Gadgets Future

Since its release last fall, the Mugen Puchi Puchi electronic bubble wrap toy from Bandai became so popular in Japan that the company deemed the novelty keyring worthy of an update. The second-generation toy, dubbed Moe Puchi Puchi, retains the same design and "functionality" of its predecessor but adds a little something to appeal to consumers who have a little thing for young Japanese . . . anime characters.

Wrapped in packaging sporting wide-eyed girls dressed in anime archetype attire, Moe Puchi Puchi still aims to satisfy the baffling human obsession with popping bubble wrap. But in addition to the standard clicking that accompanies a "pop," the speaker on the back of the toy lets out the whispering Japanese voices of the characters.

I’ve had some time with the Mugen Puchi, so the voices should be clear as day. They’ll all be in Japanese, of course, but the tone (moe means "cute, precious, innocent" and is typically used to describe young girls in anime and manga) should be enough to convey the sweet sentiments.

As with the original, these "bonus" sounds will only be heard at set intervals. Every one-hundredth pop on the Mugen results in a completely random and often humorous sound like a clown horn honk, dog bark, or burp; the Moe version, on the other hand, utters heart-melting phrases either every 50 pops or after being left alone for too long (there’s conflicting info on this).

There are four colors to choose from, each corresponding to a distinct archetype and equipped with one-liners appropriate to the character:

• Pink is Imouto, the adoring baby sister.
• Black is Meido, the stereotypical young maid.
• Blue is Osananajimi, the loyal childhood friend.
• Red is Tsundere, the tough yet vulnerable school girl.

As the only toy designed to replicate the feel of popping bubble wrap, the Puchi Puchi is obviously in a class by itself. It’s unique and fun (for a minute), to be sure, but it doesn’t really feel or sound like bubble wrap. The buttons are realistically squishy and soft, but they’re just too firm. You really have to push the bubble to get it to "pop," which is too much work for too little reward.

If you’re thinking of paying $59 for the whole set just for the anime voices and to brush up on your Japanese, then fine. To each his own, they say. But if you want the Moe Puchi Puchi because having everlasting bubble wrap with you at all times is equivalent to sheer bliss, then you may want to reconsider.

Samsung will be releasing an new Aura model called the R410. It features a 14.1-inch, 1,280 x 800 display, 45nm Penryn CPUs, ATI Radeon Xpress 1250M graphics, a DVD burner, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, built-in WiFi and bluetooth, and a welcome ExpressCard slot. The R410 is going for about £499 or $1,000. The Aura R410 will hit Europe in May.
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The Pioneer AVIC-F500BT is almost here now after receiving approval from the FCC, offering one of the larger screens where GPS naviation systems are concerned at 5.8″. It provides door-to-door driving directions and is able to connect to virtually anything in your vehicle, pairing up with your handset thanks to Bluetooth while boasting support for an optional TMC antenna. Heck, the ND-BC2 add-on also allows you to connect it to a rear view camera for those who question their own reverse parking skills. Patience is a virtue, friends, so don’t go blow that wad of cash you have at the moment on something frivolous as you wait for the Pioneer AVIC-F500BT to hit the streets.

Pocket-lint does a first look review of the Nokia N96 and writes, “Just like its predecessor the N96 sports HSDPA connectivity, a 5-megapixel camera, GPS, the Symbian S60 operating system and that dual slider screen that hides the keypad and dedicated music controls…Around the back you’ll find the 5 megapxiel camera that now features a “kickstand” around the lens that allows you to perch it on a desk for hands-free viewing.”

Read more about the Nokia N96.

Altoids seem to be just as popular for their curiously strong flavor as they are for the metal tins they come in. I’ve seen everything from headphone amps to battery backups to even actual iPods crammed into those tins, so it seems almost logical that someone would make one specifically designed for that purpose. Case Logic, who produces cases for nearly every piece of electronics on the market, is now selling a Traditional Tin metal case for the current generation iPod Nano and 80GB/160GB iPod Classic.

The tins are custom fitted for either ipod, and are lined with a silicon insert to cushion the mp3 player while the metal case protects it from wear and tear. There are holes cut in the top and bottom giving you access to the iPod’s ports and controls, and the lid slides up and down so you can see the screen and access the scroll wheel. The cases run $30 each and are available in either black, pink, eggplant purple or silver depending on which version you buy.
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Somehow sports that feature projectiles in a game (badminton, soccer, cricket, squash, tennis) have given birth to obsession such as the “fastest serve in the world”. In cricket, the fastest a ball was delivered is approximately 100mph, but those are the domain of professionals. What if you’re a budding cricket fan who adores the sport and want to know just how fast you will be able to bowl that cricket ball? Well, instead of getting a friend to stand at your side and using radar guns to capture the necessary statistics, why not use this Speedsensor cricket ball? For AUD$55 a pop, you get the official size, shape and weight of a standard cricketball, complete with a small LCD readout on one face. The only drawback is the need to program just how far the object is away before you bowl it…too much math…brain…exploding!

LavNav
Avoid that ghastly glaring bathroom light as you stagger lavwards on your nocturnal constitutionals.

You can have this for ?19.95

Do you love having late nights out, only to realize that it is near impossible to concentrate on lectures the next day? Perhaps the Yamaha Pocketrak 2G will be able to help you out, being a stereo digital pocket recorder that comes with the following :-

• 2GB of internal memory
• 9 hours of recording time
• Records in MP3 and PCM format
• Integrated speakers
• Twin high sensitivity swivel microphones
• USB connectivity

The Yamaha Pocketrak 2G will hit your wallets for £260 damage.

Now is this a cute digital camera or what - the Casio Exilim EX-Z80’s interface is rather comical when you think about it, providing some relief for folks who are just too serious in their life. Heck, it will literally display a heartbroken image should it fail to focus on your subject, but you can also choose other images such as stars, flowers and even babies to break whenever you snap a blurry one. Stars and flowers are fine, but babies?!? Hopefully this firmware will be able to find its way outside of Japan - keep your fingers crossed, folks!

I’m a 38 year old software developer who’s spent the bulk of his adult life behind the keyboard. I’ve gone through iterations of software that most people don’t even know existed, includnig several assembler programs. So, “What’s an assembler?” you ask… It’s a tool that most developers today never have to touch, but one that is at the heart of every compiler and one that is behind every single application out there in existence. It’s just hidden from developers for the sake of generating executable code more quickly.

I’m going to make a bold claim here: We’ve lost something significant. Something amazingly significant.

I’ve been very fortunate recently to have every computer I own crash on me. I say fortunate because it gave me the unique opportunity to find out exactly how much we’ve lost with the continued growth and bloat of Microsoft products. I have pretty much always purchased Microsoft’s Upgrade operating systems because they’re cheaper. But, what does that do for someone when you get a few generations down the line? It means that I have to install Windows XP or Windows 2000 first, using my originally purchased Windows 95 or Windows 98 discs, before I can then install Vista, for example. And, that’s the subject of this article.

In the process of installing Windows 2000 I was able to see how much faster a computer system could be than what we are seeing today. Basic operations are much faster than they are with Vista, and even so on lesser equipment. Vista’s graphic engines require fast hardware, but it’s more than that. So much of Microsoft’s products are built around the .NET environment, which is an emulated environment touching countless libraries of compiled code. And Java is the same. Modern .NET and Java compilers actually translate the emulated opcodes into literal opcodes to run natively on the machine, but that doesn’t hide the fact that the emulation exists and is, therefore, necessarily less efficient than original algorithms written for the CPU.

What prompted me to write this piece today was an article on Sun’s website from earlier this week entitled, “Sun Java Real-Time System Selected for Space Surveillance Radar” along with another one from Microsoft’s website entitled “Microsoft Enables Real-Time Business Decisions with BizTalk RFID Mobile”.

BizTalk is Microsoft’s .NET based server system for e-Commerce. I had the opportunity to do some development in BizTalk last year and was amazed at how incredibly slow it is, how complex it is, and while ultimately extensible, it must be extended in just a particular way (without getting into really complex, tricky enhancements).

We are losing a significant amount with the emulated toolsets we’re seeing today. Most everything programmed today does not run on the machine itself, but rather runs inside a virtual environment which is emulated inside the machine. This means that specific CPU features that may be present are not often utilized by these emulated devices. It also increases the compute burden on the CPU because in order to do something that should only require 1 million instructions (note that on modern CPUs 1 million instructions executes in about one two-thousandths (1/2000) of a second) now takes 200 million instructions. Literally. And while 200 million instructions can execute in about 1/10th of a second, it is still that much slower.

The fact is most people don’t care about the difference between 1/2000th of a second versus 1/10th of a second because human beings don’t generally deal with times that are that small. Anything less than a second is just great! Nevermind the extra power consumed to compute all of those otherwise unnecessary instructions, resulting literaly in billions of dollars per year in world-wide energy waste due to software inefficiencies running on every Microsoft OS (and many other OSes running Java and other similar environments). And all because the real software developers out there, the ones who can program in assembly, or C or even C++ (though even with C++ you begin to lose so much over C, about 10% in performance or more), are a dying breed. They’re dinosaurs.

Who wants a software developer that can write small, tight code in C when it can be written in Java? Or Visual Basic or some other .NET language? Very few. But still, at the heart of every Java compiler, .NET emulator, .NET language compiler, etc., exists a group of developers who are still working in assembly, C and C++ to make sure everything works as it should on the actual CPU itself.

When modern software developers write for the toolset they are stepping far away from the CPU. And while this is arguably a good thing for the fact that the same compiled code will run on platform after platform, how many of us do that? And how many pure Java apps run natively on multiple platforms without special software consideration on behalf of the developers anyway? In my experience very few.

We need people who are willing to spend the extra few weeks or months it would take to develop and maintain code using something that’s close to the machine.

Challenge
I challenge everybody out there to dig up an old copy of Windows 95 or Windows 98, and install it on your machine and note how much faster that user interface operates than the modern ones today. I also advise grabbing some older software written in the late 1990s for those operating systems and see just how fast they are today on modern equipment. A perfect example of this is Microsoft Word 2.0. It absolutely flies on modern machines whereas today’s Microsoft Word 2007 is so painfully slow to boot and use certain tools that it’s almost unusable at times.

Are we willing to forego that performance, that energy savings, that truly usable system for the sake of higher graphics and ribbons, especially when those things can be programmed using the older models just as easily as the newer ones? In fact, if anyone would like to fund me for such a challenge, I’ll stand up personally against anyone in this business and prove to them that with the proper initial base design that the entire thing being done in these bloated emulated environments can also be created using the older models, and with greater speed, flexibility and efficiency even.

I stand behind my words. Any takers?