Microscopic images

Last weekend I found my old microscope, that I was given as a child. Even by the standards of a school science lab, it’s pretty poor – but as I child it made me feel like I was a real scientist.

Today I decided to see if I could take pictures with it using my camera. I set up the microscope without its eyepiece, and added a macro extension lens to my Fuji S9600. It took quite a while to get it set up properly – the hardest part was aligning the microscope with the camera on its tripod, but I eventually managed to stack up some DVDs.

Then was the fiddly issue of focussing it. I had to focus the microscope in the usual way, by turning the knob. Unfortunately, that made the whole barrel of the microscope move up and down – changing the distance away from the camera lens. After setting up the microscope, it was a case of moving the camera back and forth by tiny amounts, and lastly changing the focus on the camera. Of course, changing the focus on the camera moves the lens and not the body, and just touching the camera moved it around. It took ages to get it right.

I backlit the subjects of my photos using a halogen desk lamp and a small mirror that’s built into the microscope. Apologies for the quality of this image – it was taken on a phone.

Then it was just a case of running round the flat like a 6-year-old, looking for things to put on a slide. First I had a look at a daffodil petal. The microscope has three objective lenses, 150x, 300x and 600x respectively. Of course the camera’s macro lens also adds an additional 1.5x or so. I started with 150x…

…and then increased to 600x…

Bored of my botanical subject, I plucked a hair from my beard. Here it is at 300x…

…and at 600x…

And finally, here’s the end of the hair that was once attached in my follicle. This one only looks more zoomed in than the previous ones because I cropped it quite closely on the computer.

The bluish area in the picture seems to be the camera’s way of telling me it didn’t appreciate having a bright light shone right up its barrel, so I decided to call it a day before I broke something. I might revisit this idea with my 35mm SLR (which has better quality optics, and no CCD to accidentally ruin).

It’s all getting too much

Perhaps my job as a mobile IT specialist is getting too much for me.

Last night I had a dream that someone configured my alarm clock for push notifications and then signed me up to a high volume mailing list.

When it went off this morning, in a half-awake state I irritably tried to remember how to configure my push mail settings (aka “snooze”) and went back to sleep. Repeat in five minutes. Ugh.

Perhaps it’s time for a holiday!

My thoughts on the iPhone 3GS

I’ve now had an iPhone 3GS for a couple of weeks, and it seemed only right to write something about it. This is not a review – there are many, many other reviews of the iPhone out there. This article is just a collection of my own thoughts, and a few comparisons to my other current smartphone (an HTC Magic) and my old smartphone (a Sony Ericsson P1i).

It might sound like a daft thing to complain about, but the iPhone doesn’t have an “alert LED” to warn you when there’s a text message or voicemail waiting. The P1i and the Magic both have this – and it’s great because you can see from across the room whether you’ve missed a message. I didn’t realise how much I used it until I realised that the iPhone doesn’t have such a feature. It’s annoying to have to walk over, pick it up and unlock it to check.

The iPhone suffers from poor battery life. Admittedly I tend to keep wifi and GPS turned on all of the time, but with an average day’s use (0 phonecalls, a handful of texts and maybe 30-60 minutes of app usage and web browsing) the battery gets down to 25% and I have to recharge every night. It’s OK provided I’m able to charge it every night. If I was going camping, I’d make the effort to turn wifi and GPS off, and maybe even get 2 days of use out of it! My P1i lasted for days before it needed fresh coal, and the Magic lasts for a few days between recharges with wifi enabled.

Some people have also complained that the iPhone’s battery can’t be changed by a mere mortal and have cited this for a reason for not buying it. I agree to a certain extent, but the battery isn’t likely to wear out for a couple of years, and by then I’ll be wanting a new phone anyway.

This next item might be seen as a pro or a con – the iPhone doesn’t really have many options. This is probably OK for most people, but it is not as configurable as the Magic. If an app or an aspect of the OS works the way you like it, then good. If not, it’s a bit tough. The Magic is inherently more geeky and everything has options. Having said that, the options aren’t in your face and are not intimidating for novice users.

The browser, as many have noted, is excellent. I won’t go into detail about it. The browser on the Magic is also good at rendering pages properly, but unfortunately lacks a multi-touch interface. This means you can’t do the pinch-zoom gesture, among other things. Other HTC handsets have multi-touch interfaces, though.

A minor annoyance with the iPhone is that it has to be registered with iTunes, and must be connected to iTunes when you want to update the firmware. It might not affect most people (especially if they already use iTunes for listening to music), but it could be annoyance for those who don’t want to install an unnecessary music player, and especially for me, as I had to build a Windows virtual machine to install iTunes. In contrast, the Magic simply receives its updates over the air, using 3G or wifi.

I prefer the feel of the Magic in my hand over the iPhone. The Magic is a bit smaller, a bit lighter and a nicer shape, I think. Doesn’t make a huge difference though. By this point, I’m just nitpicking.

Both devices have good screen, good onsreen keyboards and generally similar. The iPhone is a bit slicker, but I think my favourite phone out of the two is the Magic. I’d like it even more if it had multi-touch, too 🙂

GPS tracker

Since getting my iPhone 3GS, I’ve been playing with a few apps. Today I tried one called Cyclemeter, which is a GPS tracker and can provide some interesting stats about your cycle rides.

I set it to track my journey to work (Speedwell – Clifton) and was quite interested by the elevation graph in particular. (N.B. this route is slightly shorter than my usual one, since the Bristol-Bath cycle path is currently closed near Lodge Causeway, so I’ve been taking a shortcut on main roads).

I’ve included some iPhone screenshots of my results:

Map of my route to work
Graphs of my route

Key points:

  • I start at home, taking the roads
  • At 2km, I join the Bristol-Bath cycle path at Rose Green Rd. You can see a dip in my speed where I stop and push my bike through the gate.
  • Most of the cycle path is gently downhill towards the city centre
  • At 5km, I reach the end of the cycle path and proceed through Old Market. It’s a bit stop-start in traffic.
  • From 6km onwards, it’s a steady uphill climb (Woodland Road today, sometimes St Michael’s Hill instead) from about 85m to almost 160m above sea level!

So long, Symbian

This week, my phone contract came to an end and it was time to say goodbye to my old smartphone – a Sony Ericsson P1i. I thought it fitting to say a few words. Don’t confuse this with a review for a 3-year old phone – this is more like a comparison between the early days of smartphones, and the handsets you can buy today.

Sony Ericsson P1i

I’ve had the P1i for 19 months, during which time I have used it every single day – so I know it pretty well. I originally chose it because I wanted a smartphone – something that could handle web and email. My previous phone had been a Sony Ericsson K800i, which had GPRS, and a basic email client and web browser. It was slow, and it never really worked properly. I guess that’s what you might expect given that it wasn’t a smartphone 🙂

So I chose the P1i because it boasted 3G, wifi, a decent web browser, a more complex email client and other Internet-oriented features. It also had a QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen with a stylus. There wasn’t a lot of choice because at the time, nearly all smartphones were sold intended for business, and the Apple iPhone had just been released but cost a weeks’ wages – even if you were the boss of Apple.

(I briefly owned a BlackBerry Pearl 8100, but it was so awful that I sent it back after 48 hours).

I had used a Sony Ericsson M600i at work, so I knew vaguely what I was getting. The P1i was pretty much the same, except with twice the memory, a newer OS, and wifi. When I started using it, I was excited that I’d be able to browse the web at will, read my emails on the move and never be bored again.

But my dream never quite came true. Why not?

The web browser

As mobile browsers of the day go, it was pretty good. It was an integrated version of Opera Mini which is a decent browser. It just doesn’t cut the mustard these days, as you simply can’t do without Flash or Javascript. Many sites simply don’t work.

Like today’s smartphones, it had options for portrait or landscape viewing. Unfortunately, you have to go into a menu to switch your view.

There’s no automatic resizing or scaling, so if you are looking at a “real” website, typically you only see the top corner and there’s an awful lot of vertical scrolling and horizontal scrolling before you find what you want. You also can’t scroll the way you can on modern phones such as the iPhone – by dragging the whole page with your finger. Scrolling was done using traditional scroll bars, which had to be dragged with the stylus (because they were too small for a finger).

And, as we now know, the concept of duplicating all web content in a special mobile web doesn’t really work. Sure, some sites offer mobile-friendly versions (e.g. Bristol University’s Mobile Campus Assistant) but it’s just not feasible to expect that you will never need to look at a “real” website on your phone.

The overall experience wasn’t great, and was mainly reserved for needing to find information on the move, such as store opening hours or a postcode for the sat nav.

The email client

If you only have an inbox folder, then you probably wouldn’t mind the email client on the P1i. However on my work email account, I have dozens of folders that incoming mail gets automatically sorted into. This is a nuisance on the P1i, as you have to go a couple of levels into the menus to choose which folder you’d like to view, and you have to go into each and every folder to see if it has any new messages in it.

I only really used the email client for writing emails when I was out and about.

The contract

Data contracts were expensive at the time I bought the P1i. They were most definitely targeted at business users, and my domestic mobile contract only included 1MB of data a month. That might let you view a handful of mobile websites, but it’s really nothing as soon as you start looking at “real” websites.

So I only used it in emergencies, because I knew that anything more would start to cost an arm and a leg.

The interface

The P1i has a QWERTY keyboard which is great for quick typing. It also has a jog-dial and some navigation buttons on the side, and of course the touchscreen. Depending the app or menu in question, you can sometimes use the touchscreen with a finger if you’re careful. Other times you’ll need the stylus.

The problem is that you have to keep switching between different input methods. The number of times I’ve started going through menus with the jog-dial, been forced to intervene by touching the screen, pressing the wrong thing, being forced to get the stylus out and then ended up typing awkwardly while also holding the stylus shows that the interface isn’t really mature.

Today, it’s practically impossible to buy a smartphone with a stylus (or a keyboard, for that matter).

The menu system

The main downfall of Symbian UIQ3 was its excessive complexity. Basic tasks, such as writing a new text message, would mean the user had to find their way through several levels of menus. Everything seemed to be hidden behind several menus, and there were pages and pages of options that would frighten most people. Consider also what I just said about constantly switching between input methods, and you might get an idea of the pain involved in, for example, changing the time zone when you go on holiday.

If this weren’t enough, the menus are slooooow and laggy. Opening a menu with several items might take a second, maybe longer. Opening your SMS inbox sometimes took as long as five seconds. That is an eternity in the world of technology users, and I often found myself hissing “come on!” at the phone when I was trying to do something.

Apps

Symbian was the forerunner of today’s smartphones in that it allowed users to download and install apps on their phone. There was no app store, and finding apps involved browsing the web endlessly and downloading them. It was a bit of a pain to do so on the phone itself, so I usually would find and download apps on my PC and transfer them to the phone using the cable or Bluetooth.

That’s fine for a geek like me, but the main problem was the fact that there were two Symbian based platforms – Sony Ericsson’s UIQ3, and Nokia’s S60. As always, there was a platform war and S60 won. It’s now quite hard to find any UIQ3 apps, and when most software developers say “Symbian” they mean “S60”.

Incidentally, Sony Ericsson are still making Symbian-based phones (such as the new Satio) but they now use S60.

The good points

Despite what I’ve said so far, it’s not all bad. The P1i did have some great features, such as:

  • Hardware QWERTY keyboard. I was almost as fast typing on this as on a laptop.
  • Relatively small size – it’s a lot smaller than my replacement phone – an iPhone 3GS.
  • An LED on the base that blinks when you’ve got a text message or missed call. The iPhone really needs one of these!
  • A battery that lasts a million years. So far, the iPhone has needed charging pretty much every night.

It’s been a good phone. It’s just time to move on now 🙂