Category: Technology

I couldn’t imagine watching television now without a DVR! Back in the day, you actually had to watch the show when it aired, later I could record it to VHS, now I can even pause live TV. People sometimes ask “Don’t you love that commercial?” and I have to tell them I hardly ever see a commercial. Also, I’ve been asked what day a certain show airs and I have no idea, since my recorder just records them and I don’t have to remember. TIVO Digital Video Recorder was released on March 31, 1999 and I went to Circuit City and bought one soon after. I used it for years but Comcast came out with DVRs that had more advanced features so instead of purchasing new TIVOs I just use theirs now.

Read more about TIVO on Wikipedia

Taking a free Raspberry Pi/Python course. Three of my basic projects.

Pinout.xyz

[From Venturebeat.com] Whether it’s named or used anonymously, Corning’s Gorilla Glass has been a key ingredient in smartphones since the first iPhone — except for folding phones, where the screens are covered in flexible plastic. The reason: Corning says that it’s still working on flexible glass that will meet the specific needs of smartphone users, a development process that could take a couple of years.
Though it went largely uncredited as a development partner for the first iPhone, Corning’s work to create a smartphone screen up to Apple’s standards was down to the wire. In fact, the iPhone’s switch from a plastic screen cover to glass was announced well after the device’s memorable on-stage debut. Over the years, the partnership yielded a series of scratch- and oil-resistant glass panes that could be made harder, thinner, more flexible, or shatter-proof — except not all at the same time.

For years, Corning was working on a thinner solution — called Willow Glass — that was envisioned specifically for the curved bodies of future wearables. But, according to Wired, the company’s now trying to create an ultrathin, highly and repeatedly bendable glass suitable for folding devices. Unlike plastic, which will eventually develop permanent and visibly distorted creases in its folding zones, the glass will remain in its original shape.
The major challenge now is to simultaneously get the glass to a tight bend radius while enabling it to withstand drops — Corning says it can do one or the other at this point, but not both. For now, the glass can bend to a 3-5mm radius around 200,000 times, but not survive a serious drop event. The company aspires to create a 0.1mm thick glass that can bend to a 5mm radius without breaking.

Whether that radius is tight enough for next-generation foldables remains to be seen, but the inability to survive a drop would be a non-starter for smartphones and tablets  — especially for users of premium devices. Recently announced plastic-screened Samsung and Huawei foldables are slated to hit the market at $2,000 or more, insanely steep prices even for devices that could survive three or four years of normal use.
As the Wired report notes, the bigger problem for plastic-screened devices is that they won’t look as good as the glass smartphones customers are accustomed to. That was the reason Apple was willing to hold out until the last minute for a viable glass solution: The color transmissibility and scratch resistance of glass are visibly superior to plastic. Samsung and Huawei limited media handling of their devices at their launch events and Mobile World Congress booths to obscure these differences, but early foldable phone customers will certainly notice them and may well wish that they waited for later models with next-generation glass.

[From XME Science] 

Digital storage is incredibly easy and practical, but it has the downside of being prone to data loss. A book stored on your hard drive might last less than a hardcover. After four years, 11% of hard drives will fail. Solid state drives last a tad longer, but after a number of read-write cycles these too will inevitably fail. Cloud storage is your safest bet at the moment, but you’re at the whim of a third party. Now, for most practical purposes this can be fine, but if you need to store important data for … hundreds of years? This might seem absurd, but national archives are very serious about it and invest a lot in networks that backup data over and over. There might now be a more elegant solution after a team reports how they managed to cram 360TB worth of five-dimensional (5D) digital data onto a small quartz disk. The researchers claim the data is stable for as long as 13.8 billion years at temperatures up to 190 degrees Celsius.Southampton University researchers fired femtosecond laser pulses onto a structure of quartz at the nanoscale to write data. They made three layers of nano dots, each layer separate by only five microns. Another laser pulse fired on the structure measures the polarisation of the light. Changes in polarization can be used to read data.

“Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures,” reads a press release.

A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is referred to as unpolarized light. The light emitted by the sun, by a lamp in the classroom, or by a candle flame is unpolarized light. Such light waves are created by electric charges that vibrate in a variety of directions, thus creating an electromagnetic wave that vibrates in a variety of directions.