Table of contents for April 1, 2015 in Stuff UK

…to a an issue of our magazine for which I’ve personally ventured underground, twice. The first time, it was to see a dark vision of a possible past, in a Cold War nuclear bunker (see it and other fascinating geek days out on p112). The second was to take a look at an altogether brighter and more concrete future, in the giant tunnels of London’s new transport system, Crossrail (p88). How embarrassing, then, to emerge and find all my colleagues were not only above ground but staring at the sky, where the swarm of drones that populate this month’s cover feature (p44) were buzzing, hovering and swooping. If you haven’t seen a drone in action yet, you should – it’s a scientific-style fact that no other gadget is more likely…

WEAR’S THAT BEAT COMING FROM? Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator The story goes that Teenage Engineering, known for their awesome but expensive OP-1 synth, asked fashion brand Cheap Monday to source them some lab coats. The folks at Monday said, “We’ll make your engineers some coats if you make our lads and lasses some wee synths.” And so the Pocket Operators were born. There are three models of the pared-back, battery-powered noise boards: the PO-12 ‘Rhythm’ drum machine, the PO-14 ‘Sub’ bassline generator and the PO-16 ‘Factory’ lead synth. Each has a 16-step sequencer with 16 sounds and 16 effects, as well as a speaker and an alarm clock. As hot as… ’70s LED pocket calculators €70 / teenageengineering.com…

Xbox One, Xbox 360 Lara Croft’s been lying low since her latest Xbox-exclusive adventure was announced last summer, but we now know that she’ll be back in Rise Of The Tomb Raider at the end of this year. Set a year after she survived being shipwrecked and almost sacrificed on the island of Yamatai, Lara’s feeling the effects of her ordeal, so just like anyone would do, she’s taken herself off to Siberia in search of a mythical sunken city called Kitezh to find out the secret of eternal life. In the spirit of the original Tomb Raider games from the ’90s, Lara’s greatest adversary is the harsh environment, with wolves and bears trying to kill her when avalanches or other natural events aren’t. As is de rigueur in almost…

Ever get back from the weekly shop to find some ruffian has left an unsightly dent in your car door? German manufacturer Hella has invented an ‘intelligent damage detection system’ that could alert you when the impact occurs and tell you how intensive it is – potentially from a scale of ‘minor dink’ to ‘Hulk smash’. The system uses sensors that can be glued behind door panels or attached to existing parking sensors. If a car has onboard GPS, Hella’s system will be able to tell the driver where and when a dent, scratch or impact happened. So far, so what, right? Why do you need to know about damage to your own car? Because you don’t have your own car, in the future. Personal car ownership isn’t factored into…

MARK PAYTON @iammarkpayton The Apple Watch has the potential to transform healthcare. Already the NHS medical director, Professor Bruce Keogh, has predicted that wearables could enable doctors to detect if you are about to have a heart attack. But of course, this also raises issues of privacy: you’re strapping a potential spy to your wrist. Top mobile app developer Mubaloo, however, points out that HealthKit – Apple’s repository for health data – demands that users grant permission before giving away personal information. Olly Berry, Mubaloo’s head of iOS, says: “HealthKit lets users see their activity, and part of this comes from Apple allowing third-party apps to put their data in there and merge it, with the user’s permission. “This could be a huge opportunity for third-party services and accessory manufacturers,…

1 Puppet Punch £free / iOS Destroy pesky puppets in this fast, good-looking and surprisingly difficult game. Nimble fingers and quick reactions are required, so it isn’t long before it all becomes a blur as you desperately try to keep your character, Pablo, alive. 2 Particle Mace £2.29 / iOS A game of most excellent purity: swing your ship around in space so that you (a) don’t hit any rocks and (b) cause your towed detritus to hit rocks and destroy them. There are no ads or purchases; you just pay and play. Ahh, such simplicity. 3 Lamp And Vamp £1.99 / iOS The tables are turned in this tile tapper: you’re a vampire trying to reach his coffin being pursued by ‘do-gooders’. Stay in the shadows, pick off enemies…

Caucasus, Russia / caucasus.ru What’s the story? With an altitude of 5642m, the dormant volcano Mount Elbrus is Europe’s highest peak, but that didn’t stop Italian studio LEAPfactory building a hotel on top of it. The vertiginous building is made up of four resin and fibreglass tubes, which were prefabricated in a factory before being airlifted to the site in pieces. Fact! Forget having to harvest rainwater – this hotel melts some of the surrounding snow to provide water for flushing toilets.…

Cupertino, USA (due 2016) / apple.com What’s the story? This US$5 billion office is where Apple will dream up the successors to its Watch, Macs and iThings. Most of the building’s electricity will be generated by an onsite power plant boasting a bigger solar array than any other corporate HQ in the world, and over three quarters of the site will be made up of distinctly non-techy greenery. Fact! The subterranean car park will be fitted with over 300 charging points for electric cars.…

CROSSRAIL BY NUMBERS 200 MILLION Passengers (per year) 26 MILES Length of new tunnel dug 4.5 MILLION Tonnes of earth moved 62 MILLION Hours worked so far Seven floors below the surface of London, a five-minute climb down aluminium steps that lead into the huge, concretelined chambers that will make up Farringdon Crossrail station, this mighty project doesn’t look like a Digital Railway. It looks like an enormous hole in the ground. Which, of course, it is, but Crossrail isn’t just a physical system. In and around these immense tunnels – the platforms are so big that some station entrances will be more than a quarter of a mile apart – an invisible structure is evolving. All around us there are stations, platforms, pilings and escalators, built as digital models,…

MINIATUR WUNDERLAND You might dispute a model railway’s tech credentials, but this £8m set in Hamburg isn’t your average Hornby. It has 13km of track and softwarecontrolled emergency services who tackle blazes and speeding motorists. miniatur-wunderland.com FORMULA ROSSA Abu Dhabi’s Ferrari World is an indoor theme park with a rollercoaster that rockets you out into the desert at 149mph. It’s the world’s fastest coaster and probably the only one that needs to give its riders mandatory goggles. ferrariworldabudhabi.com PAN AM EXPERIENCE In the ’70s Pan Am was like a flying Michelin-starred restaurant. The airline went bankrupt in the early ’90s, but a Hollywood studio (home to the sets for Airplane! and Lost) has created a replica 747 for gourmet four-course meals. airhollywood.com…

ALWAYS ON CALL facebook.com/joinstuf @stufTV google.com/+stufftv stuff@haymarket.com MAIL OF THE MONTH Q PORTABLE GAMING NIRVANA Hi Stuff, I’m a member of the WHO and am deploying to Sierra Leone to help Ebola clinical trials. I’m looking for a micro PC, pico projector and controller to churn through time-killers such as Skyrim and Fallout 3. Any ideas? Theo Grace A That’s quite a trek, Theo – good luck! As for what to take, we’d recommend the tiny Alienware Alpha (from £450, dell.com), which should pack enough grunt to run a whole host of titles. The Asus S1 pico projector (£270, amazon.co.uk) has plenty of good reviews too, with 200 lumens of brightness for decent visibility. Speak your brains and you could win a 6-month QOBUZ HI-FI SUBSCRIPTION worth £120 This letter…

Onkyo HS-N1 £600 Stuff said It’s more of a ‘style’ system than most micro hi-fis, and capable thanks to a good mix of looks, features and performance; but it’s not cheap and you don’t get a great deal extra for your money. The biggest downside is the bass, or rather the lack of it. Sony KV14LM1 £190 Stuff said Finished in a metallic grey/blue with swish ergonomics, this mini Sony will sit pretty in any surroundings. It also offers rather practical one-button tuning, and comes equipped with RGB Scart. The style and convenience justify the price tag. Hyundai Coupe 2.7 V6 £18,500 Stuff said While the new Hyundai Coupe has its faults, it still delivers fine value – the combination of style, performance and gadgetry is stunning when you consider…

DO THE HAPPY, HAPPY SHAKE Olympus Om-D E-M5 Mark Ii Oh, such love there was. We and the original OM-D walked out every evening and made beautiful pictures together. Then, without event or outcry, that love waned. But the time for pining is gone, for a second OM-D has come to town. It still has a 16MP sensor but with a 5-axis image stabilisation system that promises sharp handheld shots at a 1/4-second shutter speed. And that lithe 417g waterproof body doesn’t exactly hurt the eye either. As hot as… an athlete with mind of Newton and eye of Bailey from £900 (body only) / olympus.co.uk…

Chances are your kids have already programmed and installed Raspberry Pi-based cranial augmentations. it’s part of Key Stage 2, isn’t it? if not, then you need to get them on the path to programming pretty damn quickly, and this thickly veiled coding lesson from the BBC might be just the thing. Simplistic platforming levels make way for drag-and-drop coding puzzles, helped by the voice of the doctor, Peter Capaldi. of course, you’ll have to play it through yourself, just to check its suitability. Exterminate! Ahem. War ain’t smart POLAR A300 Remember MiniDisc? How Sony launched it, then other companies got licensed to have it too. Suddenly there were portable recorders and personal players and car head units, and everyone was using it… and then there was the war. Remember? Society…

JOE DANGER new to Android While we wait for Hello Games to finish No Man’s Sky it’s worth spending some time with one of their other games, such as Joe Danger, who is flipping his bike onto Android for the first time. There are 80 levels in which to try to kill the unkillable stuntman, and gamepads are supported. THE ROOM 3 iOS, Android to follow Considering how many awards The Room and The Room 2 won it’s amazing there’s still any space in there for puzzles, but the third piece in this touch-screen trilogy is due this month. Expect the kind of teasers that’ll distract you during the day and keep you up at night (in a good way). LETTER TALE iOS, Android to follow With a bizarre back…

1 POC DO Eyes: we’ve all seen them. What’s hot on the cycle superhighways this year is the not-seeing of them. And POC, made glorious by styling up the eyes of various road racers, has plenty of polarised or photochromic peeper-keepers. from £135 / pocsports.com 2 Giro Hoxton LF We know what you think – you think the ‘LF’ stands for ‘longfingered’. And you’re right. But you know what else? ‘Lovely fingers’. Protected by these luxuriously unsporting Merino and soft suede gauntlets. £35 / alwaysriding.com 3 DZR Jetlag Nero These might look like flippityfloppety plimsolls but they are actually highly cycle-specific. Clippy-pedal SPD cleat fixings are cut into what is a remarkably stiff sole – just the thing for burning away from the lights. £85 / alwaysriding.com 4 Velorution Vintage…

Ah, so that’s where all of time comes from. Yep. They say that when the Big Bang had its titular event, it flung out all manner of exotic gases and base materials and the little fizzy bits from Wham bars and… this. And thenceforth, there was time. Accruing, inexorable foreverness. And yet, for all that it looks authentic, you won’t believe what you’ll discover if you carbon-date this enigmatic machine. That it was forged at the very dawn of anything? No, that it was made a week or so ago last Wednesday. Or thereabouts. Which tells us something exceedingly important. Either that the Nixie Machine is able to exist simultaneously in all times, or that you can’t carbondate something that pre-dates carbon, or that this is actually just a really,…

Canon 5DS from £3000 / canon.co.uk If a normal picture is worth 1000 words, the massive 50-megapixel pics from Canon’s new semi-pro snapper are War AndPeace ● That really is a whopping great big sensor, physically and electronically. In fact it’s the highest-resolution sensor ever found in a DSLR camera, and it should be capable of absolutely enormous amounts of detail: printed full size on a standard 200DPI inkjet, images from the 5DS’s monster 50.6MP full-framer are over a metre across. Some people will tell you that the number of megapixels isn’t the big deal it once was – any camera that’s into double figures will be enough for most casual shooters. But with a gigantic 50MP-plus image, you’ll be able to crop into a small fraction of the picture…

Being able to play a musical instrument is great, unless you’re Jamie Cullum, in which case we’d really rather you didn’t. But whether you’re itching to thrash out some meaty power chords or just keen to unleash your inner cellist, here comes your big chance, because 21 March 2015 is Learn To Play Day, when over 100 UK music stores will be offering free taster lessons across a huge range of instruments. See learntoplayday.com for more details. Now, did someone say meaty power chords? There’s only one way to amplify that sort of thing, whether you’re a guitar novice or a seasoned widdler – and that’s with a proper, grandparentscaring 100-Watter. Like the Blackstar ID:100TVP (RRP £399), a programmable head with six amp voices and 12 effects. Add one Blackstar…

FOR PICTURE PRIVACY ShowStopper Photos You pass your phone to a friend to show them an amusing photo, and they start scrolling. Before long, they’ve found those pics of you dressed as a My Little Pony and things are never quite the same again. This app blocks such shenanigans, enabling you to rapidly create standalone galleries on the fly. These can then be saved as albums for other ‘scrollers’. You get four pics per album for free; unlimited scrollage costs 79p. STUFF SAYS from £free / Android, iOS FOR QUIZZING MATES Trivia Crack Q1: What do you get if you cross Trivial Pursuit with Words With Friends? Answer: Trivia Crack. Q2: How similar is it to Trivial Pursuit? A: Very – the categories are identical. Q3: How’s it work? A:…

Buckinghamshire, England / bacahomes.co.uk What’s the story? What do you do if you live on a flood plain? When you’re not cringing at building insurance quotes, you build a house that floats. This timber-framed structure by Baca Architects sits inside an excavated ‘wet dock’ that allows its to rise up like a boat during extreme flooding, guided by four vertical posts. Fact! The tiered garden gives an early warning – once the first two terraces begin to fill up, they can expect the house to start moving.…

SteelSeries Stratus XL £60 / steelseries.com First look The Stratus XL has a premium finish and feels solid and hefty in the hand. Some sloppy button lettering lets it down a touch, but that’s the most minor of minor niggles. It’s powered by two AA batteries, which last for around 40 hours. Some might baulk at the lack of an internal battery, but you can always use rechargeables. Play time The Stratus XL’s PlayStation-like stick set-up might put off some gamers, but the controls mostly work well and enable subtle movement in shooting games. However, the L2/R2 triggers aren’t so successful. Their springs boast the strength of cotton wool; rest your fingers on them and there’s a good chance your avatar will skid off the road. The controller also lacks…

So, what if you’re after more than simple deathmatch? What if you want some story and some variation? Evolve does have a story mode, and it’s interesting, if not quite what you’d expect. For a start this is still deathmatch, but it’s a string of five matches over different arenas and game modes, with the balance shifting depending on who won last. So if the hunters win a round, they might get enhanced automated turrets for the next one, making it harder for the monster – which, let’s remember, has just lost. To counteract that, the monster gets a buff to its abilities. With one hand Evolve giveth, with the other it taketh away. The different modes don inject a bit of variety, and the rescue mode neatly turns the…

THE BASICS ■ Printer types. There are three main types of 3D printer: one that heats up a filament and squirts it out in layers (FDM), and two types that fire lasers into either liquid resin (SLA) or powder (SLS) to solidify a model one layer at a time. ■ What’s mine called? Melting plastic filament and firing it through a nozzle is called ‘extrusion’, and these printers are much cheaper and more common. The CEL Robox and Makerbot Replicator use this FDM process. SLA and SLS printers can deliver better results but they’re more expensive. ■ The easy option? Preassembled machines used to be prohibitively expensive, but they’re now more or less as cheap as home-made ones. They can be up and running in minutes, but bear in mind……

When I worked in a laboratory studying for my PhD, I used a microscope almost every day. Taking a tiny sample, barely visible to the naked eye, and sliding it under the lens of a microscope is like stepping into Honey, I Shrunk The Kids: it’s a whole different way of seeing the world. We’ve not always been able to see in such minute detail. While the first microscopic lenses were made in the 1500s by father-and-son team Zacharias and Hans Janssen, it wasn’t until Galileo worked out how to focus images in the 1600s that they became really useful. Then fast-forward to the 1800s and a chap by the name of Carl Zeiss created the first ever compound microscope. That’s the same design you’ve used at school and seen…

1 GET A ROBOT GHOST WRITER Can’t really be bothered to handwrite those post-wedding ‘thank you’ notes? This robot will do it for you – in your own handwriting: 1 Go to hellobond.com and click on ‘my handwriting’. Here you can choose from various stock handwriting styles or, for US$200, request that Bond’s robot learns your exact style. 2 You’ll be sent a handwriting form, which you’ll need to fill in, scan and send back to Bond. The robot will learn your ‘idiosyncrasies’ within a week. 3 Now go to ‘send notes’, choose a card style and fill in your recipient’s address. If your laziness is on behalf of work, you can also add company logos in the ‘corporate notecards’ section. 2 READ WITH YOUR EARS Need to catch up…

Honeywell EvoHome £250 plus £70/radiator plus installation / honeywelluk.com Set schedules to control the temperature of each individual room of your home, using either the tablet-like central controller or the free Total Connect Comfort app. It’s a big old investment, but you’ll soon pity anyone living without it. Netatmo €180 / netatmo.com It’s not the easiest product to install, but once you’re up and away this is a joy to use. Its real talent is the way it uses data such as how long it takes your house to heat up and what the weather is like outside to fire up the boiler before or after the set time as necessary. Hive £200 or £150 for British Gas customers / britishgas.co.uk Installation is simple, plunging your boiler into the connected…

CHRISTOPHER WARD TRIDENT C60 PRO 600 / FROM £599 Christopher Ward’s best-selling C60 Trident Pro has been comprehensively upgraded to include a re-engineered, marine-grade, stainless-steel case (in 38mm and 42mm sizes), and it’s watertight all the way down to 600m. www.christopherward.co.uk ELLIOT BROWN BLOXWORTH929-007 / £550 Unique durability is standard on every Elliot Brown watch. This one survived six months of winter submerged in freezing cold salt water, and kept on ticking – as well as looking like new when cleaned. www.elliotbrownwatches.com SEVENFRIDAY P2-1 AND P2-2 £825 Industry, architecture, engines and design icons. Sevenfriday is strongly inspired by those elements, fromdesign to construction. See Jura Watches – the UK’s largest online luxury watch retailer – for the range www.jurawatches.co.uk DU MAURIER MAXIM BLACK II / £445 English design house Du…

LAPKA OPENS A NEW ERA FOR ARA Project Ara is a smartphone recently imagineered by Google with interchangeable modules including batteries, cameras and memory. It was reimagineered by us in last October’s issue with a shaver head, a Geiger counter and an airbag. And now, it’s been more sensibly imagined again – despite the strange colour scheme – as a multi-talented tool for health professionals. Lapka’s version includes sensors for air quality, CO2, blood glucose levels, UV light and heart rate. It also has a breathalyser module (pictured above), all of which might make it more of a developed-world tool. NEWS FEED QUIT FUELLING AROUND Shell and PayPal are to offer app-powered petrol payment. So long as you’ve trained your children to do the actual filling, you need never get…

Blackstar ID: Core Beam None of the political parties have mentioned a speakers-per-family limit as part of their election manifesto. But to make sure you’re not caught unawares, secure yourself one of these 20W guitar amps that double as a Bluetooth speaker. The ‘Super Wide Stereo’ mode promises room-filling sound, and there are six guitar modes to play with, while a USB output lets you capture your experimental strumming on PC for future fans to discover and fawn over. £230 /blackstaramps.com Korg ARP Odyssey Tumbleweed was seen rolling through parts of January’s NAMM music show in California as virtually everyone was at the Korg stand for the reveal of its new-old ARP Odyssey synth. It’s claimed to ape its 1970s predecessor from top to bottom… except that it has a…

Argggh! My eyes! We’ll agree it isn’t the prettiest, but this is one menacing SUV you wouldn’t want to mess with. BMW’s M division has taken the spanners to the latest X6 model in order to create a freakishly fast Franken-car that’s capable of devouring the racetrack while transporting five occupants. The trick lies underneath that heavily sculpted bonnet in the shape of a 4.4-litre, twin-turbocharged V8 engine that’s one of the most magnificent things we’ve heard, producing a frankly ridiculous 568bhp and 750Nm of torque. How does a bloater like that go around corners? It’s a miracle of engineering, really, because despite featuring the typically jacked-up ride height of most normal SUVs, it manages to remain flat and keep its grip through even the tightest bends like a car…

THE ECO WARRIORS One Central Park Sydney, Australia/centralparksydney.com What’s the story? This twin-tower skyscraper by French architect Jean Nouvel is equipped with a heliostat system – a huge panel of motorised mirrors that track sunlight and reflect it into a street that would otherwise be in permanent shadow. It also boasts a remote-controlled irrigation system that allows over 1000 species of plants to grow without soil across the building’s walls. Agora Garden Taipei, Taiwan (due 2016) / vincent.callebaut.org What’s the story? This twisted 20-storey marvel now under construction in Taiwan’s capital could be mistaken for a giant DNA strand. The double-helix construction isn’t just for show, though. It creates a cascade of balconies covered in vegetable gardens and fruit trees, so residents will be able to grow their own food…

Chicago, USA (due 2018) / lucasmuseum.org What’s the story? It seems fitting that Ma Yansong’s design for a museum for director George Lucas wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie. Proposed for Chicago’s lakefront, the mountain-like structure will present a history of the moving image across three exhibition spaces that will form ‘infinite loops’. Fact! Yansong plans to develop the design using 5D digital modelling, which calculates construction time and costs as well as form.…

Breva Génie 03 Speedmeter Will Dunn, editor £35,145 / breva-watch.com Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those watch guides that other, less brilliant magazines do, in which they’re all so hilariously expensive they make London house prices look sensible. My colleagues have chosen some stunning watches that offer great value. On the other hand, I have chosen one that costs about the same as a year at Eton. That said, it is the only watch in the world to have a built-in airspeed instrument. Press a button on the crown and an anemometer mechanism pops up and gives you a reading via the needle on top. Perfect for checking how fast your yacht, polo horse or sedan chair is going. My watch… Seiko Kinetic SKX031K It would take me 83…

New Nintendo 3DS XL Sony What’s the deal? Nintendo went the experimental route (as it so often does) with its current portable, packing in an upper display with a glasses-free 3D effect. The new version of the 3DS XL refines that effect while making other performance, control and design tweaks all around. Is it any good? Yes, but it’s because of the games, not the hardware itself. Truth be told, both the original and New versions of the 3DS – whether the large XL model or the smaller, standard model – feel like dated tech. The low-resolution screens are eyesores (even with new ‘super stable 3D’), the processor doesn’t even churn out Wiiquality graphics, and the battery life isn’t great. And while the New models have refined builds, they still…

1 NORTH REBEL You may want different-sized kites depending on both your weight and the strength of wind you ride in, but one of the first in your quiver should be a North Rebel. It’s a design that’s evolved continually over a number of years, but its focus is still on all-rounder ability. It’s also easier to control than many kites when the wind really picks up thanks to North’s ‘fifth line’ design, which allows extremely effective ‘depower’, letting most of the wind out of the kite so you’re still in charge when it starts gusting. from £810 / edgeriders.com 2 ION STRIKE SELECT As soon as you start getting cold, you’ll lose the strength in your limbs and, let’s face it, feel generally miserable. To make sure you can…