Archive for July, 2012 «

How to Build a Computer for Photographers

Jul 242012

The best computer for digital photographers maximizes performance and storage capacity while simplifying workflow.

So what do I mean when I say photographers? Well you should probably love taking photos for one. You most likely carry your professional camera along wherever you go – just in case. You’re always on the lookout for brand new Photoshop filters or useful editing applications and you upload tons of photos a year on Flickr or your other image hosting accounts.

If that sounds a lot like you then I’ll be showing you how to choose a computer that is responsive and fast for editing, storing and displaying your photos.

Whether you decide to build your own computer or purchase one already built, there are quite a few things to consider that are essential to choosing the best components for what is considered a “photographer’s” computer. You definitely want great storage capacity, a high performing CPU and graphics card, and finally a good monitor.

Every Photographer is Different

All photographers have varying shooting styles, workflow needs, and attitudes towards photo editing. Right now I’m working with a Sony Alpha NEX-7, and I shoot almost exclusively in raw image mode.

Raw image format captures the pure sensor data on a DSLR camera, issuing no compression or modification on the data it collects. That basically means large files, and a image editor that plays nice with Sony’s raw format.

Whatever camera you use, a good computer for editing a storing digital photos will have a few common elements. Photo editing, especially involving HDR and noise reduction effects, requires excellent CPU performance. If you’re going to save most of your photos, you’ll need a large storage capacity. If you’re editing large raw photos, more memory will help. Don’t forget about getting a good monitor too to display your images as clearly as possible.

Graphics Card (GPU)

Graphics cards don’t only serve to speed up your display and scroll the canvas, but they also act as a parallel compute engine for a number of powerful editing filters, especially blur filters.

Photo editing programs are rapidly incorporating GPU acceleration into their system. Most of these programs use OpenGL and OpenCL, two main software programming standards. OpenGL is mostly for graphics, while OpenCL lets software developers use the GPU for generic parallel compute tasks, such as blur filters mentioned before.

Just to give you an idea, the popular Photoshop CS6 utilizes both OpenGL and OpenCL, while Corel AfterShot Pro uses the graphics card to help in file-format conversion. Programmers have also built an entire photo-editing software called MuseMage that primarily uses GPU acceleration.

With that in mind, you don’t really need a premium $400 and up graphics card to run with your photo editing. If you’re not playing any PC games as well on the computer, then you’ll be fine with a mid-range GPU. You can find an AMD Radeon HD 7770 for around $200. Or if you want something with a little more oomph, an AMD Radeon 7850 will cost your around $250, and it can hold its own with PC gaming too.

Nvidia GPUs will work good too, but I’d suggest going with AMD more because they enabled their OpenCL drivers. Remember that OpenCL is the programming standard for graphics compute tasks, such as Photoshop blur filters. But that could very well be incorporated into Nvidia graphics cards sometime in the future.

CPU and Memory

As a basic recommendation, I’d suggest the Intel Core i7-3930K CPU. The 3930K CPU contains 6 cores, can execute 12 simultaneous threads, and is built on Intel’s 32nm manufacturing process. That might be a little much for some users, so a good alternative is the Core i7-3770K, which is part of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge line processors.

Running at 3.5GHz, the Core i7-3770K runs 4 cores and up to 8 threads. It’s very power efficient and costs around $350. I recommend the Intel Core i7 processors because they support Hyper-Threading in addition to offering large L3 caches, which improves performance in most photo editing software.

As for the memory, if your editing plenty of raw images, I’d recommend 16GB of RAM, since 14-bit raw images range from 45MB to 48MB each, and consume a lot more memory during editing. Besides, today’s memory prices are pretty low anyway so I’d recommended going as high as possible.

Storage

If you’re shooting tons of raw images, you’ll definitely want tons of storage. You may not be using the Sony Alpha NEX-7, but even 12 megapixel raw images take up at least 10MB of disk space each, while 12-bit, 16 megapixel images consume 14MB to 16MB each.

Now when it comes to storage on your photographer computer, don’t save images on the boot drive if you can work around it. At the very minimum, I’d recommend using two drives on your computer. A great combo would include an solid-state drive (SSD) for a boot drive and a large capacity hard disk drive (HDD) as secondary storage. Even if you’re running an HDD as your boot drive, having two physical drives will always improve overall system performance.

Monitors

A good monitor for a photographer’s computer can be calibrated to be color-accurate. No display is perfect, but some offer far better color fidelity than its counterparts. In general, I’d recommend using high-quality monitors with IPS or IPS-based LCD technology.

Unless you’re working on professional level photo work, you won’t really need a premium monitor, but you still definitely want a display that will support true 8-bits-per-pixel color. You can find good-quality 24-inch IPS monitors supporting 1920-by-1200-pixel resolution for under $400.

How to Benchmark your Computer for Free

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Jul 242012

To Benchmark means to evaluate your PC’s performance using multiple tools and utilities specifically designed to analyze each major component.

In this tutorial, we will show you which programs are best, and draw out how to get results that are both reliable and repeatable, and explain how everything is calculated.

Running a Benchmark on your computer allows you to evaluate its performance, identify potential bottlenecks and choose the right system upgrades. Although general CPU and memory upgrades may help in some situations, it often makes more sense to upgrade the storage subsystem or the graphics board if you’re looking for perceptible improvement in system responsiveness or gaming performance.

If you ran a number of Benchmarks and identified which components were holding your system back, you would be able to choose the most effective upgrade for your current system.

There are a number of different kinds of Benchmarks available for evaluating a system’s performance. Some use synthetic tests that don’t really reflect real-world usage, while others use scripted tests that rely on actually applications and simulated real-world workloads. There are some Benchmarks that assess the performance of a single computer component, while others calculate total system performance. To best determine the overall performance of a PC, try running a combination of these Benchmarks, based on your usage patterns.

Individual Component Benchmarking

There are many components in a computer systems that contribute to its overall performance, but the CPU, memory, GPU, and storage configuration generally have the biggest impact. Deciding on which components are most important for you to consider depend mainly on what you’re using your PC for. A casual user who wants a more responsive PC would benefit from upgrading a slower hard disk drive to a fast solid state drive. A gamer who wants the best frame rate would probably be better off with a faster GPU than memory. It’s up to you which aspects of system performance are most important to you.

CPU

The best CPU Benchmarks put a heavy amount of stress on the CPU while it minimizes the influence of other system components. SiSoft’s SANDRA 2012 uses a few CPU-centric synthetic benchmarks that test a chip’s performance with various mathematical workloads. The tests are multithreaded and generally scale with higher-clocked speeds and more CPU cores. SANDRA also provides results from other CPUs for easy comparison.

Another great benchmark for your CPU is Cinebench. Cinebench renders a 3D scene using the animation engine from Maxon’s Cinema 4D. Cinebench is free, works with multiple operating systems, and can run in single-threaded mode (to test the performance of a single CPU core) or in multithreaded mode (to tax all of the cores in a CPU). If all is working properly, an Intel Core i7-2700K will score about 1.55 in Cinebench’s (R11.5) single-threaded test and about 7.05 in its multithreaded test.

GPU

Myriad graphics-related benchmarks are available for testing a GPU’s performance. Many games have built-in tools to test performance; and you can test games that don’t with a utility called Fraps that shows real-time frame rates and tracks performance over time. Many synthetic and “canned” graphics benchmarks don’t use actual game engines to test performance, but produce comparable results anyway.

To test a GPU’s performance, we recommend using a mixture of synthetic and real-world tests to see how the GPU handles a range of different workloads. Futuremark’s 3DMark 7 is a popular program that provides an overall 3DMark score, as well as numerical results for each of the individual tests that contribute to the final score.

Another handy synthetic benchmark is Unigine Heaven. Heaven can test a GPU’s performance using DirectX 9, 10, or 11 or OpenGL paths, with varying levels of image quality and tessellation. Heaven’s results identify both an overall score and a frame rate.

In a system powered by an Intel Core i7-3960X, when tested at a resolution of 1920 by 1200 with 4X MSAA, 16X anisotropic filtering, and high tessellation, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti will score about 665 points in Unigine Heaven, at about 26.4 frames per second. At the same settings, a Radeon HD 7850 will score about 706 points, at 28 fps. If you have a faster GPU than those cited here, your system should be able to beat these scores, but a slower GPU won’t be able to catch them.

Memory

The most common method of evaluating memory performance is through synthetic tests designed to ascertain peak bandwidth and latency. Performance variables include the operating frequency and capacity of the memory, and the number of channels that a given system uses.

AIDA64 Extreme Edition has a great built-in memory benchmark that tests read, write, and copy bandwidth, as well as latency; but it is available only as a limited trial unless you pay for the full edition of the tool.

The free edition of SiSoft SANDRA 2012 offers memory bandwidth and latency tests, too. It reports bandwidth scores in gigabytes per second (GBps) and latency in nanoseconds. The tests are easy to run and take moments to complete. An Intel Core i7-2700K-based system with 8GB of DDR3-1333MHz system memory running in a dual-channel configuration (two memory sticks) should offer about 16 GBps of bandwidth at an access latency in the 29ns range. Higher clocked memory should deliver more bandwidth and lower latency.

Storage

To test the performance of a hard drive or solid-state drive correctly, use a benchmark that analyzes read and write transfer speeds (with both sequential and random workloads), as well as access latency. Trace-based tests, like those used in PCMark, that track performance over time with simulated application workloads are also very useful.

One of the better free tools available for testing a drive’s performance is CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark is really useful because it tests both sequential and random read and write speeds with both large and small block sizes, and with queue depths of up to 32.

CrystalDiskMark doesn’t report access latency, however, so it’s a good idea to use a tool such as HD Tune, IOMeter, or the Physical Disk Benchmark in SiSoft SANDRA 2012 to do that.

Benchmarking your entire system

Among total system benchmarks, the rather basic Windows Experience Index (WEI) built into Windows 7 and Vista isn’t a good choice, owing to the rudimentary nature of the tests and the lack of granularity in the results. Instead consider using a suite such as BAPCO’s Sysmark or Futuremark’s PCMark 7; both are widely accepted and generate extensive results. Sysmark is expensive and tends to be difficult to run, however, whereas PCMark 7 is available in a free basic edition and can be run with a single click.

PCMark 7 runs a wide range of tests that tax CPU, GPU, memory, and disk performance; and it generates scores for each test–with higher scores reflecting better performance. PCMark 7 tends to emphasize disk/storage performance, but we’re fine with that. Upgrading from a hard drive to a solid state drive tends to be one of the best upgrades a user can make to improve system responsiveness, and PCMark 7′s results reflect that.

To give you a baseline for comparison, an Intel Core i7-2700K-based system with 8GB of RAM, a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 graphics card, and a 7200-rpm hard drive will earn a PCMark score of roughly 3800. Upgrade that same system with an SSD, and its score will jump to about 5100.

Prime95

Prime95 is a popular CPU stress test and benchmark tool among overclockers. It’s part of a distributed computing project for finding Mersenne prime numbers, but it includes torture test and benchmark modes.

After you download the ZIP file and launch Prime95.exe, click the Just Stress Testing button to skip creating an account.

The torture test mode is ideal for testing the stability of your CPU, particularly if it’s been overclocked. If you want to perform a benchmark, click Cancel.

Use the Benchmark option in the Options menu to perform a benchmark.

Benchmark results are measured in time – lower values are faster, and therefore better. If you’re testing an overclock, compare the results of the Prime95 benchmark before and after the overclock to see the difference in performance. You can also compare your benchmark results to other computers on the Prime 95 website.

Super Pi, which calculates the digits of pi, is another popular tool for stress-testing and benchmarking CPUs.

Novabench

Novabench is a benchmarking suite with CPU, GPU (graphics card), RAM, and disk speed benchmarks. Unlike many all-in-one benchmark suites for Windows, Novabench is completely free. It’s not a trial and there’s no paid version with additional features that it’s trying to sell you.

Novabench’s benchmark process is faster than many other full benchmark suites. It took about a minute on my system, while other benchmark suites took significantly longer.

NovaBench displays an all-round “NovaBench Score” – higher is better – and shows the results of each individual benchmark. You can view other benchmark results and compare your score to other computers on the NovaBench website.

Top 10 Awesome Firefox Tricks

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Jul 132012

The popular open-source browser Firefox is awesome right when you download it. And by adding some of the awesome addons available for it, Mozilla Firefox just gets more and more appealing.

But when you look under the hood, and there are a number of hidden tips and tricks available that will crank the browser up for you – making it faster, easier, and more efficient to use.

Here are 10 really awesome Firefox tricks you can apply right now:

1. Add more screen space by making you icons smaller – Go to View >> Toolbars >> Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

2. Use Smart Keywords – If there is a search term you enter a lot, this is a great tool that not many people take advantage of. Visit your favorite search engine, then right-click on the search box. Select “Add a Keyword for this search” give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name and save it. Now, when you want to do a search for that term, go to Firefox’s address bar, type the keyword and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search engine.

3. Keyboard shortcuts – It may take a little bit of time to master all of these, but as soon as you do, your browsing will be a lot faster – not to mention you won’t have to use a mouse anymore. Here are some of the most popular keyboard shortcuts for Firefox.

Spacebar (page down)
Shift-Spacebar (page up)
Ctrl+F (find)
Alt-N (find next)
Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
Ctrl+T (new tab)
Ctrl+K (go to search box)
Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
Ctrl+= (increase text size)
Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
Ctrl-W (close tab)
F5 (reload)
Alt-Home (go to home page)

4. Auto complete – Here’s another keyboard shortcut, but less known and even more useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the website without the “www” or the “.com” Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there – like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

5. Tab Navigation – Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you’ve opened, use your keyboard! Here are the shortcuts for that:

Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

6. Mouse shortcuts – Sometimes you are already using your mouse and it’s just a lot easier to use a mouse shortcut than to switch over to your keyboard. Check out these really cool tricks for your mouse on Firefox:

Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
Shift-scroll down (previous page)
Shift-scroll up (next page)
Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

7. Delete items from address bar history – Mozilla Firefox’s ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up. Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to a web address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it gone for good.

8. Add a keyword for a bookmark – Go to your bookmarks a whole lot faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will immediately go to that bookmark.

9. Speed up Firefox – If you have a broadband connection, you can use pipelining to speed up you page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it is optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how you do it:

Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

10. Limit RAM usage – If Firefox is taking up too much of the memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to use. Go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

You can also reduce RAM usage even further for when Firefox is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

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How to Format Mozilla Firefox for Total Privacy

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Jul 132012

Mozilla Firefox includes many powerful features to prevent you from being tracked online, but they aren’t on by default. We’ll show you how to take control of your privacy online with Firefox’s options.

Firefox Internet Browser has some features that send personal data to Mozilla and Google, but these features aren’t required. Mozilla and Google use the date to improve Firefox, provide you with search suggestions and block malicious websites.

Firefox “Do-Not-Track” Feature

Firefox can send a “do-not-track” whenever you connect to a website, asking the website not to track you. It’s disabled by default, so you’ll have to turn it on yourself.

Select the Firefox menu, click Options and then the Privacy icon.

Click the “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked” check box at the top of the privacy pane to enable the do-not-track feature.

Unfortunately, few websites obey your do-not-track preference at the moment. Do not track is also available in Internet Explorer 9 and Apple Safari, but it’s noticeably absent in Google Chrome.

Search Suggestions

Firefox sends every letter you type into its search box to your default search engine, which sends search suggestions back.

You can easily disable search suggestions by right-clicking the search box and unchecking Show Suggestions.

Safe Browsing

Firefox uses the same phishing and malware detection technology found in Google Chrome. Like Chrome, Firefox automatically downloads an updated list of malicious websites from Google every 30 minutes. If you try to access one of these websites, Firefox sends contacts Google to confirm the website is malicious.

It shouldn’t be possible for Google to determine the exact website you tried to access, but Google cookies you have on your computer may also be sent. Phishing and malware detection helps protect your personal data and your computer’s security, but you can disable it using the options on the security pane.

Cookies

Click the “Firefox will” box on the privacy pane and select “Use Custom Settings for History” to view Firefox’s cookie options.

Many advertising networks track you across multiple websites with third-party cookies. You can disable these cookies by unchecking the Accept third-party cookies box. This may cause problems with some websites, so you may have to re-enable this check box.

First-party cookies can be used for tracking, too. Many websites won’t work if you disable cookies entirely, but you can have Firefox automatically clear them each time you close your browser. This prevents websites from building up a profile of you over time, but you’ll have to log into any open websites each time you reopen Firefox. Just enable the “Clear history when Firefox closes” check box and click the Settings button.

Select Cookies and any other type of data you want Firefox to automatically delete, and then click OK.

Crash Reports and Performance Data

Firefox can send crash and performance reports to Mozilla. Mozilla uses these reports to fix problems and help improve Firefox.

The Submit crash reports check box on the advanced pane controls the crash reports feature. Firefox never sends crash reports automatically; it always prompts you. You’ll still see the prompt if you uncheck this check box, but the crash report dialog will default to not sharing any data with Mozilla.

The Submit performance data option causes Firefox to send anonymous performance reports in the background. The reports contain information about how you use Firefox’s interface, how well Firefox is performing and what hardware your computer contains.

Remember to save your settings by clicking OK.

How to build a homemade cell phone jammer

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Jul 132012

Here’s an in depth look at how to build a cell phone jammer:

Technical Details

A lot of cell phones use a GSM800 mobile standard in order to operate, so my VCO (sweeping oscillator) is tuned to the 800MHz frequency range. Keep in mind that it could be difficult to make this work properly without some good testing tools, but the end result will have the efficient VCO.

Use a clock oscillator for 45MHz as the noise generator for this jammer. It drives the local oscillator port which is located at the mixer. The signal is going out from the local oscillator and passes through the impedance matching network along its way. This helps equalize the impedance of 45MHz clock oscillator with the impedance of the mixer’s port.

This port acts like RF input of the signal jammer. The RF output signal passes through the amplifier on the mini-circuit. The output power is increased by additional 15-16dbm in this way. Then the output signal goes to the RF output antenna. RF input has the antenna too.

Jammer Operating

Use a 45MHz clock oscillator because the GSM800 band transmitted and received signals are always separated by the exact number of frequency and it is that 45MHz. Take this into account, cell phone user dials someone and signal goes off. RF input antenna catches it and jammer modifies this signal and lets it go. This signal has a frequency of cell phone’s received signal, so cell phone user would hear their own voice in a phone!

This particular cell phone jammer might be used to block the signal of the cell-based car tracking device which records your GPS data and sends it to some other person. And it probably can even jam some IED signals if they are controlled by cell phone GSM800 band.

The used mixer was originally made for 600MHz but with a little modification it works perfectly for 800MHz.

The amplifier is great for output power. Although it draws additional power supply, it is worth it.

Jammer case was made from old aluminum box and UHF connectors you can take from an old Motorola phone.

Those connectors must be soldered to the mini-circuit to work properly.

To supply this little signal jammer the nine volts battery with voltage regulator is enough. Separate it from other electronic components with foam plastic.

Don’t forget to make a power switch for your new creation. Also remember to attach antennas to the UHF connectors.

How to remove the blue lines in forwarded emails – Microsoft Outlook, Windows Live Mail

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Jul 102012

Have you ever tried to forward a really interesting or funny email, just to have the forward appear terribly formatted because of a ton of weird, blue vertical lines running down the left side of your email? Well grab a pen and sign up to the club because you are most definitely not alone.

A strange inconsistency created by some email clients/services when a message is forwarded, these vertical lines are not only irritating, but make the email illegible in some cases and are also a huge pain in the butt to get rid of as well.

Luckily, there are a few ways that you can speed up the process of removing these annoying lines without have to use a third part email cleaner program. So here are the top three methods to remove vertical lines in some of most common email software programs and services.

Microsoft Outlook:

Even though it arguably has the most options for formatting email of any other email program or service out there, Microsoft Outlook has, surprisingly, the simplest method of removing vertical lines from forwarded emails.

1. Open the email you want to forward, and then select the content directly in front or to the right of your vertical lines in the body of the email message. Press Ctrl+C to copy the highlighted contents to your clipboard.

2. Compose a new blank email message.

3. Paste your copied email into the new email message. If any vertical lines remain, simply copy any text and images with said vertical lines still attached, and paste the copied content into the same e-mail just above the content you just copied. Repeat until all vertical lines are gone.

4. Remove any duplicated content beneath the cleaned up email, and then send. No problem!

Windows Live Mail:

If you need to remove those pesky lines in the latest Microsoft mail service, Windows Live Mail lets gives you the perfect, simple option.

1. Choose your email message and then press the forward button to open it in the standard editor.

2. Put your mouse cursor directly in front of the vertical lines you want to delete.

3. At the top of the editor, select the message tab if it’s not already selected by default. You’ll then see a variety of formatting options.

4. Select the Clear Formatting button just next to the Font size and style fields. The vertical lines will then be deleted.

5. Once all vertical lines have been cleared, you will likely be left with a bit of margin space to the right of your email content. To remove this, simply select the message content you wish to forward, then copy and paste it at the beginning of your message. Delete the old content beneath your freshly formatted message and you’re good to go!

MOBOTO: Give your iPod, iPhone and iPad Some Personality

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Jul 062012

Designer Mark Solomon has created a unique character dock for an iPhone, iPad or iTouch called the Moboto. The Moboto comes with a number of fittings that allow you to customize your dock to your liking. In addition, the Moboto incorporates a number of iOS personas that allows you to choose the look and personality of your Moboto.

“Moboto is a new and unique physical and digital experience for mobile devices. When your device docks with Moboto, Moboto comes to life and show his personality through a combination of apps, phone sensors and interactive features. We call them APPersonas.”

These “APPersonas” constantly gather information from phone sensors and web data and communicates visually or verbally to you through an array of fun images and behaviors. It also interacts with its surroundings through its sensors to make it a fun, yet informational experience.

Mark designed the different elements of the display to subtly show information such as the time, the battery percentage, or the weather. Moboto also can talk to you or lip-sync to a song if you want.

This is operated in the form of a Moboto App. You can download the Moboto App for free on the App Store. It will provide personas for the Eye/Mouth, Flower and Face moving images you can see in the video.

Future updates will continue to provide free and paid personas and features.

The Moboto also features a swivel connector that will allow most iPhone cases to fit perfectly. Moboto comes with USB Micro to USB A cord to plug into wall or computer to charge as well as a Line Out for Audio.

“Moboto is modular by design. This allows for a variety of interlocking bases, attachments such as arms, and other accessories to be easily interchanged, providing customization and personalization.”

You can customize various skins, as well as the actual dock itself, which comes apart into two separate pieces.

The Moboto is designed so that it’s easy to swap parts to customize the product to your liking.

These interchangeable parts–the base of the dock and the top portion that connects to your iPhone–use a simple twist-to-lock design.

Solomon plans to release the CAD files required to recreate the twist-to-lock mechanism to the community, so if you have your own 3D printer, you’ll be able to print your own bases for the Moboto. They are also looking to release after launch tools to create some of your own personas and other software features.

Solomon wants to bring this product to the iPhone, iPad, and iTouch with the initial launch, but eventually to the Android and Windows smartphones as well.

As of right now, you can get one of these cool persona docks for a $35 pledge to Solomon’s kickstarter page, but there are a huge range of rewards for different pledge levels.

So if you think it is something you could benefit from, jump over to the Kickstarter website now to make a pledge and help it become a reality.

Bosch robotic lawn mower cuts the grass while you relax

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Jul 052012

With their new robotic lawn mower, Bosch wants you to put your feet up while a small, green robot does all the hard yard work.

The German multinational engineering and electronics company, Bosch, has developed a more intelligent and efficient way of mowing the front lawn. This robotic electric lawn mower will mow a lawn without the need for direct supervision.

The Bosch Indego is said to cut up to 1,000 square meters at a time, (approx a quarter of an acre). Using the provided wiring, the owner must define the perimeter of the lawn in order to help the Indego understand the boundaries of the given property.

The robotic lawn mower is programmed to automatically avoid obstacles it may encounter along its path such as large rocks, sprinklers, lawn decorations, toys left out by kids and other obtrusive objects. The Bosch Indego then automatically figures out how to adjust its mowing pattern in order to avoid these obtrusions.

The electric lawn mower can cover roughly 200 square meters every 20 minutes. Once it’s low on electrical energy, the Bosch Indego will automatically return to its charging pad and begin recharging its lithium-ion battery. After spending and hour and a half to recharge the battery, the mower returns to the process of mowing the lawn.

Using the charging pad as its initial navigation point, the mower returns to the exact spot where it stopped mowing and cuts the lawn in straight lines to avoid missing any small patches of grass.

According to the German engineering company, this method of cutting the grass is four times more effective than any other robotic lawn mower.

By contrast, some other robotic mowers move more or less randomly all over the place, the idea being that they’ll eventually get the whole lawn done.

The Bosch Indego is also able to sense “no-mow” surfaces such as gravel, pavement, and tile while other automatic electric mowers must be programmed with the location of such areas, or require them to be cordoned off with wire.

In addition to its quiet, linear operation, the Bosch Indego mulches grass clippings during the process and does not expel harmful exhaust like the traditional gasoline-powered mower.

The Indego can be set to automatically head out on its lawn-cutting duties every other day or as often as the owner wishes.

Should anyone try and steal your automatic electric mower off its charging station or during operation, the Bosch Indego has a built-in alarm that will sound if it is moved a significant distance from its charging pad. Its alarm code can be updated on the internet, should you need to legitimately move it to another home.

According to estimates from Bosch, the Indego electric lawn mower is ten times cheaper to operate than a standard gasoline-powered mower. However, the extremely expensive $2,040 price tag will definitely turn people away for the near future. The robotic lawn mower will be sold within northern Europe during 2012 and expand to larger markets over 2013.

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