Gearfuse

Praise be to Beetlejesus! If you’re like any normal human being, chances are there’s been a time where your cellphone has started to die and you bring up the age-old question: “Hey, does anyone have a charger I can use?” Of course not! You’ve got an LG and I’ve got a Samsung. Ray has a Motorola and Christie has the Nokia E63. Do you see the issue? There’s no standardization on mobile phone charging, but luckily, all that is about to change.

The GSM Association announced at the Mobile World Congress that all of the UK’s mobile phone companies have signed up for the idea of a universal charger. Hopefully, American companies will follow suit. The new charger will use 50-percent less energy when standing by and features a microUSB connection as the charging port. The idea is that by 2012, most phones around the world will use the new universal charging standard. I think it’s a fantastic idea; let’s just see how well it gets executed.

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New spy cam software has been compared to scramble suits worn by narcotics officers in Philip K Dick’s novel/movie A Scanner Darkly. No one wants their own mug shown in some criminal surveillance video simply because you became an anecdote for “the wrong place at the wrong time.” With this new software, faces will be blurred and encrypted; protecting the identity of anyone innocent that is caught on camera. So, just because some other guy seems to be proceeding through life like “a cat without whiskers perpetually caught behind the refrigerator” doesn’t mean you have to suffer for it.

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