Commentary – Page 7

Solar…portable…renewable

Anyone who knows me will know that I’ve always been a fan of solar (photovoltaic) energy production. This goes from tiny little solar panels that I used with Coder Dojo to wire up fans and LEDs to larger scale panels that are used to keep my phones and other devices charged when out and about. … Continue reading “Solar…portable…renewable”

My latest purchase is the Anker 14W Solar Panel Foldable Dual-port Solar Charger.

I was pretty pleased with the package – it was smaller than I expected and seemed sturdy enough. It fits neatly into my hiking backpack when I’m not using it and when I am using it, I’ll tie it using cords to the back of the back – the built-in rings seem very resilient. The company advises using the included pockets for holding devices you’re charging (to keep them out of the direct sunshine). I’d like them to be a little bigger but that’s only because my devices are a little bulkier.

I tested this during the week in some weak summer sunshine here in Northern Ireland and I was able to generate nearly 7 Watts (5.09 Volts, 1.35 Amps). That’s about 50% of the potential output of the panel but considering I was just sitting in a park with plenty of surrounding tree cover, no effort being made to optimise the angle and a little bit of cloud cover – coupled with the weak Northern Irish sunshine – I was happy to see I could easily power and charge a phone.

Your phone likely needs 5 Watts of Power (5 Volts, 1 Amp). The average PC USB port outputs 2.5 W (5V, 0.5A). Your iPad needs about 12 W (5.1V, 2.1A). The device I’m using to measure this is a pass-thru USB power monitor by PortaPow. It can check any USB port for power output and is cheap as chips. For the aspiring geek it’s a useful informational tool.

I’ll be using this panel to charge an Anker 13000 mAh portable battery (superseded by newer models like the Anker Astro e7 with double the capacity). 25600 mAh seems like a lot but the iPhone 6 has a 1810 mAh battery and therefore I’d expect to get 10 charges out of this. Which should be good enough for a week of outdoor usage (assuming I’m using the screen a lot).

Next week I’ll be testing the charger in Southern Spain. I’m interested to see what the difference in throughput will be and how fast it will charge my external battery.

Capability Assessment – Big Screen Content and Programming Provider

This was sent to me from Belfast City Council. I think all digital agencies should look at it. The only negatives are the relative restrictions on the content that can be pushed. I would say there are great opportunities to promote some cutting edge games and experiences via the Big Screen. This document has been … Continue reading “Capability Assessment – Big Screen Content and Programming Provider”

This was sent to me from Belfast City Council. I think all digital agencies should look at it. The only negatives are the relative restrictions on the content that can be pushed. I would say there are great opportunities to promote some cutting edge games and experiences via the Big Screen.

This document has been issued on behalf of Belfast City Council (BCC) which is at an early stage of developing a procurement strategy for the provision of a content and programming provider service for the Big Screen which is located in the grounds of City Hall. In the future this service will include the maintenance and upkeep of the software and hardware to maintain the Big Screen Service. Any participation in a future tender exercise will not be prejudiced should your company respond or decide not to complete this document, nor is the completion of this document a guarantee of invitation to participate in a future tendering exercise.

PLEASE NOTE; THIS IS NOT A CALL FOR COMPETITION.

Introduction

This document provides a brief outline of Belfast City Council’s current position and anticipated outcome for appointing a content and programming provider to keep the screen operational on a day to day basis. In this document, the Council is seeking information on your organisation and your services. The same information will be requested from other providers.

This Questionnaire is divided into two sections:

1. Organisation Information

2. Service Model Questions

All responses must be received via email to bainesd@belfastcity.govuk by 3.00pm on Friday 14th August 2015.

All queries regarding this process should be emailed to Denise Baines at bainesd@belfastcity.gov.uk prior to the closing date with the email subject content stated as ‘BIG SCREEN CONTENT PROVIDER – CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT ENQUIRY’

The Questionnaire is attached here:
BIG SCREEN CONTENT PROVIDER – CAPABILITY ASSESSMENT

Europe

The month of June has been incredibly busy for me. I’ve had multiple projects on in multiple weeks as well as fitting in a lot of remote assessment for my students. Luckily we have online systems and WiFi! I spent the bulk of the last week in Luxembourg with the European Commission. I was acting … Continue reading “Europe”

I spent the bulk of the last week in Luxembourg with the European Commission. I was acting as a rapporteur for ICT evaluators. Over the course of the week I was immersed in a group of people who were interested, dedicated, passionate, educated and curious. While I was really just the Scribe, I was greeted very warmly by all (and it was acknowledged I knew a lot more than was expected about the technologies and projects). It felt good.

None of the people I met were “9-5”. They were all working full-time on their opus but had time for conversations, directed or idle. And they all spoke English – which prompted me to try my French and German even more.

Most evenings I was back to Northern Ireland matters – dealing with difficult conversations, assessing verbose reports on hardware installations and explaining to friends why I was in Luxembourg and not Lisburn (and to some, why I was in Lisburn in the first place).

Luxembourg is a curious place. Odd opening hours, seemingly conservative yet refreshingly liberal in other ways compared to home. The culture is foreign to me but I could get used to it and more than one person did suggest I look to Luxembourg or Brussels for my next work. I could get used to being one of the Luxembourgeoisie.

I heard stories of night escapes to the Island of Capri on the eve of the Second World War laden with Polish gold, ate with a restaurateur who builds schools in Nepal, of the failure of “foreign food” on the island of Crete, and of sailing and scuba diving in the waters around Spain and Mexico. We talked about travel, about post-scarcity society, about how to make a dent in the universe and how it would be cool to work on joint projects. I met some friends that I believe I will retain forever.

I am also confident that if the UK does vote to leave the EU, I will leave the UK. We need fewer borders not more.

I needed a break from the real world. And I feel like I am returning renewed.

Wanted: IT Recruiters with vision

I know there’s a few recruiters in my stream and this might interest them. We allegedly have a shortage of ICT staff – developers, dev ops and infrastructure engineers. Belfast Met is offering free training to Level 2, Level 3 and Level 5 (Foundation Degree). Yes, a free degree. On Day release. So a savvy … Continue reading “Wanted: IT Recruiters with vision”

Yes, a free degree. On Day release.

So a savvy recruiter could sell “great candidates” who may not have the full spread of skills but who are great communicators, team players or other life experience and get them trained up over a period of time to be great employees.

Obviously a recruiter gets paid over an employee reaching their probation period. So, use the system to create the candidates you need with the skills your clients need.

We currently have 100 apprentices out there right now with companies of all sizes and we think we could recruit 200 more this year.

So, come along to this on Friday 29th May and speak to the Apprenticeship NI staff.

Free to do anything

Related posts: Money for nothing and chicks for free Digital Circle going independent and my thoughts on the Future The Broadband Blueprint (re DETI Telecoms Consultation) Free Software. No Free WiFi. Bummer…

GOD

From http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/per-schlingmann-arbetslinjen-ar-dod-lange-leve-arbetslusten/ GOD is spelled Globalization, Urbanization and Digitizing half of the jobs that people perform today within 20 years will be replaced by machines. That’s a weird article. If we turned the argument around and considered that globalisation, urbanisation and digital can have positive effects, we can get away from the idea that “full … Continue reading “GOD”

From http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/kulturdebatt/per-schlingmann-arbetslinjen-ar-dod-lange-leve-arbetslusten/

GOD is spelled Globalization, Urbanization and Digitizing

half of the jobs that people perform today within 20 years will be replaced by machines.

That’s a weird article. If we turned the argument around and considered that globalisation, urbanisation and digital can have positive effects, we can get away from the idea that “full employment” is a good thing. That’s a meme from the 19th Century; that the only worth is in working.

As long as the physical and emotional needs of the people are sated, it will permit them to pursue expression and intellectual activities.

So what if a job is automated away? That’s the sort of argument that turns men and women in plow-horses. We should automate everything that is practical to automate but yes, we should consider what is practical.

A&E in NI: a problem of emergent use versus public service development

I have always been fascinated by emergent development. This is the unintended design from actual use rather than the laid down design by architects or town planners. We see this in everyday life in the development of “cow paths”. An architect or town planner says you should walk this way? And the public use a … Continue reading “A&E in NI: a problem of emergent use versus public service development”

I have always been fascinated by emergent development. This is the unintended design from actual use rather than the laid down design by architects or town planners.

We see this in everyday life in the development of “cow paths”.

An architect or town planner says you should walk this way? And the public use a slightly different route and that’s because the people know best. They aren’t wilfully destroying carefully coiffeured grass ways, they’re trying to get somewhere. Planners and architects need to think about this.

The same goes for public services. This is an article from BelfastLive.

Just under half the people who turned up at Northern Ireland’s A&Es last year were not emergency cases, shock figures have revealed.

Statistics provided by the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) also show only 14% of patients arriving at casualty units had suffered major trauma and needed immediate care.

And yet we hear nightmare stories of people being kept on trollies for hours or how our emergency medical services are completely overburdened. It’s obvious the problem is one of design, not one of staffing.

In light of this, we should be re-designing our public services to meet what the public plainly want. They want to get seen by a medical professional.

I’ve previously proposed that a better solution might be to put a paramedic station in every town, maybe built onto the side of a health centre or GP practice. Somewhere where local people can flock and always be seen in an emergency. The current system of A&E and Out of Hours GP plainly isn’t working so we have to start to think smarter. If every large business tends to have a first-aider on every floor, why doesn’t every town have an emergency station?

The naming of the place is important too. What may be a sprain to you or me, is a break in the mind of someone who is hurt. It has to be described as the place you go when you have a medical emergency and the definition of emergency is entirely subjective.

Remembering… Northern Ireland in 1998

As I parked my car yesterday, I caught the eye of a middle-aged woman standing waiting nearby. In a typical “up-the-country” Northern Irish accent, she blurted out “I hope your car is okay, the wee skitters have taken mine.” Her frustration was palpable. I was reminded of the weeks leading up to the Good Friday … Continue reading “Remembering… Northern Ireland in 1998”

I was reminded of the weeks leading up to the Good Friday Agreement and I remember my girlfriends car being stolen. We were parked outside a friends house and the arrival of the police prompted a flurry of opening windows and beating the air with magazines. Two days later, on the day of the vote, the car re-surfaced with a heavy weight in the back along the Grosvenor road and was duly exploded in a controlled fashion by the Army.

I mentioned that may have happened to her car. Same time frame, same size of car (small hatch back with R plates). She shook her head and continued to tell me all of the business of the day; the make, the model, that her brother was coming to get her, that it still had R plates and the first couple of letters from the registration. I smiled politely and decided to wait until her brother arrived which he did about 2 minutes later.

I bid her goodbye and scurried across the road towards my next meeting and something made me look across the road where I spotted a small, recent model white Fiesta with R plates and the same first numbers on the registration. Of course, I did what any normal human would do and ungracefully loped back across the road, waving my arms like a lunatic to an extremely grateful lady.

Yesterday a man was also shot. There’s no doubt that as a former IRA commander and the various implications in his life that he was no innocent. And there’s no doubt that as a “community worker”, he had an army of people rallying around him. But someone walked up and shot him. I’ve heard rumours of loyalists, or republicans or drug lords or turf wars but really I’m left with this single thought.

In 1998, most of us turned out and voted for peace. And then most of us switched off again. Because we switched off, we have moved barely an inch forward from that vote and barely an inch forward from the supposed ceasefires of the past.

We have to switch back on and vote for a civic society because the alternative is a world where cars are turned into bombs and men, whatever their background, are shot in the street.

That’s the secret…

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Somebody had to move first…

If you read nothing else today, read this by Kameron Hurley. It will take you a while so get a warm drink or a sugary lozenge and buckle up. I remember being on the train in Chicago in a car with about a dozen other people. On the other side of the car, a man … Continue reading “Somebody had to move first…”

If you read nothing else today, read this by Kameron Hurley. It will take you a while so get a warm drink or a sugary lozenge and buckle up.

I remember being on the train in Chicago in a car with about a dozen other people. On the other side of the car, a man suddenly fell off his seat. Just… toppled over into the aisle. He started convulsing. There were three people between me and him. But nobody said anything. Nobody did anything.

I stood up, “Sir?” I said, and started toward him.

The entire article is about how we have a common and distasteful narrative of our lives and we struggle through sheer inertia and laziness to break out of it. It affects more than half the population in very negative ways. As we accept the normal narrative, we reinforce it. How a parent or mentor accepts these tropes has a direct effect on children and apprentices. It becomes necessary for us to upset these toxic memes and develop a new narrative that can be accepted. In this new narrative, any human can express themselves, any human can excel and position is based on merit. It works for all of us too as in the new narrative, the tyrants of the old narrative are forgiven.

It makes me wonder again how to write the stories I want to write. How I have struggled to write good narrative for my far-future heroine, Kesho Mbaye in my FRONTIER game. I struggle because I want to get it right; Kesho deserves more than a sidelining or to be the spoils of any male-pride display. She becomes an adult in a world that has been made free of the social tyranny of before and where the robber barons have been punished. Her life is hard but she knows she has the power to make the world a better place.

Kesho, a Zambian-born farmers daughter, rebuilds education in a post-apocalytpic Earth, scratching words in the sand and founding a series of international schools. She is mentioned first in helping her father as he tills the fields but as soon as she is able to cast off the shackles of societal duty, she does. And then she flies.

Kesha’s spiritual successor in the story is Masira Ba, another woman whose impact was to give humanity the first steps off the ruined earth and into futuristic space habitats. At no point do I mention her husband or the male influences of her life, I do mention the success of her sisters.

I want to make the default different. It’s hard to find an action movie without the hero being white or male or both. Even when the protagonist is female, there are often compromises and the writers forget they are dealing with humans and not just archetypes. Those of us who remember how awesome it was to see Ripley save the day in Aliens for the first time probably witnessed a sea change in the media. Yes, it took science fiction to do it but in the straight horror genre, she would have continued as the Lost Girl/Lady Survivor archetype. But give that archetype a machine-gun duct-taped to a flamethrower and you’ve just changed the narrative.

Thanks to @AngieMcKeown for pointing out the article to me.