If you look close at the advancement of technology in past couple of years, then you’ll realize two things. First, the phones are getting bigger. Second, the laptops are getting smaller. When we’ve to name a few smaller laptops what we recall are the ones with the 12-inch screen. But, the GamePad Digital (GPD), a Chinese company is mass producing a tiny laptop after fundraising over $3million dollars in an IndieGoGo campaign. This GPD Pocket is even smaller than the smaller laptops that we’ve been seeing. The 7-inch screen laptop, is indeed small but still, comes with worth-mentioning specs.

GPD Pocket: Everything You Need to Know

GPD Pocket comes with a 7inch touchscreen Retina Display that sports a resolution of 1920*1200 resulting in odd 16:10 aspect ratio. The display is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. This tiny laptop is powered by Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor and has 4GB of RAM. It boots on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Windows 10 Home. It is 480 grams heavy and 18.5mm thick. The housing is stylish yet sturdy since it’s CNC precise all-in-one body made of magnesium and alloy. So, this tiny little thing is just as good-looking as the Apple Macbook Air or Microsoft Surface 3. As far as the ports are concerned, it has a USB 3.0, USB-C, mini HDMI and 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead of a trackpad, this laptop comes with a mouse knob like the one in older dell and Lenovo laptops. It has Bluetooth for connecting BT mouse and headphones. The company claims that the laptop will give 12hours of battery life off a charge.

Pricing and Availability:

The GPD has already closed its Indiegogo campaign, so you can’t be a backer and can’t pre-order the device. However, the device is expected to go on Sale in the US starting from June 15. The device can be bought from Indiegogo at the price of $399. Whereas, those buying from an offline retail store will have to pay $599.

Verdict:

Well, this small laptop from GPD seems impressive. Despite its small dimensions, it is still feature-rich and has the configuration that is comparable to Apple Macbook Air and Microsoft Surface 3. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, the laptop has been made tinier than it should be. So this tiny laptop with a tiny keyboard wouldn’t be a right one for me to write my stuff on the go. Well, that could be just me and you might be interested in buying a tiny laptop that you can carry around in your pocket.

We all have come across these boxes with distorted letters and asked upon to retype those displayed letters in a text box. These tests are called CAPTCHA which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In artificial intelligence, Turing test is a test for intelligence in a computer. This test is done to check if a human can distinguish a computer from a human using the replies to questions put to both.

How it all started

CAPTCHA were created in the early days of internet to prevent the access of web content by automated pieces of codes. These code could damage the integrity of the website. The whole point of these tests is to prevent SPAM on the internet. It also stops automated programs from making online purchases like all the tickets of a well awaited concert or an event to prevent the sale of the tickets in black market.

CAPTCHA has become a universal tool and an accepted part of the internet user experience. Millions of people on the internet input these CAPTCHA on a daily basis. Some companies in developing countries have taken this phenomenon as a business opportunity. These companies basically let low wage workers solve these CAPTCHA on behalf of others. They may be people such as the visually impaired or to the companies interested in advertisement.

Evolution to reCAPTCHA

Millions of people were voluntarily translating nonsensical images into text. This seemed to the creators of CAPTCHA as waste of free labor. This led to the birth of reCAPTCHA which utilized this man power to solve words rather than random letters. The creators decided to digitize all books by scanning the pages of the book. It led to the utilization of optical character recognition software to translate the words to digital text. Any word that was not correctly recognized by the software was uploaded as reCAPTCHA.

Any reCAPTCHA that was typed as the same word for the text image shown multiple times, the word would be confirmed as the text and uploaded to the eBook database. Due to this effort hundred million reCAPTCHAs were solved per day. This rate led to digitization of two and a half million books every year. Google then acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 to digitize all their Google books. Also they used it to digitize street sign from Google street view to label Google maps.

Birth of noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA

As the advancement in image recognition grew, CAPTCHA were no more a barrier for bot. As CAPTCHA were made more and more difficult, a 2014 Google analysis found that artificial intelligence could crack even the most complex CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA images with 99.8 percent accuracy where as the humans could not even solve a CAPTCHA with 50 percent accuracy. Google then launched the now familiar “I’m not a robot” checkbox know as the noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA. While it may appear to the user as a simple task, the program in the background analyzes things like the IP addresses, cookies of the user’s web activities and event the user’s mouse movement as it hovers and approaches a checkbox.

This method can pretty much distinguish a human from a bot. If the program is still not sure, a set of challenges are presented to the uses which are based on multiple image recognition problems.Google will then remember the next time the user checks a noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA. ‘noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA’ means no frustration, let people go where they are going faster and keep the bots at bay.

India launched their GSAT-9 Satellite on May 5^th 2017 by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) region. It is basically a communications and meteorology satellite. This plan was put forward by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of a satellite that serves the needs of SAARC member nations in the 18^th SAARC submit held in Nepal in 2014.

What is a communication satellite?

Well a communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunications signals. It creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. These satellites are used for television, telephone, radio, internet applications. There are over 2,000 communications satellites in Earth’s orbit of which the SAARC satellite will be one of them. Like every other machine, satellites do not last for ever. However the mission duration is estimated to be 12 years.

The SAARC satellite basically has a geostationary orbit (GEO). It orbits the Earth at an altitude of 35,786 kilometers which is about 35 times the length of the east west highway. It orbits around the earth once every 24 hours which is similar to the earth’s rotation about its axis. This means that the satellite will appear stationary to all the observer from the earth. This Satellite is specifically for TV broadcasting and telephone communication as the satellite dishes pointing toward this GEO satellite will never have to change the position. This GEO satellite is at such high altitude and has uninterrupted view of a large area of the earth. It is therefore also used for monitoring the weather and climate of the Indian Ocean.

Will it be beneficial for us?

As stated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the satellite focuses on enabling:

• full range of applications and services in the areas of telecommunication
• broadcasting applications viz television (TV)
• direct-to-home (DTH)
• very small aperture terminals (VSATs)
• tele-education and tele-medicine
• disaster management support

The launch of SAARC GSAT-9 satellite is an excellent multi-dimensional facility that is currently at our disposal. This has led to the decrease in dependency of Nepal to other foreign satellite. Nepal can now rely on its own SAARC satellite for communication with the world. However, it depends on how the Government of Nepal is going to utilize its new resource.  Do you think this is a big step for communication development in our country? Will it help to improve the rural communication infrastructure of Nepal? Well this is a question that only time can answer.

Honor 8 was a pretty well-received phone last year. It made headlines for having a perfect balance between aesthetics and power and came pretty cheap as well. Now, the new iteration of the phone, Honor 9 has been leaked showing phones from different perspectives.

Design wise the phone closely resembles the Honor 8. But there are some notable changes to the hardware of the phone. Looking at the render it looks like  Huawei has ditched the headphone jack on the phone as only the USB C port lies on the bottom and the top is completely clean. With the headphone jack removed, leakers have speculated that the new phone might come with some sort of water resistance. The fingerprint sensor has been relocated from the back to the front of the phone. And this might be the only cue to distinguish the Honor 9 from the old Honor 8. You get all the good stuff from the Honor 8 like the Dual Rear Camera, Dual LED Flash, Laser Auto Focus and IR blaster.

Besides the renders, the internals of the phone hasn’t been revealed yet. We can speculate that the phone could have a slight camera improvement, a larger battery and it can get upgraded to the latest Kirin Processor. We have to be skeptical about the renders as they are not from the official source and things can change until the time of official release.