Chrome to Phone is an application that utilises this service to allow you to instantly send links from your Chrome web browser on your desktop or laptop computer to your phone. There are two parts to using it; a Chrome browser extension (available here) and a mobile application available for the Android Market.

It places a button in the browser window and whenever you want to send a link to your phone, just click the button and it is sent. Instantly, in my experience. It’s a very handy feature to have. If you have to go out you can send a link to the website you were reading which is handy to say the least.

Not only is the extension itself exciting but the technology behind it should also give you goosebumps. I’d like to see it implemented into the Facebook application, which compared to its iPhone cousin is rather lackluster.

The Deal

The deal can be broken down as this:

• Free HTC Desire unlocked handset
• Orange 24 month contract
• £12.50 p/m after redemption (details here; £25 p/m without)
• 300 any network minutes
• Unlimited texts
• 500MB data allowance

Which, in my book, is pretty good; especially with an unlocked phone. It seems to me that they receive stock on a weekly basis, though not on consistent days. The HTC Desire is currently out of stock, but they are supposed to receive more stock by the middle of the next week. I ordered mine when it was out of stock at the beginning of the week and it was despatched today after they received stock last Thursday. Go and grab your Desire! (#)

There are other deals on there that you might want to look at but I wanted to stay with Orange, which may screw me over at a later date.

Whether you are wanting to work where you attend university or college or whether you’re travelling home for the summer, the ways to go about getting a job are pretty much identical. The first thing to do is prepare all the things you will need to apply for a job. This means creating your CV. There are plenty of good websites out there that will guide you along the process of creating a good, relevant CV. If you have an academic tutor at your disposal, they are an invaluable source of help for making a subject specific CV.

A couple of weeks before you will be available to start work, it’s a good idea to identify and apply via the post, internet and in person if possible to the places you’re hoping to work it. With these applications the most important pieces of information to include, especially for retail related jobs, are the dates you are available for work, what hours you can work and why you want to work there; all of which can be attached to your CV on a cover sheet.

It’s a real shame but you’ll have to get used to the idea that hearing nothing back usually means no. Most shops and companies will not even let you know if you fail in your attempt to get a job with them. While in my opinion it’s quite disrespectful, it’s common practise and so the only solution is to try until you get an answer. Be persistent.

Within the couple weeks before you go home, or wish to start work, it’s an extremely good idea to sign up to some employment agencies in the area. They can do half the work for you and find you temporary work for over the summer. While this is attractive and I myself have gotten summer work through an agency the past two years, it doesn’t guarantee you work over the entire duration of the summer, if at all, and you can become unemployed at a whim. It also invites the possibility of doing many different things and working long shifts you may not be used to. Experience has taught myself, and people I know, that persistence with agencies is only a good thing and can make the different between getting work and not.

These tips are here are just a guide and are things that have worked for myself and the people I know. Earning extra money during the summer vacation can make the difference to some people between scrimping and saving for a year and enjoying your student life as you should. One thing to remember it to check your payslips if you are in full time education. As a student you do not have to pay income tax on your earnings out of term time. If you are being charged income tax, you need to contact the tax office and request a new tax code, or get them to send you a rebate. Good luck.

Not managing our money properly can lead to terrible decisions that have to be made; Do you buy the food for the week or the cheap beer that’s only on offer today? Do you pay your rent or go out every night in a week? As you’re a student, and because you’re reading this article, you’ve obviously gone weeks without eating and been behind on your rent. On a serious note, this can not only effect your health, well being and state of mind, but also result in you becoming homeless or having legal action taken against you. Not what you want at any point during your university life.

In my experience, living in halls on your campus or private halls elsewhere is the easy option. Payments are, usually, in tune with student loan payments and bills and utility payments are usually included in the price. Your first year is usually one crazy year and one you’ll want to cram lots into. For this you need money. Halls is definitely the way to go here.

A few simple things you can do though, to make the most of your first year and prepare for the second. Firstly, if you do receive a student loan and maintenance grants, put them into a high interest savings account. This will hopefully provide you with a few extra quid through interest. Most student accounts require you to use that current account as your main account, and they do check. So have the funds sent to that account and then transfer them to your high interest savings account. Secondly, set aside a certain amount that you will transfer from your current account to a savings account. This is the easy part, but leaving that fund alone will be the hard part. Usually, opening an e-ISA or other savings account is usually free, requiring an initial £1 deposit but this may vary. Basically, it’s easy so there’s no excuse.

When it comes to your second year at university, you’re probably going to move into privately rented accommodation with your mates. That was my decision, anyway. When you do, do your research. What is the normal weekly cost in your area? What length are the tenancies? Will you get a summer concession during the summer months when you’re probably not even going to be living in the house? There are a few things to consider that your SU can probably help you with. Moving into a house, or flat, is a more complicated experience. Firstly, try and go through websites such as Unipol which will hopefully keep the nasty, evil landlords from your computer screen. See the properties. Ask them about the things listed above. And most of all, ask how you’ll be paying. Some like to be paid monthly, or in instalments. Work out when the money will leave your account, and when any money will be entering it from loans or jobs etc. You don’t want to fall behind on payments; although many landlords are quite forgiving, some are not and missing a single payment, even by a day, can be a breach of contract which can lead to eviction.

A top tip for living privately is to plan how much you have to spend over each period between rent payments. Don’t spend more than you have. It’s not worth the hassle.

Other things you can do to help include getting the best phone contract you can, so downgrading to a cheaper tariff, only turning the heating on in your house for a few hours a day. Those sorts of things go a long way. Not getting Sky, Virgin Media or BT, but sticking to Freeview or better yet, just using your laptops/computers to watch your favourite programs. Looking for the best internet deal for your property and not just sticking to the provider that the previous tenants had. And, don’t use your overdraft if you don’t have to.

So, what have we learnt?

Well, if you’re a student you probably didn’t read all of that. So, here are Sunny Man’s top student finance tips to help you have a money trouble free year at university:

• Transfer your loans/grants into a high interest savings account.
• Put aside £5/£10 a week into a savings account over the year.
• Know when and what you have to pay and to who.
• Try not to use your overdraft, however good it looks.
• Have fun, it’ll be the best years of your life so far…

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my phone to the HTC Desire for, unsurprisingly, about seven weeks now and Orange have been out of stock all this time. A few phone calls to Orange and it turns out they have at least around 5,000 – that’s five thousand – of the HTC Desire in their possession, possibly more, which Orange are testing. The issue is apparently not to do with stock shortage, as they do get regular deliveries, but to do with the number of devices passing Orange’s tests. Apparently, a shipment of around 4,000 devices this last Monday only produced 90 devices that passed. That’s 2.25% that are passing Orange’s tests! A new software update should apparently be implemented soon which should let the Desires flow freely from the test centre and into our hands, but when this is supposed to happen is anyone’s guess. Hopefully in the next couple weeks.

But don’t get too excited as a reservation list apparently has around 15,000 people who are next in line to get their lucky hands on this phone. My advice? Go sim free if you can. Or go to another network. If you’re not prepared to wait that is!

To combat this foretold ending, governments around the world are investing in alternative energy sources that produce less CO2 and all that horribleness. Wind, tidal, wave, geothermal, solar and nuclear are the main power sources currently experiencing a surge.

Now, forgetting all this poison business, let’s look at our main sources of energy. Coal, oil and gas. Mucky stuff. Take one step back and just look at it. We are digging this stuff up, setting it alight and making steam to power turbines. This is all very well, but isn’t it so…. 19th Century? We’re in 2010 and we still get most of our power from black stuff we dig up from and ground and set on fire. We need to change. And change with the times, technology and environment.

Nuclear energy is touted by governments as the magical cure for our energy crisis. No carbon emissions, they say. True, but what about all that nasty nuclear waste and all the dangers associated with nuclear material? They have answers to every question you could ask. Over on TED, there is a small debate on Nuclear energy (embedded below) which is quite interesting and made me rethink my own stance on the issue. Take a look.

The scientists in the above video make some very good points both for and against Nuclear energy. It also points out we’re very uneconomical with the way we’re placing these alternative energy sources in and around our respective countries. What’s your view on Nuclear energy, climate change and alternative energy sources in general?

As a scientist, I think Ahmadinejad has a point buried somewhere deep beneath all that shit he chats. As modern, scientific and progressive nations we shouldn’t be advertising the belief that a sea creature can predict the future. That’s an absurd conclusion to come to. I think what the Iranian president was trying to say is that our belief in luck and believing that we can predict the future is totally unfounded. Yeah, that’s what he was trying to say.

Instead, we obviously should be punishing rape victims, segregating the population by gender because of those insatiable females who can’t control themselves and whom try to corrupt the men. We should be spending money on ‘nuclear power’, or another word is defiance, rather than letting girls learn to read and write and we should definitely be helping out those poor, poor terrorists because they’re just misunderstood and only need a few more missiles to get people to come around to their way of thinking. It all makes sense really.

Mahmoud, to put it in the politest possible words, you are a pillock. You say you and your country aspire to ‘human perfection’ and that we couldn’t possibly do the same because we cheer on a slimy sea creature because it, by chance, happens to choose to eat from one box which we happen to assign to a football team. We know it can’t predict the future. If you want to heckle and denounce something worth your while, and do something honestly decent with your power, stature and your precious time why not speak out against the belief in witchcraft in some African nations that harms children? Or work to help abolish the death penalty in Saudi Arabia for the ludicrous crime of sorcery, for which there is no legal definition.

Why? Simple, you’re a stroppy teenager rebelling against his parents, doing the things they tell you you’re not allowed to do. Pillock.

We start off with a mathematical function that describes, what we will call, our hill. This function represents the ‘height’ of our hill, h if you will, at the different points in x and y.

So, in our MATLAB script we first of all generate a grid of points using x values from -1.5 to 3.5 and y values from -2 to 2. The follow code achieves this.

x = linspace(-1.5,3.5,50); % 50 values of x
y = linspace(-2,2,25); % 25 values of x
[xg yg] = meshgrid(x,y); % generate points

And next we generate the height values of our hill, using the grid we have just created with x -> xg and y ->yg.

h = exp(-(xg.^2)-(yg.^2)) + 0.5.*exp(-((xg-2).^2)-(yg.^2)); % calculate height values

With our hight values in the array h, all we need to do now is plot them. Firstly, to create the 3D plot we just plot x,y and h using the surf() function.

figure(1); % create new figure window
surf(x,y,h); % surface plot
title('3D Hill Plot'); % title and axis labels
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
zlabel('height');

Now, to look at several slices through the hill at different values of y, we need to select the different values of y from its array and plot them on the same graph.

figure(2);
plot(x,h([1,10,20],:)); % plot 1st, 10th and 20th values of y
title('2D Hill Plot'); % title and axis labels
xlabel('x');
ylabel('height');
legend('y = -1.5','y = -0.4','y = 1.2',0); % legend not overlapping any of the plot

Putting it all together you get a 3D plot of the function and the cross sections in two windows. Job done.

One item of contention with the Desire is that the battery life is rather disappointing. While this doesn’t deter me, as I’m used to charging my current phone nearly every day, it would deter some power users looking for something more. With this in mind, HTC today put out a press release detailing that the next revision of the HTC Desire, and the global Nexus One (the Google phone), would include a new screen employing Super LCD display (SLCD) technology which offers up to 5 times more power efficiency than the current lineup.

Whilst this is indeed good news, it also means users wanting to upgrade to the HTC Desire have to choose between risking upgrading now for the phone that everyone loves, or waiting until whenever it is HTC decides to unleash the more power efficient SLCD Desire onto the market, which may be as soon as the end of this summer. Or even to wait for the rumoured HTC Desire HD, hitting a shop near you in October apparently.

In my spare time I ported a PHP script my friend created to MATLAB which enables the creation of beautiful fractals from the Mandlebrot set. The maximum image size you can create depends on the amount of memory available in your system and the script isn’t something I’ve spent a lot of time on so feel free to improve on it.

On my laptop, a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image took about an hour to create, using 20 iterations. You may find this differs on other machines.

Download the MATLAB Fractal Generator Code.

]]> http://blog.eop.org.uk/457-create-fractals-with-matlab/feed/ 1 http://blog.eop.org.uk/453-adobe-air-p2p-video-calling-for-android/ http://blog.eop.org.uk/453-adobe-air-p2p-video-calling-for-android/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:05:06 +0000 Sunny Man http://blog.eop.org.uk/?p=453 With a move to an Android phone in the near future planned to replace my tiring Motorola E8, I thought I’d spend a bit of time talking about a concept using Adobe Air that brings peer-to-peer video calling to the Android platform. With Apple introducing their FaceTime application along with the next generation iPhone, the iPhone 4, a few months or so ago, it would seem that the Android platform is fast becoming a realistic competitor to the iPhone, and currently iOS 4, especially with the rising number of applications being developed and the range of choices the consumer gets in the Android marketplace.

While only meant to show off the peer-to-peer capabilities of Adobe Air 2.5, the video calling application shows the potential of the platform. While at this early stage there are some expected glitches, it shows what could be expected from the platform. With smartphones becoming ever more powerful, most phones will be able to use these features with no problem in the near future.

The fact this concept uses Adobe Air opens up the possibility of peer-to-peer video calling over different types of devices. For example you could make a video call from your smartphone to a colleague on their laptop at work or video calling your friend who’s watching TV from your tablet computer. This is definitely one to watch. But while you wait for the polished product to hit your marketplace, check out Fring.

Via: Engadget
Source: FlashMobileBlog

Beautiful.

The key findings of the research revealed that 14 to 24 year olds amass a collection of around 8,000 tracks on average. If these were all gained illegally, that’s about six to eight thousand of our Great British pounds the music industry has lost, just from one person. My music collection barely tops two thousand tracks so for me this is quite a surprising statistic. On the other hand, the accessibility of illegal music on the internet – forums, torrents etc. – means that huge numbers of tracks can be downloaded over a small period of time.

A multi-million dollar industry

Another result of the study revealed that, although the percentage of people who admitted to illegally downloading music has reduced by 3% on last year, 61% still admitted to it this year. This is not as high as I would have expected but I think you still have to account for those who did not admit to it when answering this question. The real value may be a little or a lot higher than this.

Illegally downloading music, among other media, is a huge issue at the moment and it seems it will continue to be unless the music industry and their customers listen to each other and compromise. People want free music and they want it on demand. This will never change. Some service providers, and even governments, have taken drastic action to stop illegal file sharing but people have found, and always will find, ways to get around the blockades imposed. Have a read of the report and see what you think and whether you agree with the findings.

Still going strong and I got a post coming up for you all tomorrow. Thanks to those that read it.