Category Archives: Technology

Lecturer finds way to ‘silence’ World Cup vuvuzela

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PHOTO: Dundas Football Club, Some Rights Reserved

On how to silence the noise from vuvuzelas at the World Cup in South Africa, this press release came from DCU today.

Interestingly it notes after method two that “This could be done by broadcasters”, so now there’s no excuse for the likes of RTE to claim they can’t do anything?…

So you’ve started watching the World Cup in South Africa, you’re enjoying the games, but the thing that’s spoiling it for many are those vuvuzelas. Until FIFA gets around to banning them, there is another way of reducing the sound on your television.  Dr Sean Marlow, lecturer in DCU’s School of Engineering, tells us how.

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Recent updates

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As I seem to be using Twitter for many links I would usually put on this blog, here’s some of the recent Twitter updates from @cianginty:

  • ‘Taoiseach in High Court challenge to release Cabinet CO2 document’ http://www.irishtimes.com/n… …Getting a look at the minutes of Cabinet discussions on Ireland’s emissions would be interisting to say the least
  • UK universities told to cutting emissions 50% by 2020 against 1990 levels, and 80% by 2050 http://bit.ly/cfz2v > Will the same happen here?
  • ’2 million Irish voters vs 100 million’, French Euro minister is quoted as saying by France24. Does he remember how the French people voted?
  • Does anybody know why existing customer are unable to buy iPhones from 02′s website?
  • LINK FAIL: Electric Picnic newsletter with no link to the website or where one could buy tickets.

Twitter for busy bakeries

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Baker Tweet is an interesting little device allows busy bakeries to tweet what is fresh. Twitting from presets by just a flick of a dial and pressing a button. When they are not so busy, they just have to log into bakertweet.comto change the presets. It was made by digital creative agency Poke who says they are “based across the road from the Albion [the first bakery to have the device installed, @albionsoven] and, perhaps selfishly, we wanted a way to get the freshest baked stuff first. Then we realised it could be a great tool for bakers everywhere”.

(Via Ben Terrett’s flickr stream)

Broadband speed matters

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oecd1

Ireland is ‘‘slipping in broadband league” according to the OECD’s latest broadband report. The full results are are on the OECD Broadband Portal (source of the charts). Penetration is the main news angle — broadband penetration has increased in Ireland, but we’ve been oven taken on the league table.

Out penetration is mostly low speeds broadband of “up to 1mb,” and mostly below “up to 5mb.” Above shows the average advertised speed, we’re in fifth last place. The true problem with speed is shown in the fastest broadband speed where we come in at forth last. Thus when it comes to penetration of high speed broadband, we’re just starting off — we need a new network. And upload speeds are worse, which means slower upload of video and images.

Speed matters and in coming years it will start to matter more and more. At the moment I’m down the country and Eircom is reminding me how far behind we are — the “up to 1mb” connection I’m at isn’t working at 1mb, and earlier — when more people in the area were online — it was even slower.

On cost, the OECD report Ireland ranks badly and it doesn’t even take into account of our high line rental which is needed for most connections.

oecd2

Browsers reacting to human error… IE wins!

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In Firefox (with the Google tool bar activated), if you enter an address with ” http://” missing the colon mark, you’re redirected to the Wikipidia page which explains Hypertext Transfer Protocol. I was going to put this down to a programmer being smart, but on second thought the browser is likely not seeing past the forward slash, thus just see “http” and searches such.

In Chrome, the browser is programmed as to react to the lack of a http:// so you mistaking end up with, for example, http://http//google.com/

Internet Explore is the nearist to making up for the error of leaving out the colon, it inorges the “http//” and just serches the rest of the address. So, you end up with a google result of the site your were looking for. Althought it should be noted that I reacted with an automatic palm to my face (aka facepalm) when there was a typical slow down using IE compared to the experance of using the other browsers.

Could celebrities kill the media obsessed with them?

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John Cleese, on Twitter (it is apparently the John Cleese), has two comments on a Daily Mail article about celebrities using Twiter, he says:

Daily Mail Cottons onto Twitter Shock! http://tinyurl.com/77ganh they of course hate the fact we chat and interact without them, don’t they?

And, adds:

The thing is that the press and trad media have had a virtual monopoly for a long time.. it must hurt them to see it vanishing pfffffffft!!

Blogging (Cleese also has a blog) and having your own domain name has been already been mentioned for years as a way of any famous person or business person, or businesses,  to have a direct public reach. But is it wishful thinking that celebrities them selves could seriously harm the red tops, magazines and blogs which are obsessed with celebrities? Or could it make them even more aggressive and (subjectively) distasteful?

Never learning lessons

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(Via Memex) From the Register comes some good comment Dell and Limerick, even if some of it has probably been mentioned already.

But these lessons are not new for Ireland. The scale is new. But in a way it’s not. It might be argued that the equivalent of the affect of Dell leaving Limerick has been seen in small and large towns across Ireland. Our boom years, if anything, allowed the normal mantra of not learning lessons to go widely unnoticed.

Elsewhere, while I’m not quite sure how correct he is, Bernie Goldbach talks of a possibly “entrepreneurial culture” which might grow out of the closure. He says:

Many editors fail to point to the start-up culture engendered by large businesses and that’s true in Dell’s case as well. I believe a nascent entrepreneurial culture sits in the remnants of Dell’s closure

In the post before this Goldbach talks of the importance of support for start-ups, and what he says here is more true now when banks are apparently slow to lend.

Reading the Irish Times in lectures

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Ireland is least violent country in Europe - WHO report

Eoin O’Dell writes about laptop usage in lectures and how usage in his classes isn’t quite as high the US yet, but it’s growing every year. The screens that I’ve seen sitting behind people using laptops in DCU would confirm the that usage often isn’t for taking notes. However, I’ve read the Irish Times in a few lectures before. Continue reading →