September 30, 2013

With no keyboard or monitor and costing a piffling £21.60 ($34.40) the idea is that the Raspberry Pi will help overcome the lack of programming skills which has arisen in recent years. An even cheaper £16 ($25) version will go on sale later this year. The Pi seems to have been a hit so far, with the website of one supplier crashing owing to heavy traffic only hours after the launch (perhaps they need better programming skills?). Running on Linux, the Pi can be linked to a common or garden monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc. It also features an ethernet port, for high-speed internet connectivity. The makers’ hope is that the fanfare surrounding the Pi, which has in turn led to a huge community of supporters and developers, will in turn lead to an explosion in new capabilities and programmes for the device. The Gnome can hardly wait for the next piece of fruit.

OPEN WATER

Despite his unending appreciation of the humble garden pond, the Gnome, let it be said, is not a big swimmer. What with the unfathomable rise in the popularity of triathlons and other extreme open water challenges, a need (apparently) for waterproof GPS tracking devices has arisen. Behold the Hydro Tracker GPS, made by water sports tech operation FINIS. The waterproof device attaches to your goggles (snazzy!) and then uses GPS technology to create a map of where you have doggie-paddled, and it also records performance data.

Once your quintuple triathlon is complete, data can be downloaded from the Hydro Tracker and your route can be viewed on Google Maps, in map or satellite settings. The Gnome rather thought that all water looked much the same from space, but there you have it. Apparently this is useful, however, because information such as speed and distance travelled can be pinpointed from any spot on the route and compared with other races or training. There’s also a free online log to monitor your progress. You can use it on dry land also, naturally.

R-APP-ID EYE MOVEMENT

The Yumemiru app for iOS, like a lot of other apps, detects when you enter REM. However, rather than simply monitor you, Yumemiru aims to actually direct what you dream. The user can preselect the sort of dream they would like to have (options include the likes of flying, becoming rich, and of course romance) and the app with then play a soundtrack designed to invoke those sorts of dreams. Yumemiru is already available, but sadly only in Japanese at the moment. Hopefully more languages are to follow – the Gnome would definitely like the ‘walking through a forest’ sound, for obvious reasons.

SNEAKY

The Nike+ system has been around for a long time, but Nike+ Basketball and Nike+ Training are set to expand the system to other sports. The systems make workouts more ‘engaging and fruitful’, it is claimed. A pressure sensor that is built into the trainers measures movements throughout a game or workout and transmits the data wirelessly to a smartphone equipped with the Nike+ app. The data is then fed to the athlete in order to track his performance, identify areas of improvement, and share these scintillating updates with other athletes and friends.

In “Track My Game” mode, Nike + Basketball measures how high a player jumps, and how speedy his movements are. Another mode allows players to superimpose their performance data on a video and share it with friends via social networks. Gnomes, sadly, are not predisposed to basketball talent. Nike + Training is similar in design but is more geared toward the needs of workouts. Using an app it provides visual cues directing the user to perform short, focused workouts for speed and fitness. The magic shoes send data back to your phone and users can develop their own training programs through the app and can share and motivate each other via an online community. The Gnome’s not built for basketball, sadly – when they develop one for fly-fishing, come back to me.

BEAM ME UP

Samsung has released an updated version of the Galaxy Beam, a smartphone with a built-in projector. It can project pictures up to 50-inches wide onto walls, ceilings (or anything flat, in fact) via a 15 lumens projector.

The updated version of the projector phone will use Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and has a 5-megapixel built-in camera, and has a 1GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of internal memory, and a 2000mAh battery. Just make sure you you don’t leave your projector switched on if you’re looking at anything personal.

WHAT A WHOPPER

Unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, all eyes were on the 41-megapixel Nokia smartphone called the 808 Pureview. The 808 Pureview’s low-light performance is said to trounce the competition, and its image compression capabilities make sharing pictures easier.

By all reports the phone is extremely chunky and heavy, but the quality of the pictures is variously described as ‘astonishing’ and ‘breath-taking’. But commentators suggest that Nokia has somewhat boobed by using Symbian, its own operating platform, instead of Android. Nokia hopes that the Pureview may help it clamber back towards the heights it once attained in the global mobile phone market – it is certainly no secret that it has been left floundering in the wake of Google and Apple in recent years. Last month Nokia announced it was to stop manufacturing mobile phones in Europe and moved all production to Asia to save money. Let’s hope the Pureview is not the prelude to Nokia’s swansong.

NO MORE DELHI BELLY

Should you, as the Gnome often does, find yourself on a minibreak in Mexico and wonder if that next tasty taco is to be served up with a nice dose of Montezuma’s Revenge, worry no more and behold the phone equipped with a bacteria-detecting scanner, which researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have rustled up.

The device attaches to the phone’s camera and incorporates semiconducting quantum dots combined with a grouping of glass capillary tubes (keep up) that contain antibodies. When E. coli bacteria from liquid samples are placed in the scanner, they are captured on the capillary surface, where they get excited by the light from built-in LED bulbs. This reaction causes the quantum dots to emit florescent light, which is magnified by a lens located beneath the capillaries, and then captured by the phone’s camera. The amount of E. coli present is shown by measuring the amount of light emitted by the excited bacteria.

GUTTER PRESS

Have you, like the Gnome, ever wondered whether the plethora of virtually identical free newspapers in London and other cities leads to a huge litter problem and is a total waste of an awful lot of tree life? Well, the City of London has awarded a company called Renew a 21-year contract to run a digital news service via a network of…bins. Each bin has two LCD screens providing updates on what’s hot and what’s not in the City, as well celeb gossip tidbits and other newsworthy bulletins. They’re already there, within the Square Mile area of London, and numbers will rise to 100 by May and 200 in July, with the target of the bins reaching the consciousness of three million City types by then.

The daily news service will run from 6am to just before midnight on working days. The service can also be used to alert and update city-goers to transport disruptions or civil emergencies. The company has also announced that enhanced wireless connectivity will be provided to the bins to provide interaction opportunities between mobile devices and the units, for those of you who deeply hanker after interacting with rubbish. The scheme is, apparently, set to go global.

On a green note, the recycling bin part of each unit is expected to collect in the region of 1.5 tonnes of recyclable material (presumably paper from well-thumbed newspapers) every year.

GOOGLE EYES

The Gnome has heard on the down low that Google is developing and will aim to sell by the end of this year Android-powered glasses which will feature a head-up display and have wireless connectivity to make apps and data available in the wearer’s field of vision. Apparently passers-by will hardly be able to tell that the glasses are not a pair of regular sporty shades, but are in fact the cutting edge of technology. Reports say that the glasses will have a 3G or 4G data connection, a motion sensor (a nod’s different to a wink in this case) and GPS. Presumably the new privacy policy will apply to that GPS data and to those nods and winks as well?

WORLD ECONOMIC FUTURE?

The Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies at the World Economic Forum has just published a list of the top ten technologies that it believes will have the greatest social, economic and environmental impact on the state of the world in 2012. They include: the development of greater information processing tools (informatics) to sort and value the vast quantities of information we generate every day; wireless power transmission; the development of atom-sized products and technologies (nanotechnology); high energy batteries; and on a more general level, the harnessing of carbon dioxide (the most abundant gas in our atmosphere) to create greener carbon-based products, and possibly fuels. All these are distinct realities which have been or will be developed to a commercial level this year.

AND FINALLY…

Tired of always forgetting your wireless keyboard? Leaving it on the train? In the tanning salon? Well, Erik de Nijs and Tim Smit have designed a keyboard jean. The mouse is attached by a cord and left to dangle or be stylishly tucked into your back pocket. The trousers have even got speakers. The keyboard jean is not on sale yet, but at design concept stage. Estimates are that they could cost around $400 if launched in the US. It’s the crotch aspect which perplexes the Gnome. Apparently the return key is currently right on the fly. Try a bit of touch typing on the metro and one is likely to find oneself having a brush with the law. “But my jeans really are a keyboard, officer…”.

EH? WHAT’S THAT THEN?

‘LOOP’: Text-speak for ‘laughing out of politeness’. Just keeping you in the loop. LOOP.
iPad3: We have heard that Apple are announcing the release date of the iPad3 tomorrow. We will of course report on the release as soon as it occurs.

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