I’m on my way over to 5live to talk to Richard Bacon about Apple being sued over in-app purchases. Kids on both sides of the Atlantic have apparently been running up big bills on their parent’s iDevices through the purchase of additional features inside games. Games for these devices are often free but once you’re playing you’re offered upgrades or in-game items like currency. Buying them requires just a password. If the kids have the password, they can buy, via the parent’s credit card attached to their iTunes account. This throws up a number of issues:...read more.

I’ve just watched the Andre Geim episode in the BBC series Beautiful Minds. Geim, in case you’re not aware, is the Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of Graphene. Graphene is one of those discoveries that makes you wonder what the future’s going to look like. 300 times stronger than steel and just a single atom thick, with incredible conductive properties, Graphene and other two-dimensional materials are going to revolutionise our world. If you think we’re sophisticated today, we will look like loincloth-sporting grunts in a hundred years time. As we look back from our super-conducting future we will...read more.

I am in the process of moving house. It’s going to take a while, as the house I’m buying won’t be available until a few months after I have to be out of the house I am selling. Which combined with an extraordinarily busy period at work, and a new baby due, means that reviews and writing are taking a little bit of a back seat at the moment, although I will continue to appear pretty regularly on local and national radio. Part of the barrier to my doing effective gadget reviews in the past has...read more.

While clearing out my parent’s loft the other day I found some entirely forgotten boxes of my stuff. Stuff is really the only description here: two boxes containing a random collection of old birthday cards, letters, photographs, postcards, gig tickets and wristbands, and of course, old gadgets. One gadget in particular caught my attention because it is just such a perfect example of what you could call ‘Instant Obsolescence’. It is a gadget designed to transfer MP3s to a MiniDisc player. I have no memory of ever buying this gadget, nor of ever using it, but...read more.

It may surprise you to know that most petrolheads love the idea of electric cars. At least I believe the real ones do. Sure we will miss the raw sound and contained fury of the combustion engine, but real car lovers are excited by the prospect of great electric cars: perfect weight distribution, huge torque, and rapid, unremitting acceleration. Sadly the reality is some way from this dream. As well as being ugly, electric cars today are utterly impractical, requiring long charging times for very short (circa 100 mile) ranges. No petrolhead lusts after a Nissan...read more.

Facebook is expected to file for its initial public offering today, with an initial placement of around $5 billion valuing the company between $75bn and $100bn. Should we (or our pension funds) all be piling in with our cash? Not in my opinion. Facebook is a fascinating company with a very successful product, as is clear from its 850 million users worldwide. I use it daily, as do most people I know. Facebook is also believed to be fairly profitable, with estimates ranging from $1bn-$2.5bn for 2011 – we won’t know for sure until it files....read more.

Since my last post about the HomeOS I’ve been a little obsessed with technology in the domestic environment: security, media, automation, robots, the works. And reading around I’m starting to get a good feeling that 2012 might be the year that home automation finally hits the mainstream. First thing to catch my attention was Android @ Home. Just watch this video from May 2011 and see if you’re as excited as I am – the good bit starts at 6:12. It’s not so much the Android aspects that excite me here, though clearly that has cool...read more.

My house needs an operating system. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, then the OS is the core software that allows a device to operate, providing an accessible interface between applications and the hardware. It allows applications to communicate with each other and share access to all of the hardware. I have a lot of hardware at home. Of course there’s the techie stuff (home cinema, games consoles, PCs, tablets, phones) but there’s also the more basic bits (fridge/freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, cooker, boiler, thermostat, blinds, lights, burglar and smoke alarms, gas, electricity and water meters)....read more.