Sleep Diary Participants Required!

For this early stage in the project I am going to be conducting a sleep diary. However, if I do it myself, it won’t really be conclusive or really show anything of note apart from I don’t sleep very well. I already know that.

This is where you lot come in. I am looking for some people to take some time to help fill in a sleep diary and for half of it, try and change what you do in the sleeping environment. You will be of particular use if you use your phone or laptop in bed. After answering a few questions, all you have to do is put in rough times. I will explain!

• The sleep diary is going to be split into two parts. Each part is of 4 days, so it will be 8 days total.
• From days one to four, you make no changes to your sleeping habit.
• Follow the instructions for days 1 to 4 (either print it off or write it on a scrap piece of paper, its up to you!)
• Fill in the corresponding boxes on the sleep diary table for the first four days (complete as you go is best)
• After the first four days are up, try and remove technology from your sleeping area
• Follow the instructions for days 5 to 8 (either print it off or write it on a scrap piece of paper, its up to you!)
• Fill in the rest of the sleep diary table as you go

It is as simple as that, but because I can’t really explain things very well at times, I could have explained it simpler…

Once the 8 days are up, hand them back in person, email them, take a photo or post in the comments what your results were.

PDF VERSION

#178 Electronics Practice Begins…

And so it has begun, the commencing of trying to refresh my memory as to how to work PicAXE microcontrollers in preparation for going back to Uni in September. The long and short of it is that it didn’t go well. I can’t find anything which simply says how to wire the 28×1 Pic up just so I can even plug it into the computer. I even rummaged about in my book from second year where I had written down bits of code, circuit diagrams and whatnot but to no avail.

The picture below doesn’t quite show the extent of my efforts as I did get as far as putting wires onto the breadboard and managed to put in a transistor and a ceramic resonator but trying to hook that up to the USB serial breadboard adapter and consequently, my iMac didn’t produce any results whatsoever. I ended up calling it a day with a semi built breadboard due to the temperature in my room getting a bit too hot for my liking.

I am hoping that I can get it all set up soon and being doing some of the things that I managed to achieve in the Bluebird’s Duet, but a bit more advanced considering this is all going to be part of our final years project…

#167 Time to move on?

After a mass changing of passwords earlier this week, I have come to a big decision, which was to remove my twitter client from my both my computer and my phone. The reason being? I can’t really be bothered with it anymore, and the time spent constantly sifting through peoples updates for something that I might find interesting have shrunk drastically since I started using it two years ago. I will still use it, but I don’t see any point in having something open on my desktop all the time, distracting me from something else I would rather be doing. I’ll check it when I am checking everything else I go on to at the start of the day, and if I feel like it, at the end of the day.

The only exception to this will be my iPad, which will keep Twitteriffic on it since I use that, not so much for doing productive things, but when I am watching tv or the likes. Another site that has fallen foul of this decision is facebook, I don’t exactly use it and the tidy up earlier in the week cemented its fate. Like twitter, I will go on occasionally when I check everything else, but not any other time. I also have to add, that I never had (apart from only a week or so) the fb application on my phone and it has never been on my iPad, because I rarely use it.

As you can see in the screenshot below, no twitter client is present on my iMac.

#162 Dropbox: The Dissertation Saviour

This post is by no means me just finding out about Dropbox, it is just having found an even more useful application for it in context with everything else I have been doing. At the moment I am writing my dissertation. No big problem you might point out. I have one of my external hard drives plugged into my iMac all of the time to do do Time Machine backups so if I lose it or make a mistake with it and want to go back I can. Again not a problem. The problem is that I have 2 computers, my iMac is the one I use most of the time if I am doing work, because the screen is bigger and I can immerse myself in what I am doing easier, and my other computer is my ageing, 4 year old MacBook which is still just as capable of doing high intensity Photoshop work etc but I tend to avoid using it for anything major apart from work in University in the studio or light browsing.

If I need to exchange files between my two computers, I would either use a USB drive or external hard drive and manually move the files between them (dubbed Sneakernet by Phil Schiller) or I will hook them up together with my Ethernet cable for larger files I want to copy, such as merging Aperture libraries so it takes seconds instead of hours. You might ask now why I don’t just use that instead of going to the hassle of downloading and installing dropbox. The reason is simple.

I still have my computer back up every hour, again that isn’t a problem. I still have my dissertation and file of other things in a folder on my computer, another non-problem. I want my dissertation on 2 computers without the need of ‘Sneakernet’. Problem. When Dropbox is installed, it puts a folder on your computer which is uploaded to the ‘cloud’ and subsequent changes are then uploaded too. I installed Dropbox on both of my computers, put the dissertation folder into the folder that is uploaded and hey presto, it does the job as advertised on the tin. I go to my dissertation folder, open the Pages document as normal, and as soon as I press the save button it is uploaded. I want to go somewhere else and work on my dissertation, I take my laptop, and away I go, the dissertation is downloaded and I can work on it. I am not too bothered with incremental backups not being saved on my laptop with Time Machine or similar because I know the majority of the work will be done on my iMac. Simple as that.

#157 More IOGraphs

Some more IOGraphs. The first one is 2.1 hours, done last night. Just light internet browsing:

The next one is 6.5 hours worth from almost a whole days worth of computering. I turned the mouse stops off (the circles in the other IOGraphs) and it gives a different kind of image all together. Activities on this one included some light photoshopping, and light internet browsing. I turned the background on whilst saving it too so you can roughly see where abouts on the screen I was moving a bit clearer.

#155 Preparing the Work

Preparing for some photoshopping isn’t always the easiest of things to do especially when you are working to a tight deadline. The last piece of work I did, I decided to plan it out a bit better than I normally do so I printed off the images I was going to be changing and drew the alterations on before I started work. It did, in short, make the whole process easier and to an extent a lot quicker. Here are some pictures of the planning of the Lamborghini Aventador SV:

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#149 Website Update

If you hadn’t already noticed, I have been going over and updating my website (mrdouglaswood.com) and have been slowly improving it. Just now I have reached a point which I am going to say is the end of the first revision on it. I will be making some more changes to it, but if you find the time to take a look and provide me with feedback on it, either comment on it here, or using the contact form, I would be rather grateful.

mrdouglaswood.com

My website also does look quite good on my iPad, but that is neither here nor there.

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#112 Getting Board

Work has begun on the presentation boards for the D&AD project. The Scenario board is pretty much complete whereas the other 3 boards (product overview, product detail and research and insights) have just been laid out basically in the same sort of style. If all goes well, work for this should be finished by the end of next week.

I am forcing myself to use InDesign for this even though I still consider it to be an awful piece of software that is counter intuitive and very difficult to use.

Aphasia: Research

Just going to quote the same thing I posted on Twitter so help the research process for our Design Studies project regarding Aphasia.

“Help wanted for research (University project). What does everyone know about aphasia? (without googling what it is) Thanks in advance.”

Even if you do not know what it is, please take a guess to allow us to gauge how much or little people know of the condition.