Tom's Tech Corner
Tom’s Tech Corner : Moving into 2009
The future of Blu-Ray. You might, but probably haven’t, noticed that a consortium led by Sony won the next-generation DVD war. What does this mean for you? In a word, nothing. The DVD was a great improvement in usability and quality for video-watching folks. To this Blu-Ray adds very little. They say the quality will be through the roof, with more interactive features, uncharted possibilities, and, yadayada… Shut up, and let me watch a goddamn movie. Statistically speaking, and I don’t mean to come off snobbish but will, a preponderance of viewers opt for crap anyway. So now you’ll get the same crap in high definition. Great. In about a year’s time content is going to be piped to your home by increasingly pay-per-view cable offerings. The potato won’t even have to leave the couch anymore to go and fetch a flic. Physical data-carriers are out, and evolution can go ahead and chip another toe off homo digitalis.
TV in 2009. Ditto all of the above, plus some more ranting. Flat-screens will get even cheaper this year, and LCD technology will slowly step aside and make room for greener OLED’s. There’s talk of “laser” TV’s appearing on the market. I don’t even know what “laser” TV’s are, but you need to switch all that shit off a bit more often this year. Write a nice letter to a friend, go for a walk and talk to a stranger, play board games with your kids. For crying out loud, they might learn something. Read. A. Book. There, I said it.
Video Projectors. There are days when I shouldn’t be writing about tech. Something about a hangover simply impedes my enthusiasm glands from oozing whatever the hell it is they’re supposed to ooze in the face of digital wizardry. Health professionals are saying for years that we ought to move more, shake those rusty limbs, and work up a little rose on your cheeks. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what a recent innovation in projector know-how will allow you to do. Take your home-grown run-of-the-mill LCD projector, that clunky leaf-blower-loud contraption of boardroom and increasingly the living room as well, and shrink it. That’s right. Think mobile phone, the diminutive candy-bar kind. Fellow bus-train-plane passengers will soon be able to regale not just by means of bleeding head-set racket, but indeed, large-than-life video to boot. They’re here. They’re cheep, and compatible with just about anything.
Fuel cells. Whatever the hell happened to fuel cells? The cold fusion of consumer electronics fuel cell technology has been on the cusp of widespread adoption for the past five years. Today, you can actually go and buy a portable gizmo-charger that looks more or less like an oversize scent dispenser. It’s powered by a 15 Euro capsule containing some kind of alcohol-based fuel which injected into the machine, will juice up any hand-held device about four times. Very handy indeed when out camping in wild uncharted expanses of oxygen and beauty you need to charge your iPhone.
House automation. 2009 will be the year of the death of the remote control. At least it should be. I’ve just had it with these over-sized, over-buttoned, battery-guzzling, hiding-in-parallel-universes-when-you’re-looking-for’em eh… things. If your house is big enough to warrant a remote, your butler can flip the channel.
On a different note, I predict Roombas will become even smarter this year. Smart enough to accidentally bump into the TV power socket, and tell you with a droney electro-voice to get a life.