HURSLEY, U.K. - 11 Mar 2011: More than 450 students from 80 schools across the South of England will be celebrating National Science . . . → Read More: Blue Fusion 2011]]> As it is National Science and Engineering week, IBM Hursley are running Blue Fusion 2011 - The official press release summed it up quite well, and also contains a list of this year’s activities:

HURSLEY, U.K. - 11 Mar 2011: More than 450 students from 80 schools across the South of England will be celebrating National Science and Engineering Week at IBM’s 16th annual Blue Fusion event. The students will need to use quick thinking, scientific knowledge and teamwork in a number of fun activities, designed to inspire and encourage young people to develop their interest in Science, Technology and Engineering.

“Communication” is the theme for National Science and Engineering Week 2011 and volunteers from IBM Hursley, Europe’s largest software development lab, have put together a wealth of fun, inspiring and engaging activities.

Each day, teams from 16 schools will participate in a variety of specially-designed activities promoting innovation, teamwork, problem solving and communication skills. Students solve puzzles and technological challenges that explore basic concepts in some of the most interesting areas of modern technology. The activities will include building network communications to cracking codes to designing an ecologically friendly house. The students will experience first hand how science benefits our everyday lives and how instrumented, interconnected and intelligent technology can help build a smarter planet.

Approximately 200 IBM employees volunteer their time and experience to Blue Fusion, many of whom are recent graduates who can share their passion and experience of working in the industry with the next generation. Local dignitaries will be attending the event throughout the week to see the impact and success of Blue Fusion in inspiring young people into Science, Technology and Engineering.

I look forward to hosting schools on Thursday – it has been fun being involved for the last five years, so should be great this year too! I wrote briefly about Blue Fusion and Bright Sparks in 2007 (I can’t remember if that was the year I organised and ran Blue Fusion with Dan)

There are one or two videos about Blue Fusion which really show what the event is about:

Aldiko is a fantastic program for reading free ePub books, so I am working my way through a few H. G. Wells . . . → Read More: eBooks on Android]]> Since buying an Android phone I have been starting to think about using it to read books. The screen isn’t bad, and it turns out that there is some good software out there

Aldiko is a fantastic program for reading free ePub books, so I am working my way through a few H. G. Wells books as they are now public domain and available directly through the program (along with many other free books). The software has good options for font styling, line spacing, page turning, black on white vs. white on black as well as quick shortcuts for changing the brightness.

One thing I have yet to figure out though, is buying eBooks.

Sure, there are loads of places out there that sell them, many including their own software (available for Android) for reading the books with DRM. However it is almost impossible to work out which ones use which DRM systems, and what the restrictions are on them (some may even be per-book)

Why am I worried about DRM? Well, what if I want to read the book on a train on a laptop, or what if my phone dies and I get a different phone? Can I transfer it to another device? What if I decide to buy a hardware eBook reader? Will I be able to copy my books to it and read them there?

I haven’t even addressed the idea of lending the book to my wife without giving her my phone.

DRM worries me greatly, and so I doubt I will buy an eBook anytime soon unless it comes without DRM (but no sites make it very clear that they are DRM-free). Why can’t they come to the same conclusions as online music distributors and realise that DRM-free means more sales?

I guess it is paper books for the forseeeable future

The hardware is fairly similar to the iPhone in shape, but a matt-black back casing and sort of purplish-metallic looking trim. . . . → Read More: HTC Desire – Android rocks!]]> I gave in to the whole “smart phone” thing on the a week ago and ordered a HTC Desire online. The phone arrived last Tuesday and has barely been out of my hand since.

The hardware is fairly similar to the iPhone in shape, but a matt-black back casing and sort of purplish-metallic looking trim. The screen may be slightly taller than the iPhone, but only just.

Android is quite a cool OS, though I cannot tell how much is core Android and how much is “HTC Sense” which comes as part of the phone. One thing to say is that while an iPhone feels like a phone with lots of pages of buttons, the Desire is somewhat more like a computer. Technically it IS a computer – It is running a 2.6.29 Linux Kernel and you can hack a root account on it, though I have not done so (yet? Yeah, I surprised even myself here – I thought I would be hacking it and upgrading it to the latest Android straight away, but I am just enjoying all it can do right now)

I have 7 desktop screens, and swiping left or right moves between them. Each one can be filled up with application icons or shortcuts, or many applications also have “widgets” such as a clock with weather forcasting on it (clicking on the weather opens the weather app showing the weeks forecast).

Similarly I have a calendar widget showing me what is coming up from my Google calendar, and clicking on it takes me to the Google calendar application.

The touch-screen is a capacitive type and behaves wonderfully, though typing on the keyboard does take some getting used to.

The integration of the phone is quite incredible. Adding a twitter account and setting to get alerts whenever someone mentions me and now my phone beeps, vibrates and shows a twitter update in the pull-down status panel alongside text messages.

Facebook and Google integration however are far more impressive. Setting a Facebook and Google account and once it syncs I can see all the people I know in Facebook and all my Contacts in Google on my phone. Not only are they visible, but if it can it links the accounts (you can manually set links too) so that all the data shows up together. So for example, I have friends that I only had a mobile number in my phone, and email address in Google, and now that all shows up together along with their Facebook profile photo and more details from Facebook! (If only I could then force all that data back into my online Google address book)

I suspect the iPhone appstore is slightly better stocked than the Android Market, however there are still plenty of very good apps out there, and many are free (yes, there is a free lightsabre app if you really need it)

Google Maps is rather cool, and even has “Navigation”, which gives voice directions while driving (or walking) – It even pronounces the names of streets, though not particularly well.
If you are walking the route, at the touch of a button you can see the route through Google’s street-view so that you can see where the turns really are, though I suggest not trying this while driving.

As I am with 3 as my provider, I fought my way through their website to get the MSN and Skype applications, which once found were easy to install. One odd thing is that both Skype and MSN only work if you have good 3 signal AND have turned off wireless. It seems strange to me as there is no harm in letting you use wireless, but I guess they have their reasons (I believe that the Skype app actually uses a GSM phone call to do the voice to their server which should be easier on their network than VOIP, but that doesnt exaplain why wifi couldnt be used)

Google Earth is pretty cool to see running on a device in your hand, but perhaps even cooler is the Google Sky app which not only uses GPS to work out where on the Earth you are, but also uses the Compass to work out which way you are facing, and the tilt/accelerometer thingy to work out which way your phone is facing. Holding the phone in front of you, as you would taking a picture, it shows the stars, planets and constellations that are visible in that direction. As I know almost nothing about star constellations this is rather interesting to me.

Okay, so Google have influenced the apps a lot, but they did write a lot of the OS, and it is perfectly fine to use without a Google account (it does POP/IMAP and Exchange for email), but I think you get more out of it if you use Google already.

One thing I have yet to try is application development: I’ve only had it a few days – come on!
Looking at the developer docs it looks pretty straightforward – Eclipse IDE, Java classes provided, you should even be able to debug your app running on your phone via the USB cable. The only downside I have heard is that the GPS libraries require licensing, though apparently it will work in debug mode on your phone. It also appears that there is a $25 signup fee for the Android Market, but that doesn’t seem too extreme (especially when you compare it to $99 per year for the Apple app store)

One thing worth checking: I found (as did many other people if you search for it) that having the Twitter account enabled for updates (for example in Friend Stream) caused the calendar to continually poll for updates. This uses lots of battery (and probably bandwidth). It seems that calendar is the task responsible for nearly all background updates, so don’t just assume that it is your calendar using all your power or bandwidth, it is probably something asking calendar to do lots of updates

If you think something is using too much battery power, download the app “Spare Parts” from the Android market, and in it select “Battery History->Partial Wake Usage” and see what comes top. Mine used to show Calendar, but after removing the flickr account settings from the core OS “Settings->Accounts & Sync->Flickr->remove” and restarting the phone the bars are all very much smaller (and Calendar barely features on the usage)

Spare Parts looks incredibly useful, as you can also track bandwidth usage.

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