Messing with Street View

If you haven't yet had a go with Google Street View, do. Just go to http://maps.google.co.uk/, zoom into one of the supported UK cities (all of the major ones have been mapped) and drag the icon of the little man onto a street. You'll then get a photo view of the street that you can drag and view around 360-degrees and 'walk' around by clicking the arrows.

Leaving aside the privacy concerns, particularly where people have been caught in embarrassing situations, such as throwing up outside of a pub, emerging from a sex shop or haggling with a Big Issue salesperson, it's an astounding work of technology.

Google employed people to drive around cities in special vehicles fitted with an array of cameras that automatically photograph the surrounding area. The pictures are all stitched together and uploaded to Google Maps to give you the view that you see online. It's absolutely brilliant and an amazing way to enhance directions, look at a new house or even explore somewhere before visiting for real.

Enough about the practical uses of the service, what about having fun? Remember how the old-style school photos would work, where the camera would be panned across the pupils, and if you were quick you could run from one side of the photo to the other and appear twice? Isn't it about time that we did that with Street View?

My aim is now to track down the photography cars and follow them as they take the pictures. By the time the files are uploaded I'd like Street View to look like my own personal Being John Malkovich. I may even go one step further and put on a variety of different disguises for different shots.

Why stop there, though: join in the fun yourself and bring some friends. A flash mob dancing in Liverpool Street station is one thing, but a flash mob taking over Street View has got to be even better; especially if we all dress as zombies.

MiniPCs are ready to take over the world!

Shopper’s office has been invaded by a raft of capable little critters, though thankfully it’s not the kind of infestation that requires us to call Rentokil. Instead, it’s mini PCs that seem to popping up in their droves, so many in fact that I’m keeping them well apart for fear the little beauties will start breeding.

We’ve seen a few atom-powered mini PCs over the last few months, the most memorable being Asus’s slender Eee Box B202, all hoping to ride the wave of popularity generated by netbooks. Amongst the four new models we’ve seen this month, two are particularly intriguing: Asus’s new HD-capable Eee Box and Nvidia’s Ion platform prototype.

This got me to thinking about what uses these new mini PCs are best designed for, and whether the desktop PC is facing extinction – though it wouldn’t be the first time someone has wrongly suggested the traditional tower’s demise. More interesting, though, is the possibility that Microsoft’s dream of a Media Center PC under every TV may now be a realistic possibility.

When Windows Media Center was launched back in 2005, it was a bit of a disaster. It was only available as part of the special Windows XP Media Center Edition. It wasn’t very stable either, and the hardware required was bulky, noisy and expensive by today’s standards. It’s not surprising that it didn’t catch on.

Things have changed, however. The software is now part of Windows Vista Home Premium – the standard OS for a new Windows PC. Media Center itself is greatly improved, and is now arguably the best EPG you can get, certainly better than Sky+ or anything we’ve seen on a Freeview PVR. The latest Mini PCs are the final part of the jigsaw, providing us with compact, quiet, inexpensive and HD-capable hardware.

Add this all up and its not desktop PCs that need worry, but instead those £200-£300 HD-capable PVRs and media streaming or playback devices. The next-generation of Mini PCs should be able to do everything they can and a lot more beside. The only remaining stumbling block we can see is the price of Windows Vista itself, as it adds a considerable hike to such low-priced hardware.

Home Office clueless: The transcript

Below is the transcript of an interview that Computer Shopper conducted with a Home Office spokesman regarding the government's policy towards tackling child abuse websites. We sent our questions over to the Home Office a day before the interview took place, to give them plenty of time to prepare.

Computer Shopper: In 2006, the Home Office pledged that all ISPs will block access to illegal content. How does the Home Office intend to make this happen?

Home Office: Over 95 per cent of consumer broadband connections are covered by blocking of child sexual abuse websites.

The UK has taken a collective approach to addressing this issue, and has had considerable success in ensuring that the sites on the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) list are blocked. We will continue to consider what further action or measures might be needed. We're working towards getting that last five per cent to make it 100 per cent.

In terms of how we actually achieve that, we have some very tough penalties in place. For example, the maximum penalty for possession of child pornography is five years. For the production and distribution of that is up to 10 years. So there's some tough penalties in place. So basically the short answer is that we use self regulation and tough penalties.

CS: Is the IWF allowed to view illegal content in its office, given that it is not a government body? If so, why? Is there a special licence that is required, and how many other organisations have this permission?

HO: The IWF doesn't perform that role itself. What it does is provide a list of websites containing illegal images to industry members, and then they themselves block access to those websites.

CS: Doesn't the IWF have to visit illegal websites and download child pornography in order to compile that list?

HO: They have a list of websites with illegal images. It's something that we don't physically do ourselves, as it were.

CS: If I were to go online and start looking at child pornography, obviously that would be illegal. So for the IWF to do that, they must have been given some sort of licence to be able to do that?

HO: Well they don't do that themselves, to be honest it's better to ask them how they actually do that.

CS: I have asked them. They told me they get reports from consumers about potentially illegal websites, and then they investigate suspected child pornography websites. It would be illegal if consumers were to take that responsibility upon themselves, so wouldn't the IWF need some sort of permission?

HO: Sure, to carry that function, they need to delete that, so yes they have that.

CS: So they have an official licence to visit child pornography websites?

HO: Not as such, no. But it's not illegal to delete such images, it's illegal to actually possess it, produce it or reproduce it - it's not illegal to delete it, which is what they do.*

*(The IWF does not delete any content. It reports illegal websites to the government and law enforcement agencies, who investigate the individuals involved and take down offending websites.)

CS: How does the government make sure that the IWF's list is only blocking illegal content?

HO: We meet with the IWF fairly regularly for updates on how they're doing. So that's what is undertaken.

CS: How can ISPs block access to child pornography websites without relying on the IWF? Is it possible?

HO: Well, the IWF doesn't actually block them, what it does is provide a list of dodgy websites to ISPs, and they then undertake the blocking work.

CS: If an ISP, for one reason or another, did not want to subscribe to the IWF's blacklist, is there an alternative that they can use?

HO: How do you mean an alternative?

CS: Well, does the government have its own blacklist that ISPs could use?

HO: No, it's something that we do with the IWF.

CS: So there is no official government body that ISPs can rely on to help them. They have to use this independent organisation?

HO: Well indeed, yes. That's right.

CS: So the government is telling ISPs that they have to block all child pornography websites and it's telling them that they have to use the IWF's blacklist to do that?

HO: Well indeed yes, we believe that's the best vehicle for it.

Are you ready for the HD?

YouTube, it seems, doesn’t believe in hyped-up launches, preferring instead to soft-launch new features. Despite being a regular YouTube user, both watching an uploading videos, I was surprised by how many new features I found when I uploaded a new video last night.

You can now annotate your own videos, edit them and even swap the audio for something else. The newest feature is ‘Insight’: a button which lets the nerd in you satisfy your desire for statistics: you can see how many people viewed your video as a graph over time, when they viewed it, their location, what type of player they viewed it in and even Hot Spots, which – if there’s enough data – shows a graph of how hot or cold your video is at any particular moment. Clever stuff.

However, I’m more interested in the fact that the boffins behind the scenes have added ‘real’ HD support. This is in contrast to the ‘fake’ HD support they touted last year, which used a ‘High Quality’ moniker to confuse people into believing it was High Definition. Well, I was confused anyway.

I’ve been waiting ages for proper HD support as, being a foolish early adopter, have owned an HDV camcorder for several years. Of course, this stunning quality has been totally wasted on YouTube until now. Previously, friends and family had to make do with ‘awful quality’, where crisp facial details were reduced to a blocky mess akin to a mosaic, and any motion simply resulted in full-screen blur.

YouTube’s new HD support isn’t ‘proper’ HD, but it’s still a big step forward. It’s 720p, not 1080p, although this is understandable given the bandwidth 1080p would consume. And bandwidth is the biggest hurdle, since most people’s broadband connection runs at a piddly 2Mb/s – if that. 2Mb/s isn’t enough to stream HD video, unless it’s highly compressed, and that’s how YouTube does it.

Whatever you upload, it gets converted into a standard definition FLV video, plus an H.264 version if the original video was in HD. I experimented with a two-minute long HDV video, exporting it from Adobe Premiere in MPEG-2 format (the same as the original files) at 1,280x720 at 3Mbit/s with 44.1kHz MP3 audio. The resulting 75MB file was a pain to upload via my puny 2Mb/s broadband connection (with an upload speed of 379Kb/s) as it took a little over 28 minutes. After that, the rotating timer icon turned into a green tick (it’s a shame that the YouTube boffins have removed the progress meter), and I was able to play the video.

A message above the viewer warned me that processing was still taking place, and quality could improve once it’s finished. Annoyingly, there was no red HD button, which you need to click to select the top-quality version of the video. A quick search revealed that this doesn’t appear for a couple of hours, or at least until the processing is complete. Thanks for making that clear, boffins.

I duly waited and, sure enough, the magical red button appeared. When you click it, the player becomes larger than standard (856x480 pixels to be precise), but you’ll only see the full 720p version if you click on the full-screen button. Of course, unless your screen resolution matches this, you’ll see an upscaled or downscaled version, so to properly assess the quality, I watched the video on a 15.4in laptop with a 1,280x800 resolution. The trouble was, a 2Mb/s connection isn’t fast enough to stream the file, and the video turned into a slideshow. In the end I waited for it to buffer and then watched it.  

The overall was noticeably better than High Quality videos. Confirmation, if it was even needed, came in the form of approval from my technophobic wife who noticed the difference straight away.

Wanting to know what YouTube had done with my original MPEG file, I downloaded the converted video and used the brilliant gSpot to look at its details. The good news is that it was virtually unchanged – the resolution was the same, as was the frame rate (25fps). The average bitrate was just over 2Mb/s, which explains the jerky playback and the great quality. Sure, it’s a world away from the 25Mb/s 1080i quality from the HDV camcorder, but still good enough to see fine details.

If you want to check out my HD test video for yourself, press the play button in the viewer below to force the red HD button to appear, click it, then click the full-screen button and post a comment back here to tell me what you think.

How lucky we are

I've just returned from a trip to Ethiopia, for a project that Computer Shopper is taking part in with IT charity Computer Aid.

When we think about charity projects in the Third World, our minds tend to generate images of malnourished children whose lives are at risk from unsafe water and disease. Such factors are, of course, problems in Ethiopia, but not everyone is at risk. Put bluntly, not everyone in Ethiopia is dying, some are living; trying to earn money to support their family and build a better future for their children.

This is where IT is so important. We in the developed world are wholly reliant on technology. Most of us couldn't imagine going to work without a PC at our desk, a phone to stay in touch with friends and family or the internet as a source of information and communication. IT is a staple of our society, it's an integral part of what makes us "developed" countries, and it's an area in which the Third World has a lot of catching up to do.

Rather naively, I hoped to blog about my experiences in Ethiopia. However, I soon found that internet access was very scarce and unreliable, if you could even manage to find a PC at all. Even in the cities, many buildings had no phone lines, and in some of the places we visited there wasn't even any electricity. We ate our evening meals in candlelight and the torches we brought with us proved invaluable. To me, it was a wonder that families living in rural areas could survive at all.

Computer Aid is trying to rectify this problem across the developing world. Their projects bring PCs into schools in the developing world, and in Africa, this is essential. In bringing IT to schools, these projects help to form a middle-class in countries such as Ethiopia.

IT skills are essential for children to receive higher education and find professional employment later in life. They can then go on and earn the money needed to support themselves and their families, without being reliant on handouts from the developed world. These projects target the future of a country - they give children the skills that they need to stimulate their own countries' economies, develop their own skills and a real chance to break themselves free from their dependence on people born in more developed lands.

In Ethiopia, I saw a country with beautiful scenery, rich history and wonderful people - but they need our help. Computer Shopper will continue supporting Computer Aid in its efforts, and if you'd like to help us, you can donate a little through our Justgiving page.

It costs £2,700 to install and provide support for a suite of 20 PCs in an Ethiopian school. This suite can serve more than 1,000 students, so just £2.70 can change a person's life in ways we cannot even comprehend.

Sponsored by

A song and dance

London’s O2 (the infamous venue formally known as the Millennium Dome) is a depressing place. Due to the big-name concerts that take place there, you’re sometimes subjected to invasive security screenings before you even set foot inside. Once inside, the temperature is more frigid than an industrial meat locker, the décor is more oppressively soulless than an Ikea showroom and the only places to eat are offensively bland chain restaurants that make cannibalism seem appealing.

Its only saving graces are the interesting exhibitions that make the most of the ample space available. The latest is the British Music Experience which recounts the history and development of British popular music since 1945. Adult tickets cost £15, while child tickets cost £12. A family ticket for two adults and two children is available for £40 though. We managed to get a sneak peek before its official opening to the public on March 9th.

Various musical memorabilia is on display including Brian May’s guitar to a dress worn by Amy Winehouse, as well as numerous music playback devices from 8-track players to the first iPods and everything in between. Listening stations allow you to sample certain songs and hear interviews from various musicians and other industry figures.

Perhaps the most interesting part about the Experience are the technological extras. Your ticket doubles as a personal RFID tag. Some exhibits have sensors next to them, so if you want to find out more about the exhibit, simply tap your ticket on the sensor and the extra information is saved to a personalized account on www.britishmusicexperience.com which you can retrieve later.

There are also recording studios where you can preserve your attempts at playing a Gibson guitar or singing the lyrics to Wonderwall. If you remembered to tag your recording with your ticket, you can view it later online. Unfortunately, our account doesn’t currently seem to be working, but it will hopefully be rectified soon.

The clever RFID ticket technology is potentially much more useful than the overpriced audio tours and guidebooks sold at other fee-paying exhibitions and museums. Hopefully this won’t be the only time we see it.

Alan Lu

Plane crazy

Modern life is so permeated with technology that it’s easy to forget what it’s like to live without it. It’s hard to imagine life without the internet, for example. No email, no Facebook, no Amazon, no YouTube. No free information on any subject you can think of. In fact, without networked computers, modern life would be very different.

And while consumers depend on their computers and network connections, they’re critical for businesses. This fact was demonstrated spectacularly at Gatwick airport a couple of weeks ago. I arrived in good time to check in for my flight, but the queues were enormous and moved incredibly slowly.

Only when I made it to the desk the best part of an hour later did I find out the reason why – the computer systems were all offline. The check-in staff could barely cope with the resulting melee, as they had to resort to hand-writing all boarding cards and share a single sheet of stickers containing all the plane’s seats. Without computers, and with a single sheet of stickers per flight, there was no way to check multiple passengers in to a flight at once, meaning I had to wait at the desk until the sheet of stickers arrived with the guy behind it, and only then could he peel the 14A sticker off and attach it to my boarding card.

As you’d expect, this caused severe delays and – needless to say – we missed our take-off slot. This turned a three-hour flight into a five-hour one: precisely what I didn’t want when travelling abroad for the first time with my 14-month-old daughter.

Fortunately, the consequences of this computer failure weren’t disastrous – it merely made thousands of people angry and late – but it serves to highlight just how much we rely on technology these days.

Ryanightmare

Flying is rarely the most fun experience in the world. After fighting through the massive security queue, where I inevitably get stuck behind a family with plane-load of luggage full of suspiciously-shaped objects, there's the sheer misery of the shopping area. Alongside the over-priced designer clothes shops and the fancy luggage retailers (who, seriously, is going to buy a suitcase at this point?) there's the overwhelming horribleness of the restaurants.

These are very much like restaurants in the real world, only all of the fun, customer service and general enjoyment have been magically sucked out of them, leaving a giant happiness void behind. Then there are the staff: grey-faced zombies, as if these restaurants are the place that good waiters go when they die.

Once that's all over, there's the 10-mile run to the departure gate, which is made all the more urgent by constant reminders that your plane is about to start boarding. Of course, when you get there, it's just another queue. This time, it's a queue to get herded into a glass holding pen where you're kept for an indefinite amount of time. Although, as time moves more slowly in airports, it's probably about six real hours. Then, it's time to board.

Depending on your flight this will either be through allocated seating, where by a big throng of people ignore the instructions and fight like chavs desperate to get into a Primark sale; or there's no allocated seating, whereby a big throng of people ignore any instructions and fight like chavs desperate to get into a Primark sale.

But then, all is good. You take your seat, put on your headphones (remembering not to turn anything electrical on until the flight has taken off), and calmly do your best to ignore your fellow passengers for the rest of the flight.

That was, however, until recently when Ryanair decided that it would make flying even more tiresome by letting people make mobile phone calls while in the air. Credit where credit's due, it's an impressive feat for Ryanair to make using its service even more unpleasant that usual.

Everything about flying with the company seems to have been specifically designed to irritate, annoy and generally upset you. From the early stages of booking where charge after charge gets laid on for crazy things, such as wanting to be able to store your baggage in the plane, to fighting your way onto the plane, it feels like hell's designers were employed – and they did a great job. Then there are the planes, themselves. For some reason the insides are decorated entirely in the most offensive shade of yellow that has ever existed. The very site of it makes you want to scratch your eyes out and pray for blindness. If that wasn't enough, the entire time the plane's stationary a horrible electronic version of Chopsticks is piped over the intercom endlessly. It's like Damien from the Omen is sitting in the cockpit with a Bontempi keyboard.

At least until recently you had a fairly good chance of closing your eyes to the point where only a manageable level of yellow bled through to your retina. With mobile phones, you might as well wave goodbye to that last refuge, as the you'll now undoubtedly be surround by a flight-load of 'innits' boring you through the entire flight with their pointless conversations.

Ryanair's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, has addressed the problem to the satisfaction of, well, himself.

"I have no patience with the approach that says people don't want to use their mobile phones in-flight," he told The Guardian. "You don't take a flight to contemplate your life in silence. Our services are not cathedral-like sanctuaries. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things."

Surprisingly, this statement shows a surprising amount of tact from Ryanair; that is compared to the comments of one staff member who posted a comment on Jason Roe's blog entry, which described how he found some free Ryanair flights (even at this price, it seems expensive to me). The Ryanair staff member called Jason an "idot and a liar", "stupid", and implied that he's got nothing better to do than receive prank phone calls on a "lonely sat evening".

Rather than deny these claims when the press picked up on the story, Ryanair actually wrote to the Times to confirm that its staff posted the comments and stated that, "Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."

The company might be driving down the cost of air travel, but it's constantly looking for ways to drive up the price of everything else and make flying the most unsatisfactory experience since The Phantom Menace. So, as well as trying to rake the cash in with mobile phone calls, the company is also looking at charging £1 a visit to the onboard toilets. Nice. I for one will be leaving the Ryanair staff a 'little present' in the seatback pouch, which they can also take as my accurate review of their service.