Ideas - inspirations experiments & notes

Samsung just stole my idea.

Samsung are apparently intending to include eye tracking in their next smartphone release, to scroll text by looking at the bottom of the display. They filed an EU trademark - "Eye Scroll" - on 23rd January 2013.

My post, suggesting the idea of ereaders using eye tracking to turn pages without hand input, written 31st May 2012.

Get my IP lawyer on the phone...

iPhones have a few common problems that come up again and again. Cracked screens, splitting cases and dodgy headphone connections often occur but the most common problem seems to be the hardware buttons; either the sleep/power button or the home button just stop responding, or become inconsistent.

This can be caused by one of two issues: the contacts connecting the button to the motherboard being broken or misaligned, or the button itself failing. When it happened to the home button on my phone, I decided to track down the offending piece of hardware and find out the issue.

Having checked that the motherboard contacts were intact, I removed the button, and stripped it down to check the internal contacts. As you can see from the photo above, there were signs of water damage, which isn't that surprising, given how little environmental protection there is in the iPhone's design for this critical component: the plastic button actuator sits in a hole in the glass screen, and any water that gets between the glass and plastic tends to be forced into the phone through the action of the button itself. Since there is no seal or gasket to prevent it, once inside, water can easily enter the button's contacts, as they are covered with a tape that is perforated around the edges.

After removing the corrosion and applying contact cleaner, I reassembled the button, put it back in the phone and the home button worked beautifully again.

Firstly a clarification: there is no way short of looting you will get your hands on a Cintiq pen display for less than three figures. They are extremely expensive bits of kit and for good reason. However, the pace of global technology development and the subsequent rampant obsolescence of all things technological means that you can get a Wacom pen-enabled screen for next to nothing.

One option is to go DIY. There are a few very clever folk out there hacking apart old A4 and A3 Wacom digitisers and fitting them under LCD monitors, wiring the whole lot up and even fitting it inside a home-made case. This is not for the faint-hearted, but can yield some impressive results, and would certainly be a great project. But it won't be cheap - even if you're lucky enough to have some of the bits lying around. And you'll need to be more than a little handy with the soldering iron.

Alternatively, you could try one of the non-Wacom pen screens that have sprung up to cater for those of us reluctant to shell out for the Cintiq. There are several options including one or two that have some very neat ideas of their own: using a USB port for the monitor connection, or multi-touch capability. But the jury is still out in terms of their reliability and quality. I certainly wouldn't expect them to match the precision of the Wacom digitisers, given their history.

So where are these cheap pen-enabled screens? They're called Microsoft Tablet PCs and they were "the next big thing" only a few years ago. Microsoft spent a lot of money and effort trying to persuade us all we wanted to carry around a laptop to write our notes on, only to realise that the idea was another cul-de-sac of doom. But whilst the mass market never materialised, [...] More...

Reading a story in New Scientist about caustic light interference led me to the photographs of Philippe Bompas.

He created the images using the play of sunlight reflected from a chrome surface or falling through rippling water.

Via flickr,l-00.net

Your browser does not support the HTML5 canvas element, which this experiment uses to display the panorama shown below.

Another experiment with captured film frames and stitching techniques to produce a panorama. This time it's a view of London's Southbank, shot in around 1955 for the opening sequence of the thriller 23 Steps to Baker Street. Great skyline of St. Paul's cathedral, Bankside power-station (now the Tate Modern), Waterloo Bridge, the Royal Festival Hall and Cleopatra's Needle.

This would have been a few years after the Festival of Britain, before the shot tower in the centre was demolished to make way for the Hayward gallery and other buildings of the Southbank centre. Note also 'Big Ben' swathed in scaffolding. This may possibly have been filmed from Shell Mex House.

Spent the morning overhauling this beautiful Braun AW10 wristwatch. It was designed for Braun by Dietrich Lubs in 1989, and demonstrates the functionalist design ethos that also created the iconic Braun alarm clock.

It needed a clean and a new battery, but I also noticed that the bright yellow second hand was misaligned, so that it never lined up with the marks on the dial as it ticked. Such sloppiness was contrary to the precision of the original design so I stripped it down, removed the mechanism and realigned the hands.

The strap also needed replacement, as the glue had begun to decay and the neat leather edges were peeling. A quick search led me to a generic replacement of the correct dimensions, with the same semi-circular strap end. For the record the dimensions were:

Strap width at lugs: 18mm
Strap width at buckle: 16mm
Long strap length: 115mm
Short strap length: 75mm

Once the anodised aluminium Braun-branded buckle was detached and transferred to the new strap, it was better than new.