It’s been a while since I first embarked on this 3-part article. Since then, life happened as it always does and before I knew it, quite a bit of time has passed and the digital camera landscape has completely changed. But always for the better. Newer and more affordable video and cinema cameras have surfaced that surprised everybody. For the sake of completing this series, I will not discuss any of the new developments. That is best left for another article altogether.

Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage has been around for a number of years now, providing users with up to 25 GB of free storage, with their Live ID login.  Yesterday, they updated the service by releasing an updated Skydrive application for both Windows (Vista, 7 and 8 ) and Mac OS X (Lion).
Once installed and you provide the proper login, the SkyDrive folder simply appears as another folder in Windows Explorer and the Mac Finder, much like other cloud solutions such as DropBox.  The maximum filesize has also recently climbed to …

Jack Tramiel, who founded Commodore International, passed away this past Sunday at the age of 83.  Born in 1928, Tramiel survived Auschwitz and a labour camp in during World War II, and later emigrated to the United States and started building typewriters.  He later set up Commodore Business Machines in Toronto for supply chain purposes, and branched into computers with the Commodore PET, which was a staple of computer classes in schools at the time.
It was the Commodore PET that inspired me to get my first computer, the VIC-20.  Before …

Ever since the days of the original Palm Pre, worries about saturated market has permeated many reviews and reports about new entrants in the smartphone ‘race’. A lot of the tech press were raising flags, suggesting Palm was in a “too little, too late” position.
Palm was certainly in the “too little” category, I’d argue they were far from “too late”.  There were a lot of problems with Palm’s WebOS reboot, few of which had to do with timing.  Unfortunately, because Palm (via HP) did crash and burn, it reinforces the idea that “market saturation” is the …

The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab has been working with quadrotors from some time, demonstrating how the flying robots can be used for everything from assembling structures to flying through moving hula hoops. Back in January, they put out a video demonstrating the capabilities of their minaturized ‘nano quadrotors’ flying in formation.
Vijay Kumar of U Penn gave a talk at TED 2012, and the video above goes into greater detail about the hows and whys of quadrotor development and application.  The second half of the video shows even more complex applications, …

Nokia, which has long held the crown as ‘best camera on a phone’ with their 12 megapixel N8 today upped the ante with the announcement of their PureView 808 phone. The phone will ship with a custom 1/1.2″ sensor, much larger than most smartphone cameras. While this leads to a noticable hump on the back, the results make up for it, as it sports a 41 megapixel sensor, enabling it to capture images up to 38 megapixels in size.

Microsoft has taken a lot of flak for their horrible naming conventions and overly long names, and deservedly so. When first announced, Windows Phone was called Windows Phone Series 7. They officially chopped of the “Series” by launch, and now just advertise it as Windows Phone. It just makes more sense.

Similarly, they last year rebranded their paid Office cloud service to Office 365. Office 365 makes sense. It’s Office, all the time. Do you know what they called it previously?

Business Productivity Online Suite.

Life imitates art, right? That doesn’t have to mean it’s good art to result in a good cause. In that vein, the Swiss Space Center yesterday announced that they’ll be launching the CleanSpace One project, with its first goal to build and deploy a “janitor satellite” named CleanSpace One, with the singular task of tracking down the detrius we’ve left stranded in our solar front yard. The space junk will then be carried back towards Earth, with the goal of burning up during re-entry.