TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Usually, when tootling around town on two wheels, you really don’t need to carry anything with you but a couple of good locks. If you snap a chain or pop a tire, you’re nothing more than a long walk or a subway ride away from the tools you need. But out in the country, or on a road tour, you need to go equipped for anything, with enough spares to at least get your bike to the nearest town, or better still, carry out a full repair right there.

Forty years in the future, humanity will be on the brink of mass extinction due to its blatant neglect toward the environment; robots will steal most of our jobs (even mine); I’ll be too old to care about technology. But those are just my predictions. Let’s hear what people less jaded have to say — the children, in particular. 

The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network on Thursday launched the World Mural Project, which hosts an online mural encouraging children around the world to digitally illustrate their predictions of "what computers will empower us to do" in 40 years.

Relatively speaking, the iPhone 3G’s battery life isn’t all that bad — but plenty of people are still complaining about it. For those difficult to please, there’s a solution out there (sort of).

Try this on for size: iPhoneck’s Backup Battery ($43), shipping sometime August. In the event that your Jesus phone shuts off, you can fully resurrect it by plugging one of these babies in.

With their tiny, terraced homes, outdoor toilets and boiled food*, it’s no wonder the Brits have to escape into fantasy every now and then. Photographer Steve Schofield tracked down British Sci-Fi fans and snapped them in their natural environments, often their own homes or other familiar spaces. Far from being the laugh-out loud nerdfest you’d expect, the resulting series is both surreal and somehow touching.

Instead of happily tapping their touch screens, many iPhone users are using their fingers to point accusingly at Apple — and the developers of iPhone applications.

That’s because of widespread reliability and operating issues associated with the multimedia device’s hardware and software upgrades last week.

Since Apple’s combined iPhone 3G/2.0 launch July 11, some users have reported frequent application crashes, inadvertent reboots or overall lag. It’s not clear what’s causing the problems: A poorly debugged operating system, or poorly-written apps.

That’s to be expected with a major new upgrade, said Raven Zachary, founder of iPhoneDevCamp, who said the fault should be shared between Apple and the independent developers who create iPhone apps.

"The hope is most people understand we’re dealing with new technology and there are going to be kinks along the way,” Zachary said. “We’re all in this together, whether we’re developers, Apple, or consumers, and these issues will pass.”

Many users have reported that restoring their iPhones has fixed most issues related to application crashes.

All types of companies and research universities use nanoscale lithographic technology to create the latest and greatest microchips –
and since the chips are the brain of most systems, any new breakthrough in the brain is important.

Yesterday, MIT researchers announced that they had created the finest patterns over the largest areas in a microchip yet, with lines at 25
nanometers wide, and separated by spaces 25 nanometers apart.

What would you store on Pioneer’s new 500GB optical disc? The monster platter consists of 16 layers sandwiched together, each one of which can store the same 25GB as a single Blu-ray disc. It even uses the same kind of lens as a Blu-ray player, so in theory it could be compatible with existing technology.

The caveat? It’s read-only. The only use we can see is for delivering very high-definition movies on a single slab. Or perhaps you could squeeze a future version of Windows on there with some clever compression techniques.

If it was read/write, though, we could have some fun. As things stand, I could fit my entire collection of movies, TV shows and music on a single disc.

We love us some firmware updates. They magically add new features to our computer controlled devices. Try doing that with an old toaster. On the heels of yesterday’s big product announcements, Nikon has updated its current top-end DSLRs, the D3 and the D300, bringing them into line with the features of the new D700.

These homemade specs could be straight out of Cory Doctow’s latest (and possibly greatest) new novel, Little Brother . The simple hack consists of mounting two infrared LEDs into the frames of a pair of sunglasses and running the cables to the earpieces, where they hook up with a couple of button batteries.