Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i Popular Mechanics South Africa

By now, you should be well into the swing of sculpting that new, leaner, meaner you. You remember, the body you solemnly resolved to construct as 2017 burst noisily into life. If you can even squeeze your way into the gym – and please don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that you’re too big to get through the turnstiles. The thing is, this is the time of year that fitness centres groan under the burden of masses of heaving, glistening bodies hyper-energetically attempting to sweat off Festive Season excesses. You are not alone in this. As one whose job description involves playing with stuff – euphemistically described as populating our Tested section – Lindsey Schutters is undertaking a test of a different sort. He’s testing out a lifestyle change…

The Cape Town City Hall will be turned into a massive multi-level club where master international beat makers, like the UK’s Nightmares on Wax and Germany’s Boris Brejecha, will drop thundering basslines alongside more than 30 local acts including Rudeboyz, DJ Kenzhero, DJ Lag and many more. Apart from the core music fiesta, the festival will also host a series of satellite events and workshops in the run-up to the main event. The Design Indaba has put Cape Town on the world map as a hotbed of innovation and will be back again at Artscape from Friday, 11 February to Sunday, 20 February 2017. From engaging with intellectuals at the conference to voting for South Africa’s Most Beautiful Object and seeing design-inspired flicks at the film festival, you will find…

Late on a Saturday evening your phone buzzes. You’re out at dinner and the conversation is going well, so you ignore it. Then another buzz. After the third one, you check to see what jokes are circulating the family Whatsapp group and mute it. But it isn’t your family. It’s your fridge. You need to buy milk and cheese. Further down the notifications list, you can tell that the TV was unplugged and, importantly, the airconditioning is trying to regulate the temperature because the window is open. You get home to realise that you were robbed. Completely cleaned out, even the fridge. Your house tried to warn you, but you didn’t listen. It’s okay, though, because the virtual neighbourhood watch can piece together the incident from the suburb’s security cameras.…

Smart homes are safe homes and a safe home brings peace of mind. But peace of mind is something that people living in informal settlements are rarely afforded due to the constant threat of fire. Lumkani is a unique device that is trying to change that. Lumkani is not just a blue box; it is a heat detector like no other. Meaning “watch out” in Xhosa, Lumkani alerts communities when they are in danger of fire. Developed in 2014 by UCT student Francois Petousis and his supervisor Samuel Ginsberg, Lumkani measures the rate of increase of heat in homes and sets off an alarm if that rate is rising too fast. The idea for Lumkani came to Petousis and his colleague Paul Mesarcik in 2014 when a fire ravaged Khayelitsha…

In the 1800s, we thought the telephone was amazing. Now we have hybrid computer phones in our pockets. Flat-screen TVs impressed us in the early 2000s, but that was before we’d seen HD. Which was before we’d seen OLED TVs. And there’s no way the guy who invented the microwave knew he’d indirectly spawned an entire convenience food industry. But for every useful creation, there is a useless one. For every person inventing the PC in his garage, there’s someone thinking up the recumbent bike. It can be hard to tell what technological feats are worthy of our time and admiration. That’s why we’re here. As a magazine, we support advancement. But we also realise that sometimes – just sometimes – there is such a thing as a bad idea.…

Dakine, the surfboard accessories company, has always been better known for outfitting its packs and bags to best accommodate things like surf leashes and helmets. Now, it’s focusing on transporting easy-access soda and beer in what is clearly the mullet of backpacks. Up top, it’s all business: 28 litres of storage capacity for your regular gear plus a protected pocket for sunglasses and your phone. Down below, it’s a party with a separate compartment that holds 12 cans and ice packs. The best part, though, is a zippered side dispenser. You can pull out a drink without having to take off the pack. Take into account the three insulated cosies and bottle opener on the shoulder strap and you’re a roving, unencumbered good-time Charlie. A few weeks ago Facebook notified…

Not since Mary ingeniously upcycled a manger, or Moses drifted down the river Nile in a basket woven from reeds, has the cradle had such significance. SNOO is a collaborative effort between Happiest Baby – a company started by paediatrician and child development specialist Dr Harvey Karp – and Yves Behar, founder and principal designer at fuseproject, to create the world’s smartest and safest baby bed. This intelligent cradle responds to unhappy babies by gently moving at a rhythm that mimics the movement babies feel in the womb. The movements, coupled with comforting shushing sounds, are said to promote the infants’ sleep. Dr Karp says SNOO’s effect on babies can be seen within days: babies become better sleepers. Even better: parents get much-needed rest. What’s special about SNOO: • Gentle,…

BY 2020, THREE OUT OF EVERY FOUR OF YOUR CONSUMER INTERACTIONS will not be face to face with another human. Instead, the majority of your shopping will be self-service – using chatbots and VR – according to new research by computer technology company Oracle. The Oracle report, “Can virtual experiences replace reality?” polled 800 senior marketing and sales professionals in France, the Netherlands, South Africa and the UK. Undertaken with Coleman Parkes Research, it targeted the areas of manufacturing and high-tech, online retail and telecommunications. It revealed how the use of emerging technologies is set to surge by 2020. Seventy-seven percent of brands expect to provide customer experiences through virtual reality in the next four years, while 79 percent expect to serve customers through chatbots. It comes as no surprise,…

SOME SOUNDS CAN SOOTHE THE SOUL (think great music), some can drive you crazy (think yapping dog) and some, like a warning toot on a hooter, can save your life. It’s the last category of sound in particular that bothered Zuko Mandlakazi when he tried to get to grips with a close family member’s hearing disability. Being deaf was bad enough, Mandlakazi recognised, but worse than that was the apparent lack of a solution to address her daily challenges and those of the 360 million deaf people worldwide, That prompted him to start Senso. It’s a tool based on a wrist-mounted wearable device that picks up sounds and translate them into vibration and LED light. Senso (pronounced sensor) provides the convenience of alerting through vibration and light instead of sound,…

ON-EAR HEADPHONES are strange. You pay the size penalty and need to make room on the top of your head to accommodate them, but then they make your earlobes sweat and don’t do a great job of sealing off sound. Glorified airplane earphones, the lot of them. Except when they cost over R2 000 and come with all the baggage of the Beats brand. And these are the entry level pair. And they are chained to the device you’re listening to by a non-removable cable. Yes, in an age where Apple has removed the headphone jack on the iPhone, Apple subsidiary Beats Electronics brought a corded product to market. It isn’t all folly, though. You wouldn’t want your earphones to fail on you at the office, forcing you to endure…

Home automation has steadily trickled down from the high-end to the mass market. The kind of functionality previously limited to specialist installations using expensive custom-designed systems based on either a single ecosystem, or cobbled together from a range of products, is now available off the shelf. Adding to the speed of uptake, manufacturers are making products compatible with a particular protocol or standard, such as Z-Wave. You don’t need to be an electronics tech to set-up, either: most of these require only limited DIYing before you’re up and running. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. The ease of use of a one-make solution could turn into a dead end as components or software become obsolete. Mixing and matching promises more versatility, traded off against the possibility of incompatibility…

OUTSIDE A LARGE WAREHOUSE in Pittsburgh, in an area along the Allegheny River that was once home to dozens of factories and foundries, but now has shops and restaurants, I’m waiting for a different kind of technological revolution to arrive. I check my phone, look up, and notice it’s already here. A white Ford Fusion, its roof bedazzled with futuristic-looking sensors, is idling nearby. Two people sit up front – one monitoring a computer, the other behind the wheel – but the car is in control. I hop in, press a button on a touch screen, and sit back as the self-driving Uber takes me for a ride. As we zip out onto the road towards downtown, the car stays neatly in its lane, threading deftly between an oncoming car…

Hod Lipson’s laboratory at Columbia University is a place designed to nurture the human instinct to tinker. The space itself is pretty basic: linoleum floor, white walls, natural wood tables. Wires, markers, textbooks and glue bottles cover most surfaces: the detritus of students designing, making, refining and tweaking. Robotic models line the shelves: a robot with giant plastic wings that look like a housefly’s, miniature machines with exposed silver gears, geometric robotic skeletons. There are laser cutters and microscopes and welding masks hung on hooks. Pushed up against a wall, a robotic arm bears a paper sign: “DANGER. Robot moves without warning. KEEP AWAY.” Lipson became a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia in 2015, after 14 years as a professor at Cornell University. He is a pioneer in the…

Scrub Daddy is a brightly coloured smiley-face sponge, with holes for the eyes and the mouth. It’s ugly. But it works. Invented by the former owner of an automotive buffing company, the Scrub Daddy uses a temperature-dependent polymer-based foam called FlexTexture, which was originally invented to help mechanics clean their hands. In warm water, the sponge’s texture changes, becoming softer and more malleable. When the water is switched back to cold, the sponge increases in roughness, easily scraping away old soap scum and mildew. And it smiles at you the whole time. No matter what it’s covered in. A BATTERY FOR YOUR HOUSE Tesla’s new Powerwall banks energy in an aesthetically pleasing reservoir so you can power your home with solar energy at night. It is a model of utopian…

Compiled by ANTHONY DOMAN anthony@ramsaymedia.co.za Romeo isn’t really the robot’s name, just one coined by our bubbly tour guide. Romeo is blue and has the typical lean, mechanical frame bent at a 45-degree angle. And yet, at the Bentley factory in Crewe, Romeo is unique: in this 30-hectare manufacturing facility, he’s the only evidence of automation. Romeo’s sole purpose is to place sealant around Bentley windscreens. Once done, he is not allowed to position the windscreen into its aperture, as he would have done if this were any other car manufacturing facility. Like everything else here, that job is done by hand. Crewe is home to the biggest collection of Bentleys at any one time anywhere in the world. But on these exact foundations, the Rolls Royce V12 27-litre Merlin…

HOT OR COLD, it doesn’t matter what end of the heat spectrum you’re coming from: too much of either can be a bad thing. That said, keeping our homes within the habitable “goldilocks zone” during our hot summers has already become a financial burden for many South Africans and it’s only going to get worse. It’s a double whammy, because as global warming pushes temperatures up, so our electricity tariffs escalate. It’s the worst nightmare for any lover of air conditioning. You probably haven’t got a fancy offgrid home, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your dwelling more thermally efficient and save some hard-earned cash. Like spending it on Stumbelbloc’s affordable DIY building block, which is so thermally efficient it boasts a 60-minute fireproof rating. Blocking cold just as…

MEASURED AGAINST the R1 400 cost of replacing a battery in a colleague’s stranded car – including the callout fee to the battery centre – the cost of maintaining battery health using an external device starts to make sense. Particularly when the battery is intermittently or inadequately charged. The Swedish-developed Ctek battery maintenance system provides a convenient means of checking on your battery’s health and, where necessary, restoring it to good health. Ctek’s Bluetooth-enabled Battery Sense works in conjunction with a free iPhone or Android app and allows multiple batteries to be monitored simultaneously. That’s particularly useful for seldom used batteries such as those on motorbikes, jet skis and ski-boats. It syncs automatically to your mobile phone via Bluetooth. According to the local distributors Charging Systems Africa, push notification is…

A Cape Town security technology startup based in has spent nearly four years developing Sentian 3i, a system designed to make off-the-shelf security smarter – while at the same time simpler to operate. Sentian 3i connects your alarm, CCTV and home automation to the Cloud and to your phone, allowing these systems to do things they cannot do individually: Identifying what has triggered an alarm by sending the user a 12-second video clip. The ability to respond to an alarm event, even remotely, by carrying out actions such as pressing a panic button, opening gates, turning on security lights or viewing CCTV. Substituting multiple, outdated and often counter-intuitive keypads and systems to access and control your alarm, CCTV or home automation with a single, intuitive interface, available on multiple platforms.…

We’re all guilty of amassing stuff. This is called hoarding. It’s a disorder in which we can’t bear to part with possessions. As distinct from collecting: while collectors may feel anguish of their own at the thought of parting with a prized collectable, their activity has its compensations. Collecting is often satisfying, methodical, and, for the astute, lucrative. You are greeted by your childhood when you step into Sergio Pereira’s home. There’s Batman, The Joker, Wolverine and every comic book hero or villain you could think of, or, at least, that a 31-year-old like Pereira could think of. Pereira has a love for comic books and graphic novels, overshadowed only by his passion for explaining the difference between comic books and graphic novels. “Comic books are single issue, usually have…

Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree cameras have dropped to GoPro prices. (The 360fly is only about R4 000.) The only real issue is editing. In terms of field of view, you’re looking at six to ten times more raw footage with a 360 camera. As with drone footage, unless you do something truly VR-worthy – tour an Air Force base, dive with sharks, visit a cat café – only a portion of what 360 cameras capture is worth looking at. For now, the final video won’t be as focused or compelling as a tight 2D clip. It can’t be. Especially if the person you show the video to doesn’t have a VR headset or Google Cardboard. But this is about looking forward. Not to a day when everyone is using YouTube 360, which, honestly,…

There’s an entire subspecies of humans who ride and collect only old bikes. They are as numerous as the insects hitting your helmet at night. Now, with most bikers it’s a constant battle to be the coolest guy on the road. But that’s especially the case with these folks. They’ll rattle off endless stats that only bike nerds seem to comprehend. It’s mostly posturing. Vintage riders have a certain rite of passage to biker manhood and that’s out-statting another biker. I know this isn’t the only category of male behaviour in which this happens – sports, cars, carpentry and baking that perfect muffin all come to mind – but it’s even more amplified when it comes to vintage bikes. There is one man I met on the road to understanding…

When I was casting around for furniture to take to college, I found a red army footlocker I’d never seen before. It probably came from the garage. My mom, who once bought a pick-up truck just to bring home tables and chests of drawers left on the side of the road, helped me paint and stencil it so it would match my dorm-room decor. In the fifteen years since, the footlocker followed me to nine apartments in three cities, filled with Halloween costumes, old photo albums, Christmas ornaments. Eventually I learnt that it had once belonged to my stepdad’s father, Richard Purnell, who had done a tour at Osan Air Base in Korea as an Army corporal in the early 1960s, after the signing of the armistice that unofficially ended…