A Siri alternative - Maluuba

Siri has definitely been a game changer in the world of voice control on mobile devices and there are many similar apps being developed for other platforms.

I have recently come across a great app for Android called Maluuba which offers a number of Siri style functionality but also a lot more.

Maluuba can be downloaded from here http://www.maluuba.com

The interface is clean and simple to use and I was particularly impressed with the tiles on the explore tab.  Integration into  calendar and social network functionality is slick and worked well.

The voice interpretation is reliably accurate and generally understands my accent!

Maluuba is definitely an app that will be one of my favourites and offers excellent functionality.

I will post a more detailed review later.

Versus Touchpad 7 unboxing

Some people think I've turned to the dark side but I have bought an Android Tablet!

Versus Touchpad 7 from PC World (£99.99)

Night vision effect on iMovie

Do you like TV shows like "Most Haunted"?

Try out this tutorial on creating a fake night vision effect.

Running Android on the Raspberry Pi

Check out the video of Android running on my Pi here

I had my first boot of an Android system on my Raspberry Pi on Friday.  We have made many exciting uses of the Pi at home - programming, web use etc by running Android on the Pi (and therefore on the TV) would be a big step forward.

Back in July 2012 the first tentative mentions of Android running on the Pi were made.

Following the threads and links from Google I found these instructions at:

http://androidpi.wikia.com/wiki/Android_Pi_Wiki

Step 1: Download an image (this was a compressed file) from 

http://rosefire.us/~razdroid/aaa801/Gingerbread+EthernetManager.7z

Step 2: Extract the image file.

Step 3: Create the image file to a SD card (minimum 2GB) using dd or image writer which can be found here https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download

Step 4: Boot!

Running a simple time-trial it took approximately 30 second to launch an Android welcome screen and then approximately another 5 minutes before the user interface appeared.  This sadly was too slow to be useable (at the moment).

Long exposure firework photos taken in my garden

Here are a couple of long exposure photos of sparklers taken in my back garden using the Fuji FinePix S2995 from Jessops.