Ever wanted to fly your paper airplane that much better?
Bored of flying it once and then having to get up out of your chair to go and get it and throw it back?
Well that is a thing of the past thank to the PowerUp 3.0!
To buy your own PowerUp 3.0 please click here!
To listen to Marcus’ experience with the PowerUp 3.0 please click here!
To see what the PowerUp 3.0 is please view the video below!
US regulators want to limit what people can do with their phones whilst driving. Sounds good to us! The US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have published their first safety guidleines regarding driver distraction which specifically target things that you connect to your car such as music players or better yet, smartphones.
The guidelines, which are part of a second phase of NHTSA proposals are for the cars console. These were back in 2013 and they suggested that you got to touch a button to call someone rather than dialling a number. Which sounds really safe to us!
At the heart of it it is all about making things ‘dumber’ and ‘easier’ to use while behind the wheel to reduce the amount of distractions that we have while driving. The NHTSA suggest a thing called “Driver Mode” which are like Apple’s CarPlay and the Android Auto. Where a selection of apps or tasks are easily attainable through easy to use big button interface. For example Drivers could see maps that are on their smartphone in short chunks of texts that can be easily read from a quick single eye glance from the road, but with more reliance on voice activated commands than physical touch.
Sounds good right. But the NHTSA’s “Drive Mode” system, wants to go one step futher and prevent certain features being used whilst driving. Which makes sense as you shouldn’t be manually entering text whilst driving or adjusting maps to see where you are. The NHTSA suggests that it would be better with their “Driver Mode” to do things through “Driver Mode” where the user wouldn’t have to turn it on and it is automatically switched on once you enter the car and it the car is in motion.
However all this sounds really cool and safe and would go a long way to prevent accidents, these guidelines are exactly that guidelines. Car makers don’t have to implement the technology into their cars. Not only that some tech doesn’t play well with others like Google Maps doesn’t work with CarPlay so a driver has to mount thier phone on the dash.
While it is important to make our drives safer, it still requires users to use self will not to get distracted and it does seem quite nanny state like to control what we can and can’t do with the stuff we own when in certain situations.
Will there be ways to prevent us from having more and more accidents, only time will tell, but this seems like a cool way to do it.
To hear the guys chatting about this please click here!
Electric cars are becoming more and more popular the past several years especially with the introduction of the Tesla. Now there are several huge car firms that are prepping for the future of car travel and are creating high powered charging networks across Europe. 400 Charging Sites to be exact.
The firms are BMW, Daimler, Ford and Volkswagen Group, including Audi and Porsche.
The charging stations (sounds like a massive dock for your car!) provides really quick charging for your electronic cars, along many major roads across Europe. (However we think 400 is a little small for such a large area of land) Tesla’s can’t use these charge points as their cars use different electronic systems, so if you have a Tesla, you’re out of luck. Sorry!
Reason being as the network will use combined charging system standard technology, while Drivers of electric cars can plug in and charge at speeds of 350kw which is a lot lot faster than you can get today!
To hear the guys chatting about this please click here!
Someone has created an Apple Mirror that actually WORKS! It’s just a concept from YouTube user “dymekraf” but it gives a cool insight into what Apple could actually do with an iOS intergrated Mirror. It can do a whole heap of stuff such as:
Check below to check out this guys cool invention!
To listen to the guys chatting about the Apple Mirror please click here!
Well it looks like there are an evil Team How To Kill An Hour out there! Parallel Universes exist! (Apparently)
A wise-man called Howard Wiseman of Griffith University in Australia has spearheaded a team that suggests a cool new theory that there are in fact multiple universes which exist in the same space and time as our own but react on a quantum level. (basically space and time do not behave in the same way that ours do) Wiseman’s team has a theory which slightly differs to a well known theory called ‘Many Worlds’ which originated in the 1950’s. Wiseman and his team have a “Many Interacting Worlds” theory.
The most popular and well known theory “Many Worlds” suggests that after a huge event occurring like our very own big band that numerous universes are created with all possible outcomes of that event Eg: Dinosaurs getting bigger/better or Dinosaurs getting destroyed. With all of those universes that were created occur at the same time (running parallel) but never interacting – unlike Wiseman’s theory.
The theory is like much like the one we just described but instead of them all running parallel and never impacting one another, this new theory suggests that one affects the other. For example, if you roll a dice any outcome could occur, until you roll again and something else occurs thus affecting the universe.
So in effect this theory suggests that parallel universes overlap one another and take up some space and time and simultaneously exist all at the same time and all possible outcomes live out their lives until something happens and forces one universe or state to exist over the other.
Interesting huh?
To hear the guys chatting about this please click here!
We love our music here at How To Kill An Hour and we love our wireless speaker technology even better! Ever since Apple took the 3.5mm adapter away from us all we have been looking at ways at getting your music out there and in the room wirelessly. We love the Bragi Dash’s but what about if you want to share the music?! Well the SONOS:Play 1’s are here to save the day!
These little speakers pack an incredible punch and they sound absolutely magnificent! Pack some great base and some decent high ends these guys really sound good! But what’s even better is that if you have more than one or a selection of SONOS speakers you can control them all from the SONOS Controller app. Adjust the sound levels independently of one another. So the one in the bedroom can be quiet and the one in the office can be incredibly loud or control the sound levels at exactly the same time. But what’s cool about them is that they will be playing the same piece of music at the same time from the exact same source! They can also:
To download the SONOS Controller app please click here!
To buy your own SONOS Play 1 please click here!
To listen to the guys chatting about the SONOS: Play 1’s please click here!
Bragi have released update “Bragi Dash OS2.2” and it makes the cool Bragi Dash’s even cooler! We love the Bragi Dash here at How To Kill An Hour and this update makes it even more ‘must have’ this Christmas time.
Amongst the plethora of features that it already has this update adds a lot more:
To buy your own Bragi Dash’s please click here!
To download the latest Bragi Dash update please click here!
To listen to the guys chatting about the Bragi Dash Update please click here!
We have recently been sent the Amazon Echo and we love it! If you don’t know Amazon Echo is a home automation device that sits in your room and is controlled via your voice only. There is no screen and it includes only a 360 degree omni directional speaker with far-field voice recognition technology built in. Far field Voice Recognition technology is basically a really cool piece of tech that allows Alexa (the internal voice in the echo) to hear you from a far and in noisy environments or when you are playing music. The Echo is controlled entirely with your voice and is activated by simply saying “Alexa”
Alexa can do a range of things including:
To learn more and buy your own Amazon Echo please click here!
To listen to the guys chatting about the Amazon Echo please click here!
Twitter has shook a trolls life up!
This week Twitter has introduced a way to block/filter certain words or phrases from appearing on your timeline! It’s a brand new way from the social company to tackle trolls and abusive content on their site.
Muting a conversation that you are apart of is also a feature that muting allows. For example if you have engaged in a conversation for a while and have since dropped out of said conversation, by muting the thread you will no longer receive notifications regarding that thread (they will still be on the notifications tab on your Twitter profile, you just won’t have your phone constantly bleeping all day) Or if you have had a tweet go viral you can mute that also and stop getting notifications for that one tweet.
Another way that muting helps Twitter’s customers is the ability to avoid spoilers from sports events or film/tv shows from showing up in your notifications, however, they will still appear in your timeline – sorry!
Yet Twitter said in a post on their blog:
“This is a feature we’ve heard many of you ask for, and we’re going to keep listening to make it better and more comprehensive over time,”
So there may be some hope for you Walking Dead fans at least!
The main reason for the ability to mute certain words or phrases appearing in your notifications is a fight by the company against harrasment, racism and bullying on their platform. So alongside this muting feature Twitter have improved the way their users can report hate speech, with internal tools and training of staff to allow them to effectively and quickly deal with the content that’s reported to them.
While this feature goes along way to battle the bullies, Twitter said in a statement regarding the update
“We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that. Instead we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn”
To listen to the guys discussing this feature please click here!
Fleetlights is a new initiative from Direct Line aimed at giving light to some of the darkest and most dangerous places in England.
What Fleetlights basically is, is a fleet of drones with lights attached to them which follow you around via an app on your phone. The best use for this would be in places like Petworth which is home to one of themost dangerous roads in the UK. Due to the lack of streetlights people cannot see where they are going or walking so with the use of Fleetlights they are able to get home safely.
Direct Line are preparing for a future version of insurance companies where they’re becoming much more preventative of accidents rather than dealing with accidents after they have happened and Fleetlights looks like an incredible way to start! A user can even set a group of drone’s to light their path rather than just illuminating above them via a way pointed path set by the user.
To listen to the guys discussing ‘Fleetlights’ please click here!
Please see the video below for more information regarding the Fleetlights technology!
To listen to the guys discussing Fleetlights please click here!