The Geek Church

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There is apparently a group of Czech designers known as Technodat that has been working on a flying bike. That’s right, a flying bike. This group wanted to have this flying bike, or FBike, done by August. Yes, they actually call it a FBike, and I have no idea how to pronounce this, and yes, it should have been done by now.

You can watch the video above and you will see how a 220-pound bike that is radio-controlled can hover off the ground with about six battery-powered propellers. All without the use of an extra-terrestrial.

In case you are wondering what you can use this for, isn’t it obvious? Haven’t you always wanted a flying bike, like out of E.T.? As it turns out, the creators just wanted to have the “fulfillment of our boyhood dreams”. Man, that is pretty awesome, isn’t it? Why do you think I reported on it.

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There seems to be a big push amongst companies to get a smartwatch on the market. I reported on the Smart Fitty smartwatch and how Apple is planning on making one .

This is the GEAK, a wearable device that has 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, and it allows for Android 4.1 downloads. This also comes with Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS, and FM radio. It also can monitor sleeping pattern, pulse, blood pressure, and other types of mood and stuff. All this comes in a 8mm thick body and the chip has 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of storage.

Sound too good to be true? Well, the price is about $330, which is pretty up there. You can pre-order it for July 3rd. What interests me is that it could very well be the first official good smartwatch, and it just shows that a smartwatch war is coming.

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In transportation, one of the things that hinders travelers from going from Point A to Point B is the time it takes to load and unload transports. Think of all the time wasted with connecting flights, and constantly getting on and off buses and trains.

Imagine if you could use Clip-Air, which combines the best of air and land travel. You can see in the image a flying wing with three capsules, and it is imagined that such capsules could be train cars.

So what you do is take a train the airport, and then the train car itself will affix itself to the flying wing. Now, if only the train capsule could detach and take you to your final destination.

Holy gosh. This could change everything. Yeah, it is a good idea. Of course I like it, but all I can think about is what it would take to implement it, cost and labor. All commercial planes would have to be replaced with these flying wings, not to mention what would have to be done to the entire railroad industry.

Still, if you ever had to start the transportation system from the ground up, might I be the first to suggest this one? In the meantime, it will be alive in the pages of speculative fiction.

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I suppose a proper caption for this image would be “who is the robot here”.

The human is Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, and he is the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University. He has created a robot lookalike of himself, and made a public appearance of it at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress.

My Source reveals that Ishiguro has created other robots such as Geminoid, a female model tht can be used as window dressing. He even has a robot roadshow, and they can act out a show with some human expressions. He has said that he made his robots too perfect, and stated they were “more humanlike than humans”. I think he paraphrased a line from Blade Runner, which I think I’ll have to cover on Speculative Fiction Friday soon. Ishiguro has coined the term “trans humanity” to describe the ambiguity between where humans end and tech begins.

Ishiguro has joked that he could use a robot to do lectures when he is on the road. I honestly don’t think that he should have been joking about it. I honestly think we are heading into a robotic age, but it won’t be like the one that Asimov described, at least not yet. We are definitely heading into the age of telepresence, like the VGo

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I think it is interesting that we have all these accessories for the iPad, so much so that an accessory had to be created to store them.

After all, if you have a stylus, earbuds, charging cables, and so on, this can take up a lot of space in whatever you are using to hold your iPad. The Smart Cargo is able to carry all of them by attaching itself to the iPad smart Cover using magnets, and it is triangular for a reason. Can you figure it out? That’s right, when you turn the Smart Cover into a stand, that triangle shape goes right in the middle of it.

So, this sounds like a terrific project, doesn’t it? I agree. Unfortunately, it is a Kickstarter project, which means that you will need to donate to get it to the market. Personally, I think it is pretty ingenious, and I wish the creator Dotan Saguy a lot of luck. If you wish to donate, feel free to click here

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I realize that I don’t review speculative films that are recent, and I suppose that whatever hype this film has will soon be discontinued by whatever new summer movie that is coming out, which will be that new Superman flick.

I’m going to start this article by just saying that I didn’t really like this film. This isn’t to say that I absolutely hated this film, any more than I hated Star Trek III. It’s just that the odd-numbered Star Trek films of the past were not the franchise’s best foot forward, and I don’t think Into Darkness was their best effort. Perhaps in the new Star Trek series, the even numbered ones will be the weaker wessels, I mean, vessels.

Granted, this film was a good step for the famous franchise owned by Paramount as it takes the normally utopian Star Trek crew and gives it a darker look. I always felt that Star Trek conflicts were based on keeping the peace rather than all-out war, and this is our first foray into it all out bloody conflict. In short, Star Trek always looked very neat, like the interior of the Enterprise, but this feels like some dystopian stuff going on, and it is welcome.

The problem is that it isn’t well-executed. You know how a lot of action films begin with a sequence that is unrelated to the rest of the film? I’m sure there is a proper name for this type of beginning, but just think about all the James Bond films. Now, it has been established from the J.J. Abrams Star Trek first film that we have rebooted this universe, so this is a crew that is in a parallel timeline to that of the crew of the original late 1960′s series.

The opening feels weak, an excuse to use special effects to stop a volcano that is about to erupt on an alien world. It feels like I am watching an episode of one of the other Star Trek series, only I haven’t been given time to care about these aliens. Considering that the first season of Star Trek had a lot of interesting conflicts, couldn’t they have rewritten an ending from one of those episodes and incorporated it into the film? Heck, they are already rewriting the entire universe of the original Star Trek series, I say you need to go all out. They actually mention an episode when Scotty talks about “the Mudd Incident”. Could you not start out with some Romulan conflict, as this film has events that take place before events that correspond with the events from the original Star Trek Series.

This is one of the weaknesses of this new Star Trek Universe, as it takes little risks. Considering that the first film was a blatant declaration that they are in a new timeline, I suppose that this scenario was put into place so, in the event that the 2009 Star Trek reboot flopped, Paramount could just sweep it under the rug and try rebooting Star Trek in some other form. As it turns out, that film was a hit, and so they can create some interesting plots with these successfully-tested iconic character reboots.

After the initial action sequence, it turns out that Kirk broke a few Starfleet rules to save Spock. Instead of being grateful, Spock reports Kirk. Yes, I have seen episodes of Star Trek where captains (and I do mean all of them, up to John Archer) have broken rules and not faced proper consequences. In the case of Kirk, he does get removed from this post, which only creates a conflict which is, at best, a subplot.

Of course, the real plot is a villain known at first as John Harrison. I say “at first” because there is a big reveal as to who this villain is, and this is also not a risk. It was pretty easy to figure out if you know the show and the eighties Star Trek movies. If you don’t, then the big reveal will not even matter, so he might as well stay named the bland “John Harrison”. There are some spoilers ahead, by the way.

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Granted, this next product is for the younger crowd, but I think this is quite interesting and yes, fun.

The Light Marker is essentially a light pen for the iPad. You can have access to a free application which has some very cool activities on it. For example, it has a connect the dots game, where you can connect dots on the screen.

By the way, you don’t need to touch the screen to get it to work! This is really cool when you want to play the Hide ‘N Seek game where the Light Marker is used as a flashlight.

All in all, I would have to say that the Light Marker is a whole lot of fun, and I would say that it is worth the price of $29.99. If you want it, feel free to get it here

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I first saw the Proximo at CTIA, but I was a little confused about how it works. I managed to get a chance to try it out, and I found it completely needed. Proximo is an App-enabled monitoring system. This means that you can take these fobs and use your iPhone to keep tabs on them.

You see the fob with the button? Say you can’t find your iPhone, so you can just push a button and a sound goes off on your iPhone. Yeah, there it is.

Here is another situation. Let’s say that you leave something with your fob behind, but you still have your iPhone. There will be an alert there, trust me. You can also buy additional tags to track important items. The best part, you can look at

According to the official Kensington site

, a mobile phone is lost or stolen every 3.5 seconds. I think what Proximo shows us is that people need some sort of theft deterrent for their smartphone. The battery is good for about six months, and you can personalize the Fobs with customizable alarm tones.

If you want to get in on this, get over to the Kensington Site

and lay down about $59.99. By the way, if you want to see more, check out this video here .

Now that E3 is about to wrap up soon, depending on when this posts. We should talk about what the big console companies announced at the biggest video game convention of the year.

The Wii U is already out, and I suppose there is only a few new games that I look forward to like Super Mario World 3D. But Sony has the PS4 coming out this Christmas, and Xbox One is also coming from Microsoft.

The PS4 is been announced as something of a real crowd pleaser. The reason why is because PS4 users will be able to share, sell, rent, or lend any game without any restrictions. Oh my gosh, the whole game field is changing. I honestly don’t know how will this affect the entire game environment.

By the way, I heard there is a problem that the XBox One

needs to be Internet connected. Okay, that could be a problem for those who use Microsoft gaming consoles in places that are not connected.

Okay, let’s get to the prices. The Sony PS4 is $399 and the XBox One will be $499.

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Just so I can get the disclaimer out of the way, I received the Galaxy S4 Zoom press release this morning, but the picture is from some other source, so it isn’t really official.

The Galaxy S4 Zoom is something that I thought I would see eventually, and it is a smartphone that really can be used as a camera. Yes, practically every smartphone has a camera these days, but this one has a 10x Optical Zoom, 16 Megapixel CMOS Sensor, OIS, and Xenon Flash.

I’m not certain how this works, but there is a Zoom Ring, a “simple and intuitive way to access the Galaxy S4 Zoom’s key feature”. You can share a photo while on the phone, and there are also features like Quick Launch and Shortcut features.

Well, there are also features known as Photo Suggest and Smart Mode for your settings. Then there is Story Album, just like what is on Galaxy S4. I’ll be reviewing that one next week.

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and Photo Source