As I promised ear­lier, I would write a review about TOMTOM. I have had the device now a couple of months, although I find the device the eas­i­est to use cur­rently avail­able in the indus­try, I have some real com­plaints, actu­ally I only have two. On the hard­ware side the bat­tery life, which is really shame­ful! I know I can charge the device with my cig­a­rette lighter but thats not really the point of a portable device. With modern Lithium-​Ion bat­ter­ies nowa­days you can expect bat­tery life of 5 hours or more. While it charges quickly, after less than two hours on the road the little bat­tery indi­ca­tor at the lower right would start to flash yellow… bugger. My second com­plaint is about the soft­ware, I would rather see TOMTOM write a native Cocoa appli­ca­tion, JAVA tech­nol­ogy is okay, but one way or an other, JAVA pro­gram­mers seem only to be able to pro­gram buggy and crappy pro­grams, that’s at least my expe­ri­ence. I have tried mul­ti­ple times using the TOMTOM Home soft­ware, it can brick your TOMTOM (the famous blink­ing red cross)! Luck­ily I had backed-​up my device so it wasn’t a prob­lem. I can repro­duce it every time. The soft­ware really sucks balls big time! SO should you buy a TOMTOM? I would say yes, it’s always right in find­ing my loca­tions, traf­fic infor­ma­tion, is really easy to use and when I buy a new car I don’t have to migrate or redo all my data or settings.

I came by this amaz­ing con­cept car from Chevro­let called the Chevy Volt, with its rev­o­lu­tion­ary E-Flex Propul­sion System which will be dif­fer­ent than any pre­vi­ous elec­tric vehi­cle because it will use a lithium-​ion bat­tery with a vari­ety of range-​extending onboard power sources, includ­ing gas and, in some vehi­cles, E85 ethanol to recharge the bat­tery while dri­ving.

When it comes to plug­ging in, the Volt will be designed to use a common 240-110 Volt house­hold plug. For some­one who drives less than 64 km (40 miles) a day, Chevy Volt will use zero gaso­line and pro­duce zero emis­sions. For longer trips, Chevy Volt’s range-​extending power source kicks in to recharge the lithium-​ion bat­tery pack as required.

Researchers at the Human Media Lab­o­ra­tory, Queen’s Uni­ver­sity in Canada are devel­op­ing pro­to­types of new “non-planar” devices, which are vir­tu­ally com­put­ers that have a flex­i­ble shape. Com­put­ers are nifty, but often too bulky to be car­ried around. Even a laptop is too big to put in your pocket, but imag­ine if your com­puter looked and worked like a mag­a­zine or a piece of paper to be tucked away into your pock­ets. Not only will they take on flex­i­ble forms we’ve never imag­ined like pop cans with browsers dis­play­ing RSS feeds and movie trail­ers com­put­ers of the future will respond to our direct touch and even change their own shape to better accom­mo­date data.
The con­cept behind these next-​generation com­put­ers is “organic user interface”. Every­day com­put­ers live in only two dimen­sions and as a result, have become narrow-​minded. You are essen­tially look­ing at a tiny tunnel into a flat, on-​line world, and that causes people to think in a two-​dimensional way. ”Flatland” inter­faces are incred­i­bly lim­ited com­pared to nat­ural 3D ones”. This is in my opin­ion a rev­o­lu­tion in human-​computer inter­ac­tion. So Apple if you’re read­ing this…

Our days have been a bit hectic lately, not because of our new born son, but because of all the nice people who: vis­ited, send cards, send e-mails, flow­ers and presents. Thank you all so much we have been over­whelmed by all the atten­tion and my sin­cere apolo­gies for those who had to bail-​out at my request. I had to manage the number of people who called and tried to visit us. Tris­tan and Mar­ijke need their rest. Tris­tan is now 16 days old, he weights 4.4 kg (9,7 pounds) and is about 57 cm (22,5 inch). This morn­ing I grabbed my trusty SLR (Canon EOS 350D) and took some pic­tures of him laying on our bed.