Digital Cinema and a Film Festival

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from March 17th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

Digital Cinema

Festival du Film Vert

The DCP – or Digital Cinema Package is the format that cinemas play – it’s a lot better than DVD and even blu-ray! Count on a 2k (like HD) movie taking between 75-160 Gigabytes and a 4k (like ultra-HD) movie taking up to 600 GB.

Professional kit for making DCPs is expensive, but fortunately for festivals like mine there’s great open source software for making DCPs for your local cinema!

Open DCP

DCP-O-Matic – this one is brilliant as you can cluster together computers to reduce encode time. With this software I went from 3 days to 7 hours to make a DCP.

The film festival starts today, hope to see you there. If not, see you next week on WRS!

Tech at the Geneva Motor Show

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from March 10th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

From the Mobile World Congress we had the LG Flex2 self-healing phone…

But this week is mostly about the Geneva Motor Show, which runs from the 5th to the 15th of March

The ED Design Torq – Electric Driverless Racing Car – which apparently could have a racing driver inside, but who’d want to without windows?

Bentley EXP10 Speed 6 with 3D printed parts

The Quant F and Quant Quantino Nanoflowcell cars have a range of up to 1000km between refills with ionic electrolyte fluid.

The EDAG Light Cocoon (for the blinky light fans)

The Aston Martin all electric DBX concept

The Swiss Rinseed Budii that will hand the steering wheel to you if you feel like driving

There is also the completely bonkers Koenigsegg Regera “hybrid” which does 0-400km/h <20 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWm8xEapjuQ There are 76 cars at the motor show which emit less than 95g of CO2 per kilometer, and most of them are in production

Oh, and this week Apple launched the most personal computer ever designed. This goes on sale in France on April 10th, and in Switzerland “sometime in 2015”

See you next week!

Mobile World Congress (hah!) and Virtual Private Networking

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from March 3rd, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

For the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge:

The Virtual Private Network (VPN) comparison site I mentioned is https://www.bestvpn.com

Just to be safe, I suggest you use either Paypal or an e-card (one time use card number) from your bank to make the payments to these companies. It’s not that they aren’t safe, but I’ve noticed that they come and go over time.

Open source routers will allow you to VPN to your own home, but I won’t give you a link. If you don’t know how to find these, you shouldn’t be attempting it. Surf safely!

And remember – a VPN is just a pretend (really long) network cable.

For details of the next Pangloss events click here.

Internet of Things

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from February 24th, 2015:



Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

The Internet of Things market is expected to be huge, with pretty much all market forecasts in the high billions of dollars. By 2020, there are expected to be more than 100 billion devices connected.

The home monitoring (air quality, temperature etc) system I have is from Netatmo My little drone is the Parrot Minidrone Rolling Spider, available from 1000ordi in Geneva for 135-7 CHF. They also have a range of Connected Objects and speak English (not a lot, but enough!).

The lighting system from Philips that’s getting towards what I’d like

And of course, the build it yourself option with the Arduino Micro from Sparkfun and the Femtoduino

We held the first Pangloss Labs Internet of Things meetup on the 23rd of February in Eaux-vives.   For details of our next events click here.

Flying free like a bird

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from February 17th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

If you’ve ever wanted to fly like a bird you need to catch up with the BIRDLY bird simulator.

And the amazing EPFL telescopic contact lense is here.

The Pangloss Labs Internet of Things meetup will be held on the 23rd of February in Eaux-vives.  You don’t need to be an expert – just bring an object and tell us how you’d like it to be connected (or not!)  For details on this and all our events click here.

LIFT to Space

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from February 10th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

The totally brain-resetting LIFT Conference web site so you can see what you missed.  The presentation from my workshop on Designing Alternative Currency Systems can be found on the Pangloss Labs site.

The BikeCityGuide can be found in the app stores for iOS and Android, or take a look at their web site.  The Geneva map basically goes from the Jura to the Saleve.

You’ll need to use google translate or the Chrome browser (which has google translate built in) to read the Norwegian findmysheep.com website, but it’s worth it to find out how to get those 21st century cowbells.

Being more serious, the European Space Agency Technology Transfer program is designed to bring space applications into our daily lives, so if you are a startup company, you’ll want to take a look.

You know about the awesome Solar Impulse project, but have you heard of Solar Stratos – using solar power to get to the edge of space?  Another local project, as is Swiss Space Systems – who are hiring.

The Pangloss Labs Internet of Things meetup will be held on the 23rd of February in Eaux-vives.  You don’t need to be an expert – just bring an object and tell us how you’d like it to be connected (or not!)  For details on this and all our events click here.

Robots!

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from January 27th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of links & videos from the show:

Our list of Pangloss Labs events so you won’t miss our next robot workshop

The Open Source (hardware and software) Thymio robot from EPFL and it’s programming environment

The NAO robot

and the much more serious and large ATLAS robot from Boston Dynamics:

And one of my favourite French open source robot projects, InMoov:

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Have a good week, and remember that according to the original Terminator movie humanity should have been destroyed by now, so we are definitely not in that future.

French – English translation on the go & a giant robot suit

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from January 20th, 2015:

Here’s the usual set of  links from the show:

The Google Translate app for iPhone and iPad

The Google Translate app for Android

The Kuratas Giant mech suit from Suidobashi Industries in Kyoto on Amazon for $1million

Why would you want one of these?  Just watch…

CES Roundup 2015

Gadget Guru is a short weekly radio show on World Radio Switzerland that I do with Tony Johnston.

Here’s the show from January 13th, 2015:

Here’s some links from the show:

More information than you ever wanted about CES.

A round up of wearable technology from Engadget.

How to get and avoid tech neck (hint – lift your phone up).

The Belty smart-belt is easier to see than read about.

and the Sharp freeform display technology, so I can get my hexagonal screens 🙂