Fancy getting all very Mission-Impossible at home or round about? Concerned that you need to protect yourself against International terrorists, your elder brother or members of a rival spy gang?
Wild Planet, based in San Francisco, will be able to fulfil your paranoia/technology dreams with their Lazer Tripwire. From the product name, it’s not exactly surprising that it act as a tripwire, but uses a laser to do it.
Using a low-power beam of light that won’t burn you retina out even if you look directly into it (not a laser then), for detection, the three supplied devices clamp on to relevant surfaces. Each of these units has an angle-able transmit and receive heads, so lining them up creates an invisible barrier around whatever is inside. As you all know from the movies, breaking the beam will set of the alarm, alerting you to the intrusion.
It’s an interesting adoption of technology that is used to protect really rather serious things, like armed fighter planes sitting on a runway and power stations, as Rayonet from UK company, Integrated Design, does.
Clearly devices like Rayonet are a little different in that they use infrared light and have a _little_ more sophistication in them, like the ability to ignore birds flying through the beam, but the Lazer Tripwire fundamentally uses the principles.
Michael Bystram of Integrated Design tells me that the initial ideas for Rayonet started 24 years ago, With a considerable step forward in intelligence around 8 years ago. Jump to now, and there’s a toy using the same principles.
The Lazer TripWire comes from Wild PLanet’s Spy Gear equipment range which, if I was in the process of going through childhood, I would been quite obsessed with getting hold of (frankly I’m pretty tempted now).
Wild Planet
Watch the Lazer TripWire Tv advert
Integrated Design’s Rayonet
The Bush administration doesn’t appear to have taken in to account any of this, and all of a sudden are interested in the views of the people. Wouldn’t it have been great if they’d listened to the view of the people before invading Iraq.
Toshiba claim a first with their release of what they claim is the first commercially released Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) hard drive.
They’re also using the drive to make their Gigabeat music player sexier. The introduction of PMR technology into the Gigabeat F41 not only gives them 40Gb of storage, from a previous 20Gb, but lets them shrink the thickness by 3m.
How does it work its magic? Today’s drives typically use Longitudinal Magnetic Recording (LMR). In simple terms, the difference between the two is LMR has the magnetic field pointing either left or right, while PMR has them pointing up or down. This helps to achieve higher and more stable recording densities, and in turn improves storage capacity. The images from Toshiba should help make it a bit clearer (if you happen to speak Japanese).
While the theory of PMR has been around for a number of years, Toshiba has taken 1-2 quarters longer than they’d expected in getting the MK4007GAL to market.
A couple of stories have been circulating about the BBC of late, both concerning their adoption of digital TV.
We’ve all known for a long time that TV as we knew-and-loathed-it was under pressure, as people discovered there were things more rewarding in their lives than passively sitting in a darkened room, being bathed in light from a box in the corner of the room, watching whatever the channel controller decided to ‘entertain’ them with.
In 2003 the BBC did some far more interesting research in this area. Of course they found that numbers of hours watched dropped, but what we found significant was that those hours that were being spent in front of the TV, weren’t dedicated to watching it.
After a period of speculation, a press release on UK cable company NTL’s Web site makes it official that they intend to move their customers to broadband connection “up to 10Mb as standard.”
We think it may be some time before this actually gets to the customers, as NTL are also talking of introducing an interim service, ‘The Turbo Button,’ which will burst a connection to higher speeds, when customers are downloading bandwidth heavy content like video.
Online broadband film distributer, and latterly video content provider CinemaNow, has announced that they will be carrying some high-definition from HDNet on their Internet to PC delivery platform. It’s the first time that HDNet’s content has been made available on-demand through an online broadband service.
Mark Cuban, the CEO of HDNet, has been slowly gathering HD content to the point where HDNet now lay claim to having more original high-definition content than any other network. We at Digital-Lifestyles.info have had our eye on him for years, as we think he’s a smart cookie. He not only spots upcoming trends, but turns them into businesses. He made a fortune when he sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for billions of dollars at the peak of the market.
The long-awaited results from the Welsh Digital TV trial were published today.
The digital signal was switched on in November 2004, running simultaneously with current analogue for three month.
Transmission and Coverage – No one lost their TV service during the trial. Only three homes, which were previously in poor reception areas, could not receive the digital service and these were given a digital satellite service. Broadband was introduced during the trial and is seen as an alternative form of delivery to satellite.
Content – Having an EPG went down well with the residents, particular when they used it to record programs on their PVR. The trialists also enthused about the ability to receive extra TV channels – after all the major benefit to consumer if the expanded choice they will be given.