Engage The Cloak

According to a report on the BBC Technology site this morning, researchers at the University of Texas have successfully “cloaked” an object.

Using plasmonic materials, an 18cm cylinder has been rendered invisible. Sadly, it’s not quite as exciting as sounds, as it’s only invisible to light at the microwave end of the spectrum. According to the report, the technique and materials used are unlikely to work for the visible part of the spectrum, so all of those cunning uses that FrequencyCast listeners might conjure up for a cloak of invisibility… will have to wait. More details on this breakthrough at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16726609

Although we’re not there yet, it’s still, it’s good to know that some early steps are being made – at this rate, we might be able to have cloaking technology ahead of the Klingons, and that can only be a good thing.

We’re still waiting for those tech boffins to create the SEP Field – If you don’t know your Douglas Adams, the Someone Else’s Problem Field allows something to appear to be invisible because it’s too implausible to be there… “the brain just edits it out, like it’s a blind spot”

Apologies for this odd clipart – you try finding a picture of a cloaked object!!

Star Trek Tricorder

In other sci-fi related “coming soon” news… There’s a competition running to be the first to build a Star Trek Tricorder… If you can build a handy gadget that can diagnose 15 diseases, then you could net yourself £6.5 million in the X Price competition that was recently announced at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. Qualcomm’s stumping up the $10 million prize, and you can check out the terms and conditions here:Star Trek Tricorder X Price

What gadget from the Star Trek Universe, or the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy would you like to like to see become a reality? Add a comment below, and we’ll share your thoughts with the FrequencyCast audience.

Who is Pollyanna Woodward?

Of course, she’s one of the presenters of The Gadget Show, on Channel 5. The show is loved by many a gadget geek, including the gang here at FrequencyCast.

We met Polly and the team at Gadget Show Live this year, and spoke briefly to Polly for our podcast (FrequencyCast Podcast 63). To the right of the words that I’m typing now, you’ll see a picture of the lovely Pollyanna, taken at Gadget Show Live – Note that the fingers belong to Pete.

We’d love to tell you more about Polly – but we can’t.

And that’s because yesterday, her Wikipedia page was removed.

We were alerted to this by listener Steve L  (thanks Steve), and on checking, sure enough, her page has been zapped by the powers that be at Wikipedia. The stated reason is as follows:

“Only a handful of tabloid lifestyle pieces of no significance. The Gadget Show is high-profile itself but her presence on the team has yet to generate independent impact.”

From Polly’s own website, www.pollyannawoodward.com, we learn that Pollyanna’s made over 4,500 hours of telly, was a finalist in Popstars the Rivals, was a Miss England finalist, as well as some tabloid and FHM coverage. It seems, at least to us, that  this Nottinghamshire-born lass has every right to be on Wikipedia with her credentials, especially given some of the personal vanity pages you’ll find on Wikipedia.

We note that pages for the other honourable show presenters Suzi Perry, Jason Bradbury, Jon Bentley and Ortis Deley remain intact. Even former presenter Dallas Campbell has a Wiki page.

Pollyanna Woodward, formerly on Wikipedia

Why do we care?

Well, we can sympathise with young Polly, as our own FrequencyCast Wikipedia entry was zapped in July of this year. The reason for our removal was that we’re an “unremarkable podcast” (sob), with another reviewer nothing that Frequencycast “Does appear to have won an award, however the article does not assert any other notability.” 

Despite the fact that our shows have been running for five years, and we now have almost 3 listeners, we know we’re a small minnow in a huge online ocean – Polly, however, isn’t. Although FrequencyCast is unloved by the Wiki Mods, at  least we’re in good company though.

Our SaveGadgetPolly Campaign?

We think Pollyanna deserves a Wikipedia entry, along with her untouched colleagues on The Gadget Show – Hence “#SaveGadgetPolly” (her Twitter ID is GadgetPolly). After we tweeted our first “Save GadgetPolly” message, regular listener Rob Dickson replied with “How do we save her?”. It was at this point that we realised our campaign had hit a stumbling block.

At the moment, our campaign consists of us here at FrequencyCast HQ uniting with Polly by raising a fist and quietly mumbling “Damn you Wikipedia Mods!” Hardly consists of a major campaign – but we know we hold the moral high ground!

Anything to say? Please tweet your support with the hashtag #savegadgetpolly , or add a comment below.

Yours,

FrequencyCast… unloved by Wiki…

Well, we’ve released some audio just for those getting into the festive spirit, and it’s all thanks to CoolArif79 who tweeted thus: “Can you for show 69 and 70 concentrate on gadgets coming out for Christmas?”

We don’t claim to have any insight on what are going to be the top gadgets for Christmas 2011, but we can help with a few ideas of things to add to your list. Carl and Pete recorded a special Update looking at favourite gadgets of the last six months, and then went out-and-about to see what stocking-fillers they could find at a major shopping centre in England.

The audio update lasts 20 minutes, and features a special guest. As blokes don’t do shopping, we were assisted by the lovely Kelly, who kept Carl and Pete under control, and also kept an eye out for a few gifts for the tech-savvy ladies out there.

We looked at a few high-end must have gadgets, some novelty items, and even a few high-tech kids toys… the aim was to suggest a range of gift ideas that you may not have previously considered – and on our show notes, we include a few links and photos to get your creative juices flowing!

We hope you enjoy this rather unorthodox FrequencyCast update. As you’ll hear, we had quite a laugh putting this together, and hopefully will give you a few ideas on what to look out for as gifts for the upcoming festive period.

Our Audio Special

The show has just been released to iTunes, and is also attached to this news post as an mp3 file. The audio will soon appear on our streaming radio service, and can also be downloaded from our FrequencyCast Update page.

Show Notes and Links

You’ll find the show notes, links and pictures here: www.frequencycast.co.uk/gadgets.html

We’ve also released a transcript, complete with pictures, at www.frequencycast.co.uk/festivegadgets.html

Marmite Chocolate?

So, why have we chosen a picture of Marmite chocolate to illustrate this audio update? Well, you’ll have to take a listen! We challenge our listeners to try this stuff for themselves – your life may never be the same again…!

Comments please!

We’ve love to know what you think of our little Christmas Special. Please add your comments below.

Remember, without your feedback, there’s no show, so please have your say on what you’ve heard, and what gadgets you want for Christmas…

As requested by our listeners, we’re talking about printers and all things printing. Not the most exciting topic, but we’ve tried to add a few things that might be of interest, plus a mystery object, and a special guest.

In the show, we also look at the hottest virtual assistant on the planet – Siri.

As you’re probably aware, Siri is the new speech recognition gizmo from the clever folk at Apple. We’ve been putting Siri through its paces, to see if it’s actually useful in the real world, or just a gimmick to get people to rush and and buy a new iShiny (if o2 let them upgrade to a 4S, that is)

As part of the show, we play a fun video clip demonstrating that as well as being a semi-serious tool, Siri can be fun. People have been playing around to work out what fun things she (or “he in the UK) can say. In the show, we feature a short extract of a Siri Duet, performed by Jonathan Mann.

Here is the full video clip. Tissues at the ready, everyone:

We hope Jonathan’s dream of one day marrying sexy Siri comes true.

For more Silly Siri Stuff, have a listen to our November show, which is due out on Tuesday morning…

Brian The Brain

We’re in the process of editing our pice on Apple’s new Siri speech recognition package, found on the new iPhone 4S.

During the recording, Carl remembered we used to have the rather chatty “Brian The Brain” in some of our earlier shows – and the product had some rather basic speech recognition.

Any product that is designed to interpret the user’s speech, is always of interest to us, and it’s fun to put it through its paces. Siri is getting lots of interest in the tech community, and our Pete is having fun with it. By comparison, Brian The Brain, pictured here, was a little basic, but still fun – and now sits silently in our studio.

Brian featured on a few of our shows, but for some reason, he didn’t like Carl’s voice. Back in our “cutting room floor” archive, we found a short audio file of Carl having a tiff with Brian, and we thought you might like to have a listen. Silly, but it made Carl smile, and it may make you smile too!

If you have 2 minutes and 27 seconds of your life that you never want to see again, take a listen to our quick “Off The Record” bit of bonus material audio. The clip is attached to this blog post, on our iTunes channel, and also released on our audio RSS feed.

Expect us to be discussing the iPhone 4S and its virtual assistant Siri in the next show, Show 69, due out in the next few days.

Today, we’ve discovered a rather unusual approach being tried by community radio station Chorley FM, in Lancashire…

The radio station launched in 2006, after some trial ‘special event’ broadcasts, and has a good following in the community – it’s also a good training ground for people in Lancashire to get some experience in working for a radio station.

In a bid to get some revenue, the station is inviting one company to sponsor the station’s output for six months. Nothing new there – but it’s the way that they’re doing it that has caught our eye.  The sponsorship deal is available now as a “Buy it now”on eBay:

Chorley FM's sponsorship ad on eBay

For the £6,600 asking price, you’ll get advertising, presenter mentions, text messages to listeners, inclusion on the station’s branding, mentions on the station’s website, one on-air interview a month, and an Outside Broadcast of your choosing.

The station has a potential audience of 120,000 locals in the South Lancashire area, and broadcast on FM and online.

If you want to sponsor this community radio station, you can “buy it now”, or make ‘em an offer on eBay until the 16th of July: Chorley FM Sponsorship on eBay

Full credit to the guys and gals at Chorley FM for finding this rather unique way of raising money to keep community radio alive.

PS: If you’re reading Chorley FM – We’re happy to let you (and any other community station) make the FrequencyCast radio show a part of your output for free! For details and T&Cs, see our Syndicate FrequencyCast page

A reminder that today is a very important day, and a day that we all take very seriously here at FrequencyCast HQ (Apart from Carl)

Today is Towel Day – As all good Hitchhikers will know, it a day where the carrying of a towel is mandatory in honour of Douglas Adams, creator of that wholly remarkable entity that is the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy. It’s been ten years since Douglas voyaged to the Restaurant at the end of the Universe.

If you know and love the radio series that spawned a book that spawned a wobbly TV series, that spawned computer games, more books, more radios and eventually a mostyly-watchable movie – then you’ll know what this is all about, and, of course, be carrying your towel with pride today. You may also appreciate this short YouTube clip that reminds us all of how mind-bogglingly useful a towel is:

If you have no idea what this is all about, then you need to download the original radio series. Now. Seriously, we mean it. You can download a copy for the cost of 1.5 Starbucks coffees – Here’s a link: HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy Radio Series

We wish you all a hoopy Towel Day.

Share and Enjoy

The video, recorded in February 2011 by Eli Pariser, highlights that what we see on Facebook and Google has been tailored to our personal requirements, and that we may be being force-fed Internet Junk Food.

Here’s the clip, which will take up just 9 minutes of your time.

This may be a topic we cover in our next show,so we’d love your thoughts. Filters… A good or a bad thing for those of us who live online…

Update: We cover this in show 64. More: Internet Filter Bubble

Fancy a cheap and collectible souvenir of April’s Royal Wedding? Well, here it is. A Limited Edition Wills and Kate Mobile Phone.

In patriotic Red White and Blue, with a picture of the happy couple as a screensaver, this exclusive handset will only cost you a quid, and in a few years, could well go for quite a bit more on eBay.

The phone is made by Alcatel, and for its price (£1), has a few handy features, such as a torch and an FM radio.

For the sheer heck of it, Alcatel has also pre-loaded the phone with a “God Save The Queen” ringtone, to make calls on Royal Wedding Day just that bit more topical and regal.

About the phone

According to the blurb provided to us, this is a one-of-a-kind collector’s item and comes in a commemorative box. On the back of the phone, there’s an inscription of Kate Middleton and Prince William’s initials joined together, as well as the date of the historic wedding. The phone also has a calculator, organiser, FM radio and alarm clock (We wonder if it has “Here comes the bride” as the wake-up tone?)

The Special Edition Royal Wedding Phone is available online exclusively at Carphone Warehouse, for a very limited time only.

Price – £1 for the phone. You have to top up with £10. Delivery is free. You can get it on Orange and Virgin.

If you fancy a collectible, get the souvenir Royal Wedding Phone quickly (before it’s too late) from the following link: Royal Wedding Phone at Carphone Warehouse

FrequencyCast now has a hot bird in the office, and we’ll be squeaking to him in the new show. Here’s an early shot of our Angry Bird interview.

FrequencyCast interviews an Angry Bird

The Angry Bird soft toys are out now – cute, chatty, and not at all happy. We’re thinking of getting Red here to fill in for Carl on the next show to see if anyone notices.

Want to pull your own bird? Check out the Angry Birds at Firebox.

Episode 7 is out now at www.fostersfunny.co.uk - and as well as being required viewing for Partridge fans, is also a must-watch for anyone who’s spent time working in local radio, like our Carl and Pete.

In this installment of Mid Morning Matters, some home-made jingles, Alan’s interview, and the hottest radio quiz in North Norfolk, radio Battleships.

Hope it makes you snigger and cringe alternately…

Back of the net!

(Listeners – Pete and Carl? Which one’s Alan, and which one’s Sidekick Simon?)

Handy as stress toys – you can fling them at those pesky pigs, they come in all your favourite breeds of birds, and they’re available in two sizes, 8 inch or 4 inch.

Our favs are the 4 inch furious feathered folk – as they come complete with sound effects.

Want a bird? They’re migrating your way from the 1st of March, and can be pre-ordered now at the gadget nest that is Firebox: Angry Birds at Firebox

There is, of course, the oft-forgotten H2G2 – The online encyclopedia originally created by fans of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, the Douglas Adams classic.

H2G2 is a kind of precursor to Wikipedia, where entries could be added and updated, to make for a user-generated directory of all things.

For the last ten years, good old Auntie Beeb has been hosting H2G2, but now it seems that the site is set to shift from the BBC, as part of announced cutbacks. Keen to ensure that the mass of data doesn’t vanish into a black hole, H2G2 is looking for a new home (or more importantly, a new buyer).We wish them well, and hope they continue to Share and Enjoy.

To find out what H2H2 is all about, visit www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/

For more on this story, see h2g2 Rescue Mission @ The Register

In this update, we look at BBC iPlayer, Apple iTunes, Karotz, servers, Zombies and Apple TV

The 12 minute FrequencyCast Update is attached to this blog entry, and is available free via iTunes or at www.frequencycast.co.uk/update.html

We hope you enjoy our little update…

Watch makers Tissot have launched a virtual shop window at London’s Selfridges, where you can use augmented reality to try on one of their watches. You can even try it at home. A novel idea.

No idea what we’re talking about? This video clip explains all…

Could interactive shop windows, and augmented reality home demos be the way forward for retail shopping?

Here at FrequencyCast, opinions are mixed. Our Carl’s given up on Lost – he gave up around the hatch era. Pete’s still hanging in there, although he reports a headache.

After 6 years and 121  episodes, the finale’s just a couple of days away now – and it’s a mammoth 2 hour special. Typically the UK is a few days behind the US, but as a first, the final episode will be simulcast as it goes out in the US.

Serious Lost fans need to set an alarm for 5am on Monday 24 May. If you don’t fancy an early start – either Sky+ it, or watch the finale on Tuesday 25 May at 9pm.

So – How many of our listeners are following Lost? anyone planning an early start on Monday?

There’s us, banging on in Show 47 about the importance of backing up your data, and this week, we lost a vital file.

The file in question was actually a transcript of the latest show, Show 50, kindly created by the team at Typing Angels. Foolishly, our Pete deleted the email with the transcript, and later, during some housekeeping, emptied the Recycle Bin.

Fortunately, each night, we take two backups of important files such as our Inbox. One copied to an external drive, and one backed-up to an online backup service (We use PCFort)

Irritating, the local backup is set to overwrite the previous day’s file at midnight, so when we came to look to the missing transcription, as it was deleted over a day ago, our local backup didn’t have the file either.

So, we turned to our online backup – which is set to keep the last three versions of backed-up files. The PCFort backup service sends us an email every day to confirm that the overnight backup worked, or reporting errors if it didn’t. We logged on to the backup service, found a copy of the Outlook file that should have contained the attachment we were looking for, and hit “Restore”. As our Inbox isn’t small, it took several minutes to download and decrypt… before reporting a problem decompressing the file.

After some faffing, we got onto PCFort support, whose support chappie told us:

“I have had a look and the backup for the 29th ran out of time prior to completion. As the .pst file was split into smaller pieces for upload the second part did not get uploaded. As the restore is expecting 2 parts that is why it is not restoring.”

Practical upshot – although the file shows as available to recover, does not appear in the “Failed Backup” section, and didn’t generate an error message of any kind… the file is unrecoverable.

The backed-up file, looking good to go

The lesson here – even if you think you’re doing the right thing – your backups may be less use than you think, and if you use PCFort, you may not actually be able to recover files that you’ve backed up.

Lesson learnt?

We’ve switched online backup providers (again), and we’re glad we did. Now, we’re using Acronis Online Backup. They offer 250GB of online storage, you can back up up to 5 PCs, multiple versions of files can be stored away, you can access your files from any PC, and it’s all secured using a personal encryption key of your choosing. Oh, and it’s under £40.

If you want to give Acronis a try, there’s a free trial available from www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing

As a reminder, there’s lots of discussion of backups and ways to keep your data safe back in Show 47. And if you want to read the missing Show 50 transcript, it’s here: mp3 extras (thanks to Typing Angels who manage to keep things safer than we can!)

Happy Easter all!

When the service launched in 2009, only roads in major cities were covered, but in today’s update, it seems that around 95 per cent of homes across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are now covered in high resolution. Apparently a quarter of a million UK roads are now covered.

The launch of the service last year raised a number of privacy concerns, and with this new data appearing, we can expect the second wave of this, as people see faces where they shouldn’t be, un-blurred car number plates, and people doing daft things.

Take a look at maps.google.co.uk – enter a UK address or postcode to see what was captured when the Google camera van visited your road. Drag the little orange person onto your target location and have a look around.

Found something funny? Let us know?

Got two minutes to answer some MP3 player questions?

Fill in the survey at www.frequencycast.co.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=61754

Thanks in advance!

The game officially launches on Tuesday the 2nd of February, but many Trek fans have been able to get early access to the online Trek Universe through a successful public beta and a “headsup” weekend for those who pre-ordered the game.

Our Pete has been exploring Star Trek Online for a few days now, and has been impressed:

“The game cleverly mixes first-person shoot-em up with role-playing and space battles for an immersive experience. I’ve seen a few glitches and stutters during gameplay, with will hopefully get ironed out along the way. First impressions are that this is a well-thought out online experience, and very immersive. All trekkers are advised to pick up a phaser and beam over to STO”

Star Trek Online allows you to create your own avatar (many races available), and after a few training missions, take control of a starship of your choosing. The levels (a.k.a. Episodes) seem pretty true to what we know of the Star Trek universe, and there are a few familiar voices that you’ll encounter along the way.

Pictured here is Pete’s rather heroic-looking avatar, and if you’re already signed up, you can find Ensign Pete on the aptly-named USS FrequencyCast.

You can get the new Star Trek Online from Game or HMV online – Note that a monthly subscription applies.