quicklink | blast out test on the bike on bambuser

finally had the cash to be able to get this mount.  it's overpriced but i wanted to move forward on the idea and start the ball rolling with the bandwidth in a box concept for extra bandwidth for mobility for events and conferences.

the idea originally was to install two cameras and some heavy duty wifi connectivity with a stack of external aerials on the roof to drag in the cellular signals so we had a good solid constant stream but with lack of reception from car companies we started with what we have -- a bike! :)

if you are a car company, leasin or otherwise we are looking for a smart car sized (electric ideally) motor that will do 10,000 miles in that year driving three times a week a rough total of about 400 miles a week.  you can send me a tweet with hashtag #transport in it to get some information back about what we are doing -- just send that to my twitter account @philcampbell

we are happy to rent, lease or something from around £99 up to say £150 per month but we are looking to give it back after the year is out.  i simply have no use for a three year contract on car as i'm happy with using rail and public transport not having a car now for over two years.

anyway, back to the bike! ;) - had a successful first stream out to the jubilee campus and the second fibrecamp premises.  i'm doing a presentation there tomorrow, i did one yesterday with the ntu students (i did it in css3 with impress.js to be flash) and so went to grab an interview with nick gostick on audioboo.

i'm not sure why the stream dropped on the way back maybe i caught something inside the case or something or the camera screen went off.  i need to do more testing to see what the problem was there and i've reported it to bambuser because when it dropped the connection after 45 seconds of starting recording (i did'nt noticed till i was nearly back to the studio) it stopped all together so i had no locally recorded video stream on the phone to upload as a complement after which was a bit annoying.

that said, i discovered a bunch of new tagging features on the website when i got back to the desktop that allow for timed comments on the video (see top picture) so that means you can jump to certain sections.  i have a plan about grabbing streamed event video and piping that to another service to do all kinds of things.  i've been wanting to get streaming again.  

expect more of this stuff now that i have the mount.  next is to build a decent lightweight mini bandwidth in a box (bag?) to see if we can improve on the speed and quality of the connection (wifi via cellular router with more redudancy involved) as we had it set on medium today -- i'm also thinking that the new iphone4s with the new sony based camera will handle the low light better so i'm looking to source one of those badboys too.

a happy first test run thou.

since i got the bike i had become quite keen on tracking those 'rides' out in terms of calculating what kind of fitness it was doing for me. i know that every time i get back from the station even those five miles little bike rides felt like i was doing myself some good - even if i had a back covered in sweat from my heavy laptop bag (oh my kingdom for an ipad and mini wireless keyboard)

it started out for me with the runkeeper application on my iphone 3g which worked ok but i found myself with problems with the gps locking on and getting really random results with how many miles i had done and seeing straight line jumps on the map when the gps signal had dropped out. that said, it could have quite easily been problems with the gps on my phone as after 18 months the phone was starting to show real wear from all the times that i had dropped it.

after purchasing the bike i had decided on creating a separate twitter account for it at @carrerafit so that people would not get constantly spammed in the twitter main timeline (some would argue the amount i post anyway it would not make much difference) for my rides out and completed miles. i've been quite keen to keep a record of the miles i was doing.

then, news dropped that the iphone4 was to be released so i quickly put up my iphone 3g in for recycling with o2 and got my £173 back for the phone - not a bad deal i thought for a run down 18 month old 16gb iphone that could go to a better home elsewhere after recon. i had good service out of that phone.

two weeks after selling the phone and realising that i would not have the funds to purchase an iphone4 straight away i was left with a massive media making smartphone hole in my life that i needed to do something about - after 18 months of having this device attached to me day after day the sudden cold turkey of mobile device loss left me craving for a replacement. Not having the funds to purchase another i asked a few friends if i could trial loan an android based phone and i have been using the htc hero for my gowalla, photos and gps tracking action.

At first thou i did have a few problems with the android based phone because runkeeper that is available on the android phone requires v2.+ to run. the htc hero was sadly running v1.5 of the android os and because the phone was on trial i did not feel i had the right to flash the rom with the latest 2.1/2.2 android firmware that i found on the interwebz. i had to find another solution to my gps tracking problems and came across a great application called endomondo (thanks @iamkat) which did work with v1.5 and was really simple and found the gps satellites everytime on the htc hero android phone. i've been using this ever since until last week when i came across dailymile (doh, i hate finding new shiny shiny sites sometimes)

dailymile (again thanks @iamkat) is a lovely looking web2 style community based workout website that tracks your runs, cycling and a bunch of other activities in a really elegant and stylish way. the one problem for me right now is that you need either a nike+ or garmin device to get the most out of it - that's annoying me a little and i really hope they work on bringing in data from runkeeper and endomondo because i'm quite keen on staying with the endomondo solution at present.

that said @iamkat did highlight me to a great garmin gps watch device that looks ideal for not having to worry about keeping the phone charged up and ready to go and having it on my wrist could be great to track all those other little walks you do during your day - they all add up and i'm quite the power walker.

of course i do not have the £230 to purchase a gps watch and even if i did i have more pressing financial things to worry about to afford such a device. i'm quite happy with having my mobile phone collect the data at present as i'm always aware of charging it and the little holder space on my bike is more than good enough to carry it in. although, i have been thinking that instead of having an android backup device that i might entertain the iphone 3gs 32gb as the new backup phone to the iphone4 when i've saved enough pennies because you can get a custom case by dahon for that. the speed bump over my 3g would be better and i'm really missing audioboo on the iphone - it just does not compare to the android version! :)

quicklinks

http://dailymile.com (src: @iamkat)
- uber sexy bubbly layout and great tracking/community

http://endomondo.com
- really simple iphone/android gps tracking app/site

http://runkeeper.com
- original program, still like it but tracking was clunky

http://bit.ly/9UgnRP
- the garmin forerunner 405cx (£229) gps watch

i've been using both carbonite and backblaze on different machines. they do as they say on the tin and that is offsite backups. it's pretty slow thou - it is based on your upload speed of your connection and the background process of uploading it while your working on your system. Something just hit me today thou when checking my 3gig transfer limit i have on my 'three' 3g dongle for this month - i'm using my bandwidth for uploading!

So, i'm asking this of carbonite, backblaze and any other background offsite uploading backup application - can we have a tickbox or some kind of auto detection for dongles or mobile devices when we are paying for the bandwidth per topup because as the application is a background process we forget that it is using our valuable data transfer limit when we connect - and trust me i can connect for hours on my dongle, would be great to have a switch so we can turn this off in software or to know what dialup/connection device i'm using.

quicklink | Windows Sensor and Location Platform

The Windows Sensor and Location platform, which is new for Windows 7, enables your computer and applications to adapt to their current environment. With location sensors -- including GPS devices, WWAN radios, and even triangulation technology -- your applications and gadgets can know exactly where they are, enabling them to provide more locally relevant content and functionality. Ambient light sensors, for example, can allow your computer to automatically adjust your screen's brightness based on the current lighting conditions

So with great interest with the 3G intergration on the netbook last week i totally missed the fact that it has a-gps functionality. for those not in the know the 'a' part is assist which means that it can help the startup time of the gps unit but it also does a variety of other smart things - check out the wikipedia entry for those if your interested. Having a mobile device that does not require to have a dongle attached for 3g or a gps connected up are two less things to worry about power for and the battery life on the nokia certainly makes using the a-gps onboard functionality a dream for a mobile media maker.

I found a pretty neat application this morning for windows called GooPS (terrible name!) or google earth gps tracking and navigation. This got me all excited about how we could use this data tracking for something like roadcamp. the fact that it has intergrated ftp support suggests that i could actually upload data from the program to a remote location and that data could be fed into a layer on the doorstepr system. I'm yet to discuss this with @subwolf but i am thinking that would could actually have a pretty realtime trail (we obviously would offset the time in some circumstances or if cellular dropped out) of our location as we travelled across the country. We could use this data actually to center the map on where we are thus making it easier for any content we post on the map with other services having a centred reference point. Very useful.

Exciting. I'll be having a play with this! :)

other resources for this blogpost

- discussion over on the nokia forums