Gerhard Potgieter

Researchers from the Ilmenau University of Technology lead by Professor Andreas Mitschele is atempting to use flying wireless quad copters to create self asembling ad-hoc wireless networks.

The group claims that the copters can be used in disaster areas where standard infrastructure is destroyed

The robots can create a network of radios that can be used for both mobile-phone or standard wireless network access. All this is being achieved with normal off the shelf parts.

The robots can spread themself and deploy a network far more quicker than any on the ground. As with any electric power device there are limitations though.

Having only 20 minutes for flight time the copters can easily fly to a destination and go land to deploy the network.

The quadcopter kits come in at 300 euro (R4000) thats excluding bateries, with batteries being more expensive at 1000 euro (R14 000) capable of only lasting 20min at full load.

For everyone who works in computers, this Tuesday, 9 December, is a significant date. It’s the 40th anniversary of the day when Douglas Engelbart, one of the industry’s great visionaries, gave an audience of geeks at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco their first glimpse of the technological future that we all now inhabit.

The computer mouse was a key element in the icon-based interface that we now take for granted, and it was a great success in its day (though Engelbart did not make a cent from it). Last week, for example, Logitech, a leading computer accessories manufacturer, announced that it had shipped its billionth mouse. ‘It’s rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company.

Original story from Guardian

Multichoice yet again screwed up with their new HD PVR decoder and HD subscriptions.

According to majority of HD subscribers they woke up this morning with no HD PVR functionality.

Users have posted complaints on the DSTV forum but still awaits response from a multichoice representative, in meanwhile a list have been drawn up to help multichoice troubleshoot.

(5) Error message on screen on top of playlist screen is “Your subscription is not valid for PVR functions”

If you experience any other errors please go post it on the DSTV Forum

For those wanting to try out the beta version of Google’s all new browser Google Chrome, it can be downloaded here. Currently the download is only available to windows users for beta testing, so the linux guys will have to wait a bit longer for this one.

Google will today launch it beta version of Google Chrome, a open source browser to go head to head with Firefox and the likes.

So why are they launching Chrome? Because they believe they can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

Google’s aim is to provide a fresh new browser built from scratch, in fact the first multi threaded browser. Under the hood, they were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, they were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. They improved speed and responsiveness across the board. They also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Apparently this is just the beginning, Google Chrome is far from done, this beta is only being released to Windows clients to start a broader discussion and to get input from the public as soon as possible.

For a comic explaining Google Chrome go here

As soon as the donwload is available I will post a link and info here.

So you own a couple of DVD’s and they are just lying arround the house gathering dust and scratches, well I had the same scenario this weekend.

I’m had just moved to a new place and with the move I discovered a few DVD’s packed away so far I forgot I owned them. So I thought wouldn’t it be better if I just digitize them, I mean I watch all my movies via my xbox streaming them from the PC so why not just backup the DVD’s to the PC and then they are available in my playlist aswell.

After carefully thinking it through I decided not to just make ISO images of the disk, cause then I won’t be able to stream to the xbox, and the space could become a problem as your collection grows. So I opted for the DVD to DivX conversion.

After searching high and low on the internet I couldn’t quite find a suitable free product that could do this for me, and all the paid ones was a bit pricey. So after searching a little bit longer I came across a nice application called AutoGK. It is a application that allows backup from DVD to DivX / XviD, and best of all its free.

Program features support of:
- DVD/VOBs(unencrypted from hdd), MPEG2, MPEG1, transport streams (including multi-program ones) and AVI/DV input sources
- XviD or DivX(5/6) output formats
- AC3, DTS, PCM, MPA input audio tracks
- AC3, DTS, MPA, CBR/VBR MP3 output audio tracks
- two audio tracks in AVI
- external (vobsub) or internal (burnt-in) subtitles (with support of forced subs)
- HDTV input/output resolutions(upto 1920x***) and frame rates (50/60fps)
- automatic crop and resize based on compressibility of the source to achieve best results
- automatic detection of input source: PAL, NTSC, FILM, HYBRID
- automatic deinterlacer and IVTC
- automatic split into CD-sized chunks for main video and external subs

The program is really good and it doesn’t compromise quality at all, and if the default quality settings isn’t good enough for you , you can always adjust them to your liking. I think AutoGK is a must for every DVD collector wanting to back up their collection to PC. So if you have a few DVD’s lying around go dowload AutoGK and start backing up those DVD’s.

Not many South Africans know about the ZA Tech Show yet, but its popularity is growing with every podcast.

The ZA Tech Show is a weekly South African technology podcast where they discuss all the latest trends and technologies thats happening in South Africa. The podcast is now at their 10th episode and can be download for free from their website.

The ZA Tech Show is led by a panel consisting of Simon Dingle from Hypertext Media, Duncan McLeod from the FM and FM Tech, Jon Tullett from IHS, Benedict Kelly from Finweek and Brett Haggard also from Hypertext Media.

So if you are a technology junkie and would like to keep up the trends then this podcast is a must for you. Big up to Simon Dingle - founder of ZA Tech Show - and his team for a great weekly podcast, i’m sure you’ll make it big with this show.