Drones: Coming Soon to a Sky Near You

Drones are “unmanned aerial vehicles”, or UAVS.

Drones come in all shapes and sizes, each being designed for one of two purposes: surveillance or warfare.

The two best-known drone models are at the extreme ends of the scale.

The average citizen can use an iPhone to conduct neighbourhood surveillance with the Parrot AR Drone 2.0. This stylish unit packs a flight guidance system and an HD video camera into a form factor about the size and weight of a large pizza.

You can pick one up at The Source for just over $300. (And, yes, that would make a tremendously appreciated gift for yours truly.)

If bombing Al-Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan is more your style, you’ll have to join the US Air Force or the CIA. It’s only within those organizations that you’ll get the opportunity to pilot the massive, missile-laden $56 million Reaper from the comfort of a base in Nevada

Find a Comfortable Seat for the Future

The surface of BRC Designs’ Binary Chair is completely covered with a collage of motherboards, computer chips, lcd screens and hard drive disks held in place by sheet metal screws. The chair also has an interactive quality as the hard drive disks can be spun, the telephone keys and other buttons can be pressed, and the antennae raised and adjusted.
Credit: Benjamin Caldwell, BRC Designs

A couple of years ago Benjamin Caldwell of BRC Designs introduced us to his Binary Chairs.

Arguably more sculpture than furniture, they are constructed entirely of second-hand computer guts – things like circuit boards, CPUs, hard drives, wires and data ribbons. While the chairs are inexplicably beautiful they don’t look particularly comfortable.

The Binary Chairs are wonderfully emblematic of our modern world. Just as they are totally built of tech detritus, so is technology itself now built into everything. It’s naturally part of the daily fabric of our world.

And while that fine weave of life and technology can be a beautiful thing, it’s also full of jagged edges and unexpected sharp surfaces.

That harmonious conflict between humanity and technology will be under the microscope at an important conference in Toronto this June.

The 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society will address “the social implications of wearable technology and augmediated reality in everyday life.”

Holy crap, sorry, that was a mouthful. So I’ll just paraphrase it a bit: as technology integrates itself ever deeper into our lives and alters our view of reality itself, how do we adapt to it and manage its effects?

Let’s start investigating that question with something familiar: the smartphone.

Adveillance. Or, Trading Your Life for Glass

Surveillance, according to Wikipedia, is “the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting.”

We’re almost used to it now. We seem to accept the fact that everything we do is captured and stored by some mysterious third party for review and sharing at some future date.

Consider then, sousveillance, which is defined at Wikipedia as “the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity,” typically by means of a wearable computer or video recorder.

The phrase sousveillance was coined by Stephen Mann, a University of Toronto professor who has in fact been practicing it for nigh on 3 decades using one form or other of homemade device.

Then there’s mcveillance, a term that describes (again, according to Wikipedia), “the ratio (linearly) or difference (logarithmically) of surveillance to sousveillance”. In other words, it’s where sousveillance and surveillance meet in conflict. We have this term thanks to Mann’s son who invented it after he watched his father get kicked out of a McDonald’s restaurant for practicing sousveillance in a strictly surveillance-only zone.

What about when sousveillance and surveillance meet on friendlier terms? Enter Google Glass, an unabashed rip off of Mann’s inventions. It enables the average consumer – or at least those of us willing to fork over $1000+ for half a pair of glasses – to practice sousveillance. But it’s a Google device so, just as with the other horses in that company’s stable, your every move is also being collected and analyzed for resale as ad fodder. In other words, you’re volunteering yourself for real-time, personal surveillance.

But everybody’s happy, right? So there, at the other end of the spectrum from mcveillance we have “adveillance“. You really have to wonder who’s getting the better half of that deal, though.

Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive: Where There’s Clouds, There’s Thunder

Wow, what a thunderstorm this week, eh?

We heard it approaching on the horizon for a while, but I don’t think any of us expected anything like that!

What? Oh, no, I’m not talking about the weather.

I’m talking about those clouds on the internet.

You know, services like Apple iCloud, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. And I’m especially referring to the new one that caused this week’s huge storm, Google Drive.

“Clouds” are basically places up there in the internet where you can put all your digital stuff. Think of them as online hard drives.

I’m not going to give you the run-down on the various clouds’ features, or even try to assess which might be best. I’ll refer you to, “Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off“, on The Verge for that.

Instead, I’m going to provide a primer on what these clouds are for, why you might want to use one, and what you need to be careful of.

CBC Budget Cut? We Asked for It.

Facebook just spent a billion dollars on a tiny little internet startup called Instagram.

Meanwhile, our own beloved/celebrated/maligned/despised CBC is figuring out how to suffer through a $115 million budget cut.

650 people will lose their jobs at the CBC, and at least 6 programs will be cut.

Instagram, on the other hand, only employs 13 people. They were all just made instant millionaires.

Okay, I get that the trials and tribulations of a national public broadcaster are very different from the success of a private firm that has experienced a high profile aquisition. That’s very much an apples-and-oranges story.

But that’s not the story. The story is us.

Are Tablets the Perfect Computer?

Laptop computers took 12 years to reach 50 million people. That same milestone was reached by smartphones in 7 years. Tablets, which is to say the iPad, got there in just 2.

Many analysts predict that by the end of next year, total tablet sales will completely eclipse traditional computers.

But does it mean that the tablet is the “perfect” computer? Or is it just another gadgetstop on the neverending geek highway?

Most likely the tablet is just the first step in an evolution to something better that embraces a broader range of our natural communication behaviours.

Three Basic Principles for Buying an E-reader

I have this funny feeling that e-readers will be a marquee gift this holiday season.

I don’t know why, but it could have something to do with all these new Kindles from Amazon, the new Kobo Vox, and the just-introduced Nook Tablet from Barnes and Noble.

There are so many e-readers on the market these days that deciding which one to buy for whom can be tough.

Luckily there are few general principles you can work with when considering what’s available.

Siri: The Beginning of the End of Computers

I hadn’t planned to, but I ended up lining up in the wee hours a couple weeks back for an iPhone 4S.

It was more a father-son bonding thing than a geek thing, to be honest. But once the Vancouver media descended on the scene and started interviewing us, well, I felt compelled to buy one, just to show it off for the TV cameras if nothing else.

And to be honest, I’m kind of glad I did. The iPhone 4S packs a key technology that clearly demonstrates the future of how we’ll use computers: a service called Siri lets you do things on your iPhone using just your voice.

In concept, Siri, isn’t that significant.

We’ve theoretically been able to operate our desktop computers with our voices for quite some time.

Instead, Apple’s true achievement in Siri is twofold:

First, it pretty much works, unlike most voice services that have come before (including those from Apple).

Second, it’s available away from your desk and it’s baked in. Voice services matter a lot more to the average person when you’re mobile and they’re easy to access.

With Siri, Apple has effectively reset the compass on the future direction of personal computing.

Instead of continuing along the path of pushing pixels across glass screens, Siri demonstrates that we can do without devices altogether.