24Hr Laptop Battery Life

Not only do Solid State Drives (SSD) sound like something incredibly cool off Star Trek (yes, that is possible) but it is actually being implemented in ways that show off what it was designed for. Hewlett Packard (HP) has developed a laptop that uses several features in order to offer an extremely impressive 24 hour battery life.

HP has happily pointed out that it’s the equivalent of ten trips in the Eurostar between London and Paris, although unless you’re the driver of the damn thing I can’t imagine why you would want to make ten trips without charging your laptop battery. And that raises the question of whether the driver should really be using his laptop constantly during the journey (you can’t even eat a Kit Kat when you’re driving).

The EliteBook 6930p uses an ultra-capacity battery but also relies on the SSD to deliver the right level of performance at manageable loads. The basic set up won’t bag you 24 hours though, and you need to pay the extra for the big battery and opt for the 80GB SSD in order to get all that juice off a single charge.

Sensoglove Golf Grip Training Aid

If we’re going to be frank about this, there are some crap golf training aids available that have no genuine reason for being useful. We’re not really sure whether the Sensoglove falls into that category or not but we know it looks pretty futuristic… sort of. In fact, it looks like something that would have been considered futuristic in the 1980s.

Regardless of its efficacy and value, the Sensoglove aims to improve your swing, as does any discerning training aid (it’s that or putting at any rate). It does this by working very specifically on your grip measuring how tight and the position of your hand, alerting you to any problem areas that you might be displaying as you swing.

Numerous sensors and a tiny onboard computer monitor, store, and analyse the data and as well as pointing out problems, the glove gives you a rating between 1 and 18. As you improve your grip using the Sensoglove, your grip rating should naturally improve and because you can continue to test it over and over again the theory is that the perfect grip will become second nature, your swing will improve, and you’ll get better golf, winning promotion and influencing those around you.

The Big Bang 2 – Big Bang’s Revenge

As far as experiments go, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland has had its doubters and its detractors. The fact that it’s taken two years longer to complete and cost four times as much as originally planned. To make matters worse for the Cern run project, there’s been all sorts of doomsday theories that threw around terms like “killer strangelet” that would essentially result in the end of the world.

The switch on, which occurred yesterday was said to have gone well and the very existence of somebody to say so is a positive sign in itself. The LHC is designed to answer a multitude of long wondered questions including what mass is. The result of firing protons at one another at vastly highly speeds is to recreate the moments immediately after the big bang.

A 27km long tunnel houses over 1,000 cylindrical magnets from end to end and “fires” protons at slightly less than the speed of light, eventually causing them to collide. On collision, various different sensors will measure and analyse data concerning the matter and dark matter that is generated. Granted that’s a very basic explanation of the whole stargate program, but the good news is the world didn’t end.

The KeyPad Pen

How often have you been sat at work writing in your daily planner when you remember that you haven’t done your morning’s brain training? Yep, it happens to us all the time too and bran training is like medication; you really shouldn’t miss it so you probably nip to a handy cubicle and ready yourself for a tough mental workout.

Or maybe you use a touch screen tablet or PDA but the closest thing you have to a stylus is your half chewed soggy Bic biro that’s just about ready to release it’s inky load; not the ideas stylus implement to use on any touch screen. Well, now, you can kill two birds with one stone by getting the KeyPad Pen that is according to the marketing text a “handsome writing device” but also doubles up as a stylus.

One end replaces your soggy biro and the other end is a conveniently located stylus. It won’t help you remember your brain training but it will help out in other ways. Just remember that it comes with two ends and, therefore, two other ends; neither of which should be considered chewable.

The Inconvenience Of Memory Sticks

Stories of government and MoD data loss aren’t exactly difficult to find. It seems that there’s more classified USB memory sticks circulating in the general population than there are within the MoD, who have reported that one such memory stick found on the floor a club in Newquay is being forensically tested. A full investigation into the matter is underway – which raises a question, do you think they have a special and now rather large and overworked team that deals specifically with investigating the “loss” of USB data sticks?

There was a reasonable chance that one would turn up in a nightclub considering that more than 120 have gone missing from the Ministry of Defence since just 2004. This particular memory stick was found in May in a club called The Beach in Newquay. It held information regarding the training movements of more than 70 soldiers as well as numerous other files.

Memory sticks, while offering convenience to the rest of the nation, seems to offer the complete opposite to government officials. A number of departments have had to announce the rather embarrassing loss of a lot of different memory sticks holding personal information of particular groups of people – soldiers and prisoners being the preferred groups.

Apple Announces… Not Very Much

Apple has unveiled the new iPod Nano, along with a couple of other update releases, and the biggest news is really that it’s a bit thinner and comes in lots of colours. To be fair, though, it does include the Genius function that creates playlists and recommends music based on your personal preferences.

Of the more dubious features is the “shake and shuffle” mode. It’s clearly not designed for when you’re jogging or partaking in other activities that might require the sudden jerking of your wrist. Doing so will cause the Nano to shift forward or backwards a track.

It is also said to be the most recyclable iPod Nano yet. Presumably this doesn’t mean it’s the one that you’re most likely to throw away but that it’s created from materials such as arsenic free screens and a body free of both mercury and PVC (that sounds like the kind of Friday night that no politician would ever be involved in)

Other announcements included a thinner iPod Touch with a few extra features built in and new free software for the Apple iPhone. All in all it was a bit of a lacklustre affair with few real innovative products being thrown at us but it’s what we were all expecting.

Apple Announces… Something Tomorrow… Probably

Tueday 9th September may prove to be a historic date in the calendar of Apple lovers around the world, or it may turn out to be a bit of washout with very few new ideas but a raft full of barely updated items being “announced”. As you would expect less than a day before a major announcement from the likes of Apple there have been some serious rumours doing the rounds.

The MacBook has come under some fairly serious scrutiny and some believe that a new design is imminent (ie tomorrow). This new design is expected to, essentially be smaller and use LED screens to improve battery life. Some of the less stable are also predicting an Ultra Portable Netbook release to add to the Macbook line.

Mac Tablets have been a fairly consistent rumour for a few weeks but that means nothing except that somebody did a good job of spreading that rumour. Anyway, if you believe the stories, the Mac Tablet will be a fantastic touch screen device that looks great and costs a bomb.

On the music front, iTunes 8 WILL be announced tomorrow while some also think that this will coincide with the release of a new line iPod Nano designs and a new generation of iPod Touch.

Bletchley Donation From IBM And PGP

The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley has been given a much needed financial boost of £50,000 jointly by IBM and PGP. The museum looks likely to close unless it can raise the £7m that it is estimated to cost to run the museum. It holds many exhibits that are crucial to the life and development of computers around the world, not just in the UK and the two donors hope that they will start the ball rolling within the technology industry.

Exhibits inside the National Museum of Computing include what is believed to be the world’s first computer, Colossus. Bletchley itself is famed for being the spot where the Enigma code was cracked during World War II which made the donation from PGP, an analytical firm, a no brainer as well.

Both IBM and PGP believe the Bletchley museum is not only integral to the history of British computing but that it plays a part in further development because it will inspire and teach the next generation that they should not take computers for granted. Parts of the museum are in a state of disrepair and in dire need of work but the museum does not currently have the funding to make those repairs.

Google Newspapers

Whatever else you might think of them, Google is certainly not afraid to move forward and offer new products. One of the most recent examples is the already popular Chrome open source browser designed to eat into Microsoft’s share of the browser market but there are many other plans going on in the background and a lot of initiatives are released with barely a mumble to the general public.

Google news is a popular source of news stories and it is set to be vastly updated through the inclusion of scanned papers from yesteryear to offer a historical timeline of dates and events. Over 100 different papers are apparently keen to be involved and old issues of the paper would be scanned and then indexed so that users can gather information.

The indexing system will enable readers to skip to a specific passage from any particular paper or date, and a list of related articles will also be displayed on the right of the page to offer supporting pieces and more information on a particular story. Working in a similar fashion to Google Books it is actually a progression of something that Google has been attempting with two major US newspapers for some time now.

Sega Homestar Extra Planetarium

You may not know this (at least, I didn’t until I read Gizmodo) but Sega produces quite an extensive range of home ceiling planetarium displays. They enable you to lye back and look at the stars without fending off killer moths that are at least the size of small bats and wait for the inevitable cloud covering to disperse to a reasonable level. And just ask Patrick Moore about the levels of light pollution created by street lighting and he’ll tell you the best way to resolve the problem is with an air rifle and a good solicitor.

OK, so the Sega Homestar Extra may not provide quite the same authentic experience as freezing in the back garden led in dog poo but it looks pretty impressive all the same. The latest in the Sega line is more pricey than its earlier counterparts and geared towards educational institutions rather than the average home user.

The illumination is so bright that you don’t even need to turn the lights off completely to enjoy the effects of between 45,000 and 120,000 stars being beamed onto your ceiling. Shooting stars can be set to appear in random places and at random intervals of time too and the set is due for release in December with a price tag of about £450.

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