Did you know that the best solution to all your tech buying problems is simple! Ask a Geek. And this week, Geeky Jerrick answers the question what Video Camera should I buy that has a good image stabiliser for under 300 Singapore Dollars. The answer is not easy as it comes from a geek but as you know we at Tech65 aim to serve and try out best to give you a satisfactory answer. As always, Jerrick is available for your tweets @askjerrick or via email @ askjerrick [at] tech65 [dot] org.

Love, Smurfs and Astroturf!

Jerrick

Jerrick is transformed into the God of Fortune, just for Chinese new year! It’s his 24th year and through some miraculous Dragon Year transformation as decreed by the Goddess of Food, Drink, and Committee Meetings, Jerrick is now the God of Fortune! And he’s even wearing a special festive red! So now that you’ve done the rounds and eaten your fill and opened your Red Packets… what will you do with all that cash lying around in near 2s 5s and 10s? Let Jerrick help! With the help of his silent sidekick, chilling in the back and playing on the Alienware, Jerrick will tell you what’s good for this Chinese New Year.

Before we get started with this season of Ask Jerrick, we like to tease you, to give you just a small taste of what is to come. This season is going to be monumental, with more exposed skin, more weirdness and more Jerrick-y goodness. What does that taste like? A well seasoned beef steak, some potato dauphinoise and a side of carrots, beans and triple fried chips. Heston Blumen…Rams…Oliver would approve, and so, we know, you would too!

- Jerrick

Background music: “Chase sequence” by Fireproof_Babies

- Jerrick

Background Music for 65Bits is courtesy of spinningmerkaba.

In this Episode we talk about..

1. Fusion Garage story follow up
2. Mozilla and Google continues tie-up
3. The American PS Vita game list is up!
4. LG unveils biggest OLED screen evar!
5. SOPA News
6. iPhone Europe Market Share falls
7. London Buses are EPIC!
8. Sony Ericsson Rumours
9. Magic Lanterns light the way!

On this week’s episode of Ask Jerrick, we ask the question you’ve only dared dream of. Which tool should one use to disseminate information across all social networks. We have two options to choose from, Posterous or Tumblr. And the answer may surprise you. Like a chocolate which you think may just be a solid bar of chocolate but actually has praline in it? You know what I’m talking about? yeah. Anyway – we hope you enjoy this episode and as always drop us an email @ askjerrick [@] tech65 (dot) org or tweet us @askjerrick!

With a big dollop of love from grey London,
Jerrick

Oei! Ah Beng Jerrick here. Today ah, I answer you WiFi reception question from this uniquefrequency guy on twitter. So listen good good my answer to his unique question. What you think? Good answer anot? Good.

Mr Bengster,
Jerrick

In this week’s episode, I answer question asked on twitter regarding where to purchase the Amazon e-ink book reader, the Amazon Kindle and the rumored Amazon Tablet. Keep watching the rest of the season! That’s right~!

I’m brought to you this week by…
Jerrick

This week we talk about 2 not-as-popular-as-iPhone phones and deciding between the 2 – the Nokia N9 or Samsung Wave 3 – both being available soon, if not already. Even finding someone who have heard of these phones is one tough puppy to yelp at. But of course, with Ask Jerrick, we will find the answers for you whether you like it or not! Keep watching the rest of the season! More mumbling and fumbling heading your way.

Little puppy dogs and all things cute,
Jerrick

This week we make the trek down to the Canon Photomarathon to gather a special question for our very first episode. And it involves two things very near and dear to our hearts: Phones and Cameras. In a hyperkinetic display of Red Bull and sheer willpower, we blast the answer at your mindgrapes! Keep on watching for the rest of the season. With exciting thrills and a lot less spills.

Love Smurfs and Lemon Puffs,
Jerrick

Ultimately, Tech65 will be reconstituted in the way it was, with a crew as devoted as before to seeking the truth and finding the awesome tech that you want and need. Thanks for the support guys and We love you.

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS

For those of you out there who really believed. Thank you. And We’re sorry. We understand we’ve come to be a part of your Tech news life and we hope you will take this joke in the spirit it was intended. We still love you…

1) Apple’s Closed Ecosystems

While Apple has made an incredible effort to open up their OS to outside developers, remember that this only happened later on in the development cycle with Version 2.0. Version 3.0 is a completion of this opening up but this is something that we must remember of Apple, their first instinct is usually to protect rather than allow the world to take and play with. Apple’s famous paranoia may have been toned down at the moment, with seemingly every other application being allowed, but there are still restrictions that come with a closed market, there are still things that the iPhone will not do unless hacked. Much of these have been removed again with 3.0, but I wonder if history should serve to teach us a lesson here. I think tethering (using your phone as a modem for your computer) in particular is one that is quite interesting, it will not be enabled unless the carrier allows it. Most other phones have such capability out of the box. Why not the iPhone? And why only allow it now, with carrier approval?

Another problem with a closed ecosystem, is that it usually takes longer for features to get implemented. What shocked many people is that copy and paste took so long to deliver. Seriously. 3 software iterations to get right what any other phone has in its first iteration. Not impressive. Albeit Apple had to work out the technicalities in the first place but that is hardly an explanation. I could go on. But there is a bit of light shining here. The wait is over. Apple will bring all these toys now and we can bask in the glory that is Apple. The only questions I want to raise here is: What of the future? Will all things continue in the same vein or will it progress slowly but surely.

2) Apple’s very particular worldview

Apple makes amazing products. Everyone knows that. Perfectly engineered, gorgeously designed, brilliantly conceived. But sometimes that genius throws out something completely Heh? The latest iPod Shuffle is one of those design decisions. The thing about Apple is, and it is probably something the Fanboys *myself included* love is the very esoteric way in which they view the way tech should work and how humans should work with tech. You either LOVE it to bits, or hate it but buy it anyway because that’s the only thing that works, and you somehow fit your life around it. The iPod is an example of such tech. It works because it is so simple, but let us be honest, it is also radically different from any product out there. No one else can emulate it with such precision and perfection. The iPhone is yet another example of such design ideology. No one can make it work like Apple, and no one has succeeded so far because it’s just so far out of everyone else’s design ideologies. The only thing that even comes close is the Palm Pre; and that’s from an Apple Alum!

3) Apple’s Self Confidence

Apple knows what it is doing. They know they basically rule the market and their arrogance shines through their products. They don’t need to offer cutting edge, or even top of the range. Their survival is based almost entirely on one thing and one thing alone. Design. Apple has built it’s empire on design and this works in the world where everything is built overloaded with stuff. Simplicity triumphs in such a world because it’s simply less taxing on the brain to use a product. This can serve as a foil however, when Apple has a bad product, because they will try to fix it no matter what. Even if the fundamental conception is flawed.

I believe that Apple will continue to survive, even thrive in these times. I just want to point out some of the longer term struggles Apple may have and how it should attempt to deal with these issues.

A thought struck me as I was trying to come up with a suitable topic to write about here today. Information Technology has not changed schools at all. Yes, it has made research much easier and more efficient. And word processing is not the chore it once was. But whilst technology has fundamentally changed the way the world is viewed, it has not fundamentally changed the way we learn. We still exam in the same way, and we are still expected memorise and learn in the same way. My key point here is that schools need to catch up or risk being made redundant.

The key promise of technology has always been to help make the lives of its users easier and more efficient. One of the major problems however with technology is its power to disrupt, disrupt old ways of teaching and learning but also disrupt one’s routines and lives. With the ubiquity of increasingly connected devices today, one would think that computers have made all our activities much more straightforward. The fact of the matter is, however, whilst much of the world has advanced into the digital age, humans are still only able to process information in an analogue fashion. The constant distractions made by such applications like Facebook, are welcome when one has nothing better to do, but inevitably end up becoming a drag on time when one has a dateline hanging over his head, and simply reflect most people’s inability to simply sit down and write for an hour or so straight.

My premise is that ultimately, schools lack the ability to prepare students for a world where they are always connected and expected to be available 24/7. Whether it be via text message, Blackberry or phone call. Education has for hundreds of years been all about learning the necessary skills for that particular area which you have an interest in working in. This has changed on some level in that research can be conducted easily and quickly over the Internet, and lower level tasks can be outsourced quickly or just as quickly performed by one’s self with little effort.

One of the biggest problems with education on a whole then is the role of examinations. Whereas it remains one of the most essential means to test a student’s academic ability, the modern world rarely expects someone to sit down and plug away at a task for hours on end that he or she has spent months revising for, only to forget what happened in the past three hours ten minutes after the exam, and find out that he was wrong in the narrowly defined parameters of the examination. The modern world has moved beyond that and requires a method of testing more in line with the nature of work today. Am I saying that we completely do away with exams? No, that would be ridiculous, but perhaps testing of one’s abilities should involve more cooperation among students, more time given to thresh out ideas and an opportunity to express an opinion rather than repeat what has been learned previously under controlled conditions. An exam hall, the place where one is to be at his most creative and most ready for work is one of stifling boredom and one that I feel will completely disappear in the next ten to fifteen years.

At the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson made the claim that schools kill creativity by placing an overwhelming focus on being right. (See TED) My contention then is that technology has the power to resurrect that creativity, but only if one knows how to use it. Out of the box, every Windows PC possesses a video editor, every Mac, a video editor, an audio editor and a photo editor. There are countless websites available to create your own content, from one that would transform your face into a Simpson’s character to a comprehensive system of blogging for which one can post his thoughts, creations, ideas however misguided or wrong they may turn out to be. If schools are to succeed in educating the next generation of students, schools must teach students to use the tools of the internet and a curiosity as to how new services and new paradigms in the web can help foster that creativity.

Testing should also reflect this paradigm shift in the way which technology shapes our world. Why are we not allowed to use our laptops to take an exam? When everyone knows that in the real world, should be we require a quick refresher or an analysis of an issue we would simply pull up Google or the various specialist databases that are available online. The fear, of course, is that students will cheat with these devices available to them during an exam. My response then is that our conception of cheating has to change. Yes, wholesale copying and pasting of another’s opinion should be forever be labelled as a despicable act of intellectual dishonesty, but maybe opening up the exam hall to the bounties of modern technology will allow students the leeway to be much more creative and much more productive in the exam hall.

An even more revolutionary suggestion might be to open up exams to collaboration. Allow people to bounce ideas off each other during an exam, allow the flow and exchange of ideas, possibly through instant messaging, or another monitored form of communication, let people draw on each other’s shared ideas and build on them during an exam, the so-called Open Source method. This is the way anyone is expected to work today and should we not be tested on our ability to collaboratively create a better piece of work? This may cause difficulties initially but I believe will be much more reflective of the way society works in this day and age.

My ultimate claim is that it is no longer enough to be educated. One has to possess the technical know how to use technology in any size and form in any line of work. This coupled with the need to be widely educated rather than deeply educated more than clearly indicates that the old ways of focusing on purely scientific ways of measuring talent should be de-emphasised. Technology can help aid such an education, to create discerning learners, ones who will not be afraid to make mistakes and learn from them.

There’s a very good chance that I will meet Will Wright, Creator of The Sims, Sim City and Spore, on Friday. Have you any questions for the man himself? Ask them here and I will forward them on!

And NO I can’t ask him to crap out a copy of Spore for you.

-EDIT- Sorry. I didn’t get to see Will Wright! He had to leave early because he was tired. He had been in Singapore for a week doing the publicity for Spore. Ah well. Some other time then eh?

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