Charge Your Phone the Lo-Fi Way

Charging Phone – Lo-Fi Way - Nipper

From pocket solar panels and kinetic energy converting armbands to wireless inductive charging docks, portable phone charger market seems to be more like science fiction with each passing day. For those interested in updated lo-fi option or has a backlog of AA batteries around the place, could utilise a gadget known as Nipper which could be of some help.

The Nipper tends to hold in place, two AA batteries with magnets and plugs in the smartphone’s micro USB port in order to deliver extra jolt of power around 10% with 30 minute charge and 20% with one hour charging. It has been developed for the purpose of quick spurts and emergencies instead of full fuel ups and is appropriate for those moments of time when one tends to be trapped in a subway station and to avoid the risk of arrest by plugging into an outlet.

The Nipper is hyper portable measuring around 17mm cubes and fits on a keychain. Presently it only works on phones with micro-USB connectors with models of Samsung, HTC, Nokia and other Android devices. However, the designers are of the opinion that an iPhone compatible option is in the pipeline and the first Nipper would be shipped in April 2016.

Small Phone Charger – Emergency Use

The Nipper is a small phone charger, small enough to be carried around wherever you go and is readily available everywhere – household AA batteries and is primarily designed for emergency use. It is the phone’s smallest phone charger and can be carried anywhere.

When one is in desperate need in using the phone, but is unable to access to the laptops, electrical sockets, wind turbine or solar panels, the Nipper comes to your aid in these situations. When it is not being used, it can be attached to a keychain, pocket or bag and when needed, you can open the Nipper and place two AA batteries between the magnets and connect the same to the phone.

 The Nipper tends to give an extra 10% battery capacity in 30 minutes and 20% in over an hour for a modern smartphone which was tested by utilising a HTC one M7 with Duracell Ultra AA batteries. The power output differs based on the batteries used, in the case of new Duracell batteries; it was found that it gave 500mAh.

Circuit – Boost Converter

The Nipper comprises of 3 neodynium magnets and have the double function of holding the batteries in place while simultaneously makes an electrical connection to the Nipper circuit board. This circuit is known as a boost converter which turns the power from the batteries into a 5v power supply in order to charge the phone.
If the volume of Nipper is small, 3D print of the cases out of high quality nylon will be done but if the demand is high and the need to make a full Nipper army is needed, mold will be injected in the cases out of polypropylene. The two halves of the Nipper can be connected by fabric or genuine leather straps. The neodymium is the nickel plated on the classic Nippers while gold plated on premium Nippers.

The AA batteries are generally recognized and the most widely sold battery and though it does not seems to be sensible relying on AA batteries for daily charging of the phone, it could prove to be handy in times of emergency.

IBM Announces 7 nm Computer Chip Breakthrough

The latest breakthrough in technology seems to have overcome the main issue, which had posed one of the most "grand challenges" of the industry. IBM has created a test version of a semiconductor, which has the ability to shrink down the circulatry. This prototype is the first of its kind in the world. The microchip industry is always evolving and there are better products available in the market every new day. This ever evolving industry has to face immense difficulties due to the extent of their growth and due to various technological and physical limitations. But inspite of all the hindrances IBM has been successful in creating a chip with seven nanometers transistors.

Gradual advancement

The leader of this industry, Intel has been the recipient of several technical hurdles throughout. Technologists have even begun to question one of their foundation theories; they are questioning whether the long withstanding pace of chip improvement, the Moore's Law, could possibly continue beyond the present 14-nanometre generation of chips. Every generation of chip technology can be differentiated with the aid of the least size of fundamental component, which switches the current at nanosecond intervals. Now the advancement in technology has made the transition from the 14 nanometer to the manufacturing of 10-nanometer generation of chips.

Ever-evolving technology

This advanced technology created by IBM is basically an advanced version of the ultradense computer chips which has approximately four times the capacity of the other most powerful chips. As the advancements are brought forward in every generation of the chips, each of them brings forth an estimate of around 50% reduction in the region required by a given amount of circuitry. The new chips created by IBM are suggestive of a possibility that the semiconductor technology shall continue to shrink at least through 2018.

Individual identity

The advanced feature in these chips are the presence of the This advanced technology created by IBM is basically an advanced version of the ultradense computer chips which has approximately four times the capacity of the other most powerful chips. IBM has used silicon-germanium in their chips. In the other variants of chips, pure silicon is used. But IBM instead of using pure silicon has opted for silicon-germanium, which happens to be the key ingredient of the molecular-size switches. This also aids in faster transistor switching and in the lower power requirements.

Yet to be released in the market! 

However, it must be duly noted that most of these are mere speculations and experimentation. Nothing has been launched in the market as of yet. There are numerous complex procedures, which will test whether the product is viable for sale in the market. IBM shall take the final decision in collaboration with their development partners at the State University of New York's Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. In the previous year, IBM had released a statement, which had declared their 3 billion dollars investment over a time period of five years to forward their chip technology and meet the demands of cloud computing, mobile products, data and other technologies.

Announcing the D-Wave 2X Quantum Computer

D-Wave Systems Incorporation launched the world’s first quantum computer named D-Wave One which was commercially available on May, 2011. It operates on 128-qubit chipset and it uses quantum annealing technology in order to solve optimization problems. Many of the you don’t know what is a Qubit. Qubit is a quantum analogue of bit and it is a unit of quantum information used in quantum computing. It is also referred as quantum bit.

About D-Wave 2X Quantum Computer

D-Wave Systems is the only company based in British Columbia, Canada, known to sell quantum computers worldwide. It recently announced the availability of the new generation of quantum computers, named D-Wave 2X. D-wave 2X will help customers to solve very complex as well as larger problems with its 1000+qubits capacity including other advancements in technology.

Besides having beyond 1000 qubits capacity, it also incorporates other scientific technologies. Advancements include it operates at 15millikelvin temperature, very close to absolute zero. Having 128,000 Josephson tunnel junctions, it consists of most complex superconductor integrated circuits as new processors ever used successfully. Its 50% noise reduction has led to its quicker performance.

Performance of D-Wave 2x

A number of benchmark tests have been done in order to compare it with ordinary PCs to solve optimization problems.

One of the benchmarks is computation time. Computation time needed to solve complex optimization problems with bigger problem size is same for both classical as well as quantum processors. Therefore it becomes prohibitive for the 1000+qubit D-Wave 2x processor to find the optimal solution. Even if optimal solutions are obtained, many large scale solvers tried to find solutions which were close to optimal and they were given a specified time to submit the best solution obtained.

In order to solve hardware problems, D-Wave Systems established Time to Target (TTT) metric. Summary of TTT are given below:

• Near optimal solutions were found to be 600times faster than usual comparable times by highly skilled solvers. Quantum anneal time is used for this comparision.
• Using total time measurements D-wave 2x found near-optimal solutions 15x faster than the solvers.
• The hardware problems are of best performance than software solvers, which is of high advantage by using D-Wave 2x.
• The difference between optimal and near-optimal solutions is very less around 1% less. But D-Wave 2x works 100x faster to find near-optimal solutions rather than optimal ones.

D-Wave’s product, the 1000+qubit D-Wave 2X quantum computer, is the most technologically advanced efficient quantum computer in the world. It is based on the concept of using a novel type of superconducting processor that takes the help of quantum mechanics to accelerate computation massively. It is the best computer that can tackle complex optimization problems that exist across many domains such as:

• Optimization
• Financial Analysis
• Machine Learning
• Pattern Recognition
• Software/Hardware Verification

D-Wave 2x is such a high precision quantum computer that it can evaluate 21000 possible solutions that are converged to near-optimal solutions, thus having more possibilities than the articles that exists in this universe. The powerful effect of quantum computation is not shown by any ordinary computers of any kind that could represent such huge number of possibilities, thus making D-Wave 2x Quantum Computer a cutting edge technology.

Thousands of Cars Vulnerable to Keyless Theft, According to Researchers

Cars at Risk of Electronic Hacking

According to computer scientists, thousands of cars inclusive of high end-marques like the Porsches as well as the Maseratis are at risk of electronic hacking, since the research has been stifled for two years by court injunction for fear that it would help thieves to steal vehicles to order. It emphases a weakness in the Megamos Crypto system which is a kind of technology utilised by big manufacturers like Audi, Fiat, Honda, Volvo and Volkswagen.

It is invented to avert a car engine being started without the presence of a keyfob which contains the accurate radio frequency identification chip. Nevertheless, researchers at the Birmingham University and Radbound University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands are capable of intercepting signals that are sent between the chip and the car.

Listening twice enables them to utilise a process of reverse engineering, by using a commercially available computer programmer in order to identify the secret codes that are used in starting the car. According to Director of Cyber Security at the University of Warwick, Tim Watson who told Bloomberg that `it is not a theoretical weakness, it is an actual one it does not cost theoretical dollars to fix, it costs actual dollars’.

Publication Ban Denied Public Crucial Information

In 2012, the flaw had been identified by the researchers though Volkswagen won High Court injunctions in the prevention of its publication one year later. The motoring giant had commented that the work of Flavio Garcia, at Birmingham University and his two Dutch colleagues would allow someone especially a sophisticated criminal gang with the right tools, to break the security and steal a car’.

In reply, the researchers had debated that a publication ban denied the public crucial information with regards to security of their vehicles. Eventually they could reveal their results at the Usenix Security Symposium in Washington at the weekend with a sentence redacted.

`Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser’, their paper, gives a description on how they began their research while police state that they were perplexed by the rising numbers of `keyless car theft’.

Chip System to Be Changed

The research had been published on the ground that the ban should block all essential information from the knowledge of the public. According to the Metropolitan Police, around 6000 vehicles seemed to be stolen without keys last year, half of which were all thefts.

The paper concluded that `the implications of the attacks portrayed in the paper were particularly serious for those vehicles having keyless ignition. At some point the mechanical key had been removed from the vehicle though the cryptographic mechanisms had not been strengthened to compensate it.

 It is recommended that the chip system be changed to one which could include a random number generator and thus make it difficult to use intercepted transmission in order to break the codes.

5 Urgent Questions about Windows 10 Answered

It’s been a month since the launch of Windows 10 with early reviews being positive. However on a particular site readers have reported everything from smooth sailing to minor issues to serious problems that have made them go back to Windows 7 or 8. These types of issues are probable with major new software. Some of the questions answered are:

1. Does Windows 10 really share Wi-Fi automatically? 

Windows 10 has features known as Wi-Fi Sense which tends to make it easy for friends and family to get on your encrypted Wi-Fi networks and they do not have to type in a password, where Microsoft tends to log them in automatically.

2. How can one tell if there are potential compatibility problems Before installing Windows 10? 

Some users are apprehensive about upgrading to Windows 10 and then find out that a critical program or piece of hardware does not work. However one can get the revelation on the potential issue prior to hitting the upgrade button. To start with one could get Windows 10 app icon in the notification tray at the bottom right corner of the screen and then right click on it and select `click the upgrade status’. On the screen that appears, click the icon with the three horizontal lines in the upper left area and from the menu which drops down, you could click on`check your PC’. The app brings up either `yea’ or `nay’ on installing Windows 10 and list some of the items on the computer which may not be totally compatible and could miss out on things, though it should give a general idea on whether an upgrade would be smooth for you or not.

3. Are there any critical features in older versions of Windows that Windows 10 does not have? 

The same is based on the definition of `critical’. Windows 10 has dropped some features which some people tend to rely on. The one which most of the people find it upsetting is Windows Media Centre. Media Centre is Windows program enabling you to watch as well as record TV using third party TV tuner cards in the computer. It is also a good way of managing and interacting with your videos, music and the other media. This can be replaced with a free program known as Kodi though it is advisable to test it prior to upgrading. There are six more features which Windows 10 has dropped.

4. Is it true one can’t refuse updates? 

Microsoft has decided that with Windows 10, all security as well as program updates would install automatically the day they are released. This is logical for security since most of the Windows users all across the globe do not install updates and thus their computer tends to get vulnerable to attack.

5. If one upgrade and does not like Windows 10 can one undo it? 

Thirty days after upgrade, one can go back to the version of Windows one has upgraded from. By going to Start>>Setting, opt for the Update & Security icon. Thereafter go to Recovery section and under `Go back to Windows 8.1 or `Go back to Windows 7’, you could click `Get Started’.