Category Archives: JOURNEYS KCOMPLETED

A revised Roundsheet specification

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Around 1994, I specified in a document that the term “Roundsheet” was my own property. It designated ideas I had been developing about an alternative to the two-dimensional spreadsheet. Subsequently, in 2010, I came up with some more thoughts on the concept. Now, some 19 years after I had the idea, I’m going to try and nail down a specification and maybe try and get a prototype built.

After reviewing my previous writings on the subject, I concluded that the obvious next step was to tighten up the 2010 document particularly with respect to the top level components, and to define explicitly what types of data the Roundsheet could handle. The result is a revised, very high-level, specification (4. Roundsheet Spec v0.4 – 24Mar2013) which provides a reasonably complete and internally consistent description of the Roundsheet functions. Three short illustrations of its use have also been included.

In considering what to do next, two aspects seem to be key – protecting the intellectual property, and getting the tool built. From what I have heard about applying for Patents, it sounds very time consuming and expensive and only worthwhile if you genuinely expect to be able to capitalise on the ideas. I don’t have such confidence, therefore I am reconciled to just including a statement asserting my ownership and rights to a royalty percentage, on my writings on the subject.

Regarding getting the tool built, I am not going to attempt it myseIf as I don’t have the necessary current knowledge of platforms and programming languages – and am not prepared to spend huge chunks of my time acquiring the expertise. So, if it is to be built at all, I will need to find someone else to do it. First, however, it seems sensible to get some other opinions as to its viability and usefulness to assess if it’s worth trying to persuade someone to invest their time on it. With this in mind I’m going to send this latest spec to a few people and ask their views.

Plans for Year Files

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We have Year Files into which Su and I put material which we want to keep but for which there is no other obvious place for it to go. It’s a handy system which serves two purposes: it’s a short term store for things you might want to refer to in the next few years such as receipts, and it’s a long term store for mementos. However, as the years go by the storage space required increases relentlessly. We are now on our seventh box in the loft – below is an example of one of them.

Example of Year Files

As well as requiring storage space, there are several other disadvantages of keeping the material in this way:

  • it’s relatively difficult to access,
  • a lot of the material is generally invisible and often gets forgotten about,
  • if we move house it will add to the removal effort and cost,
  • if we move house there may not be sufficient storage space available to take it,
  • such a great pile of material may be more of a problem than a joy for those who inherit it.

To try and address these issues, we’re going to go through it, throw away unwanted material, digitise where appropriate and make visible the things we want to enjoy. The lessons learned when assembling the photobook of work experiences can be applied – particularly the approach to uncovering what we really want to achieve with each set of material and how to turn those desires into reality. As we work through it, I’ll be reporting on what we experience with each different set of material.

Sadly, the one unique feature of the Year Files will be lost – the ability to traverse a year chronologically through all its activities, family mementos, major events, and trivia. However, that’s a pleasure that, in practice, is not in great demand. In any case, once the material has been transformed, perhaps a future piece of work could explore how to re-create that experience on demand.

A problem with Alerts

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In the last 5 days I’ve received five messages from BIT:

  • three alert messages giving advance notice of various papers accepted for BIT;
  • a message announcing the 2nd issue of BIT for 2013;
  • and another message announcing the 3rd issue of BIT for 2013.

Since I didn’t deal with them all immediately, I now find myself having to do a relatively substantial amount of work all at once. It would have been much better if these emails had been spaced out a little more. It certainly seems undesirable and unplanned to notify users of two whole issues of BIT within 4 days of each other. I presume that it was caused by problems in the production process. However, my view is that, as a matter of policy, notification of new issues should be spaced as far apart as possible.

Neither of the two issues contained papers I had already previously seen through the alerting process, so I reviewed their contents on screen – first checking the abstracts and then the full text if they looked interesting. As noted before, this experience was fine.

However, checking the alert messages was a little less satisfactory. Because several alert messages are sent out for the same paper as it goes through its reviewing and acceptance cycle, I wanted to establish if I had already checked a paper before spending time on reading it again. I’ve worked out that you can identify papers new to the alerting cycle by looking at the publishing history at the beginning of the paper. Basically, if it has more than one Posting/Publishing entry then one can assume an alert has previously been sent out. If this was the case, I double checked all the previous alert messages (stored in my mail system) that I had received. Once reassured that I had already seen the paper I was able to discount the alert and store the email. For the papers I had not already seen, I reviewed them in the same way as described above i.e. read the Abstract and then, if interested, downloaded and scanned/read the full text.

My current feeling is that the alerting process doesn’t quite meet my needs. I haven’t properly thought it through yet, but I suspect I would prefer to be able to specify my alerting requirements at a much finer level of detail i.e. for each of the standard stages in the reviewing and publishing cycle. I know that my choice would be to only get alerted the very first time a paper is made available online. I don’t believe such granular selection options are currently available.

One other thing has happened in the last week: as a result of a conversation between Dave O’Neil (the Chief Exec of the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors) and Taylor & Francis (the publisher of BIT), I now have online access to all back issues of BIT. So I am proceeding to download those issues referenced in my filing system, prior to then trying to find a home for all my hardcopy  issues of BIT.

Reflecting on the poster management exercise

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Digitising all the posters, pictures, paintings and artworks has certainly been a useful exercise. It has:

  • enabled unwanted physical items to be thrown away;
  • prompted the permanent display of some paintings that had hitherto been stored away;
  • given visibility to items normally stored away from view, using free standard issue Windows 7 software;
  • prompted the purchase of a frame to rotate pictures through;
  • prompted the flat storage of some items that had hitherto been rolled up in cardboard tubes;
  • provided a digital record of our paintings of value for insurance purposes should that ever be required.

Since the numbers of items involved (in this case around 80) is relatively low, the whole exercise didn’t take long to do. However, as with all other digitising activities, dealing with a large backlog of material is always much more daunting and time consuming than simply doing it bit by bit as you go along. Now that the initial job has been done, the challenge will be to maintain the digital collection as new physical items are added and other items removed.

Displaying and rotating the physical posters

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For displaying the physical posters, I decided to rotate them in a single frame and to store the bigger ones at the rear of the frame. I never got to see a Snap frame (which allows the front to be opened) and instead purchased a large 36 x 24 inch beech frame from the Frame Company for about £34 and £7 next day postage.  The backboard is secured to the edge of the frame by folding down 4 or 5 metal strips along each side, and I figured these would be flexible enough to accommodate the thickness of the 6 or 7 posters I wanted to store in the frame. This turned out to be the case – with enough room for a few more if necessary.

I duly constructed the montage I had been planning out of the colourful 10-20 year old covers of “Interactions” – the ACM magazine for the discipline of Human Computer Interaction (having scanned their contents it seemed a waste to just throw the covers away). The resulting 30 x 18 inch collage is quite informative and interesting but not particularly pleasing to the eye. Ah well, you can’t win them all. Anyway, at least it did provide a focal point and incentive for obtaining the frame – and it will only be on display some of the time as it takes its turn in the rotation of the posters and pictures through the frame – provided I do actually perform the rotation – only time will tell.

I didn’t really explore the use of Snap front loading frames for the reasons of cost, looks, the lack of any product to look at, and not being able to understand how multiple posters could be held securely (ie. without slipping down) while being stored behind the picture being displayed. Having said that, and despite my desire to try out storing posters/pictures at the back of a frame for rotation,  I do believe that probably the best way to store most posters and pictures is in a large art case – provided you can get one big enough to take the largest size poster that you have.

To emphasise the point that the purpose of the frame I have purchased is to rotate posters and pictures through it, thumbnails of all the posters and picture not on permanent display in the house, have been printed out and glued around the edge of the mount in the frame. In principle, one could select from the thumbnails, which poster or picture to display next in the frame. Although the net result is quite busy as you can see below, it does do the job. Perhaps it would look better with something other than the collage on display in the middle of the frame.

Digitising the Posters and Pictures

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The digitising exercise has been very rewarding. All the posters, paintings and drawings in the house – some 80 or so items – have been reviewed and photographed. Some of the ones that had been in storage in the loft or elsewhere have been framed and put up on the walls. Items of more sentimental interest than physical value (such as graffiti on large wall sheets from parties held long ago) were photographed and thrown away.

Photographing the items proved relatively easy and quick to do using a modern digital camera and a white background, though two pitfalls were encountered. First, you have to be careful not to tilt the camera when above the picture otherwise the picture does not appear rectangular in the photo. Second, reflections are difficult to exclude when photographing framed pictures under glass. Despite these problems, however, the digital images are pretty good, so I turned my attention to using them to make the posters and pictures more visible in three different ways:

First, I put all 80 odd images into a single folder and specified that they be displayed in slideshow mode as the desktop background of my Windows 7 laptop.

Second, I specified that they be displayed as a slideshow as a screensaver in my Windows 7 laptop. I[ could also have specified that they be displayed as  within the Windows 7 Slideshow Desktop Gadget which appears as a small window  on the desktop – but I considered that to be overkill. Instead I use the Slideshow Desktop Gadget to display all the images in the My Pictures folder – very effective].

Third, I printed out thumbnails of each of the images not currently on permanent display in the house, to go around the edge of the physical frame that I’ve bought – more of this in a subsequent entry on displaying the hardcopy posters.

The net result is that the posters and pictures are all now highly visible – I see them everyday as I use my laptop. They are almost too visible, so at some point I may just display them in either the desktop background or the screensaver. However, the objective of making them more visible has certainly been achieved. Its to be noted that all three functions I’m using – Desktop Background, Screensaver and Slideshow Desktop Gadget – are all free pieces of software that come bundled with Windows 7.

An initial look at physical frames

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In researching physical frames that are currently available I came across the following:

  • Movie poster frames that are front loading i.e. you don’t have to take them down from the wall to change the poster that’s being displayed. Around $85 for a 27 x 41 inch frame from http://www.spotlightdisplays.com
  • In the UK, front loading frames for business are known as ‘snap’ frames. An A0 (23 x 33 inches) snap frame costs around £30 from http://www.tradeframes.co.uk. A 27 x 41 inch silver snap frame costs £35 (on offer) from http://www.sign-holders.co.uk
  • There are also swinging display racks in which you can have instant access to a large number of pictures. However these tend to be quite expensive. For example, a 50 picture system costs $695 from http://www.clevelandskyline.com
  • I also came across variety of possible products in Staples including a Nobo flip chart board which you could use to suspend pictures on (somehow) at around £60; a Cork board (600 x 900 mm) at £44; an A1 clear presentation slip case at £5.50, and an A1 presentation case.
  • A standard frame of 36 x24 internal dimension, and a with a beech-type moulding measuring 40mm wide and 30mm deep, can be obtained for £33 from http://www.frame-company.co.uk/beech-36×24-frame-with-white-mount-cut-for-image-size-30x20_1.html
  • I did NOT come across any frame that also offered poster storage to its rear.

So, my conclusion after initial investigations of frames is that I need to decide between a snap frame which enables the contents to be changed while still fixed to the wall, or an ordinary frame which probably would look nicer but which would need to be taken down to change its contents. I think I’d like to take a look at a snap frame before making the choice.

The Poster and Picture Challenge

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I have a variety of poster sized material stored away in tubes or rolled up in the loft. I also have smaller sized pictures stored flat in an art folder, and some acrylic paintings done on board. They are not on display because I don’t have room for them all on my walls – nor the money to frame them all.  Of course, they can all be photographed and then some of the originals could be thrown away (and I have already done just that a few years ago for quite a few of my poster sized items); but there are others that I want to keep in their original physical form. I would prefer all the originals to be stored unrolled and in an easily accessible place so that I can rotate their display in fixed picture frames already on the walls.

The solution seems to be in two parts – digitising (i.e. photographing) the posters and pictures and coming up with ways of displaying them to their best advantage; and the storage and periodic display of the physical items. To add a little immediacy to the physical display challenge, I have been planning to create a large collage for a while, and so I shall attempt to make the frame I display it in a rotating display unit suitable for displaying the other posters and pictures.The space in my study in which the frame will be mounted dictates the frame size – it cannot be bigger than 29.5 x 60 inches.

Another requirement which I’m going to bear in mind is that I’d like to be able to store artefacts and to display a subset of them at any one time. Perhaps the rotating display unit can serve this purpose as well.

 

Reading an Electronic Journal

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I received notification of my first electronic-only volume of BIT a few days ago and have just finished going through it. The experience was fine. I upped the text size in my browser so it was easy to read and zipped through the papers in pretty much the same way and pace as I used to with the hardcopy. The main difference was that previously I might have gone through the hardcopy in bed and then, later, sat at my desk to index, download and store any of the papers I was interested in; whereas now I need to do all of that at my desk. It could be argued that I could read the papers elsewhere on an iPad and then go to my desk to do the indexing and storing; however, now that I’m accessing the papers directly from the web site, it seems more sensible to do the indexing and downloading as and when I’m doing the reading.

Anyway, overall the experience of receiving an electronic journal, reading it and filing papers I’m interested in, was fine – no problem. However, that is not how it will be going forward. Since I have elected to take alerts on papers as they are accepted into the journal, I will already have seen several if not all of the papers in the electronic editions of the journal that I receive in future. I will report on that after I have experienced it.

Movie editing and formats

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Over the last week or so, I’ve been exploring how to convert DVDs into a format that I could edit, store and view on my laptop. It was a task I’ve been waiting to do for a couple of years, ever since getting some family cine film transferred to DVDs and finding that copying and editing them would take some specialist software and time and effort.

I’ve found that there are typically around seven or eight files on a DVD with various file extensions including .IFO, .BUP and.VOB; and that the major part of the content is in the VOB files. A quick bit of research on the net established that a VOB file is part of a standard container format for DVD-Video media which breaks up the content into a series of 1 Gb or less computer-compatible files. The VOB files can be converted into a single file in  another format such as MP4, using specialist packages, conversion tools, or freeware.

I decided to use DVDVidesoft’s FreeStudio which includes a specialist DVD Converter program amongst its many facilities. This appears to work very well and I have converted several DVDs into MP4 files with no apparent loss of quality with one exception: when the camera moves very quickly across a scene, the conversion process seems to make it a little more distorted than it already is. For this reason, and because I’m no expert in these formats, I’m keeping the original DVDs just in case.

Several of my DVDs contained converted cine film which I wanted to break apart into separate logical units which could be viewed and stored individually. To perform this editing work I chose the Microsoft software “Movie Maker” which comes bundled with the Windows operating system or which can be downloaded from a Microsoft web site. The version of this software released in mid 2012 will output files in MP4 format (previous versions did not have this capability).

There appears to be no help facility with Movie Maker, however I eventually got the hang of it after a bit of trial and error and some advice from various sources on the net. The process I followed was something like this:

  • Start work on a movie: Use the ‘Add videos and photos’ function to browse and select the movie to be worked.
  • Remove unwanted frames: Identify  the start and end of any parts that you want to delete because they are of poor quality etc,, then put the timeline curser onto the start point and select the SPLIT command. Do the same for the end point. The section to be removed is now a separate element in the timeline and can be deleted by right clicking on it and selecting REMOVE.
  • Break into separate parts: Use the SPLIT function to break up the material into all the separate elements that you want to save as individual MP4 files.
  • Save a version: Use the Movie Maker function ‘Save Project’.to save a version that you can return to later.
  • Select the first element to be saved as an MP4 file: Click on each of the unwanted elements in turn, right click on them and select the REMOVE function. When this has been completed, only the element you want to save as a single file will remain.
  • Insert a Title: Use the TITLE function to include a title frame at the beginning of the movie.
  • Save the element as an MP4 file: Use the ‘Save Movie’ function to save it as a file in its own right. I use the ‘Recommended for this Project’ setting to specify the quality and standards to be used.
  • Close Movie Maker and start again to save the next element: To select another element to be output as a file in its own right, close down Movie Maker, then open it up again with the Movie Maker Project that you saved earlier. Then follow the same steps already described to isolate the next element and to save it as an MP4 file.

Overall, the combination of FreeStudio and Movie Maker seems to enable me to do everything I need to produce stand-alone movie units which can be itemised in my photo index, stored and played individually on the laptop. For the most part I have produced each element in MP4 format since that seems to be a widely used standard which is likely to be long lasting. However, in one case I was unable to do the conversion and have retained the file with its original .mov extension (an Apple QuickTime format) which works just as well on my laptop.