Project Glass could see a laser keyboard attached thanks to a new patent acquired by Google
Google have found themselves with a new patent that would see a tiny laser attached to a device to project out a virtual keyboard onto a surface, or better yet, on to users' hands. This might not be too surprising, but it would be perfect for one device: Project Glass.
According to the patent, the Mountain View-based search giant would use the system with Project Glass which would help those sporting the wearable computers input text into situations where voice control or voice input can't be done, such as an elevator or bathroom. Google see users projecting out a keyboard, keypad or graphical UI directly onto the palm of your hand - imagine the possibilities!
We're only talking about a patent at the moment, so this could all disappear, or materialize into something incredibly intuitive from Google. It could change, everything, again.
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RumorTT: Samsung to launch 5.8-inch smartphone, would be called 'Galaxy Fonblet'
Sammobile are reporting from a source that is claiming that South Korean electronics giant Samsung are set to launch a new 5.8-inch smartphone for the European market. This so far doesn't sound too far out of Samsung's reach, but the name for the device is quite odd - the Samsung Galaxy Fonblet.
The Fonblet is said to be based around the company's Galaxy Player 5.8 PMP which was a Korean-only device that sported just cellular abilities. The Galaxy Player 5.8 sported a qHD display, and a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera. Sammobile is reporting that we should expect the Fonblet to feature the same qHD display. We should also expect the new European destined device to feature dual-SIM card capabilities, too.
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Nexus 4 demand in the UK said to be 10 times higher than Google had expected
The incredibly awesome Nexus 4 is constantly sold out as it's so popular, where ten times as many British smartphone fans want the Nexus 4 than Google had expected. LG is blaming the Mountain View-based search giant again, with LG France boss Cathy Robin talking to Challenges who has put the blame on Google once more.
LG has said that they built as many phones as Google had asked for, which was based on the number of Nexus devices sold previously. Obviously Google had badly misunderestimated the number of Nexus 4's they'd sell, which should've been obvious. It's one of the most powerful smartphones on the market, priced at the price of a mid-range smartphone.
LG have said it takes around six weeks to increase the number of deliveries, so by mid-February we should see many more Nexus 4's available.
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The world's first 3D-printed building to be constructed in 2014
Right now 3D printing hasn't taken off into the mainstream, but over the coming years it's definitely going to be leaving a bigger footprint. A Dutch architect is looking at 3D printing a home, where he hopes it'll be constructed by 2014.
Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture is the man behind the idea, and the 3D printed home is his project which is part of the Europan competition which lets architects in over 15 different countries build projects over the course of two years. Ruijssenaars will work with Italian inventor Enrico Dini, who is the founder of the D-Shape 3D printer.
The project will use 6x9 chunks of frame, which will be comprised of sand and inorganic binder. After this, they'll fill the frame with fiber-reinforced concrete. The final product looks amazing, which features a single flowing design, and will be a two-storey building.
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Microsoft hires designer Andrew Kim, will work with the Xbox division
"The Next Microsoft" was a vision by designer Andrew Kim, and received a bunch of press when it was unveiled last year. It was a minimal rebranding for the company across multiple platforms such as Windows, Surface and Office - but it worked, and it worked well.
Kim has now announced that the Redmond-based software giant has hired him after seeing his designs, countless other companies were after Kim, but Kim says that Microsoft was the most obvious choice. He also promises that he is to create his "greatest work ever" when he starts at the company in a few months time.
Kim will be working within the Xbox division, which is an interesting move considering we've been hearing about the next-generation Xbox launch in the summer. If this happens, we should - and hopefully - see a total revamp of the Xbox brand. It's been a while coming, but let's hope that Microsoft ditch the number and just call it 'Xbox'.
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Ask the Experts: I currently have an AMD Radeon HD 5870 and want to upgrade, help!
Our
Ask the Experts section has a new question, where we have Jim in Cambodia wanting to upgrade his GPU.
Q: I've recently upgraded the majority of the components in my rig, i7-3930k, SSD's, etc., but have held off upgrading the GPU. Currently I have an ASUS HD5870, and while it runs most games pretty decently, would like to explore high end single GPU options for gaming. I've looked at the Radeon HD7970 GHz, GTX 680, GTX 670 and Radeon HD7970. Help please!
A: You can view the answer to Jim's question right
here.
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Google invests $1 billion into a plot of land for a new central London HQ
During the week, search and mobile OS giant Google purchased a 2.4-acre plot of land in the King's Cross Central development, where they will begin construction on a new 1 million square foot office based in the UK.
Google haven't announced just how much they invested into the land, but a source close to the deal reportedly told Reuters that the Mountain View-based company are investing around $1.04 billion into the project. By the time the construction is completed at an estimated 2016, the building is expected to increase in value, putting it at $1.6 billion worth.
Construction will begin later this year, and the building will range in height from between seven to eleven stories. Google plan to completely relocate to the complex in 2016. At the moment, Google's UK operations are based out of offices in London's Victoria district, where property prices are much higher.
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HBO confirms Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks to begin third WWII miniseries
There are leagues of fans of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, but now HBO have confirmed that producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are on-board for a third series set during WWII.
The duo will reportedly tap Donald L. Miller's Masters of the Air as their source material, with the miniseries currently not titled. Miller's book is a narrative non-fiction work which tells the story of American bombers in their air campaign against Nazi Germany, focusing on the "Mighty Eighth" Air Force.
There's no ETA on the miniseries, but we should expect the production budget to be absolutely huge. Band of Brothers had a mammoth production budget of $125 and The Pacific blew its budget out to $200 million. So we should expect some big things from the third miniseries and I for one can't wait for it.
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SimCity closed beta to be hosted next week
The reboot of SimCity coming from Electronic Arts and Maxis is going into a closed beta next week, which was revealed through the official SimCity Twitter account as well as a newly opened
registration page.
The beta will take place for just a few days, between January 25 and January 28. If you want to jump in, you'll need to punch in your details into the registration page before the registrations close. Participants for the beta are chosen completely at random, so I hope I get in!
Registrations are easy, you just get asked how much you play games, did you play the previous SimCity games, and how many hours you'll be able to participate in the beta.
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Kim Dotcom's Mega launches, sees huge surge in user registrations
Kim Dotcom's new file sharing site Mega has launched in the last 24 hours, and it has launched to some huge early success. The launch took place on the one-year anniversary of the raid on his New Zealand home, after authorities close down Megaupload.
After just 10 minutes of Mega launching, Kim Dotcom tweeted that he had his server bandwidth going "from 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes". He later reported that sign-ups were rolling in at a rate of thousands per minute. Mega has been offering 50GB of storage for free, as well as three pricing tiers each offering additional storage and bandwidth capacity.
A total of 250,000 user registrations was tweeted by Kim Dotcom a little over 7 hours ago now, and minute later he tweeted "this is going to be huge", and I will mirror that. Mega is going to turn into somewhat of an elephant in the room, and that room is the US government, various authorities, the MPAA and more. Kim Dotcom just flipped them all off, big time.
At the time of writing, Mega wasn't loading for me - the server must be getting crazy amounts of hits right now.
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RumorTT: PlayStation 4 controller to feature LCD touchscreen, biometric sensors
A source close to CVG are claiming some huge news from Sony's research and development department that they've been busy playing with more than one controller design for the next-generation console from Sony. We should expect it to launch as the PlayStation 4, but things can still change before release and we could see it released as simply "PlayStation" - something I believe has some weight to it.
These controller designs are said to be including an LCD touchscreen, as well as biometric sensors on its grips. Biometric technology on console controllers would be interesting, as it is capable of reading data from a gamer's body, which includes gamers' heart rates, temperatures and more.
This information isn't just a huge leaked rumor, as sources from Eurogamer are mirroring the same info, stating that Sony have been testing a PS4 controller with a touchscreen and biometrics functionality for at least six months, in which the designs reportedly change every month. This would be a huge departure from the DualShock controller which was introduced with the original PlayStation in 1997, and we've seen an iteration of the DualShock controller with every new PlayStation.
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NYPD releases an app to help citizens report crime
An app has been released by someone you would've thought would be last to release one, the New York Police Department. The NYPD's application was designed to help the NYPD's mission to "enhance the quality of life in New York City by working in partnership with the community and in accordance with constitutional rights to enforce the laws, preserve the peace, reduce fear and provide for a safe environment."
The NYPD's app allows citizens to access crime statistics, to view the Most Wanted lists, get precinct information and view rewards for information about past crimes, as well as let citizens submit anonymous tips about crimes they have witnessed - hopefully with some unbreakable encryption.
There's also a 'Tips' section which will ask citizens to enter the suspect's description including gender, race, appearance; the crime's description including what, where and when; and the vehicle description (if used) including make, model, color, year and license plate. You can even upload a photo from your phone, or choose to snap a picture from the app directly.
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Pandora users rack up 13 billion hours of music listening over 2012
Pandora, one of the main competitors to Spotify, have announced their 2012 stats where they've seen 13 billion hours of music listened to, spanned across one million songs and over 100,000 artists. In this process, they've seen 1.6 billion stations created, and more than 10,000 musicians and bands notched up 250,000 unique listeners.
The Internet radio and music recommendation service have been teasing their numbers for quite a while now, where they've been issuing metrics on a month-to-month basis, trying to scoop up more advertising revenue. In one of the first of these releases, Pandora talked of having 49 million active users, something that rose to 55 million in July. The audience is slowing getting bigger as they launch services in new countries such as Australia and New Zealand.
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Google defines the Pirate Bay as a 'malware distributor'
It looks like the Pirate Bay is about to get a little bit harder to find on the Internet, thanks to a bunch of malware alerts sent to Google have resulted in sites on the Pirate Bay being flagge by their content advisory service.
If you're like me and rocking Google's Chrome web browser, the advisory is alarment and displays the phrase "visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware'. Sitting on the Firefox side of the browsing fence will display it an attack page, stating "many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners".
The team over at the Pirate Bay have told TorrentFreak is in relation to one of their ad partners who have "screwed up". There should be no malware threats now, and the warnings should eventually fade away from their side. These automated tools are slipping, and banning certain sites because of the ads, as they're made to target specific items and flag them. TPB getting flagged is another one of those "automatic" anomalies.
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The Expendables 2 (2012) Blu-ray Review
Following both critical and financial successes with
Rocky Balboa and
Rambo, the formerly dormant career of Sylvester Stallone has enjoyed a resurgence of late. Naturally, if one aging star can pull $131 million, how much could seven aging stars pull in? The answer to that was the 2010 tour de force
The Expendables, which took the novel approach of mingling stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve 'Stone Cold' Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and a cameo from the then "Governator", Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a hard-assed throw back to the films of old.
When that made a reasonable amount of cash for the studio, a sequel was, of course, inevitable. The formula for
The Expendables 2 is simply to ramp up the best elements of the first film, lightening the tone and putting even more old people in!
When the mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) coerces Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), the leader of the Expendables, into accepting a reconnaissance mission to retrieve an item from a downed airplane in Albania, the group find themselves at the mercy of arms dealer Jean Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his opposing force. The retrieved item is exchanged for their lives, but not before one of their own is slain. Vilain escapes, but the Expendables vow vengeance, tracking them across Europe. But Vilain has an even more devious plan and now the means to execute it.
Where the original film was a more serious and to a certain degree, joyless film,
The Expendables 2 plays up the humor quotient, solidified by the casting of internet favourite Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme, ensuring that the tongue is automatically firmly in cheek. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis expand their previous cameos into much larger roles and don't shy away from battle, in a climactic shootout which shares more than a passing similarity to the 'No Russian' level of
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Make no mistake, this isn't high art, and won't be in contention for any Academy awards. This is fan service and no attempt is made to skate over this. Numerous allusions are made to the roles which made the stars household names ("I said I'd be back!") and even the meme's of Chuck Norris are referenced ("I heard you got bitten by a king cobra" "Yeah. But after several days of excruciating pain, the cobra died.")
You'll not have any life affirming moments during
The Expendables 2, but if films are meant to be entertaining, then it's certainly one of the most entertaining movies to come out from the year that was 2012.
Video
The Expendables 2 is presented in the film's original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, encoded with AVC MPEG-4 compression.
On Blu-ray, the movie looks exactly as it did in the cinema - draped in gritty and dark hues, with significant colour grading which desaturated the frame and accentuates blue tones. There's a little softness to the image, which isn't a fault of the transfer, but would suggest its purpose is to tones down some of the stars aging signs.
Despite the darkness, there's pleasingly little in the way of black crush, revealing a lot of detail in each frame. Its production methods won't lead the film to being the next best demo disc, but as far as faithful encoding goes - the
Expendables 2 takes the cake.
Audio
The Expendables 2 is presented in DTS HD Master Audio 7.1, at 24 bits.
Well, actually that's not entirely true.
The Expendables 2 is the first Blu-ray in the world to be encoded with what's being called 'DTS 11.1 Neo X', which essentially means there is additional speaker height information encoded in the stream. Hands up if you are equipped with this tech? I thought so, but still - a very cool move from Roadshow.
Everyone else will have to make do with 'just' 7.1; a doozy of a consolation prize. Just like the film itself, there is nothing subtle about
The Expendables 2 sound mix. Every explosion, crash and bullet storm rattles the floor with a resounding low frequency thud.
There's quite the range of accents on offer from the rather international cast, but very rarely is anything of any consequence unable to be heard. Sound designers have clearly had a lot of fun crafting the sound mix here, I imagine the order from on high was to make it as big as possible and that's exactly what we get.
Extras
At first glance it would appear that there isn't much in the way of extra features here, but what we do get is pleasingly substantial. Let's take a look see.
First up is the feature length
Audio Commentary featuring Director Simon West on solo duty. His adeptness with helming ensemble action films made him a good choice for helming the sequel and whilst he offers a solid commentary, only the most pure fans will be willing to stick it through to the end.
Next we have four decent length featurettes, the beefiest -
Big Guns, Bigger Heroes: The 1980's and the Rise of the Action film charts the growing popularity of action heroes in the American psyche, whose rise of the Stallone's and Schwarzenegger's of the world dovetailed with the explosion of interest in bodybuilding and the excesses of the 1980's.
God of War: Assembling Earth's Mightiest Anti-Heroes discusses the casting process and how series newcomers were roped in.
On the Assault: The Real Life Weaponry of the Expendables 2 takes a light hearted look at the movies gunplay, which coming just weeks after events in the United States might make this appear a little touchy.
Guns for Hire: Real Life Expendables investigates the real world industry of mercenaries and what their jobs entail.
Finally, we have approximately five minutes of
Deleted Scenes which reveal some brief superfluous shots, along with five minutes of spectacularly unfunny fluffs in the
Gag Reel.
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Gangster Squad (2013) Cinema Review
I'm not sure what it is about the genre, but gangster movies are generally underappreciated in their time, but go on to become cult classics. In evidence, titles such as
Scarface,
Casino,
Dick Tracy,
Gangs of New York,
Once Upon a Time in America and
A Touch of Evil...I could go on and on.
Gangster Squad will probably make plenty of money owing to its hot cast, but I'm pretty sure it won't be reappraised in future years from anything more than 'average'.
The year is 1949. Ex-boxer and feared gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) has Los Angeles in his pocket, with lawyers, police and judges all in his employ and no one willing to prosecute him. But there are some good men left. Chief Parker (Nick Nolte) has had enough and calls on Sergeant John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) to establish a team of solid cops to take him down and clean up the city. But with a police force so deeply mired in corruption, the squad won't be officially sanctioned, forced to rely on their own resourcefulness to exploit the holes in Cohen's systems and protect not only themselves, but their loved ones.
Gangster Squad seems to have taken
The Untouchables as its inspiration, borrowing the same structure, but filling it with more blood, a harder edge and more sex appeal. But where that film is a satisfyingly compelling dramatization of Al Capone, that's where the similarities end.
On the surface, the film seems to tick all the right boxes, including great sets, and abundance of CG, slick visuals and a great cast, but this is a film that is tonally closer to
Dick Tracy than
The Untouchables.
And that's a real shame too, because in another universe, with a stronger script and a different director,
Gangster Squad could have stood side by side with that film as one of the great dramatizations of larger than life villains.
Sadly,
Gangster Squad's most unforgiveable crime is that it so comprehensively wastes its strong A+ list cast, never requiring more than a bat of an eye-lid from Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling to stand back and smolder the screen. Penn's scenery chewing as the wholly one-dimensional Cohen seems to channel Al Pacino, but falls far short of the mark. Let's remember, he's an Oscar winner for god's sake.
Ultimately,
Gangster Squad just feels like a film doesn't know what it wants to be. Cinema by numbers. Film making by faceless studio heads. I'll admit, it has its entertaining moments, but at the end of the day, a good looking mess is still just a mess.
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