Author Archive for: Admin

If you use a padlock on a regular basis — at the gym or locking up your bike — then you’ll know the annoyance of misplacing your key or forgetting your combination. (It’s stupid but it happens.) Canadian tech firm Pishon Lab wants to solve this by kitting out padlocks with a security measure that’s become almost essential on smartphones: the fingerprint sensor. The company has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for its fingerprint-secured TappLock padlock, which Pishon claims is “the ultimate in security and convenience.”

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The TappLock app lets you request and share entry with other users

The TappLock comes in two variations: a beefy version with a three-year battery life that doubles up as a portable phone charger, and a smaller version, the TappLock Lite, which only has a six-month battery life and can’t charge your phone. You set the padlock up with the help of a smartphone app (available on iOS, Android, and Windows), with Pishon claiming that the TappLock unlocks in just 0.8 seconds. The app also allows you to unlock your padlock using your phone and share entry with other users — either on request or during pre-defined windows of time.

All this sounds convenient, but questions of reliability are difficult to answer. Smart padlocks have been tried in the past (including the iFingerLock and the Bluetooth-only Noke range), but user reviews of these products usually include complaints about locks randomly seizing and refusing to open. Pishon is also being slightly economical with the truth in its marketing material: the video for its Indiegogo campaign (above) shows the lock’s built-in alarm sounding when someone attempts to cut the shackle, but the company later clarifies that the alarm only goes off if the shackle is already broken. And misleading crowdfunding campaigns don’t usually end well.

So, adding a bunch of sensors and electronics to a lock doesn’t necessarily make it simpler to use, but if the TappLock is as reliable as its owners claim then it could be handy. Pishon is trying to raise a total of $40,000 on a fixed goal scheme, meaning that if they don’t hit this target they won’t take any money (a positive sign when it comes to crowdfunding schemes), with early-bird prices starting at $29 for the smaller TappLock and $49 for the larger version.

It’s not supplanted R2-D2 in the “cute robots we wish were our best friends” stakes just yet, but The Force Awakens’ BB-8 is getting close. Sadly, we’re at least a few years away from the kind of artificial intelligence that’ll let us create a race of real-life droids. Until then, we can either with Sphero’s smaller version of the Star Wars robot, or — like 17-year-old engineering prodigy Angelo Casimiro — take matters into our own hands.

Angelo’s version of BB-8 is life-size, controllable with an iPhone, and built from just $120 worth of parts. For the body, Angelo took a low-tech approach, slathering a beach ball with paper mache to build the central sphere, before topping it with a domed styrofoam “head.” Inside, Angelo has used an Arduino Uno — an open-sourcemicrocontroller board — as the “brains” of the robot. That controller is wired up with other boards to control a set of wheels inside the body, allowing the home-made BB-8 to move around just as the movie version does.

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BB-8’s head is made of styrofoam and is held into place by magnets

Most impressively, Angelo’s even managed to rig it so that BB-8’s head stays in place on top of its body, remaining upright as it navigates corners and picks up speed. The 17-year-old maker cracked open a set of speaker magnets to fix the head in place, relying on their magnetic force to keep BB-8’s shape in a way that even Sphero’s official BB-8 toy can’t always manage. Once complete, Angelo uses a free Arduino controller app — designed for remote-control cars — to steer BB-8 around, connecting to a Bluetooth board also placed inside the droid’s body.

You’ll need a few tools, a bit of confidence, and some space to tinker if you want to copy Angelo’s design, but his extensive tutorial should make the process much less painful than trying to build a robot from scratch. You might even learn something about engineering along the way, but at the very least, the result — a BB-8 as big as the movie’s — is something we all want.

Sensor aside, the Pen-F should be a worthy competitor to interchangeable lens cameras like the Fujifilm X-T1 and X-T10. It shares the same resolution OLED electronic viewfinder (2.36 million dots, though the opening on the Olympus one feels a bit small), and it has a 3-inch touchscreen on the back that swivels. It’s Wi-Fi equipped, and it’s also so light that I thought the battery was missing when I first picked it up during a brief hands-on event a few weeks ago.

The Pen-F has the same 5-axis image stabilization found on the older Olympus Pen E-P5 and the newer (and even smaller) E-M10 Mark II. Five-axis stabilization is an important and attractive feature — it makes for much easier low light shooting, lets you make longer exposures, and helps eliminate the image blurring that comes from shaky hands. Olympus and Sony are the only companies building this feature into their camera bodies right now, and it’s a huge advantage as it makes the feature available for every lens you attach to the camera.

Olympus Pen-F sample images

Sample images from the Pen-F. Shot by Mike Boening, Olympus Trailblazer.

The Pen-F is also a tightly designed camera that doesn’t waste any space on its small chassis. It comes in silver or black — the two standard looks as far as current throwback designs go — and really looks like a much less boring Pen E-P5. There are metal knobs galore on top, a grippy rubber belt around the middle, and a shutter button that looks like it’s from another era.

But there’s more to the Pen-F than just retro styling. Olympus made sure there are no visible screws. It hid a cable release in the shutter button. The camera also has a dedicated color profile knob on the front for quick switching between black-and-white and a number of other presets. There’s a lot going on here, but it’s done in such a careful way that the Pen-F doesn’t look as garish or crowded as some of the cameras in Olympus’ OM-D line.

The back side of the 3-inch LCD uses that same rubberized material as the rest of the body, so when you flip it over it and close it, the camera looks even more like it came from the 1960s. The new Pen-F definitely doesn’t look as radical as the original film version, but it’s a sharp looking camera, and it’s one of the most attractive designs Olympus has ever released.

Olympus has built a lot of clever software features into some of its other recent mirrorless cameras, and a number of them will show up in the Pen-F, too. For example, users will be able to select autofocus points while they’re shooting by moving their thumb on the touchscreen — something that was pioneered on the E-M10 Mark II. The EVF can also simulate what a non-electronic viewfinder would see, giving you a chance to better judge what to expose for without making you pull your head away from the camera. And the Pen-F features a “high res shot” mode that, when you use a tripod, actually moves the sensor in between shutter releases in order to build a massive 50-megapixel image.

The Pen-F is also very powerful for its small size. It can shoot RAW images at 10 frames per second, or up to 20 with the electronic shutter. The shutter can stay open as long as 60 seconds on its own, or snap a picture in as fast as 1/16000th of a second. While the Pen-F doesn’t have some of the signature features on Olympus’ bigger, more expensive cameras (like weatherproofing), the new camera should be extremely capable.

Canon and Nikon have fallen behind the trend of mirrorless cameras, and that’s left room for companies like Olympus and Fujifilm to create really attractive cameras at nearly the same price point as an entry-level DSLR. The new Pen-F will be another weapon in the Olympus arsenal, but it also might just be its best one yet.

The pursuit of happiness might be enshrined into the US Declaration of Independence and arguably the basis for western civilization, but for legendary German director Werner Herzog, the concept is unimportant. “I find it odd that people are striving for happiness as a primary goal in life,” Herzog said during a panel at this week’s Sundance’s Film Festival in Utah. “I find it silly.” But Herzog — who shared the panel with The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer — argues he’s not a proper nihilist, just focused on loftier ideals. “I’m interested in other things. Hope or no hope, optimism,” he said. “Being part of something meaningful like striving for justice, or equal rights for all humanity. It’s a much more dignified goal than personal happiness. Who cares about that?”

That happiness doesn’t interest him should be fairly obvious to anyone who’s watched one of his movies. Herzog has made a career directing gruelling films, both in their subject matter, and their production — the infamous shoot for Fitzcarraldo involved lugging an entire steamship over a mountain in the stifling jungles of South America, saw its leading actor come down with dysentry, and was nearly derailed countless times by the wild rages of longtime Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski.

Oppenheimer, too, has focused more on Herzog’s ideal of justice than any form of happiness in his movies. His 2013 documentary The Act of Killing relives the Indonesian military coup and subsequent genocide of 1965 and 1966 by interviewing the people responsible for the deaths, and asking them to reenact their crimes for his cameras. Oppenheimer says his aim as a filmmaker is to “make visible the lies, the delusions, the self-deceptions that constitute the immoral imagination that allows us to imagine everything is fine when it’s really catastrophic.”

Both directors faced ordeals in making their movies

Key to that is understanding that human beings are amalgams of good and bad, Oppenheimer says, and being careful not to lump people in what he calls “the Star Wars morality.” The director says the press is complicit in this problem, too easily marshaling facts to judge people and casting them as paragons of virtue or evil monsters. “There’s this confusion of condemnation for comprehension in journalism,” Oppenheimer says. Even speaking to professed murderers in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer refuses to call them monsters, justifying their boasts about body counts as ways to normalize the guilt and shame they’re feeling.

Like Herzog, Oppenheimer too faced an ordeal in making The Act of Killing and its follow-up, 2014’s The Look of Silence. The director took a decade to finish making the movies, saw his sources threatened by perpetrators of the genocide still in power, and faced up to known murderers to ask them about their crimes.

Both directors are known for handling weighty topics. Herzog took the time to address exactly where he gets his ideas from, and why he can’t just back away from ordeals like Fitzcarraldo. “They come upon me like burglars in the night,” he said. “I do not make much choice. They’re all of a sudden there, and one of the four burglars in your kitchen comes wildly swinging at you, so you’d better deal with that one first.” It’s an evocative image, made more effective by Herzog’s trademark deadpan delivery and an accent that stretches vowels out into notes of portent. His voice, coupled with his face — naturally inclined to gloom — has given the lauded director a second career as a fictional villain, memorably appearing as a finger-chewing gang leader in Tom Cruise-led action film Jack Reacher.

“I’m considered the gloomy Teutonic dangerously living guy,” he told the Sundance panel. “There’s no better villain in Jack Reacher than me. There’s some others but they yell and they open fire. They’re not really dangerous, they do not look dangerous. But I can do it. I can do it with great ease.” But despite the demeanour, Herzog says he’s not as dour or dangerous in his private life, characterizing himself as a “fluffy husband.” He’s even started to knowingly skewer his image on TV shows, making a cameo on the last season of Parks and Rec as the unsettling owner of a dilapidated and quite probably haunted old house. And why wouldn’t he? “There’s a part out there that pays me handsomely to be frightening to the audience,” he explained to the panel. “Of course I do accept it.”

Kevin Weil, Twitter’s former VP of product who was among the group of executives who left the company over the weekend, has a new job: Head of Product at Facebook-owned Instagram.

That’s according to multiple sources, who claim Weil was recruited by Instagram for months before announcing his departure from Twitter late Sunday night. The timing makes sense. Peter Deng has been Instagram’s head of product for the past two-plus years and jumped to another Facebook property, Oculus, earlier this month. So the head of product position is (temporarily) vacant.

An Instagram spokesperson declined to comment.

The move is a bit of salt in the wound for Twitter, which is was already losing a number of key executives, and now has at least one headed to a direct competitor. Contrary to numerous reports, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Sunday night that all of Twitter’s executive departures were resignations, including Weil’s. If Instagram was indeed recruiting Weil for months, that seems to support Dorsey’s message. It may also be why sources inside the company tell Re/code that it appeared Weil’s responsibilities were scaled back following company-wide layoffs in October.

Weil wasn’t the only executive to leave on his own accord. According to numerous sources, VP of Engineering Alex Roetter and Media boss Katie Stanton also resigned, and were not fired as numerous stories claim. Both execs had been at at Twitter for more than five years. Roetter apparently alerted Dorsey of his decision to leave sometime after the company’s reorg late last year.

We assume Weil will report to Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom in his new role. We do not have an idea when he is expected to start, but it certainly won’t be this week. According to an SEC filing from Tuesday, Weil and Roetter are set to stay at the company until January 29 and February 4, respectively.

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Days after Kanye West announced that work was completed on long-awaited new record Swish and posted the tracklist for what he believes will be “the best album of all time,” something major about its release has changed: Swish is no more, and now we’re all waiting on Waves.

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West later tweeted an updated and embellished version of the tracklist for The Album Formerly Known As Swish, adding a new track and suggesting possible involvement from A$AP Rocky, The-Dream, and Swizz Beatz:

If you’re keeping count, that’s the third official title for West’s seventh album, though we can’t say we weren’t warned even after So Help Me God gave way to Swish.

West’s fifth album was also expected to be called Good Ass Job before that was ditched for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So then. Waves, or whatever it ends up being titled for real, will be out on February 11th and see a live premiere at Madison Square Garden also screened in theaters.

Update, 9.45PM: Added second tweet with new tracklist photo.

Microsoft’s experimental app outfit, the Microsoft Garage, released another iOS app today called News Pro. The reader is similar to Apple’s own offering, Apple News, and mobile mainstay Flipboard. You can login with a Facebook or LinkedIn account, where you’ll pick topics of interest like finance, tech, and design to get a selection of algorithmically chosen articles in a more mobile-friendly reading format. News Pro has a highlights section for getting a list of top stories and an explore tab for checking out new topics organized by industries, organizations, skills, and products. That type of granularity may be useful to some users, especially those interested in certain subtopics like coding languages.

By linking with either your Facebook or LinkedIn account, Microsoft’s is trying to glean what topics interest you most from a social and work perspective. It succeeds in some respects, and fails in others. It accurately subscribed me to The Verge, video games, nanotechnology, and graphic design, among other topics. But it also thinks I like farming, dairy, and food production, which I’m sure was gleaned from some strange misunderstanding of my Facebook activity and liked pages. News Pro also put me down as a sports fan, despite my appetite for sports-related news being almost non-existent.

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear. Garage apps, which are made by a hodgepodge of company employees, are often one-off projects put out in the wild and forgotten. They rarely if ever move from one platform to another, and Microsoft has already confirmed Android and Windows 10 Mobile users won’t be getting News Pro. Still, if you’re an iPhone user looking for a no-frills reader to stay informed and Apple News and Flipboard just don’t cut it, Microsoft’s product may be worth your time. One big benefit of News Pro is that its web app works on any device, so it could be a good desktop destination for when you’re bored at the office.

To Apple enthusiasts, it’s hard to imagine that someone might go more than a year or two without upgrading to the latest and greatest iPhone.

With new plans from AT&T, Verizon, and Apple itself that make it easy (if perhaps not cost-effective) to trade in your iPhone for a new model every year, many gadget lovers are well-equipped to always have the newest iPhone. But many, many people — a majority of iPhone owners, in fact — do not upgrade every year, or even every 15 months, according to data released by Apple CEO Tim Cook on this quarter’s conference call.

In fact, only 40 percent of iPhone users who — deep breath for caveat — owned an iPhone the day before the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, have upgraded to one of the new, larger screened phones: either the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, or 6s Plus. That means 3 in 5 iPhone owners in September 2014 have yet to upgrade to new phones.

And it’s been a very slow climb. A year ago, after the first quarter of iPhone 6 availability, barely 15 percent of iPhone owners had upgraded, and that’s in a quarter where Apple sold nearly 75 million iPhones. See this chart:

So, if you read an article that says Apple’s sales have flatlined (Apple sold roughly 75 million iPhones in both the December 2014 and 2015 quarters), just remember: there are millions of people still using the iPhone 4 or 5 who might be upgrading to Cupertino’s newest phone in the next year or two. And that’s a lot of phones.

Days after Kanye West announced that work was completed on long-awaited new record Swish and posted the tracklist for what he believes will be “the best album of all time,” something major about its release has changed: Swish is no more, and now we’re all waiting on Waves.

---

West later tweeted an updated and embellished version of the tracklist for The Album Formerly Known As Swish, adding a new track and suggesting possible involvement from A$AP Rocky, The-Dream, and Swizz Beatz:

If you’re keeping count, that’s the third official title for West’s seventh album, though we can’t say we weren’t warned even after So Help Me God gave way to Swish.

West’s fifth album was also expected to be called Good Ass Job before that was ditched for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So then. Waves, or whatever it ends up being titled for real, will be out on February 11th and see a live premiere at Madison Square Garden also screened in theaters.

Update, 9.45PM: Added second tweet with new tracklist photo.

Microsoft’s experimental app outfit, the Microsoft Garage, released another iOS app today called News Pro. The reader is similar to Apple’s own offering, Apple News, and mobile mainstay Flipboard. You can login with a Facebook or LinkedIn account, where you’ll pick topics of interest like finance, tech, and design to get a selection of algorithmically chosen articles in a more mobile-friendly reading format. News Pro has a highlights section for getting a list of top stories and an explore tab for checking out new topics organized by industries, organizations, skills, and products. That type of granularity may be useful to some users, especially those interested in certain subtopics like coding languages.

By linking with either your Facebook or LinkedIn account, Microsoft’s is trying to glean what topics interest you most from a social and work perspective. It succeeds in some respects, and fails in others. It accurately subscribed me to The Verge, video games, nanotechnology, and graphic design, among other topics. But it also thinks I like farming, dairy, and food production, which I’m sure was gleaned from some strange misunderstanding of my Facebook activity and liked pages. News Pro also put me down as a sports fan, despite my appetite for sports-related news being almost non-existent.

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear

Microsoft’s ambitions for News Pro are unclear. Garage apps, which are made by a hodgepodge of company employees, are often one-off projects put out in the wild and forgotten. They rarely if ever move from one platform to another, and Microsoft has already confirmed Android and Windows 10 Mobile users won’t be getting News Pro. Still, if you’re an iPhone user looking for a no-frills reader to stay informed and Apple News and Flipboard just don’t cut it, Microsoft’s product may be worth your time. One big benefit of News Pro is that its web app works on any device, so it could be a good desktop destination for when you’re bored at the office.