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News Briefs
News Archives 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Image Sensors Go Organic
 Fulifilm and Panasonic have
got together to develop a new generation of image sensors based on organic compounds,
and advanced processing circuitry to take advantage of the new sensors. Stay
with us, it may not sound terribly exciting but here’s the thing, the new
technology should lead directly to brighter pictures with more vivid colours
and enhanced contrast on our smartphones and digicams, and it’s particularly
good, so they say, in brightly lit scenes or on darker subjects. The key to the
new technology, which
was announced at a recent semiconductor seminar in Kyoto, Japan, is in the
photoelectric conversion properties of the organic materials. To put some
numbers on it, the new organic CMOS sensors have a dynamic range of 88db, which
is around 1.2 times more sensitive then regular sensors, which use inorganic
silicon photodiodes. They also have a wider incident angle, so they capture
more light, and can be made smaller. To sum up, okay, it’s not exactly earth
shattering, but the facility to take better pictures in a wider range of
conditions, especially low light, is something we can all appreciate. However,
don’t put off buying that new camera or smartphone, it may take a while before
they reach the high street, but when they do, at least you’ll be able to say
you knew it was coming…
1706
iOS Charger Danger?
 Possible scary times ahead
for Apple iPhone and iPad users as news reaches us of a device called Mactans.
It looks like a regular plug-in charger but concealed inside is a circuit that
takes advantage of a security loophole in iOS device’s USB capabilities. The
charger is able to insert software into a device within a minute of it being
plugged in, and it works on both stock and jailbroken phones and tablets, and
with no action, other than plugging it in, on the part of the user. The first
public demo will be at Black Hat 2013,
held in late July in Las Vegas. This is the now mostly-respectable annual
conference and gathering of hackers and codeheads, who make it their business
to poke and probe into security systems until they crack. And they are very
good at it, having highlighted in the past numerous flaws and loopholes in once
supposedly bulletproof systems. By bringing these things to everyone’s
attention the company’s concerned will take action before it becomes a problem,
hopefully… Just be careful where you shop if you are in the market for a new
charger for your iPhone or iPad this Summer.
1006
Timed To Perfection
 Since the 1950s atomic
clocks have been capable of incredible accuracy, and they’ve been steadily
improving, to the point where you have t ask, do we really need to be able to
tell the time to within a few billionth’s of a second? Apparently we do, and
according to Gizmodo scientists at The National Institute of Standards and
Technology in Boulder Colorado, have come up with yet another world’s most
accurate clock. This one uses the now well-established technique of measuring
the frequency of the vibrations of atoms, which. However, inaccuracies – the
odd billionth of a second – can occur due movement caused by the influences of
gravity and electrical fields and so on. TO get around that problem this clock
works by bouncing laser light from mirrors to create a lattice like structure
that captures atoms of Ytterbium. The trapped atoms, now securely held in place
by the light lattice, can be shot at with lasers and the vibrations of the
reflected light processed to calculate time that is equivalent to an accuracy
of plus or minus one second in 31 billion years, (which as we all know can be expressed as: $\bm{1.6\times
10^{-18}}$ after only $\bm{7}$ hours of averaging), so they say…
0306
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Here’s one of those quick
and simple tips that’s worth filing away, because one day you will need it.
First the problem. The Windows filing system, accessed through Windows Explorer
is generally okay and does pretty well everything you want, but it has one
serious limitation, and that is there is no obvious way of printing out a list
of files stored in a folder, So, for example, you want to print out a list of
tunes, or photos in a folder, there’s just no easy way to do it. Of course
there are programs that can do the job, and we’ve discussed them in the past,
but here is a way using software that may already be on your PC, namely the
Mozilla Firefox or Chrome browsers. Here’s what you do. Just open Windows
Explorer on your desktop – it helps to open it in a minimized view, so you can
see the other icons on your desktop -- navigate to the folder containing the
files that you want to print out as a list, now drag and drop the folder icon
onto the Firefox or Chrome icon and hey presto, it opens displaying the file
list and all you have to do is go to Print on the browsers File men and away
you go!