The moment you think you’ve lost your wallet, you get that panicky feeling. All of your cash, your ID, and your credit cards are suddenly gone. Your range of options is dramatically limited. You might be stranded somewhere, unable to get home or into the club where your friends are. You can’t buy food, lodging or transportation. It’s scary, frustrating, maddening, and the clean-up is a mess: you have to contact your bank, your credit card companies, your air travel and other loyalty card providers. You need a new driver’s license and perhaps social security card. What were all of those cards in your wallet? How do you reach all of those providers? Thank god you have your cell phone.

But given the choice between have my wallet or my cell phone stolen, I’d much rather lose the wallet.

My cell phone has all of the email conversations between me and my friends and my clients. There’s also a phone directory of everyone I know, a calendar with my birthday, their birthdays, and everywhere I am planning on being (or have been) for months. It would be easy to impersonate me on the phone, by email, and in all of the online communities in which I participate: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You could ruin my reputation, extort money, and victimize anyone I know.

There’s also confidential client data — presentations and meeting notes, recordings,and photos. All of that is in addition to the thief’s ability to access to my bank, financial institutions, PayPal, investment firm, and Mint.Com.

Cleaning up after having your wallet stolen is a cakewalk compared to the mess you’re in if your phone is compromised. Yet people are way more casual about leaving their phone laying around than their wallet.

Part of the reason for this is that the function of a wallet has remained relatively constant, while the function of a phone has dramatically increased in scope. Even though it’s a now a GPS navigation system, financial terminal, email client, Internet browser, hard drive, camera, media player and social media device, we still call it a “phone.” Our attitude about phones hasn’t kept up with the phone’s increasingly important role.  The truth is, if I had to eliminate one function of my phone, I would do without the part where you talk to people.

Even if you’ve been slow to realize how important your phone is, criminals have not. Antivirus firm McAfee reports that last quarter mobile device malware was up a whopping 46%, while other threats we down overall. The problem is only going to get worse as phone functionality increases. This year near-field communication chips are being added to phones which literally turn them into wallets, meaning you can lose your phone and wallet simultaneously.

Virus attacks on your desktop computer are becoming passe, with most users aware of the threat and using a range of very good free and low-cost AV tools. On your phone, you’ve had fewer options. But that’s changing as phone manufacturers and software developers recognize this threat.

The first line of defense is to use your phone’s built-in password security. Most people don’t turn this feature on because it’s a nuisance to enter a password every time you pick up your phone to use it. Unless your phone is stolen by the NSA, this feature does a great job of protecting information stored in your phone itself, although it does nothing about data or documents stored on your phone’s removable memory card.

To encrypt passwords and other sensitive data that you carry around with you, there are specialized applications like OISafe. Programs like WaveSecure can help you track a missing phone, backup up the data on it, and remote wipe the memory on command.

Those applications are great if you know that your phone has gone missing, but the far greater threat is malware which can steal the data off your phone while you’re using at it. While there hasn’t yet been a wide-reaching virus attach on mobile devices, it’s just a matter of time as tablets and phones replace laptops as people’s primary mobile device. This past year has seen Norton, McAfee, AVG and dozens of smaller companies release smartphone security applications, many of them not very good. (Lookout Mobile Security is a standout, featuring anti-virus, lost phone tracking, remote backup and remote wiping.) Expect to see an arms race on mobile devices play out in a way similar to the way it did on the desktop, only at an accelerated rate. (Hackers and AV companies have, after all, learned a lot from the desktop wars and will be applying it to the battle for mobile security.)

So, you’ve been warned. If you haven’t taken the time to set the lock code on your phone, do it now. And think about installing an anti-virus application and a remote-wipe function. It’s simple to do now, and impossible to do when you realize you really need it.

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1. I Fell in Love with an Android

[In my previous posting, I discussed the shortcomings of the digital alarm clock and what my goals were for the ideal clock. A link to that posting is at the bottom of this one.]

How the Clock Works — from the Outside.

Our clock has only three interface elements; a big blue display (the time), a smaller yellow display (the alarm time) and a knob. Pressing the knob turns the alarm (and the yellow display) on and off. No yellow numbers, no alarm. Yellow numbers? That’s what time the alarm will go off. It’s that simple.

You change the alarm time by turning the knob. It moves in 15-minute increments, so in a couple of spins (forwards or backwards) you can move through a whole day. I’ve always thought that the little AM/PM light was hard to notice, so we’ve done away with it here. You set the alarm in 24-hour time. which makes it really hard to get it wrong; 7:00 AM reads as “7:00″ while 7:00 PM reads as “19:00.”

That just leaves the noisemaker. Rather than leave it up to the a radio station, which has too many parameters to set (volume and tuning) or may have unreliable programming, I decided to include my own noisemaker. Sure, we could have interfaced to an iPod, but adding another device undermines our assurance that the alarm will go off as planned. Instead, I’ve chosen to play sound files off a micro-SD card. This gives us lots of other capabilities as well, like making the clock chime on the hour, speak the time, or play different alarm tones at different times. Since the reader accommodates a 2Gb card, you can design your own audio “skin” if you like.

Last, but not least, we solved the power problem. With the old mechanical clocks, you lost exactly as much time as the power was out. With digital clocks, even a brief power interruption restarts the clock at 12:00.  Some clocks have a back-up battery in case the power fails, but most do not. The ones that do, require you to replace the battery periodically (which no one ever seems to do).

This clock keeps the correct time even when you pull the plug. For how long? At least a few days and maybe a couple of weeks (there are a lot of factors involved). The displays turn off and the alarm can’t sound when the power is off, but when power is restored, the time is still accurate.

How the Clock Works — from the Inside.

The guts of this machine contains a hard-working and very inexpensive 8-bit PIC microcontroller. (It’s the long rectangular black thing in the picture.) There is also some audio circuitry to play sound files off a micro-SD, an amplifier to drive a speaker, some LED displays, and a power supply to make it all work.

The Logic Board

The PIC microcontroller does all of the heavy lifting, keeping track of the time, managing the two displays, controlling the audio chip, and handling user interaction.

One more component worth mentioning is the carbon aerogel supercapacitor. (It’s the big round thing on the logic board.) This little guy stores up electricity when we’re plugged in. When we’re not, the microcontroller senses the power failure, shuts down everything non-essential and hunkers down for a long winter. It draws just enough power from the ultracapacitor to stay alive and keep track of the time. Supercapacitors are cool because, unlike batteries, they don’t get tired of charging/discharging so they don’t need to be replaced periodically.

Mechanically

I decided to build this clock into a CD storage container. It was about the right size, inexpensive, and I liked the color. In order to give myself a little more flexibility, I put all of the electronics on two boards instead of just one. There is a display board, which holds the digital displays and the knob, and a logic board which holds the microcontroller, audio electronics, and power supply. A 16-pin connector mates the two boards together.

The Display Board

The size of the display board, which is the larger of the two, is primarily determined by the size and placement of the LED displays. By putting the rest of the electronics on another board that mates behind it, I gave myself the option of fitting the whole thing into a smaller box than I could have if it were all on one board (in case I change my mind later).

In our next installment, we’ll talk more about the details of the design and how engineers design something like this.

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock in (1200 Easy Steps)

With everyone at the Consumer Electronics Show drooling over giant flat screen TVs and miniature tablet-shaped supercomputers, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a common consumer device that we STILL haven’t gotten right after a hundred years or so: the alarm clock.

You would think that a device so critical to modern life would be designed better, but in spite of the fact that there are thousands of models to choose from, they pretty much all suck. How often have you gone to bed the night before a critical meeting and been unable to fall asleep because you had no confidence that the alarm was set correctly? My own alarm clock requires at least a dozen cognitive steps to set the alarm with any confidence.

How it should work

You should be able to set your alarm clock in a few seconds. You should be able to tell from across the room if the alarm is set, and for what time. You should be able to set it in the dark, without your glasses. You should never be lying in bed wondering if you accidentally forgot to push some button or bumped the volume control and are going to get up late and look stupid.

So, forty years after the digital watch was rolled out at CES, I decided to design and built the perfect digital alarm clock. Even with all of the advances we’ve made since the 1960s, this has turned out to be a really interesting challenge. It involves assembly language programming, custom fabrication, parts suppliers from all across Asia, and an enterprising low-volume circuit board manufacturer based in Bulgaria. Why all the complexity? Because of the simplicity.

Simple = Complex

Let’s assume you want to fly to Los Angeles. (Don’t take it personally, it’s just an example.) Think about the steps you have to go through to make that happen.

• Determine when you want to go and when you want to return
• Go on various websites to find the right combination of itinerary, cost and airline
• Identify and use the correct payment method
• Manage your seat assignments
• Create appropriate reminders to ensure you arrive at the correct airport at the correct time
• Arrange for transportation to and from the airport

And this doesn’t even include packing luggage and all the personal aspects. This is just getting there and back. Now imagine you wanted to make this completely simple for yourself. What would you do? You’d hire an assistant and say “Steve, book me a flight to Los Angeles.” Very simple for you, but it requires that you interface with a highly complex and sophisticated machine — Steve.

The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designer. This is something I’d always more or less understood, but this project made that completely clear.

In the next posting, I’ll describe the clock itself: how the user experiences it, and the insane complexity behind that apparent simplicity.

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock (Part 2)

QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

• Social Media Examiner, “How QR Codes can Grow your Business”

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"Braindoggle"

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Nixie tubes

Back in 1954, before we had LED’s and digital readouts, Nixie Tubes were the only way to display digital data. Today, these delicate glass tubes are very rare.

I’ve been buying them from decommissioned factories in Russia and designing them into retro electronic devices like clocks and other art pieces.

Nixies fell out of favor as soon as other technologies replaced them because the fragile glass tubes are sensitive to shock and vibration and they require 180 volts to operate.

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