TV review: Micro Men

As part of its Electric Revolution series, the UK’s BBC has shown a fact-based drama, Micro Men, looking at the early 80s period when Britain was arguably leading the world in home computing. The heart of the story was the personal rivalry between Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong, pictured above right) and Chris Curry (Martin Freeman, pictured above left), whose Sinclair and Acorn companies led the battle to get a computer in every home.

The story begins with Curry failing to persuade electronics guru Sinclair that home computing is the way of the future (Sinclair being more interested in developing his infamous C5 electric car). Curry then breaks away with friend Hermann Hauser to form his own company, Acorn, which begins work on the Atom computer.

However, while Curry recruits a team of computer enthusiasts working to produce a high-quality machine, Sinclair changes his mind and decides to get to market first with the ZX80, with the main selling point being that it’s the first home computer to cost under £100 (roughly £458 or $726 in today’s money.) The drama’s central theme of quality vs quantity is best shown in scenes at a trade fair where Curry is boasting that his machine has double the memory of Sinclair’s – a mammoth 2k – while Sinclair confesses to a journalist that there is a significant issue with attaching a RAM expansion pack to the ZX80, but that it’s easily fixable with a piece of Blu-Tack.

The crescendo of the conflict comes when the BBC decides to produce an educational TV show about computing and license its name to a special machine for the product. With free national TV advertising and the potential for sales to every school in the country, the race to win the contract is hotly contested. Curry eventually wins through a wildly ambitious pitch, leaving his team to produce a working prototype of the BBC Micro in just four days.

However, while both men go on to success (Sinclair making millions from the ZX Spectrum), they both have a change of principles. Sinclair despises the way his machines become popular for gaming and puts his efforts into the upmarket QL, which fails to make a dent in the business market. Curry responds to the lack of games for the BBC Micro by producing a cheaper, slimmed down model, the Electron. In the end, he is left with tens of thousands of unsold models as the home computing “fad” passes, replaced by the CD player as the must-have gift.

As a drama, this was somewhat like revisiting the ZX80: awful, but entertainingly so. Given the genre, it had its strong points, notably in the use of archive news footage where Armstrong and Curry’s faces had been skillfully superimposed. That helped avoid a common problem with such docudramas where real footage appears and shows the disparity between the actors and the people they portray. However, other elements were clunky, most notable a ludicrously unbelievable scene in which Sinclair is driving his C5 down an empty road only to be overtaken by trucks belonging to Microsoft and HP. Talk about a clumsily unsubtle metaphor.

As a piece of history, the show was questionable. It came across as remarkably one-sided in favor of Curry, to the point of making you wonder if that was down to his side being more cooperative with the programme’s researchers. However, as a piece of nostalgia, the show is a solid hit.

Micro Men will be available to viewers in the UK via the BBC iPlayer service for another six days. It is possible it will appear later on the BBC America station, though this isn’t confirmed. In the meantime, non-UK readers may well find it isn’t torrentially difficult to get their hands on a copy. A UK based proxy could also be used to listen to the show with the BBC iPlayer.


Powermat Wireless Charging: Lose the Cords

Powermat has just released its lineup of wireless chargers last Wednesday. Their first online ads are out, and they’re pretty darn hilarious. Check them out!

(Warning: Video contains strong language)

The Powermat Wireless Charging System provies a simple, fast and efficient way to keep all your favorite personal electronic devices charged. Enabling your devices with Powermat Receivers allows you to drop and charge them on any Powermat mat to experience wireless charging.

World’s Thinnest Speakers

World's Thinnest Speakers

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just hang your speakers on the walls, just like you do with calendars or movie posters? Well friends, if the following technology ever takes off, this may eventually become reality.

Developed by researchers at Taiwan-based ITRI, Flexpeakers are composed of arrays of tiny speakers that can be attached to each others to produce high-quality, paper-thin speakers of almost any sizes. And because they are lightweight and consume very little power, these speakers could be the perfect solution for use in cellphones and public advertising billboards of all kinds.

The only problem? For now, their frequency range, from 20KHz down to 500Hz, isn’t too amazing. Now if only someone could come up with a super-thin subwoofer, all our problems would be solved.

Fun with the D&D 4th Edition Character Builder

By Natania Barron
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

dnd_4new_tool_characterbuilder_pic3_enAlthough I’ve been playing a 4th Edition campaign for over a year now, I hadn’t had a chance to play with the D&D Character Builder yet. While our campaign has been extremely successful –the longest-lasting most enjoyable we’ve ever run– my husband, the DM, wanted to give one of our other players a chance to run a game. So we decided to take a break and start a campaign with some new characters at 11th level (the level of our current characters) to mix things up a bit.

I’d been putting off using the character creator, admittedly. But because I wanted to play a bard, which has been heavily supplemented in the new Arcane Powers book–a book we don’t currently own–I thought I would boot up the PC and give it a try.

character-builder

And I’ve got to say I was pleasantly surprised. Granted, it’s not pretty. There are parts to the character creation that feel really, really clunky (especially the background/feats portions). The UI is far from intuitive, but once you get the hang of it, it totally manageable. It’s definitely important to have a leg-up on the 4th Edition terminology, but it’s certainly preferable to sifting through various handbooks and cross-referencing everything and doing all the math yourself. I wanted to pick powers and feats that spoke to my character, rather than just selecting stuff to do the most damage, and the character builder made that process really easy. Not to mention it’s just a blast to play around with and experiment.

Yes you do have to be a D&D Insider subscriber to join, but there’s also a demo that lets you try it out for free. If you enjoy rolling up characters, or want to experiment with a variety of builds without wasting paper it’s definitely the way to go and certainly worth the subscription, especially considering all the other stuff you get with it in addition.

While there are some D&D 4th Edition naysayers out there, I’ve got to say one of the best parts about the most recent version is the character creation process in general. It’s faster than previous editions I’ve played,  even without the fancy character builder, and for me that means it’s also more fun. I spent about two hours last night putting my little gnome bard together, and now I have a lovely character sheet for tomorrow’s first game, equipped and ready to roll.

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Improve your Health with the Piano Stairs

I’ve started taking stairs about a year ago, mainly because I wanted to lose a little weight (hey, every bit counts!), but most people I see going to work each morning use escalators. Motivating yourself to start improving your health, even in little ways, can be difficult. But a bunch of guys in Odenplan, Stockholm created a new way to make it easy to do just that: a set of common stairs that they transformed into piano keys. The result? 66% more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator. This is caused by what they call “the fun theory“. Check it out:

[Via Gizmodo | The Fun Theory]

Sony introduces Amazon download store; faces PS3 Blu-ray lawsuit

It’s a day of good news and bad news for Sony. The good news is that it’s launched an Amazon store for downloadable content which could get new sales from wary customers. The bad news is that it’s facing a class action lawsuit over charging $150 to repair damage allegedly causes by a recent PS3 firmware update.

The Amazon store works on a simple system: customers buy the game on Amazon just like any other product and receive a download code which they then type into the PlayStation Network to get hold of the game. That might sound pointless, but in practice there may be many users who haven’t yet registered their credit card details with Sony yet, either because they can’t be bothered or aren’t comfortable doing so through their PS3. But as anyone who is already registered on Amazon knows, the 1-click ordering system makes you much more likely to buy low-priced goods without the moment of hesitation that comes from typing in card details.

The system may also clock up some sales among users who don’t spend much time exploring the Play Station Network (largely because they are busy gaming), but might be more likely to browse Amazon (for example, when killing time at work.) Another advantage of the system is that people can pay for the games on Amazon and then give the code to somebody else as a gift. Given the price of the games, players might want to stick a few on their Amazon wishlists to make virtual stocking fillers.

To promote the launch, Amazon is offering credit for one download code with each purchase of a 120GB PS3 or a PSP-3000.

Meanwhile, the company is facing court time over the PS3 version 3.00 firmware update issued last month, which reportedly caused the Blu-ray drives on some machines to malfunction. That’s gone down particularly badly with users who’ve been charged $150 by Sony to repair the problem.

If and when the case goes before a judge, the claimants will have to prove it was indeed the update which caused the problem, as opposed to it being a mere coincidence and the malfunctions simply being a hardware failure.

The case has been brought via a class action suit (PDF). That means that if a trial goes ahead, any users who can show they have been affected by the same specific issue can automatically join as plaintiffs rather than have to bring a separate case. If the court did then find against Sony, all the plaintiffs would automatically qualify for any relevant damages.