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Having a baby is a pretty major change in your life, and things tend to get a bit hectic. I’ve found having a device in my pocket that can help smooth the way a bit really helps.

Just Noise

This app is like having a magic button on your phone that soothes grumpy babies. For some reason babies find white noise really relaxing. I’ve used this one to get my daughter off to sleep many, many times.

Remember the Milk

All of a sudden your life has just got a lot more complicated. Unfortunately this also coincides with a new adventure in sleep deprivation. Having an app that can organise you life and remind you to do things is invaluable. You can set recurring tasks, organise them by lists, tags, and a heap of other features. Requires a Remember the Milk Pro account, but the US$25 a year is well spent.

Aldiko

If you’re going to spend countless hours sitting up awake at night settling babies, you might as well do something useful with your time. Aldiko is a great ebook reader that actually makes reading on a small screen quite enjoyable. Plus it has a huge supply of free books ready to download. Mostly that means old book that are out of copyright, but if you can handle reading the Sherlock Holmes novels, War of the Worlds or some Sun Tzu then you’ll be fine.

One handed reading is a very useful thing to be able to do when you’ve got a bundle in the other arm. Another good option if you’ve got a Kindle is their Android app. It will even remember what page you were on when you switch back to the Kindle

Quick Alarm

Simple app, but does the job. Set yourself an alarm for a 20min catnap when you get the chance, and fight back against the sleep deprivation.

Baby ESP

Plotting and recording when your child eats, sleeps and poops may sound a bit anal, but it can also make your life a lot easier. Sometimes you don’t realise your baby has fallen into a routine until you track it, and then knowing when they’re going to do what ahead of time is a huge win. This is a paid app, but you get a fully functional seven day trial. And it’s only US$3 anyway.

At least that’s the result of a Nielsen survey in the US when they asked smartphone users how likely they were to stick with their current smartphone OS when they next upgraded.

Another interesting stat was the OS which people said they would choose if they switched:

From this, we can take a bit of a potshot at estimating what the battlefield in the smart phone wars will look like in a year’s time. Assuming that everybody is able to defect to the system they’d most like to then to figures below show the Iphone snatching the top spot from the Blackberry. The problem with that assumption is that an awful lot of Blackberry users (and 40% of Iphone users, incidentally) are given their phones by their employer, so actually aren’t free to switch.

Personally, I don’t think the Blackberry number will drop as much, for the reason mentioned above. WinMo has been dying a slow death for a while, so a 4% drop doesn’t sound too unreasonable, despite also being popular with enterprise users. Recent polls have also shown Iphone uptake to be stagnating, while Android is surging. So my prediction is that my numbers for Android and WinMo will be accurate, but that the swing from Blackberry to Iphone may not be as severe as the numbers suggest.

Can Blackberry hold onto that top spot? Only time will tell…

The Fonera is a compact green and black box. The multiple antennae betray the presence of high-speed wifi-n under the hood.

I’ve blogged about FON recently, but didn’t go into too much technical detail. The magic box behind it all is the Fonera router.

The latest iteration is the Fonera 2.0n, which unsurprisingly uses the new 802.11n standard for higher speeds and better range wifi. That alone is probably worth the £79 pricetag, but this beastie actually has a lot more tricks up it’s sleeve. Features include:

• A seperate public wifi signal, giving the owner access to all FON hotspots worldwide.
• USB port for adding storage, printers, soundcards, etc. With storage added the router functions like a NAS. With a printer added it works as a print server. Or you can plug in a USB hub and do both.
• Transmission bit torrent client.
• Download tool for file sharing sites (eg: Rapidshare).
• Facebook, Picasa, Youtube and Flickr uploaders.
• Plug in a 3G dongle and it’ll create a wifi hotspot from it. So you don’t even need a landline or ADSL connection to use it.
• An open application framework for extending it’s capabilities.
• As a “self-tweeting router” it has it’s own Twitter account, and will tweet you when your up/downloads are done.

On top of this it has all the usual router functionality such as DDNS, QoS, static and dynamic IP addresses, etc.

Overall it’s an impressive and flexible device, and FON seem committed to keeping it an open platform and encouraging people to play about with it. Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to someone looking for a simple cheap NAS and torrenting solution. It does have one major drawback though. Bizarrely, it doesn’t include a modem. You will need an ethernet ADSL modem or a modem/router as well. However, I was surprised to find how well it played with my old BT Voyager modem/router. It’s just a pain to have a second box plugged in just to get the Fonera online. For such a feature-packed device it’d be nice if it could handle the ADSL connection as well.

Despite this weird shortcoming, I think it’s a cool device. Access to thousands of wifi hotspots for a one-off payment is a good deal. Chuck in wifi-n and the bucketload of useful features and I can forgive it for not having a modem.

Incidentally, if it’s access to the FON network you want, they also do a stripped-back 2-port wifi-g device that’ll start you FONing for only £29.95, which is a great deal.

Ever since buying a smartphone and a netbook i’ve been on the constant lookout for free wifi hotspots. Paying the exorbitant rates for paid access just isn’t an option. But what if you could get free access to thousands of hotspots worldwide? FON does just that, in a very cunning way.

To get access to FON’s network (which includes all BT OpenZone hotspots in the UK) you need to buy a FON wifi router and plug it into your broadband at home. These FON routers are actually pretty cool devices, and i’ve reviewed one here. Besides working just like your normal router handling your own network traffic, the FON devices also create a seperate FON hotspot using your connection. It’s totally secure and once you’re sharing your own connection you’ve got free access to all of FON’s hotspots worldwide.

To check out the FON hotspots near you, check out the FON maps.

The logic behind the "singularity" applied to razor blades. Personally I think there might be something in this one...

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the supposedly looming “technological singularity“. For the uninitiated, this is based on a principle called Moore’s Law. Broadly speaking, Moore’s Law states that every couple of years, computers get twice as fast for the same cost. The impressive thing is that in the 40 years or so since Gordon Moore first cooked it up, it’s been remarkably accurate, even though the tech has gone through changes he could never had foreseen.

What gets all the singularity nuts excited is the idea of what happens next. According to Moore’s “Law”, computers will get smarter and smarter, until eventually they’re smarter than us, and begin (according to the singularity folks) designing themselves at a rate we couldn’t match. The machines take over, humanity becomes irrelevant, etc, etc.

Except that’s a load of bollocks, and here’s why:

In the real world stuff never continues to grow exponentially forever. Projections based on unbridled exponential growth are the mathematical equivalent of perpetual motion machines. It’s called a Malthusian growth model, after a bloke who made some very dire predictions about world population back in the 19th century. Lucky for us, the complete lameness of this type of model meant that the world didn’t implode under the combined weight of humanity, and the mathematicians went back to the drawing board. The result was a new, better model they called the Logistic model, which acknowledges the idea that even if something can grow at an exponential rate for a while, eventually forces that may have been too small to notice begin to slow the growth rate. This model has been far more successful at accurately modeling real-world processes.

Sure the idea of the singularity is fun, but the less sexy reality is that your wrist watch is unlikely to ever be able to out-smart you, let alone usurp your position at the top of the food chain by creating it’s own army of super-intelligent wrist watches. Moore’s Law will eventually break down, machines will stop getting smarter so quickly, or even stop getting smarter at all.

Short, sharp, and straight to the point.

There’s a hell of a lot of random waffle about technology out there. That’s why I like Shot of Jaq.

A twice-weekly 10-minute shotcast from Jono Bacon and Stuart “Aq” Langridge (Jono+Aq=Jaq) they cover a wide range of geek topics. Recent shots have tackled the impending the rise of ARM netbooks, the nightmare maze of ebook incompatibility, and whether Android is living up to it’s early promise as an iPhone killer.

The guys have an obvious rapport, having worked together before on Lugradio. The initial part of each shot is scripted, followed by the random musings of the two presenters, after which the topic is thrown open to the listeners and continues on the site, Twitter and IRC.

So far it’s been good stuff, I hope the guys can keep finding interesting stuff to argue about every Tuesday and Thursday for a long while yet.

Not content with possesing enough conventional firepower to squish pretty much anything on the battlefield, the US military seems to now be plundering the future for cool new tech to waste people with. Next up on the US military’s agenda: autonomous walking battledroids. No really.

It turns out walking is actually a pretty practical way of getting around over rough terrain, so DARPA is flinging money at tech labs who can build them a droid that can lug heavy loads across rough ground. Presumably these poor bots would end up doing the jobs that the humans find difficult and dangerous, such as resupply and EOD. They’re kind of creepy, but i’ll bet they’d be popular with the meatsacks that would be doing these jobs otherwise.

Electric cars: no longer glorified milk floats

Formula 1 is the cutting edge of automotive technology. A lot of the stuff in production cars today like ABS and fuel injection started out in F1. That’s why the news that the FIA is backing a new racing series using electric propulsion is exciting news. Called the EV Cup it should help accelerate the performance of alternative propulsion in cars.

It could make for some exciting racing, too. Electric propulsion has ludicrously high torque, meaning insane acceleration and crazy passing manoeuvres. If all goes to plan, look out for EV Cup races in 2011.

Why watch those downloads on your PC, when you can watch them from the comfort of the sofa?

The plan:

Watch video and photos and listen to mp3 music stored on our home network through the normal TV and stereo in the living room.

Issues:

1. Must have low power consumption
2. Must be quiet
3. Must boot fast
4. Must be stable and low-maintenance
5. Cheap is good!

What:

Mini-ITX based PC with a decent processor and onboard graphics, squeezed into a tiny wee case.

Why:

For a while now most of us have had two cool things in our homes: a home entertainment system and a network. But how can we get all our great digital content onto that nice big TV and hifi in the living room? The answer is a media centre PC.

How:

Hardware:

• Jetway JNC-62K Motherboard with onboard Nvidia 8200 graphics card
• AMD Athlon X2 e4850 high efficiency CPU
• Silverstone NT07-AM2 low-profile heatsink/fan.
• 1GB RAM
• 80GB SATA hard drive
• Terratec Aureon PCI sound card with S/PDIF
• Jou Jye NU-528i-B case with internal 73W power supply.
• Wireless keyboard with built-in trackpad
• TOSlink optical cable to get shiny digital sound to the hifi

Software:

• XBMC media centre software
• Ubuntu 64-bit, stripped down custom version. See Ubuntu Minimal: Build an ultra-lightweight custom OS

How much?

Grand total was £269 (+P&P), sourced from mini-ITX.com, Advance Technologies, and dabs.com.

>>> Enough talk, show me how it’s done! >>>

Mmm, donut...

I received the latest Android update over the air a couple of nights ago. Codenamed Donut, Android 1.6 isn’t a huge change, but i’m pretty impressed. On my HTC Magic, the main highlights are:

• It’s noticeably faster. No more lag in animations like when switching between  browser windows. I’d been led to believe Donut would be a little clunky, but my experience has been the total opposite.
• Search is now awesome. It now searches all the phone’s contents (contacts, notes, etc) as well as the web. This is a Google phone though, so search should be this good.
• The revamped Android Market is nice.

But that’s about it as far as I can tell. A couple of apps are slightly broken for now (including Google’s own Voice Search, wtf?) but i’m assuming they’ll be fixed in updates shortly. (All fixed now!)