Gadgets Blog » This and That

The decade is almost over, and wow, what a decade it has been. The technological advancements easily set this decade apart from many others, and a lot of that has to do with Apple and Nintendo.

The world of gaming saw the creation of the motion-controlled Nintendo Wii, X-box 360 and hardware powerhouse PlayStation 3. Everyone was “bowling” with the Wiimote and fighting with light sabers until Microsoft came out with the Kinect for X-box 360 and the game changed. As graphics and sound developed far beyond those of the ’90s, televisions have kept up with them. You can now watch movies and play video games on 3D high-definition televisions and even see them in realistic 3D on the big screen.

This could easily be considered the decade of the smartphone. Perhaps, no other medium has come so far so fast. Blackberry started it all by syncing e-mail and calendar with my computer, and then Apple revolutionized smartphones by adding real Internet browsing and hundreds of thousands of apps for everything from shopping and maps to games and sexy women in bikinis. Just when you thought Apple was going to corner the smartphone market, Android came in, and while it hasn’t overtaken the iPhone yet, it’s gaining a following.

This decade put the final nail on the paperback coffin, with millions of e-readers being sold. Kindle and the like can download books directly to the reader, as well as get the daily New York Times. Entire bookshelves can be downsized to a single tablet reader.

I work from home and I love it. I spent years at the corporate cubicle surrounded by gray walls and velcroing my children’s drawing or using a magnet on the filing cabinet. When I started working from home, I knew that with three small children there would be times of…well… chaos.

For their entire lives, I have been gone before they woke up and got home only a few hours before they went to bed, and suddenly I am home all the time. Now, they want to play all the time, come and talk to me during deadlines and I have to graciously and politely tell them that I am working and I will be done in a little while and we can play then.

Most of the time, that works or I may take a few minutes to play hide and seek or just sit and watch television. There are occasions when a deadline is coming too fast or I need absolute concentration to focus on my writing, so I grab my laptop and head to the local Starbucks from some overpriced tea and free WiFi.

I’m not usually there for more than a few hours. I can take the whirr of a cappuccino machine for only so long and if I hear the word vente one more time it may turn violent. For me, it’s a necessary evil, but for others, it’s their office.

In my opinion, turning Starbucks or some other local coffee shop into your eight-hour a day office is wrung number four on the circles of hell, but some people just can’t things done at work. The mobile office allows certain people the luxury of heading out and getting away from that corporate structure. You sit down order a coffee and spent three hours creating that PowerPoint presentation, order lunch and type out that management memo then grab a chocolate chip cookie for the road.

Growing up I watched a lot of Star Trek and dreamed about exploring space and seducing women while captaining a massive starship. What can I say, I was in high school. Many of the gadgets in the classic and next generation series have come to fruition like the communicator, which is reminiscent of current cell phones. There are still many machines that are far into the future, but I can imagine how life would be much more interesting is some of those gadgets were available for purchase online.

Transporter: There is nothing that will make you want to drive off the road and into a guard rail than a three hour car ride with a group teenagers or screaming toddlers. If only we had the ability to move from place in just a few seconds. No more “Are we there yet?” or mid-trip potty breaks. Sure, you would have to have your body disassembled, transformed into energy and then reassembled at the destination. It may not sound like fun, but I would do anything to avoid a long care ride.

NASA recently unveiled Robonaut 2, a human-looking robot that will do some of the mundane chores on the International Space Station, so the astronauts can focus on more important things. To celebrate the occasion, a Twitter account was created for Robonaut 2, affectionately called R2, and last time I checked it had more than 12,000 followers.

The first thing I thought of was Rosie the Space Maid just kicked my Twitter behind in a day. For writers, Twitter and social media in general are important tools to our success. We use them to promote ourselves and our work with the goal of our followers reading the pieces and upping the page views. Writers are active tweeters and try to cultivate as many followers as possible. It’s not unheard of to reach several thousand followers, but we lack the exposure or true “artists” like Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan.

When I broke the 700 mark on my Twitter account, I practically did a jig, sure it looked more like a spasm, but it was supposed to be a jig. It took weeks to get that number and it grows daily. I felt a little cheated when I heard that Robomaid received so many followers in a day especially since he can’t talk, has no emotions and looks like Boba Fett.

Who hasn’t wanted to be David Bowie at some point in their life? Anyone? Ok, so just me and definitely outside of the whole Ziggy Stardust phase. Let me rephrase: How many people have seen the movie “Labyrinth?” Ok, I got few more hands raised on that one.

This ’80s Jim Henson classic starred a young Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, a imaginative and possibly insane girl, who must complete the magical “Labyrinth” to save her little brother from the clutches of the Goblin King a.k.a. David Bowie.

When Bowie and Sarah first meet, he has a large ball that he waves around doing all sorts of tricks. At the time I thought it was completely CGI. This is kind of funny given CGI back then consisted of Commodore 64 and a little dude called Pac-Man.

Typically on the Smarter Gadgets Blog, we focus on consumer-oriented products designed to make our everyday lives easier. Products such as smartphones and laptop computers are used on a daily basis to network us with the world, gathering information from the Internet, and connecting with old friends.

Today, however, we’ll be taking a look at a very specialized gadget, one that won’t be seeing time on the market anytime soon. Earlier this week, a robotics team at Leeds University in the United Kingdom unveiled a metallic creation intended to explore the inner corridors of Egypt’s Great Pyramids, something that has puzzled archaeologists since the 1800s.

The Upuaut-2 robot, named for the Egyptian magician King Khufu consulted before building the Pyramids, has been specially constructed to penetrate into the inner chambers of the Pyramids. Two unexplored shafts of the largest Pyramid have puzzled scientists since the discovery of the Queen’s Chamber in 1857.

The answer:

The Z1 is considered to be the first modern computer. It was designed and built between 1935 and 1938 by Konrad Zuse, a German engineer. It was the first programmable machine that used Boolean logic & binary floating numbers, and it contained almost all the parts of a modern computer including a control unit and memory. The Z1 was privately financed by Zuse’s family.

The Specs:

• 64 words of 22 bits
• 1 Hz clock speed
• four basic operations – add subtract, multiply, divide
• It weighed 1,000
• It completed basic calculations in an average of 5 seconds. Multiplication problems took up to 10 seconds

Where Is It Now?

The Z1 was destroyed during World War II during the 1934 Allied air raids. A replica is on display at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin.

As a gadgets and technology aficionado, I’m glued to my smartphone and laptop. Both go where I go – I never know when I’ll need them, and I can’t stand to feel unplugged.

Even though my email accounts are 95% spam, I need to check them at least every hour. At any moment, someone – somewhere may try to reach me. Of course, they won’t call me – they know I’m probably multitasking.

When I was 13, while my friends were interested in art and poetry, I was into programming and web design. Little did I know how much these two “hobbies” would benefit me professionally – I just enjoyed the satisfaction of working through the challenge of creating something new.

Ten years later, I spent about ten hours a day – every day- in front of my computer. What I do to space out? Shop online…look for templates to build my new website…try to find cool open source programs.

Few television programs in the United States have the same legacy and pedigree as “Jeopardy!” The game show, hosted by legend Alex Trebek, is a trivia program that has been a household name for several generations. Contestants are posed with questions, frequently worded in idiosyncratic ways intended to trick the players, who must then respond in a question format.

The television show challenges both the trivia knowledge of the contestants as well as their ability to interpret these clues, which often involve wordplay and combinations of unlike terms. It’s a game intended to showcase the sharpest of human minds… until now.

Few things bring out absurdly wonderful displays of nationalism like international sports, and in that regard we’re in the midst of perhaps the highlight of international sporting competitions. World Cup season brings about all sorts of excitement for both serious and casual soccer fans alike, and also (thanks to USA’s 1-1 “victory” against England) makes for excellent trash-talking calling upon historical dates and long-forgotten wars. And while the excitement on the pitch itself is certainly exciting, the real headline-maker thus far has been in the hands of the excited spectator. Our Gadget of the Week is also the noisiest gadget ever to appear on this blog: the vuvuzela.

Spectators are expected to be loud at the World Cup, and 2010 is no exception. While some fans sing and chant, the tradition in South Africa is to blow incessantly on this three-foot-long horn, generating a low monotone capable of reaching some absurd decibel levels. According to Wikipedia, the vuvuzela can generate sound at a staggering 110 decibels, which can cause permanent hearing damage over periods of long exposure, such as a soccer match. The horns originated as a soccer-specific noisemaker in the 1980s and were adopted as a common practice in African matches during the 1990s.