Gadgets: Portal Phone

There's no denying that there are a ton of Portal fans out there, and some of them love to show off just how much they love it. Now, it's entirely possible to make your Android-powered smartphone look like this. If you don't mind taking the time to dig into your device.


Reddit user "itsnickk", who designed this particular interface, said he did it “For science.” In fact, it didn’t take that much effort to achieve. After rooting his smartphone, he downloaded the LockBot Free app which allows for the customization of the Android screen either with your own design or with one of a growing number of themes.

With the layout customized, he then used Photoshop to create the Aperture Laboratories background, which he has been kind enough to make available if someone else wants to apply it to their phone’s background.

There’s a question mark hanging over whether you do actually need to root your Android device to do this. Itsnickk later realized LockBot Free works regardless of rooting, but there’s mixed reviews on the app’s page about how well it does actually work.

If you want a Portal-ized phone interface, though, it’s well worth the effort to see if this works. There’s some suggestions in the Reddit comments thread on alternatives apps that may be able to achieve the same thing, too. They include Minimalistic Text and WidgetLocker Lockscreen.

Entertainment: ...And Another Thing!

For many, Douglas Adams was simply a humour writer. For some, a humanitarian. For others, a man with his eyes to the future. All would be right. He was certainly all of these things and more. Today marks the tenth anniversary of his passing, and a day that should be remembered by all geeks and non-geeks alike.


Douglas Noel Adams was born in Cambridge in March 1952, educated at Brentwood School, Essex and St John's College, Cambridge where, in 1974 he gained a BA (and later an MA) in English literature. He was very proud to be the first known example of DNA evidence (if you don't get it, take another look at his name). Adams described himself as a "radical atheist", adding radical for emphasis so he would not be asked if he meant agnostic.

He was creator of all the various manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which started life as a BBC Radio 4 series. Since its first airing in March 1978 it has been transformed into a series of best-selling novels, a TV series, a record album, a computer game and several stage adaptations.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's phenomenal success sent the book straight to Number One in the UK Bestseller List and in 1984 Douglas Adams became the youngest author to be awarded a Golden Pan. He won a further two (a rare feat), and was nominated - though not selected - for the first Best of Young British Novelists awards.

He followed this success with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992). The first two books in the Hitchhiker series were adapted into a 6 part television series, which was an immediate success when first aired in 1982. Other books by Adams include Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul (1988). In 1984 Douglas teamed up with John Lloyd and wrote The Meaning of Liff and after a huge success The Deeper Meaning of Liff followed this in 1990). One of Douglas’s all-time personal favourites was written in 1990 when he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine and wrote Last Chance to See – an account of a world-wide search for rare and endangered species of animals.

Prior to his death, Adams had felt the need to continue the story: "I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book..." and "People have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. And it was a bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number; six is a better kind of number." As a result, And Another Thing… is the title of the sixth installment of Adams' Hitchhiker's "trilogy." The book, written by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, was published on the thirtieth anniversary of the first book, 12 October 2009, in hardback. Colfer was given permission to write the book by Adams' widow Jane Belson.

Adams was a serious fan of technology. Though he did not buy his first word processor until 1982, he had considered one as early as 1979. He was quoted as saying that until 1982, he had difficulties with "the impenetrable barrier of jargon. Words were flying backwards and forwards without concepts riding on their backs." In 1982, his first purchase was a 'Nexus'. In 1983, when he and his wife, Jane Belson went out to Los Angeles, he bought a DEC Rainbow. Upon their return to England, Adams bought an Apricot, then a BBC Micro and a Tandy 1000. In Last Chance to See, Adams mentions his Cambridge Z88, which he had taken to Zaire on a quest to find the Northern White Rhinoceros.

DNA: A man powered by the
Infinite Improbability Drive

Adams' posthumously published work, The Salmon of Doubt, features multiple articles written by Douglas on the subject of technology, including reprints of articles that originally ran in MacUser magazine, and in The Independent on Sunday newspaper. In these, Adams claims that one of the first computers he ever saw was a Commodore PET, and that his love affair with the Apple Macintosh first began after seeing one at Infocom's headquarters in Massachusetts in 1983, although this was very likely an Apple Lisa.

Adams was a Macintosh user from the time they first came out in 1984 until his death in 2001. He was the first person to buy a Mac in the UK. Adams was also an "Apple Master", one of several celebrities whom Apple made into spokespeople for its products (other Apple Masters included John Cleese and Gregory Hines). Adams's contributions included a rock video that he created using the first version of iMovie with footage featuring his daughter Polly. The video can still be seen on Adams's .Mac homepage. Adams even installed and started using the first release of Mac OS X in the weeks leading up to his death. His very last post to his own forum was in praise of Mac OS X and the possibilities of its Cocoa programming framework. Adams can also be seen in the Omnibus tribute included with the Region One/NTSC DVD release of the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide using Mac OS X on his PowerBook G3.

Adams used email extensively from the technology's infancy, adopting a very early version of email to correspond with Steve Meretzky during the pair's collaboration on Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While living in New Mexico in 1993 he set up another email address and began posting to his own USENET newsgroup, alt.fan.douglas-adams, and occasionally, when his computer was acting up, to the comp.sys.mac hierarchy. Many of his posts are now archived through Google. Challenges to the authenticity of his messages later led Adams to set up a message forum on his own website to avoid the issue. Adams was also a keynote speaker for the April 2001 Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, one of the major technical conferences on embedded system engineering. In his keynote speech, he shared his vision of technology and how it should contribute in everyday – and every man's – life.

I think it would be safe to say that were he still alive today, Douglas Adams would be an avid fan of today's ebook readers, smartphones and tablets, and with his love of Apple products, likely the iPhone and iPad in particular. With these and the apps that can be run on them, we're ever closer to the "Guide" he envisioned so many years ago.

May 25 is known as International Towel Day, a day that Hitchhiker fans celebrate Adams, his works and the culture that surrounds it. Bring your towel.

Gadgets: Apple iOS 4.3.3

While not everyone bothers to install iOS updates the minute they arrive, today’s 4.3.3 push shouldn’t be ignored if you count yourself among the legion of iPhone users who let out a collective horrified gasp when Apple’s kinda-sorta-secret location database was outed by researchers recently. While security pros like F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen believed the data was being used to feed Apple’s global location database — enabling iOS devices to avoid unnecessarily probe for coordinates using GPS when a less power-hungry read could be accurately ascertained using WiFi. Plenty of other brainy types agreed, and it turns out they were right. Apple confirmed as much only days later.

Today’s iOS 4.3.3 update makes it very clear that it’s designed to nip location concerns in the bud, reducing the maximum size of the cache and deleting the database entirely when a users chooses to disable Location Services. The update also prevents the location database from being backed up to iTunes.

It remains to be seen how that whole lawsuit thing will be resolved, but remember that Apple did get users to opt in — albeit somewhat cryptically. Hypponen points to the fairly innocuous-looking “you can help Apple improve its products” dialog which appears during the iTunes installation process. While “diagnostic information” doesn’t sound at all like location data, clicking through to Apple’s privacy page makes it clear that your whereabouts are indeed part of the delicious information you agreed to transmit back to the collective.

Updating Over-the-Air

Updating any device with new firmware can be a real pain in the ass, and  its a time consuming process, depending on the device in question. The frustration of having to apply an update can be minimized by allowing the user flexibility of when and how to apply it.

In the category of how an update can be applied, Apple falls short compared to the competition requiring your iPhone be hooked up via USB to a computer running iTunes. Other smartphones offer the convenience of over-the-air updates, but until now Apple has not.

9to5Mac has multiple sources stating that Apple is about to change its limited update method and introduce over-the-air updates for iOS. Whether your iPhone has access to these updates will depend on your carrier, though, as they have to sign up to support these large downloads (iOS 4.3.3. is over 600MB). As well as handling the large downloads, carriers will have to have some form of backup system in place in case a phone battery dies, or the connection is lost making it more than just a data transfer problem.

The best way to avoid large data access fees, and potential data loss of over-the-air updates is to be in a location where WiFi access can be had.

Technology: Most Badass TV Ever.

Wouldn't you want this in your living room?!

Sharp has created a near 360-degree video room for the theme park of Huis Ten Boschwith, Japan. Comprising a large front screen surrounded by screens on the top, bottom, left, and right, the system engulfs visitors on five sides with detailed life-like images in a new kind of image space. The attraction, called the 5D Miracle Tour, will open on April 29, 2011.

This multi-screen display system has a total of 156 units of the PN-V601 60-inch LCD monitor configured in five surfaces: a front wall, ceiling and floor (36 monitors each) and left and right walls (24 monitors each). Because of the small system frame width between neighboring monitors, visitors are surrounded by huge, seamless displays in front, above, below, and on both sides. An image transmission system controls all of the LCD monitors to give visitors a whole new visual experience of images that are bright, detailed, and life-like.

I'm sure you've already spent a few moments looking at the picture above, and imagined your couch in there, watching your favourite blockbuster BluRay, or battling your way through some kickass video games. You probably also even imagined your significant other agreeing wholeheartedly with this idea. I know I did. Sadly, I also know she won't.

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Geek Culture: Pimp My Cubical

 

A few weeks ago, I showed you how you can decorate your home, the Geek Way. This time around, let's take a look at turning your drab little cubical into a Workstation of Awesome.

No really, read it.

Before you get to decorating your area, you should make sure you have yourself a coffee mug that will make all other coffee mugs jealous. It's not just a vessel to hold that ever precious elixir of life that is coffee, it can also be yet another method to convey your disdain for the lesser mortals. Do you constantly get asked to fix other people's computers or get asked stupid questions that would only take a few minutes of looking at the manual to sort out? Tell 'em how you really feel with your mug. Or go for the badassedness of the brass knuckle-handled mug. No one will fuck with you with one of those in your hand.

Nest, choose your theme, or themes. Do you go sci-fi? How about Star Wars or Star Trek? Retro video games? How about comic books? Why not grab a pile of action figures and display them at your desk? I currently have most of the Justice League of America figures sitting above my triple monitor setup. Yeah, that's right. Three monitors. Is it completely ridiculous? Absolutely, but I have three freaking monitors! Alternatively, you could always build a train set, or rollercoaster circling the perimeter of your cubical, or build some epic battle scene with Lego.

Pardon me, but do you have
any Grey Poupon?

You could always add a USB Rocket Launcher and a pile of sandbags to keep those bastards away from your TPS Reports, or just as part of your office warfare armory. Many have even gone so far as to turn their cube into an English study, adding a touch of (cl)ass to their workplace.

A few great places to get some crazy cubical gear is of course ThinkGeek or KlearGear or even your local Home Depot and Toys R' Us.

So get those gears rolling and pimp out your cube. Feel free to send me pics to thehouseofgeek@gmail.com and maybe I'll do a showcase of your cubes! Oh, and don't forget your red Swingline.

Entertainment: Disposable Music

The Music Industry, much like any other segment of the entertainment world, is an ever changing world these days. With the advent of technologies like the MP3 and the almighty iPod, your average consumer just doesn't have the same appreciation of the effort involved in making a record. Gone are the days where you would wait with baited breath for your favourite record store to open up Tuesday morning so you could get your hands on that new album by your favourite band. Why wait, when you could probably find a pre-release leak online? Or if you're one of those who still do prefer to pay for your music (good for you!), you can still pre-order it from iTunes or Amazon and have it download while you sleep on release day.

To make matters worse, modern computer technologies have made it even easier for your average hobbyist musician to build a halfway decent recording studio in their bedroom for a relatively low cost, thus adding even more to the deluge of "artists" out there shoveling their crappy music down our throats. Never mind that it was there has been that candy-coated bubble gum music, where a complete song can be written and recorded in a day (trust me, I've seen it happen) since the dawn of time, there just happens to be more half-assed music out there than ever before. Sure, it also lets the talented underground musicians and bands get heard in ways that were unthinkable even ten years ago, so there is some silver lining to this otherwise murky cloud.

Only once in a while now, can you pick up a record, put on some headphones, lay back and soak it all in, front to back, and appreciate the awesomeness that it is.

Geek Culture: Interior Design - The Geek Way

So you've finally peeled yourself out of your parent's basement and got yourself an apartment of your own. Good for you! You might actually meet people! Well, maybe not, but it will give you some new scenery in which to spend more countless hours playing WoW.

But should you decide to clear out the piles of empty pizza boxes, pop cans and coffee cups and invite people over to your awesome new digs, you should consider decorating a little. Question is, what's a geek to do? Well, you could always go to your local Ikea, and get the same crap everyone else who just moved out of their parents' has. Or you could whip out the credit card and do your shopping online. It's all a matter of where to look. Here's a look at some of the top pieces of geeky furnishings that I've found for you

The Han Solo Encased In Carbonite desk from Tom Spina Designs is a perfect place to start things off with. Not only can you spend hours imagining that you were Han and that a sexy Princess Leia would come and rescue you, but it makes for a great place to set up your home office. Having this beauty in your office would leave even the most tangentially geeky person in awe of your furniture owning prowess.

Couple the awesomeness that is the Han Solo Encased In Carbonite desk with the Emperor's Throne (also from Tom Spina Designs) and you've got yourself a workspace from which to rule the world, or at least your apartment.

There really are no words to describe this totally badass replica of the throne where Emperor Palpatine himself once sat his pasty, boney ass in beside fuck yeah!

Now, if only you could figure out how to use the Force to get that last slice of cold pizza from the fridge.

For a mere $2000, you can have Captain Kirk's chair from the original Star Trek series, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it. Having this chair in your living room makes even the most mundane of tasks an action-filled adventure in the 23rd century! Whether you're ordering pizza, changing channels or just masturbating gloomily, you'll feel like Captain Kirk ordering pizza, changing channels and masturbating gloomily and have all the confidence of a man who humped his way across the galaxy.

This chair swivels, lights up and plays sound effects (intercom hail, phaser and more) and immortal phrases that dripped from the lips of William Shatner when he commanded Starfleet’s most famous ship. This includes Shatner’s full "Space: The Final Frontier" prologue, "Chekov, arm photon torpedoes" and the perpetually useful "security alert to all decks". The officially licensed Enterprise furniture is available at Diamond Select Toys.

If you plan on entertaining more than just yourself in your hovel, you'll need a couch. And a coffee table. Here are a few options to geek up your living room, in a classy way.

For anyone with even the tiniest hint of nerd genes inside them, Scrabble was the awesomest of board games for one simple reason: it made you look smart. Sure, if you walk around all day spelling difficult words at people, you'll eventually get shot. But do it in the context of a Scrabble game, and suddenly you're the life of the party.

Do you know what's awesome about chemistry? Fucking everything, that's what. Argon? Lead? Molybdenum? Back in the day being a geek wasn't just about video games and a shrine to Megan Fox, you also had to be the kid with thick rimmed glasses who carried a pocket protector and actually knew what the fuck calculus was good for. Now that everything nerdy is ultra cool, it's time to embrace that genius heritage with the Periodic Table (get it?), which has a sample of all 88 naturally occurring elements embedded in a replication of the Periodic Table. At $8,550, it ain't cheap, but keeping it real never is. And while the table is a guaranteed conversation starter, each element comes in its own individual cube, meaning if you ever throw a party, you're going to wake up the next day with a table containing only shit elements like calcium and fucking xenon gas with a busted thorium cube leaking small amounts of radiation. Meanwhile some jackass is trying to pawn the chunks of gold, silver and platinum you like to rest your coffee on.

If gaming is more your style than science, (for shame! Science brought you that video game console, you fool!) then you could always go for the  Rubik's Cube Coffee Table instead. Rubik's Cubes were once a huge part of our culture, and back in the 80s everyone had one. The fact that most people "solved" it by breaking it apart or rearranging the stickers didn't matter.

But for some puzzle geeks, the Rubik's Cube remained the exemplar of cool. In a masterstroke of unnecessary and inexplicable inspiration, someone gambled that those people might need a table to keep coffee on, or to toss out some copies of Wired magazine when friends were coming over. And thus,  this piece of furniture genius was born. I know what you're thinking. Get a bunch of friends together to try to solve this huge bastard, and you'll have a great time. Sorry to spoil your fun, but retailing for $600, this table combines all of the function of a table with none of the fun of a Rubik's Cube, since it doesn't actually work. So really it functions as a table in much the same way any object of a similar size would, including the box the table comes in.

For some folks, it takes a little more than one piece of furniture to geekify their domains. They'll turn a whole room into a shrine to some piece of pop culture. Super-fans Vic Wertz and Lisa Stevens used to run the Official Star Wars Fan Club and even the Star Wars Insider magazine. But even though they’re both out of that business now, they still pay homage to their dark lord and master each and every day. The entire thing was designed by Doug Chiang, the lead designer on Episodes I and II. DVDs are tucked behind a hidden door replica of Han Solo in carbonite, and the entire star field is lit by fiber optics.

For an extra dash of badassery, they added a life-size model of Boba Fett, and a life-size model of closet case, C3PO. Throw in a massive flatscreen and a few wicked chairs, and you have the ultimate place to watch Star Wars. Having any kind of home theater is pretty awesome, but a Star Wars home theater is double deep-fried awesome with extra awesome dipping sauce. What I'm really trying to say is, it's awesome.

The downside is that it's pretty much only good for watching Star Wars. It might get a little weird having Boba Fett see you cry when Macaulay Culkin dies at the end of My Girl. And forget about porn. Can you imagine tugging one out under the never-ending robot gaze of Threepio? His cold, robotic stare, observing you. Judging you.

Not enough to just deck out one room? Well, you and Tony Alleyne of England will have a lot to talk about. A big fan of Star Trek: Voyager, he completely stripped his apartment and refitted it to look like the starship.

Much like most of you, I like Seven of Nine's space-age tits too, and arguably there's something cool about living in an immersive world in which it seems like they're only a warp core breach away, but come on. We're talking about freaking Voyager here. While late at night after binge drinking Yoo-Hoo and schnapps it might seem like an awesome idea to model your entire home after Star Trek, but dressing it up as the second worst Star Trek series ever? Not Star Trek, TNG or even Deep Space Nine, but fucking Voyager?!

In the harsh light of day, the fantasy falls apart a bit. For instance, there is no longer the harsh light of day. Lacking windows as the dank starship Voyager did, Alleyne's home is a shut-in's dream cave making its owner a little more Gollum-like with each passing day. And in case you're wondering, yes, his wife left him.

And lastly, the piece of furniture that I stumbled on this morning that started this whole thing off: The Binary Table 01, from BRC Designs.

Let’s face it, a lot of people don’t recycle their old electronics. When they get a new cell phone, laptop, or replace that old desktop they’ve had collecting dust since 1995, most people are clueless about what to do with their old tech products. So, into the trash they go. However, one design firm decided to follow the Three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle), and decided to create something out of all those discarded computer parts.

In an abandoned warehouse, BRC Designs found a heap of old and discarded computers and electronics. They took motherboards, computer chips, LED screens, and hard drive disks, and used them to make one of the geekiest coffee tables I’ve ever seen. By bending the materials into the correct shape, and holding them in place with sheet metal screws, the Binary Table 01 was born. Even the top of the table is recycled. It too was found in the abandoned warehouse.

Although you can’t actually plug it in and expect it to work, the table is still interactive. The Binary Table 01 has disks that spin, buttons that click, and pieces that slide. So, if you’re bored on a rainy day, at least your coffee table can briefly entertain you.

Technology: A New Way to Communicate

The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion -- now you can control Gmail with your body. Capitalizing on the massive success of the Wii, PS3 Move and Xbox Kinect, Google has designed a mail program that moves you.

How it works
Gmail Motion uses your computer's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.

Motion Guide
Familiarize yourself with some of the basic functionality of Gmail Motion using this printable guide of sample gestures. With it, you'll be able to start writing and responding to emails – with your body – in no time.

If you haven't figured out that this is Google's attempt at an April's Fools prank, then you are clearly as dumb as you look.

Technology: Pump Up The Volume

Anyone remember that Christian Slater flick from the early '90s as fondly as I do? For those who aren't familiar with it, go watch it. You won't be sorry, if you can get past the obviously dated fashion sense of the early '90s. In the movie, Slater played an awkward but smart kid, Mark Hunter, from the eastern US, moved unceremoniously to the suburbs of Arizona. His dad bought him a shortwave radio kit, so he could keep in touch with his friends back home. Instead, Mark uses it to start a pirate radio station, and under the guise of Hard Harry, he lets loose all sorts of mayhem at his high school, and a constant barrage of Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows.

It all seemed like so much fun. What a way to reach out and be heard by so many people. Sure, social networking sights such as Twitter and Facebook do a great job of that, but it just doesn't have the same charm as sitting in your dimly lit bedroom with a home-built radio station does.

"Ham radio", another term for amateur radio, is intended solely to be the licensed and private use of designated radio bands, for purposes of private recreation, non-commercial exchange of messages, experimentation, self-training, and emergency communication. Amateur radio, like other regulated radio services, operates under rules that limit the maximum power and the technical and operational characteristics of transmissions. Amateur radio stations are issued with a designated call sign to allow identification of stations. The power of amateur radio equipment is restricted, and operators must not cause interference to other authorized radio users. They may not broadcast to or communicate with the public with their equipment. They are only allowed to communicate with other licensed operators. National regulations governing amateur radio use are coordinated under international agreements since radio frequency transmissions can cross multiple national boundaries. But where is the fun in that?

So how would you go about building your own "pirate" radio station? You could head down to your local electronics shop and buy a heap of semi-expensive equipment and a stack of Leonard Cohen records, or you can go the high-tech route, and go with online streaming options, such as Nulsoft's SHOUTcast, or NCH's BroadWave among others. Still, you will generally need a few things to get your show happening, such as a microphone, a mixer maybe, some audio editing software and a pretty decent computer. If you want to be legit in any way, you should also shell out a couple of bucks for licensing if needed (depending on the streaming service you go with). A few bucks here and there might mean the difference between some awesome radio, or a night in jail. All this should generally be cheaper than a day at Radio Shack, but you'll be set for a long time either way.

Go, make some Radio Gaga, some Radio Googoo, and shoot me your station addresses!

Technology: Broadcasting - Going Mobile

Over recent years, we've seen a great deal of change in the way we receive our media content, primarily thanks to the internet, and more recently, our handheld mobile devices, such as the iPhone and BlackBerry.

The first to feel the winds of change was clearly print media such as newspapers, followed closely by the music industry with shifts from physical delivery systems such as the CD to "digital downloads" via the illegal types of Napster, Kazaa, and their legal brethren, iTunes. Walkmen laid way for the Discman, which has now become little more than a paperweight with the advent of the MP3 player, such as Apple's iPod devices, first introduced in fall 2001.

Years later, traditional television and radio broadcasting has had to address the way their viewers and listeners alike want to take in their content. Netflix has had a big hand in the way that viewers watch their content - in my own home, I can watch nearly any movie or TV show from my game console, any one of our many computers, or via our mobile phones. Most cable or satellite providers also make On Demand content available to their subscribers; they also make DVRs with large capacity storage for their subscribers to record any program they want, to watch at a later time. Long gone are the days where you had to hunt for a blank tape to record a specific show.

Smartphone penetration is significant and increasing. Pandora and other pureplay streaming listening is increasing. Still, the impact has been generally minimal on FM and AM radio. But make no mistake, habits are changing. The seeds of this are happening today with streaming audio, and radio can’t afford to ignore what is happening in that space. Its future depends on it.

For radio, we are seeing this accumulation of changing behavior occur before our eyes. From fewer commercials to the ability to share our listening experiences with friends to On Demand access via podcasts to pausing and skipping songs, there is a gap in functionality that will increasingly lead to a streaming tipping point.

When consumers start to say that radio annoys them because it can’t do this or it doesn’t have that, then you will start to see consumer adoption change. Many forward thinking broadcasters are already making the changes necessary to move with the times. Streaming audio has long been available via station websites, and many broadcasters are also offering their fare via applications for smartphones. One of the best parts of that is that you can now access stations from across the country that you couldn't before. It IS a small world, after all.

Technology: Car 2.0?

In the blink of an eye, the technology that we have become so reliant on can change how we live and function in an ever changing world. Just take a look at the flat panel HDTV on your wall, or the smart phone in your pocket. Hell, even the internet has changed the way we live, compared to twenty years ago. It's amazing to look back on the advances we've made in the last few years, and how accepting we've become on the gadgets we use on a day-to-day basis.

With cars though, the auto industry seems to be stuck in a rut, merely updating the same old same old rather than replacing the lot of it with superior technology. Sure, there have been some minor advances with hybrid engines for a greener environment, but that's only been a small step towards the future. Just step into the driver's seat of your typical late-model car or truck and you're confronted with a big wheel for steering that is mechanically connected to a rack, wheels and tires. Look left and right and you'll see some glass mirrors that are good for reflecting images of the things behind you. And most of the cars today still come with analog dials, while the few that do have handy and intuitive touch screen interfaces do so as a nicety, not for primary operation. If it ain't broke, don't fix it?

If you want to steer a car today, it's by way of a straight forward physical connection. You are connected to the steering wheel, the steering wheel is connected to a shaft, and the hand bone s connected to the arm bone... It's simple, has worked for a hundred years and it'll work for a hundred more. But what if there's more?

But while the conventional mechanical method is a proven and reliable system (and let me remind you, so was the old tube TV), it does have its drawbacks. Firstly, the whole thing weighs a hell of a lot. Pre-power steering, you needed to gulp down a can of spinach in order to turn the wheel when parking. Power steering - a major advancement in the auto industry, thirty years ago - is a system that both adds a lot of weight and drains power. Also, technology had a hand in improving on steering wheel design by making the steering column collapsible and adding air bags so you're not impaled by it in a frontal collision, or your teeth aren't unceremoniously removed by the wheel itself. But there's still a big spike between your legs (gently, boys) and it's pointing straight at your chest with a big, round tooth smasher on top. Oh, and that was a long time ago, too.

Now, as anyone who's every played a video game can tell you, driving a car with your thumbs on a stick or hand on a joystick is pretty darn easy. "Drive by wire" takes the mechanical operation of a vehicle and puts it in the hands of a computer commanded by an operator - or driver, in this case. The theory behind drive by wire in an actual vehicle is much the same: you make an input on a stick that is recognized by a computer then sent down a wire to some actuators that turn the wheels. It's a system that's light and compact, requiring a couple of high tech boxes at each end and some cables connected to a computer. It means no more heavy mechanical linkages, metal spikes lurking behind your wheel - no steering wheel at all, potentially.

Several manufacturers in the nineties experimented with a joystick setup. Saab had a proof-of-concept 9000 on display as early as 1992 which had a joystick where the gear shift would be. More recently, BMW has made some beautiful looking drive-by-wire prototypes that simply scream Car 2.0, freeing up valuable dashboard real estate and allowing more room for safety and greater visibility in the process.

But as jet fighters, space ships and even passenger ferries have been employing by-wire operation for decades, the car is still just second-generation caveman with the old wheel in the helm.

Rear and side view mirrors have been around almost as long as the car itself - it didn't take them long to figure out that tunnel vision and driving didn't mix. Of course, mirrors have drawbacks in that they're not "life sized" and thus, blind spots. Also, a car's body, sides and roof structure also make for opaque impediments that even a mirror can't see through. Headrests and even passengers' heads get in the way, too. So we shoulder check before changing lanes or making a turn. Or we're supposed to, anyway.

The rear facing camera has made its way into cars as a way to mitigate the rearview mirror's shortcomings - but as a safety augmentation, not as a replacement for the mirror itself. And there's still no camera option to replace the sideview mirror, but there should be. Instead of having mirrors perched on our doors, how about a wide angle camera lens the size of a thumb tack? This would net a larger field of view in a small package aiding in aerodynamics and aesthetics in the process. Add another one on your trunk lid and you have the perfect solution. Display it all in the dash on a full HD widescreen display and you've no more blind spots, you rarely take your eyes off the road for but a second, and suddenly parallel parking is as simple as one-piece Tetris.

Cameras seem like an obvious solution and have many advantages over normal mirrors - but they also have their drawbacks that legislators won't ignore. For example, unlike a camera, a mirror doesn't stop working when there's an electrical failure. Then again, neither does your iPhone, which only needs a wee battery to keep it operating. Power a camera system with a back-up battery and the problem is pretty much solved, no? What's more likely is a camera system in place as a redundancy to mirrors, then a whole lot of studies showing that drivers don't actually rely on the mirrors anymore.

If one were to design a car from scratch with no pre-conceived ideas on how it would look or function, the so-called "suicide doors" would instantly make it to the drawing board. Suicide doors are doors hinged in reverse from that of a conventional door; they open "backwards," so to speak, and make access to your seat much easier. If you've ever stepped into a London cab you have found it so easy to get in and out, because the door doesn't force you through a funnel to get to the seat. They're just better, period.

Carbon Motors new purpose-built police car will have this feature just to make it easier to throw perps into the back. This seemingly obvious design has recently returned to fashion on cars such as the Mazda RX-8, Honda Element and the newer Rolls Royces.

It has the unfortunate name stemming from the notion of jumping from a moving car and getting smacked by the door. Just look at any James Dean movie from the '50s. But the reality is that the backward facing door had mounting problems back in the day. When cars were relatively new, door latch design wasn't great, and suicide doors had a tendency to fly open on a whim, also aiding to the name. Likewise, the structural stiffness of the chassis ore than a little questionable, and car doors would often sag not fit, unless mounted forward. The front hinged solution was adopted, and was never really revisited until recently, now that common sense and super rigid manufacturing materials are part and parcel with automobile construction.

Believe it or not all of these design elements could have been on our cars for decades. It is not a lack of technology holding us back, but the legislation that constrains their evolution. In Europe, Rolls Royce had to go to great lengths with the authorities to prove their suicide door could not open on the move and cause injury, even though I'm sure none of us here can remember the last time a car door flew open due to a latch problem.

And drive-by-wire seems like the next logical step for steering to some, but clearly it's too "radical" for the powers that be, as if only fighter pilots and 12-year-old Gran Turismo experts can wrap their heads around joystick control. Fair enough, some people just wouldn't get it... though anyone under the age of 52 probably would. They're the same ones who fgured out how to program a VCR. For now, inroads in campus runabouts like the GM EN-V will have to make drive-by-wires the norm, not the oddity, before you get to take your joystick out on the highway.

Until governments recognize the need for advancement in order to actually improve safety rather than just mitigate the shortcomings of last year's models, reduce weight and keep costs down, Car 2.0 won't happen until Car 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 prove viable. It's the slow road, but at least the Gran Turismo nuts have something to look forward to on their 52nd birthday.

To me, the more important question is, where is the Flying Car we were promised all those years ago?

Gadgets: BlackBerry Taking Another "Crack" at Apple

Apple recently launched it's iPad 2, the predecessor to it's widely popular iPad, initially launched in Spring 2010. Now, RIM is taking a swing at the tablet market with it's BlackBerry Playbook, news of which leaked last month via a leaked image from Office Depot, which showed the 16GB WiFi model with an MSRP $499.

Today, RIM officially launched the PlayBook, available in three models including 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage, listed at $499, $599, or $699 respectively. Clearly, the Office Depot leak had some legitimacy to it.

RIM hopes to take on the iPad 2 and others with its first tablet aimed at both consumers and business users alike. It looks well-built, and the smaller display makes one-handed use easier. Early reviews show that performance is solid, based on a pre-release operating system, though just how well the TabletOS will behave remains to be seen. However, a 7″ display may be too small for some, and there’s a question mark over just how many and the overall quality of the apps on offer, and we won't know that for a few months to come.

Now, how can I get my hands on both an iPad 2 and a BlackBerry PlayBook for a Round 2?

Gadgets: Battle of the Smartphones!

I'm one of the few to own both an iPhone and a BlackBerry smartphone. I have the iPhone 4 16GB, and the Blackberry Curve 3G, but to make things fair for the purposes of this test, I've abducted my wife's BlackBerry Torch 9800. Both are on different networks, but that's not part of this comparison.

Let's get started, shall we?

First thing's first, a by-the-numbers side by side comparison.

	iPhone 4	BlackBerry Torch 9800
Professional Target Market	Tech Sector	Business Sector
Display Size	3.5” Retina Display (960x640 pixels)	3.2” High Resolution (480x360 pixels)
Interface	Multi-Touch Screen Only	Multi-Touch Screen and slide-out Qwerty keyboard, trackpad
OS	iOS 4.x	Blackberry OS 6
Processor	Apple A4 1GHz	624 MHz
Memory/Storage	512 MB RAM/16 or 32 GB flash drive	512MB RAM/4GB flash + 4GB microSD (expandable to 32GB)
Size/Weight	4.5”x2.31”x0.37” 4.8 ounces	4.37”(5.83” open)x2.44”x0.57” 5.68 ounces
Battery	Built-in 1420 mAh lithium-ion. 7 hours talk/300 hours standby (3G network)	1300 mAHr lithium-ion. 5.5 hours talk/18 days standby (3G network)
Camera	5-megapixel, w/autofocus, LED flash, 5x zoom. HD quality video (720p)	5-megapixel, w/autofocus, flash, 2.5x zoom. VGA quality video (640x480)
Audio Formats	AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), HE-AAC, MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, 4, Audible Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV	MP3, AAC-LC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, AMR-NB, MIDI, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis
App Selection	+350,000 available from iTunes App Store	+10,000 available from BlackBerry App World

Both phones have their ups and downs, and I do enjoy both, to a degree. The Torch's  big downside, for me, is that it is a little bulky, and the slide-out qwerty keyboard feels a little cramped, compared to other BlackBerrys. The iPhone's touchscreen keypad is a dream, once you get used to working with a touchscreen. But that's not a of the iPhone directly - that's just how touchscreens are. Win: iPhone 4

On the other hand, the Torch is better suited for selecting and copying text and other items and using the data in other applications than the iPhone, with the use of the trackball that's found on all BlackBerry phones. Win: BlackBerry Torch 9800

Personally, I enjoy navigating through the iPhone better. You can configure your apps to reside in folders, thus keeping like-apps together, instead of all over the place, like you have with the Torch. Win: iPhone 4

Both phones have a snappy, multitasking OS, and make it fairly easy to get around and be productive. The multitasking however, is a little better on the Torch, and although the processor is technically slower, it chugs along smoothly. Win: BlackBerry Torch 9800

The sheer amount and variety of apps available to iPhone users is just mind boggling. Apps, both paid and free, are available for virtually any task, for both professional and entertainment use. Apple's tagline of "There's an App for That" is beyond accurate. RIM's BlackBerry App World is lacking in this department, but since BlackBerrys are typically used by the business types, there are plenty to get the job done. Like with all cross-platform applications, some work better on the iPhone, and some work better on the BlackBerry. Win: iPhone 4

Syncing apps and music on the iPhone is done through Apple's iTunes software, and done very easily and intuitively. The BlackBerry Desktop Manager is fairly less so. Not that you can't syncronize everything you need to fairly seamlessly from your handheld to your computer, you can and you can do it well. Just not as well as with the iPhone 4. Both can easily syncronize with your Outlook account to manage your time, contacts and appointments. Handy, huh? Win: Draw

Ultimately, it all boils down to personal preference, but for me, the iPhone 4 is a much better phone/personal assistant, as I find myself reaching for my iPhone more often than my BlackBerry to execute most tasks.

Geek Culture: Meet the Geek

I'm a geek.  I was born a geek.  I've lived my entire life as a geek.  I will die as a geek.  When I was growing up, the term "geek" was an inflammatory statement, meant to hurt.  Nowadays, it's a way of life, that is widely accepted, and even embraced.  Works for me!

I'm the son of a computer programmer, and for a laugh, I hacked into my father's company's mainframe when I was 13, with an old tank of a laptop (it was smoking fast for the time!).  I've been working with computers since the days of the Commodore64, and the Atari1030xt.  I've been playing video games since the days of ColecoVision and the Atari2600 (the old "wood-grain" model).  I'm also a musician, and so I've been working with Digital Audio Workstations (or DAWs) since I was 15.

I have a degree in Audio Engineering, with a minor on Broadcast Technology.  I was the Canadian support manager for a major international music software company.  I was a technical wireman for over four years, building a variety of television studios in the Greater Toronto Area.  I now work as a radio engineer for a major entertainment company in Canada's largest market.  I have 3 laptops of various degrees of awesomeness, a Mac, two iPods, an iPhone and a Blackberry.  And at my desk at work, I have a Cisco IP phone, and a computer with not one, or two screens, but three.  I also have a display of action figures on a shelf above these three monitors.

And I read comic books, and love superhero movies.