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December
Elastic Electricity
 Here’s another one of those solutions to problems that you
probably didn’t realise that you had. It’s called stretchable wire, and
apparently it can be used for anything from headphone cables to charger leads
and something called electronic textiles. The wire, which has been developed by
researchers at North Carolina State University, can stretch up to eight times
its original length. The trick to how it works lies inside in the outer casing,
made of a stretchy elastic polymer. The rubbery tube is filled with what’s
described as a liquid metal alloy composed of electrically conductive gallium
and indium. Just for a change it turns out that it relatively easy to manufacturer,
but needless to say there had to be a catch. There are probably several, but
the one that really needs to be sorted out before it can go into production is
how to stop the liquid leaking, or running out of the cable is severed. That
could be quite a task, though before we get too concerned, both metals have
relatively low toxicity, but you can be fairly sure leaky electronic textiles will
make a mess of your washing machine…
3112
Pack A Pi To Go
 The brilliant little
Raspberry Pi, the ultimate bare-bones computer for those who want to get back
to basics or learn how to program, has spawned yet another variant, this time a
mobile version from Parts People, called Pi
To Go. In the true spirit of this Open Source project, which encourages
experimentation and collaboration, the case is designed to be made on a 3D
printer and the instructions include the necessary files so you can build your
own. The spec is fairly modest, based around the Raspberry Pi board, which
costs around £30, the prototype uses a 3.5-inch LCD screen recovered from an
in-car reversing camera, a battery pack from a Dell laptop, which gives around
10 hours running time, it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, an off the shelf miniature
keyboard and touchpad, it has a 64Gb SSD and 4Gb of RAM. The whole thing should
cost around £350 to put together, and possibly a lot less if you are adept at scavenging
and modifying parts.
2412
Google Maps Back on iPhone
 There is much rejoicing in
Apple land, and a few wry smiles over at Google now that Google Maps is back on
the iPhone and my thanks go to Gizmodo for coming up with a way to bury the
much maligned Apple Maps on the iPhone. In case you haven’t been following this
story, Apple decided to replace Google Maps on the iPhone with it’s own mapping
software and it was a complete disaster. Allegedly the only thing you could
actually rely on it accurately locating was Apple Stores. It all got a bit out
of hand but there were certainly quite a few mistakes and cockups but in the
end it got so bad that Australian authorities advised against using it as it
could potentially direct users into dangerous situations. Anyway, after firing
the executive in charge of the team that developed the app Apple finally bowed
to public pressure and on December 13th allowed a whizzy new version of Google
Maps back in the App Store. And very good it is too, but being Apple, it wasn’t
going so far as to let users delete the hated Apple Maps from their devices
it’s protected like all of the included apps – but you can hide it far away.
Here’s what you do. Create four bookmarks on the home screen, they can be
anything, it doesn’t matter. Now drop the Apple Maps app into one of them and
give it a suitable name. Next put one of the random bookmarks on to a blank
home screen, swipe right and put another of those bookmarks onto the next blank
desktop and repeat for the third and finally the fourth one, with Google Maps
inside. The idea is that the despised app is now so far away that it is
unlikely that you will ever see it again. Okay, so it’s not a very elegant
solution but it works, and if anyone comes up with a better one, we’ll pass it
on.
1712
A Touch of Class
 Touchscreen technology has
improved in leaps and bounds in just a few short years. The first resistive
screens were pretty horrible, but they had one advantage, and that was they
responded to pressure, so you could use them with gloves. Then along came super
silky capacitive screens, lovely to use, but no use with gloves, which meant
frozen pinkies in winter. Then someone had the bright idea of touchscreen
gloves, with conductive fingertips and things got much better. Some of them are
a bit thin and weird looking, but you can live with that, and now they’ve
reached the mainstream, with some fairly nasty ones appearing in the pound
shops, but we’re left with the problem of what to do if you have a favourite
pair of gloves, and don’t like any of the special touchscreen offerings? Now
there’s an answer, a magic liquid called AnyGlove, just a few drops on and
you’ll be stroking and gesturing with nice warm fingers, suitable for use on
smartphones, tablets and ATMs, and only £5.99 a bottle. Only one word of
warning, it may stain or cause discolouration, which doesn’t matter too much on
woolly gloves and work gloves, but you may want to keep it away from expensive
and light coloured fabrics and materials.
1012
Double Life Magnesium Ion Batteries?
 Yes, yes, you’ve heard it
all before. We get all excited about a battery the size of a pea that is so
powerful it can drive a Jumbo Jet. But it is still in development and we’re
going to have to wait a few years for it to go into production, and then,
nothing…
The next big thing in
battery technology is always just around the corner, and this one will probably
be no different, but we’ll pass it on anyway and news of a new high energy
density battery reaches us from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Review. It concerns research being conducted by Toyota, using relatively cheap
and abundant Magnesium instead of Lithium in a Magnesium Ion battery. Magnesium
is interesting because it has two positively charged ions; Lithium has only
one, so in theory a magnesium ion battery can hold twice the charge, gram for
gram, compared with Lithium. So far so good, but there is a problem with the
chemistry, namely that magnesium, when used to form an anode, doesn’t work with
conventional electrolytes and produces a blocking layer that interferes with
the flow of a current. The Toyota boffins are now working on two possible
solutions, new electrolytes and new ways to form the anodes that will allow
them to work with conventional electrolytes. Apparently progress is being made
but it’s still too early to know which method will work. As usual the white
coats reckon it will be at least 10 years before you can buy one in Dixons and you
can be sure we’ll let you know when it cones to pass…
0212
November
BT Broadband Record Breaker
 Don’t get too excited, not
just yet anyway, but BT boffins have been tinkering with their fibre optic
broadband network and have managed to achieve record breaking speeds of up to
10 gigabits per second; that’s more bandwidth than was used at the peak of the
Olympics by the media networks. What makes this really interesting is that this
is through a more or less standard optical fibre link. All of the hard work is
done by the gizmos sending and receiving the data, using a system called XGPON
(Tens of gigabits on a Passive Optical Network). So far it’s just a proof of
concept exercise, using a recently installed connection between a company in
Cornwall and a BT exchange in Truro. It’s all fairly academic at the moment as
the web and your average PC can’t handle anything like those speeds, but it
shows what can be done and once day you might be able to simultaneously stream
scores of TV channels and dozens of movies, in the blink of an eye. All you’ll
need then is the time to watch them all…
2611
Google Maps for iOS Almost Ready?
 Good news if you have an
iOS 6 device and have been less than impressed with Apple Maps. According to a
unnamed source in the Wall Street Journal Google is now putting the finishing touches
to its iOS version of Google Maps and should soon be ready for approvals
submission to the App Store. Features rumoured to be on the new release include
turn-by-turn navigation, but the final line up is being kept under wraps whilst
it is being field-tested. There’s no date for a launch yet but you can be
pretty sure that Google is pulling out all of the stops to get it ready,
hopefully in time for Santa to use it to make sure that all those pressies get
to the right addresses…
1911
Banishing the Bird Slicers?
 Personally I think wind
turbines are great, and the bigger they are the better in my opinion, However I
concede that there’s a significant minority who do not like them for visual
impact on the environment, the noise they make and their alleged effects on
wildlife. So it will be interesting to see what the naysayers make of the Saphonian wind generator (named after a
Carthaginian wind god, in case you were wondering). It’s bladeless and
resembles a big satellite dish. Okay, so it’s probably not going to score too
well on looks but no blades means no diced birds (though the jury is still out
on just how damaging they are to bird populations). It also means significantly
reduced noise levels, and like all wind turbines, the residual environmental impact,
unlike most other forms of power generation, is negligible and when they are
decommissioned the land they occupy is easily returned to its natural state. So
what’s the catch? There doesn’t seem to be one, according to the designers they
cost half as much to make as bladed turbines, it can capture up to 80 percent
of the wind energy, compared with around 30 percent for turbines (defying the theoretical 60 percent efficiency ceiling of
wind powered systems, known as the Betz limit). So how does it work? Well, it operates
like a sail converting wind energy first into mechanical movement and then into
hydraulic pressure that can be stored, or converted directly into electricity.
Sounds too good to be true? Let’s just say for the moment we’re filing this one
under the wait and see category.
12/11/12
Cheaper Solar Using Carbon
 Producing electricity from
silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) solar cells is expensive and in spite of the
steady reduction in the cost of panels, it can still take between a quarter and
a third of a solar panel’s 25-year working life to recover the energy consumed
in its manufacture. Payback times are coming down, as panels and manufacturing
processes become more efficient but it needs a big breakthrough to make it a
truly economical and environmentally friendly means of producing electricity.
We’ve looked at many promising new solar technologies over the years; there’s
no guarantee that this one, from Stanford
University, will fare any better and sink without a trace, on the other
hand it could be the one, if the scientists and bean counters get it right.
This panel is based on carbon, not in itself a new idea, but the way it works
is. The layer in the cell that absorbs the light and converts it into
electricity is made up of those wacky new forms of carbon, Buckyballs and
nanotubes – tiny carbon structures that do all sorts of interesting things with
electricity and light, and the power they produce is carried away from the cell
by another new carbon wonder material, graphene. The light-absorbing layer can
be made into paste for coating directly onto surfaces, it’s flexible, very
resilient and in theory carbon PV cells could be much cheaper to make than
silicon panels but here’s the inevitable catch. The current efficiency, of converting
light into power, is said to be just one percent, compared with the still
fairly miserable 20 percent achieved by silicon cells. Researchers are hopeful
that it can be improved and it’s very early days, so as always, if anything
ever comes of it, we’ll let you know.
0511
October
Just How Wide Is The Web?
 Have you ever wondered how
much data there is kicking around Internet, and how many hard drives it would
take to fit it all on? Quite a few is the simple answer, the Internet Archive,
the non-profit organisation doing their best to capture the whole web, and
responsible for the excellent Waybackmachine
archive, has just hit a notable milestone by capturing it’s tenth petabyte of
data. It’s a mind-boggling number, so let’s try and put that into some
perspective. 10 petabytes is the same as 10,000 terabytes, which brings it down
to a sort of manageable scale, assuming that you are used to thinking in terms
of terabyte drives, but if you’re still getting used to gigabytes, you’ll be
delighted to know that’s equivalent to 10 million of them. In short that’s a
lot of data, and it’s by no means the whole web, not even the obvious stuff we
know about, there’s probably at least ten times as much – the so-called dark
Internet – composed of data squirreled away on commercial and government
servers, dynamically generated pages that only come into being when you access
a site, and probably a whole lot more we don’t know about. Just to complicate
matters, tens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of new data is being added every
day, so they’ve got quite a job on their hands…
2910
Ultra Unorthodox
 If you have only just heard
of, or are just getting used to the idea of 4K then forget all that you know…
For all you Luddites out there still not up to speed on 4K, here’s a quick
update. 4k is shorthand for 4000, which happens to be, more or less, the number
of pixels across the width of the next generation high definition video
displays (the actual standard looks like being 3840 x 2160 pixels). Still
confused, well, current HDTVs – not HD-Ready, mind – have around 1080 pixels on
the horizontal axis, so 4k means very nearly four times the number of pixels,
and hence, getting on for four times as much detail. In short it’s Ultra High
Definition, a startlingly crisp way of displaying TV pictures, and essentially
what this story is all about. The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has
decided that Ultra HD or just UHD will become the official name for 4k, which
pretty well everyone thought was a bit teccy and rather confusing. Not that UHD
or 4k isn’t confusing enough already, with several competing standards, a whole
lot of TVs and projectors being shown by various manufacturers, and the not
insignificant problem of virtually no UHD material available and you’ll need
very deep pockets to afford the hardware. The bottom line? Don’t panic, the
vast majority of TV still uses the good old 625-line TV standard, HD is
starting to take over but it’s going to be a long slow process, 3D has been a
massive flop. There are no UHD players or broadcasts or likely to be for quite
a while so the industry is in no great hurry to roll out yet another format,
especially one with poor software support; in other words, come back in 5
years, maybe…
2210
Apple Chip Chop
 It’s somewhat ironic that
the recent spat between Apple and Samsung has overshadowed the fact that Apple
sources many of its key chips from the Korean manufacturer. It probably won’t
come as a surprise to learn, via MacRumours, that the US giant is considering
switching to another supplier, and the top contender is the Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company, who are beavering away on the next generation of quad-core 20 nanometer
products – basically cramming even more digital trickery into ever smaller
spaces. There is also speculation that it might be in discussions with Intel,
who are pioneering even more complex chips, using 14 nanometer production
techniques. This makes it less likely that the two warring factions are ever going
to settle their differences amicably and further disputes are a distinct possibility.
Shhhsh, can you hear it? That's the sound of lawyers rubbing their hands
together…
1210
Smarter Faster Charging
 Those of us who have been
around the block a few times well remember the problems we used to have with
first and second generation gadget rechargeable batteries. Nickel Cadmium cells
were slow to charge and developed the notorious ‘memory’ effect that reduced
their capacity by half in just a few months use. Nickle Metal Hydride was a
slight improvement but things didn’t really start to happen until Lithium Ion
came along and is now the de-factor power source for all of our toys. It’s not
without its drawbacks, though, with high price and short lifespan to name just
two. Charge time isn’t too bad and you can normally get away with 2/3 hours on
a phone or laptop, but now the boffins at the University of California in San
Diego have figured out a way to cut charging times in half. Current methods –
pun intended – rely on the charger monitoring the volts and amps flowing in and
out of the battery and it’s on-board charger chips. The new technique works on
a more subtle level, using algorithms to work out precisely what’s going on
inside the battery, things like charge distribution, its state of health and so
on, to deliver the most efficient charge. This means that some Lithium ion
batteries could be fully charged in as little as 15 minutes, and as an added
bonus, improve performance and make them last longer. It’s still at the
research stage but major battery manufacturers are taking a keen interest and with
the need to improve the versatility of electric vehicles it may not be too long
before it’s put to good use.
0710
Intel In Clover
 Chipmakers Intel has
released more details and the future roadmap for its new generation of mobile
processor chips, designed for the upcoming generation of Windows 8 tablets and
laptops. Codenamed Clover Trail, the key features are speed and a frugal
appetite for power, operating times on first generation Clover Trail devices
are likely to be in the region of 10 hours, and they should be able to remain
in standby or sleep mode for up to 3 weeks. The new chips utilise a
32-namometer production process; it’s a dual-core device with a clock speed of
1.8GHz, and quad hyper threading technology means it can run four threads
simultaneously. The first device, Z2760 supports up to 2Gb of RAM and already
more than 20 models using the chip are I development and expected to hit the
shelves in the next few months.
0110
September
Betcha Can’t Fill
This One…
 Worried about
running out of free space on your camera’s SD memory card? Well, it just ‘aint
going to happen with this new one from Lexar, which manages to pock in a
whopping 256 gigabytes – a quarter of a terabyte – into an SD card. To save you
working it out, on a typical compact digital camera that’s enough storage space
for over 75,000 shots. In fact we’ve been talking about super high capacity SD
cards for a while, and the SDXC (eXtended Capacity) sub-format allows for up to
2Tb capacity, and it’s been around 2009 but t date the largest production cards
have topped out at 128Gb. So now for the bad news, as you may expect super-size
doesn’t come cheap and the Lexar 256GB SDXC is going to set you back an
eye-popping £550, but just think, you’ll probably never have to delete another
photo, just pray you don’t lose it, or it ever pops it’s clogs… One last
thought, the as the size doubles the price lower down the chain tends to halve,
so those still pretty impressive 64 and 128Gb cards are likely to get a lot
cheaper, and it won’t be long until paltry 4 and 8gig cards are being given away
in packets of Corn Flakes, probably…
2409
Hard Drive Inflation
 As if the physics of hard
disc drives aren’t mind-boggling enough, Western Digital’s subsidiary, Hitachi
Global Storage, has gone and added a whole new dimension to hard drive
technology by filling them with Helium gas. No, it’s not to make them lighter,
or increase the pitch of the data, the idea is Helium, being much less dense
than plain old air, reduces drag on the spinning platter and chattering heads.
This also leads to a useful reduction in power consumption, they run cooler and
that in turn means that more platters – up to seven of them -- can be slotted
into the same space, resulting in a 40 percent increase in capacity. According
to PC World, where the story originated, the technique has been known about for
a while but it has taken engineers a while to figure out how to stop the gas
leaking out. They are still a couple of years away from production but when
they arrive capacities are expected to be in the region of 5.6TB.
1709
Wire We Waiting?
 Flexible batteries have been around for a good while and
in spite of them promising to make things smaller and lighter they’re still
mostly confined to the ‘coming soon’ tech pages. We can’t be sure if this new
idea from LC Chem will fare any better, but as always, it looks very promising.
It’s a battery inside a cable; you can tie it in knots, wrap it around things
even wear it like a bracelet. It’s based on lithium ion technology and made
using a hollow spiral nickel-tin plated copper anode surrounded by a composite
cathode, encased in an insulating sleeve. Prototypes have been used to power an
iPod shuffle, LED display and MP3 player and researchers report it continues to
work even when twisted and bent. Needless to say it’s still a way off mass
production and we’re not holding our breath but this very flexible (pun
intended) battery design would clearly be welcomed by gadget designers and
opens up all sorts of new possibilities, especially in the field of wearable
technology, we shall see…
1009
Google Gets On Its Bike
 Actually, two stories for
the price of one. The first you may have heard about already and the next time
you’re off walking Britain’s highways and byways don’t be surprised if a odd
looking bloke on a bike with a camera stuck on top of a long pole passes by.
Yes, Google’s Streetview is now reaching the parts it couldn’t get to in its
Smart Camera Cars, including canal towpaths, footpaths and narrow lanes. Google
bike story two is that it now has turn by turn directions in the beta
version of Google Maps Navigation covering a staggering 500,000km of bike
tracks and paths in 10 countries, including the UK. Just mount your smartphone
on your handlebars and follow the dark green lines, which show dedicated bike
paths and trails; dashed green lines indicate bike friendly routes, and there’s
even an option to avoid steep hills.
0209
August
Read it and Weep Kindle
 So, you though the Amazon Kindle e-book’s ability to store
several thousand books is impressive. Well, wait until you hear what the folks
over at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering have figured out. They have been working on using DNA – the coding
in our cells – to store data. It’s a technique that’s been around a little
while, but their efforts could push the technology to new limits and they
reckon they have found a way to store what amounts to 70 billion books worth of
data on a four grams of DNA, which is a lump about the size of your fingernail.
The actual storage capacity we’re talking about is 1 million gigabits per cubic
millimetre. There’s no need to worry about the data degrading either, according
to the researchers, and your fancy DNA flash drive should still be readable
after 400,000 years, even if you leave it in the glove compartment. Don’t get
too excited, it's all still a bit theoretical and it could be a while before
there’s a DNA socket on your PC or laptop but if you are hoping for a way to preserve
those treasured photos, for generations to come, or at least a bit longer than
the 50 or so years promised by the likes of optical disc and flash memory, then
this could be worth waiting for.
2708
Windows 8 On The Cheap
 Some welcome news for those wondering if it's
going to be worth the bother and expense upgrading to Windows 8 when it goes on
sale on October 26th. Reports coming from US insiders suggest that it will
available as a low-cost upgrade until the end of January 2013. The as yet to be
confirmed price could be as low as $40.00 (around £25.00), though if true the
UK price is likely to be closer to a straightforward dollar-to-pound
conversion. This is for a download version, if you want it on disc that's going
to cost you the thick end of $70.00 (£45.00). The upgrade should run on any
reasonably well specified PC running XP or above, but you might want to pop
along to the W8 Compatability Centre check site first.
1308
It Is Rocket Science
 Google Earth’s Streetview
continues to poke its cameras into unusual and unexpected places and one of the
latest locations you can visit from the comfort of your armchair is the Kennedy
Space Centre in Florida. You can drive around the facility, gawp at the installations
where the tour busses don’t go and even pop inside buildings that are normally
strictly off limits to the public. See rocket engines, Shuttles and the
mysterious machines used to propel men and satellites into space. You are free
to roam and peek into the more mundane corners of the site, take a trip around
the complex’s nether regions, nose around the car parks and even spot some real
rocket scientists strolling around the site.
0607
July
Apple Takes The Stand
 Court exhibits and
documents used in the ongoing Apple vs Samsung patent tiff obtained by The
Verge have included some interesting images of prototype iPhones and iPads.
Apple’s legendary obsession with secrecy means that these are rarely, if ever
seen, outside of the company and they provide an intriguing insight into the
company’s design process. The design of both i-devices went through many
changes and several features, like a hinged kickstand on the back of the iPad,
appear to have come and gone quite quickly. One of the more unusual concepts
was this octagonal shaped case, and in a somewhat bizarre twist, there are
suggestions in the Samsung defence team’s evidence that some iPhone design
elements were inspired by Sony and Nokia products from the mid-noughties.
3007
Atomic Bombs May Be Good
For You…
 There is a well-established
theory that exposure to low levels of nuclear (ionising) radiation is actually
good for you. It’s called Hormesis and is loosely based on the theory that what
doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and the argument
can be quite compelling, however, for a really mad, bad and quite outrageous
demonstration that an atomic bomb blast may not be has harmful as you may
expect, see this video of a US Army
bomb test from 1957. It shows five officers volunteering to being exposed
to the detonation of a 2-kiloton warhead 10,000 feet above their heads, and
having quite a good time of it, judging by the cheery commentary. More
surprising is that all five either went on to die at a ripe old age, or in one case,
may still be alive.
2307
LEDs In A Spin
 This one ticks a lot of
boxes, it’s a new organic light emitting diode (OLED) that’s brighter, cheaper
and more environmentally friendly than other OLEDs, and it comes to us courtesy
of the University of Utah. The key development is Spintronics, a technique
known as spin-polarisation, which probably doesn’t tell you much, but basically
it boils down to a device called an organic spin valve. This is made up of
three layers with an organic semiconductor sandwiched between two metal
ferromagnetic layers; one made of a cobalt alloy, the other a lanthanum strontium
manganese oxide compound. So, that’s all clear? Okay, you want more. The device
is around 300 microns wide by 40 nanometers thick, so it’s pretty small. It
works by applying a low voltage to the semiconductor layer, which results in a
flow of negatively charged electrons and positively charged electron holes;
when a magnetic field is applied the electrons and holes spin, and when an
electron and hole meet it releases a creates an ‘exciton’, which releases a
small amount of energy in the form of visible light. So far so good? Now, the
problem is that the light emitted at the moment is orange, so it’s not much use
for displays, but the white coats reckon they’ll soon have that one licked in
the not too distant by varying the spin to produce different wavelengths of
red, green and blue light. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted and let you know
when it’s time to get excited about excitons…
1607
High Voltage Highway
 Researchers at Japan’s Toyohashi University
have succeeded in transmitting between 50 and 60 watts of electrical power
through more than 10 cm of concrete, according to a report in Engadget. So what
you may say; wireless charging systems that transmit power to gadget batteries.
using inductive loops, have been around for yonks, without making much of an
impact, but this development could turn out to be interesting. The obvious
application would be to power electric vehicles, overcoming the huge problems
of range, battery charging and cost. Needless to say this is very early days
and if previous experience in these ideas is anything to go by the major
obstacles are going to be gross inefficiency and power loss, not to mention the
massive amounts of power that will be needed to power roads full of cars, (at
least they won’t freeze over in winter…) but as they say, they’re working on
it.
0907
Spray On Storage
 US researchers at Rice
University in Texas have come up with a novel type of re-chargeable battery
that can be applied to almost any surface. It uses a spray technique to build
up the component parts of the battery in layers. This makes it possible to
incorporate the battery into virtually any shape. So far they’ve managed to
create batteries out of glass and stainless steel objects, and even a ceramic
mug. Prototype cells have also included a battery made up of nine spray-painted
bathroom tiles. The steady 2.4 volt output was able to light up a set of LEDs
for six hours. The technology still has a few wrinkles that need ironing out,
including difficulty handling the liquid electrolyte, and the painting has to
carried out in a dry, oxygen-free environment but there’s high hopes of turning
the process into a commercial reality. One intriguing idea is to combine the
spray-on battery with a solar cell to create a device that both generates and
stored energy.
0207
June
Phaser On Stunning New
Memory
 If you are wondering what
the next big thing in solid-state memory if going to be, you may not have too
much longer to wait. As we have previously reported companies around the world
have been working on Phase Change memory devices for at least the last six or
seven years and the promise has been memory chips that spew out data more than
100 times faster than conventional flash memory, with a faction of the power
consumption. Prototype chips have been around for a while but to date the big
problem has been the write speed, which is not much faster than flash but that
may be about to change. Engadget reports that The University of Cambridge has
come up with a mixture of materials, including germanium, antimony and
tellurium, which brings the write speed down to just 500 picoseconds, which is
10 times faster than previous devices. There’s still one more nut to crack, and
that’s the need for these memory chips to be constantly powered, so data they
hold is volatile, but it’s another step in the right direction that could make
instant on PC and tablets a reality.
2506
Massive Mouse Madness
 If you find mice with two
buttons and a wheel tricky to use, avert your eyes now. Logitech have come up
with a Gaming Mouse, called the G600, which features no less than 20 buttons. It’s
designed for hard-core gamers and in particular those who while away their time
playing MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, who need this kind of rapid
access control facility. In addition to the usual right and left clickers there
are 12 buttons on a side mount keypad; this also light up and changes colour
(16 million of them…). There’s two more buttons behind the central wheel, and
for good measure this also tilts right and left. Virtually all of the buttons
and keys are programmable and in case you’re still not sold on the idea, it’s
available in black or white. So far so good? Now for the tricky bit, the price.
In the US it will be selling for just under $80, which on past experience
translates to around £65 - £70 by the time it reaches the UK, so start saving your
pennies now.
1806
Windows 8 Budget Upgrade
Offer
 News reaches us of an
offer, from Microsoft, for what looks like a cheap upgrade to Windows 8 for
just £14.99. It’s open to anyone buying a qualifying Windows 7 PC between now
and January 31st next year. All you
have to do at this stage is pop along to the Microsoft website and register your interest, with
details of your email and phone number; when you’ve bought your PC you’ll be asked to enter a few more
details. The offer is valid in over 130 countries, on all supported language
versions of W7. You’ll get the Windows 8 Pro version, in the form of a
download. A disc based copy will cost you extra. You should read the FAQ if you
are currently using W7 with a touch screen – it seems there may be some
compatibility and performance issues with the new OS -- and you would be well
advised to check the W8
minimum system requirements to make sure the PC you have, or are about to
get is up to the job.
1106
Radiation Detector Phone
Announced in Japan
 Well it had to happen and
the first company to come up with mobile phone with a built-in radiation
dosimeter is the Japanese network operator Softbank. The smartphone in question
is a Pantone 5 107SH, made by Sharp and powered by the Android operating
system. The dosimeter feature is enabled by pressing a button on the handset,
with the reading being shown on the display in microSieverts/hr. The measurement
can also be geotagged and uploaded to a website which will eventually build up
a radiation map. This is not the first attempt to combine mobile phones and
radiation detectors and in the past year there has been a flurry of add-on
devices, and even some dubious apps that use smartphone cameras to detect radioactivity.
The latter requires the camera lens to be covered and the brief flashes of
light, caused by gamma particles interacting with the camera chip, are counted
to produce a reading. All of these devices and apps are pretty much next to
useless for any serious health or safety purposes, and the readings they generate
are virtually meaningless without specialist knowledge and training. They are also
generally incapable of measuring the tiny amounts of radioactivity released in
the environment by the Fukishima accident, beyond the well-defined exclusion
zone, but the Japanese now have a deep distrust of the authorities and the
media and naturally fearful of a reoccurrence so the Pantone will probably sell
well. There’s also likely to be a demand from the worried well and gadget
freaks outside of Japan, so if you are interested pop over to our partner
website anythingradioactive.
0406
May
Samsung Pencil In New Transistors
 As you doubtless know the
modern era owes everything to tiny little electronic devices called transistors
– basically switches with no moving parts – and they in turn owe everything to
the humble and plentiful element silicon. In the 60 odd years since this
remarkable invention numerous materials have been found to have so-called
semiconducting properties, in fact the very first transistors used exotic
germanium, but now Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology has come with a
new family of devices, based on the wonder material Graphene. It’s essentially
graphite, also known as pencil lead, but in super thin slices, just a few
molecules thick, and that’s good news for transistor manufacturing. The problem
until now has been that the thickness of the materials in silicon chips has
become a major limiting factor, determining the speed at which they can
operate, and the unwanted heat they generate. Graphene looks like it could be a
way forward, electrons move through it more easily, but because it’s not a
semiconductor, turning it into a switch has proved to be difficult. Samsung’s
solution has been to go back to the drawing board, and come up with a device
called a Barristor, which switches a current on and off using a technique
called a graphene-silicon Schottky Barrier. As usual, don’t get too excited,
but file it away, just in case and if it does happen, you’ll be able to say
where you heard of it first…
2805
Early June Date for Windows
8 Release Preview
 Stand by your modems; Microsoft
has announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview edition will be available for
download in the first week of June. Those of you that have been following the
saga will probably already be playing with the first Consumer Preview edition,
which went live in February. This new version will be as near as dammit the
final polished edition of the operating system, and probably the last stage
before the official launch, which is stil on course for October. As with all
preview versions it should be fully functional – barring any last minute bugs
and wrinkles – and it will almost certainly auto destruct, or at least run but
with greatly reduced functionality as soon as the retail program goes on sale
and PCs and laptops start shipping, so don’t get too attached…
2105
It’s Not All Black and
White
 Why, you might ask is one
of the world’s top camera makers going to all of the trouble of producing a
digital camera that only shoots in black and white? You might also be curious
as to how it can be that the Leica M Monochrom costs a touch over six grand,
which would be a pretty penny for a top-end colour camera. Well, the Leica name
and legendary build quality probably accounts for a fair whack of the price. The
camera’s 18 megapixel sensor and top grade lens doesn’t come cheap either but
the key to this camera’s market is the target audience, which is likely to be
well heeled professionals and artists, keen to explore the currently trendy world
of black and white photography. There’s no denying the special quality of black
and white prints, that colour film and image sensors just cannot capture and
until now the only way to get the real thing has been to use photographic film.
Now there’s an alternative, and we wouldn’t mind betting that before long
others will be jumping aboard this potentially lucrative bandwagon.
1405
Better Batteries, But Not
Yet…
 Several promising new
battery technologies may (or may not) provide the long awaited solution to
powering our gadgets and vehicles, without relying on rare and expensive
materials. First up hails from the Tokyo University of Science where Shinichi
Komaba has developed a battery using the abundant element Sodium. Its used in the
manufacture of electrodes, together with other common materials, including Iron
Oxide and Manganese Oxide. The energy density said to be in the same ballpark
as Lithium Ion, which basically means that cells can store roughly the same
amount of power for a given weight of battery, but inevitably there is a
problem. Prototype cells have demonstrated a very rapid aging effect and the
capacity of the battery decreases significantly after just 30 charge cycles.
Contender number two comes from chemist Christopher Johnson working at the
Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. His battery brew uses layers of Vanadium
Pentoxide in a Sodium cell’s positive electrode. This concoction apparently improves
both energy density and cell life, which is increased to 200 charge cycles. Clearly
there’s still plenty of work to be don but if only by sheer weight of numbers,
one day one of these battery technologies will make it out of the lab.
0605
April
New Glass Clearly Better
 You would be forgiven for
thinking that there wasn’t much left in the way of new developments for glass, a
material that has been around in one form or another, for more than 3500 years,
but needless to say you would be wrong. The white coats over at MIT been
tinkering with something called surface nanotextures and come up with a new
glass that produces virtually no reflections, and as an added bonus it’s
self-cleaning and resistant to fogging. Already the possible applications are
lining up, everything from smartphone and tablet PC screens, optical
instruments and car windscreens, not to mention windows. The solar panel industry
is also very interested because panels can lose as much as 40 percent
efficiency in six months due to a build up of crud and dirt. The basic trick is
to start with regular glass, coat it with a photo-resistive chemical and expose
it to light, though a grid pattern which results in the surface being covered
in microscopic cones; you can read more and see a video on the MIT
News website
3004
Raspberry Pi Secrets
Revealed
We’ve been following the
fort unes of the Raspberry Pi cheap as chips computer for some time and it has
been going from strength to strength, with demand outstripping supply. So much
so, in fact that they’ve been turning up on ebay, in some cases selling for more
than eight times it’s official selling price of £20.00. For those unwilling to
pay through the nose for the tiny PC, and prepared to wait a little longer, new
stocks are on the way, and you can keep yourself amused and figure out new
applications by pouring over the computer’s circuit diagrams, which have just
been published on the Raspberry Pi website.
2304
Thunderbolt Heading For PC
 Moving data quickly from
one place to another has always been something of a challenge, and who amongst
us can forget the excruciatingly slow serial busses of yore? Then in the mind
1990s along came USB, with what seemed like blindingly fast transfer rates of
1.5Mbits/second. It wasn’t long before the speed was upped to 12Mb/s, then in
the late 90s we welcomed FireWire and USB 2, which cracked along at almost
500Mb/s. USB 3 is now rolling out with transfer rates of up to 5Gb/s but even
that seems fairly leisurely beside LightPeak or Thunderbolt as it is now known,
which manages up to 10Gb/sec. Thunderbolt was developed by Apple and following
its launch last year has only been available on its own high-end systems but
the word on the street, courtesy of Gizmodo, is that it will soon be available
to PC users. This follows the development of Windows-compatible Thunderbolt
mass storage devices from LaCie. To put 10Gb/sec into perspective, a full
length HD movie could be transferred from one box to another in under 30
seconds. However, you might want to hang on a bit for a new interconnect
technology, currently in development by Intel. This uses a mixture of optical
and silicon technology to achieve speeds of 50Gb/s.
1604
Kindle Sees The Light…
 Whilst we’re waiting for
Amazon to pull its finger out and launch its Kindle Fire Android tablet in the
UK, news reaches us, via TechCrunch, of yet another new Kindle e-book, this
time with an illuminated display. As owners of first and second generation
Kindles will know all too well, the excellent e-ink display looks fine in good
light, but when the sun goes down, so does the book, unless you invest in one
of those clumsy add-on lights on a stick. The new Kindle’s touchscreen is said
to have a soft blue-white backlight, which should be restful on the eyes (and
no so annoying for bedfellows, trying to get to sleep…). The device is still in
development, but from the photographs it looks like it’s not far off production
and there is even talk of a launch later this year. We’re not getting too
excited, past experience of the Kindle rumour mill has shown it to be a tad
optimistic, when it comes to timings but it’s an inevitable development and it should
be one worth waiting for.
0904
Mac Attack From China?
 According to Gizmodo two
new trojans have been identified that target Apples famously virus proof iOS
operating system. Currently there’s no need to panic, the few Apple infections
that have been identified rarely spread very far due to the small user base and
near bullet-proof security, but these ones are different. They exploit an old
security loophole familiar to Windows users, and ride in on the back of Word
documents. Once the document is opened the virus is activated and opens a
backdoor to a remote server where hackers can, in theory, steal data or allow
them to plant more dangerous viruses and malware. The fact that the backdoor
leads to servers in China, and the infected computers discovered so far belong
to pro-Tibetan organisations has led to speculation that trojans were devised
with political motivation or government backing.
0204
March
Wheely Good Idea…
 Driving a car used to be so
simple; basically all you had to do was keep your eyes on the road, and try not
to hit anything. The biggest distraction was changing stations on the radio.
It’s a lot harder nowadays, as well as all the steering and gear changing you
have to contend with texting and chatting on your mobile, listening out for the
GPS, and keeping an eye on the car’s multi mode status displays. It’s all
getting too much, no wonder drivers keep bumping into each other. The good
folks at AT&T labs are trying to help. They’ve just come up with a
vibrating steering wheel to make GPS navigation easier. The idea is actuators
inside the wheel produce a pattern of vibrations that represent a right or left
turn; there’s also talk of it being used to warn the driver that they are getting
too close to the car in front. It all sounds very clever, except this seems to assume
that drivers hold their steering wheels two-handed at the approved ten-to-two
position. Good luck with that one! Here’s a thought, how about putting those
actuators in the seat? Left bum cheek turn left, right bum cheek turn right,
and we’ve got a really good suggestion for a way to get drivers to slow down or
stop quickly…
2603
Google Takes To The Skies
 If you have been wondering
where and how Google are going to strike next, then wonder no longer. Following
its recent buyout of travel technology company ITA Software, it has now got its
beady eye on air travel. Google Flight
Search is currently only useful for flights that depart from the US, but it
now covers 500 airports worldwide, listing all of the flights for a given route
on a particular date, along with the lowest available fares. There is little doubt
such a powerful tool will eventually be rolled out for an international
audience, and rival services, like Kayak should now be officially concerned.
1903
Blood Sweat and Transistors
 We’re not sure how and why
researchers at Tel Aviv University came to combine blood, milk and mucus,
probably better not to ask, but they did, and in doing so managed to create a
semiconductor material. Essentially it can be used to produce electronic
components like transistors and displays, and as an added bonus they should be
biodegradable, which could conceivably help with the growing waste problem
associated with electronic wizwangs. The protein in blood’s ability to absorb
oxygen means it can be doped with other materials to give it semi-conducting
properties. Mucus has the ability to combine with fluorescent dyes, that can be
combined to produce white light, and milk proteins are used to create strong
fibres, used in the construction of the transistors. Needless to say this is
all a very early stage of development but given the huge costs involved in
manufacturing silicon-based semiconductors, and the abundance of milk and
bodily fluids this seems like a potentially fruitful, if not messy field of
research.
1203
W8 Compatibility Checker
 Remember all the fuss when
Microsoft introduced Vista? A lot of manufacturers were caught on the hop and
many applications and peripherals simply wouldn’t work with the new operating
system. Microsoft leaned a few lessons and the transition from Vista to W7
wasn’t anything like as bad. Nevertheless a lot of people got caught out so
this time, with W8 due to launch in the next few months it’s time once again to
check if your software and hardware is up to it. Microsoft has just announced
the all-new Windows
8 Compatibility Checker. It’s the most comprehensive one yet, covering
hundreds of the most popular products, and fingers crossed, it looks like it’s
going to be fairly painless changeover with a lot of green ‘compatible’ ticks.
There are a fair few exceptions, though, some older printers and multi-function
devices could be a problem for example, and if a manufacturer chooses not to
develop a suitable driver you could be stuck so if you are planning to get a
new PC, or upgrade in the next year or so now is the time to find out how much
of an upheaval it’s likely to be.
05/03/12
February
Badger Blues
 It’s a worrying times for
small furry animals in Dorset. Sculptor David Cranmer has an unusual use for
dead badgers, as you can see. It’s called a Badgermin, a variation on a
theramin electronic instrument, which produces spooky sounds when you wave your
hands near a pair of antennas. Inset in this deceased creature is a PaiA
Theramic unit, you can see the two antennas, one emerging from Brock’s rear
end; the other appears to be connected to its neck. We’re fairly confident the
beast was properly taxidermically prepared before modification, if only because
it would smell terrible, and you shouldn’t place electrical devices close to
damp objects. You can hear it in action on the Nervoussquirrel
website, and the bit about it being a live sett, is their joke, not ours…
2702
The W8 is Over for the Logo
 By now we know pretty much
everything there is to know about the up-coming Windows 8 operating system,
everything that is, except what the logo looks like. Well, wonder no more, here
it is. It has been designed to fit in with the Windows 8 ‘Metro’ styling theme
that we’re starting to see all over the place (brightly coloured square tiles),
and for those of you who are interested in such things, the company behind the
new logo is the Pentagram Design Agency.
As you may expect much time, thought and effort went into it. In fact
there’s a whole philosophy behind the concept, and not just the W8 logo, but
the whole series. You can read all about it, and relive the glories of previous
Windows logos on Sam Moreau’s Windows
Blog.
2002
Shaping Up Nicely
 You’ve doubtless heard
about 3D printing, where objects can be made using a clever widget that builds
up shapes, by depositing thin layers of molten plastic? Well, here’s a nifty
gadget that does the opposite. It’s the Roland iModela,
essentially a miniature milling machine for the home. The idea is you pop in a
chunk of balsa wood, foam, wax or plastic and a high speed tool, controlled by
your PC, running computer aided design (CAD) software, carves it into the
required shape. These can be as simple or complex as you require, up to and
including three dimensional models and components. Of course milling machines
are not exactly new and they’ve been used in industry for a century or more,
and automated and computer controlled machines have been around for at least 50
years but the idea of having one on your kitchen table is rather novel. It’s
not cheap, though, and you can say goodbye to the thick end of £600 for this
one. Nevertheless you get a fair bit for your money, it comes with basic 3D
design software to get you started, it has a milling area of 86 x 55 x 25mm, the
spindle supports a wide range of readily available tools. It also comes
supplied in its own carry case and you can join a growing community of users,
to share ideas and designs.
0601
January
Get Your Slice of Pi
 Start saving your pennies, and I mean pennies,
because the remarkable Raspberry Pi
has just gone into production. In case you haven’t heard of it, Raspberry Pi is
a computer, but not just any computer; it’s not much larger than a pack of 20
cigarettes, yet it packs the same kind of capabilities and performance as full
size laptops and desktops. What’s more it’s British and when it goes on sale in
the next few days (hopefully) it will be selling for under £20.00. More
importantly there are very high hopes that it will introduce a new generation
of youngsters to the art of programming, and creating their own software,
rather than just learning how to use ready-made applications, which is basically
all they are taught to do in schools these days. It sounds incredible but
Raspberry Pi takes advantage of advances in phone processor and video chips,
which means an entire computer, including sound and video adaptors, USB, SD
card, network and HDMI connections can be fitted onto a board measuring just 54
x 85cm. It has been designed to use existing Linux distributions and new
versions have been developed to take advantage of the PCs ARMv6 architecture.
If you go to the website you can see demos of it doing an excellent job
rendering high definition video, as well as doing more mundane tasks like word
processing and games. For less than twenty quid don’t expect a case, and you’ll
have to provide your own keyboard, mouse, monitor and power supply, but what
really matters is that there’s a whole community of users growing up around
this little device. It’s going to be big in education, robotics, multimedia, in
fact any field that can be thought of, and quite a few that haven’t yet, and if
it all works out it British programmers could once again be showing the world
how it’s done.
3001
Scanning For Shooters
 Gun-toting villains, footpads and
ne’er-do-wells take heed. The constabulary may soon have the technology to
detect your firearms while you are walking down the street, without frisking
you, from a distance of almost 5 metres or 16 feet. The device, reported in the
New York Times, works by detecting distortions in the natural radiation field
that all living things generate. This radiation is electromagnetic in nature
and in what’s known as the terrahertz region. It passes through cloths but is
blocked by dense objects, like guns. The scanner is currently being tested by
the New York Police Department, in collaboration with the Pentagon. It was
developed by the US Department of Defense and is still in prototype form and is
currently about the size of a large flat-screen TV, but it is bound get smaller
and the NYPD reckons the range could eventually be extended to 25 metres (80
feet). It’s not going to be deployed just yet, though, and there will be the
inevitable invasion of privacy claims, not to mention possible health concerns
as some long-range terrahertz imaging devices – and it’s not clear if this is
one of them – also emit radiation.
2301
Dorky Door Chime for Trekkies
 The big question is why has it taken 45 years
for someone to come up with a Star Trek themed door chime? Well, the long wait
is over and now you can have your very own Enterprise wall panel. It’s suitably
futuristic and incorporates a motion sensor, that makes the classic ‘swoosh’
door sound, or if you like, the strident Red Alert sound to warn you if those
pesky Klingons are dropping by to borrow yet another cup of sugar. It’s the
real deal too, officially licensed by the Federation, or at least the people
who give the nod to these sorts of things, and the bad news, well it doesn’t
run on Dilithium crystals or anti-matter, just 6 rather boring, and decidedly
old fashioned AA cells. Not sure when we in the UK will be fortunate enough to
get our hands on one but if you’re in a hurry you could try ordering one from
the US online store at thinkgeek.com,
where it will cost you a mere 30 galactic credits (or US dollars if you’re ordering
from Earth).
1601
Last Gasp For IE6?
 It's been around for more than 10 years but the
time has finally come to say goodbye (and good riddance) to Internet Explorer
6. It's current share of the world browser market has dropped to 7.7 percent,
down from 12 percent last year, but the aim is to get it to below 1 percent,
which come as a great relief to web designers everywhere. They waste an
enormous amount of time ensuring that sites remain compatible with the old
browser, and you won't need reminding that it had its fair share of security
loopholes and bugs. The move to wean users away from IE6 and on to more
advanced, and safer browsers began in earnest last year. Now there's a website
dedicated to tracking its demise, called IE6Countdown, which shows the number
of users worldwide, and where they live. For the record the good guys are
Norway (0.2%), Finland (0.5%) and the US (0.9%). The UK isn't too bad at 1.4%,
but there's clearly still some work to be done in India (5.4%), South Korea
(7.2%), and naughty old China who can't seem to give it up and are bumping
along the bottom with a whopping 25.2%
share.
0901
Top Telly For Vegas
 About this time of year the electronics
industry gathers in Las Vegas to show off their wares at the annual CES
(Consumer Electronics Show) and as usual it's a bean feast of new and
nonsensical gadgets that sooner or later, may or may not make it into our
homes. There doesn't seem to be any big surprises this time around but new
tellies are always good for a few headlines, and this one from LG is bound to
get noticed. It's a monster 84-incher, and he LCD screen has a whopping 3840 x
2160 pixel display, so -called Ultra Definition' or '4k', which is just the job
for a spot of really convincing 3D. SO far it's only in prototype form but
these things have a habit of making it onto the shelves with a year or so, so
start saving now, not just for the TV, but the bigger house you'll need to put
it in...
0201
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