Category Archives: Technology News

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Wireless Power Transmission: real available technology and marketing advantages

Wireless energy transmission for remote charging is one of the most strategic key factor for the development of a new generation of tech devices in the near future. Few years ago some futuristic thinkers forecasted the possibility of wireless energy transmission between far places. In particular the academic community was interested in energy transmission between the planet earth and orbiting satellites equipped with solar power stations.

This long range power transmission technology would radically change the energetic, economic and power equilibrium of our world but unfortunately, at the moment, this technology is not available.

On the contrary, near range power transmission is something near the corner.

After long researches an USA company is launching the first generation commercial version of a wireless power transmitter with ultrasound that will allow to recharge (for the moment) mobile phones in a range of 15 feet (4.5 meters) just using a special cover.

Fifteen feet are not a long range nor a medium one but the important thing is that it is contactless and that 15 feet start to be an interesting distance.

So interesting that a big coffee shop chain as Starbucks is considering to introduce these remote charging devices in all its shops.

In this way all the customers will be able to automatically and freely charge their mobile devices as soon as they enter into the coffee shop. A good added value considering how much energy our devices need when strongly used during the day. And consequently, for many people, a good reason to prefer a store to another one. A potentially viral added value as well as a magnetic marketing strategy!

Last but not least, it must be considered that the success of this kind of technology operations is determined by costs. At the moment it is not possible to find any information about prices for the mobile device covers at the end consumer side. If the end users price for covers will be high, the huge, positive effects of a partnership with a big player as Starbucks couldn’t be enough without some kind of tech fashion pivot.

Good luck uBeam! You have the right idea!

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References:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/26/kill-the-cord/#.qngqm6:i3dY

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GrooveDown vs. GrooveOff: my personal experience using Grooveshark

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Grooveshark is an online music service, very well-known and common especially in Europe. The quality of its mp3, offered just for listening is higher than what you find on YouTube and some programs were developed to allow listeners to search and listen songs without visiting the Grooveshark website. Some of these software let you save sample of songs for a later listening but this habit doesn’t complain with the copyright laws in many countries so we discourage this kind of practice.

Today we would like to just endorse the ability of a single developer (www.caleta.fm) who was able to modify one of these programs, GrooveDown, and adapt it to the new website requisites.

This developer, using wireshark, was able to identify the misconfiguration between GrooveDown and the Grooveshark’s server and to positively update the data (client version and password) exchanged.

More in general I think that GrooveDown is the best client to listen to Grooveshark also because it is more powerful, fast and easy to use than its competitors. In particular, during some tests I did, I was positively impressed by the results I obtained using GrooveDown because I received better and more complete search results than using, for example, GrooveOff which is too a good software but, for my personal experience, gave back less impressive results.

Last but not least I want to underline that the caleta.fm development of GrooveDown is really stable and it was developed in two different versions just to be used with Java6 or Java7 platform. Recommended!

Once again about cookies, supercookies and Flash cookies… How to better protect Firefox, your Linux OS and.. you!

Keep Calibre always updated! Correctly manage your digital library and new e-book formats

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Library As you know, Calibre is a powerful tool that allows you to easily manage your e-book library. It also allows you to back up the e-books that you buy online and to transfer them to other devices when your e-book reader is out-of-order.

Sometimes the problem is that e-book formats evolve rapidly and new versions have been “recently”created. For this reason I personally suggest to update Calibre very often because new version have, obviously, the most updated plugins and consequently support new formats.

The Calibre website has a good download section where you find easy instructions to update your e-book reader on almost any OS. In my experience, usually you spend less than 6-7 minutes to update Calibre and the advantages you have worth the time you spend.

Moreover, if you have problems to read an e-book on the last version of Calibre, check the file format (in my case was .azw3), launch Calibre and go in Preferences → Behaviour. Then, be sure that the file format you are trying to open/read is correctly activated into the list you find there. Enjoy your reading!

How to obtain a free digital signing service for your personal documents

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Sooner or later you need to digitally sign a document. If you have never done it before it’s only a matter of time, you will need a digital signing service sooner than you can imagine. The problem is represented to be ready without being obliged to spend money for it.

You will find different offers online and many trusty companies will try to convince you that their offer its the best but many of them limit your possibility to freely sign documents when you really need.

During my tests I tried a bunch of them and, for my experience, just few worth any attention.

In particular I was positively impressed by hellosign and Adobe Echo Sign. They are both interesting but hellosign offers something more. I mean you have not to spend a cent for both but Abobe limits the number of documents you can free sign to just 5 documents each month. If you are not used to digitally sign your docs this limitation doesn’t represent a problem but, trust me, when you will begin you soon need more than 5 free signatures a month.

HelloSign also allows you to upload an image file with your handwritten (and, of course, scanned) signature or create a new one choosing between some different fonts. You have no limits for signing documents but you can send only three signature requests a month (enough for my present necessities). Moreover, you can browse into the hellosign Documents folder and find all the documents you have signed before.

On the other hand, Adobe Echo Sign request more personal information when you sign-up for the service and, as we already underlined, it limits your experience to just 5 activities a month.

Try them and let us know if you have already found a better, free, online service to digitally sign your documents. Good luck!

How to manually mount USB drives on Ubuntu

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The first time I had this kind of problem was when I was trying to create a bootable USB drive and a pop-up windows appeared informing me that “you must first mount USB drive /dev/sdc1 to a mount-point. Most distributions will do this automatically after you remove and reinsert the USB drive”. I had never had this matter on Linux because, normally, all the USB drives are immediately recognized and mounted but there is always a first time….

After some googling I discovered that a specific program dconf-editor could help me to check the Linux settings and to consequentlyresolve the situation.

First of all you need to install dconf-editor on your Linux so you have to open a Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

After the installation you launch dconf-editor (for MATE environment it’s into the System Tool menu) and navigate it to media-handling:

org –> gnome –> desktop –> media-handling

Now you have to be sure that commands automount and automount-open are both flagged.

If you discover that they are already flagged, its necessary to manually create a mount point using the Terminal.

Open a Terminal and type:

df -H

to see the mounted disks. If you are not able to find the USB drive that you want to mount then type:

sudo fdisk -l

and you’ll see all disks (mounted/unmounted).

Now you are able to know the right drive identity (e.g. sdb1, sdc1, sdd1) that your OS assigned to that specific drive. Memorize it and start to create the mount point:

sudo mkdir /media/newusb

where “newusb” is the mount point name you want to assign to your USB drive.

Then type:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/newusb

where “sdb1” is the drive identity we found before and “newusb” the mount-point name you choose.

That’s it, now your USB drive has a mounting point and you can use it (in my case I was able to create a bootable USB drive usiing Unetbootin)

You can find some extra useful tips about mounting USB drives at the Ubuntu community.

How to dig more information on Wikipedia using Google

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Wikipedia contains many information about million of topics but each single thematic page doesn’t contain all the possible info or links about that specific subject. In fact some other details about a topic, or related to it, can be in other parts of Wikipedia not linked to the main topic.

In my experience, sometimes you can find some really interesting details about a topic if you simply use a Google query as:

site:en.wikipedia.org “Chet Baker”

Where the topic is “Chet Baker” and it is searched by Google into the entire Wikipedia.org website. If you deeply peep the results you can now find some information not contained in the “Chet Baker” page in Wikipedia.

These tip is really simple but I think it could be useful for journalists, data miners or for all that people who are not satisfied by a simple Wikipedia search.