GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

No More No Less Faucet by Jasper Hou. Image via Yanko Design.

This high-tech faucet solves two problems, both for you and for the environment. First, no more wasting water down the drain because you forgot to shut off the tap. Second, no more time wasted fishing around your cabinets for a measuring cup.

The designer, Japser Hou, built the faucet with a simple controller that shuts itself down after a certain amount of water passes through it. Technically, it doesn’t measure volume but time = you enter the desired amount of water, and the tap will shut itself down after the number of seconds it takes the tap at full blast to pump that much water. Finally, there’s a built-in auto-shutoff, to turn the tap off after 30 seconds. Could be inconvenient if you’re trying to fill the entire sink to soak dishes, but if you’re anything like me, compared to leaving the tap on and walking away, that’s a relatively rare scenario.

It’s also quite elegant. You control how much water you want by twisting a simple knob. An LCD screen displays your setting, along with water temperature and total water outflow (kind of like a built-in odometer). This last part blows my mind: there’s no electricity or batteries. The LCD screen is powered by the water flowing through the tap. Like your very own river mill or hydroelectric dam, right in your kitchen!

A Quantitative Tap [Yanko Design] (Sadly no pricing or purchasing info available)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Small always-on handheld devices equipped with low-power sensors could signal a new class of “context-aware” gadgets that are more like personal companions.

Such devices would anticipate your moods, be aware of your feelings and make suggestions based on them, says Intel.

“Context-aware computing is poised to fundamentally change how we interact with our devices,” Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel told attendees at the company’s developer conference.

“Future devices will learn about you, your day, where you are and where you are going to know what you want,” he added. “They will know your likes and dislikes.”

Context-aware computing is different from the simple sensor-based applications seen on smartphones today. For instance, consumers today go to an app like Yelp and search for restaurants nearby or by cuisine and price. A context-aware device would have a similar feature that would know what restaurants you have picked in the past, how you liked the food and then make suggestions for restaurants nearby based on those preferences. Additionally, it would be integrated into maps and other programs on the device.

Researchers have been working for more than two decades on making computers be more in tune with their users. That means computers would sense and react to the environment around them. Done right, such devices would be so in sync with their owners that the former will feel like a natural extension of the latter.

“The most profound technology are those that disappear,” Mark Weiser, chief scientist at Xerox PARC and father of the term “ubiquitous computing” told in 1991 about context awareness in machines. “They are those that weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life.”

Making this possible on PCs has proved to be challenging, says Rattner. But the rise of smartphones and GPS-powered personal devices could change that.

“We now have the infrastructure needed to make context-aware computing possible,” says Rattner.

The next step is smarter sensors, say Intel researchers. Today, while smartphones come equipped with accelerometers and digital compasses, the data gathered from these sensors is used only for extremely basic applications.

“Accelerometers now are used to flip UI,” says Lama Nachman, a researcher at Intel. “But you can go beyond that to start sending human gait and user behavior.”

For instance, sensors attached to a TV remote control can collect data on how the remote is held by different users and build profiles based on that. Such a remote, of which Intel showed a prototype at the conference, could identify who’s holding the remote and offer recommendations for TV shows based on that.

Overall, context-aware devices will have to use a combination of “hard-sensing,” or raw physical data about a user (such as where you are), and “soft-sensing” information about the user, such as preferences and social networks, to anticipate needs and make recommendations. This creates the cognitive framework for managing context.

On the hardware side, context-aware computing will call for extremely energy-efficient sensors and devices. Devices will also have to change their behavior, says Rattner.

“We can’t let devices go to sleep and wake them up when we need them,” he says. “We will need to keep the sensory aspects on them up and running at all times and do it at minimum power.”

So far, context-aware computing hasn’t found commercial success, says Intel. But as phones get smarter and tablets become popular, the company hopes users will have a device where apps disappear and become part of the gadget’s intelligence.

Photo: Intel CTO Justin Rattner holds up a prototype sensor that could help enable context aware computing in devices/ (Priya Ganapati/Wired.com)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

14-Cup Food Processor, from manual at Cuisinart.com

Long before we had supercomputers in our pockets, our gadgets were mechanical. In the 1970s, if they weren’t in the garage, they were in the kitchen. Food writer Mark Bittman wants to restore to power the one appliance to rule them all: the mighty food processor.

In a long article in yesterday’s New York Times, Bittman writes an extended ode to his food processor, praising its compact versatility:

The food processor replaces the whisk; the pastry cutter; the standing mixer (for which there are still some uses, but only if youre a dedicated baker); the mandoline… and, perhaps most importantly, the grater… I gave the food processor the greatest compliment possible: I upgraded its position in my kitchen from a cabinet to a spot on my itsy-bitsy counter.

Bittman even shelves his blender, opting just for a lightweight immersion blender for margaritas. Music to my ears: like Bittman, I also have near-zero counter space. (The food processor plus immersion blender combo is the kitchen equivalent of the office’s B&W laser printer plus portable scanner all-in-one alternative.) Throw in a rice cooker, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.

What’s more, Bittman puts his cooking money where his gadget-loving mouth is, posting a series of first-rate food-processor recipes, for dishes from pound cake to mayonnaise. If your food processor’s gathering dust in a basement grave somewhere, these just might tempt you to clear off your countertop.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

A new research breakthrough from Intel combines silicon chips and lasers to transmit data at 50 gigabits per second — and someday, maybe as fast as a terabit per second.

The 50 Gbps speed is enough to download an HD movie from iTunes, or up to 100 hours of digital music, in less than a second.

The technology, known as silicon photonics, can be used as a replacement for copper wires to connect components within computers, or between computers in data centers.

“The fundamental issue is that electronic signaling relying on copper wires is reaching its physical limits,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer for Intel, which announced the breakthrough Tuesday. “Photonics gives us the ability to move vast quantities of data across the room or planet at extremely high speeds and in a cost effective manner.”

Photonics refers to the generation, modulation, switching and transmission of light and can be done using lasers or light emitting diodes.

Over the next two years, Intel hopes to perfect the technology, including improving the efficiency of the lasers, the packaging and assembly of the silicon chips, and the manufacturing techniques needed to churn out millions of these modules.

“We have a good sense of the challenges here and what it takes to put all the components together, so we expect the technology to be widely deployed by the middle of the decade,” says Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics technology lab at Intel.

Copper cables are the lifeblood of computing today. But they are limited in their length because of the signal degradation that comes with using them over distances.

“At speeds of 10 Gbps and higher it is difficult to move electrons fast enough and with enough signal strength to beat the tradeoffs,” says Rattner.

This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other, says Intel. The alternative is to transmit data over optical fiber, but that is expensive and limited in its use currently.

“It’s not an issue if you are using only a few of them in an undersea cable,” says Rattner, speaking about optical fiber cables. “But if you want to have optics widespread, from consumers to supercomputers, the cost has to be taken down or it is not practical.”

That’s where integrated silicon photonics could step in. Using silicon-based chips and the same manufacturing process currently used for those chips, photonics modules could replace copper connections.

It could change how computers and data centers are designed in the future, says Intel. Earlier this year, the company showed its Light Peak technology that uses optics to deliver bandwidth of 10 Gbps and higher. Silicon-based photonics can go much higher, reaching tera-scale data rates, says Intel.

Here’s how the silicon photonics prototype works to achieve the 50 Gbps rate. Each module has a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip. The transmitter chip has four lasers whose light beams travel into an optical modulator. The modulator encodes data onto them at 12.5 Gbps. The four beams are then combined to output a total data rate of 50 Gbps.

The receiver chip at the other end of the link separates the four optical beams and directs them into photo detectors. The detectors convert the data back into electrical signals.

“In the labs, we ran this for 27 hours with no errors and transferred about a petabit of data,” says Paniccia. “And all this at room temperature with no fancy cooling.”

The silicon-based photonics chip could be used within a computer or to communicate from server to server in a data center. “If we are talking about CPU-to-memory connection, we would take our photonics chip and put it close to the CPU to bypass the copper interconnects,” says Paniccia. “For now we are not talking about integrating with the CPU.”

As the next step, Intel researchers are trying to increase the data rate by boosting the modulator speed and increasing the number of lasers per chip.

“If you increase the data rate of the modulator and put more than four lasers on a chip you can scale the whole thing,” says Paniccia. “The 50 Gbps rate is just the beginning.”

Photo: A 50Gbps Intel Photonics module/Intel

Source:wired.com

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If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers. The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

In a magic trick that only geeks can pull off, researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there.

Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.

The project, called ‘Mouseless,’ uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into commands for the computer.

“Like many other projects in the past including the Nintendo Power Glove and the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, this attempts to see how we can use new technology to control old technology,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who hasn’t worked directly on the project. “It’s just an intermediate step to where we want to be.”

Though new user interfaces such as touchscreens and voice recognition systems have become popular, the two-button mouse still reigns among computer users. Many technology experts think the precision pointing that a cursor offers is extremely difficult to replicate through technologies such as touch and speech.

Last week Intel CTO Justin Rattner said though Intel research labs is working on new touchscreen ideas, the mouse and keyboard combination is unlikely to be replaced in everyday computing for a long time.

In the case of the Mouseless project, the infrared laser and camera are embedded in the computer. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present under their palm, the laser beam lights up the hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera detects this and interprets the movements.

A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximate $20 to build, estimates Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project.

Mistry is one of the star researchers in the area of creating new user experiences. He previously developed the ‘Sixth Sense’ project,a wearable gestural interface that lets users wave their hands in front of them and interact with maps and other virtual objects — much like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

The Mouseless idea is not as big a breakthrough as Sixth Sense. Though it is fun, it is difficult to see a real-world case for getting rid of hardware while keeping interaction the same. User interfaces are going beyond the point-and-click interaction that the computer mouse demands. And mouse hardware itself is cheap, so there’s not much of a cost saving here.

Check out this fun, partly animated video to what the Mouseless can really do and how it works:

Photo: Mouseless Project

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

For the last few months, Intel has been offering us tantalizing tidbits about its upcoming chips for smartphones. Now we have a sneak peek of the device from Europe.

Steve Paine, who edits the Carrypad and UMPC portal got his hands on a prototype smartphone running Intel’s chips and MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system developed by Intel and Nokia.

Intel’s smartphone chip codenamed Moorestown, is based a processor based on the company’s Atom platform. Moorestown for cellphones has been created to be extremely power efficient, yet pack enough computational muscle for multimedia features such as video conferencing and HD video, says Intel.

Intel had hoped to have the first phones featuring its chips in hands of consumers later this year but last week, the company said the devices are expected to launch early next year.

Though Intels chips power most desktops and notebooks, Intel chips are absent in smartphones. Almost all smartphones are today use chips based on Intel rival ARMs architecture.

There’s no word yet on performance and how Intel chips are handling multimedia content.

Meanwhile, Intel has also been working with Nokia to bring the MeeGo OS to market. Last year Intel had been working on Moblin, a Linux-based operating system designed specifically for netbooks. Separately, Nokia had been working on a new Linux-based software platform called Maemo for smartphones and tablets.

At the Mobile World Congress conference in February this year, Intel and Nokia announced they had combined efforts and spawned a new OS called MeeGo. MeeGo is hosted by the Linux Foundation and is designed to live on phones, netbooks and TVs.

Paine says Intel and Nokia have now released version 1.1 of MeeGo that includes the the handset user experience or UX available to developers for review. MeeGo will have its first developers conference in Ireland in November.

The protoype phone running MeeGo has an interesting user interface. MeeGo is still in pretty early stages so we will have to wait and see if other handsets manufacturers will take a shine to it and MeeGo it can become an alternative to Android.

Meanwhile, check out Paine’s photos of the Intel prototype to get an early sense of what MeeGo looks like on the phone.

Photo: Intel prototype phone/Carrypad

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews