The cellphone that runs for 15 years on one AA battery

Posted in Lifestyle, Mobile Phones, News

Like many of us, I suspect, I keep a spare mobile phone in my car. It’s just a cheap but reliable old Nokia, with a 365 day call bundle on it and a car charger to juice it up should it be required. I know it’s there should I not have access to my regular phone for whatever reason. However the SpareOne GSM cellphone is a much more sensible product for this type of scenario. It has been specifically designed to run for 15 years on a single AA battery.

Amongst the usage cases the manufacturers propose are cheap travel phones loaded with local minutes to use while you’re abroard, a robust emergency phone for kids that can just be carried around in a backpack until required and in case of disaster when there’s no power to charge your standard phone.

The SpareOne can hold its charge for 15 years – or longer if the battery manufacturers come up with a better battery. When in use you can get 10 hours of talk time from that one battery. It can be customised in a variety of colours and will take any standard micro-SIM card. If you want one, they start shipping in March.

TFI Friday Time Waster – Christopher Walken Reads ‘Where the wild things are’

Posted in News, TFI Friday Time-Waster

Apple Launch iBooks Author – Available Now Free in the App Store

Posted in iPad, Mac, News, Software

Have to say, I love this latest release from Apple – you’ve got to hand it to them. Here they’ve simplified the means of production for the generation of books (particularly but not limited to text books) and handed it over to the the knowledge experts. Teachers, scientists, engineers, journalists – anyone with expert knowledge of a subject can now publish a book on the iPad. iBooks Author is available for download here.

Bitwig – Amazing New Digital Audio Workstation Takes on the Mighty Ableton

Posted in Linux, Mac, Music, News, Software, Windows

Ableton revolutionised the production of music and, to a lesser extent, DJing. All of these commercial CD mixes you buy in your local music store – the odds are that they were made on Ableton and not by a DJ mixing live with a couple of decks. Anyway – BitWig is a newcomer to the scene that has been created by a couple of Ableton developers who moved on to do things their own way. It’s a multitrack recording suite that also does clip arrangement and launching (that’s the DJing bit), clip automation, per note automation and real-time sound stretching. It will be released on Windows, Mac and (yes!) Linux in 2012.

Picturenaut – Slick HDR Imaging for Windows

Posted in News, Photography, Windows

HDR has been getting a bit of a bad press lately. This is largely due to people releasing horribly over-saturated photographs that look like an acid trip gone wrong. But used correctly, high dynamic range photographs can look absolutely sensational.

If you’ve ever fancied trying your hand at this form of photography, then Picturenaut from HDRLabs is a bloody good place to start. It’s a well coded application that can leverage the power of your multi-core CPU to produce great HDR photos in less time. It’s 64-bit and supports industry standards such as EXIF and ICC data. It does image alignment, exposure correction, colour balancing, ghost removal and even supports the popular HDRShop’s plugin architecture.

Tubalr – Like Pandora For YouTube

Posted in Cloud, Music, News, Websites

So you’ll recall how the great thing about Pandora was discovering new music – you’d enter an artist you liked and you’d get to listen to lots of similar artists – well Tubalr is like Pandora but for YouTube videos. To get going you simply enter an artist you like and you get a cool list of songs that are similar.

Why Are Most Stories About Apple And Other Big Tech Companies Unsubstantiated Guff and Hot Air?

Posted in Mac, News, Websites

I like Macworld magazine. I’ve been reading it for a long time and I respect the team that put it together. That does not mean, however, that they are immune to the vacuous nonsense that passes as tech news these days – particularly when it refers to Apple.

Take the story which just popped up in my RSS news feed, entitled, ‘Slimmer’ iPhone coming later this year – analyst. This story, plucked from the Apple Insider website and rehashed badly by Ben Camm-Jones is an absolute gem – a non-story based on a rumour based on nothing but gut feelings and hot fucking air.

Let’s have a look at the facts, for want of a better word, that are presented to us in the Apple Insider/Macworld ‘story’. Firstly we discover that the source for the story is an ‘analyst’ at the investment bank Morgan Stanley by the name of Katy Huberty. You know Morgan Stanley, they’re those fuckwits at the epicentre of the global financial crisis who needed a $9b handout from the Japanese in order to stay afloat – so clearly we should trust the information produced by the far-sighted geniuses they employ.

So, we’ve established that the source of the story is an employee of the sort of investment banks that everyone loves these days. What does Katy have to say? Well, firstly, we are told that the next iPhone will be ‘slimmer’ than the current model. Well fuck me backwards – slimmer you say? I thought they’d revert to those old house brick sized mobiles that the yuppies used to wander around the City with back in the 1980s. Not only is this staggering insight put forward, but it’s such a big deal that it merits mention in the title of the ‘news’ story. Katy – are you seriously suggesting that you get paid money to produce reports with gems like that in them? I don’t know what’s worse, that Morgan Stanley produce this guff or that tech websites then repeat it like dogs throwing up next door’s three week old Chinese takeaway.

What’s next then? We are told that the miracle breakthrough that will allow the next iPhone to reduce in size will be due to (and I quote), “new touch panel technology.” Imagine that – touch screen technology will not, in fact, remain unchanged for the next thousand years – it will evolve and change. And even better friends, Apple are going to use some of that changing technology in their next iPhone!

We are then informed by Apple Insider/Macworld that the Morgan Stanley analyst conceded that, “other details of the next-generation iPhone remained sparse.” Of course that doesn’t stop her cavorting off into fairyland, dreaming up more stuff that Apple may or may not decide to install in their next iPhone. Katy ‘believes’ that it’ll come with a quad-mode chip from Qualcomm. Well, I believe in money trees Katy and I hope to discover one in Faraway Land any time soon.

Another gem then issues force from the Apple Insider/Macworld/Katy Hubert mouthpiece. Katy believes (no, really, she does) that “demand for the next-generation device will be strong.” Fucking hell, I was hoping I could saunter into my nearest Apple Store on launch day and take my pick from the eager staff in the struggling high street retailer’s premises, instead of having to, you know, fight through the legions of devoted Apple fanatics who’d buy an iDogshit if it came stamped with ‘Made in Cupertino by Apple’ on the base.

And that’s it. Someone in a bank that can’t balance its own books ‘believes’ the next iPhone will be slimmer and more powerful and people will want to buy it. Macworld, Apple Insider, Katy, we don’t claim to bring hard-hitting reportage to the masses here at Geekosity. We’re just a frivolous little tech news blog bringing small gobbets of information about interesting software and gadgets to a tiny readership. But if I ever sink as low as publishing the sort of fucking travesty of a story that you guys have the planet-sized balls to put out, I will close my doors and never bother another soul online again. Ever.

Slimmer, you say?