June 2006 – Page 8 – Digital-Lifestyles

Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders

Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders Look, we know there’s something a bit sad about wanting a PC that glows brightly with useless dials, flashing lights and obscure read outs, but we just couldn’t hide our juvenile excitement when we saw this new gizmo from Japanese manufacturer Scythe.

Available in a silver or black finish to match the PC case of your choice, Scythe’s new PowerWatch panel comes with enough buttons and dials to keep Lieutenant Uhuru busy through a Tribble onslaught.

The PowerWatch panel is a bit of a hefty beast (148×84× 71mm deep), hogging two CD/DVD-sized slots on your PC, but you sure get a lot of glowing widgets in return.

Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders The panel is dominated by a large, circular colour LCD display giving readouts for computer temperature (centigrade/Fahrenheit, with up to four temperature sensors supported), fan speed, warning temperature and current time.

As well as the built in disco, the panel also adds two of the new PoweredUSB 2.0 ports and a card reader supporting SD and miniSD cards, MMC, RS-MMC and smart media, Compact flash, micro drive and Memory Stick (PRO and DUO).

Wrapping up the feature set, the Windows Me/2000 and XP-compatible panel also includes a microphone in/ audio out connector.

Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders Pricing and availability to be announced. We’ll take two please!

Scythe [Japanese]

Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders PoweredUSB
In case you hadn’t heard of it before (to be honest, we hadn’t), PoweredUSB is an enhanced form of USB that comes with two additional wire pairs.

These wires get past the current USB power limitations and can carry enough juice to power certain components – thus reducing cable clutter.

That all sounds great of course, but only if enough PoweredUSB peripherals start appearing – and we can’t say we’ve seen many in the consumer maket.

PoweredUSB

Suekage SOIOS Panoramic 55-Cam 360 Webcam

Suekage SOIOS Panoramic 55-Cam 360 Webcam Japanese manufacturers Suekage are hoping that their new SOIOS 55-Cam 360’s unique ability to provide panoramic viewing angles and then relay them to 3G phones may make them a hit in the home security market.

The curious looking camera (it looks like an overgrown egg-timer to our eyes) offers three different vision angles; a conventional webcam ‘standard lens’ viewpoint, a panoramic 270 degrees and a complete 360 view. The system employs a CCD camera to take video images reflected on a hyperbolic mirror measuring 55mm in diameter.

Suekage’s omni-directional optical sensor (“SOIOS”) provides an ascending angle of 12 degrees and a descending angle of 50 degrees – measured vertically from the mirror’s focal point – giving a horizontal field of view over 360-degrees.

Suekage SOIOS Panoramic 55-Cam 360 Webcam Well, that’s what their blurb said, and we’re not in the mood to get out a protractor and argue the toss, but that basic principle is: big curvy mirror = 360 coverage.

The webcam hooks up to PCs through a Firewire/IEEE 1394 interface, and images can then be streamed to a website for viewing on the user’s computer or mobile phone.

Danger Will Robinson! Burglar Ahoy!
A newly developed software component (SOIOS +alpha) offers a notification system to send out security alerts.

As soon as the system spots a purloiner in da house, the system bangs out an an e-mail to your PC or mobile phone with the ability to download a 15 second video clip of the bad boy in action.

Suekage SOIOS Panoramic 55-Cam 360 Webcam The advantage of this system is that the webcam’s 360 degree all-seeing eye does away with the need for expensive motorised systems

The disadvantage is in its 0.35 megapixel sensor which is only capable of delivering low quality VGA images. So low in fact that you may only end up seeing unrecognisable blobs for faces on your fancy-pants 360 webcam.

No pricing or availability has been announced yet.

Suekage [Japanese]

Sony Alpha 100 SLR Camera Specs Leaked

Sony Alpha 100 SLR Camera Specs Leaked Some details of Sony’s eagerly-awaited debut into the dSLR market have begun to emerge online.

The Australian Digital Photography Blog website has revealed that Sony’s new Alpha 100 dDSLR will offer 10.2 million effective megapixels and be fitted with an APS-C size CCD sensor.

As previously announced, Sony’s first dSLR camera will use an updated lens mount compatible with Konica-Minolta Alpha/Maxxum/Dynax lenses, with Sony expected to reveal a slew of new Sony G lens using the highly regarded Carl Zeiss optics.

The camera is expected to carry a large 2.5 inch format Clear Photo LCD Plus Screen with AR coating and a resolution of 230,000 pixels.

The bright optical viewfinder comes with a Spherical Acute Matte screen, 20mm eye relief, 0.83x magnification, dioptre adjustment and an interesting EyeStart Auto focus.

Sony Alpha 100 SLR Camera Specs Leaked This feature – inherited from Minolta -begins autofocus and auto-exposure as soon as it detects your peeper gazing through the viewfinder. Neat

The camera is also rumoured to be incorporating Sony’s Super SteadyShot Picture Stabilisation technology, which employs horizontal and vertical motion sensors located inside the lens assembly area.

Although there’s no firm details of pricing yet, some pundits are estimating a street price of $1,000 (body only) which places it in the highly competitive enthusiast market.

Other leaked details include an Anti-dust protection system (We like these – a lot!), 1600 ISO equivalent, Burst shooting, advanced flash modes and BIONZ Image Processing Engine.

Sony Alpha 100 SLR Camera Specs Leaked The onboard high-speed autofocus is said to sport 4 focus modes – Single-shot AF; Direct Manual Focus; AF Automatic; AF Continuous – with centre-weighted, spot and 40-segment honeycomb pattern metering modes.

The Sony Alpha 100 looks to weigh in at 545g without battery, with dimensions of 94.7 x 133.1 x 71.3 mm (L x W x D).

We should point out that Sony don’t actually call it the ‘Alpha’ in print, preferring to use the arty squiggly symbol (a bit like popstar Prince and long forgotten 80s nobby band Freur), but we couldn’t be arsed to try and find that on our keyboards.

Sony is expected to make an official announcement about the Alpha 100 later this month, but if these tempting specs are on the money, Sony could be set to make a big splash in a market currently dominated by Canon and Nikon.

Digital Photography Blog
Sony dSLR

TalkTalk ‘Free’ Broadband Hits Problems

TalkTalk 'Free' Broadband Hits Problems There’s been some deep rumblings of discontent from tens of thousands of customers trying to sign up to Carphone Warehouse’s offer of “free” broadband.

It seems that the Talk Talk calls/broadband package has been the victim of its own popularity with a slipping launch date and Carphone Warehouse CEO Charles Dunstone admitting that callers faced delays in getting through to the company’s call centres.

TalkTalk 'Free' Broadband Hits Problems The TalkTalk offer gives punters unlimited landline telephone calls and broadband access for £20 per month, with a one-off £29.99 connection fee.

Carphone Warehouse had announced customers could sign up immediately to the service, which would be made available to “nearly 70 per cent of the UK population.”

Despite a promised connection date at the start of July, new customers applying for the offer have been told that they can forget all about their freebie surfing until August at the earliest.

TalkTalk 'Free' Broadband Hits Problems The Independent has reported that chatrooms have been “inundated” with punters venting their frustration over their attempts to sign up to the service, with the TalkTalk website offering a rueful apology on their website:

“Your free broadband might take a little longer to go live than we would like. There is huge demand for this amazing offer and there are lots of local difficulties to deal with, so even with our engineers going full tilt, there’ll be some customers we can’t connect immediately”

TalkTalk

Adobe NoteTag Revealed

Adobe NoteTag Revealed Adobe has made available a proof-of-concept version of their new productivity tool, NoteTag. NoteTag harnesses Web 2.0 standards (such as RSS and tags) and integrates them with social software services. It allows users to take electronic notes and share them in a multi-user, collaborative environment. NoteTag users can quickly record, assign and update tasks locally from within the Web-based system but can also access them on Blogger, Typepad and del.icio.us.

The really clever bit of NoteTag is that Blogger, TypePad and del.icio.us are the back end of the system. There are no proprietary file formats or technologies; instead, NoteTag is built on current tagging standards and so can interface with anything that supports the Atom Publishing Protocol.

NoteTag is the first release from Adobe’s Kiwi Project which aims to create rich Internet content using Flex2 technology. The software is open source and free, and the project is keen for users to feedback their experiences and comments.

Adobe NoteTag Revealed As bloggers Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel and have noted, NoteTag is somewhat complex to get up and running and needs to be hosted on a server, but its integration with Web 2 services points to interesting new directions for Adobe.

A NoteTag demo and a Kiwi Project blog are available.

Google, The Next Dark Empire? Pt2

Google, The Next Dark Empire? Pt2 Google Earth/Maps
If you haven’t heard of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) you’re not a techie. It’s the buzzword of the moment and Google Maps uses it brilliantly (Google Mail is another example). It’s pretty old technology that uses the power of the client to locally render information delivered by the server. With Google Maps the browser loads a small Javascript application and sends data/requests back to the server which then delivers the next bit of data which the client then renders i.e. moving around a map.Google Earth is the next step in actually showing satellite data of the area you’re looking at (you can see cars parked in your street). Why would they want to offer these services? More advertising. Do a map search and you can also see information on local services (or restaurants, petrol stations, bars etc).They are both very powerful, easy-to-use apps. Google Calendar
Google’s latest AJAX application, Outlook calendaring but hosted centrally so it can be accessed from anywhere. Of course it’s more than just a calendar as it allows subscription to other calendar/events, sharing of calendaring information and even mobile synchronisation.Privacy
There’s been a lot of media interest in what information Google store about you as they could abuse it and the authorities could request it to see what you’ve been doing. It’s uncertain how much information they do store, but it could be quite considerable. They actually might not know it’s you personally, but your computer. Google uses cookies which are used to track your personalisation settings, but they can store a lot more info, though Google are likely to just use the cookie as the identifier which enables them to quickly personalise things.Just looking at the information they could store when you do a search, it’s the search criteria itself, then which sites you clicked through to. But that can be combined with other info like what Google Map info you looked at, who you emailed through Google Mail and your previous search history. That may lead to a bleak picture if you’re committing illegal acts.The other side to it all is that the processing of all this information is extremely resource hungry and though Google are particularly good at correlating information, they might not bother. They will for some aspects, but most of the time it’s probably not worth it and they’ll keep succinct summarized information.If the authorities want to know what your doing, it’s actually much easier for them to go to your ISP and request the information from them (if they are running caching equipment which speeds up Web access for all users, they don’t just know what searches you’ve been doing, but every Website you’ve accessed and everything you’ve down or uploaded).The Future
Google are encroaching into territory that used to be securely within the MS domain, desktop search and now IM. In the IM market they’re using open protocols which will gather traction from both the open source community and allow interesting applications to spawn from it.With things like Google Maps/Earth, searching has been moved from the electronic (or Internet) world to the real world. Google are already toying with mobile, but you can be sure that’s the space they’ll enter next.Imagine your smartphone or PDA with a local Google application installed. As you move around, it uses location based services and delivers relevant local information straight to the device. Looking for a restaurant? It’s got Google Talk too, so you can chat or really talk to the restaurant and book a table before you get there. Google are going to dominate the desktop and the mobile space and it’ll all happen in the background.Microsoft must be quaking as Google are their biggest threat.Let’s hope the Google Empire is benevolent and doesn’t become an evil behemoth.References
GMail Drive shell extension

Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications

Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications “Would you like a single piece of sheet music that contains all your favourite pieces, and never needs to be turned over?”

Well, duh! yes, of course. No musician has ever been born who didn’t burst into a fury of invective when playing a piece from music, when the page turned itself back three seconds after you turned it over. No musician has ever been born who didn’t lose a sheet of music. No player has ever failed to snap the spine of a book of music, trying to get it to stay on the page you’re playing.

I work with e-paper – a lot. Of course, there is none on the market yet, apart from something pretty primitive from Sony and something slightly less primitive from iRex; but I spend my time playing with the products of 2008 – and this week, I got to see some of them “in the flesh” as part of a design competition at the London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. And it was astonishing to me just how many bright ideas are buried in the simple concept of an e-Page.

An e-Page is related to the concept of an e-book reader in the same way that an iPod is related to a CD player. Each is a use of e-paper, designed as part of an entire ecosphere; with authors, distributors, performers and hardware makers and customers all considered, fitted into the big picture, and happy with innovative leaps into the wonderful future.

Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications The universal piece of music wasn’t even the first prize winner in this competition. It was a contest sponsored by one of the world’s leading e-paper technology designers, Plastic Logic, which has demonstrated a flexible sheet of A5 “paper” that has the contrast and readability of real paper, the flexibility of soft cardboard, and the power consumption of a watch. And the prize went to something that is, in the end, “just a book.”

I can’t give all the secrets of the contest away; Plastic Logic is planning a press announcement for later this week, where all the short-listed entries will be showcased. My job was to be one of the judges of the competition (in my role as Founder of AFAICS Research along with my partner, Nick Hampshire, and Tony Chambers, Creative Director of Wallpaper – as well as a senior executive from Plastic Logic, and technology evangelist and financier, Herman Hauser of Amadeus Capital. They were there to make sure the technology was of value in the market, of course.

But it was a genuine eye-opener for me.

Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications When you invent a new technology, you always start off by producing something which you know has a market already, and which you think you can do better.

For example, if you wander around the woollen mills of the early industrial revolution, you’ll see machinery which faithfully replicates the actions and movements of the people who wound bobbins or spun thread. I remember seeing one room full of spindles that “walked across the room” the way a human would have done, winding up wool, then walked back to the wall pulling out a few new feet of thread, before winding up again.

Similarly, the first e-paper concepts take things which are made of paper, and where it’s more robust to use e-paper. One concept that was actually my favourite, was a replacement for tags for patients. In a sense, you could say “It gets rid of the printer” and at a simple level, that’s exactly what it does. But it does far more; because the data is held in digital form, it’s machine readable as well as machine writeable, and the whole thing becomes part of a holistic system.

After the afternoon’s judging, I went home, with my mind buzzing. We sat down and had an impromptu Board Meeting of AFAICS Research, and hopefully, over the next few weeks, I’ll be able to pass on some of our ideas. But the nub of it is: “We really need to start planning the e-Page industry!” because if we don’t, we’re going to end up with a hundred pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, none of which make up the same picture.

Personal Train Timetables Review: For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%)

Personal Train Timetables For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%) If you’re a regular train traveller across the UK, or you’re planning a holiday involving lots of different journeys, keeping track of all the various train times can be a bit of a pain.

Normally, you’d have to lug around a bag full of separate timetables or fork out for those spoddy jumbo timetable books often seen in the clammy paws of trainspotters, but thanks to the cunning skills of the German railway Website bahn.de, you can download customised timetables direct to your PC, phone or Palm handheld.

Setting up individual timetables is simplicity itself – just type in your start and destination stations and then select the date period you want journey information on.

Then tick off what days of the week you want included in your timetable along with the outward/return journey times (or select ‘whole day’ for the all trains) and select what modes of travel you want included or excluded from your file.

Next, you have to you choose what format you want your timetable in: PDF, PDB (for Palm handhelds) and J2ME for Java mobiles, downloadable as a zip file or via a WAP URL.

Personal Train Timetables For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%) Then it’s a case of bashing the ‘create’ buttom and waiting for a few minutes as the Teutonic technlogoy does it thing, before being presented with links to your timetable (you can elect to download the timetable directly from the site or have the files emailed to you).

Free Palm viewer
Palm users can also download a highly functional free custom viewer called, appropriately enough, Personal Viewer, created by the German company that powers the timetable engine, HaCon.

Personal Train Timetables For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%) This small download provides a simple interface serving up enough timetable-related data to give train buffs a moist spot or two.

Users can store as many timetables as they like on their Palm (the files can also be run from the card to save space), with the tabbed interface letting travellers select their journey and time of travel and then see available trains, journey details and stops on the way – there’s even an indication whether snacks will be available on the selected train!

We’ve been using this program on our Palm handheld for years, and can thoroughly recommend it – especially as it’s totally FREE!

Overall score: 85%

Personal Timetable

BBC World Cup Online Via Broadband

BBC World Cup Online Via Broadband The BBC Sport Website will be carrying all of the World Cup 2006 football matches – Live. It will be only open to UK broadband users (or non-UK clever clogs who can set up a proxy or two).

Not content to having such a major, big ticket event being carried online, broadband uses will have the advantage of being able to listen to live commentary from Radio Five Live, while reading the kick-by-kick accounts in text.

BBC World Cup Online Via Broadband Panic in the network departments of companies around the UK will be settling in tomorrow morning as they realise quite how many of the employees will be sneaking a watch of the matches while at work. We suspect that bosses will be sanctioning, or possibly even buying TV for the staff to watch, rather than have their networks melt around them.

The BBC are keen to point out that this won’t be the first time they’ve shown football or even sports events online. The final of the Club World Championship between Liverpool and Sao Paulo was shown in 2005, as was the Athens 2004 Olympics. They also plan to stream Wimbledon for the first time this year.

While this is clearly a major headline grabber, we do wonder how many people will be actually be watching the games on their computer. What is more certain is that not many will be using it as their major TV source (except us of course). It’s more likely that they’d just run it alongside their TV.

The BBC isn’t having it all their own way. We know of several National newspapers and some local papers that will be sending journalists out to the World Cup to file video reports. This World Cup will be the most tech’d up so far.

BBC Worldcup

Google, The Next Dark Empire?

Google, a name synonymous with Internet searching, is now permeating the desktop. Currently it’s the PC (i.e. Windows environment) they’re moving into, but Apple Macs and even Linux are the likely next moves.

Microsoft (MS) has traditionally owned the operating system (OS) and many of the applications, but Google’s new tools allow searching in that space without having to directly access any of the aging empire’s software directly.

Google Desktop Search
The newest version (2) has the option of a sidebar or deskbar and searches can be entered directly into these. It also installs a search bar into Outlook. It’s possible to directly search items using these without ever going through the Windows “Start” menu. Whereas MS has had tools such as Lookout (actually produced by another company, which MS bought) which allowed searching in Outlook, it’s no longer needed as Google does a better job and searches more file types.

There are potential privacy concerns as Google will search Email, Chats, Web history, Media files, Text, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Journal and other files and send relevant info back to Google, however that can be turned off.

Once Desktop is started it sits there a while locally indexing the info and then searches are very fast, new files are indexed as they are created or arrive etc. Google Talk
Though Google Desktop (ableit in an more limited form) has been around for a while, Google Talk is new and is their take on the Instant Messaging world.

The client is quite basic, it currently supports simple chat and voice. You need a Google Mail login to use the service (GMail accounts now support 2.5GB as standard) and it can check your GMail inbox. Chats can now be logged into the Google Mail system.

The voice quality is superb, Google have licensed some pretty good codecs (the software that translates analogue voice into digital form or vice versa) and it’s as good as Skype if not better.

Google Talk actually uses the XMPP open protocol (better known as Jabber) so any Jabber client can be used with Google’s server (including Gaim for various platforms and Apple’s iChat for Macs), though voice functionality is currently only available with their own client. However, that’s about to change as Google have released ‘libjingle’ a programming library which implements their voice services so others can incorporate them into their IM clients.

Jabber allows server connectivity to other networks and sure enough Google have just enabled this feature, so Google users can chat with Jabber users on other Jabber networks (if the other network connects).

Since the client is only v1, new functionality will be added as time passes, one can only wonder what but it’s likely they’ll be some form of search capabilities, maybe even adwords based on the conversations that are taking place.

Jabber itself has a lot more to offer itself, like conference rooms, which Google are sure to implement.

Google Mail
Another service that’s been around for a while (and again sparked heated privacy debates) Google Mail or GMail now offers 2.5GB of mail storage. The premise is you never delete mail, but just keep everything. All mail arrives in your INBOX, but then it can be sorted using various criteria and moved to various folders.

This concept isn’t new, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, now long gone) had this idea with their Altavista mail service, whereby all mail arrived in your INBOX and the client just put everything in the right place. Google just got it right and made it a Web service.

Some people will use all their space, but many struggle to use even a small percentage of it. An enterprising developer has made an application that allows Windows XP users to utilise it as a remote file store with drag and drop capabilities. There’s no guarantee it will keep working as Google can alter their systems at anytime. There’s a link at the end of the article.

Part two of this article will be out tomorrow.

GoogleMail
GoogleTalk