CES is the biggest technology show in the world each year, so CES 2018 has undoubtedly set the tone for things to come for the next 12 months. Long story short, it’s going to be a good year for consumer tech.

Samsung “The Wall”

The Wall is the World’s First Modular MicroLED 146-inch TV. They feature 8K resolution, and fewer panels can be used to create a TV that isn’t quite as massive. Samsung hasn’t yet announced pricing or availability for The Wall, but this is undoubtedly one of the most impressive creations yet from the world’s #1 TV maker.

LG’s 2017 OLED TV

LG’s 2017 OLED TV lineup was arguably the best in the world last year, and the company continued its hot streak at CES 2018 by announcing the new LG Signature OLED TV W8. This stunning 77-inch television is less than 3mm thick, and it uses a special zero-gap mounting system to hang flush on any wall. OLED TV creates superior images by using self-lighting pixels. By eliminating the backlight and replacing it with pixels
that switch on and off individually, OLED screens are able to produce perfect black and display over a billion colours.

Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector

With an artificial marble top, aluminum frame and wooden shelf, the LSPX-A1 transforms your living environment while complementing its decor. Inside its furniture-like design is a sophisticated 4K projector featuring large screen and Ultra Short Throw technologies, and it can sit just 9.6 inches from the wall. Despite that close distance, the 2,500-lumen laser projector is capable of beaming a screen that measures up to 120 inches diagonally. The same enclosure houses a Glass Sound Speaker with 360° sound, ensuring the best possible home theater experience without the need for any additional equipment. It’s aimed at the highest segment of the high-end market, and will carry a price tag of $30,000 when it launches.

AURA

Smart home security was a big theme at this year’s show, and the new Aura was one of the smartest solutions on display at CES 2018. This futuristic motion detection system doesn’t use cameras or infrared sensors like existing solutions. Instead, Aura monitors the Wi-Fi radio waves that fill every home and reads the patterns as they bounce off of walls and objects. When these patterns are interrupted, Aura knows that motion is occurring and it can set off alarms or trigger smart home events as a result. Plug the Aura Beacons right into the wall for a quick and easy setup.

UltraBright MultiView Screen

California-based startup MirraViz isn’t a household name yet, but this new screen could change all that. This revolutionary projector screen allows users to aim two different projectors at the same surface and produce two completely different images. The special display design bounces each projected image back in the same direction from which it came, allowing two people in two different positions to see different images on the same screen. Comes in 52″, 75″ and 94″ inch displays

Two major computer processor security bugs, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, affect nearly every device made in the last 20 years. The ramifications of how much these bugs will impact computing is still playing out, but it could lead to compromised servers for cloud platforms and other farther-reaching effects.

The Meltdown and Spectre bugs affect a variety of CPUs, including Intel chips and ARM chips on mobile devices. The resulting attacks impact every major operating system in some way. Companies have rushed to patch the vulnerabilities, and it’s still unclear whether the patches will result in significant performance slowdowns. More broadly, security teams are likely to struggle with variants and other consequences of the bug for years to come.

Here’s what you need to know.

Apple confirmed on Thursday that all Mac and iOS devices are affected by the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws that have roiled the computing industry for the past 24 hours, resulting in a race to patch operating systems and cloud computing infrastructure at the highest levels. The company says it plans to issue patches for Safari on macOS and iOS to better help devices defend against Spectre, which is more easily exploitable and affects devices using chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM. Apple Watch devices are not affected by Meltdown in any way, the company confirms.

Microsoft just released several updates aimed at helping protect Surface devices from the two security vulnerabilities exposed by CPU bugs. Installing the newest patch is one of the main ways users can protect themselves from Meltdown and Spectre.

The following Surface devices running Windows 10 can be updated with the new patch:

• Surface Pro 3
• Surface Pro 4
• Surface Book
• Surface Studio
• Surface Pro Model 1796
• Surface Laptop
• Surface Pro with LTE Advanced
• Surface Book 2

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the updates are currently rolling out now, and they can be downloaded by either checking with the device’s internal update system or by visiting the Microsoft Download Center. The company stresses, however, to wait for the appropriate firmware updates specifically related to Meltdown and Spectre, so as not to download older versions.

Protecting a Windows PC is complicated right now, and there’s still a lot of unknowns. Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla are all issuing patches for their browsers as a first line of defense. Firefox 57 (the latest) includes a fix, as do the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Edge for Windows 10. Google says it will roll out a fix with Chrome 64, which is due to be released on January 23rd. The best thing to do right now is ensure you have the latest Windows 10 updates and BIOS updates from Dell, HP, Lenovo, or one of the many other PC makers.

What is Cloud Networking?

Cloud Networking provides centralized management, visibility, and control without the cost and complexity of controller appliances or overlay management software.

Cisco Meraki products are built from the ground up for cloud management, and come out of the box with centralized management, layer 7 device and application visibility, real time web-based diagnostics, monitoring, reporting, and much, much more. Cisco Meraki deploys quickly and easily, without training or proprietary command line interfaces. Cisco Meraki now has a complete line of cloud networking products that power over 20,000 customer networks, including massive global deployments with tens of thousands of devices.

How it Works

Reliable, high-performance Cisco Meraki wireless APs, switches, and security appliances are deployed in your campus or remote branches. Cisco Meraki devices automatically connect to the Cisco Meraki cloud over SSL, register with your network, and download their configuration. You have complete visibility and control over your entire network over the web. Configure thousands of devices, run diagnostics, or view reports with a few clicks. Tasks such as RF optimization and VPN configuration are automated by the cloud, while firmware updates and application signatures are seamlessly deployed over the web.

eStorm Apple Authorised Service Centre at Springfield Xmas Closure

24th of December – 1st of January CLOSED.

All other days our usual hours and opening times apply.

Have a safe and fabulous Xmas

The Sydney Opera House is this week the venue for Samsung’s ‘Dance Discovery’ program, which helps students with special needs engage with the arts. Three linked workshops make use of the vendor’s technology, including its Gear VR system. “By integrating technology into the heart of the workshops we were able to enhance learning outcomes and produce an interactive workshop that students with special needs were able to fully engage in,” Samsung’s corporate social responsibility manager, Tess Ariotti, said in a statement. “All aspects of the activity were created through consultation with the teachers of these students, making sure the workshops were easily accessible for students of all levels,” Ariotti said.

(Techworld)   

For businesses, failures to the Network can have a devastating effect. As a result, organisations are implementing strategies to diminish risks across core business functions and processes.

In most businesses the network is the foundation on which data, applications, and people are connected. As such, it is essential that organisations have a network disaster recovery plan – that is a set of procedures that outline how best to respond to any interruption of network services, regardless of whether it’s a natural disaster or an internal incident.

The best approach to disaster recovery focuses primarily on planning and prevention – for example, by identifying areas where the business can be threatened and supporting activities that reduce risk.

• Detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible
• Notify any affected party so that they can act
• Isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread
• Repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed

These points are collectively called risk management activities. When executed well, disaster recovery procedures save large sums of money. The financial impact to corporations of even a few hours of network downtime or lost web connectivity runs easily into big money.

While creating your recovery plans, here’s what organisations need to consider:

• Possible threats to a network include: attacks (internal and external, including attacks from hackers and viruses); blackouts; physical damage (everything from sabotage, weather, and high voltage, to accidents, fires, and water damage); misconfigurations; and failed updates.
• For a true understanding of the impact of downtime, organisations must ask themselves key questions like: Who will be affected by a downtime of a certain service? Which dependencies does this service have? What is the impact for the business? How long is an acceptable downtime?
• The cost of downtime and find technologies that will support their activities with optimum investment. One formula that might help with this calculation is  costs < (loss in revenue X probability of occurrence).
• Organisations must have a clear understanding of who will be informed internally and who needs to be informed as the situation escalates. In addition, external contacts need to be identified within relevant authorities, vendors, partners, and even customers – ensuring transparent and open lines of communication during a disaster.

Its difficult for any business to predict or protect themselves from every disaster, with the right tools organisations can minimise the damage of the unexpected and keep themselves running.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a web-based development platform which allows users without specialised programming or 3D expertise to create and run virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.

Currently in invitation-only preview mode, Amazon Sumerian allows users to build scenes and import objects in its WebGL and WebVR based editor, and script the logic that controls how objects act. Sumerian runs on popular virtual and augmented reality hardware including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and iOS mobile devices (through support for Apple’s ARKit) with support for Android ARCore is coming soon, the company said.

Sumerian also includes easy to create and animate 3D characters, called Hosts. After some basic gender, voice and language options, the Hosts can be integrated with Amazon’s automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding engine Lex to understand user questions and Amazon’s Polly so input text can be expressed in a ‘lifelike’ way in response.

Potential use cases suggested by AWS include creating a virtual classroom to train remote employees and onboard new ones, or a virtual environment that enables people to tour a building. Designing and editing AR and VR applications in Sumerian is free, although you will need to have an AWS account to get started. Users will be charged based on the amount of storage used for the 3D assets stored in Sumerian and the volume of traffic generated by scenes, plus any other services like Lex or Polly that Sumerian Hosts use.

I’m salivating over the new iMac Pro, due for release in December. Apple have gone far, far beyond, creating an iMac packed with the most staggeringly powerful collection of workstation-class graphics, processors, storage, memory and I/O of any Mac ever.

A lean, mean dream machine, an iMac with up to 18 cores is an entirely different creature than its predecessor wiht 8 cores. Add Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.5GHz, and iMac Pro has the power and flexibility to balance superb multicore processing with great single-thread performance. So whether you’re rendering files, editing 4K video, creating real-time audio effects or compiling your next five-star app, it all gets done at lightning-fast speeds.

The Radeon Pro Vega graphics card is more than three times faster than any previous iMac GPU, packing the power of a double-wide graphics card into a single chip. All of which translates to higher frame rates for VR, real-time 3D rendering, more lifelike special effects and gameplay at maximum settings.

As you’d expect from this machine, there are plenty of high-speed ports to create a high-performance workstation. You’ve got four Thunderbolt 3 ports, so you can connect two 5K monitors and transfer data at a blazing-fast 40 Gbps.

Its 27-inch screen is dazzling, 500 nits of brightness across its 14.7 million pixels. Along with a P3 colour and support for over a billion colours, iMac Pro delivers spectacular true-to-life images.

So far the general consensus is that people are loving the iPhone X. The iPhone X is entirely new and entirely different and it marks a complete departure from iPhones of previous years.

One of the coolest features of iOS11 is a new Automatic Setup option that allows you to quickly transfer key details from your old iPhone to your new one. Similar to the Apple TV setup process, you simply hold both iPhones close to each other and you’ll see a “Set up new iPhone” prompt on the older model followed by an Apple Watch-eqsue pairing process. From there, information such as Wi-Fi credentials, Apple ID logins, and more is transferred effortlessly to your new iPhone. Coupled with restoring from iCloud, this new feature really makes the setup of the iPhone X as seamless as possible.

One big change is the removal of the Home Button. Instead there’s a new gesture that allows you to swipe up from the bottom of the display and return to the Home screen. This also means you get a new multitasking experience that allows you to just swipe between apps, similar to the four-finger gesture on the iPad.

The iPhone X is taller than previous iPhones, and that’s where a lot of that extra screen real estate is packed. You also have the home indicator along the bottom and the notch along the top, both of which eat up some of that 5.8-inch screen.

The Face ID setup process is just as easy as the Touch ID setup process. One suggestion I have heard is to make sure you setup Face ID in a natural lighting environment. A blogger initially set his up in a car, which meant there was some weird sunlight beams and whatnot. He set it up again inside and noticed an immediate improvement in detection. Apple has done an excellent job of integrating Face ID throughout iOS for things such as app logins and Keychain for passwords in Safari.

All in all, the iPhone is an incredible phone.