Hasta La Gadget!

Just because a particular processor comes with its fair share of cores, that does not mean that more is necessarily better. After all, there are still many other considerations to think about, and when it comes to the MediaTek MT6592 which features not three, four, five, or even six, but eight (!) Cortex-A7 CPU cores, then one would definitely sit up and take notice. Making use of the 28nm manufacturing process, it is said to be able to run all eight cores at once.

With the MediaTek MT6592 prototypes already available, it is then no surprise to see it appear on an AnTuTu 4.0 benchmark which will offer us a better idea on how the chipset performs in comparison to other chipsets that are already in the market. When paired alongside a Mali-450 GPU, 1GB RAM and a 720p HD display, it seems that the MediaTek MT6592 did not impress much. The Galaxy Note 3 from Samsung leads the pack, with the MediaTek MT6592 dwelling near the bottom, not even surpassing the HTC One. For instance, the LG G2 hit 31,077, while the NVIDIA Shield carries a score of 37,985, with the MediaTek MT6592 sporting a count of 25,495. Sure, this is a prototype only, so the future might bring something else with the finished product, but this is a pretty good indicator of what’s to come.

MediaTek MT6592 AnTuTu Benchmarks Not Too Impressive At All original content from Ubergizmo.

Can you smell a symphony? If Le Laboratoire has its way, you soon will. The contemporary art and design sensor founded by academic and scientists David Edwards in 2007 was at Wired’s 2013 event in London this week, showing their latest creation: an olfactory experience unlike any other, delivered digitally like an email or instant message.

Edwards and his former student Rachel Field revealed the second, and much more polished prototype of the Ophone at the show, which is a cylindrical device that rests atop a base supplied with a number of chemicals. It’s a “phone” in some respects, as its name implies, but it doesn’t transmit sound or receive sounds like your iPhone: It can receive encoded transmissions that tell it what kind of smells to play.

No, that’s not a typo. Here’s how the prototype works: First, you go to a website and enter in a number of ‘movements’ for a ‘symphony,’ choosing a type of coffee, then a chocolate, then a caramel and a nut variety. Then, you can send this off to the Ophone’s servers, and it’s received by a smartphone that controls the device, which transmits the recipes via bluetooth. The Ophone combines its materials in the required complication to render those smells.

The experience is the latest from the collective around scent and taste, as Edwards continues to try to explore the nature of olfactory processes as another type of communication on par with music, writing or anything else we might hope to offer up. Already, the company offers up capsules that spritz small serving doses of things like coffee, reduced to a fine dust, which can be brought on planes and are completely travel and customs safe.

The more interesting possibility for the future, according to Edwards, is a vision where delivery mechanisms for the olfactory units are built-into every device, making it possible for your cell phone, TV remote control or anything else to offer up a scent shot. That’s what the company hopes to accomplish, given more time to refine the product and work out a final production Ophone-type device.

“In the next few years we’re absolutely moving towards a world where you have these little chips, they’re universal, and you have any number of objects they work with,” he said. “It could be the holder of your phone, your desk or something in your clothing, so that any communication, whether it’s on the phone, or an email, or an Internet site or a James Bond movie, that has an inherent olfactory dimension, if you turn this on, you’re going to be smelling it.”

The Ophone is currently the most advanced iteration of that vision. It’s much, much better than the typical smell-o-vision type inventions you’ll see trotted out at trade shows, as I learned via a nose-on. That’s because it’s remarkably subtle, and remarkably personal. There’s no haze of smell you have to walk through, for instance; and when you want the experience to end, you just draw you head back and the smell quickly fades.

Currently, the Ophone prototype can produce up to 320 different smells, and working out the UI for that experience is its own challenge. Field says that they came up with the idea of symphonies, and the basic set scent selection as a way of making it more digestible, but in fact its extremely flexible, and they’re interested to see what people are able to come up with to interact with it once its more generally available. You can easily imagine a situation where people come up with various “scent recipes” and “scent apps” like they do now for lighting with the Philips Hue.

The concept of a smell-based media device isn’t new, and it’s been applied to everything from TV to gaming, but the Ophone and the larger vision behind Le Laboratoire envision a much more expansive application of olfactory sense tech. It’s still pretty sci-fi, but it’s a lot more palatable (and eligible for consumerization) in this form than having a fog machine shoot a foul-smelling cloud in your direction, which is how others’ efforts have come off in the past.

Shutdown, Obamacare, Syria… who cares—while Humanity wastes time in political shitslinging and unnecessary wars, a team of Ukranian astronomers have discovered a massive asteroid that has a real chance of hitting Earth in 2032 with apocalyptical consequences. It’s the second time in history that an asteroid makes it to the top of NASA’s space danger list as a potential danger.

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Putting on makeup might not be the same any more in the future, as wearable technology takes on a whole new level of interactivity. With the clever application of conductive makeup in common beauty items such as false eyelashes, nails and eyeshadow, computer scientist Katia Vega managed to figure out a way to make conductive elements as well as sensors part of transforming an ordinary makeup into gadget-activating remote controls.

Whenever the eyeshadow is applied to both the top and bottom of the wearer’s eye, if you were to take longer than 0.5 seconds to blink, sensors within the eyeshadow and metallized fake lashes will hook up and complete a low-voltage circuit. This would then be able to launch a miniature drone in theory, activating an LED headpiece in other applications, with one’s imagination being the limit. For instance, how about other low-voltage applications such as switching a musical track or a presentation image?

Of course, there would also be other experiments by Vega that involved the use of false nails, so that the wearer is able to be a DJ by controlling the music with just the surface of a pool of water alongside one’s nails. Is the age of the Hunger Games coming?

Makeup Gets Conductive original content from Ubergizmo.

Just like clockwork, here comes the latest release of Ubuntu: version 13.10 Saucy Salamander. Like April’s Raring Ringtail, this update is mostly about fine tuning the things that already make Ubuntu the Linux distro of choice for many out there. Performance has been improved, especially in Unity …