TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Sometimes I don’t know what’s worse: robots with a face, or robots without one.

Especially when it’s crawling towards you crying “ma-ma!” as it rises up to standing height on its spindly metallic legs.

Researchers at Japan’s Hosoda Laboratory developed Pneuborn-7ll and Pneuborn-13, a pair of musculoskeletal infant robots. Their names come from the fact that they use pneumatic muscles as actuators (and in case you were wondering, they don’t actually say “ma-ma!”, as far as I know).

Penultimate, my favorite handwriting app on the iPad, has just added the most dangerous new feature yet: a stationery store. Once I switched away from paper and pen, I thought my days of spending way too much money on beautiful stationary were over. I was wrong.

Penultimate’s strength is its simplicity (well, that and its great design). Essentially, it turns your iPad into a piece of paper. You can add pages to make books, choose nib size and color, and erase.

Since I got an iPad, I have been able to easily spend a good part of the morning sat on the lavatory, catching up on news and sinking just one more putt in Super Stickman Golf. But if I somehow managed to install Kohler’s Numi toilet in my ancient, crumbling bathroom I’d probably spend the entire day in there (I might also need to install an opening window).

Thanks to Toshiba, using an SD memory card can be as annoying as burning a CD. The new Write Once Memory Card allows you to write data once and never again, just like burning a non-rewritable CD. The storage size isn’t far off, either, at 1GB against a CD’s 700MB.

Why bother? The card is aimed at governments, police and other entities that need to record tamper-free data. Evidence photos, for example, could be stored on this card and couldn’t subsequently be changed.

Got an iPad? Use Adobe Lightroom to organize and mess with your Photos? Then prepare to get excited. Photosmith has launched today, and it’s an iPad app which sits between your camera and Lightroom.

Photosmith lets you tag, rate and otherwise organize all of the photos which you have imported into your iPad, whether using the camera connection kit, an Eye-Fi card or just saved from an e-mail. This means that you really can leave your laptop at home when you go out shooting, or away on vacation.

Infrared photography used to be dead easy. You’d buy some IR film and put a dark, dark red filter on the front of your lens. Then you’d turn the focus ring a notch to the left to compensate for the fact that the IR light focuses differently. Apart from not actually being able to see anything through the viewfinder thanks to the IR filter, it was simple.

To do the same thing with your digital SLR you have to start by removing the IR filter over the sensor.

Remember when computers had removable batteries? Neither do I, but apparently they did. These days, the batteries come hidden away from the user, freed from their bulky cases so that device makers can squeeze more into smaller and smaller spaces. So it is with the BlackBerry PlayBook, freshly torn open by the ravenous zombies at iFixit. “Chipzzzz”, they cry as they rip into brand new electronics with their spudgers. “Chipzzz!”

But this hard-to-access battery (hidden behind the motherboard and speaker), along with a metal frame glued to the screen, is the only hard-to-repair part of RIM’s new miniature tablet.

I have never seen the point of screen protectors on glass screens: they add bubbles, they never go on straight and they are usually more prone to scratching than the glass they are supposed to protect. Still, if I was in the market for an iPad screen protector, then I might take a look at the Moshi iVisor AG.

Unlike the usual plastic film kits, the iVisor actually looks like the front of an iPad, with a black or white bezel to match your model.

Instagram is pretty cool if you have an iOS device. The community photo-sharing service can be browsed through the official app (still the only way to actually upload photos) or viewed with various third party apps and sites. But what about those losers who can’t — or worse, won’t — look at your amazing, grungified photos? Perhaps these luddites, probably your family members, don’t even own an iPhone or an iPad, or a device with an internet homepage browser.

Many iPad owners have complained that its backlit screen is just too bright for bedtime reading.

A recently unearthed patent shows that Apple has plans to fix such a problem by developing a hybrid display: part LCD or OLED, part low-power electronic ink.

Uncovered by Apple Insider, the patent, “Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display,” illustrates a method for displaying static content in e-ink while other portions of the screen appear using standard LCD technology.