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I am writing this because I have today spent nearly 6 hours dealing with everyone’s favorite camera shop, Jessops regarding a minor issue.

2.5 years ago I bought a camera, memory card and insurance from Jessops in Epsom, following this I had a wonderful time using my camera, until it recently had a problem, in fact it wasn’t even the camera at all. It was the £79.99 SanDisk memory card I bought to go in the camera.

The trouble was that because of what I consider a manufacturing defect the plastic had slowly cracked on the card allowing the write protect switch to come loose, fall out and go missing.

I have taken the card to the shop, called their customer services, emailed their customer services, had several calls back and forth from customer relations and then been emailed to say:

…we are of the opinion that the fault described may have occurred due to the condition of the memory cards and possible improper use…

I then contacted the manufacturer who told me the same thing, all through this process everyone has been accusing me of being, effectively a liar, because they do not belive that I have cared for this memory card well.

However today a break through, the crazy people at SanDisk asked for some photos to be emailed, so I borrowed the family macro lens, and took some mega high quality, detailed macro pictures, which on first glance made it look all my fault, but then I thought, what would it look like if it were actually damaged by me?

It might have:

1. Major scratches
2. Dents
3. Strech marks from bending
4. Gouges
5. Chips

I now beg of you, how many of these did I see from the photos alone, thats right NONE!

I now have photographic and deductive reasoning which prove my innocence, however I am still waiting for a reply from Jessops or SanDisk regarding this.

I think the lesson to be learned here, is that whilst many customers, will try it on, others will be telling the truth and whilst it may for a small company be impractical to replace every device at a whim, I think that customer service and satisfaction far outranks the small amount of loss made on replacing a device.

I think ultimately its a vicious cycle, the more unhappy customers you generate, the more call to complain, the more that hasel your suppliers, and the more that bring legal action against you.

Where as the other side is also true, the more happy customers you generate the more that call again to buy more stuff, the more that tell their friends what a great service you offer and overall you have 100% more customers and recommendations and 100% less complaints, unhappy suppliers, and legal threats.

Jessops: Learn from this experience, refund my bloody memory card, offer me a bit of compensation and apologise for the inconvenience – is it any wonder you had to be taken over by you (now) parent company when you drive people away like this?

Late last year I bought myself a MacBook Pro 13″ because I wanted a small, powerful computer to work on however it had an issue which caused the hard drive drop sensor to trip too easily and park the head of the hard drive too often, so it was sent back for a refund.

Apple recently announced a new range of MacBook Pro computers so I decided to give it another go, I bought the computer and it arrived last week, and I couldn’t be happier, especially as I can tether my iPhone to MacBook Pro and get wireless 3G internet on the train to work.

One of the biggest improvements to the MacBook Pro compared with the last range which isn’t even listed on Apple’s website is that the Mini DisplayPort video output port now includes audio output within the same connector.

The Mini Displayport & connector standard allows (optionally) for audio to be passed through but in the previous range of MacBook Pro’s this option was not enabled so you had to connect both a video and audio cable to the computer to plug it into your TV.

I found out through a bit of searching and reading that a couple of companies make connectors for this new MacBook Pro which allow you to output video and audio together, as the old adaptors which manufactures made didn’t actually include the audio wires inside, probably to save on costs.

The one I bought was the Griffin Video Display Converter a bit of a mouth full but its a nice little multipurpose adaptor, it has as you can see below a thing black body with a HDMI port on the end where you connect your HDMI cable, this includes the audio output, and as far as I am aware supports HDCP, which should eliminate any issues with iTunes copy protection.

It also has a small dongle which you can plug onto the end to make it a DVI adaptor, now it would have been nice for the price if it had included a VGA dongle as well, but I suspect this is mainly a techinical limitation.

The two pieces mate together really nicely and make a smooth contoured piece, and the cable feels well made and durable, I am really happy with this purchace, I just wish it had not been so hard to find a place to buy the thing, it is early days, but the online Apple Store don’t seem to stock it here in the UK and the regulars like Amazon and eBay either don’t have it or are selling it for hyper inflated prices.

I am sure we will see the costs go down on these as more become available but if your thinking of buying one, take a look at e-digital.co.uk where I got mine, their site design leaves much to be desired and they actually emailed me after I bought mine to tell me that they had sold them all to another supplier so my order would be delayed even though I had phoned up to check they were in stock, the price was good and the delivery was still only about 1.5 weeks which considering they didn’t actually have any was pretty reasonable.

I paid £22.81 for the adaptor and I bought an Amazon Basics 2m HDMI cable to plug it into the TV for £4.99 which I am pretty happy with too.

Here are a few shots of the packaging, sorry for the quality of the photos.

I went up to London for the day today, I met up with my friends, Mike, Claire, Evelina, and Sophie at London Bridge near the spike thing. Whilst waiting I spotted two (ex-)managers from my work which was strange.

We went to Borough market and had a nice lunch sat down in the grounds of Southwark Chuck. Then we walked down the river to The Barge House, at the OXO Tower where UnitedVisualArtists were showing off thier latest light installation. This one was in partnership with Virgin Media to celebrate 10 years of broadband in the UK.

The show has various elements and the idea is that your voice is captured at the begining and heard throghout, I didn’t think this aspect was particularly interesting/well done but the rest was amazing, specially the bit I’ve dubbed ‘The Laser Lounge’ (above) and the final room before you leave which is a vast space filled with a short laser show.

Although it was quite a big space there was not much to see, however I certainly would like to go again if only it wasn’t finishing on Monday afternoon, if you have not yet seen it I highly recommend you get down there ASAP because it closes (as before) on Monday afternoon.

On a side note, it was really nice to see an advanced preview of the exhibition space which we will be using for this years 3rd year students. I only wish that we could have had this space for our show because it is far nicer than The Old Truman Brewery.

See more pictures here

So I was having my phone replaced again the other day when I stumbled upon the Vodafone shop and for a long time I’ve said to my self when I upgrade to a new phone it will be on Vodafone because I am fed up of the poor network coverage I get on O2 and the eleged speed improvements on Vodafone. I decided that with this in mind I would take out a new SIM from Vodafone, I have a pay as you go SIM with £10 credit which I used to buy a bolt-on for data use, I am going to be posting a summary on my opinions at the end of the month when it runs out, because I want to see how much better or worse the Vodafone network was for signal coverage, 3g coverage, speed and reliability.

I already now have 3G in my house rather than GPRS, although Vodafone’s network does not use EDGE as far as I know so it really will be 3G or nothing.

I am going to be using the SpeedTest.Net tool in a few key places, and I am most interested to learn how the signal will fluctuate on my journey to work in London because normally I lose signal on O2 between Fanborough and Brookwood because of big hills, At Weybridge for the same reason, and around Clapham Junction and Surbiton for no apparent reason except the network is overloaded or not there at all.

I also want to see how it fares on the tube as I can often get O2 right the way from the escalators in most tube stations so will Vodafone be better? Also another thing that annoys me is the fact that the network seems to drop the call when it runs out of signal then instantly reacquire full signal on the next cell rather than switching, apparently this could be my phone or the network being overloaded and not switching the call quickly enough before it terminates.

I am also interested to see if the speeds are better because Vodafone hasn’t been hit for the last 2.5 years by the iPhone data effect where as O2 has.

We shall see!

Just discovered last night in the Google Lab that they have this horrifically ugly but useful new tool called Browser Size, it essentially overlays with transparency an image with your page underneath so you can get an idea of how many people can see all what parts in the first instance before scrolling.

Have a look here: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

I’ve written about this before, but today I really needed to dig up an old transaction from last year, and I didn’t fance sifting through the 3 inche thick pile of Natwest statements and 1 inch thick pile of Abbey/Santander statements. I went to the Natwest site first and although the site has always been a bit clunky, they are getting much better these days. Also the iPhone app however crap it actually is is definatly 1 more app than Santander have.

I thought I would do a comparison of features offered by the two, I think I want a new bank?

Overall I don’t like either, Natwest have given me problems in the past which I will never forgive so I only use them as a way of getting a free 16-25 Railcard. Santander have good interest rates but they seem to becoming very behind in the technical aspects of their service, why is there no iPhone app for their ex-Abbey customers? Why can’t I view all my transaction history?

Also other bug bares with Santander are that they don’t seem to allow you to talk to someone on the phone without a telephone banking pin number but the only place to change the code is at the ATM so I never change it and I always forget to keep the new number in a safe place.

Santander are overall probably better than Natwest but I am still unhappy, Nationwide were pretty poor in the past so I may have to try Barclays as I don’t like Lloyds TSB from my friends past experiences.

Something I found that I want in my home one day!

Symbol Coat Rack – Browse All – Yanko Design.

A twitter friend (@simonmaddox) of mine saw my post about brownies and decided to make them with his girlfriend over christmas and sent me the rather festive results, apparently they tasted great!

If you have a bank account with Abbey you might be used to having to type in the long card number every time you want to login to your online banking, well not any more!

For a long time there was this bit that said Personal ID and when ever I asked or looked for the setting to create this it was not anywhere to be found, but at last I have found it!

Follow these steps to set it up for your self!

1. Login to your online banking as normal with your card number.
2. Click the  button at the top of the screen.
3. Under ‘Change my Personal ID’ click ‘Go’
   
4. Enter your card number as the old Personal ID and then choose a new Personal ID that you will use from now on.
   
5. Submit that and your done!

Now your can login to your online banking with Abbey without having to try to memorise a 16 digit card number which changes once a year, for added security you can also setup the one time pin number service which they send to your phone to protect your account from being emptied to a strangers account if you get hacked.

Arduino, Processing, Arduino, Processing, Arduino, Processing, Arduino… Fritzing???

Many people have heard of Arduino, and many have heard of Processing. Two of the best open source tools in the interaction designer’s toolkit. They are like Photoshop is to a photographer and Illustrator is to, well an illustrator. So you come up with a great idea, and you use the Arduino to create the physical interaction, and Processing to do the software interaction, but what about the hardware prototyping. You can’t just leave it on a breadboard for ever.

The cleaver people who made Fritzing took a whole new approach to PCB design, rather than expecting people to learn complicated but more comprehensive software like EAGLE the new approach works on the idea that you probably have a breadboard wired into your Arduino right in front of you. You start by inputing your breadboard layout using a fantastic vector based drag and drop interface with wires and resistors and everything. Then you can move to schematic view or PCB view and make your circuit diagram or PCB layout (respectively).

So why am I so excited?

The Fritzing project is also open source and free to use like the others, but to help fund development more professionally they have started a web store and are trying to setup a service which allows them to offer manufacturing as well as design software under one roof.

To test out this brand new facility they gave 12 people the opportunity to have their designs produced, and really wanted to have a go, I quickly made my design and despite a few quirks it worked very well, I found the schematic view hard to use but it wasn’t important because all I needed was a PCB layout, and I was amazed, where as before I needed to sit down and struggle through the impossible UI of EAGLE this time the mildly elegant and very intuitive interface of Fritzing meant that despite my lack of time I was able to build the whole project and submit it to the competition email address in time for the deadline (more or less).

I won’t bother explaining what the project I built did but if you came to my degree show you’ll probably know about ‘the tree’ and this is a miniaturised version of that.

To the point

I a writing this post because I wanted to share my excitement about Fritzing but also show you some photos of my newly etched PCBs which arrived on Friday.

The one problem I would like to complain about is the lack of 2 sided board designs, meaning several things go wrong. The two I had were that I had to use jumper wires on my design because pins needed to cross over and there was no second layer to go via. Also because there are only pads on the bottom side it means the pins which push into the Arduino have no where to solder onto, which was a big problem until I figured out a little hack to my header pins to fix them to the underside…

Basically just push the black bit to one end and poke it through the top and solder to the bottom rather than poking the short side through the bottom and soldering to the top as you would expect.

This is the finished design…

And finally because these lovely people share their software with the world and bought me two great little PCBs and because I want to support their future development and to get 2 LAYER SUPPORT!!! (HINT HINT!!) I have donated €30 what I felt I could afford to the Fritzing team.

Also I wanted to say thanks to @tinker_it on twitter for bringing my attention to the competition via her tweet.