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Track how drunk you are constantly with this Apple Watch…

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Wearables have been counting our steps and tracking our heart rates, but finally, here comes a wrist strap to constantly track your blood alcohol level.

From BACtrack, makers of a range of smartphone integrated portable breathalysers, the BACtrack Skyn has the company’s high-quality pedigree for combining accuracy and convenience. With simple wristband and Apple Watch strap options, it’s expected to launch during the American summer for around $99.

This is more than a toy for frat kids to see how far they can push their numbers. After that initial burst of fun, this kind of tracking has the potential to give many people a realistic and highly detailed assessment of how their body handles drinks, how quickly they get drunk and how quickly they get sober again.

Instead of bursts of tracking through a breath test, this real-time tool can give someone a clear trend on how their blood alcohol content is shifting. We often forget that that last drink can take a while to hit our system, but the app can paint that picture of where you’re going to end up. You can even add notes to the tracking app to flag exactly when you had a drink to see when the effects hit your system.

Talking to the BACtrack team at CES 2017, they see that there’s plenty of mainstream curiosity for this new device but the biggest potential is in medical research. Until now a lot of self-reporting has been required for alcohol monitoring alongside breath tests. The ability to have real-time all-day monitoring can give analysts a lot of new research opportunities.

The post Finally, a wearable that tracks your blood alcohol level in real first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Good design is hard. But more and more we all have to do it. Whether it’s a nice Facebook banner, a clever profile pic, an eye-catching Instagram post or some well polished ideas for a work presentation, we all want something more than the terrible basic options offered up by Powerpoint.

Enter Canva. The 5-year-old Australian startup is all about offering slick templates through a free service that is exceptionally simple to use. Whether through its website or the apps for iPhone and iPad, it takes just a few seconds to work out how to get started and make something that looks great.

This all sounds like an ad — simple DIY design sounds too good to be true — but a quick taste test proves how true the pitch is. And after a slow boil for its first few years, a rapid climb to over 10 million users across 179 countries (Canva says it just passed five designs per second) suggest this is something that is starting to resonate.

“Having great quality ingredients for people to work with has been a driving premise behind Canva,” says Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. “Before Canva, you’d have to be a professional designer to easily access beautiful stock photography and illustrations. There are template libraries out there, but again, they’re only for designers who use professional design software.”

While the service is free, Canva makes money through the sale of stock images as well as a “Canva for Work” premium offering that lets a company set brand guidelines and templates to make it easier for people all around a company stick to core design principles without always needing designers to create every document, every presentation or whatever else may be required.

“Social media posts, pitch decks, proposals, marketing materials. Designers are getting spread really thin throughout organisations,” says Perkins. “They often have to neglect sales, for example, who often just string their own terribly off brand things together. This really helps to bring brand identity together. Colours, fonts, logos so everybody is on the right track.”

Democratising design

Exploring the Canva website, beyond the design tools the company also offers anyone who wants it a crash course in good design. There’s a design school blog, design tutorials and a design stream where you can see what other people have been designing and offer likes and comments. Perkins suggests people have been conditioned to think they’re just not creative, so they’re often afraid to play around.

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When Canva first launched, the company’s user research found people were inherently afraid to click things in case they messed something up.

“People were really conscious about not clicking too much and not playing around. But this is meant to be the exact opposite,” says Perkins. “So we introduced starter challenges — put a hat on a monkey, change the colour of a circle, add a background to a page, really basic things. But each step builds confidence.”

Offering templates that don’t get too repetitive is a big challenge, but Canva has tried to solve for this concern by inviting professional designers to share templates publicly and receive royalties whenever their templates are used by others.

For Perkins, it’s the success stories of those who have been using Canva that make her feel like they’re achieving their mission. From the story of a small US sheriff’s office using Canva to create wanted posters, to the story of a woman who created an image to help track down her birth mother that worked after going viral on Facebook.

Australia’s coolest tech company

Canva is fast becoming the proverbial and literal poster child of the Australia startup scene. From humble origins in Perkins’ mother’s living room and “incubating” in San Francisco food courts, the company is now growing rapidly with a team of over 120 across 3 countries and a latest funding round of AU$19.8M at a valuation of AU$462M.

The company also provides classic Silicon Valley perks, with an in-house chef, free gym and yoga classes, flexible working conditions and more. It was all enough to land Canva the title of Australia’s Coolest Tech Company two years running from job listings website Job Advisor.

“We’re in the ridiculously fortunate position that before we took on this latest funding we hadn’t spent a dollar from the previous round,” says Perkins. “We got the revenues to grow rapidly and everything sort of naturally moving in the right direction.”

There’s still a lot more to do. Getting apps on Android is an obvious one, but Perkins suggests the company is only scratching the surface of its larger, and far loftier, long term plans.

“If we can become the productivity tool, the productivity platform for the next generation, with all the crazy needs everyone has for visual content they need to create, that would be pretty cool.”

The post Canva: The poster child of DIY graphic design first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

“Everyone told me I was crazy.”

This is a pretty standard line from entrepreneurs and founders in the tech industry. But when Judd Armstrong, founder of wireless headphone company Jaybird, says it I believe him more than most. He’s Australian, from the Gold Coast, and has a casual, no nonsense attitude that frames him as not being too worried about carefully choosing his words.

And building a wireless headphone company from scratch is a pretty crazy thing to do.

“People were saying, ‘What if Apple does something? Or, you’re going against Sony? And Plantronics? You’re no one!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah! I am no one!'”

Jaybird was founded in 2007 in the USA and has evolved its wireless sports headphone offerings through around 10 different products over that time. Since its success in the USA the brand has now launched into the Australian market. For Armstrong, it’s obviously a homecoming.

“We’ve had a distributor here before but they never did anything with it,” says Armstrong. “It was just another thing in their catalogue. So we ended that relationship pretty quickly and just decided to wait for the right opportunity. Being our own backyard, we really wanted to do this right.”

Proudly premium

Jaybird’s focus is on being a sport and outdoor lifestyle brand that delivers high-end wireless headphones. Starting with designs that “went behind the ear like a hearing aid with a cord between them” that also required Bluetooth adapters, the company has seen the wireless revolution since its beginnings. And for a long time many just didn’t trust wireless to deliver good audio.

“It must have been 2013 when you stopped hearing that concern,” says Armstrong. “Bluetooth did get better, which was great. But also everyone was moving toward wireless.

“A lot of people sacrificed audio quality for functionality just to get a wireless product. Signal performance is really important to us and that’s one of the big challenges of miniaturisation — an antenna normally needs a large amount of space. Redesigning things like the Bluetooth codec and boosting the signal are really important things. Those little fiddly points on some headphones just destroy the whole purpose of wireless headphones when you’re active.”

From retailing in USA’s Target and Amazon, then Best Buy and Apple stores, Jaybird has carved out its sport and outdoor lifestyle niche in the premium end of the market against the biggest names in the business like Beats, Sennheiser and Bose. CNET’s Jaybird reviews have flagged the products as too pricey, but not competing on price is something Armstrong is very proud of.

“If you don’t have a massive marketing budget to throw around, you’ve got to do a lot of your communicating right there in the store and on your website,” says Armstrong. “Early on, our packaging didn’t actually have the name of the product in any large print like today. The big message was ‘secure fit wireless earbuds’. That was a new thing. Then we had lifetime warranty against sweat, and that was good for credibility. The kind of stuff that builds trust.”

Today the Jaybird products are slimmer and smaller than ever, pitching for attention with unique features like “infinite” playback (a light clip-on battery pack that can be charged separately so you never have to stop using the headphones to recharge them) and a sound profile app that updates the headphone firmware to directly customise audio settings to your personal taste.

So what about tomorrow?

The future of wireless — and wearables

The obvious question is Apple dropping the headphone jack and whether Jaybird sees this as a big opportunity.

“Throwing back to when the iPod never had Bluetooth, we were just thinking, man, when iPod gets Bluetooth things are gonna go crazy. But it took a while even then,” says Armstrong. “It may be a huge catalyst for a lot of growth, but we’ve always been wireless so, for those new people, welcome to the party!”

The other side of wireless is, like we’ve seen from Apple, dropping cables altogether.

“There’s a strong movement toward truly wireless, of course. Everyone is working on one. If they’re not, they’re a little silly, I guess,” says Armstrong. “Truly wireless is interesting. It means you’ve got two batteries, two sets of electronics. You’ve got twice the bulk. Just to remove that cord there’s a number of downsides. It’s got to be just right.”

Aside from these direct aspects of headphone evolution, Armstrong suggests there is a lot more ahead for his company’s sports lifestyle focus and how to deliver useful technologies to this space in other ways. The biggest being biometrics.

“Biometrics can be pretty boring for a lot of people. It’s just too involved. But what we’re doing is taking biometrics and converting that to everyday meaning. I can’t say yet what we’re working on, but there are some beautiful things that just relate back to everyday use cases, using some very sophisticated technology.”

As for wearables, Jaybird once had a wristband product in its range, the Jaybird Reign, which focused on monitoring heart rate variability to tell you how ready you were to perform today and manage your training load to focus on being at your peak performance zone for a race day. It tried to do something different, but didn’t make enough impact on the market and is now discontinued.

“Having done all that wrist work was still great for us,” says Armstrong. “We’ve got a lot of IP that can be of use on the wrist and I think as Apple develops their hardware platform we can start doing apps that really enhance the athletic experience.”

“I think the wrist is going to be a big, big area and we’ll be watching it closely.”

At its most basic, though, Jaybird is still about listening on the go, and Armstrong can’t help but point out one big wearable feature a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of right now.

“A lot of people don’t even know their Apple Watch can have music on board. You can go for a run and stream music from your wrist and it’s pretty awesome.”

The post Jaybird headphones land in Oz and there’s no place like home first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

What’s a home PC really for these days? Once upon a time the answer to that question was “everything”. It was the only computer in our lives. Before you buy another one, it’s a good idea to know what you really need — today, a Network Attached Storage box, or NAS, might be the better way to go.

Wireless devices of all stripes have taken centre stage, what we need from that home “hub” computer has changed dramatically. “General purpose computing” just isn’t what it used to be. The need for a big desk-bound PC setup has faded for most households.

So why do we still own that hub PC? Mostly for its ability to store lots of files in ways a laptop or mobile device just isn’t suited to. All our family photos, our music collection, our movies. With these at the forefront, a storage-centred device makes a lot more sense. Something that is all about feeding and supporting a home full of wireless devices.

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Network Attached Storage is an awfully dull name for an incredibly useful category of products. When it was named, it was nothing more than a dumb box of hard drives used to organise and share files among a wider network of computers. It didn’t do anything particularly useful with those files except share them and do its best to keep them safe from data failure.

What a NAS was 10 years ago is not what it is today.

Much more than a storage box

Personally, I’ve been using home NAS for 10 years. First a ReadyNAS NV+ (bought from a company called Infrant, which is now a part of Netgear) and today a Synology DiskStation. At first the magic of owning a NAS was having a significant chunk of storage on my home network for running automatic backups of other PCs. Peace of mind humming away quietly under a desk.

But now the NAS has become the ultimate home hub for music, video and photo storage. It’s everything we were promised by home theatre PCs without the fuss of managing TV connections and the dramas of a full-fat operating system.

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Today’s home-friendly NAS — Synology options lead the pack in the CNET NAS round up — comes with a desktop-like interface you access through a web browser along with dedicated apps for phones and tablets. Any smart TV can also treat such a NAS as a media server, streaming your music, photo galleries and movie collections across your network in real time. Synology and QNAP (another NAS maker) have both released apps for the newest Apple TV ($70 at eBay) as well.

You can also setup your NAS to make your files available from outside your home, so you’ll always have access to your media collections and files whenever and wherever you need them.

The application options keep growing too. There are a lot of business-style features among them — email servers, web servers, databases, plus Synology is adding a lot of features like private calendars, chat systems and even word processing and spreadsheets. But there’s plenty for home users too, with photo, music and video apps that make for a very user-friendly interface to all your stored content. In my home we’ve even got our NAS running a Minecraft server as the host for a shared family world.

It’s easier than you think too

With its business tech legacy, there’s a common assumption that a NAS takes serious technical skills to get up and running.

But today it’s as straight forward as adding anything else to your home network. You buy a NAS, buy hard drives to fill it to a capacity that suits your needs, and plug it into your home router. That’s it. Many home NAS options don’t even need any tools at all to get the hard drives fitted, so it’s a very simple process.

To get things running you install an application that finds the NAS on your network and from there you can use a Web browser to set up the NAS to do everything you want to do.

There will always be a reason to own a PC. Gamers will game, creatives will create. But in many respects the laptop is the domain of day-to-day PC usage, but their weakness is a more limited storage capacity and they are not easily “always on” for sharing their capabilities around the home. The personal “private cloud” experience a NAS can bring to a home is a powerful and complementary proposition.

NAS prices range from $170 for a good two-bay unit or up to $500 for a four-bay unit with extra bells and whistles. Hard drives are also now very inexpensive, with good 2TB hard drives now less than $90 each. That places a good basic setup around just $350 (roughly AU$450, £280), which sits very well compared to most.

What is your home PC for? Ask yourself again. If the answer relates primarily to storing files, then it’s time to take a serious look at a NAS.

The post Why a NAS should be your next home PC first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

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iPhone 7 launch leaves some fans disappointed

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For some, Apple launch day didn’t bring the usual joy and excitement.

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus officially went on sale as the clock ticked over to Friday morning in time zones around the world. The first big moment fell to Australia, with Sydney’s George St. Apple Store the honorary “first buyer” location for worldwide coverage (though many other stores open at the same time along Australia’s East Coast).

The iPhone launch has become an annual spectacle, drawing in fanboys and enterprising individuals who line up in front of stores — sometimes for weeks — to nab Apple’s latest and great. Some are there to bask in the glory of being first, while others just want the attention. This year, Apple added a little wrinkle: It issued a warning on Wednesday that many of its iPhones were allocated to advance orders, and that the iPhone 7 Plus and jet black iPhone 7 would be unavailable to buy on the spot.

The shift in emphasis toward reservations and delivery has long been part of Apple’s attempt to bring order to the often mind-bogglingly long lines that form on launch day.

See also

• CNET’s take on the iPhone 7
• Warning: If you want an iPhone 7 Plus or jet black iPhone, don’t line up at the Apple Store
• Apple’s iPhone Plus is buyers’ favorite for first time

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said lines were shorter this year — about 23 percent shorter at the stores he visited, on average — because more people order online and “this year’s line appeared to have little to no representation from overseas resellers that we have seen in the past.” The iPhone 7 was available in more countries on the first day of launch than ever before, which meant resellers from China and other regions didn’t need to buy the device in the US. And, Apple had sold out of some of the flashiest new iPhones.

The emphasis of online orders meant some fans who lined up well ahead of Apple’s warning left empty-handed or with their second choice.

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Apple iPhone 7 Sydney launch

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Marcus Barsoum, 16, was at the front of the line in Sydney, in place with a friend since Wednesday. He wasn’t pleased by that news.

“I finished my exams so I’ve got no school for the next few weeks,” said Barsoum. “We were hoping for the 7 Plus in the jet black, so we were devastated at the time [we heard it wasn’t available] but I’m personally happy to have a 7 matte black.”

Barsoum was near the front of the line in 2015 and back then bought the rose gold 6S because “that’s the one that shows off it is the new model.”

While the line in Sydney was nowhere near as long as for past launches, it still stretched a half a block from the store.

A damp London launch

Later in the day in London, the doors to the Apple Store swung open in perfect synchronicity with the end of summer. A post-heatwave storm unleashed torrents of rain on the small line of customers clustered at the Covent Garden arches.

A new system in the UK and other countries across Europe this year means there are no iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus devices available for walk-in customers on launch day. The only walk-ins allowed are for the Apple Watch Series 2.

Apple Store employees have spent the last couple of weeks advising people inquiring about the new phones that they should reserve or preorder online, and on Friday they were checking all reservations in the line and at the door. As a result, the line was much shorter than it has been in years past and most customers waited only a matter of minutes before being led into the store.

But people haven’t been discouraged from lining up. In Berlin, a small group of regular queuers gathered earlier this week in spite of preordering, said a staff member, just because they enjoyed the social aspect of waiting in line with other fans.

The iPhone 7 Plus, with its new dual-lens camera module, sold out globally during the preorder period, but the people CNET quizzed in the line and in store were less fussed about the bigger phone. The more diminutive of the two iPhones seemed more popular in London, and there didn’t appear to be much interest in the new jet black color either.

Computer scientist Brad Karp, who was picking up a black iPhone 7, said that he was upgrading from his iPhone 6, drawn by the optical image stabilization on the latest model. He wasn’t willing to buy the bigger Plus just to get the dual-lens camera.

“When they can fit that into this form factor then I’ll be interested,” he said. “They just need another couple of years and I’m sure they’ll sort it out.” Karp added that he purchased the phone in matte black as he was worried the jet black coating might be more predisposed to getting scratched.

On Saturday, British stores will be selling the iPhone 7 to walk-in customers in all colors except for jet black, which as with the iPhone 7 Plus, sold out during preorders.

Heartbreak in New York

Luis Lorenzo had waited in the line in front of the Apple “Cube” store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for 14 days and 15 nights, eager to purchase his iPhone 7 Plus.

When told by CNET on Thursday that there would be no Plus model available for purchase, Lorenzo clung to his hopes — and his spot — until this morning when Apple Store manager after manager confirmed there would be no larger iPhone 7 available. That’s when he admitted defeat and left the line.

“It’s a total bummer,” Lorenzo, a 46-year-old from Queens, said. “I’m disappointed because I waited so long for the iPhone 7 Plus. They sold out completely and I was second in line at the flagship store.”

iPhone 7 launches around the world

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Last year, his perseverance in holding out for the 6S in rose gold worked out, despite reports those models were sold out.

“I thought it would be like deja vu,” he said. “I guess that wasn’t the case.”

Meanwhile, Matt Zimmer, 28, had just joined the line. The Manhattanite wants to get an iPhone 7 in rose gold for his birthday, which coincides with the phone’s release.

He decided at the last minute that he’d wait in line for the iPhone to celebrate.

“It wasn’t the way I was expecting to,” Zimmer said.

Jaime Gonzalez, 39, of Queens, was first in line and first to get an iPhone 7. He bought two.

Though he’d been hoping to get the Plus, he was still so excited to show off the phone that he walked out without paying and had to go back into the store — where he’d left his credit card and ID — to pay for it after the media frenzy.

All things considered, it was an improvement on 2015’s iPhone launch. “Last year I didn’t preorder,” he said, “so I went from being number 1 to number 500.”

After more than three weeks on Fifth Avenue this year, he’s looking forward to finally going home. “I haven’t slept in my bed for the last 23 days. Right now what I’m gonna do is go home, take a shower and pass out.”

Gonzalez is looking forward to being first again next year for the 10th anniversary iPhone.

Order and short lines in San Francisco

Justin Harris, the first person in line at Apple’s new store in San Francisco’s Union Square, wasn’t sure if he’d even buy a phone since the model he wanted, the iPhone 7 Plus, was sold out. The 19-year-old from Oakland had been waiting in line for a week mostly for the experience, he said.

“I’m not getting anything at this moment,” he told CNET before the Apple Store opened. “I’m walking in and experiencing life.”

Apple Store employees convinced him to buy a matte black iPhone 7, but Harris said he doesn’t “plan on keeping this more than the return period.” He’s going to order the 7 Plus online instead and hope it gets here before he has to return the iPhone 7. If not, Harris may keep buying and returning smaller versions of the phone until he gets the 7 Plus, he said.

Lines in San Francisco were shorter than in years past, not even stretching the distance of a city block at the time the store opened. Apple’s new store features two different entrances — one through the huge front doors and another through a back courtyard. It lined up people who’d reserved their device in the courtyard, while everyone else lined up on the sidewalk along the building. The two entrances got people through the line quicker but made the exit of people with their phones much less dramatic.

Tod Barnett, a 29-year-old about a dozen people into the line, got to the store a little after 3 a.m. with the hopes of nabbing a 7 Plus. When he found out it wasn’t available, Barnett decided to stay anyway to buy his younger brother an iPhone 7 and himself an Apple Watch. And, he hoped, Apple just might find some 7 Plus devices in the store. They didn’t.

Instead, Barnett, who’s participating in Apple’s upgrade program, will buy his own device online.

Lou Kosak, trading in his rose gold iPhone 6S as part of the upgrade program, reserved his 128GB jet black iPhone 7 for an 8 a.m. pickup. He arrived at 6:50 a.m. for that appointment because “last year I showed up half an hour early and it was a really, really long line.” Kosak opted for the smaller phone over its larger sibling because the Plus “is a lot of phone.”

Updated throughout the day: To include launches from Australia, London, New York and San Francisco.

iPhone 7 launch leaves some fans disappointed

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The post No iPhone 7 Plus? No problem on Apple launch day first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

“The NBN network is available in your area.”

So sayeth the NBN website. But tell that to the ISPs…

It’s been two months since the National Broadband Network website told me my area was ready for service. Two months of calling ISPs who tell me there’s nothing they can do yet to connect me to the local node. They don’t know when, they don’t know why, they just know they’re waiting for something to change in the NBN system before they can do anything for me.

I get it. I’m lucky to even be this far down the NBN track. You’re still a dirt road, while I can see the bitumen and I’m just waiting for the driveway to be paved. But I’m living in NBN limbo, and I’m not the only one.

The official term is ‘Service Class 0’. I hope that’s the name of the NBN house band. According to the NBN, approximately 2.5 percent of homes find themselves in this situation right now. That doesn’t sound too bad as a percentage. In real terms it’s a little under 48,000 premises in the 1.9 million ‘brownfield’ premises being upgraded from the traditional copper network. If you’re in the 48,000, you’re still going to be very annoyed that it’s you.

So what causes this problem? How is there a gap between what the NBN website tells us about our address and what ISPs see for the same location? Half the frustration is that there is no straight answer.

“Not all areas are uniform and in some cases there may be additional works required,” an NBN spokesperson tells me. “These works could be civil or they could relate to integration with the power grid.”

So the wider town you live in is signing up to plans all around you. Everything on the path home is almost ready. It’s just that ‘almost’ can mean a lot of different things. Days, weeks or months.

“NBN provides [retailers] with all relevant information for end-user premises,” says the NBN spokesperson. “Including the access technology it will receive, its service class status, date of serviceability and exact location.”

But in that interim ‘Service Class 0’ window, there’s no new information to share until those extra works are done.

The NBN waiting game

I asked Australia’s top three ISPs for their perspective on this knowledge gap. To be the face of NBN retail but be unable to answer questions for people who see they should be able to connect on the NBN site, but get told by ISPs they are still in a holding pattern. They didn’t have much to say.

More NBN stories

• Why Australia’s internet has turned into a literal car crash
• New rules prevent telcos from stuffing up your switch to the NBN
• Optus misled customers over the NBN, cops $1.5 million fine
• NBN CEO throws shade at copper in most polite mic drop ever

TPG, now the owner of iiNet as well as its own operations, did not respond to our request for comment.

Optus didn’t comment on this specific aspect of NBN connection problems, only saying that “NBN provides Optus with serviceability forecasts and regular updates about homes and businesses as they become serviceable.”

Telstra was relatively strident by comparison: “We do consistently and persistently check in with NBN Co regarding premises that are Service Class 0. These are unique cases and ISPs, including Telstra, are not in a position to influence NBN Co’s connection schedule nor do we have access to background information, these would be questions for NBN Co.”

It is absolutely a question for the NBN, but the NBN is expressly designed to not communicate with the public. But it’s also been a political football that has been forced to sell its virtues in the public spotlight. And that includes having a website that lets people check the status of their location.

What to do while you wait

So what do you do?

One thing you don’t do is just ring every service provider you can find until someone promises to sign you up. Between less scrupulous sales agents and carefully worded false promises, you could end up with something that still isn’t really the NBN. I’ve heard more than one suggestion to sign up to a company’s ADSL “while you wait and then we’ll transition you when the NBN is ready.”

You can wait for the NBN on any network. You don’t need to jump anywhere — and live with disconnection and reconnection hassles — before the NBN is genuinely ready for service.

As hard as the wait might feel, use the time to do more research on the NBN plans out there. Plans are changing rapidly. ISPs are tweaking their deals regularly. In the two months I’ve been stuck in limbo I’ve watched a number of new unlimited NBN plans hit the market. Competition is heating up, so if there’s a silver lining it’s that a delay could be saving you money or mean your perfect plan finally comes to market.

Remember that all providers are selling the same basic service when it comes to NBN. Shopping around for a great deal that suits your needs is absolutely in your interests.

Most ISPs are also offering a service to let you know when your address is finally ready for action. Sign up for this notification with any ISP you’re happy to get a call from. I don’t trust that I’ll get that message as quickly as I want (which, to be honest, is yesterday), but it’s better than refreshing websites all day long in the hope that something will change.

Beyond watching carefully, doing your research and making an ISP or two keep an eye on things for you, there isn’t anything else you can do.

Except practise your patience. I hear it’s a virtue?

The post NBN Service Class 0: When you’re stuck in NBN limbo first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

What do you really need from a computer processor? AMD is thinking you want to “work faster, play longer” with its newest range of processors.

AMD has launched its 7th Generation A-Series APUs at Computex in Taiwan, claiming that it’s gaining ground on rival Intel, and that this year it is delivering a lot more power at lower price points.

For those out of the loop, ‘APU’ is AMD’s name for its processors, starting five years ago. These ‘Advanced Processor Units’ aim to combine genuine graphics processing right alongside the traditional CPU to deliver best possible performance on a single chip.

AMD is particularly pleased with its lower-end chip improvements (its A9, A6 and E2 series), delivering a 52% improvement in CPU performance over the past generation. This is thanks to introducing its higher-end CPU designs into the lower-end models this time around.

According to AMD, its previous generation of processors offered certain performance levels at a lower price, while this year they will offer a lot more performance at the same price.

At the higher end of the range (FX, A12 and A10 series) there’s plenty of improvement too and some genuine competition for Intel. AMD says they’re delivering 56% higher CPU performance since 2014, and on graphics performance claiming 53% better performance than Intel’s current Core i7 line.

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One of the big claims for this generation of processors is its efficiency when watching videos. AMD’s Kevin Lensing, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Business Unit, said the new processors see up to a 41% reduction in energy use during local 1080p video playback over the previous generation. Compared to a three year old system, that improvement is a massive one-third of the power consumption.

Pointing to HD video being 70% of all internet traffic by 2019, AMD is building out deeper video playback support. The 7th Generation APUs feature hardware support for HDMI 2.0, UHD H.264, 4K H.265/HEVC, and 1080p VP9. That’s essentially all the key flavours of video encoding people will bump into online, and this hardware all plays a role in reducing energy needs so battery life lasts longer while watching video.

While the wider industry is spending more time talking about processing beyond the PC, Lensing affirmed AMD’s focus on the desktop and notebook market.

“We’re extremely focused on the PC,” says Lensing. “We’re not interested in drones and we’re not pushing hard on auto. We’re really big on PC.”

Check out all the news from Computex 2016 here.

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Keep swiping that credit card, folks. The latest VR headset announcement comes with yet another price caveat with today’s PlayStation VR price announcement not telling quite the whole story.

That $399 US price tag — it’s AU$550 in Australia and £349 in the UK — won’t do anything unless you also own a PlayStation Camera, priced at $59, AU$75 or £39. It simply will not work at all. Add to this that many games will also demand two PlayStation Move controllers, which are about $49, AU$46 or £24 each, and suddenly the “full” PSVR experience bumps that price of admission up to around $556, AU$715 or £436.

Update: Sony has announced a $500 PlayStation VR bundle that will be available for preorder in the US starting on March 22. The bundle includes the PlayStation Camera, two Playstation Move controllers and a PlayStation VR Worlds game disc.

The fight to be the VR platform of choice is getting very hot, and now the three major VR players have placed their cards on the table. The big question is whether price, content or ease of installation will win the day, or whether the mass market will hold fire until cheaper options become available in future generations.

Sony’s PlayStation VR headset will cost you $399 and it’s coming in October (pictures)

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As we’ve discussed elsewhere, a VR headset is just a movie screen for 360-degree videos unless you have a way to interact inside the virtual world. So for the PlayStation VR that means you need at least the PlayStation Camera, which launched alongside the console, to track your actions and translate them into the game world.Even with these extra costs, the PlayStation VR still beats the Oculus Rift launch price of $599, AU$649 or £499, which also doesn’t include controllers. For Oculus, you plug it into your VR-ready PC and use PC or Xbox controls as an interface, but genuine motion controls will be announced later at an undisclosed price.

The HTC Vive is the only complete room VR package on offer, but it comes in at $799. And you still need to have a VR-ready PC to even turn the hardware on.

For all of the above, the PlayStation VR still looks most promising with a total package price, including a PS4, PSVR, camera and controllers, around $900, AU$1,200 or £725. And for many PlayStation 4 owners — already the leading console of the current generation with over 36 million sold — they will already own a Camera and maybe have a Move controller or two still knocking around from the PS3.

But the constant add-ons and extras to even get off the ground could keep people from pulling the trigger on getting VR up and running in their living rooms.

Last updated on Friday, March 18 at 9:50 p.m. PT: Information on the PlayStation VR bundle has been added.

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Samsung wants mobile gaming to feel as much like desktop gaming as possible, and with the Galaxy S7 it’s pushing to deliver on that mission.

But there’s saying “we take games seriously” and then there’s delivering meaningful features that make a real difference to what people want to do when playing games. The good news is that in the Galaxy S7, launched at the Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, Samsung has integrated deep hardware and software tools to back up the claim.

Games push processors harder than anything else, so the first big upgrade from Samsung is water cooling like you’d find in a serious desktop gaming system. Obviously the scale is miniature compared to desktop water cooling, but the sealed copper cooling system will still do its best to shift excess heat away from the S7’s processor when games push things to the phone’s thermal limits.

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In other low-level updates, the S7 also supports the Vulkan API for game development. You don’t need to care about the details, but what it means is that many new games are coming soon to take better advantage of modern multicore processors. The S7 is ready to support these games, and when they arrive they should look and play much better than almost anything you’ve seen on Android before.

Samsung needs the Galaxy S7 to reignite consumers’ interest in its phones. Although it remains top dog in mobile, it’s not biting off as much of that market as it used to: About 23 percent of all smartphones shipped last year came from Samsung, down from 25 percent in 2014 and 31 percent the year before, according to Gartner. Consumers aren’t rushing the way they once did to acquire new phones, and when they do upgrade, they’re increasingly opting for cheaper devices from companies like Huawei and Xiaomi.

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You may not pay much attention to the changes under the hood, but the new game launcher and tools options are things you won’t want to miss.

A new “No Alerts” mode means launching a game will tell the S7 to suppress all notification pop-ups so you can play uninterrupted. Anyone who has ever had a high score ruined by a rogue calendar reminder will love this. You can also lock the Recent and Back keys so you can’t accidentally bump something and knock yourself out of a game.

YouTube Let’s Play videos of console and desktop games are a huge industry now, and Samsung is also making it easy to record mobile gameplay on the S7. Launching game recording will also trigger the front camera so you can commentate over the top of your gameplay with a picture-in-picture mode.

Finally, Samsung also offers the ability to tweak graphics performance between three settings so you can dial things back a little if you want to put battery life ahead of gameplay. The standard setting will run games at maximum resolution and at 60 frames per second. The “low power” setting reduces frame rate to 30 frames and dials down the resolution somewhat, while “extreme low power” sticks with 30 frames but drops the resolution again. We didn’t catch exact figures here, but we could guess at a reduced resolution of 720p or thereabouts. This may depend on the game in question.

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These features are all launched from a new “game tools” icon that can lurk inconspicuously at the edge of your screen during gameplay so taking screenshots, recording videos or tweaking settings are all just a tap away.

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On show at CES 2016, the Samsung-backed TipTalk is a clever new “smart strap” for traditional watches, adding fitness tracking, notifications and calling features to any watch. Its greatest trick? Letting you take calls by pressing your finger into your ear like some kind of kids’ make believe fake phone game has become reality.

The idea comes from a Samsung project called C-Lab, where over 100 projects run by internal staff have been initiated since 2012. TipTalk is one of nine to be broken out as a full external startup.

As smartwatches take hold, many horological hardliners are sticking to their traditional watches with renewed fervour. So the arrival of a smart strap that gives classic timepieces a smart upgrade could be just what the traditionalist has been waiting for.

It’s the magical finger calls that make this strap truly unique. The representative said the call audio isn’t transmitted via bone conduction, but vibrations are being sent from your wrist to your finger through your body. You can use it for taking calls or to have it read out your text messages.

Bluetooth gadget showcase from CES 2016 (pictures)

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I tested the TipTalk and it took a few tries to get the sound working (you can feel the strap is trying to vibrate sounds at you when you’re doing it wrong). The sound was very muffled, but I could definitely understand what was being said even though I was standing on a busy show floor at CES. The strap was also a little loose, which could have contributed to the poor sound quality compared to setting it up just right with a tighter fit for my personal use. The strap has links at the ends that can be added or removed to get a better fit.

From that test, you wouldn’t want to rely on your new magical finger phone as your primary way to make calls. But for a quick call somewhere you want a little extra privacy, particularly somewhere quiet where a normal call would be easily overheard, it’s a promising working demo for a product that is looking to run a crowdfunding campaign in the coming months.

TipTalk works with Android and iOS, and while the project is an internal Samsung project, the team behind the strap say they are working toward an Indiegogo launch in coming months, with a target price under $80.

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