Technology Category
Independent news, views, opinions and reviews on the latest gadgets, games, science, technology and research from Apple and more. It’s about the technologies that change the way we live, work, love and behave.
Parturition chairs made child birth more comfortable
PARTURITION chairs were used by women when they were giving birth. Is sitting down more comfortable than lying down when giving birth? Are these the models for the moden day electric chair?
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Posted: 20th, November 2012 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Taliban spokesman emails contact list to the world
THE enemy might be idiots. Really. The Taliban spokesperson’s emailed press-release contained a CC to all his contacts:
The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.
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Posted: 17th, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Blending real objects with 3D prints – Lego bricks in a stone wall
MIXING 3d printing with real world objects – a sandstone block built from lego, blending real objects with 3d printing. Greg Petchkovsky does the work with Lego. But what else could this technology be used for?
Alfio has an amputed leg. He wonders if the technology could help him.
Every morning before putting on the sleeve and the prosthesis, I have a dressing bandages and cotton to absorb the bumps and shape the stump with the convex tip. This is very annoying… I tried to make the molds by dipping the residual limb in bowl of silicone. It’s not good.. Do you think that this process is applicable in my case?
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Posted: 13th, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Instagram is killing photojournalism
IN Instagram, the Devil, and You, phtographer Kenneth Jarecke muses on Instagram. The Associated Press has been experimenting with Instagram. We get them in a feed. The file contains not one memorable photo of the US election. The images are all about the photographer saying “I was there. I took this. Look how close I got to the action.” It’s enthusiastic, fan-based photography.
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Posted: 12th, November 2012 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
World’s first 3-D printing booth creates small action figures of you
THE Word’s first 3-D printing booth means you can create mini action figures of yourself.
Spoon and Tamago reports:
What’s being called the world’s first 3D printing photo booth is set to open for a limited time at the exhibition space EYE OF GYRE in Harajuku. From November 24 to January 14, 2013, people with reservations can go and have their portraits taken. Except, instead of a photograph, you’ll receive miniature replicas of yourselves.
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Posted: 10th, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Face of the day: Pain Less: the future of relief
FACE of the day: Chris Loaring, Venom extraction technician from Venomtech, a company that provides venom for research, demonstrates how to extract venom from a tarantula during the preview of Pain Less: the future of relief, a new exhibition opening at the Science Museum in central London on Thursday 8 November until July 2013. The free exhibition explores the future of pain relief and the different ways that pain management is being developed.
Last year, nearly 6 billion painkillers were sold in the UK.
Living in pain is not living much at all. It is horrendous. If the drug help – take them. And if anyone in power is reading this, legalise marijuana. It can help:
Posted: 9th, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Your Kindle books, iTune songs and online videos are worthless
I’M sure we’ve all done the trudge down to the second hand bookshop when the shelves get overloaded. Get back 50 p a copy for the old paperbacks sorta stuff. Or the equivalent at the CD shop, even bundled up the stuff and gone to a car boot sale.
The big question in this modern digital age is whether we’re going to be able to do the same with out Kindle books, online videos and MP3 music files.
The short answer is: No.
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Posted: 8th, November 2012 | In: Money, Technology, The Consumer | Comments (3)
X-Box Kinect player boots cat
IN this video a man playing Hole In The Wall on his Xbox Kinect kicks his cat into the camera filming him. The cat’s lucky. Had the camera not been there, the mighty kick would have sent it to China:
Posted: 4th, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Google Maps in everyday life
GOOGLE Maps can help you in everyday life. They can explain how things work, where you;re heading and where you are:
Posted: 2nd, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Composer turns himself into a giant baton – BBC news get the big kazoo
COMPOSER Alexis Kirke has become a “giant baton“. That’s the conductor covered in sensors inside University of Plymouth’s new wave tank. His arm movements influence the 24 giant paddles that create waves. If he moves his arms up, the music shifts in pitch. With joystick, the volume can be raised and lowered.
Presumably, if he clutches his head in his hands, it stops.
Said Dr Kirke of his Orchestra Of Waves:
“I wanted to be like King Canute, controlling the waves. ‘The show went very well and people in the audience were asking whether they could buy the music. You are in a building and hear the noise of the waves and the smell and see them crashing down. There’s no way of explaining what it’s like to have dramatic sounds synchronized with that.”
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Posted: 1st, November 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
The anti-wrinkle Honda Fit is for women only
THE Honda Fit is the car for women. (Look out for the Ford Transit Well Fit.) What makes teh Honda Fit teh car for women, then?
The effect of high concentration Plasmacluster
The “Plasmacluster” is an air-conditioning system for women.
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Posted: 31st, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Nuclear waste? Cancer? Shoot at it with the world’s biggest laser!
EVERYONE knows that laser beams are ace. They go PYOW! and ZZAP! and make things explode in a most entertaining manner.
And now, lasers are going to be aimed at things in real life thanks to the EU spending 700 million euros to build the world’s most powerful laser beam! So we’ll be seeing baddies and planets blown up, right? WRONG. This megalaser is going after nuclear waste and cancer!
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Posted: 29th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
French want Google to pay to link to websites
THE latest installment of the Gallic incomprehension of the most basic pieces of economics is that they want to charge Google for indexing the French newspapers. Something that is really very absurd indeed.
France’s new government has been making noise about forcing Google to pay for the privilege of linking to French news sites.
Erm, what?
Google responded by threatening to remove all French news sites from its index, which would presumably eliminate the 4 billion clicks it sends to those sites every year.
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Posted: 27th, October 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Facebook has kidnapped your friends and put a price on their heads
FACEBOOK has been turning down the volume. Not all those followers who have taken the time to “like” your Facebook page are seeing all of your updates. You might not have noticed.
Anorak has a pretty modest Facebook following. We never paid much interest to it until recently. But the plan, as with all small and big publishers, is to spread the word and get as many people to like the site to follow our updates. The new Anorak site (a couple of weeks away) has ben designed to be more Facebook friendly.
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Posted: 27th, October 2012 | In: Key Posts, Technology | Comments (3)
Hear the one about WWII remote controlled bomb-pigeons?
THE thing that really defines Britishness, is the man tinkering around in a shed, coming up with hare-brained ideas. And so, in that spirit, British secret services considered sending “radio-controlled pigeons” on sensitive missions after World War II, according to a diary from a top intelligence officer, which has just been released.
Guy Liddell, then deputy director general of MI5, was briefed on how the flight pattern of pigeons might be controlled by Captain James Caiger, who oversaw the Army’s pigeon loft. Yes really. Liddell believed it might be possible to control pigeons with electric beams. Seriously.
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Posted: 26th, October 2012 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Great ads: Mercedes radar-based technology
ADVERTISING cars is tricky. I once worked as a copywriter on a Mercedes campaign. The brief escaped me. It was just a car. They are all the same. Ford proves the point. But theses adverts for Mercedes’ radar-based technology are brilliant.
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Posted: 26th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
The best creepy crawlies microscope photos
THESE are the best photographs from Nikon’s Small World microscope photography competition 2012. Unpleasant creepy-crawlies can be beautiful:
Posted: 25th, October 2012 | In: Key Posts, Technology | Comments (2)
The Fujitsu computer for women comes in Feminine Pink with kitchen sink app.
HUZZAH! Fujitsu has invented a laptop computer just for women. And they’d named it after an air freshener. Floral Kiss is made by “female engineers…aiming to bring elegance to PCs”.
The press relsease is epic:
…Based upon the design concept of bringing elegance to PCs, Floral Kiss is a new series that was planned and developed primarily under the direction of female employees.
Number of women on the Fujitsu board of directors: one out of 12.
As the first PC to be released under the Floral Kiss brand, Fujitsu will be offering an Ultrabook™ developed in an all-out pursuit of elegance, from the size and design of the model to its accessories, mouse, AC adaptor and other peripheral devices, and even to the applications. Featuring the latest Windows 8 OS, a high-performance 3rd generation Intel® Core™ i5 processor, and 500GB of hard disk space, the new notebook PC’s specs are sure to make for a user-friendly experience. It also provides access to My Cloud, Fujitsu’s proprietary personal cloud service that will be available as a full-scale service from today.
Wow. Lots of technical spec there. And there is ends:
The new series also includes a model designed in collaboration with the jewelry brand “agete.” That model is scheduled to be exhibited at a number of agete’s shops.
It sparkles!
The Floral Kiss series features a unified design sensibility that has been developed for the female consumer—from the PC’s design to accessories, such as the mouse and case, and optional add-ons. Users can select their favorite color from among three variations: Elegant White, Feminine Pink and Luxury Brown.
Not Gay Pink. Not Estate Agent Shirt Pink. No. Thsi is Feminine pink.
The top casing has been constructed with an elegant and refined gradation with gold trim, and it features a flip latch that can easily open the display—even by users with long fingernails. The power button is adorned with a pearl-like accent, and the power status LED and Caps Lock key are decorated with diamond-cut stone for a sophisticated look. An exquisite gold ring frames each key on the transparent keyboard, highlighting its elegant style. In addition, the outtake and intake vents all feature a floral motif design.
Shiny!
The included AC adaptor and wireless mouse are compact and fit easily into the hands of all users. At the same time, zirconia adornments and other details that give them a stylish appeal.
Nothing screams class like zirconia.
What does it do?
SCRAPBOOK automatically stores and organizes pictures and URLs of the items, retail stores, recipes, and other content that users come across when they are casually browsing the web. The application also allows users to create theme-based collages for saved content such as web captures.
What about porn? Does it bookmark porn? Finance? Banking? Sport? Pictures of cats?
With “12 Horoscopes by Fortune@nifty,” users can check their horoscope every day for the present and following day.
Live the dream.
Spotter: Karen
Posted: 23rd, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Outlawed by Amazon DRM: those Kindle books aren’t yours
WHO own your Kindle book? Martin Bekkelund has news:
A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.
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Posted: 22nd, October 2012 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comments (4)
Making petrol from air
I’VE no idea whether this is just a spoof story that’s been fed to the Telegraph or whether there really are some people sufficiently deluded to think that this is a good idea. But there’s a story today that you can make petrol from air. And this is how you do it:
A small company in the north of England has developed the “air capture” technology to create synthetic petrol using only air and electricity.
Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis.
The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before “electrolysing” the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.
The company, Air Fuel Syndication, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
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Posted: 20th, October 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment (1)
Help us choose what Apple will say in its Samsung ads
THIS is rather a fun little court ruling. After all the piling onto Samsung that Apple have done in courtrooms around the world now they’ve got to run ads in the UK praising them.
Well, Apple has just lost the High Court appeal to have that decision overturned, meaning that despite the backhanded compliment, it will still have to run adverts in the press stating that the Korean giant had not copied its tablet designs.
Most, most amusing.
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Posted: 19th, October 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comments (3)
Reaction to Twitter’s block on German Neo-Nazi group
TWITTER has decided, for the first time, to block German’s access to the account of a neo-Nazi group. This is the first time Twitter has decided to act on a policy known as “country withheld content”.
“Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently,” said Alex MacGillivray, the company’s general counsel, posted on Twitter Thursday morning in Germany.
“It’s not a great thing, but it’s a way of minimizing censorship,” said Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “It’s better for Twitter if they can keep countries happy without having to take the whole thing down.”
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Posted: 18th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Twitter bans Nazi-group Besseres Hannover: we vill fight zem in 140 characters or fewer
TWITTER has banned Germany from reading the tweets from banned neo-Nazi group Besseres Hannover (Better Hanover). Why? Will reading their tweets create sympathy to their cause? Are Germans still so easily turned onto genocide and Uber Alles and all that? Sod Nuremberg rallies. You can whip the natives into a frenzy it 140 characters.
This is the first page Twitter has banned.
Fans and followers of @hannoverticker trying to view the page in Germany are met with the result: “Withheld account. @Hannover ticker’s account has been withheld in Germany.”
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Posted: 18th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
Apple’s troubling relationsip with Foxconn
ARGUABLY, most technology firms use companies to make their components that aren’t exactly nice. Giant hangars of workers soldering away like battery hens enable us to have nice, tiny gadgets. However, Apple have a rather troubling relationship with a company called Foxconn, which has seen underage workers and suicide getting too many depressing column inches.
Foxconn are the world’s largest contract electronics maker, and they have admitted using students as interns as young as 14 in their Chinese factory. Workers have been pushed so hard that suicides have been alarmingly prevalent, to the point where Foxconn saw fit to install a net around the building to stop employees from throwing themselves off the top of the factory. Recently, there have been riotous breakouts.
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Posted: 17th, October 2012 | In: Technology | Comment
1960: Joseph W. Kittinger Jr leaps into the unknown
FELIX Baumgartner jumped to Earth from 128,000 feet. Before him, the highest jump has been performed by Joseph W. Kittinger Jr., who made the record jump from 102,800 ft in 1960. Kittinger, a Captain in the US Air Force, had no sponsor. His mission was to test the effectiveness of Francis F. Beaupre’s parachute. Supersonic flight at high altitude was great. But what if the pilot had to eject? Would the parachute work? The jump was part of Project Excelsior. Up Kittinger went in an open gondaler over Tularosa, New Mexico. And then…he jumped:
Posted: 17th, October 2012 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
