May 15th 2012, London, UK – DriveGain, an iPhone application that helps you save fuel as you drive, is saving one Dutch user £560 a year in fuel. Ed de Tollenaer started using the DriveGain app in April 2012 and since then has seen is fuel consumption fall by 24%.

“Before I started using DriveGain I was getting around 370 miles from each tank of fuel,” said Ed de Tollenaer, “but after using the application I am getting 490 miles from each tank”.

“To get these savings I just followed the audio feedback and the visual displays the app gave me”, he added. “Changing your driving style requires breaking some old driving habits so having the app constantly giving me encouraging feedback helps a lot”.

At US fuel prices Ed would save $540 a year. In Europe the savings would be around €640 a year.

DriveGain uses the iPhone’s GPS to calculate how efficiently the vehicle is being driven. Combining information about the rates of acceleration, driving smoothness, and overall speed with the exact specifications of your car, DriveGain gives the driver feedback on how they can reduce the amount of fuel they are using.

The basic version of the app is available for free, offering a MPG reading and a Journey Score out of 100 for each trip. Additional displays like the Cost Meter and Fuel Savings Meter can be purchased as add-ons. For example the Fuel Savings Meter this driver was using cost just £1.49.

“The £560 a year savings that Ed has been able to get by using the DriveGain application show that the money that can be saved by changing your driving style can be significant,” said Simon East, CEO of DriveGain.

“Over the last 20 years the cost of fuel has tripled*. In the current recession DriveGain is an important money saving tool for motorists who want to reduce the cost of driving.”

DriveGain can be downloaded from Apple’s App store here: http://itunes.com/apps/drivegain

This could, in theory, be a good thing.

Of course there are a number of problems with this as well. One of the more pressing is “just where the heck are we supposed to run this?”. Running it in a virtual machine will only get you so far and there is not exactly an abundance of available hardware which run WebOS already. HP has mumbled something about perhaps building some more TouchPads, you know, the tablet computer that was on the market for about two months before being discontinued.

Good thing about having the source code though, is that we can do the necessary changes and make it run on other hardware. Assuming that there is sufficient interest in making WebOS run on a given device or reference platform, crafty individuals can surely make it reality before too long. We have seen this happen in the past, where clever people have managed to make Android run on iPhones, so it’s far from unrealistic to see WebOS be subjected to a similar process.

Another interesting question is how this matter will be dealt with in legal terms. There are a large number of patents currently owned by HP, which came with the purchase of Palm, that cover various portions of WebOS and its functions. Since the source code will be available to all, and someone might make a device using some of said source code at its core, what action would HP take? Would they use the legal backing of a large patent portfolio to crush anyone who builds a device, slaps WebOS on it and sells it for profit? Will we only be allowed to use the source code as is, not being allowed to turn it into a functional product that we can sell?

What puzzles me is that HP will apparently still be forking over money towards the development of WebOS. It could be that they still see it as an alternative that they could use in the future, on devices that do not yet exist except in imagination or on the drawing board. Perhaps the thinking was to open source WebOS, get a lot of attention and clever people from all over the world to start contributing to it, and somewhere down the line when there are lots of improvements made take the code-base and start building products around it again. Crazy? Just a little. But not entirely unthinkable, specially considering the track record of HP in the last couple of years.

Attracting developers to WebOS is the real nut to crack. While the open sourcing of it will undoubtedly attract a lot of attention from a lot of programmers, that does not mean that we will have an abundance of apps to run on it, nor that it will get anywhere else than it is today. Both Palm and HP have tried and not really succeeded in getting too many people interested in developing for WebOS. Fortunately the ones who did develop or perhaps even still do, have managed to at least secure the main areas of necessary apps for any platform.

Assuming that some hardware manufacturer takes a great interest in WebOS and starts building devices that will run it from factory, manages to attract some developers to the platform and get the apps that cover 80% of most peoples needs, it’s possible that WebOS does have a future. I have a hard time seeing it catch on in the mainstream unless devices come with it as the default operating system and that there are the most necessary apps available for it. Heck, I see it not even catching on in the nerdy niche unless there is some dedicated hardware to run on!

The foundation is solid and there is a lot of clever design in WebOS. It makes me quite sad to see such a great opportunity be squandered and now tossed out the window to a uncertain future, at best. The code-base might very well come to great use in other projects and some great ideas might lead to awesome developments elsewhere, but WebOS as it is in itself is quite doubtful right now. I would really hate to see it get chucked on the pile of forgotten technology in the not too distant future.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

What I’m talking about is a mentality that is both harmful and erroneous, bordering on pure incompetence. It’s the thought process I would like to label as “I don’t like this, therefore it sucks for everyone” or “I don’t understand this, therefor it sucks for everyone”.

What is gold to one person can be utter rubbish to another, definitely. But labeling something, whatever it might be, as complete and utter waste of time and darn near a crime against humanity just because you can’t see what others see it it? That’s just wrong.

Granted, I have done the same mistake many times in my life and I’m sure I have written articles containing such obnoxious ideas. As time has passed, I have become more and more aware of the fact that what I like and use is not the perfect fit for everyone else. Not everyone likes or understands how I can keep up with my writings in plain text format, using Notational Velocity and Writeroom. Just like not everyone appreciates Iron Maiden played somewhat loudly while I’m writing, or that I like to enjoy podcasts while I’m doing chores. Just because I can get along with my iPhone 3G in the year 2012 does absolutely not mean any other person can do the same. These are all facts I realize and comprehend on a fairly extensive level, as I would assume that quite a great deal of people do.

Some obvious examples would be people quickly dismissing the iPod as a device, or any Android smartphone only because it is an Android based device. I would wager that there is still a pretty big market for dedicated music playing devices, ranging from the ridiculously small iPod Shuffle all the way up to the iPod Classic, including the iPod Touch. And sure, there is a boat-load of things that could be better in the world of Android, but that does absolutely not mean it should be dismissed as something nobody wants, needs or should have. For some situation and use cases, it’s perfect.

Naturally I don’t want people to stop saying their opinion about things, as that would be truly horrible, if anything. Looking outside our own little box would be key to delivering great journalistic coverage, and I can see that not everyone is gunning for that. All I’m saying is that this is a mentality I associate with small children before they have developed the ability to think about anything besides themselves, and not something particularly becoming to anyone who is, supposedly, a serious technology journalist. Or any other kind of journalist, for that matter.

We all have our own needs and forcing the square peg that is our individual perception of the world into the round hole that is the perception of nearly any other person on the planet is pretty numpty. In my opinion, of course.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine

When you try and install iPhoto, the Apps Store checks the account and then the device and will stop you from installing it on the iPad One as its listed as an ‘unsupported device’. So, you’ll need to download The iPhone Configuration Utility from http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/ if you want to get around this . If you’re a PC user though, don’t worry, there are Mac and PC Versions available there

First, Download the iPhoto App, then after you’ve done this, plug in your iPad and let it sync as normal. Finally fire up the iPhone Configuration Utility and select the ‘Application’ tab on the left side. Then select ‘Add’ at the top left. The dialogue should now show you the newly downloaded iPhoto App, add the app and then click the name of your iPad in the left hand column and select ‘Applications’ in the overhead tabs.

Scroll through the apps until you find the New iPhoto App and then click the ‘install’ button which is next to it. In a moment or two you will see that the item is install and you can simply unplug and get started.

A word of warning though. Once you’ve done that, when you reconnect your iPad you will get a warning that the computer you are attached to is no longer authorized for the apps on that iPad. If you click ‘Authorize’ nothing will happen and the dialogue will come back again next time. If you click ‘Don’t Authorize’ then the newly installed iPhoto Software will be removed and you’ll have to start again.

Why Apple is blatantly borking software which is perfectly capable of running on older devices isn’t clear but where there’s a will, there’s a hack

Happy Hacking

This Great Tip was brought to you by Peter Emery (@_Windrider on Twitter). Thanks Pete.

Now…I’m not so sure.

Not 5 years ago, if you suggested that a new Apple products might do something or look like something else and function in a super cool way, Apple Fanboys would say “Oh Yeah, that would be great…and then you could…”.

The creative mind would take over rational thought. Endorphins would flood your system at even a hint of seeing something that had ‘Super Cool’ or ‘Sub-Zero’ tattooed through its very fabric. The dilating of pupils, the reddening of your face and neck at the arousal of something that would set your pulse racing was palpable and irresistible

But then everyone had one. And Journalists devoted a mass of column inches to them. And then the rumours got popular too and the Fanboys would trumpet them regardless of consequence. We didn’t need any proof. We just needed hope.

Then, enter The Doubters. Those who realized, with a slide rule, that quantum of rumour far outweighed the quantum of reality and it became easier to say ‘BLAH’ and to squash the hopes of those of us daring to dream. And yes we all knew that for Apple to realize all those dreams would require more R&D and production hours than there were people on the planet. But it didn’t matter…we were fanboys and that’s what we did. We followed Steve no matter what.

Then Steve died and a nice bloke, if boring, called Tim took over. And those that dared to dream were marginalized and spat on by The Doubters. They knew that, statistically speaking, if they kept poo-pooing the rumours, they would be right more than wrong and anyway, being negative about something was now way cooler than being hopeful. And slowly, ever so slowly, The Doubters won.

I’m not an Apple fanboy but I get it. I’m not a Doubter but I get that too. I’m a lover of technology and gadgets and all things that take your money and promise the world and end up not one year later on eBay or in an office drawer. But I love hope.

Good on Apple for trying to dream. Good on the fanboys for daring to rumour and ‘BOO’ to The Doubters who pour water on the flames of people’s desire.

Bring me a rumour. I’ll publish it. Because the dreams of the past are the reality of the future. Thank you Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Isaac Asimov, H.G.Wells and yes even George Orwell and more. The world I live in today is better for rumours and dreams. Bring ‘em on!

Take, for instance, the fact that we nowadays regularly perform video-calls as opposed to just talking to people far away and hearing them talk back to us. While it might not be on quite as large a scale as you would have imagined, specially considering what sci-fi has been promising us for decades, but a lot of us do have actual conversations while able to see the other person. Take the very podcasts on this fine network as an example. People from all over the world effectively gather in a virtual room to sit down and talk about things in one particular topic. Distances are no longer an obstacle, only bandwidth and time.

A lot of us run around in our lives toting a small, yet very capable computer in out pockets. It does all kinds of communication in text, voice and even video, tying into the above mentioned video-calling. Add to the fact that in the last couple of years the software available has both been increasing in number as well as in capability. It’s perfectly realistic to answer a phone call, talk to someone, hang up, write down some notes, shoot a video, edit it and upload it to several of the largest video sharing sites on the Internet. Even more shockingly, the quality isn’t bad. It might not look like a Hollywood production, but then again feature films are rarely shot on something as small as your average smartphone either. While it’s far from free, a smartphone capable of this is well within buying power of a great deal of people today.

Computational prowess used to be relegated to government institutions, banks and the zaibatsu’s of the world. Today you can stroll down to your nearest home electronics store or computer store and plunk down a very modest amount of money for a device that would have sent NASA into a frenzy if presented with it only some 20 years ago. One of the more popular PC’s today, the iPad 2, has the equivalent capacity of a Cray supercomputer in the late 1980′s to early 1990′s. Difference is that the iPad 2 is easily portable, while the Cray supercomputer can’t quite be called that.

Much to the chagrin of a lot of people who have been working with computers for a long time, the days of normal people being unable to understand or make use of a computer are long gone. Usability and relative user friendliness has increased by leaps and bounds over the last 30-25 years, giving people unprecedented ability to perform vastly complex tasks, like editing a photo, cutting together their own movie or creating a website. Consider also that a whole lot of applications these days are quite pedagogic and aids the newcomer quite a lot, and reduces a large threshold that once existed. Sure, the outcome might not be earth-shattering, but it’s quite impressive none the less, in my mind.

Should you want to argue that price is a barrier, then just point your attention towards the many projects that aim to bring computing to everyone everywhere. The very interesting Raspberry PI project aimed at making ICT actually mean something by supplying a dirt-cheap computer designed for tinkering and learning in mind. Utterly astonishing what you can get for the very reasonable price of $35, wouldn’t you say? And in all honesty, you can pick up a quite decent laptop for a very low cost these days and there’s no shortage of them. Cheap and ubiquitous you say? I think so!

Through modern technology we can truly be together with people near and far, without having to actually move our bodies more than to the nearest computer and get online. If we have any artistic desires, those can often be aided and enhanced by a computational device of some kind, and not to mention spread to almost the whole human population in the blink of an eye.

While we still don’t travel to the far stars, enjoy the wonders of a holodeck or have our own personal robots helping us in life, it’s pretty darn impressive what we can do today. Who knows where we might be in another 10 or 20 years down the line?

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

This article is about the latter of the above descriptions. A topic that was the beginning of me contributing to BagelTech, back in May of 2011.

F-Secure, a well known and respected computer security company, released a report last week, detailing the growth of malware on the Mac OS platform. Sadly they only reveal data from April of 2011 to December, but their findings were quite interesting from a number of perspectives all the same and what I said back in May is very much true today too. Throughout the year there were some spikes when they found more malware, and some dips in activity when there were very few new variants of malware found. For 2011 the two biggest spikes in malware detections were in June and October, with 12 new variants in June and 11 new variants in October respectively. A grand total of 58 new variants of malware were found during the course of the whole year.

The different types of malware in the wild, targeting Mac OS X, that F-Secure found were Backdoors, Trojans, Trojan-Downloaders and Rouge. I will explain the differences between these different types of malware soon, but I would like to point your attention towards that F-Secure never mentions finding any kind of virus for Mac OS X during entire 2011. If there is one type of malware that even the most novice of computer users know of, it’s the virus. So far, there have been none for Mac OS X in the wild and I have a feeling that if one were to pop up, we will hear about it either we want to or not!

A backdoor is essentially a way for someone who as managed to compromise any given computer system to more easily slip back in, whenever they please to do so. The backdoor will bypass any layer of security that might exist on the system in question, leading to the very apt name, of being a backdoor that one can take in order to avoid the big lock and chain on the front, so to speak.

Trojans are apps masquerading as something they are not, just like the famous Trojan horse of ancient mythology held a small army inside while posing to be a trophy. If you for instance downloaded a copy of Pixelmator, the famous image editing application, from a file-sharing site, chances are you got something completely different. While the app you downloaded pretended to be Pixelmator, this was not the case at all and instead you installed a trojan on your Mac.

A Trojan-Downloader is essentially a Trojan, but it downloads more malware in the background, without you knowing it, and runs them as well. The old case of going from bad situation to even worse situation since there is nearly no limit to what other apps can get downloaded and installed.

The last kind of malware mentioned in the report is Rouge, which is the perhaps nastiest kind of malware in that it pretends to be anti-virus or anti-malware, while in reality it might not at all have any kind of functionality that such an app should have. While not all of them are completely without function, many are. They serve to lull users into a fake sense of security while they fork over money for something that does nothing of what the user really needs.

The one thing all these different forms of malware have in common is that the user of the computer must in one way or another be active in getting them onto the system. For these types of malware to “just infect” your Mac is not possible, since they are not designed in that way. Again, these are not viruses, they are malware of different classification all together. The user is the way in which the manage to bypass security, either by pretending to be an app that it is not, comes along for the ride with an app or that is pretends to be anti-malware of some kind.

Essentially the malware creators have decided to attack the weakest link in the security chain of most computer systems these days; the user! Many of those now using Macs are converts from many years of using a Windows machine, and probably think in slightly different terms and ways that someone who has been a Mac user for some time. Someone who has used Windows for years is conditioned into doing a lot of things that make sense in the Windows world, such as always having some kind of an anti-virus (sometimes anti-malware) installed and running maintenance apps regularly. While these things are not in themselves bad, they are often misunderstood in what they do and why they should be run or even installed,

As with most things, it’s best to pay attention to what is going on, regardless of what operating system you are running and who has built the hardware. At any given time there might be that nearly magical security hole found, which enables the most dastardly of malware to slip into your machine. It might sound far off to some, but I prefer to take security very seriously personally, while I hope the company behind the product does everything in their power to make the device as secure as they can from their end. Assuming that you are sitting in the impenetrable fortress might be fun for a while, but after a while I’m fairly sure you will suffer, one way or the other.

We still don’t see many malware variants for Mac OS X, compared to the threat seen for Windows users, but the ones that do exist are very real and should be taken seriously. Better safe than sorry, if you ask me!

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

Hey Everyone. I know that Rumours will abound in the coming weeks over iPad 3 etc and the ideas that Apple will do a second sized tablet are nothing new…but we have some news from our contact inside Apple. On June 26th Apple will deliver a 7 or 8 inch ‘tablet’

The device will have a stripped down version of iOS and carry a ‘lower grade processor’ than iPad. The device will however have a ‘Retina Display’ and be incredibly easy to read. The price is yet to be finally decided but suspicions are that the device will be in the $250 – $299 price range. This won’t be a rival iPad but will be more focussed on complimenting the iBooks store and creating a more ‘eReader’ like experience

The Name on the Table at the moment is the ‘The iReader’ but others have still not been discounted including ‘The iBook’. With the date being just 2 weeks after WWDC its also highly plausible that this is the delivery date after an announcement to developers who will no doubt have concerns over upscaling and resolution issues with current iPhone and iPad Apps

Given the success of the iBooks Text Book Launch last week and the need for a more ‘Text Book’ like size, this move is certainly plausible and with the Retina Display packing all the clarity you would need, its certainly worth considering. iPad 3 is likely to make its Debut at the same time.

With the portability that a 7or 8  inch device would bring, this is likely to chime well with existing ‘Apple Commuters’ who have often expressed to our shows, the frustration of a smaller iPhone and an iPad which is just that bit too big for the handbag, pocket or small pouch.

I’d buy one for sure. Apple…put me down for one

Ewen Rankin

Apple commenced by stating the problems with the old system of the printed books. They are heavy, they are expensive, they wear out, they are not searchable, they are not up-dateable and yet their content is amazing in that they impart knowledge.

A few years ago there was no obvious alternative to even think about changing the way textbooks were made available, fortunately we are no longer living a few years in the past, for today we have the iPad. A piece of technology that apparently was the number one item on kids wish list this past holiday season (I assume they meant Christmas).

It was only a matter of time before these two fields converged and today was that day.

Firstly with the introduction of iBook2. iBooks 2 allows publishers to present highly interactive, colourful and engaging text books that I could have only dreamed of as a school kid. Suddenly kids will be able to explore their subject matters with interactive diagrams, zoomable pictures, video and various other features.

Students will be able to easily add notes too which I always recall my teachers telling me specifically not to do in our books or doodle in them in anyway, shape or form. I always thought this was a little ironic (I assumed I knew what ironic meant back then) as the pages were invariably already adorned with many intricate drawings are various bodily parts or the suspected sexuality of many of the school teachers (as you can tell I went to a top notch London school).

Of course all these new flashy books have to be created and anyone who has had to deal with desktop publishing will know what a pain this can be. Having to reformat text and resize pictures. Well Apple thinks it has solved this problem with it’s new app, iBooks Author.

iBooks Author is primarily focused on textbooks but it is reported you could make any kind of book with it. Simply open the app, choose a template and start dragging your content right into the book. Add text, photos, video and Word files that will automagically create sections and headers based on the content. Decide to add more pictures afterwards and the words will simply flow around the image dynamically.

You can also add widgets such as an image gallery to add a little interaction into your creation. The ability to import a Keynote is also included simply by dragging and dropping. However, for the more gifted programers out there they can also write their own widgets using Javascript and HMTL.

Once your book is created you can publish it to your iPad to check the layout and proof your creative masterpiece. Apparently you will also be able to send it off to iBooks to be published but I am presently not sure how that approval process will work.

With the introduction of iBooks Author many teachers and writers will have at their hands a very powerful way of easily creating an ebook, but what is the cost of this rather powerful piece of software? Free….Totally free.

To show Apple means business they have partnered with a number of important publishers in the textbook world for this launch. Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have all produced textbooks that are available today all for under $15.

To further the educational aspect of todays event Apple also released the iTunes U App for the iPad. Now students (or anyone else) can subscribe to the many free courses available through iTunes U and have them all neatly organised in one app.

Once subscribed to a courses you can get full details of the teacher, the syllabus and option things like office hours and credits available. The teacher can post notes to subscribed students including assignments and to-do lists. These assignments can link you to the relevant book in your iBooks section. The teacher can also make videos available also accessable through the app. Once again notes can be easily taken and stored for later reference. A Materials tab makes it a breeze to link out to any required or suggested books, videos, documents are other material required for the course.

So that wraps up pretty much everything from the Apple Educational event. Already I have heard a few rumours that people have been disappointed with the presentation and the tools offered but in all honesty I cannot understand why? Apple made it clear that this was to be an educational event and that is what they delivered. The iBooks Author app alone I can see as having the potential to being a major game changer. If the production of books becomes a simple case of drag and drop I can see far more authors dabbling with self publishing than ever before.

There are times when I am so jealous of the kids of today. They have grown up with with technology around them and to them it is all second nature. I have no idea if the existence of the modern internet would have helped me out when I was at school but I am pretty sure, judging by the way kids love to engage with the iPad, that its inclusion within any educational field will sure to be an viewed as an added bonus….well, until the kid wants a quick game of angry birds at least.

Karl Madden
@claw0101 

While this was taking place, up here in the somewhat nippy northern parts of Europe, things are not quite as rosy and lovely. Amazon is to the common person on the street an unheard of company, Netflix is something people use in movies and tv-series and Lovefilm only recently started offering streaming. With a pretty abysmal selection of available titles, even in comparison to the DVDs they mail back and forth.

As you can see, the situation is not exactly great. Consider also that we have to travel in harsh winter conditions for a good portion of year when we want to rent movies, so it’s even worse for us… Actually, I’m kidding. Things are not as gloomy as I made them out to be.

One of the options available for some time is the service Voddler, by the Swedish company bearing the same name. While having made some strange choices over the years, like making a desktop client completely void of mouse interaction, they have managed to improve considerably during 2011. Personally I prefer to stay away from watching movies on the desktop, simply because it depends on Adobe Flash and my old MacBook is not fond of that. The iOS apps are pretty good and do deliver a rather nice experience as far as it is possible on a mobile device. Library of movies is not too bad either, with new titles popping up at least as fast as they do in any rental place I have seen. The bad part is that there is no good way of sending the movie to the big screen, as Voddler does not have any interaction on for instance an Apple TV or any other media device that hooks up to your TV. Advantage: Netflix

Another option is the late-comer to the game in these parts; Apple! Yes, during 2011 they finally let us too join in on the joy of buying and renting movies via iTunes. The technology is far more integrated into existing options for getting the movie up on your TV, but only if you bought into the Apple ecosystem, of course. Here the real annoyance I have found is the somewhat slim offering of available titles. Could be that this is due to trouble getting all the various companies to sign on the dotted line or just that this region is not viewed as important in terms of making an effort to supply more titles. Prices are far from as bad as I have heard people say they are in other regions, compared to the alternatives there, but I’m not exactly impressed either. And there is no subscription service. Advantage: Netflix

Then there is the other Swedish service named Headweb, which offer roughly the same service as Voddler, sans the apps for Android, but there are apps for iOS. On the other hand, there is the option to use the service with your Playstation 3, which offers an alternative I have yet to see other companies have. Similar to Apple, Headweb does not use any kind of DRM on their wares anymore, but rather a form of digital watermarking that can be traced back to the buyer, should the file find its way to the general populace somehow. Gets titles about as fast as Voddler, but suffer from the same issue of not having quite the same library in the back as Netflix. Headweb does have some other interesting social interaction and awarding system built in, so at least there is that. Advantage: Netflix

So all in all, there are indeed a bunch of options available up here in the cold north known as Sweden. They just aren’t up to the same level as Netflix, regardless of what way I choose to look at it. Granted, they are not necessarily bad and they do offer a compelling option to rolling out the door and moseying along to the nearest place where they let you borrow a plastic disc in exchange for some hard earned cash. I hope Amazon will crawl its way up here before long and give the existing companies a run for their collective money, as that would probably be needed right now. It’s not bad as it is, but it can indeed get a fair bit better, at least in my mind!

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

I have so far installed Netflix on my 360, Apple TV2, iPhone and iPad and can say I am very impressed with the results. The pictures look crisp and clean on even older standard definition files. HD with 5.1 looked and sounded fantastic on my 42″ screen with very little noticeable pixelation. The media started streaming almost immediately and looked perfect compared to other streaming media I have tried in the past. However I must admit I currently enjoy a 50MB Broadband connection but according to Netflix’s website they only require a connection of 500kbps (0.5MB) to allow you to watch media instantly.

Obviously this kind of service will live and die by it’s content though, so what does Netflix have to offer right out of the bag. At the moment Netflix seems to be pretty cagey as to how many films they are currently offering but they have said the total is due to rapidly increase over the coming months.

A quick perusal of their library revels such gems as Pirates of the Caribbean, Sneakers, National Treasure, Sin City, Kill Bill, Face Off and Con Air. Ok, these are all guilty pleasures so don’t judge me too harshly. There are many more but I can’t do an exhaustive list.

TV shows are also well represented with series of Doctor Who, Torchwood, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Poirot, Arrested Development, Twin Peaks, Faulty Towers, The IT Crowd and many more.

When you compare the system that Netflix is offering it is very easy to compare it to the similar streaming service offered by Lovefilm. I have unfortunately used LoveFilm and although the recent addition of the LoveFilm app to the Xbox360 is far from terrible the rest of its streaming strategy as often left much to be desired with poor quality streams and a limited library even after several months.

Netflix appears to be offering a cleaner, simpler interface with an initial library that is satisfactory if not stellar. Hopefully time and licensing deals will rectify this in the future but for it’s first day out in the UK Netflix is an impressive service and I look forward to see how it develops…and how the ISP’s cope with the inevitable strain on their systems.

Karl Madden
@claw0101 

Foto Photo Walk

Alex Fox from BagelTech Foto was our guest professional for the day and he was soon engaging us all in techniques, settings and compositions that we could try to bring out the best in the subjects we were photographing.

Foto Photo Walk

Next we moved to the South-bank in search of a local tavern that would supply us with much needed liquid refreshment. Once inside the warm we were able to chat and swap stories and ask further questions from Alex who was more than happy and willing to share his expertise.

By now the sun had finally set leaving us with the glorious sites of the River Thames at night. We filed across Blackfriars Bridge and all tried our hands at prolonged exposures to capture the night views. Again Alex has on hand to share techniques and we all managed to get some stunning shots.

Foto Photo Walk

The day turned out to be a total pleasure. I met some wonderful people and had a fantastic time while learning lots of new things that I will be using again in my future photography. We eventually parted ways but not before expressing an eagerness for our next photo walk excursion. Hopefully next time you may be joining us.

Karl Madden
@claw0101

I’ve had enough – only this week on the Big show I had to defend Research In Motion (RIM) – then I read Paul Thurott’s blog post on RIM, even the BBC are at it. It just seems like a cheap shot. RIM shows no signs of bankruptcy, or poor business practices, yet the tech media insists they’re done finished and gone. I frankly think all these normally wise heads are swayed by these pretty glass rectangles made by fruit themed toy makers and a popular search engine company, and are missing the point completely.

Are Blackberry’s the best business phone? maybe not … they’ve had some misses with some recent handsets as they stepped away from what they know to sell pretty glass rectangles. However the simple curve/bold qwerty keyboard phones are best in class without a doubt. Not convinced Nokia, HTC, Motorola, Samsung and others all have a designs that looks similar, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Why make one if the markets dead?

Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg, the Blackberry infrastructure is superb, offering end to end e-mail encryption. You can start with a 50 user Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for free, and all you loose over the paid version, is some granular control. BES Express still has end to end e-mail encryption, remote wipe, application control and and all the other essential features you need. The recent outage in the UK only affected users of blackberry’s web-based BIS service. The rest of us with BES’s just carried on. 2011 outage was the first since 2009 each earlier outage was pretty minor.

The level of security up to recently has been ironclad, the encryption keys were closely guarded by RIM, and government’s were generally told to get stuffed if they asked for them. However in this “terrorist under the bed” post 9/11 world, RIM has released the keys to selected governments and security services after some arm twisting. But, its still the first choice for civil servants, drug dealers, spies and most recently rioters as a secure method of communication. What better recommendation is there….

Paul Thurrott’s recent hatchet job on RIM, was in some places well observed. The playbook was ill advised and they should have ignored the tablet fad and watched the market a bit longer before diving in. No one would have cared if just they carried on making qwerty keyboard phones, that’s what businesses the world over trust RIM to do . But, he missed the point in laughing at the playbook and the model of the month release schedule thats always been a “feature” of blackberry ownership. All thats small beer, RIM still provides reliable business class messaging services with fleets of Blackberries out there to prove it.

I’m sad to say lazy tech journalists seem blinded by the wizzy flash touch screen phones that are so trendy at the minute. They miss what the rest of the world is doing. Across the world now millions of blackberries are beeping and providing safe secure business critical email to everyone from CEO’s to engineers in oil fields. Thats the sound of success not of a company in trouble.

Ian Grant

Ian can be found on twitter @tioaboa and soon on his blog…. Ian is a system administrator with 15 years experience in the IT industry, and is a messaging and virtualisation specialist.

OS X remained virtually unaffected from most forms of malware for a number of years, having the odd blip of suspicious code here and there, but not more. I would surmise that it was several factors that led this to happen.

In the early days of Mac OS X there weren’t really that many users. Even today if we compare the amount of people using OS X, even Windows XP is by far more common and widespread. Since it was both statistically unlikely that the user would have it as well as that many malware makers were already very familiar with Windows, made the Mac a much less interesting target for attack.

As the number of Mac users have increased greatly in the last 5 years, the situation has changed. Given the knowledge most windows users have and in some cases the lack of knowledge, a new opportunity has arisen. Now there are a ton of “normal users” who have been conditioned for many years to have certain ideas about how a computer behaves and what it needs to function. These people won’t be able to tell a real dialog box from a fake one on a website and they are more likely to enter their administrator password when prompted to do so. While the system itself has a very strong secure foundation, the bad guys just exploit the one true weakness: the user!

More people on a platform means it’s more tempting to “mine” that potential gold and make a profit from it. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into believing that the Mac is now huge, since a PC is far more likely to be running any variant of Windows than Mac OS X. But the numbers are great enough to attract attention from the darker recesses of the Internet.

One misconception is that it’s a virus outbreak that’s next on the security agenda for the Mac, but I highly doubt that. While there are indeed lots of new viruses discovered every day, viruses are not as much in the future as other, more modern threats. Trojans for instance.

A version of Pixelmator was recently discovered to contain a rather nasty payload called DevilRobber. In fact the download didn’t contain Pixelmator at all, just the malware. After duping the user into running the fake program, DevilRobber would be installed and hidden in the background of your system. Particularly nasty is the fact that this particular malware not only uses your computing power to create bitcoins, but also to steal any bitcoin information already on your machine as well as a keystroke logger. Say goodbye to your passwords as soon as you have typed them! They’re now on their way to the malware creator.

Trusting the source of the download is critical nowadays and downloading pirate copies of software is not a good option. This is not the first time this has happened either, as pirate copies of iWork has been found to contain Trojans in the past. Expect this to be frequent in the future to come, if the recent past is any indication of things.

Security is reality and we must all take responsibility for how we use our computers, regardless of what kind, be it laptop, desktop, smartphone or tablet. Nothing matters unless we can trust our devices and we take the necessary steps to stay safe!

My quick and easy advice to everyone who uses a computer, no matter the brand and what software you are using, is to download software only from trusted sources and think twice about giving away your administrative password. Common sense will take you far, you should exercise that ability as much as you possibly can.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

It still seems crazy to me that in this hyper connected, fibre optic world we are still governed by these outdated modes of business. I know the music took a massive hit from the likes of Napster when it first exploded onto the scene and ever since then they have been on the defensive when it comes to the digital world but come on guys, join the rest of us here in 2011.

I know you may be sick of reading this by now but I recently read the Steve Job biography and even he was constantly shocked and dismayed that these music industry types just didn’t understand the world had changed and they could no longer cling to their outmoded forms of thinking.

The very idea of giving the consumer a choice to legally purchase just one or two songs from an album filled them with dread, possibly because they knew that around 80% of most albums are just filler. If people could just buy the few tracks they wanted the world would fall apart, mass hysteria would follow and we’d all fall into the fiery pits of hell.

Obviously none of these things happened and once presented with a cheap, legal and easy means to obtain music the vast majority soon bought into the iTunes service.

The next move was to streaming. Many companies have dabbled in this service, probably the most successful being Spotify. For a monthly fee you gain access and can stream from over 15 million songs to various devices. However there are still limitations. Not all artists are available on Spotify and so it is still a less than perfect situation. Of course as you are only ‘renting’ the content once you stop paying the subscription all the music is no longer available.

I know it must be scary for these record executives to just release their grip on what they perceive to be their only stream of revenue. However it must be remembered that this is the same industry that funds such services as the RIAA for millions of dollars to lobby on its behalf in Washington. It is this industry that usually only pays the actual artists a pittance from any sales. It is this industry that for better or worse (worse in my case) has unleashed shows like X-Factor upon us, reducing music to nothing more than a commodity with plug and play plastic-popstars.

With that all said maybe it is no surprise that these executives still fail to see the opportunities that are standing before them in this digital age. They fail to see cheaper logistics and cheaper prices spurring on bigger sales. They fail to see how their artists can engage with their audiences and raise their interest across social networks. They fail to see how sharing music can build an audience and reach a new people.

Maybe one day a new breed of executives will reach the boardrooms and effect change. Ones that have grown up in this modern era. Ones that have shared the frustration of Digital Right Management systems. Ones that have discovered new music because their friends shared it with them. Until this day comes however I feel we are all destined to live with these draconian licensing laws that govern how we are able to enjoy our various forms of digital entertainment.

-Karl (@claw0101)

As a resident of London I am often forced to endure the special kind of hell that is our underground system. When it is not being held hostage by its union leader it is the fastest form of transport in this great city. Naturally once you venture down to this subterranean world and hurtle along in steel tube canisters you cannot help to look around at your fellow travellers to see what they have brought along to entertain themselves.

In the old days this was a simple choice. A book. It was small, personal and fitted easily into your pocket or handbag. Some did try newspapers but they mainly annoyed fellow passengers with the constant folding and page turning, which often resulted in said fellow passengers doing that typically English thing of not saying anything in annoyance.

With the advent of Smartphones these soon started to take precedence. Many passengers would stare into their small screened worlds while hurtling along the tracks. Naturally the only downside to this was a complete lack of signal on much of the underground network.

Then the e-reader started to appear. Slowly at first but soon gaining traction. Without much ado passengers would whip out the small grey Kindle and start reading. Fellow passengers would look across, as we do when we have yet again forgotten to bring anything to relieve the boredom, and see the small device with the grey screen but really great display.

Soon the item started to proliferate with all kinds of travellers loosing themselves in their latest reading material. Slowly the vast number that used to read paperbacks were being usurped by this new breed of electronic readers. Naturally some of the newspaper readers still persisted and as a result were still being ignored.

It’s easy to see why so many have made the e-reader choice. The Kindle is a lightweight item that feels so comfortable in your hand. The display uses an e-ink system that results in pin sharp resolution that is very comfortable to read, assuming you have a source of light of course. The devices internal memory can hold thousands of books at once and the device remembers where you are when you stop reading.

Another great advantage is there are many books out there that are free and legal to download. You can often find some classic literature that may has passed you by but now is just a quick download away.

Finally the biggest advantage is the price which has continued to fall since the Kindle’s introduction. This fact is opening the Kindles availability to an ever increasing market and consumer level.

As I mentioned at the start of my piece the Kindle Fire will soon be joining the line up from Amazon. This will only be in the great US of A with no stated plans as yet for a global rollout. The Fire will allow the downloading of music, movies, TV shows, apps, books and allows you to browse the net. With it’s colour display and a pixel density slightly higher than the iPad will it be able to slow the adoption of Apple’s device as many are claiming?

I am sure there will be consumers out their that will see the Kindle Fire and the iPad as one and the same with the only difference being the price. However the limitations of the Fire might soon become noticeable. The Fire is definitely a consumption device, something that the iPad was previously labeled as. Both have their own stores and appear to be quite strict what can and can’t play on their systems. However I think they are very different beasts and I’m not sure the Fire will dent anyone’s desire to have an iPad. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for the rest of the Android tablets out there. I can see the Fire causing all kinds of problems for these manufacturers who were already struggling to compete with the iPads price and are now having to face another competitor at a much lower price point.

However no matter what potential purchasers decide to spend their hard earned cash on there is still one inevitable result. The poor old book will face yet another competitor vying to finally banish it to history and although it might not be the Firemen from Bradbury’s story making it go up in flames the result might well be the same as the physical book is banished to the pages of the history books, naturally in e-book format.

-Karl Madden (@claw0101)

A lot of games are given a new life on the various online stores available on many platforms these days. For some games moving to some platforms, there are some problematic conversions and compromises to be done, just to make them function on said platform. As brilliant as the touch screen is for interfaces, it’s not ideal for a lot of games, and specially not for games that were originally designed to work with a physical controller of some sort. The experience will be sub-par, unless some really good way has been found to compensate for this. So far, I have not been too impressed with how conversions have been carried out.

One review I read on the app store simply stated that the game was too difficult, for what I could discern as that it simply didn’t “hold the hand of the player” enough. Many older video games pretty much tossed you straight into the action without giving you a tutorial or instructions in the actual game. Comparably, modern games are littered with sections meant only to teach the basic mechanics of the game to the new player. Add to the mix that the controls of this game are not as responsive or exact as could be desired.

Have kids these days gotten so “spoiled” by the culture of tutorials and “go here, do that, then go here” mentality of gaming that they are unable to understand and get into the older games that lack these mechanics? I honestly don’t know the answer to that one, but I would like to find out. Hopefully my worst fears are completely unfounded and kids are still able to grasp the simple complexity of retro games, even in this day and age.

The games of the NES, SNES, Master System and the MegaDrive were indeed difficult games more often than not. Those of us who started playing video games back then wrapped around brains around those limitations and created strategies for how to deal with them. Exploration and trying everything imaginable was one of those strategies and I still play games by it today, even though games nowadays follow a much more linear path. For my taste, even a bit too linear.

There is an exactness, an eye for crucial details that sometimes leaves the player breathless, when you think about the details of some games. They excel at being artistic and pushing the hardware to its absolute limits, while having a soundtrack that keeps you going and exploiting every possible feature of the limited sound chip. Not to mention the pixel-perfect controls and relentlessly unforgivable gameplay style. So many of these games have nothing to be blamed in terms of how you interface with it and failure is a feature exclusive to the player. Except if you are playing it on an aforementioned sub-par port to a different platform.

Much of the same style and general mechanics still exist, but you won’t find it in the mainstream titles by big names in the business. Instead, aim your attention towards the indie scene, where brutal difficulty and pixel graphics still reign supreme. Often times these games are developed by people who grew up with the old games, so I guess the hope is not completely gone.

Like with Growl on the Mac, it could be a case of either loving it or hating it. Either you love the old games with everything that is their style and function, or you simply just despise it for all what it is worth. Everything can impossibly cater to every taste under the sun, so it would make sense that not all gamers like or even can appreciate the old games. I just hope for a future where they are remembered as the marvels of technology, interactive art and entertainment that they are, not being tossed on the garbage pail of the past, only to be forgotten by choice.

Robert Falck

Robert is a freelance tech journalist from Sweden. You can follow his posts here on Bagel Tech and on his site streakmachine.com or you can follow him on twitter @streakmachine.

Japanese IT giant Fujitsu and the government-funded RIKEN research lab announced that the supercomputer they’ve built in Kobe can speed through 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second and going under the name the “K Computer”.

The K is named for the Japanese word “kei”, which represents 10 quadrillion. The super computer spans 864 server racks and over 88,000 interconnected CPUs, all able to work towards a common task. The last of the racks were installed at the RIKEN lab in Kobe, Japan this past August.

According to the industry standard Linpack benchmark, the K Computer’s average performance is about 93 percent of its peak 10 petaflop speed. In June, it topped the Top 500 list with a peak performance of 8.162 petaflops.

Earlier in the week, the Chinese uncloaked a world-class supercomputer built entirely with homegrown processors. The K Computer however is ten times faster, yet proving that not everything in this world is made in China.

Follow me on Twitter @kyleswager

Lots and lots of column inches have been devoted to the pros and cons of which one offers what benefit and which provides for what drawback. I hope you read all those articles because I wont be wasting my time repeating them here.

The long and the short of this post is that RAW v JPEG is a CHOICE not a WAR! Too many people who write articles, feel the need to draw a conclusion as to which format they have finally settled on and then blindly shoot that format going forward.

I recently lent a camera to a young aspiring photographer at my cricket club and forgot to switch the capture to JPEG from RAW. She spent the afternoon taking 1-3 images of most of the cricket shots from our batsmen and then she handed me back the camera.

I was distraught to find that all 600+ images had been taken in RAW. Why ever would you want to shoot local amateur sport in RAW. There are bound to be any number of good shots available and for 99% of those, the camera will have done a great job exposing the result. The results were going on the Cricket Clubs Flickr Page and even if a ‘magic image’ been missed because of exposure issues…so what? Its Local Amateur Sport.

I however had an afternoon of wading through each image and then having to process each one through Adobe Bridge and in 100% of cases clicked ‘auto’ in the settings selection…what a waste of time!

RAW is a Tool for the photographer to use just as much as a Tripod is a tool. Use it when you need it or feel that it would be helpful in creating a great image and avoid it when you don’t need it and feel it would be cumbersome in either the time it takes you to process the images, or in the file size that it consumes on your storage media and backup media.

The Conclusion is…Make an educated choice based on the pros and cons of each image type and use the one which suits the setting and the opportunity, JUST like you would a tripod. Carry it if you’ll need it, leave it in the trunk if you don’t. It’s SIMPLE!

Stop listening to all the static that is talked over RAW and start listening to your own skill and judgement. THAT’S what sets pros apart from amateurs.

Regards

Ewen Rankin (JPEG & RAW User)

If this is what some people define as a jail, I’m quite impressed by these facilities! You can come and go as you please, something I sure wasn’t aware of was standard for jails. There are also a large number of tools available to enable you to do all kinds of things, from sprucing up photos to writing or perhaps just play a game for a while. Then we have the aesthetics, which in my opinion are some of the best available on the market, both in terms of hardware and software.

So basically the Apple jail is something along the lines of this:

• You can come and go as you please

• You have a very large choice of things to do

• It looks good on the outside as well as the inside

• Your information can be taken to other places without too much trouble

• The jailers apparently want you to be able to do what you want while you are there

While I can understand it from some perspectives, it puzzles me that people define the whole experience as a jail. It’s far too free to be a jail, since I’m allowed to do what I please when I please to do so, and using any tool I desire. Sure, the tools available (the apps, in this metaphor) are limited to what Apple selects, but that is not too much more different than what stores to all the time. Yet, we do not call stores for prisons or jails.

Quite the opposite of a jail, if you ask me. I may not be able to see the source code, that which makes all the programs in the whole system, nor do I get the hardware specifications along with design diagrams for how to build my own. But on the other hand, how many people of all those who buy any kind of a computing device would really need, want or understand how to use such things?

I keep burping the same thing over and over, but it’s just a fact we cannot escape: nerds are not the ones computers are built for anymore! These days they are designed for anyone to be able to use, not just those who have an interest in them. Should we fundamentally deny people this for the sake of having everything available to everyone? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea necessarily, but if we just face some realistic facts; there are some people who just don’t give a darn.

It’s not like we are without alternatives either. There has never been as much free software available as there is now and there are some truly great tools out there so that you never ever have to touch anything that would even remotely remind you of a jail. Instead of whining about how closed Apple is and how secretive their products are, why not go out there and build something that so far exceeds what Apple does and beat them at it? Making something that just works so much better in every single aspect, with all the source code completely available for all the magic behind the scenes. And it would be nice if it was an aesthetic experience where you can do what you want while enjoying the experience as a whole. But maybe it’s more fun to use wget to download websites and stare at them in lynx? You can do that if you want, I sure won’t call you anything and I won’t say you are in any kind of institution, but just don’t expect other people to enjoy it as much as you do.

If some people still want to call what Apple builds a jail, then fine by me, I won’t stop you. I merely want to invite some reflection on the term itself and what it means in comparison to the real life institution, and how that refers to Apple services and products. By the same definition you are in a jail whenever you choose any product by any manufacturer, be it milk or a car. Only remember that just because something doesn’t conform to your personal view of the world or your opinions of how it should work, doesn’t make it a jail that cripples the imagination and enslaves millions of people all over the world.