#168 Some Calculations

Last night I was thinking about something. How much it has cost me per day since I got my phone, almost exactly a year ago. The initial figure was quite shocking. £1.80(ish) per day since I got it.

How did I work this number out? Well for starters I ordered my phone directly from Apple (it is an iPhone 4) in time for launch day at a cost of £499 for the 16GB black version. At this time I also swapped pay as you go tariff on O2 from the one I had with my old iPhone 3G which cost between £10 and £20 a month to an O2 Simplicity Pay as you Go Tariff for £15 a month which gave me 100 minutes, 500MB internet, and unlimited texts. I tried to find out how much I had topped up over the year and couldn’t find an exact number so this first year was only an estimation of £15 a month multiplied by 12 months to give £180. That much in just topping up per year. Then to work out how much that was per day, the total cost (the cost of the phone plus the cost of the top ups) which came to £679 was divided by 365, and this comes to £1.80(ish).

That is a lot of money to be spending on a phone that, admittedly, I don’t use anywhere near my allowances per month so it is wasted. Hence the reason why I am on Pay as You Go rather than on a contract.

I continued working out costs for how much this phone would cost me over an estimated 10 year period, a little ambitious for a phone, and the cost per day still only worked out at about 63p a day. That is still quite expensive if I was using the same tariff, though not as expensive if I were to change phone every odd year, needing to buy it myself since I am on pay as you go. It would take 3 years for it to dip underneath the £1 mark per day.

What about change tariff I hear you say! The cheapest O2 tariff for PAYG from what I could see was a minimum of £7.50 a month to get unlimited texts, normal texts are 10p, I would have to spend a further £3 to get mobile internet on it which is quite essential since it is a smartphone. At £10.50 a day, it would still end up being 85p after 3 years and 50p per day after 10 years.

Still not good enough in my opinion. I have been with O2 for almost 3 years now and it could be better. Yes, by the looks of things I got a better deal with them than what I did with Vodafone before but they are still taking more money than they need to (in my opinion). I checked other network websites. Vodafone: I couldn’t figure out how much it would cost me so I gave up. Orange: our internet service provider at home, but the tariffs were still a bit much for what they gave you. Then I remembered a network that I had heard of before but not really considered; Giffgaff.

Giffgaff essentially is a crowd sourced network taking a piggyback ride on the O2 network. In otherwords, people have created the network and it uses the O2 masts and network to operate. Apparently, because of their lack of advertising, or phone support, they can make huge savings and pass them on to their customers. Their prices show it. It is a PAYG only network and texts cost about 4p and calls only 8p per minute with internet (from what I could establish) only a maximum of 20p per day. For £5 a month you get unlimited texts and for £10 you get 250 minutes, and unlimited texts and internet.

I shoved these numbers into my spreadsheet I had made up and, if I used an average of £5 per month, after 10 years total cost for this phone would only be 33p per day. It might not seem much less than the O2 one but it all adds up! In the screenshot below, you can see I was a bit liberal with the amount and put £7 per month, just in case and it still only came to 39p per day.

I had a look at some review sites and people seem quite happy with it, so I ordered a free sim card and I am going to try it out, and if it is good, I’m going to switch to them completely and get my number changed across too. All I have to do then is convince others to join too then there are free calls and texts between Giffgaff users…

#160 How Real Can You Get?

After a long while of keeping away from Gran Turismo 5, I have made the mistake of starting it up again, but I have decided that the career mode is as good as I’ll ever get it, so I have started to have a little more fun with the other features of the game, more specifically, photomode. Mimicking the functions and results of a real camera the shots that can be taken are phenomenally good, and with a little tweaking in Photoshop with some custom actions I found that mimic the style of a certain type of film, and adding a slight grain to them, they look as good as the real thing.

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My favourite image by far from this slight foray into Le Mans with the Audi R10 was this Panorama. Taken in the same way you would if you were taking a panorama in real life, it was stiched together in photoshop and had the same effects applied as the rest of the images.

#145 A Makeshift Studio

A few days ago, I started to dabble in making a makeshift light box to take pictures in of small objects. To do this I used the tutorial I found or was forwarded to a while ago (I’ll post link later when I’m back on my iMac). The result was relatively good if a bit small. All of the paper I had, no matter which sketchbook I tore pages out of to get paper to make it, none of which was sturdy enough to make it stand on its own, reinforcing it with cardboard strips did help but I was then left with the problem of it being really wonky and hardly big enough to fit anything decent inside to take photographs of. Another additional problem was that I couldn’t get my camera in at a decent angle for some things I was wanting to take a photo of.

This image below is what I ended up with and just look at how shoddy it looks:

That was Saturday. Last night I gave the whole lightbox/mini studio thing another shot and I took a different approach. I was thinking bigger this time. Remembering I had a sketchbook of A2 layout paper I started taking a few pages out of it and got to work. I took some blu-tac and put some on the sides of the paper and put it 20cm above the surface of my desk, letting the rest of the paper drape down and onto the desk. This left a short portion of white on the desk which would have been obvious on the photos, so I overlapped another piece of layout paper onto the one I had already positioned. Excellent. This sorted out the background for the photos, but the next bridge to cross was lighting.

With the first iteration of the light box I made, the built in roof helped with the diffusing of the light, avoiding the obvious reflections and the horrible direct light the desk lamp would have given. This version did not have a ‘roof’ so I had to improvise some what. I remembered something I had read somewhere on the internet, of someone at a motorshow and they had their DSLR with them. They wanted to avoid harsh highlights and shadows gotten from the use of the flash so they taped a piece of tracing paper or something close to tracing paper onto the flash of the camera which apparently helped them out massively with producing better shots. So what I did was I cut down a piece of layout paper (since I didn’t have my smaller layout pad to hand) and some more blu-tac and loosely wrapped the paper around the shade of the desk lamp (doable because it was an anglepoise style lamp) and attached using the blu-tac. Wrapping it round loosely meant air could get in and circulate so the paper would not get so hot which could cause a fire. That was something that was mentioned by the photographer talked about above at the motorshow who said that after constant use of the paper on the flash, a burning smell occurred which meant he had to stop and change paper every so often.

The final change I made was to change the light bulb in my lamp. The one that I use in it has a warm white light. Very yellow. The one I changed it to in order to take the pictures, and the one I got with the lamp when I bought it was a very white light, quite cold and clinical. It was, going by the white balance preset in Aperture 3 afterwards, quite close to daylight in a way.

And that was that. I could angle the light where I wanted it, and switching between my 50mm prime and my 18-55mm lenses I was able to produce some quite good photographs of model cars, my new Mr Jones Watch and a few other things. I spent roughly 3 hours taking photos last night which I was quite happy to do as I hadn’t taken so many for quite a while.

Here is the updated light box/studio

The changes for next time? I think next time I am going to make a few more changes to this. The first one is that I am probably going to buy a large A0(ish) piece of paper to use. The larger space would be useful for taking larger objects, or being more adventurous with smaller ones. I was limited a few times when taking some pictures that I ended up seeing the edge of the paper. Use a tripod. I spent most of the time resting the camera on the desk and taking pictures that way. It became a bit of a problem when trying to take shots from above, especially when the shutter speed was quite low for some of the pictures. Make a better or bigger light diffuser to cover the light and possibly position it a little further away from the bulb itself. There was a number of times when I saw the light reflection and I know it could have been done a bit better. The final one is probably the use of some helping hands, either the small crocodile clip style or just getting someone in to give me a hand, but trying to hold up a piece of kappa board as a reflector, adjust the light and hold on to the camera at the same time did get a bit tricky at times, which did end up with some blurry images.

Apart from that, it ended up quite well. Over 300 photos were taken, that being an average of about 100 an hour for those of you who didn’t want to work that one out. And the quality was astonishingly good for something made in under five minutes. Some of the photos of model cars looked just as realistic as full size car images.

Here are some examples of the photographs taken using the makeshift studio:

#142 iPad to PS3

The other day I was thinking, as you do, and it came across me, why can’t you use an idevice such as an iPhone or iPad to control basic functions of a PS3? A bit of a random thought I know, but using one as a remote would give more functionality than a standard controller.

The way I see it would work (and I have googled to see if it has already been done and as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t), is that it would be in app form. It would be loaded up and connect via either bluetooth or wifi to the PlayStation. Almost acting as a secondary display, an XMB (cross media bar) would be displayed on the iPad screen, all the usual gestures would be usable and the functions could be used. It wouldn’t be able to be used to play games with, but it would make sense if it could be used to view images, play music or play video with good playback functionality.

Using the standard PS3 controller for media functions on a PS3 can get a bit confusing, and not many users would be willing to fork out for a specific media remote for it. The number of users who have iDevices is pretty much at 100 million at the moment, and the app would be available to all, and in my opinion, something which could be quite popular.

Here is something I quickly knocked up to show what I mean, even if it just looks as though it is a secondary screen…

#85 HT30007 Dissertation Mind Map – Assignment 3

The DHTP module is advancing ever further and we are currently at the point of picking our dissertation topic. On Wednesday the 27th, we had a dissertation workshop. Before hand we had to pick a topic, meet up with our group and make another mind map, this time of our chosen subject. At the current moment, my topic or direction is The Divergence of the Human Computer Interface in Automobiles, a direction which I hope to find out lots of information about.

A group meeting was had before the dissertation workshop. We went through everyones ideas and got a fair amount of work done. Unfortunetly, the pictures taken all have me in them, so not good.

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