Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

Bofn Bulletin Magazine

2012 Bofn Bulletin Awards
History Spot - From Acorns to Mighty Oaks Page 5 The technology awards of 2012 by Bofn Bulletin have been released. These have been well thought through by all he team. Continued on page 3.

Ubuntu For Phones

Ubuntu for Phones, previewed at CES is in the release, starting with a beta release for the Galaxy Nexus. Continued on page 4.

Sony Ends 13 Year Production of PS2 Page 6

GameStick Hits $100 000 Target in 24 Hours

Digital Sales for 2012 a Record High Page 7 GameStick, the Android-based gameconsole that ts in a stick the size of a pen drive, hit its $100 000 target, needed to gain funding from Kick Starter, in 24 hours, and then doubled in 48. Continued on page 7.

Little Box of Geek Tutorial Page 6 And Much More

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

Bofn Bulletin Awards 2012
Smartphone of the Year

Winner Motorola Razor I

There were 6 major contenders here, the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S3, the HTC One X, the latest Google Nexus, the new Nokia Lumia and the underdog the Motorola Razor I. We selected the Motorola Razor I above the others partially as it has a reasonable sized screen; The Galaxy, HTC and the Nexus have screens that are too big for most scenarios. The iPhone 5 was ruled out as it costs twice as much as the others and the OS is not open enough. The Nokia Lumia is a very well designed phone. We like the funky styling and the screen size very much. A great phone! Then they put Windows on it. Oh dear. My personal advice is to hack it and put the new Ubuntu for Phones in place of the old, frankly useless OS. The Motorola is also very well designed. A virtually edge to edge display that isnt to big or too insensitive. It has one of the best phone OSs, Android (the latest version), a decent sized processor (1GB of RAM), and we love the way Motorola have set up the OS. An SD card can be added to boost memory. Ooh and the way it locks like an old television is amazing. And all this for a decent price! However, it lacks a HD screen, yet you dont really notice in most cases.

Technical Release of the Year Winner Raspberry Pi

It has to be really. Windows 8 is a joke, Ultrabooks run Windows and the iPhone 5 is too expensive, has a little i at the start which is a nightmare for writers and is numbered incorrectly (its the sixth iPhone). The Raspberry Pi is a great technical achievement, backed by a great charity to try to get kids back into coding. All this for 25! The foundation have also managed to squeeze an extra 256mb of RAM in in the latest model b, giving it 512mb, the same as Apples latest iPod Touch.

Computer OS of the Year Winner Ubuntu 12.10

The contenders were Windows 8, Mac OS Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.10. No contest. As I have said earlier, Windows 8 is a joke. Mac OS is too closed; It is only available on Macs and they cannot run a different OS unless you use a virtual machine. Ubuntu however is prettier than a Mac, more user-friendly than either of them and faster than Windows 8 (not hard to do). It also will not wear, unlike Windows. An Ubuntu computer or a Mac will still be running well in 5 years time, where you will have had to rebuild your Windows computer a countless number of times, you may as well give up. The only bad point of Ubuntu is its lack of software, but you cannot say that anymore. It has certainly changed in the last few years.

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

Bofn Bulletin Awards 2012 - Continued

Ubuntu for Phones

Tablet of the Year Winner iPad Mini

This was a hard call. The iPad Mini is more expensive than the contest and has a worse screen. Its also bigger. But the iPad is so light! It is designed beautifully, made of aluminium and glass and I love the way the back just ows seamlessly into the front. The camera is also very good.

Social Site of the Year Winner Twitter Games Console of the Year Winner GameStick

OK I admit, GameStick is not out yet and it was started on the 1st of January 2013. The GameStick is a 40 Android powered games console squeezed into a little pen-drive sized stick. It connects into your TV through HDMI and you control it with a rather slick retro-style controller.

Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux-based operating systems, is launching its phone system which is able to run desktop applications; It can even launch the Ubuntu desktop when docked into a monitor. It currently can be downloaded onto Samsungs Galaxy Nexus, replacing the standard Android system. When on the desktop, you may still use the phones functionalities, such as calling and texting. The system is backed by Canonical, displaying the rst major partnership act between Canonical and Ubuntu.

Ubuntu for Android is also prospected. It will run alongside Android, at the same time, all made possible as they both use the same Kernel Linux. Ubuntu for Phones has to be installed by the user, however Ubuntu look forward to seeing phones being shipped with its OS, and I think I might just buy one. There are certain specications needed for the OS, the stripped-down version requires not all that much space and RAM, however the full whammy, with the desktop, will only t highend phones with quad-core processors. More requirements are on Ubuntu's main web site.

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

History Spot: From Acorns to Mighty Oaks

This weekend I helped my son build a Gertboard for his Raspberry Pi. He learnt much about soldering techniques, and a little questionable language, as we wrestled with these modern fangled surface mount components, but miraculously we plugged it in to nd it worked. This week 31 years ago was a very different story. Id scraped together my Xmas money along with every other penny I owned to buy my rst PC. However this still only ran to an Acorn Atom in kit form, leaving two days of soldering ahead of me. Unfortunately a dodgy chip killed it at birth, and it was to be another 2 weeks before it was repaired. But it was worth the wait.

Although it was soon overshadowed, and largely forgotten behind, other early personal computers, the Atom was truly the start of a revolution. Whereas its distant cousin, the Sinclair ZX80 seemed like a pumped up arcade console, the Atom seemed like a downscaled University workstation in terms of design philosophy. This is hardly surprising given its close links to Cambridge University. It was built around the 6502 processor with around 8K of ROM for the operating system, and 2K of Ram for programs (although I had a beefed up 3.5K version). For those too young to comprehend K, this is between a million and a billion times smaller in every dimension to a modern PC. Yet this still seemed huge at the time. The memory disappeared with the off switch. In theory you could store data on a cassette recorder (again Wikipeda can help the under thirties check out this technology). You could write a half decent pong game, or even space invaders with this level of kit, although the invaders would qualify for a motability grant so slow was the processor. For real enthusiasts who wanted to squeeze out more performance, the Atom OS had an unusual but really powerful feature the ability to embed assembler code in programmes. Assembler is the raw instruction set for the processor chip. Barely anyone since the mid 1980s has programmed this way, but it gave you a fantastic, if grinding, insight to the inner workings of a computer.

The Atom was the platform from which Acorn created the BBC Micro a few months later, quickly assuming omnipresent and legendary status. Yet its nemesis had already appeared in the form of the IBM PC. This was initially obscured by the high price tag for the PC, but once clones started to appeared around 1984 the emergence of a standard and manufacturing scale economies all but wiped out the rest of the home PC eld. Acorn later moved beyond the 6502 with the Archimedes, based around their revolutionary RISC processor, but the game was already lost. By the late 90s, Acorn as a computer manufacturer was no more.

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

History Spot: From Acorns to Mighty Oaks Continued

Despite this, Acorn was, and remains in my opinion the UKs most important technology company since the Industrial Revolution. Their microprocessor subsidiary took their RISC techniques to form ARM, which dominates portable processors to this day. Meanwhile the PC arm moved into embedded solutions and digital signal processing leading to Broadcom, also market leaders. For those who have looked carefully at their Raspberry Pi, these are the very companies whose products and talent sit behind this attempt to bring computing back to the masses. Perhaps just as important are the people behind Acorn, who have continued to exert huge inuence over both the science and commerce of technology in their later journeys.

Sony Ends 13 Year Production of PS2

Sony have announced they are to end the 13 year long production of the PlayStation 2. The PlayStation 2 was released in 2000, and has sold over 150 million consoles. It was so popular it continued to outsell its descendant, the PlayStation 3, three years after the PS3s release. Now rumours are escalating about a PlayStation 4 going into production. Despite the end of production, games for the PlayStation 2 will still be developed. For example, another game in the Final Fantasy series will be released March 2013. Overall, around 11 000 games have been made for the PS2.

Little Box of Geek Tutorial

I was roaming around on the internet, as you do, and came across a great tutorial in the "Geek Gurl Diaries".

By Dr Jon

It consists of making a little box which prints out a geeky statement on a thermal printer. I would recommend you at least read/watch this tutorial, it teaches you a lot about GPIO Python coding. The author, Miss Philbin is perhaps the coolest teacher out there. Here are some links, enjoy! Part 1: http://goo.gl/KfsMC Part 2: http://goo.gl/2ZmUo

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

GameStick Hits its $100K Target in 24 Hours

Digital Sales for 2012 a Record High

1bn was spent on digital music, video and video games, a record high, in 2012.

GameStick, an Android based gaming console the size of a pen drive, hit its $100K target in just 24 hours. It was launched onto Kick Starter on Jan 1st, and had 1 month to reach $100K to win funding from Kick Starter. The console has now gained 4 times as much as the target, with 5 days to go. GameStick's vision is to put a gaming console on every T.V., meeting a number of criteria. First it had to be affordable. $79 dollars is the price for one during fund raising. Secondly, it had to be small; the actual console is the size of a pen drive. It slots into the HDMI port of your T.V.. The controller had to be amazing too. A sleek, retro design does the job perfectly. Lastly, it had to be easy for developers, so they used perhaps the most open mobile operating system there is out there today, Android, changed the design and put it on. Developers can now talk to GameStick and get help putting their game on the console. Go over to http://www.gamestick.tv/ for more details.

Digital music sales was up by 15%, digital video sales up by 20% and digital video games sales were up by 7%. Physical sales were down by 17%, yet more bad news for the high street. This bad news has recently been shown, after HMV went into administration, luckily they've been bought out, and Blockbuster announcing large scale store shutdown. The world of gaming is not trying to help its high street either, with more people playing on smartphones and hand-held consoles with internet capabilities. Nintendo is becoming ever more digital, with its DS consoles gaining the ability to download items from the internet. The future of high-street physical media items, sadly, looks bleak.

Microsoft Look to Close Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft has alerted the users of its Windows Live Messenger that it is closing down. Microsoft's newly bought Skype is replacing it. From after the closure, users will have to sign into Skype with their Windows Live Messenger ID to get all their contacts. Previous users of Skype shall not be affected.

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Bofn Bulletin Magazine

Issue 2 - Feb 2013

On The Watchlist
Minecraft: Pi Edition Raspberry Pi Model A Apple Maps Update Google Maps for iPad GameStick Release PS4

Follow us on:

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Signed:

AJ Bofn Bulletin Chairman

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