Fourth Year: Grit is More Important than Talent

Usual (yet basic) internet browsing has led me to find an interesting article which can be related back to my project. It discusses how grit and determination to do something usually overcomes talent in almost everything. It could always be construed as practice makes perfect but in the area that I am looking at, it is more likely to be seen as if you persist with something you will overcome it.

The main points of the article can be boiled down to say that whilst some people are evidently more patient than others and can pursue projects for longer periods of time, it is not necessarily genetics that cause this but instead people can ‘learn’ to become more determined or focussed, but the irony is, I suppose, that it will take a while to learn the skill of being determined.

The article from the 99% can be found here

Plotting the basic principles of this against my project and I have found there are some striking similarities. What I would like to happen is for the end project to gradually ween people off technology whilst in bed, thus improving the quality of sleep they are having. But if I forced it to happen the majority of people would stop to use the product because they didn’t like to be told what to do.

This is why my project could subsequently be used in a number of ways. When the phone goes off and the product illuminates, it will either signal to the user that someone has sent them a message in an unobtrusive way as per phones mostly do when they go off, or it will subtly annoy the user into switching the phone off at night. This would help the users who are determined to cut the habit sooner and for the rest of them, it would help show how often it happens without taking their gadgets away from them completely.

It is a dual purpose that should hopefully help this project stand out. However because of this, I will have to tread carefully and and make sure it appeals to both sets of users despite the overall goal being the same.

#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…

#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.

#158 Bobino

A few weeks back whilst in St. Andrews, I bought one of these: a Bobino. It’s soul purpose in life is to stop cables getting tangled up, and from what I have found out in the past couple of weeks from using it, it does the job perfectly. Available in three different sizes for different sized cables, I got the smallest size which is for headphones.

It is one of those simple ideas that works very effectively and you wish you had thought of it yourself.

Bobino Website

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#154 iPhone Tracker

I know I am a little late to the party with this, but when this first came into the public eye, my MacBook was unable to run this application.

What I am talking about is the iPhone Tracking (dare I say it, scandal?) where some researchers had been rummaging around in the iPhone backups located on the computer it is synced with and found a file which has locations from where the phone had been used. They had then created an application which visualised on a map where the user had been.

I tried to run this application on my MacBook 3 weeks ago, just when it emerged, but it was unable to run. I do not know why this is, and I am just going to guess that it was that it was on Leopard and it needed Snow Leopard to run. Now, 3 weeks later, and back home and reunited with my iMac, which is running Snow Leopard, I have been able to run this application. This is what the results were:

It clearly shows the main areas where I have used my phone. The centre of Scotland is where it has been used most and is where the points are most accurate. Towards to top left of the map, things start to go a little bit wrong. This is where, from what I gather from the people who created this application, the locations are out because of something to do with the phone mast (I might be wrong with this though), I haven’t been to where all the little dots are but I have been to some of them. The cluster of blobs around Inverness seem to be about right though, and there is a small cluster about Oban which again is true.

It isn’t the most interesting of applications but it appeals majorly to the geeky side of me.

#148 Little Planets

I like little planets I do.

By taking a regular panorama and turning it into a polar panorama, you get something that looks like a little planet. Having completely forgotten all about them, recently whilst stopping off in South Queensferry and not having my normal camera to play with, I recruited the use of my iPhone and some photography apps. One of which was 360 an app which automatically creates and stitches together a panorama. One of the options once it has been created is to make a polar one and here you go.

The output straight from the application was this:

But with a little quick tweaking in Photoshop, I got this:

And in case you were wondering, my last foray into little planets was a few years ago and here it is (made using a panorama on Uist):

#60 It’s an Icon

One of the main gripes people have about the iPhone is the battery life which they can get from it, most of the time, they need to charge it at the end of every day. Yes it is a problem since it is a smartphone and has many additional features and of course, if it has features, people will then use them, draining the battery.

One product which has come up as a solution to this ‘problem’, since the iPhone does not have a user removable battery, is separate battery packs for the phone. These have usually been incorporated into a case of some sorts, so it is on visually obvious that you have a battery attached to your phone. Essential TPE on the other hand have created an icon… Quite literally!

Called ‘The Icon”, they have taken the charging icon which appears when you are charging your phone up (or iPod Touch for that matter) and made it into a physical product. It looks just like the real thing, but in 3D. The surface of the battery pack shows you how much juice is left inside of it by how much of it is still illuminated by the use of EL film. If you’re wondering how much life it adds to the phone, for 3G talktime it increases by 3 hours, and audio playback by 18 hours. The ‘Works with iPhone’ logo is present, so it has been officially tested by Apple, which is good reassurance.

It is however only to be found in stores in Asia at the moment with no apparent plans to take it anywhere else. So if you would like one, better book a plane ticket or ask someone nicely to bring you one back.

Link: essential tpe

#38 Google it.

Before you start to read this, I’m going to give a word of warning that due to the mood in which I am in whilst writing this today (21st February 2010), I do ramble on quite a bit, so if you want to skip to the end, you can just take a look at the pictures and just be done with it.

Over the past couple of years there has been something which has become ever so annoying and what is worse, they don’t seem to know that they are doing this. If you haven’t already guessed who or what I am talking about, then I’m guessing you didn’t read the title of this post. Google are the culprit, Google are the problem, and knowing Google, they think they are the solution. From where I am standing they are slowly trying to take over the world, through the dreaded act of diversifying. I wrote a post about this and how I thought companies were going down the wrong path with this way back in August. In fact it was my second post on here, and guess what. My opinion still has not changed.

Google obviously started off as a search engine, and its popularity just began to grow. They bought YouTube. A good move in the long term but at the time it did mean that they wouldn’t really be continuing with Google Video which at the time, my friends and I would prefer it to their new acquisition. Every so often, a trip into the Google Labs would be in order just to see what sort of things they were working on. To view the trending searches of the day etc, just to see what was going on. It appealed to the geek side of me.

Another step in the right direction was Google Earth, pretty much a standalone extension of Google Maps. I was an early adopter of this, or at least I think I was, and it was great, and it still is, despite being a bit of a resource hog on my computer. There are times where I am unable to resist loading it up just to have a shot in the flight simulator in it.

This is the level of diversification which I would say I was comfortable with. They were a search engine company, who had a range of other products or services which also allowed users to search for what they wanted, whether it be places, or videos.

In recent years it does seem as though Google are trying to take over the world, very much in the same vein as what Microsoft doing. But whereas Microsoft buys out businesses and makes itself grow even larger. Google gives the impression that they will have a shot at it and if it works it works and if it doesn’t then well, at least they tried. Whilst I do admire them for doing this, I don’t think that it is the right thing to do. We all need competition and it just seems that Google are trying to eliminate them all.

They launched Google Wave. Supposedly it was supposed to reinvent the way in which we use email. After the initial surge of interest and usage, it has fallen by the side of the popularity trail. I will go on and check it every so often, as I was lucky enough to have been given an invite by a friend, but the conversations had with people have just dried up. It does work quite well, but as it is still in Beta, or even Alpha form, there are still quite a few bugs in it. My MacBook can barely run it, and my iMac will frequently beachball when I use it. The longer waves have load times worthy of being given their own birthday. I’ll use it if they improve it, but at the current moment in time, there hasn’t been any sort of improvement or modifications since mid December, which was when I joined it.

One of the most recent ventures by Google is Buzz. Where they are trying to take on the likes of Twitter, Facebook and all the other sort of main stream social networking sites by providing something which just doesn’t make sense. I seem to have signed up to it by accident. It appears in my sidebar when I log onto Googlemail. I’ve not really had a look at it, but from what I’ve heard it has been a MASSIVE fail. There has been complaints about it and regarding privacy issues, it has also led to an investigation into it (well from what I can remember anyways). It definitely didn’t appear in Twitter’s trending topics for very long compared to Wave, and I don’t actually know anyone who uses it.

One of the only non search/mapping/email things I will use google for (apart from video since that technically is YouTube), is iGoogle. But even then, not very often. It isn’t my homepage, that currently is the Apple UK homepage. I don’t use it to check the weather as I have perfectly good (well, mediocre) widgets for that. Emails? Nope, I use the Mail application. So what do I use it for? The only thing I use iGoogle for is Google Reader, so I can quickly see if there have been any updates on any RSS feeds I follow. This probably isn’t what Google want me to do, but I have other things which are much better at doing what I need to do.

Whilst I am on a roll, I suppose I will have to mention the Google phone and operating system. The Nexus One is their answer to the iPhone, and it has already developed its own following. The operating system, pretty much a desktop version of their mobile operating system, Android, is planned to be a ‘cloud’ based operating system, where the users information isn’t stored directly onto the computer in which they are using, but instead on a server many miles away. Whilst this has its advantages in some areas such as users of multiple computers, it does have quite a few drawbacks. From what I can fathom out, or can be bothered to fathom out, you need to be able to connect to the internet in order to access all of your files, or most of them anyway, which is fine if you are a tech-addict who doesn’t leave their home, or areas which have internet access, but for others this isn’t really the way forward. However, I have just remembered that I am sure I read somewhere that this operating system was aimed more specifically at netbooks rather than desktops or laptops. Netbooks because they aren’t generally used at the users primary computer, it is usually their secondary, or third computer.

I am not saying that I hate Google. I use them as my primary searching facility, and email… and maps. But the thing I don’t like is the fact that they are trying to do a Microsoft and take over the world, as it were. In doing so they are slowly destroying the links they have made in the past few years. Because of the Nexus One, they have already lost a key position on the board of Apple. Why not just stay a search company, but keeping the most popular additions they have (some, not all)? Become even better at what they do instead of coming up with other services which have an impact, but don’t have the momentum to keep going. I don’t know why, even after this post which is closing in on the 1300 word mark. I guess the mood that I am in has dictated the way in which I have been able to decipher the information and just vented it out as a rant. I’m not complaining. But I am starting to query how much this has to do with design. Ah well.