Author: Duncan Geere
New mirrors reflect text the right way round
Mathematician Andrew Hicks is clever. So clever, in fact, that he’s managed to work out how to get a mirror to display text that displays the correct way around, as in the picture above. Mightily impressive, no?
He’s also done some other faintly magical stuff with mirrors, including a wing mirror that can display a 45 degree field-of-view, undistorted, and a mirror that reflects 360 degrees around you, again with no distortion.
Check out the full gallery of mirror fun at New Scientist.
Top 5: Tips to make your mobile phone battery last longer
I always run out of phone battery at the most inopportune moments. Like just as my mum calls me, so she then thinks I’m avoiding her calls, or just as a lost friend is trying to track me down on a busy street.
Well, I’ve had enough, goddamnit. From now on, I’m going to make sure that my battery’s always in tip-top condition. Here’s how I’m going to do it:
One: Switch off features you don’t use
Seriously, how often do you use Bluetooth? Even if you use a headset on the go, you’re probably sat at a computer for a good proportion of your day, when having Bluetooth on is a waste of time. If you just turn it on when you need it, you can save a massive whack of battery life.
While we’re at it, there’s also 3G (do you need your email checked every minute? even overnight?), GPS, Wi-Fi and screen brightness. Turning them all down or off when you’re not using them could double your battery life in one fell swoop.
Two: Don’t let it run out totally before recharging
With Ni-MH batteries, it’s good to let them drain properly before charging them again, thanks to ‘battery memory’, but most cellphone batteries these days use Li-Ion batteries instead. These don’t suffer from the same problem, and can in fact be damaged by letting them go flat.
For best results, charge your phone when it gets to about 30% remaining. Think of the extra capacity as backup. Then, when you’re stuck in a situation where you can’t charge easily, like a festival, you’ll have maximum possible battery life.
Three: Don’t carry it around in your pocket
Turns out that carrying your phone around in your pocket is actually pretty bad for battery life, because you’ve got hot legs. By you, I mean “humans”, not specifically you, though your legs are rather hot. *cough*. Ahem.
Lifehacker suggests that it’s much better to keep batteries as cool as possible – meaning in your bag or jacket, or even on a belt clip. If you want to go overboard, keep your phone in the fridge at night, or just, y’know, turn it off.
Four: Turn it off when there’s no signal
While we’re talking about turning the phone off, turn it off when you go on the tube or metro, or if you’re going somewhere that you know has low signal issues. The lower the network availability, the harder the phone chip has to work to get a usable signal, so the more battery it uses.
For the same reason, if you know you have to call someone, do it somewhere with good signal, oh, and keep it short. No yapping about whether or not your friend saw Neighbors last night. Save that for the pub. It sounds harsh, but think of the hours of battery life you’ll get in return.
Five: Cycle your spares, and don’t store them with a full charge
Lastly, if you’re serious about batteries then you’ll almost certainly be carrying around a spare for emergencies. Don’t just use one and keep the other as a spare, or when it comes time to plug in the spare, it’ll be dead. Instead, rotate which battery you use every couple of months or so.
Don’t keep the spare fully charged up. A full charge puts too much strain on the terminals, and can damage it if it’s kept full for a long time. If you carry the spare around with you all the time, then keep it charged about 70-80%, but if not then keep it at 30% or so and in the fridge (not freezer). Then just charge it up when you think you’ll need it – if you’re going to a festival, for example.
Conclusions
So there you go. My tips for making your batteries able to make it through two months before needing a recharge. Have you got any tips, or things you’ve found useful in the quest for battery life? Share them in the comments.
Apple makes available Safari 4 beta
Safari, the default browser on Apple computers, has just been upgraded. The company claims the new beta is “the fastest and most inovating web browser for Mac and Windows PCs”.
Apple’s lifted some of the best features of other browsers – Chrome’s speed, Opera’s top sites, and tabs from Firefox (and everyone else, these days). They haven’t stolen anything from IE, but is there anything worth stealing there? They’ve also added a cover-flow style interface for browsing through your bookmarks too. Pretty, but a little pointless?
Interesting, Safari 4’s default UI on Windows looks like Windows, unlike previous versions where it looked like OSX. That’s a pretty significant change for a company that usually prides itself on its design.
If you want to try it out, it’s available from Apple’s website right now.
Safari 4 (via Tech Radar)
Eyeball clock makes you cross-eyed at 3:45pm
I want one. Designer Mike Mak’s Eyeclock tells the time with a pair of constantly rotating eyeballs. The left eye represents hours, and the right one the minutes. At 12 hours or 60 minutes, the eyeballs look up, at 6 hours or 30 minutes they look down, and so on.
It’s just a concept design, sadly, but it’s still awesome. It couldn’t that hard to knock together yourself either, surely. Just take apart one of those clock kits and stick some big black circles to it, then mount it in a nice frame. I think I’ll have a word with CraftCrafty.
Mike Mak (via Technabob)
See how much your parking space or garage is worth with Park Let
Here’s one for the financially-motivated amongst you. Park Let is a website that lets you find out exactly how much that parking space outside your house that’s just housing a skip, or garage full of old lego, could be rented out for.
It’s free to use, and gives you a range of prices from low to high in your local area, based on data from the company (which makes its money from letting out those spaces). It’ll probably drive down prices a little bit, but at the same time, it’ll also likely bring them a whole bunch of new customers.
Whether or not you want to rent out your garage or parking space, it’s interesting to see how much it would go for. One outside my house in North London goes for £112 in the medium/all category. How much is yours worth? Play Parking Space Top Trumps in the comments.
(via CrunchGear)
Apple explores new music options – iTunes Pass
This is what I like to see – innovative new ways of buying music that encourages people to actually spend money on bands they love. Venturebeat reports that Apple is experimenting with something called iTunes Pass, which allows fans to buy a pass for a certain group or artist and then get everything that artist releases for a given time period.
Apple’s piloting it with Depeche Mode. You can buy a pass for $19 and you’ll get the band’s new single right now, the album when it comes out, and some other exclusive tracks too. You’ll also get any videos and artwork that the band puts out before June 16th, which is when the pass expires.
All the content you get is DRM-free, though it will show up in Apple’s AAC format. Apple also guarantees that the value of the pass won’t exceed the value of the individual items, so you’re getting a good deal however you look at it.
For my favourite bands, I’d definitely sign up for this. For stuff I’m less excited about, I wouldn’t, but that’s not really the point of the scheme. It’s about making fans feel special, giving bands a greater connection to those people, and maybe actually making some money off music again. Good work, Apple.
Is it something you’d use? What bands would you sign up for if they were offered? Let us know in the comments.
(via Venturebeat)
Olympus shows off the E-620
Olympus does a fine line in mid-range DSLRs, and this is the latest addition to the family. It’s the E-620, a 12.3-megapixel jobby with a 2.7″ LCD, that doesn’t appear to be a touchscreen. Akihabaranews suggests that it’s a cheaper alternative to the E-30 and E3 cameras.
You have the choice of aspect ratios – 16:9, 3:3 and 6:6 are all offered – and ISO goes up to 3200. Size-wise, it measures 30 x 60 x 94mm, and it weighs 475g. We’ve got not pricing or release date info, but I’d expect it to be cheaper than the aforementioned E30 and E3, which pegs it in the sub-£1,000 region.
(via Akihabaranews)
Two MSI X-Slim laptops announced
These little Apple-aping beauties are the X340 and X600, from MSI. They’re part of the X-Slim range, which also includes the X320, which we spotted at CES.
The smaller X340 has a 13.4″ screen, with the X600 going up to a more standard 15.6″. They both offer HDMI-out as well as VGA and pack Centrino 2 processors. The X340 is suggested to cost somewhere between $699 and $999, which is a bit like saying London is between Spain and Scotland.
No release date, or UK prices yet. Shame, because these do look rather nice, even if they’re a tad on the derivative side.
(via Engadget)
Last.fm accused of handing U2 album leak user data to the RIAA
If you’ve been listening to a leaked copy of U2’s “No Line on the Horizon”, then it’s possible that the RIAA know exactly who you are, if you believe Techcrunch who got all in a tizzy on Friday over the suggestion that Last.fm has been handing over listener data to the record company.
Last.fm immediately denied the accusations, saying:
I’d like to issue a full and categorical denial of this. We’ve never had any request for such data by anyone, and if we did we wouldn’t consent to it.
Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we’d never personally identify our users to a third party – that goes against everything we stand for.
The RIAA followed that up, with:
“[We’re] not sure where that rumor came from. It’s not true.”
So you’re probably safe for now, but given how much personal data many people share on Last.fm, if you’re one of the first with a copy of a leaked album, then you might want to be careful about scrobbling that fact. Just a thought.
VIDEO: Spotify iPhone application in action
Digital Buzzard’s managed to get hold of a video of a Spotify iPhone application in action. We’ve been aware of the iPhone app being in development for a while, as well as an S60 app, and presumably an Android one, but we haven’t seen it running before now.
As you can imagine, it looks fantastic. It promises to give you access to over-the-air streaming of Spotify’s entire music library, as well as playlist access. Best of all, you’ll be able to cache playlists while in Wi-Fi areas so that you’ll be able to play them back when you’re on the go. Initially it’ll only be available to Premium users (presumably because it’s tricky to work out how to serve ads in cached mode).
But the big question here is “will Apple let them do it?”. This service completely replaces everything that the iTunes store does on the device, offering on-demand access to songs. We’ve seen what happens when companies try to improve existing iPhone functionality.
That said, Last.fm exists happily on the device. The difference might be that the Last.fm application won’t let you listen to tracks on-demand, just offers you various radio stations based on your listening habits. It won’t cache songs, either.
Proper streaming mobile music is the holy grail for a lot of people. Already I barely listen to my MP3 collection on my PC any more, relying almost totally on Spotify. If I could get it on my mobile phone, too, reliably, then my Zune might end up totally retired.
(via Digital Buzzard)
