Happy Twentieth Birthday, RiscPC!

The Acorn-designed RiscPC computer celebrated its twentieth anniversary since its launch back in May 1994, with a two-slice RiscPC-shape cake that ended up being many more slices (lietrally!) than that, at the annual Wakefield RISC OS Show. Here's a three-minute video of the event, courtesy of Riscository.

The chap in the red shirt is the estimable Andrew Rawnsley of R-Comp – and for all of you who thought that 'Andrew Rawnsley' is a political journalist at The Observer who has a semi-regular slot on the BBC's This Week programme – I counter that for those of us 'in the know', this is and always has been the real Andrew Rawnsley, and of much greater actual value to the world.

I have three working RiscPCs myself, though two have been starting to struggle during the past few months after working more-or-less flawlessly since I first bought a two-slice in August 1995...

New Miku Development

This is interesting, and one can see where we are heading. Indeed, it is something I have been anticipating would  happen soon, and the future idea of not needing a screen is only a logical extension of the 3D in-water mini-concert we saw at Yokohama Bay.

Projecting onto air particles directly is definitely on the cards – and one day will replace the screen on mobile 'phones so that they can be built into a watch (a prediction I first made quite a few years ago). This, though, is where we are today...

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Pocket Miku

Those old enough to remember the Stylophone (my brother had one) will recognise its modern equivalent, Pocket Miku. It's the same shape, the pattern of the 'keyboard' is much the same, it has the same kind of stylus attached by a similar short wire – but this gadget sings with Miku's voice – either the notes' sol-fa names or one of five preset lyrics.

You can listen either via the built-in speaker, or headphones/ear buds (I suspect something is supplied with the unit, but cannot be sure of this). As a product of the digital age, it also has a USB port.

If Pocket Miku were ever to be marketed outside of Japan (and perhaps its immediate neighbours), I wonder whether it would still have the kind of 'new fad' impact its precursor did all those decades ago.

I suspect we shall never be able to find out, but perhaps if some were bought 'over there' by western tourists and brought back to their own countries a demand might build to the point where it was irresistible. I suspect it'd need more than five songs and 'Do-Ray-Mi' to be in a version that could sell well here, but that's not difficult to implement.

Gynoid

Gynoid is what this type of humanoid robot, this one being code HRP-4C, is being called. Others are being called actroids or simply androids, and no doubt other terms will be coined over time. The video below shows a few of its (her?) movements including walking, gestures and facial expressions, some coordinated.

Her normal stance and walking mode has her arms in what these days might well be termed the 'MMD pose' (MikuMikuDance), as MMD models are invariably pictured in the same pose.

This is one of those that have been made to appear almost startlingly human-like, and there are several others that have been shown in public over the past two or three years – also Japanese. One can see that the concept of the (so far) fictitious human-type Cylons isn't at all far-fetched, when one realises just what could become possible within just decades from now...

Within ARM's Reach

Here's a short (under two minutes) mini-feature of Sophie Wilson, who devised the ARM processor's instruction set (Prof Steve Furber designed the hardware of the processor) while at Acorn Computers some thirty years ago.

One fun thing I recall from the early 'nineties where this very same individual was demonstrating the Acorn Archimedes series computers at an exhibition, and showed a work colleague of mine what could be done within moments (a rotatable 3-D textual logo, in the Draw and Euclid programs, dragging and dropping from one into the other). My colleague's immediate reaction was "I want one!"

There's some amazing information to be gleaned from this brief clip, which was made over six months ago, such as the fact that by then a good 35 billion ARM chips had been shipped – well beyond the total number of all others ever produced, added together. Also, the sheer reach of the ARMs, almost everywhere in portable and other technology now, some definitely not realised by most people.

The few comments at the video's YouTube page also tell a story or two...

Tangible Control of Miku and Others

This is an interesting piece of tech', whereby a sort of bendy figure made up of what look like the sides of Zelda's fighting cubes from Terrahawks allows direct control of Augmented Reality (AR) characters.

You'll see what I mean as soon as we get past the opening shots in the video, which depict a few examples from the wide range of Miku designs there are around now.

I cannot yet perceive a practical application for this, but usually when something like this appears it isn't long before someone does, and the rest of us (well I do) react with a "why didn't I think of that?" For now, it's a concept looking for a purpose, so the more people who watch this the more likely it will be via such crowdsourcing that something will spring to someone's mind.

In this regard, I don't consider the very last action in this video to be the right direction in which to aim one's thoughts...

One Up on Batman's Signal

Projecting Miku onto clouds – now that's new! Obviously it's early days yet so isn't as clear as it might one day become, and it will also (probably always) require the right kind of weather and lighting conditions – but this short demonstration shows that it can be done.

The music is Night on the Galactic Railroad by Isao Tomita; but I think an old Beatles number could be re-written specially for the first actual concert done this way: "Miku in the Sky is Diamond"...

Coworkers in Slow Motion

This one-minute demonstration of the iPhone 5s slo-mo facility illustrates a supposed feud between two coworkers (or 'cow-orkers' as some on-line places term them).

I find I am not alone in thinking that this is going to become a big thing on YouTube and similar video platforms ere long...

Vocaloid Lip-Synch

If there is still a remaining significant deficiency with the Vocaloid characters, it is their rather limited mouth movements. Much of this is caused by the character designs typically having a rather small mouth, and a lot of the videos being of somewhat limited resolution. At live events, most of the audience will be a moderate distance from the stage.

Those character designers who have experimented with making the mouth bigger have generally turned their creations ugly as a result: it needs a lot of care to make that work. Also, the range of mouth 'shapes' and the frequency of updating tend to be unhelpful.

In the final analysis, it will be only when a deaf person is able to accurately lip-read a Vocaloid as easily as doing so with a human that the requisite standard will have been reached to be able to say they are then as good as the 'real thing'.

A good step in that direction has been taken by producer AkiGlancy, whose initial trials with lip-synching one of the two Miku parts in this short clip is a lot better than what we have seen previously, and without falling into those traps I mentioned above. The song is an excerpt from Story Rider.

Here, the larger mouth looks fine, is updated fast enough to be quite convincing, and the mouth has enough shapes to enunciate the range of sounds very well. It also helps to be in close-up and available in full High Definition resolution...

Miku Live In Your Hand

Readers of this who remember Lapis at Vocafarre and the Domino's Pizza live performing Miku on the pizza box will recognise this latest use of the same Augmented Reality (AR) technology to do much the same as (especially) the latter of those two, but at a specific location rather than anywhere you take your pizza box.

Because of that, again it isn't something that we here in the west can (yet) have; but it reminds us of what can be done these days with a smartphone or tablet that shows the scene via its built-in camera. Note that there are laser and glowstick effects added into the scene as well...

Phone Fiddlers

The greatest hazards I encounter out on the streets are the 'phone fiddlers' – those who seem to spend every waking moment immersed in their mobile (cell) 'phones, ignorant of the world about them. I have to have all my spatial awareness at full strength these days...not helped by my eyesight issues that are now so bad that I carry a folding white cane as a precaution in case I get into real difficulties.

That has come very close to occurring several times in recent months, by the way...

What's the problem with these people? Don't they have real lives in the actual world? They have become yet another hazard on the footpath, adding to (rather than replacing any of) those already there from earlier eras. The number of near-collissions I experience nowadays is quite astonishing – and, as I have mentioned before, it is largely my own fault for being part of the team that licensed the development of these gadgets, back in 1985.

I, along with (identified by initials only) BM, DB, JO and MD, made it possible for people to have these infernal things. It would be okay if they stopped moving and tucked themselves into somewhere not in everyone's way while they did what they feel they have to do; but of course they never but never do. It is little wonder that such as they are always being caught illegally driving while telephoning, texting or whatever.

It is an addiction, and needs to be clinically evaluated, as it is every bit as all-consuming as any other addiction I have ever encountered. The details might be different, but the underlying nature is broadly the same. Yes, such people really need to get a grip and learn to face the real world instead, but for many this now seems to be as difficult a habit to break as just about any other.

Personally, I hate the fiddly little things, and refuse to have one.

Miku at '4k' resolution

What does that title mean? you might ask.

Well, take the normal upper High Definition of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and double it – both ways, horizontal and vertical. That gives you 3,840 (nearly four thousand, hence the '4k' shorthand for this) pixels horizontally by 2,160 vertically – four times the number of 'dots' that make up the image.

This is also known as Ultra High Definition (UHD), and this visually stunning video was matered in that resolution. Here, it is at the usual 560 x 315 pixels that best fits this 'blog; but if you click the Quality (cogs icon) on the player (shown only when the player is active) the 'original' resolution is available, along with various others.

Of course, you'll need a suitable monitor to gain the full benefit of the UHD option; but there is something extra about even the 'normal' HD displays. The Miku model is an XS by someone known simply as mqdl, and it is very special for what is, after all, just the standard spec as far as hair and costume are concerned. It genuinely is quite something, although personally I am not a hundred percent happy with her mouth – but perhaps I'm just an old fuss-pot!

The song is called Leaping from Zero to Eternity, and when they are available in English the lyrics will apparently tell us something of Miku's "little genesis". I shall be looking out for those to appear...

Beyond Vocaloid

As usual, the Japanese are not content to stand still technologically, and not only has their Vocaloid software recently reached version 3, they are also going beyond Vocaloid and into non-holo/projection technologies, such as the singing robot featured in this four-minute video (in English, with subtitles where needed).

This has several new technologies on top of or even supplanting the Vocaloid tech' with which they started. All this was a couple of years ago now (though not very well known about in my part of the world) so who knows where they have got to by now...?

Pi on CNN

Here's a short-ish item about the Raspberry Pi computer that recently appeared on CNN.

It's just the right kind of British good news story that gives us a welcome break from the festive season for a few minutes and should leave us feeling positive afterward...

RasPi Talk at Hackerspace Charlotte

This is a really interesting talk by the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Eben Upton. If you're at all interested in this area of technology, do reserve forty minutes or so for the talk and slide show (but not the Q&A session, which has been cut out) in order to go all the way through this. While some of the content is, naturally enough, background material, there is also a lot of quite fascinating stuff in here, if you keep with it...

Tweet of the Day – 3 November 2012

One for the IT geeks, from FactHive, re-formatted for ease of reading...

"Price of 1 gigabyte of storage over time:

• 1981 $300,000
• 1987 $50,000
• 1990 $10,000
• 1994 $1,000
• 1997 $100
• 2000 $10
• 2004 $1
• 2012 $0.10 "

In fact, this was tweeted a couple of days ago, but I don't follow FactHive (I hadn't even heard of the account before) and picked it up from a re-tweet dated today. I thought it might be of interest to at least a few of my regular readers, so worthy of inclusion in this series.

The point this tweet makes is of course the old one about the costs of any particular technology reducing over time. Once the costs of developing a new technology have been recouped, that can come off the sale price of the end product, aided also by refinement in production techniques gained with experience, mass-production when it goes mainstream in the marketplace, and competition from others in the same line of business.

It happened with pocket calculators (originally sold for well over £100, now often given away with something else) and many other technology-based innovations. I saw a lot of it happen within the hi-fi market during my time working in that sector's retail business, so for me it is old hat: I've known of the phenomenon for more than four decades now.

Long Before the iPad

The current popularity of 'tablets' such as Apple's iPad is an interesting development. The earliest such device I am aware of, though, goes back to 1996 – yes, sixteen years ago!

This was Acorn's NewsPAD (News Personal Access Device) that downloaded news and similar information automatically, according to your specifications. Thus you could pick from categories, and also set up include or exclude filters (e.g. include pets but exclude hamsters) to tailor your downloads.

Here is the NewsPAD...

The device was designed specifically for Spain, where the data structure and download facilities to provide the information and work with the (then new) technology were being put in place. The NewsPAD itself operated via a touch-screen as is the norm for such devices...but note from the photograph that it was a RISC OS system (the icon bar is a real give-away) on a 10·4" display of 800 x 600 pixels.

It could also drive an external monitor at up to 1,600 x 600 pixels, though at a reduced colour depth. As one might expect, it had CD-quality stereo sound capability and even a built-in speaker, as well as the headphones output for top-quality listening.

Of course, it also featured the world's best and clearest text display with no colour fringing (unlike on Microsoft and Apple systems, for example), there was a docking station facility and much more besides.

Thus it is worth remembering that, when you next power-up your shiny new iPad or whatever, it's really not that new an idea at all...

Hacker-space in Medway

Hacker-spaces are physical locations where coders and the like can meet to learn, socialise and collaborate on projects, as the linked page puts it. This is of course the real (and original) meaning of "hacker" in the computer-related world – one who hacks away at programming code to make something work, not someone trying to compromise another's IT/on-line security.

It is pleasing to find a hacker-space at the Medway Innovation Centre, under the name Prototype, at the end of the first linked page's relatively short list of such spaces in the UK.

It's all been going as a concept for some time, and is worldwide, with the UK having been active for at least three years – probably much longer, but the Foundation to which I linked above began in early 2009, so (without some delving) I can't be sure of anything prior to then.

Anyway, it's there, and it's also here just up the road from me – not that I am a coder myself these days, even though I have been wondering whether to get myself a Raspberry-Pi when the new Debian Linux distro comes out (named Raspbian!) and learn Python, among other study. We shall see...

The World Is Fully ARMed

There are now so many ARM processors in the world that it seems now to have completely overshadowed all other processor types/families/designs.

Now, I'm not one for monopolies in any market; but for years we had precisely  that with the old and creaky Intel x86 type (a close clone of which was and is also made by AMD, and once upon a time a third company did the same of code-compatible chips as well).

I always think of them, and the computers with them inside, as 'HGV machines', as per my years-old saying about being like "taking a lorry out to do the shopping", because of the power, memory and other resources they take just to get going, and the heat and noise they pump out as a consequence..

These days the processor chips have silly names such as Athlon and Celeron (Pentium was a much better name!) but essentially they are somewhat distant (by now) cousins of the ancient 386 and 486 processors.

ARM has its own in-brand names such as Cortex, but at least they sound technical...

Anyway, the two important distinctions to make are (a) that the ARM is a much more elegant design, and (b) that it is made under licence by many companies, not just one or two. Indeed, some of those companies, working with the ARM people, have designed their own ARM-based designs, from Digital's StrongARM of 1996 to a Chinese design for a complete System-on-Chip (SoC) on which work started a year or so ago.

There are now billions of ARM chips on the planet; and with the approach of ARM Holdings' quarter 2 results for 2012, due out in a couple of weeks from now, it is instructive to look back at last year's results for the same quarter. There are several interesting facts and figures in the "points of interest" section on the linked page, but the first one tells the main story: 1·1 billion ARMs shipped during those three months last year.

The second point there reflects something I have mentioned before, which is that forthcoming market-leading Operating Systems will be coded to run on ARM systems. This is what I believe is termed "waking up and smelling the coffee" on the part of the likes of Microsoft and Google. The world has moved on, in a positive direction, and they can't afford to ignore or sideline it any longer.

Missing the World

In recent years I have noticed a distinct trend of more and more people in the street, on the 'bus, in shops or wherever spending seemingly every moment they have 'living in the 'phone' as I term it.

If they're not speaking, they're texting or similar, almost completely oblivious to the world around them.

It seems to me to be a very sad kind of life, when passing through the world but experiencing next to nothing of it. I have never made that mistake, even when treading a route or taking a 'bus or rail journey that I have done perhaps hundreds of times before.

Every time, it is for me a new and fresh experience, to be relished and not missed.

It was (and is) bad enough in modern society with Walkman-type gadgets, now replaced by iPod-type devices; but with 'phones it takes all the user's attention away from the world outside that little bubble, not just the ears...

I wonder what would happen if the entire mobile 'phone failed and it took at least a week to get it back up and running. Would these people re-join the rest of us on Planet Earth? I suspect not: they'd be lost for the duration; and as soon as it was restored there'd be million of text messages flying around along the lines of...

"gr8 too b txtng agin LOLOL"

Believe me: I see such messages from time to time, including on Twitter, usually from teen and twenty-something females, when they happen to include a word that one of my standing searches finds. For example, there's a recent arrival on Twitter who calls herself Waybuloo_ (why?) – so I now have to wade through all her dross along such lines, and from those responding, on a regular basis.