Stuff UKの February 2016 の目次

At the beginning of the 19th century, the greatest boxer in England was a man from Bristol called Tom Cribb. Tom trained by delivering coal all day and then, when he finished work, he’d go to the nearest wood and punch the bark off a tree. Probably not all of it – he’d have had a devil of a time trying to punch the bark off all the little twigs – but still, he could beat up a tree. Not a lot of people – in fact, not any people – can say that. If you can beat up a tree, you can beat up anyone. But do you need to beat up a tree? I would argue that you don’t. In fact, if there’s one piece of advice you…

Even now, you might have enough loose change in your pocket to buy this computer. A computer! Something that used to fill an entire room, now in your pocket for the price of a box of Lindt Lindors. Although, unless you habitually carry around a lot of loose change, you might have to reach for your wallet to get the Linux-loaded SD card, USB power supply, microHDMI adaptor and HDMI cable needed to actually fire up this new mini Pi. (You might have some of that, but probably not in your pocket right now.) The size-zero Zero weighs just 9g, and measures 65x30mm. It is assembled in Wales with the same Broadcom processor as the original Pi, but now clocked to a healthy 1GHz and with 512MB RAM. It is…

Architecture Of Radio £2.29 / iOS Despite its name, this is not an app that has diagrams of dissected radios. Instead, it grants you the most sought-after of superpowers: the ability to see radio waves. The app uses GPS along with a global database of the locations of nearly seven million mobile phone towers and 19 million routers, plus the hundreds of satellites in orbit. Hold up your iPad and it creates a whizzy visualisation of the waves in action around you. Not real, measured radio waves, then, but a fascinating visual study nonetheless.…

Hong Kong’s Airport Express check-in system lets you ditch your bags at a central train station up to a day before take-off. Armed only with your boarding pass, you can go back to your city-centre touristy or businessy activity, only jumping on the train to the airport at the zenith of your building panic about security queues. It’s neat. But neater still would be if the train simply grew wings and took off, bypassing that undignified transfer from wheels to wings at the airport. Airbus has filed a patent for a modular plane and airport system, where passengers are loaded into a semi-cylindrical coach section within the terminal, which is then lowered onto the plane as it heads towards the runway. This is surely the brainchild of Airbus’s Customer Satisfaction…

1 Felt Cruncher 24 Few Brit kids live in the sandy or snowy climes for which fatbikes are built. But terra-squashing 4in tyres are also perfect for getting little wheels over big roots. £400 / feltbicycles.com 2 Calibre Ripple High-street retailer Go Outdoors has been winning awards with its value-maxed bike range, and this chunky-tyred 20in Ripple looks like a trail smasher. £350 / gooutdoors.com/cycling 3 Commencal Supreme 20 Well, this makes a mockery of our childhood. Rockshox suspension front (80mm) and rear (100mm), with hydraulic disc brakes and team yellow paint. Envious. €1600 / commencal-store.co.uk 4 Lapierre Froggy 24 This 24in-wheel suspension bike looks ready to hit a World Cup race; and with Rockshox suspension, Shimano gears and freeride geometry, it pretty much is. £1550 / lapierre-bikes.co.uk 5 Kona…

ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN… #10 TWITTER LIKES Craig Grannell As part of its ongoing mission to eradicate anything unique about the service, Twitter has replaced ‘favourites’. Now, instead of marking a tweet with a star, you click a little heart, and this is referred to as a ‘like’. You know, like on a certain other social network that Twitter clearly really likes and very much wants to be like. The logic behind the decision was outlined by product manager Akarshan Kumar in a blog post entitled ‘Hearts on Twitter’. The star symbol, apparently, was confusing to new users: “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite.” Only it’s not that simple. Clicking that star became a means of bookmarking tweets, flagging them for follow-ups…

Calorie Counter Doing lots of exercise won’t work wonders if you relentlessly shove baked goods into your cakehole. With Calorie Counter, you can set a weight goal, track what you’re eating, and glare at scary red bars on a nutrition graph having just gorged on fat. Do watch the occasionally iffy food database, though. Stuff says £free / Android, iOS, Windows Phone ● Runkeeper It’s claimed there are 45 million people now using GPS-based exercise tracker Runkeeper, and so its big advantage is very much that sense of community. As you hike, jog and sprint towards a more svelte you, chances are you can do so in the company of friends. Friends who will secretly hate you when you’re hitting every goal. Stuff says £free / Android, iOS ● Carrot…

£540 / canon.co.uk Light up the dark A / Canon Speedlite 270EX II Flash That 50mm lens (C) will help in low light, and the 750D has a pop-up flash for emergencies, but for good pictures in murky conditions you can’t beat a proper flash. It’s perfect when you’re snapping your friends at a party (tip: point it at the ceiling to ‘bounce’ the light for a more natural look), and it functions off-camera so you can light subjects from any angle – even from behind. £150 / canon.co.uk Make the skies beautiful B / Tiffen 58mm Circular Polarising Filter You can apply all manner of Instagram-style filter effects to your digital photos, but one filter that can’t be replicated by software is the venerable circular polariser. Screw it onto…

Many wireless multiroom systems are closed shops. You buy the speakers, and the rest of your kit becomes redundant. Yamaha’s MusicCast range lets you bring all your hi-fistuff to the party. Anything you plug into it can be beamed to any other MusicCast speaker – any CD player, any turntable, anything with an output. Every MusicCast component is a Bluetooth transmitter too, so you can wirelessly stream music to your existing Bluetooth devices. The best part? All the products mix-and-match – so your system can grow as you want. And you can control it all from your phone with the free MusicCast Controller app for iOS and Android. Want to get started? Yamaha has put together some great packages to kick-start your listening. They’ll save you money over the individual…

Dorothy From renderings of long-gone football grounds to designled drawings of the Hacienda, Dorothy sells some of the sharpest art on the web. Prices start at £35 for 40x50cm frameless prints, rising to £100 for limited editions. It’s a step up from a Blu-tacked Pulp Fiction poster. wearedorothy.com Caught By The River This nature and travel site has long featured Stanley Donwood, whose woodcuts and prints found fame as cover artwork for his uni pals Radiohead. But it’s his brooding prints of Dorset’s holloways, made for a project with writer Robert Macfarlane, that really stand out. caughtbytheriver. greedbag.com Atom Gallery Based in London’s Finsbury Park, Atom specialises in cheap contemporary art and screen prints. Its online store serves up work from its own recent exhibitions, starting at £40. Dig a…

I WATCHED THE FUTURE… …and it’s not as bright as I thought it was going to be. Not because the film was The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (which is at times pretty morose), but because I was watching it in Dolby Vision, which I was expecting to be similar to the high-frame-rate release of The Hobbit a few years ago: all overblown and uncinematic. But Dolby Vision’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) and colour tweaks actually worked really well. Rich and balanced, it was, and atmospheric; a perfect foil for a frowny Jennifer Lawrence. Fraser Macdonald, Consulting Editor I HAD A DAY OF PURE GEEKERY …at the Stuff Innovators pop-up event in Shoreditch, which gave tech fans a closer look at future classics like the iPad Pro and BMW i8.…

Eight months. There are many things you might do in that time. Many steps you might take, irreversible decisions you might make. But what you won’t do is spend a single moment fustering about for the Withings Go’s charger, or being cross at yourself for not charging it. Because its single CR2032 button battery is sufficient to power it for those eight months, despite its always-on E Ink screen that shows percentage goal completion, targets achieved or an analogue clock face. It can be wrist-worn or clipped and tracks walking, running and sleep, syncing data with the Withings Health Mate app (iOS or Android). It’s also waterproof, sensing when you’ve hit the pool and tracking time and calories. If the UK price ends up being about £50, this could be…

KICKSTARTER Is that a guitar in your pocket? KURV GUITAR The reasons for not carrying an actual guitar around are manifold. Fragility. Cumbersomeness. The tendency for otherwise reserved people to demand you smash out a Billy Idol mastermix. The Kurv lets you carry your string skills more discreetly. In your left hand is the main Kurv unit with eight pressuresensitive buttons. In your right is the motion and gesture-sensing Pick (a left-handed setup is also available). The two combine with an iOS app, upon which are preloaded 60 well-known songs to play along to, and some basic guitar theory. But the pair’s output can also be used as a MIDI input for more serious software. £150 / kurvguitar.com Paper fighters POWERUP FPV “The first ever paper airplane drone with a…

Readbug £9.99 per month / iOS You know when you go round to your brother-in-law’s house, and he has really classy magazines on his coffee table – such as Cabinet or Dazed – and you think, “I’m going to get some for my table”? Well, you don’t, but what you will get is the knowledge that those high-price magazines impart, courtesy of this mag app, which gives you access to hundreds of creative and/or independent publications – more about these on p106. (Not to be confused with Readly, the app for your Stuff-level publications.)…

FOR FUNDING FUN ● Patreon If you’re not aware of Patreon, it’s a site that aims to put artistic ‘creators’ in touch with their fans. This can enable you to crowdfund your favourites, directly paying them to do their stuff in any medium from music to animation. It’s taken a surprisingly long time for an app to officially get out there, but the final product does the job nicely: fans can get notifications when creators publish new things and interact with other users, and creators can chat and post updates. Stuff says £free / iOS, Android FOR MANAGING APPS ● Launchify Apps. They’re great, until you’ve a ton of them installed and can’t easily get at them. Launchify attempts to speed up the process, giving you a ‘smart’ launch bar…

Already acclimatised to your speedy iPhone 6s and its Force Touch-able apps? Take it to new heights with our pick of the best Apple-boosters… from £540 / apple.co.uk Become an insect-botherer A / OlloClip Macro Pro Lens It might have Apple’s best ever snapper, but there are still many photographic tricks the iPhone 6s isn’t capable of. One of those is taking macro shots of tiny critters, who must love seeing the huge rectangular spaceships descend towards their ‘bad’ side. This set comes with 7x, 14x and 21x macro extenders, the latter of which is powerful enough for a profile pic of a dragonfly’s head. £60 / olloclip.com Take it to heart B / Wahoo Tickr Heart-rate tracking is the most accurate way to measure your fitness gains. And even…

from £480 / samsung.com Give it telescopic vision A / 12x Zoom Telescope Case A truly bonkers way to upgrade the S6’s camera, this 12x optical zoom lens lets you take longdistance garden shots pretending to be a giant with a tiny telescope. Try to get the same effect with digital zoom and you’d end up with a blurry smudge. As superextended zooms need to be kept extra still, it also comes with a little tripod that folds into the kit’s hard-backed case. £40 / mobilefun.co.uk Wrap it in smart armour B / S View Cover Case It might not be bulletproof or made from laser-cut bamboo, but this official Samsung case is still our favourite for the S6. Close the front cover and the phone switches into S-View mode,…

from £200 / oneplus.net/uk ■ OnePlus is a cheeky company. With the OnePlus One and 2, it boasted that it had trampled all over much more expensive alternatives such as the Samsung Galaxy S6. The OnePlus X limbos even lower, costing just £200. It’s the most impressive phone you can get in that price range. ■ Until now, OnePlus’s phones have been mostly plastic things. The X’s rear is glass like the Sony Xperia Z5, and its sides are metal. It feels surprisingly luxurious. ■ It also has an AMOLED screen, whereas the other OnePlus phones use LCD displays. What this style allows is superb contrast: no matter the lighting, black areas stay pitch dark. ■ The OnePlus X’s software is the same as the OnePlus 2’s: Android 5.1 with…

Magazines are brilliant. But I don’t need to tell you that – you’re holding a great one in your hands right now. For me, it all started with Smash Hits, then Game Boy Magazine and, for a while, Arena. But it was a movie mag called Little White Lies that changed my reading life forever. A beautiful, intelligent magazine that seemed to have been made specifically for me, LWLies took my heart. And when I heard they were holding a meet-up in a pub, I nervously went along and offered my services as a writer. For free. Just to see my name on their pages. They gave me a go, and over the years I wrote all sorts of features, reviews and interviews; and through them I discovered a whole…

People who have to walk talk fondly about bicycles. On wet days, cyclists talk about cars. Drivers talk about dry days in sports cars, and sports car owners discuss yachts. Sailors, meanwhile, read up on private pilot theory when the sea’s a-rolling. The point being, we all might scour the interwebs for leaked details of the latest Galaxy Edge superphones, but when it comes to standing in a high-street mobile emporium on a dank Sunday morning, thinking about monthly costs and budgets, a mid-range Samsung Galaxy A is what we buy. And why not? The new A3, A5 and A7 come with 4.5in, 5.2in and 5.5in screens and bigger batteries. The larger two of the group get the lion’s share of goodies, with 1080p resolution, octa-core processors, optical image stabilisation…

3 OF THE BEST APPLE TV GAMES ALTO’S ADVENTURE £2.29 This is gorgeous on the big screen. As your little snowboard leaps over ravines, the weather and daylight subtly shift. Big scores require mastery of stunt combos and the ability to outrun angry elders. BENEATH THE LIGHTHOUSE £2.99 Nitrome’s arcade puzzler features a lighthouse with spinny rooms of spikes. You make circles on the touchpad to get a rotund chap from entrance to exit without being impaled. CHILLAXIAN £1.49 This loving arcade tribute is more hypnotic than frenetic at first, as you swipe to blast away waves of dive-bombing aliens. But survive enough waves, and those aliens start learning new tricks. 1 Griddition £free / Android Flexing your mental maths muscle – by playing this grid-based, against-the-clock game – can…

US$180 / gest.co IT’S A LOW-COST, LOW-POWER SOLUTION TO MOVEMENT AND GESTURE TRACKING That looks handy. Doesn’t it just? The Gest is a motion-sensing strap-on with a mission to aid humans in their desire for mastery over the third D: a generation of geeks for whom multitouch and VR are the norm, who aren’t satisfied with the mouse and keyboard as input devices. Oh, and if you’re FaceTiming home about it, make sure you pronounce it ‘jest’. Wha-what? Like jest, not guest? Yep. Remember when someone announced ‘gif’ was pronounced ‘jif’, and the internet went into spasm? Well, that… although it is presumably short for ‘gesture’. Gest uses accelerometers, gyro and magnetometer sensors on its finger clips and main body to track movement and gestures. It’s a relatively low-cost, low-power…

Ever been at the business end of a commuter tut? It’s brutal. “Sorry! Sorry! Oh, god…” you bleat, as your cards flutter to the floor from your wallet – right in front of the ticket barrier. The man behind you shakes his head in a mixture of pity and utter disdain; then waves his wrist over the adjacent card-reader and is gone as you scrabble on the floor. Your humiliation is complete. Stupid card-clash. He was you once, you know. He was you before bPay by Barclaycard, anyway. His moment happened in a coffee shop. It wasn’t pretty… there was biscotti everywhere. But now, thanks to this ridiculously simple contactless payment system, he breezes through every transaction like he’s using The Force. bPay consists of a chip that goes into…

Apple has a habit of chuckling at new things, then remaking them. Samsung’s Note phablets seemed hilariously big at first, but the iPhone 6 Plus has been hugely popular; Android Wear arrived, and then Apple dropped its Watch. And now, in the wake of Microsoft’s surprising success with the Surface, comes the iPad Huge. Like the Surface, this monstertab is here to get things done, not just doss around with you on Netflix. And it’s best used with a keyboard and stylus… sorry, we meant to say ‘Pencil’. Of course, Steve Jobs didn’t care much for prodding touchscreens with a glorified twig. “Who wants a stylus?” he famously proclaimed, but that was in 2007. Apple’s idea now is that all that Retina real estate will let designer types shake off…

£410 / gopro.com Make it last all day A / Powervault You’ll always need more power than you think. The Powervault case takes care of this thanks to its built-in charger for GoPro Hero3/3+ and Hero4 batteries. You can charge them two at a time and its 5200mAh reserve is good for five full top-ups. The case itself is made from waterresistant ballistic nylon to protect your GoPro, accessories and batteries, and it has an extra USB port for charging other devices. US$100 / polarprofilters.com B / Knog Qudos Even though the Hero 4 Black’s low light performance is the envy of other action cams, there’s no substitute for shining more light on the subject. The Qudos’s three XB-D Cree LEDs pump out up to 400 lumens of bright white…

£900 / store.dji.com Give it a ticket to ride A / Lowepro DroneGuard CS 400 The first time you try to pack your drone back into its box you’ll realise that it just isn’t going to work – how do they fit it in there? This rucksack case, made from a sturdy but lightweight FormShell composite protective outer, will provide a much better home for your quadcopter. Its dividers make the perfect fit for your Phantom, plus there’s space for batteries, controller and a tablet. £110 / lowepro.co.uk Pack some spare arms B / DJI Carbon Fibre 9450 Propellers It’s always a good idea to have a set of spare propellers to hand when out flying, as they’re the first things to break in the event of ‘pilot error’. These…

from £230 / pebble.com ■ We’re no scienticians, but we’d estimate that the Time Round watch is 90% bezel. The actual screen is roughly the size of a 10p piece and the total watch face is a bit bigger than a £2 coin. ■ Despite this, the Time Round is more stylish and lighter than most smartwatches… especially when you compare it to particularly chunky models such as the Huawei Watch and LG Watch Urbane. ■ Other than its ginormous bezel, the big issue with the Pebble Time Round is that it slashes traditional Pebble battery life. While the bigger, uglier Pebbles can last up to 10 days on a single charge, this one only manages about 48 hours. ■ As usual there’s a button-based setup for navigating around this…

THE BASICS ■ Save a grand in a day. Companies make a tidy profit from your procrastination and inertia. Put a day aside to shop around for better household and personal bills. For a four-step ‘Money Makeover’ plan go to bit.ly/moneymakeovertips ■ Get a free check-up. Your credit score can affect the offers you get on everything from mortgages to smartphone contracts. Get a free check from the big three agencies (Experian, Equifax and Callcredit) by signing up for a free trial then cancelling within 30 days. ■ Boost your score. To improve your credit score, make sure you’re on the electoral register, set up direct debits to ensure you never miss a payment and cancel any unused cards. There is no single score, so lenders might rate you differently.…

ALWAYS ON CALL facebook.com/joinstuff • @stuff TV google.com/+stufftv • stuff@haymarket.com MAIL OF THE MONTH Q STORAGE WARS Hi Stuff! I’m thinking of buying either the Apple MacBook Pro 13in with Retina display or the Asus Zenbook UX305. Both only come with a 256GB SSD. Is there a way of expanding the storage without it being obtrusive, and so I can still put music onto other devices through my laptop, or put photos into folders? I don’t want to pay monthly for storage, though. Jonah Palmer A An NAS unit such as the WD My Cloud Mirror 6 (£230, amazon.co.uk) is the way to go. It has 4TB of space, which should be more than enough for all your photos, music and video, and the drive inside can be instantly swapped…