You can listen to the radio on this. Chances are you don’t.

I’m a tad proud today. I’ve become just learned enough to be invited to write for the BBC College of Journalism’s website.

The future of news has become something of an obsession and a specialty over the last three years. I’ve been part of a team looking closely at the way newsrooms work and factoring-in new ways of working incorporating, in my case, social media.

For a chunk of that time, I’ve been working at Newsbeat, on BBC Radio 1. It is has been a brain-stretching joy to be back in a radio newsroom. The place buzzes with energy. Even with the alarm going off at 5.30am, it’s a place where you look forward to going into work.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far, on the college’s own site.  This has been tidily subbed down to fit their style, but in a couple of days, I’ll post the longer version.

If you work in journalism, radio, or social media, I hope it’ll be interesting reading, and I would really appreciate your comments.

I dropped my N8, even though it was in a rubber protective cover, it broke the lug keeping one end of the battery cover on.

Ebay to the rescue – I found one online for less than £4, and with the great instructions from

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpOLpPu0cEo

I have now replaced the part

Blackberry 10 launches today, and their UK managing director, Stephen Bates was on 5live Breakfast to talk about it.

(Also on 5live’s own site here)

A less than triumphant performance.

Stephen Bates’ problem here was perhaps that he didn’t acknowledge the question. All he needed to do was to agree with the interviewer something like this:

“Yes, each phone manufacturer has their strengths and they learn off each other and they particularly learn what it is the consumer wants. And what Blackberry has learned about the consumer is ….”

And annoyingly it wasn’t even his first interview of the day, an hour earlier, he was in the BBC1  Breakfast studio, with something very similar.

Blackberry have form when it comes to reacting badly to unexpected questions. Remember this famous interview with (at that point, but not shortly afterwards) Chief Executive, Mike Lazaridis?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9456798.stm

You’d be surprised how long it took to get this far!

I’ve been experimenting with hacking Android phones recently, either to extend their functionality, or to circumvent mobile phone companies’ annoying blocks.

This post is really just to detail what I did, with the aim of providing useful reference for others doing something similar. It took ages searching forums and other blogs to find a correct set of steps to do this, so hopeful I can shorten the time it takes the next person.

My first effort with this was with an old HTC Wildfire I’d bought from a friend for about £60  (cheap enough not to matter too much if I inadvertently turned it into a paperweight), I was to realise that this was not an entry level task.

Normally hacking an Android phone has three basic steps:

1) Find the vulnerability that allows you to become a superuser.

2) Become a superuser (getting root access)

3) Add all the software you want that the manufacturers didn’t necessarily intend.

In many cases, gaining root access is a well-practised function, that some developers have even packed up into a handy piece of software that does step one and two for you. UnRevoked is a good example for a selection of HTC handsets.

S-On / S-Off

Annoyingly HTC have a security setting to prevent you doing this, which leads to the additional step at the start of removing this (S-OFF). Turning it off should normally be simple, again it’s been done so many times that there’s some software which perform all the steps for you, in this case, Revolutionary will do it.

Except it didn’t work for me because the firmware in my phone was too recent and there was no way to hack it to turn S-OFF. I had boot version 1.01.002, and Revolutionary only works with boot version 1.01.001.

So now I had to downgrade the boot software to the earlier, hackable version. This alone was fiddly and time-consuming, and by far the best instructions for doing so are in the Aritrasen blog.

So after all that, only now, was I in a position to begin the superuser process.

Only I then discovered that there was another stumbling block. The superuser exploit only works on Android 2.1 (Eclair) and my Wildfire has already been upgraded to Android 2.2 (Froyo), and I had to downgrade that as well (keep following the Aritrasen guide, don’t skip that step, it is not optional).

OK, now I could finally start at step 1, above! Happily the rest of the process was simple and done for me by the software packaged listed.  At this point I chose to use CyanogenMod rather than standard Android as the phone’s operating system because the Wildfire will only support 2.2 (Froyo), but with CyanogenMod 7, it effectively becomes a 2.3 (Gingerbread) device.

Results

It takes a lot longer to boot now than it did (boot screen picture at top of post) and actually pretty much everything about the phone is slower, especially if you want to use Swype, or Opera, but that’s what happens when you start to push the hardware to its limits.

However, I now have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve made my phone do something it shouldn’t really be able to do, I have a more technically capable Wildfire handset than most other people, and it’s my first play with an Android (ish) phone! Smiles all round

Can you feel me start to accept the inevitable move away from Nokia? It’s painful for me to say, I think you can.

HTC Wildfire running CyanogenMod 7

]]> http://mediabiztech.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/hacking-android-htc-wildfire/feed/ 0 Robert Wildfire running CyanogenMod 7 HTC Wildsire HTC Wildfire running CyanogenMod 7 http://mediabiztech.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/its-hard-to-listen-to-the-radio/ http://mediabiztech.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/its-hard-to-listen-to-the-radio/#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:35:48 +0000 Robert http://mediabiztech.wordpress.com/?p=555 ]]>

And they wonder why radio listening is falling

It struck me tonight what an effort radio listening sometimes is, and this came as a shock. After all, this is radio: the original electronic medium, the simplest, the most pervasive, most easily consumed.

Yeah, I thought all that too, until I tried to catch the grand finale of London 2012, the Paralympic Games closing ceremony.

I was on a train to Manchester for most of it. The on-board wifi isn’t up to TV distribution, and although I brought my digital TV USB stick with me, (yes I am that much of a geek) reception is impossible on the move.

No problem, I thought, I’ll listen. After all, I love radio – I started my career at Radio NZ (after listening to BBC World Service all through my teens) and radio is perfect for a couple of hours on the train.

I got out my phone, pushed in the headphones, flicked on the built-in FM radio app and fell at the first hurdle. Not from poor reception, actually I could get 10 FM stations from the start-up scan.

No, the problem was partly to do with paralympics broadcasting rights and partly technology.

For reasons I don’t have the strength to go into, the Paralympics on the radio is only on BBC Radio 5 Live. 5 Live broadcast on AM, DAB and online.

My phone doesn’t do AM (sensible device, it’s rubbish) but neither does it do DAB (for the same reason).

That leaves me with online, and I spent a good 10 minutes poking round in Android’s app downloads to find a suitable radio player.

I found one, Tune-In Radio if you’re that bothered.

Luckily the 3G signal on that bit of the railways is better than the TV reception and eventually, I’m listening at something close to FM quality. (Incidentally the module sticking out of my phone in the picture above is a battery extender. Continuous 3G data doesn’t half suck up the power!)

Now what a hassle just to listen to the radio! And I was thinking that accessibility was the least of radio’s problems. Listening hours are falling, even though overall reach is high, and the younger you are, the less you listen.

Thinking back what irked me more deeply was the thought of how wasteful it was. Even though we’ve built up a network of AM, FM and now DAB networks, to get what I wanted I had to have a dedicated signal of it transmitted to the train simply because none of the others was an option.

This leaves me suddenly with lots of questions over radio’s future that I hadn’t asked myself before, and it makes me look again at the ways in which you can receive 5Live and knowing exactly why they leave analogue radio languishing at the bottom.

Please leave your own opinion.

Warning: Severe disruption ahead

Something new for entertainment executives to stress over

Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with a mobile video app called Vyclone.

Check the site, download and play, but I urge you to play with other people who have the app in the same room. It’s really important you do, or you just won’t get it.

If you’ve ever been to a large event, videoed it, and have then been disappointed at the results, you’ll love this app. If you’ve experience of storytelling in video, the possibilities will probably charm you.

If you work for a commercial broadcaster, or in electronic distribution rights for events, it will probably stop you sleeping at night.

Vyclone finds all the other people in the same place as you, recording the same thing, and stitches their videos together into a multi-camera shoot. If you don’t like what it does automatically, you can make your own camera mix.

It’s the most disruptive, fascinating, troubling, creative, delicious, innovation I’ve seen in years. This is a game-changer.

Some perspective: 15 years ago, worried rights-owners would try to ban people bringing video cameras into their events (some still do). They had already sold the TV rights to another company and were obliged to protect that sale.

With mobile phone video, there were too many people to police, but they quickly realised it wasn’t a threat because these individuals made rubbish content. They weren’t organised and had no scale or impact. The individual YouTube stats for the uploaded videos proved that.

These elements have now irrevocably changed. A crowd-source video app offers both organisation and scale, automatically.

Let’s say I’m at Radio 1′s Hackney Weekend music festival. I’m recording Nicki Minaj performing ‘Starships’

(top chune btw). My camera only gets a general view of the stage. But at the front, two other people I don’t even know are recording the left and right sides of the stage. One might have Minaj in full close-up. Yet another person is recording the crowd and their friends further back.

The app stitches all of those shots together into a music video.

If you’re a broadcast professional, I can already hear your say “it still won’t be as good as our planned, directed TV coverage”, and you are absolutely right. But, here’s the kicker:

It’ll be good enough.

YouTube doesn’t amass millions of eyeballs a day because it’s professional. It has content that for the most part, is just good enough for the few minutes those millions want to watch.

Now, take my music festival scenario and imagine instead a riot. Or a war zone. You see how powerful this might be for news gathering?

There’s still a long way to go obviously. For now, you actually have to be recording through an installed application for the auto-mix to work. There’s a limit of 4 other cameras in a single mix. The video quality is, well, from a mobile phone. All these will improve and become less restrictive.

But even now, it’s good enough.

There are fights to come. The technology raises massive issues about whether anyone can “own” the resulting video when anyone is free to remix and share the individual parts.

Given the massive, lucrative sporting event about to engulf my home city of London, I’ll give you one last scenario to imagine the impact of a crowd-sourced, non-owned, multiple camera recording:

The men’s 100 metre final.

I wish the International Olympics Committee a good night’s sleep.

It’s not Facebook that’s broken, it’s my ipod screen

Facebook’s probably doing you a favour.

Some newspapers and bloggers are getting excited over the recent change to the way email is handled on Facebook.  Another example of Facebook trampling over your rights, they suggest.

Here’s my take: It doesn’t matter. Not even a little.

First: you shouldn’t even be showing your email address on your facebook profile. This is an open invitation for spam, for privacy reasons it shouldn’t be there either. If you had set your email address to private then you won’t notice this change and don’t need to notice it.

Secondly: we’re talking about email people! The communication medium of the 1990s! Since when did people go to facebook to find your contact details to email you? Never.

If someone’s on Facebook and wanting to get your attention they will either:

a) write on your wall (‘wall you’, as the kids say) or

b) they’ll send you a facebook message ( ‘inbox you’, again, those kids).

By making your default email a generic @facebook.com address, Mark Zuckerberg is probably doing you a favour. Emails from people you don’t know, get sent to the black hole that is your ‘other’ message box and you won’t see them.

</panic over>

No tweets for you right now

This doesn’t happen very often

I went to check with one of the crowdsourcing sites I’ve been to before to cross check.

http://www.downrightnow.com is where people alert that a site might be having trouble.  The more alerts the site gets, the more likely a site is down.

Except Down Right Now is, err, down right now. Probably from all the people trying to report that twitter is down right now.

Luckily there’s always Down for everyone or just me?

When twitter comes back, follow me.  www.twitter.com/robf

*UPDATE 1804 BST*

mobile.twitter.com is working.

Transmit til it megahertz, 47 years and counting.

It is such an iconic part of the London skyline, central to telecoms, and in particular television development in the UK.

I have a soft spot for the BT Tower / Post Office Tower. I gaze up at it. I watch it. I take photos of it.

When the antenna galleries were stripped of all the original (and subsequently added) microwave aerials at the end of 2011, I wasn’t the only one worried we were at the end of an era for the Tower.

In an era before fibre optics and before satellite transmission really got going, you moved signals across the country in point-to-point hops from one transceiver to the next, and the Tower was the centre of the network.

But I’m pleased to report a small return to form. The picture on the left I took in mid April 2012. The picture on the right was taken on 2 May 2012.

Spot the difference (apart from the weather) There’s a new white microwave antenna – the tower is beaming long-distance signals again! 47 years on, it still performing its original purpose.

Interestingly, the new dish isn’t located in the traditional gallery, but much further up the tower which means it probably has a range of around 25-30 miles depending on the power output. It’s facing west, which takes it out to about Slough.

The diameter is about 2 meters, so a significant sized dish.

It’s highly likely that this link is being used by a company other than BT, but if you know any details, let us know in the comments.

Keep it simple

A rare off-topic post. Because flexibility is fun.

I got to my desk this morning and as I’ve got into the habit of doing, I made a rough list of the things I wanted to do today.

Then I made some tea, and looked at my list to work out which one I should start first. And I thought, yep, this list really helps me focus on what I need to do, and it’s a great visual prompt.

At this point I was immediately distracted by wondering how many other people think so to, so I started search for “Why to do lists are great”. I got four words in and google’s autocomplete came up with:

Why to do lists don’t work

Oh dear.

It seems the productivity industry can’t agree on whether they’re good or not:

Lifehacker notes that some people have so many things to do, they need a range of online tools to help them keep track. (I go for the pen/paper option)

Morgan McLintic likes To-Do lists, but says you need to do more than just write stuff down.

Although Mike Reeves-McMillan goes into  little too much depth for me, suggesting I should “Link To-do Items to Higher-Level Goals”. I think I might spend all day supercharging my list, rather than doing the actual work.

Workawesome clearly loves To-Do lists. Oh wait, no they don’t. Apparently a ‘Done’ list is much better.

This post on the Harvard Business Review blog shuns lists because they are “setting you up for failure and frustration”.

Actually I think the best advice comes from Leo Babauta’s calm-inducing Zenhabits, with some simple tips on getting things done. Basically, take a deep breath, and start a small part of the task.

I feel better now.