This week’s Podcast / Vlog-cast comes from the second floor of Gadget Towers! In this episode, I talk to James Hazell at BBC Radio Suffolk about Apple’s class action settlement regarding the perceived slowing down of older iPhone models.
Running a website with an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt? Check that you don’t need to request a new one as there has been issues with a large number over the past couple of days.
Boston Dynamics are at it again, this time they have their ever advance automation working in warehouses. Watch the videos after the Vlog to find out more.
“I think that there are great ideas which sometimes are rolled out by the wrong people.”
This morning was the third of my Mix Tape tracks played by James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk. I’ve attached the YouTube playlist again below which will play the interview followed by the track.
This is a track which I find I go to when I need to wind down and relax. It’s great reflection music, good to chill out to.
Transcript of the interview follows.
James Hazell: The mixtape. All this week featuring Matt Porter of Matt Porter Web Design our gadget guy, who regularly is on the show talking about technology and the like. We spoke yesterday about, cars and autonomous vehicles and, and changes in our attitude to technology. Matt. It’s everything. Is every advance in technology, in your perspective being a welcome and violence?
Are there routes that we’ve gone down that have not sat come to me with you?
Matt Porter: It’s a very interesting question. Rarely. Yeah, sure. I think that,
James Hazell: right. Obviously medical technology is always to be applauded and you know, any technology, I guess that makes our lives easier. I just don’t know if it’s all been..,
..in the right direction.
Matt Porter: I think that there are great ideas which sometimes are rolled out by the wrong people.
James Hazell: That’s a good response.
Matt Porter: They don’t necessarily understand what the implications of fact technology is or the decisions about which equipment to use may not have been made for the. Right reasons, rather than our thought maybe a financial reason.
So you might not be getting the best results that you could be because of their strengths of budgets and other things. So
James Hazell: You think of the gaming, which is massive in this country, in many countries in the world, the gaming profession, which it is. but many people are now citing that. As the reason behind obesity in children not getting exercise and daylight and friendships.
Would that be an example of where technology has let us down a bit?
Matt Porter: I think so. I think one of the things that. Many of us would agree with that, although they’re all seem to be a double edge sword to everything and smartphone technology, mobile smart technology is an amazing invention. However, the, negativity, negative sides of, there are so many people becoming so antisocial through something that’s meant to make you.
So it’s almost as if you’ve channelled your…
James Hazell: Towards bringing out personal something in us rather than the technology itself
Matt Porter: into something and like, yeah, so you’re sitting there with a phone stuck against your face, ignoring people whilst talking to somebody else who’s a hundred miles away or a thousand miles away, and it’s actually caused this seems to have caused people to become less social.
People are less happy to pick a phone up and speak to you. They’d rather message you, or they’d rather send a, a text message. And I did actually watch it. It was a documentary or a piece of a news piece about, the traditional telephone effect that people aren’t using plugged in landline, no, no phones anymore.
And they interviewed people and, and people were, people were saying, well, actually making phone calls makes me anxious, so I’d draw this and now what happened there? You know where I think it
James Hazell: Probably always has. Some people just don’t like going on the telephone and do the button. So if there’s, and I don’t suppose there ever was a real alternative, so they had to do it.
Matt Porter: I think that now there is that telephones are fantastic. Voice communication is fantastic, that you don’t have to have this tech tennis match of emails and texts me example conversation. You can hear somebody how they actually mean something. You don’t have to look at it and try and read into what they’re saying.
And then through
James Hazell: Arguments in the workplace are caused by, so, you know, text, not conveying a smile.
Matt Porter: Communication beats. Exactly.
James Hazell: Yeah. Okay. When you see documentaries about the future and obviously into Sci-Fi stuff, there’s always a dystopian kind of future that we seem to be headed for. Because we become slaves to technology.
Do you think that’ll ever be the case where we become so entwined with it that
Matt Porter: Actually without it, we stop
James Hazell: Functioning as a, as a species?
Matt Porter: I mean, you
James Hazell: Could argue that
Matt Porter: That day is already around you. I was going to say, I think that we, I think we might’ve even passed that tipping point now where we become so reliant on, on this technology that we would struggle
James Hazell: to without,
Matt Porter: without it, that a dangerous place to be.
I think it probably, yes, I think he is. I think
James Hazell: That one CME from the sun, all the power goes off and we’re back to the stone age. Well, that’s very
Matt Porter: True! And we’ve seen that to a smaller extent where you have power cuts and we had a power cut last year and trains stopped running. Everything just stopped running.
Whereas, you know, there was a time when there were power stations running specifically to back up the electricity on the railway and the underground systems in London and things like that. Purely for that reason, that reason. and we had a situation where people just suddenly didn’t know what to do.
And the first. The alternative they had was to be angry and upset and stamp their feet and say, why am I late home now? This is not on. Well, it’s what would happen if there was a, an outage which wasn’t quite as easily read. It didn’t have such an easy remedy as, yeah, it’s a failure in some, protects, it was a test that went wrong and shunned down.
So, yeah. How would people cope without these things? I think we would struggle. I guess
James Hazell: We are the last generation who can remember life before the internet.
Matt Porter: Yeah. So we could
James Hazell: Probably just about, you know, go back to our child. I think, well when we were child children, this is what we did.
Matt Porter: Yeah.
James Hazell: But children now have no idea of life without the internet.
And it just worries me that they’re not such suggesting for one moment that it will ever all go off. But you don’t know. You know, that could be a major, massive fault one day, and all of a sudden. It’s off for a week and you wonder how people are going to cope.
Matt Porter: I always, always think of the Truman show.
Yeah. The film, the Truman show where if anyone hasn’t seen it, where it’s like a giant, almost like a world, a town-sized, version of big brother really isn’t aware whereas someone’s born and grown up in a, in a reality show and doesn’t know they’re in that reality show. But has, I, I think.
Feeling they might be. but the thing that always made me chuckle is at the end of that, then effectively, it finishes and that’s the end of the show. They switch it off and everybody just carried back to something else. Went back to their normal lot. Alex
James Hazell: Is on the telly. Yeah, exactly. Oh, right. A song choice for this Wednesday.
Matt Coldplay. What if for what reason?
Matt Porter: This is, Interesting one, because I used to take our children to nursery when they were younger, and one day, I particularly liked the album that this distracts on. but I remember dropping them off one day. My wife taking them in and I was standing outside the car and it was quite a sunny day and the doors were open on the car, and then this came on and it kind of grew.
Echoed around the street where we were parking, but it was kind of quite a nice, it was a lovely, lovely song. and this particular verse in that, in this song, which is really thought-provoking, you know, it, it’s one of those songs where you could read into your, something out. You could put something out of your, something that’s happened to you in your life, and maybe draw it out of this song.
“Every step that you take
Could be your biggest mistake
It could bend or it could break
That’s the risk that you take
What if you should decide
That you don’t want me there in your life
That you don’t want me there by your side”
I think it kind of encompasses everything. And my son James has a sleep disorder. bless him, terrible trouble getting him to sleep since he was born and he’s nearly 10. We used to have sleepless nights over and over again. And one of them, if I look at my playlists on, on my phone, I, it shows which track has been played the most.
We used to play music, all kinds of music, but this one, this one’s just this one has been played about 796 times or something to him. it’s a great track. Yeah. “What if?” by Coldplay? Brilliant. Yeah.
This morning was the second of my Mix Tape tracks played by James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk. I’ve attached the YouTube playlist again below which will play the interview followed by the track.
This is probably one of my favourite pieces of music ever, I don’t know quite where I first heard it, but it is a very, very, very popular dance track.
I went on holiday with my parents and some friends in Portugal. We had a villa and I brought this CD that someone had lent me, which was free on the front of Ministry Magazine, Hooj Choons.
I took that with me and it was a beautiful Villa and I went in and dragged the stereo system out beside the pool and put this on and had it blasting out sitting by the pool, and it was, it was like being in Ibiza when I was 20. It was fantastic!
Great Tune!
This doesn’t include the abrupt ending broadcast today on air!!
Below is a playlist which includes the track after the interview.
This morning was the first of my Mix Tape tracks played by James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk. I’ve attached the YouTube playlist below which will play the interview followed by the track.
The transcript of the interview follows below.
Gadget Man Mix Tape – Part 1
James Hazell: The mixed tape all this week features the gadget man himself, Matt Porter of Matt Porter web design, our regular guide. You man. Now choosing tunes for us. Matt, great to see you
Matt Porter: Great to see you as well.
James Hazell: How are you?
Matt Porter: I’m alright, I’m good, very good. Thank you.
James Hazell: Now you’re a man. Of course. We know now is very much involved in the latest technology and all of that. You regularly report for us on the latest by way of gadgetry and all that. Have you always been that “guy”?
Matt Porter: for technology, I suppose I have. Actually, when I was at school, I had a Commodore VIC-20. That was interesting because the budget for that present was the Commodore VIC-20 on its own without the tape drive.
So, I would spend a lot of time programming and writing programs to do things. Either leaving the VIC-20 switched on because if you switched it off, it’s gone forever. So, it was a good way of learning to program because you kind of had to memorize a lot of what you did or write it down.
So, when you wanted to do it again, you had to re-type it all in. It was a painful thing. But, we’re not talking about writing a copy of Microsoft Word, there was a very limited amount of memory in a VIC-20, so the programs were never that long, but it was still a good start.
James Hazell: So, what was it, 10 PRINT “HELLO”, 20 GOTO 10?
Matt Porter: With Commodores, it was POKE 36879,22 or something like that!
James Hazell: Yeah. We’ll talk more about this as the week goes by, but we want to find out more about the man himself. So, Matt Porter, who are you? Are you a local? I get the sense you’re not Suffolk born, are you?
Matt Porter: I was born in Hitchin in Hertfordshire. I lived in that area for around 33 years and then I met a young lady on an online dating site called Udate, which is long gone. I met her on Udate and we got to know each other and fell in love.
I then sold my house in Bedfordshire at the time and moved to Ipswich to be with her. We got married and we had two children and we’re still together.
James Hazell: It’s good to hear of an online success story because they can be frowned upon in use by some people,
Matt Porter: Certainly and as usual, I have to jump into something right at the beginning, it was good.
James Hazell: You were one of the first, I reckon, cause I had no doubt.
Matt Porter: Yeah, it was 2002 or 2003
James Hazell: That’s got to be early days. It’s got to be pioneering!
Matt Porter: So there you go, that’s what brought me here.
James Hazell: So your Missus must’ve been on it as well, so I suspect she’s a bit of a tech-head as well?
Matt Porter: She’s not actually, she’s not massively, almost certainly she’s not a tech head. She’s not as enthusiastic as I am, but we run Matt Porter Web Design together.
James Hazell: She won’t go out and buy a gadget just because it’s just been released by somebody.
Matt Porter: Absolutely not. No, she’s not interested. Her smartphone battery will last for days because she doesn’t use it that much.
James Hazell: When you moved to Suffolk, was there a concern with your technology minds that you’re moving to a place it’s not, shall we say, renowned for technology. It wasn’t at the forefront, I guess?
Matt Porter: I guess not. Yeah, it turns out I ended up having an office on, on the BT campus for a number of years, and it’s a super place, not many people know what a vibrant technology community is there.
But when I came here, actually, I handed my notice in for my full-time job in Hertfordshire and sold my house. I came here and started Matt Porter Web Design when I arrived, which was madness. I didn’t know anybody personally or in business.
James Hazell: So, you’ve come here this week to choose some songs for us. You’re going to start with Satellite by The Beloved.
Matt Porter: This track came out in 1996 and at that time I was house-sitting for somebody in Stevenage. During the time of the housesitting was Euro 96, which was England played absolutely amazingly! It was one of the most fantastic tournaments with classic players.
James Hazell: We were supposed to win that one!
Matt Porter: It was an amazing tournament. But I was house sitting there. So obviously I remember, watching the games and every time we scored, I think we played The Netherlands winning 4–1.
Every time we scored, I kept ringing my mate up and screaming down the phone. At that time, they also had satellite TV with MTV, and I was watching that and hadn’t really watched it before. This particular video for Satellite by The Beloved came on and it’s quite memorable. If you ever watch it on YouTube, it’s quite a memorable video, quite groundbreaking I guess, and the song’s fantastic as well. I actually have contact vaguely with Jon Marsh, who’s the singer with The Beloved by being a member of The Beloved Facebook Group. He regularly posts on there. It’s quite geeky, I guess.
This week I travelled to London to take part in the Hyundai Drive Different Test. In my previous post, I provided details on the thinking behind this initiative.
Today, I spoke to James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk about my experience and what I think made driving each car different.
Listen to the stream above and view the cockpit videos below to see some of what I experienced during the day.
Welcome to Episode 149 – It’s all go again with the mobile phone market in the UK, the confusion surrounding Mobile Virtual Network Operators and actual network operators becomes confusing again! Virgin Mobile is currently carried by EE which in turn is owned by arch-rival BT, so now Virgin is moving to Vodafone. It shouldn’t affect your service, but you should check your coverage as EE and Vodafone may differ!
Britbox has now launched in the UK, although it was launched in the USA some time ago. Britbox offers BBC and ITV material and will also offer Channel 4 and Channel 5 stuff to in time. It becomes confusing when much of the material is still offered on BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All4 and My5, you can even pay for some of these services to remove the adverts with ITV Hub+, 4+. I’ve signed up to check it out, so more on this later. I’m not terribly sure it has room to operate alongside global players such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV. Time will tell.
UK Drone registration is now compulsory for anyone flying an aircraft over 250g. Operators have until the end of the month to register their drones. It requires the payment of a £9 annual fee and you must affix your Operator ID to any drones you choose to fly.
All intelligent science is informing us that it is now past the time to start thinking about our planet and how we should be treating it before we reach its tipping point, the time when we can no longer begin to undo the damage that the human race has inflicted upon it.
Our oceans are strewn with millions of tons of plastic, so it is good to read that the big car manufacturers are stepping up to the plate and looking for alternative materials and techniques which avoid the continues use of non-biodegradable plastics which have been the go-to material for decades!.
Image Credit: By Siyuwj – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
In this podcast, I chat to James Hazell from BBC Radio Suffolk about bio-plastics and their growing use in the manufacture of car interiors.
It’s interesting listening, so don’t forget to tune in and Like, Subscribe and Comment.
Apple has now officially announced that they are splitting the iTunes app into THREE different services in the next few months.
The 3 apps will focus on Music, TV and Podcasts and will finally separate these services from the iTunes app which was initially written synchronise copy-protected music to and from the first iPods.
Apple WWDC19 – Image Credit: Apple Inc
Listen in to my interview with James Hazell on BBC Radio Suffolk to find out what iTunes was and what it will become in the near future.
Don’t forget to Like, Subscribe and Share and I will see you very soon
This week begins a 10 week series of Retro Gadgets. Technology which has featured in my life and evokes childhood memories.
Listen in on the audio recording above. I have included a surprise at the end which wasn’t recorded at the time.
If you grew up in the ’70s or ’80s, you may have experienced some of these gadgets. You might be still using them or maybe they are gathering dust in a drawer.
The first of these is an absolutely awesome gadget. A gadget which opened up the national curriculum to the use of calculators. It also introduced us to mobile gaming. Leading thousands of young people to huddle around each other in the schoolyards of the early 1980s.
Casio MG-880
Released in the summer of 1980, the Casio MG-880 was ostensibly a calculator aimed at young people. The 1980s saw a revolution in the teaching techniques applied to mathematics in schools. Initially seen as a way of ‘cheating’. Soon, however, it was accepted as a legitimate means to ‘check’ calculations, whilst continuing to show workings-out’ in answers.
Casio had something up their sleeve though. Their customers not only received a calculator, but they also received a musical instrument and game. This was genius marketing, Casio tapped into the school market and rewarded the kids at the same time.
The Calculator
The calculator functionality allowed for addition, subtraction, multiplication and addition. In addition to this, results could be written to memory, recalled and directly subtracted or added to further calculations. Percentage calculations were also included.
It was a beautifully designed device which hasn’t aged at all.
The Casio MG-880 – a creation of a timeless design that hasn’t aged over its 40 years!
Music
MG-880 provided musical entertainment by either a preprogrammed ‘Oh When the Saints’ or by users composing their own music. Musical keys illustrated by the relevant Solfège above the enabled buttons allowed for simple compositions.
Musical keys on the MG-880 were illustrated by the relevant Solfège above each key
The sound came from a piezoelectric speaker. The result was a fine 80s sound that comfortably sits alongside games to follow. I was fond of playing the Star Wars’ theme. For for those interested is 1-5-4-3-2-8-5-4-3-2-8-5-4-3-4-2.
IYou can hear this being played at the end of the attached podcast.
It was no secret that switching the calculator to ‘music’ mode in a lesson would result in its swift confiscation.
The Game (Digi-Invaders / Space Invaders / Invaders)
The ace in the pack was in the inclusion of the Game. This took the form of a button mashing invaders themed game utilising the simplest of graphics, the number display itself.
The invaders game required the using decimal-point to cycle through 0-9 and n which denoted the mothership. Digits slowly advance across the screen from right to left. The player matches the number and presses ‘fire’ to remove it. Each level became faster and more difficult. Lives are lost when invaders reach the base.
[videopress IB3JRLz0]
The game was an instant hit across the planet, from my school in Hitchin, England to schools in New Zealand, every child wanted to own one and more-so, they wanted to excel at the game. Millions of the devices must have been sold with a substantial amount of them confiscated by over-enthusiastic teaching staff!
As with all fads, the MG-880 fell out of favour to be replaced by more advanced handheld games and creating a new boom in entertainment. Perhaps thousands of them still exist in boxes on the shelves of staff-rooms around the world.
This was the beginning of Casio’s boom. Relentlessly creative, they produced some the most ingenious of technology of the 80s. From calculators to watches with built-in calculators and melodies, they were the kings within their marketplace.
Don’t forget to listen to the audio using the link above. It was recorded at BBC Radio Suffolk & broadcast on the 11 May 2019. Listen to the VERY END! I have included something geeky and special.
Thanks to Matt Marvel at BBC Radio Suffolk for inviting onto his show. Keep tuning in for the next 10 weeks for more gems!
