Archive for November 10th, 2013

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Reprap 3D print at 30x speed

Reprap_Prusa_MendelI’ve had my Reprap for ages but haven’t really used it much lately, but today I thought I’d dust of off and have a play with it.

So, just for fun, here is a time-lapse video my Reprap Prusa Mendel printing a Christmas tree. This is playing back at proximately 30x real time, the actual print time was just under 2 hours.

Now I just need to paint and light the tree!

 

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HP Chromebook 11 price drop

hp_chromebook_11Just over a month after launch, HP’s newest Chromebook is already available to buy for less than £200 in the UK. The colourful, ARM-based notebook has had £30 slashed off its recommended retail price of £229 at a number of leading online retailers.

Powered by a Samsung Exynos chipset, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC storage, the device is also notable for using an IPS display to provide better colour reproduction and viewing angles – resolving the main issue that previous low-end devices have been criticised for.

Launched barely one month ago it’s a little surprising to see the device discounted already. Amazon have the device listed for just £199 – a saving of £30. Currys/PC World are matching this price indirectly, offering between £30 cash back on the purchase of this Chromebook, (and between £20-30 on all other Chromebooks) purchased between now and December 4th, 2013.

Using a Chromebook for the past two weeks I am certainly seeing the benefits of the low cost computers. Certainly some will scoff that they are not real computers however I am struggling to find something that I can not do on it.

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Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX10 unboxing and setup video

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX10The quality and pixel count of cameras built in to smartphones is improving all the time but there are always compromises to be made when you’re cramming a sensor and optics in to a package small enough to fit in to a smartphone where anything over about 10mm is considered too ‘fat’.

There have been obvious leaps forward particularly with the Nokia Lumia 1020 and the Ultrapixel sensor on the HTC One but even though these cameras are good there’s still no beating the optics and sensors in ‘proper’ digital cameras.

So enter the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX10, a lens camera system from Sony. Sony have taken the G Lens and ExmorR CMOS sensor from one of their digital cameras and put them in to a package that’s the same size as the lens itself. The result is a camera with 10x zoom and 18.2MP sensor in a package that looks like it’s just a small-ish lens.

The idea here is that you can use this “lens camera” with your existing Android or iOS smartphone to give you a really good camera experience, far better than you could expect from the built-on camera and with a 10x zoom and optical image stabiliser to boot.

You connect your phone to the QX10 via WiFi direct and then use Playmemories Mobile app as the interface and viewfinder for the camera.

I decided to get a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-QX10 because the camera on the Nexus 5 isn’t great… However, word of warning, the Playmemories App, which is essential to using the QX10, doesn’t work on the Nexus 5, presumably doesn’t support Android OS 4.4 yet!

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