NERC Knowledge Exchange Grant

Wednesday, 16 November, 2011

For those interested, I am currently a Co-Investigator on a NERC Knowledge Exchange grant titled “The Physical Landscape of Britain and Northern Ireland.” Under the auspices of the British Society for Geomorphology, this will be putting together a fully functional spatial bibliographic database for two locations in the UK and integrating references for all published and unpublished material that relate to the geomorphology. We successfully developed (through some of the hard work of Claudio Piccinini) a demonstrator webmap and this now moves on to a full prototype with our partners Mouchel, Halcrow, National Trust, Environment Agency and Natural England.

It’s a great knowledge exchange project and comes out of a BSG Steering Group which is looking far beyond the prototype envisaged here. There is some visionary thinking going on and big aims for the future utilisation of geomorphological expertise in the UK and maximising its benefit for all. Professor Janet Hooke is leading the project and has experience of similar knowledge exchange work before. Kingston’s expertise in GIS adds strength to the project. Layman’s press release is here.

One Story

Wednesday, 16 November, 2011

One Story is a great subscription for your Kindle. Each month you get one new short story and they never use an author twice. The variety, breadth and freshness is revitalising. At at £0.99 its a bargain. Subscribe… today.

“One Story magazine features one great story every month. Because One Story never publishes an author more than once, you’ll discover a great new writer in every issue.”

“Launched in 2002, One Story has quickly become one of the top American venues for short fiction. Of the 115 issues published between 2002 and 2008, almost half were selected as among the year’s best by various anthologies and prizes, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. As The New York Times noted: “At a time when literary writing seems like a dying art, when little magazines are folding left and right, when publishers bemoan the sinking bottom line, here lies a spot of hope…It is called One Story.”“

Kindle Daily Deal

Monday, 14 November, 2011

Amazon UK offering a “daily deal” each day for a heavily discounted book. See the blog post for further details. It’ll be interesting to see how these deals develop…. equivalent price in the US at the moment. Will have to see if it goes up tomorrow as well or whether its the usual “Brits can pay more”

Ball camera

Thursday, 10 November, 2011

How cool is this ball camera?? Love the application…. our Leica laser scanner grabs similar imagery and splices them together but this is so elegant and you get a whole sphere of imagery. The alternative would be to fish-eye images but not as easy to do. Great!

Eject USB

Wednesday, 9 November, 2011

Safely ejecting USB devices is a perennial gotcha for those not in the know, recently brought home to me by a friend who copied some audio books to her Kindle and couldn’t find them to play them. What had happened was that she had “copied them” over to the Kindle and then unplugged it. In reality the files had been cached by Windows and were still there when she pulled the plug. The “Safe Eject” feature in Windows flushes the cache, completes writing the file and then ejects the drive. Except it can’t do all that if there are files open/running on the device.

EjectUSB is one (of many) solutions to this problem. Running the app will close all apps running on the drive, flush the cache (and a few other things) and then attempt to eject the drive, all automatically. It works very well and even if you can’t eject the drive, at least you will know that any incomplete file copies have been finished. Essential for people with portable apps.

Kindle loses audio…..

Monday, 7 November, 2011

PCPro had a good review of current ebook readers this month. And yes the new Kindle came out on top, but as they say, its all about content! The Kindle has that in bucket loads and the compact size, fast page turns and low price make it a winner. In comparison to the previous version (now branded the Kindle Keyboard) the screen is improved and page turns are faster. Things have been removed…. the keyboard (doh!), 3G (useful for those travelling alot) and 2Gb of storage. However the big gotcha is the removal of the audio jack/speakers. This means no music, no audiobooks and no text-to-speech. Surely it can’t have added that much to the price?? Audio is a must-have for me, although I know plenty of people will be happy without it. Anyway, that makes the touch sensitive Sony Reader Wifi at £108+VAT all the more tempting. And there is also an alternative to the larger Kindle DX which are available in the UK; the PocketBook Pro 902 has a 9.7” screened device, although not (apparently) without its problems. A good round up and well worth the read.

“Couldn’t install on USB storage or SD card” error on Android

Thursday, 3 November, 2011

Finally got around to sorting out a niggling bug on my San Fran phone. For one application only, I kept getting the following error when I tried to install it:

“Couldn’t install on USB storage or SD card”

I couldnt be bothered to do anything about it, but when it then occurred for another app I thought I’d better do some digging. Turns out that Android appears to created the file smdl2tmp1.asec when it installs an app. This is a temporary file and for some reason caused the failure to install this particular app. The solution is simple: just delete it! smdl2tmp1.asec resides in one of two directories:

/sdcard/.android_secure - this is an invisible folder on your SD card, but you can access with any file manager
/mnt/secure/asec/ - access to this folder requires root access (and a file explorer such as Android Mate)

Looks like this has been a known bug for some time…. which isn’t good because the last thing you want numpties doing is rooting their file and randomly deleting files on the phone!

Mighty Text

Tuesday, 1 November, 2011

I’ve just been trialling MightyText which allows you to send and receive SMS messages on your PC from your Android phone. Its a very clever bit of programming…. install the app on your phone, then the Chrome app on your PC. Log in to your Google account from both Chrome and your phone and, hey presto, they are then paired.

So what does it do?? Well, doh, allows you to send and receive SMS messages on your PC. The integration is pretty neat though…. a pop-up box notifies you when a txt arrives and allows you to reply. This brings up the main screen with threaded conversations (aka Handcent). You can import all your contacts from your GMail account (which means everything off your phone if you keep your phone synced) which is good, although incoming txt messages append the +44 for the UK, whilst the contacts dont. Which means you only see the phone number rather than the sender name.

Remember you need the data connection on the phone open in order for the app to work. The lag is acceptable…. about 10s which seems pretty good to me considering what is going on. The Android app is quite small, although I should look as to its utilisation. The Chrome app is a bit of a hog though… most extensions run 5-10Mb, but this is more like 50Mb.

So what’s if useful for? Good question and, obviously, you can txt from your PC which is useful in that typing is clearly easier. There are a couple of other side effects though…. you don’t have to have your phone near you to send/receive txts. And (or) you can put your phone in entirely inert mode (no notification, pop-up box, sound or tone).

Android OS Updates

Friday, 28 October, 2011

Really interesting article on OS updates comparing iOS and Android phones. This shows the quality user-experience that Apple aims for and keeping users happy with the latest OS version. It also keeps developers happy in the sense that they stick to the “curve” and make sure their products are up-to-date.

Compare that to Android where fragmentation of the OS and out-of-date products as they ship leads to a not entirely satisfied end-user. The moral of the story being, if you are on Android you are betting off rooting your phone as soon as possible and putting on the latest ROM developed by the community.

BOOK NOW LIVE “Geomorphological Mapping: Methods and Applications”

Thursday, 27 October, 2011

Our book “Geomorphological Mapping: Methods and Applications” is now live on Science Direct for download. The first print copies should be arriving in the country next week. Enjoy!

Kindle 3.3 Firmware

Thursday, 20 October, 2011

The Kindle 3.3 Firmware has now landed…. not sure what happened to 3.2 unless it was internal and with the release of the new non-keyboard Kindle this has jumped to put them both at the same point I don’t know. Also worth noting that the “branding” is now “Kindle” and “Kindle Keyboard”: ostensibly the same hardware otherwise.

Featurewise there is nothing to write home about….. backing up to the Kindle account of your own documents as well as those from the Kindle store. All part of the cloud based service that the Kindle Fire (aka tablet) is aiming to tap in to. So it makes sense and shifts people in that direction. Not sure if anything else has changed…..

Font management

Saturday, 15 October, 2011

Font management seems to be one of those things you never get around to if you aren’t a designer (and possibly even if you are). Most people become fairly blinkered to using the standard set of fonts included with Windows and don’t think much beyond Arial, Garamond or Times Roman (or, heaven forbid, Comic Sans!). Yet there is a world of creativity lurking in fonts that can lift and ordinary design to extraordinary. Typography is an essential element of design and Robin Williams’ book is a wonderful entry point for those not party to right-brain creativity (with a very useful section on fonts).

Anyway…. font management. Long and short, is that you may end up with a collection of 1,500 fonts. If you install them all your system will crawl to the pace of ant running through maple syrup, besides the pain of actually trying to work out which ONE font you do actually want to use. Enter the world of font management of which the are a large number of tools available for Mac, Windows and Linux. They all work on a similar premise of viewing selections of fonts on-screen and allowing you to install/un-install them. Beyond that there are quite a few facilities for the serious high-end user. I currently use Nexus Font Manager which is (of course!) free to use. It allows viewing, install and uninstall of fonts, but also runs from a USB stick, grouping of fonts, once loaded all grouped fonts become available on the system (without needing to install them) and tagging of fonts (to allows searching). It’s a reasonably powerful program and is great for the occasional need.

Microsoft Office upgrade…..

Thursday, 6 October, 2011

I finally took the plunge and upgraded Microsoft Office. Having used Office97 for…. well the best part of 14 years its time to retire it. The single document interface causes some problems along with the lack of proper DOCX file compatability. Perhaps the nail in the coffin was the purchase of the rather used Acer C112 DLP pico projector. This comes with some slightly archaic software to convert PPT files to a series of animated JPGs for onboard playback…. it only works on later versions of Office.

So my brand new version of Office 2003 arrived in the post and is now freshly installed. Yup, Office 2003 is just fine. None of the crap of newer versions, has a multiple document interface and is just a bit more refined than Office97. See if I can make this last 14 years!

SSTL to build SAR

Tuesday, 4 October, 2011

Interesting article by Jonathan Amos about the announcement of SSTL to build a SAR satellite (complete end-to-end at 50M euro). Quite a departure for them and sure to provide a lift to the market. Watch this space as they say.

Back to KAP

Tuesday, 4 October, 2011

I spent a day with Paolo Paron (co-editor of our book on Geomorphological Mapping) kicking off a new kite aerial photography project. Paolo (who works at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft) is looking at monitoring morphological change at a beach in the Netherlands. KAP fits the bill so he is replicating the kit I have used for a variety of projects. Yesterday was a training day (with the UK basking in mid-summer weather!) which we spent running through the kites and ancillary equipment, then on to the rig design/setup, remote control and camera. We did three test flights just to see how it all worked. We were interested in vertical aerials, but inevitably got a few obliques (which are always more interesting to look at). Hope to have some more photography from the Netherlands in November.

Geomorphological Mapping: Methods and Applications

Tuesday, 4 October, 2011

The edited book I have been working on is in the final throes of publication. Titled “Geomorphological Mapping: Methods and Applications” by Mike Smith, Paolo Paron and James Griffiths, its Volume 15 in Elsevier’s highly regarded Developments in Earth Surface Processes Series edited by Jack Shroder. Also available at Amazon.

Summary:
Geomorphological Mapping: a professional handbook of techniques and applications is a new book targeted at academics and practitioners who use, or wish to utilise, geomorphological mapping within their work. Synthesising for the first time an historical perspective to geomorphological mapping, field based and digital tools and techniques for mapping and an extensive array of case studies from academics and professionals active in the area. Those active in geomorphology, engineering geology, reinsurance, Environmental Impact Assessors, and allied areas, will find the text of immense value.

NigeriaSat-2 active

Wednesday, 28 September, 2011

NigeriaSat-2, the UK designed and build 2.5m micro-satellite, is now collecting imagery after its successful launch in August. The first image is over Salt Lake City and demonstrates the quality of the new 2.5m sensor. As the article notes, NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X, cost a total of £30M which included training in design and build of their own satellite. A remarkable knowledge transfer partnership.

New Kindles available imminently

Wednesday, 28 September, 2011

Amazon did a BIG product launch today attacking the portable media “appliance” market on all fronts with a swathe of announcements. A good roundup over at PCPro where we see the following:

Kindle (4?) ebook reader: e-ink, same size screen, smaller, lighter and no keyboard. The kick in the stomach…. $79 US or £89 UK!! Looks like the third generation with keyboard will remain available.

Kindle Touch: yes, a touchscreen version at $99

Kindle Fire (I blogged about earlier): the mythical beast is out, with a detailed review here and due out in November at $199. This is a killer price…. they are really going big guns for the tablet market and building in the media content (book, magazine, music, film) makes for a compelling product. It’ll be interesting to see how good the hardware is.

Kindle Maps

Monday, 26 September, 2011

The OS blog highlighted that maps are now making their way on to the Kindle. Kindle Map Guides are a nice example and reasonably well put together use OpenSpace data. They are probably the best of the bunch and replicate a paper map on your Kindle. They do the job, but I can’t help feel that they missed a trick in maximising the screen space given over to the map. Useful to have in the pocket though. Kindle Maps are using OpenStreetMap data with their first offering a map of Dublin.

IT setup for travel…..

Friday, 23 September, 2011

I took this picture last week whilst in Belfast. This is (currently) my IT setup whilst travel. On a day-to-day basis I now only take my San Francisco; however this isn’t sufficient for a longer trip. I need a Windows PC, reasonable size screen/keyboard, internet access and ALL my documents/software. The photo shows my ageing, but trusty, Sony Vaio, portable harddrive (stuff with all my work and portable apps. The San Francisco is then setup as a portable wifi hotspot to give internet access. Very portable.