Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I have been looking for this one for a while. And then i found EQO. EQO is a small program that you install on your mobile phone, and let you call others though skype.

It works by calling up both you and the person you are calling. That means that you yourself actually receive a call, when calling another person. And when calling another PSTN or mobile phone (Skypeout), you pay for both connections. That could be rather expensive, given the Skype price pr. minute is € 0,20 for mobile phones here in Denmark. I tested it by calling a friend and ended up paying € 0,80 for just over one minute (apparently it rounds up). But if you use it to call a phone in china (like my girlfriend often does), where the prices are only € 0,017 pr. minute, it really pays off, even though you pay for both calls. I don’t know if it could turn out to be cheaper if the call went directly from you phone using tcp/ip and thereby saving you from at least one of the Skypeout charges. It depends on the amount of data necessary to make a phone call, and the price of the data rate at your operator.
I am not sure about the amount of data transferred for using the program in general, but that could be and important factor too, unless you have flat rate on you mobile phone.

But a really ugly thing about EQO is this I found the FAQ section:

Can I still use EQO when my computer is OFF?
No. You need to have your computer ON and both the EQO and Skype™ program need to be running on your computer.

Why?? That really sucks! And it is not available for mac, so i cant just have it running on my multi purpose server. But the graphical layout is pretty cool as though.

Apparently there is another client called iSkoot out there, which also makes you do Skypeout calls from your mobile. Haven’t tried it though. What I really need is a Skype client in Java ME.

I have been longing for GPS integration in cameras for a long time. I thought that there would be many possibilities with this feature such as integration with Google maps, or Google earth or various other things. And then recently I found that some people allready where tagging there photos with GPS coordinates, exactly for the purpose of doing these cool integrations as I had been longing for.

High on life I started to investigate how the easy way to do this was, and I quickly found this cool web application for the purpose of tagging ones flickr photos. Afterwards they can be viewed in the self same application, or via google earth. It seems like this is quite a new trend (a year or so), and different people are developing new ways of watching and tagging all these photos, all the time. Some nice ways of watching is via this google earth network link (kml file), or via maps.yuan.cc. You can see my pictures which I geotagged here, or by searching in the previous mentioned applications.

For now the links between these applications are only hold by private users. But maybe someday in the near future there will be a yahoo or/and google funded connection between them. That way it would be more credible, and attractive for the masses. The tagging procedure at the moment is quite timeconsuming. So the best thing would surely be GPS in the camera.

The next thing I want is pitch, roll and yaw in the tag. But it will take me some time to determine these angles, and at the moment I am not sure what to use it for. I AM sure though, that it will prove itself useful somehow.

- – Update 2005-05-02 – -

I have made a small map application, thanks to the google map api. The map shows my geotagged images from flickr. It still has some issues in IE, but in firefox it is pretty ok. Check it.

Soon the data mining cup, 2006 wil start. Remember to register so I can wip your ass…

I am actually not sure that I can see the time to analyze all that data again this year, but last year it was pretty fun. Anyway, it is free, so try it out. You can use the open source java data mining software weka to help you with the analyzing and mining.

Some weeks ago I stubled across a cool application at binarybonsai.com to manage media collections, called MediaMan. Apparently I have to use the knock off windows version, but it seems just ok for me. But I must admit that the apple version has cooler dark wood background.

The application can import the media, buy scanning the barcode (or maybe the number on it), using a webcam. It didn’t work with mine though, maybe because it was of a low quality with bad resolution. It uses Amazon web service to fetch information, like images and general movie info. It couldn’t find all of my obscure Asian titles though, and I had to manually ad them myself. I started by using the EAN product code (barcode) but it could pretty much only find the titles are bought from Amazon self. It didn’t have information of DVD’s bought on CDON or yesasia or in stores here in Denmark. But fortunately it is possible, to search by keyword, and ad the title that are most similar to your copy.

This little application makes me hope that the global data synchronization project will speed up, and that we will soon have an object name server (ONS) like we today have the DNS. That way we could be able to look up the information that the barcode actually contains. Of course Amazon doesn’t have all the information, and by asking an ONS first, it could be possible to be directed to a place which knows about the product, and retrieve the information from there. Even better, when someday hopefully the EPC gets integrated in our products, we can look up the exact transaction date of the unique DVD. And we can use a centralized placed RFID reader in the room, to automatically detect new DVD’s and add them to the digital library…

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