US have bought one for their receptions and waiting areas. But it is not for the small businesses, the educational sector where it is the taxpayer’s money going into these “investments” or anyone else for that matter.

I could see the tears well up in this young gentleman’s eyes as he realised the Iron Curtain of Microsoft falling down around him. I did, however, try and recover from crippling this young man’s ego by telling him “the technology was impressive”. But that’s all I could really say without lying to him.

September 18th, 2009

iPhone application for UK university fresher's

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 10:06 am

Categories: Apple, Events, Hardware, Mobile computing, Productivity, University, University fun

Tags: Apple iPhone, University, U.K., Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Zack Whittaker

From tomorrow, the vast majority of new students in the UK will be arriving at their new home for the next three or four years. A UK university has taken advantage of popular technologies to provide support for the new arrivals on campus in form of an iPhone application.

The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) in the north of England have developed and rolled out an iPhone application which provides most if not all of the information the new freshers will need for their first week at their new home.

Considering the iPhone is one of the most popular phones and/or mobile devices of our generation, they are utilising the technologies that most people already have, and saving costs in printing and other services as a result.

With this application, features can be added and customised to suit every individual freshman. It includes standard access to university email accounts, availability of campus facilities, entertainment services, local transport links and maps.

With the campus being predominately wireless, it also allows them to save on network operator costs and data charges.

This is a fantastic way of utilising technologies available to many, and for a university to take this step is quite significant. This would ordinarily be the sort of thing the student union may provide, but for an educational establishment to really recognise modern day advancements in mass-user organisation is nothing short of brilliant.

Should all universities and student unions embrace the latest technologies to improve their welcome services for new freshers? Have your say. It’s free, you know.

September 11th, 2009

Generation Y and conscientious consumerism

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 1:02 pm

Categories: Environment, Hardware, Money, University, University fun

Tags: Apple iPhone, Generation Y, Zack Whittaker, Smart Phones, Sales Strategy, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Sales

Zack Whittaker is out saving the world again. For the time being, old friend of the blog, Elliot Harrison, who also writes for Neowin.net, is filling in and sharing his personal experiences with spending on technology.

Being a student, it can sometimes be hard to manage, or at least get your hands on money. This statement doesn’t completely negate anyone else from the content of this article however, I am writing it based on my subjective experience.

Summer would have been a difficult time for the average student; there are many festivals to pay for and mass quantities of alcohol to purchase. With that, summer based activities away from the classroom all involve the spending of money. The unnecessary pieces of equipment purchased throughout the year suddenly become useful not for their purpose, but how much they can be sold for.

I had a few expenses to allow for when moving house a few weeks ago, so it was time to trade in my iPhone Touch. I remember feeling a deep sense of fright as I packed all of the necessary pieces back into the box, put it into my bag and sell it in town.

On the way I popped in to see Zack where he told me I would only get about £80 ($144) for the full package. He was right. For a £240 ($400) piece of equipment, purchased only a month or so prior to its selling, the technology had depreciated by £160 ($266). Despite never being taken out of its protective pouch which I bought with it, it fetched only a small amount.

I can understand why this is. But despite my moaning, the price it sold for is not actually my issue due to the fact that the money I got from selling the iPhone was sufficient for my needs. What surprised me a great deal more was the fact that I was literally petrified by the thought of being without the item. The potential ramifications from being without my iPhone for the time felt quite unsettling.

The fact that I even felt unsettled was something which unsettled me more, and actually when I walked out of the shop I sold it in - I felt a slight relief with it not being in my possession any longer. I then considered why I purchased the iPhone in the first place; a nice pair of earphones twinned my BlackBerry would have done exactly the same job. A complete waste of £160 I am sure you will agree.

Indeed, perhaps all of this trepidation is due to my own skewed mindset with regards to the way I consider technology. As a result I have become over-dependent upon it in some manner. In short, I would describe my ‘condition’ as a false sense of ‘want’ rather than a correct sense of ‘need’.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 24th, 2009

Mobile TV: Why it stalled and why it won't take off

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 11:37 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Environment, Gratuitous rant, Mobile computing, Next-generation technology, Research, University fun

Tags: Phone, Mobile, Mobile TV, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Advertising & Promotion, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Marketing, Zack Whittaker

Being able to watch digital television on your mobile phone seemed to send the Western world into a craze two years ago. The thought of being able to watch your favourite channels or programmes from anywhere and everywhere made sense, with the apparent infrastructure already being in place.

Frank Dickson, Reed Business - Europe’s biggest online and offline publisher, told the BBC:

“The idea combines the two biggest things around: TV and phones. Everyone has a TV and everyone has a mobile phone. So of course the industry thought the prospect of bringing the two together was going to be huge. In reality, live mobile TV has been very slow to take off.”

To put this in perspective, I have been to numerous conferences, travelled daily around London for six months straight, commute from Canterbury to London both ways at least once a week, and spend the rest of my time in the city or on the university campus. I have never seen anybody watching live television on their phone. It just doesn’t seem to happen in this country.

Everyone has a phone, and everyone has a television. People use their phones for making and receiving phone calls, with the exception of evolutionary changes in mobile devices. Television is used as a device to watch at the end of a long day; to unwind and to relax, or in some cases to watch daytime tripe when you can’t get a job.

The two wouldn’t mix together well, like pouring Lysol into a pro-biotic drink.

There are currently two ways of getting mobile TV, and these two ways are flawed beyond belief:

1. A mobile TV receiver such as a Nokia SU-33W, which only works with only three compatible Nokia models at the time of print. Not only that, take a look down the average suburban street and you’ll see all the aerials on the roof pointing in the same direction. I see a mobile TV receiver working like a GPS on a train; holding it precariously against the window whilst shouting, “GET SIGNAL!”. Most of my analogies seem to involve sitting on the train…
2. Over-the-air using network streaming, which needs a network strong and powerful enough to get the stream across. I have proved with mobile broadband that it is hard enough to get downstream bandwidth over 200kbps. Mobile networks could not sustain a decent stream in the UK and US even with 3G technology. If you are using home or public wi-fi, you might be in for a shot.

Home and office broadband speeds haven’t necessarily rocketed in the last few years but have increased in bandwidth potential. With this, the chance arose for television broadcasters and networks to provide on-demand access to live and already broadcast material.

The BBC report that the slump in numbers of those utilising mobile TV is down to the fact that just under 50 million of the 270 million mobile phone users have smartphones capable of receiving these services.

But with access to these on-demand sites and mobile broadband speeds which can’t compare to those that landline broadband services provide us, the logical step is to watch television on a computer instead.

No matter which way analysts and other bloggers look at it, a good part of my degree involves looking at, understanding and predicting society and its needs. I cannot see how or why mobile TV could or would take off. I just don’t see a point to it.

You’re more than welcome to prove me wrong. Leave a comment and tell me why.

August 24th, 2009

Generation Y: 'Email is unfashionable and outdated'

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 9:03 am

Categories: Discussion, Multimedia, Productivity, Research, University, University fun, e-Learning

Tags: Facebook, Generation Y, Student, YouTube Inc., E-mail, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker

Steve Clayton, Microsoft extraordinaire and geek in disguise, posted an interesting set of statistics over the weekend, via Socialnomics, on the social media revolution  - the movement where media and information spreads far and wide through social techniques; Twitter and Facebook being the two best examples.

Students, or “Generation Y” seem to have taken a shine in these statistics, with the rest relating to social web interaction and other interesting social networking facts.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest between the United States and Indonesia.

That’s true but something that has been covered before. However since then it has grown to roughly 270 million users which makes up the entire population of France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Switzerland put together.

2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.

This baffles me as it doesn’t go into detail. “Online students” could be having a face-to-face talk with their lecturer over webcam and Internet telephony. Personally, nothing beats sitting down with your teacher in their office and discussing criminology over a steaming hot cup of tea.

1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.

E-learning is the way to go,and it really enables the learner to organise their studies better. There’s nothing worse than at exam time having a stack of paperwork so high, you need to apply for a licence to enter non-commercial aerospace. Online resources lets you click and choose at your leisure, and print out when you are ready.

Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

This angered me when I read this. Old news, perhaps, but not dishing out email addresses? I can understand that online identities are already established before you reach college - having sexybum2001, or narcoleptic69 gives you a good idea that one you might end up sleeping with and the other will most likely fall asleep (involuntarily) during your class. But a university email gives you that university’s identity and at least a little control over security, spam levels and mailing list distributions. You’re not just a student at a university, you also represent that university wherever you go.

The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. If you can’t find something on YouTube, you can find it on Google. If you can’t find it on Google, then it simply doesn’t exist. Facebook can be used as a social rule of thumb, but when Google yields no results then it either hasn’t been invented yet or you’re searching for a banned term in Chinese sovereign territory.

I still find the concept of a global interconnected network of people absolutely terrifying. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is exciting, exhilarating and opens the mind to possibilities never thought of before, which some would argue is why YouTube and Twitter became such a hit.

The world we know now has changed beyond recognition from what it was 30 years ago. The technology age that we live in has advanced us into the next generation just like the Industrial Revolution did for our ancestors. Being born into a world where these new developments blend into the background like an annoying cough at the back of a lecture theatre numbs the experience and limits the exo-perspective we gain when looking at it from a distance.

The thought of knowing that something bigger and better will arrive in my lifetime blows me away with over-excitable anticipation, but worries me at how far we have come already in such a short space of time.