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sunset straight road - how to kill an hour

What Gadgets Make Your Car Journey Comfortable?

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When you’ve got a long journey to go on, and you’ve got only your car to rely on as you go, then you’re going to need to outfit it with plenty of gadgets to keep you happy and comfortable. Sure, you can stop off at service stations whenever you get the chance to, but there’s still going to be hours in between!

 

Let’s make sure you’ve got just the right tech on your hands to make sure any future road trips or simple long haul work journeys are going to be a lot more fun and cozy. Here’s a few recommendations for you to consider.

 

sunset straight road - how to kill an hour

 

Grab a Dash Cam

 

Dash cams have a variety of purposes, and anyone who is anyone will have one in their car. So whether you’ve got useful something more affordable from the Hilton Car Supermarket, or you’ve just made a deal to drive the new electric mini, it’d be useful for you to have a dash cam on board.

 

They can be used to record first hand footage of a car accident, which can both help you in court and with your insurance company. You’ll also have an upper hand over anyone who’s acting dangerously on the road – it’ll be much easier to report someone speeding in the rain on the motorway if you’ve got footage of them doing so. All in all, it’ll make your long journey safer, and that is the number one thing to put a driver’s mind at rest.

 

A Versatile GPS

If you’ve got a SatNav in the car, good on you. It’ll make the drive you’re on a lot smoother, and quite a bit faster, and you’re never going to have to pull over to break the map out. If you’re someone who travels a lot for work, this can be a Godsend in making a meeting on time!

 

But your GPS needs to be versatile, in the modern day and age. It needs to be updated with all the new roads, and traffic information as it happens, and that means it’s going to need an internet signal as well. Which is why it’d be better to turn your phone into your onboard GPS, and then add on another gadget to give you a bigger display to work off of, and to keep you totally hands free. Something like a HUDWAY Glass allows you to watch the virtual road, as well as control the music you’re listening to and recieve your texts as normal, all at the same time.

 

Something to Monitor Your Tires

 

A quick little recommendation to finish off – have a piece of kit in your cockpit that’ll keep track of everything your tires are going through. Take a look through a few tests of the top kits on the market currently – it’ll stop punctured tires from being a surprise, and tell you when you next need to stop to top up the pressure.

 

So, how many of these gadgets do you have onboard? You’ll need them!

Netflix Keeps Your Bandersnatch Choices

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Those Bandersnatch choices you made back in December. Well those choices were kept.
Michael Veale who is a technology policy researcher over at the University College London, did a little bit of digging and found out just what Netflix keep on you. Using the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – remember all those emails you got last year. That.  To figure out that they track your choices.
According to Motherboard, Veale requested the Bandersnatch data from Netflix, to ask why: “it’s collecting data, the categories they’re sorting data into, third parties it’s sharing the data with, and other information.” Then subsequently posting it on Twitter.
Netflix told Veale that the data it collected helped them to “improve this model of storytelling in the context of a show or movie” While this seems pretty reasonable, Veale still concluded that it’s an invasion of privacy. It’s important to note that Netflix didn’t tell him how long they’d keep a hold of the data either.
We encourage you to check out Veale’s short Twitter thread by clicking here! It’s a great read! Very eye opening!

Consent

Veale told Motherboard:
“If you asked me, they should really be using consent (which you should be able to refuse) or legitimate interests (meaning you can object to it) …..It was tricky, as I had to ask these questions specifically.
It’s unclear if this is included by default in requests to get your data from Netflix or not. I can tell you often this kind of specific data is not included when you ask for ‘all your data.
Knowing what ‘all your data’ is, and what the company’s definition of ‘all your data’ does not include, is most of the challenge.”
Very interesting indeed. While it seems that it’s pretty harmless data collection. We should at least be told if we want out data collected.

(Refinery29)

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Alfa Romeo How To Kill An Hour

Car Tech You Really Need

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The latest cars are all full of technology most of which is for safety or comfort reasons, as well as making the cars more efficient and cheaper to run. The technology has advanced at such a pace that you do not have to go back many years to find cars that have very little technology in them. You can always add some to older cars, and there are hundreds of great gadgets that could help to enhance your driving experience. However, there are also some technologies that will stay as part of newer cars only.

 

Dash Cams

Many new cars are being fitted with a dash cam, and some have a rear view facing cameras too. If you have an older car it is very simple to add a dash cam to it and then you will have a recording of the journeys you have made. These can be very useful evidence if there is a dispute with another road user.

 

Portable Jump Starter

Traditionally, car jump starters are made from a large battery that you store in your garage. Now there is one that is small enough to keep in the glove compartment of your car. It includes a USB charger that you can use for your other devices and has a built-in torch in case you need to use it in the dark.

 

300W Inverter

Most cars have USB ports these days, but what if you need to use something that needs a 3-pin socket? Then you need an inverter, which will change your cars 12V DC electricity supply to 240V AC in the UK. If you need to power anything over 150W, you have to clip the inverter directly to your battery. That will then be enough to power a laptop or a camping fridge.

 

Automatic Emergency Braking

This uses a variety of sensors to determine if a forward collision crash is about to happen and automatically applies the brakes to reduce its severity or to stop it or all together. This is going to be fitted as standard on all new cars by 2022 but would take a lot of work to install in an older car.

 

Technology Helping Maintenance

This technology might not be in your car, but the latest developments in servicing and maintenance can certainly help to keep in in a better condition at a more reasonable cost. For example, Mercedes AMG servicing & genuine parts do not have to break the bank and will prolong your car’s performance.  Technology and highly trained technicians have been combined to create the best service possible for your car maintenance and repairs.

 

Adaptive Cruise Control

Cruise control has been around for years, but now it can adapt to the speeds of the traffic around you. By using an array of sensors built into the car it will adjust the speed to suit the cars in front of you. Some of the more advanced systems will even stop and restart the car without you having to do a thing.

 

Technology and car are like everything else that is going on around us. They will continue to evolve and be very different in just a few years to how they are today.

 

Episode 320 Alexis Conran

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Episode 319 Gadgets Boy

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Apple iPhone Laptop!?

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Apple have probably thrown the laptop world into a frenzy with a patent filed in September late last year. A laptop/notebook chassis that docks a phone which in turn becomes a high tech track pad which acts as a touchscreen – which works:

 

An electronic accessory device, comprising: an operational component that provides an output to a user; a housing carrying the operational component, the housing having a recess; and a control interface coupled to the operational component and configured to receive a control signal from an electronic host device when the electronic host device is positioned within the recess and coupled to the control interface, wherein the electronic accessory device is inoperable without the electronic host device being coupled to the control interface.

 

The patent is basically just a shell with a screen, with the phone providing all of the power. Yet the chassis according to the patent is a lot more than just a shell:

 

In various embodiments, the electronic accessory device can be considered a “thin” device, in that it extends the functionality of another device but is inoperable by itself as a stand-alone device. As such, the accessory device can have little or no independent processing resources in the form of a CPU or similar comprehensive processor. The accessory device, however, can provide auxiliary processing resources, such a graphical processing unit, or GPU, or other processing resources that can support the functions of the portable computing device.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Episode 72 – Koala Hoodies! (Bonus)

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