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  • News & article

    Rabbit R1's AI action intrigues

    Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2024

    » A new device out of CES 2024 in Las Vegas caught my eye. At first glance, the Rabbit R1 doesn't look all that interesting. It's a US$199 (in America), orange, handheld device that looks like an old-style gaming machine of some kind about the size of a stack of Post-It notes. It comes with a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a camera, a voice command button and a 4G LTE SIM card slot for connectivity beyond Wi-Fi. This is not a smartphone and won't replace it as there are no onboard apps, it won't pair with your smartphone and it doesn't talk to application APIs like cloud service gateways.

  • News & article

    Graphene semiconductors mark new start

    Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024

    » We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.

  • News & article

    Memory keeps getting cheaper and better

    Life, James Hein, Published on 05/07/2023

    » I recently picked up a portable 5TB drive for around US$100 (3,516 baht) and it reminded me of the time I got a 500MB internal drive for about the same price, but the difference is a thousand times the storage that can be carried with you for the same amount of money. Yes, the value of money has changed somewhat during that time so the original drive actually cost more but you get the idea, things keep getting better and the prices keep dropping. I sometimes wonder how long this will last, but for a few decades now that has been the story and it looks like it will be that way for the near future at least.

  • News & article

    What would you do without internet?

    Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2023

    » India recently blocked all internet, phone and SMS access to the state of Punjab for four to five days as they search for a Sikh separatist. I had a friend who was there at the time and they told me how eerie it was to see no one on a phone for a few days. Someone would occasionally pull out the phone to see if service had returned but apart from that, there were no people talking loudly on phones in restaurants or on public transport. This impacted 27 million people, which is more than the population of Australia.

  • News & article

    The future is here and it's all about AI

    Life, James Hein, Published on 04/01/2023

    » Well, here we are in 2023. The last two years of Covid are behind us, some organisations are starting to rebuild and the future will hopefully be brighter.

  • News & article

    When AI is not smart enough for the job

    Life, James Hein, Published on 14/09/2022

    » I was wondering what to write about this week and then I saw the Japanese Amazon story and how it relates to artificial intelligence. Labour unions in Japan have been a thing since World War II, but delivery drivers for Amazon Japan were not unionised, until recently.

  • News & article

    EU demands Apple play fair

    Life, James Hein, Published on 22/06/2022

    » It looks like the Apple-specific charging cable may be a thing of the past with the European Union demanding that all smartphone makers use a universal USB-C port for wired charging by 2024. The same rule will be applied to many other electronic devices like tablets, cameras, headphones, handheld video game consoles and e-readers. In the future, laptops will need to follow the same rule.

  • News & article

    Tesla Pi gets my motor running

    Life, James Hein, Published on 19/01/2022

    » I admit it, I'm getting excited about the Tesla Pi phone due out this year. The rumours have been flying fast and furious but there are some seemingly solid predictions. The phone will have a specially designed CPU. It will have a nice screen just under the 7-inch mark, four cameras and be deliberately priced a few hundred dollars under the top-of-the-line Apple phone. There is apparently some bad blood between Elon and Apple so that last one is a deliberate choice. Like the next Samsung range, it may have an under the screen front facing camera. There'll be lots of memory and a bunch of Tesla-like features with apparently a solar charger built into the back so you can always recharge during the day. I'm due for a new phone this year so I'll be holding off on the new Samsung and waiting to see what comes out.

  • News & article

    Prediction hits and misses for 2021

    Life, James Hein, Published on 22/12/2021

    » It is time once again to look back at 2021 to see what happened and how my predictions panned out.

  • News & article

    Don't get caught out on camera

    Life, James Hein, Published on 21/07/2021

    » - In the new Covid world, office workers are now regularly in meetings from home. Many of these meetings these days now also include a video feed. The first thing others in the call do when someone pops up, is to check the background and immediately zoom in, mentally or physically, on anything that seems out of place in the background. Last night's dishes, haphazardly discarded clothing and even a pot plant seemingly out of place will be the object of interest. Some use a green screen behind them and have an image placed on that by software.

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