Linkage

Well over a decade ago, Bill Joy was mocked for talking about a future that included network-enabled refrigerators. That was both unfair and unproductive, and since then, I’ve been interested in a related game: take the most unlikely household product you can and figure out what you could do if it were network-enabled. That might have been a futuristic exercise in 1998, but the future is here. Now. And there are few reasons we couldn’t have had that future back then, if we’d have the vision.

The Internet of Things - in which ordinary objects get smart and connected, making possible all sorts of new services - promises to give us smarter cities, fewer traffic jams, a cleaner environment and a Series victory for the Cubs. (OK, maybe not that last one.) Trouble is, while lots of technologists and technophiles talk about the Internet of Things as if it were already here, there really isn't any such thing. Not in any true sense of the term.

Google's latest and hottest gadget needs little introduction. Since its public unveiling in April 2012, the tiny head-mounted Android computer has been collecting controversy and sociological analysis. It is currently available in limited beta to eminent members of the tech community and to a selection of "Glass Explorers". As members of the latter program, we are delighted to be able to explore Glass. Growing up on a rich diet of dystopian tech fiction, we were filled with both intrigue and concern about Glass and decided to take our model apart to bring you a detailed view into the electronics guts of the device.

Rock star astronaut Chris Hadfield, just returned from a five-month stint in orbit, will be hanging up his spacesuit for a new adventure, the Canadian spaceflyer announced today (June 10). Hadfield, who picked up more than a million Twitter followers while commanding the International Space Station's Expedition 35 mission, announced June 10 that he will retire from the Canadian Space Agency.

The BBC has launched a new Android app today, bringing its classic weather forecast icon set along with a full mobile weather outlook. The app us simpler than many weather apps, offering a stylish prediction for the moment, which can be scrolled sideways for an hourly idea of future conditions. It also predicts wind speed, covers five days and lets you edit widget refresh frequency.

When the Raspberry Pi launched at its headline-grabbing price of less than £30 for a fully-fledged single-board computer, the SBC market was forced to sit up and take notice. For buyers, it’s proven a bonanza: companies as diverse as VIA and Olimex have rushed to bring their own Pi-alike to market for a similar price tag, and now it’s the turn of the open-hardware BeagleBoard project.

It’s a dream of many hobbyists: turning their leisure pursuits into a lucrative business. That’s what happened for MIT alumna Limor Fried ’03, MEng ’05, whose pastime — tinkering with electronics — not only gave rise to a profitable company, but also positioned her as a leader of a technology revolution.

Circuits.io is a free electronics design tool where we monetize on manufacturing by making it super easy to get your boards produced. The trade-off is that we ask all design to be open hardware so the community can build on your work and even order it. A quite straightforward business model.

If you’re familiar with the Raspberry Pi desktop experience, you’ll have noticed that windows on the desktop can be a bit slower to move around than you’re used to on your PC or laptop. This is because X, the windowing software (or composition protocol) that we use, is not optimised to use the graphics core of the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi. All the work is done by the ARM processor instead, which slows things down and leaves the graphics core twiddling its thumbs. That graphics core is extremely powerful, so we’re working on putting it to good use to fix the issue.

Yahoo unveiled some big changes to Flickr on Monday, both in terms of features and overall design. One of those changes is that free users are no longer limited to a certain number of photos; instead, everyone gets 1TB of space for their full-resolution photos. With that change comes an end to what used to be the biggest difference between free Flickr accounts and Flickr Pro. As it turns out, that's by design. In addition to lifting the previous upload and storage limits, Flickr is quietly discontinuing its Flickr Pro accounts (existing Pro users can continue to use Flickr Pro) and shifting to a different type of upgrade model. If you're an existing Flickr Pro user, the new changes might be confusing. We were annoyed when reading the new FAQ on account types. That's why we dug into the changes, and reached out to Yahoo for clarification on what the changes really mean for Flickr Pro users.