Michael ramses

You can suffer more than culture shock when holidaying abroad: there is a risk of electric shock too if you take your home-bought gadgets with you or are using foreign electrical goods bought from back-street stores.

Most travellers know that plugging in a hairdryer in Helsinki or an iPod charger in India requires an adaptor, but that is not the only consideration, says the Electrical Safety Council charity (ESC). Some adapters are not up to the job, especially for appliances that need an earth connection, such as hairdryers and steam irons. If you are packing electrical items this summer, look for the safety standard BS5733 on any adapter and always buy from a reputable source, preferably in the UK.

The perils of buying electrical equipment in foreign countries from uncertain sources were highlighted by the case of seven-year-old Connor O’Keefe, who was electrocuted on a family holiday to Thailand in December 2006. He was playing with his Game Boy, which was plugged into a faulty charger bought in Thailand.

Haidee Ryan, campaign manager at the ESC, says: ‘Travellers should check ahead and also be vigilant at their destination, especially in Third World countries. Make sure there are no bare wires or light fittings without bulbs and report anything unusual like equipment that is giving off a buzzing sound or a burning smell. ‘

If the country you are visiting has a different voltage (this can vary from 100 to 240 volts; in the UK it’s 230 volts), you might need a voltage transformer or converter, unless the appliance or its power supply has dual voltage rates.

If the frequency (the speed of the current) differs from the UK’s 50Hz, as it does in the US and Mexico, where it is 60Hz, your appliance might not work properly. According to the ESC, a 50Hz clock may run faster in these countries. Holidaymakers unsure of a country’s voltage could look at a lightbulb, where the voltage is usually printed.

Electrical retailer Currys reports an increase in the number of customers with second homes abroad who are seeking advice on technical problems because they have kitted out their foreign property with equipment bought in the UK. The company says differing radio frequencies, manufacturer programming and unpredictable electrical power can render this equipment useless. Radios, DVD players and TVs can cause particular frustrations.

John Wright, electrical engineer for Currys, says: ‘While with many household products it’s just a matter of swapping the plugs, others may only offer limited use, or in some cases will not work at all. People who are purchasing products to take abroad should always check with the manufacturer or store so they are not left disappointed.’ Homeowners are also advised that adapters are for temporary use only. ‘If you are living abroad you should make longer-term arrangements.’

Currys warns shoppers that digital radios may let them down abroad: just 20 per cent of stations in France and Spain and 5 per cent in Italy transmit at the required frequency. Televisions more than five years old are unlikely to work, and even the newer models will offer limited access to digital services.

The hazards of using incompatible electrical equipment also face visitors to the UK. The ESC says fire services report a rise in the number of incidents caused by visitors using the wrong plugs, particularly eastern Europeans using two-pin plugs in three-pin sockets and jamming a screwdriver into the third hole.

Phil Buckle, director of the ESC, says: ‘While two-pin plugs are safe to use in their countries of origin, they are not designed for direct use with UK electrical installations.’ He said eastern Europeans could easily convert their appliances for safe use in the UK with a three-pin conversion plug.

There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.

It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.

But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)

The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.

HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.

Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.

The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.

The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .

HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.

Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made

Cons: Slow processor; big power brick

View the HP2133 Mini-Note here

The Russian president has warned that government officials who cannot use a computer could soon be out of a job.

“They either should learn or, as they say, goodbye,” Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday in a meeting with officials in Petrozavodsk, north-west Russia. “We don’t hire people who can’t read and write. Computer literacy today is the same.”

Since taking office in May, the 42-year-old has made it his mission to modernise Russia and fight pervasive corruption. He said yesterday that if the government carried out more of its work online, it would increase transparency and make corruption more difficult to hide.

He added that there had been no real progress towards putting documents, government purchase orders or the results of government-funded research online, despite years of talk about establishing an “electronic government”. He blamed the foot-dragging on poor computer skills.

“Civil servants who don’t have elementary computer skills cannot work effectively,” Medvedev said. “Computer literacy should be part of job evaluations.”

The government should help increase internet access, he added. Internet penetration in Russia is among the lowest in Europe, with only 12% of people aged 15 or older regularly online, according to a study by the internet research firm comScore. But it also has the fastest-growing number of internet users.

The Russian leader has often pointed to his use of the internet. He told Itogi magazine in March that he was fond of watching the television news online.

An ancient Greek “computer” used to calculate the movements of the sun, moon and planets has been linked to Archimedes after scientists deciphered previously hidden inscriptions on the device.

X-ray images of the bronze mechanism, which was recovered from a shipwreck more than a century ago, also revealed a sporting calendar that displays the cycle of the prestigious “crown” games, including the Olympics, which were held every four years.

Corroded remains of the device were found in 1901 by spongedivers, who happened upon the shipwreck of a Roman merchant vessel while sheltering from a storm near the tiny Greek island of Antikythera. The ship, which was laden with treasures from the Greek world including bronze statues, pottery and glassware, is believed to have met its fate in the notoriously dangerous stretch of water en route to Italy.

The remarkably complex machine has been dated to around 150 BC, but it has puzzled researchers who have spent decades examining its 80 or so corroded fragments in the hope of learning how it worked and perhaps even who made it.

The device is thought to be the earliest known mechanism to use geared wheels, a feat of engineering that was not to reappear for at least another thousand years in the astronomical clocks of medieval Europe.

Writing in the latest issue of the journal Nature, researchers from Britain and the US describe how they used three-dimensional X-ray imaging to decipher previously unnoticed inscriptions on the back of the device, which was enclosed in a wooden casing the size of a large dictionary.

The images revealed the names of the different months, which were used only in certain parts of north western Greece and Sicily. Intriguingly, it is the same calendar that would have been used in Syracuse, the Sicilian city and home to the great mathematician Archimedes, who is known from ancient texts to have built astronomical machines.

“We know Archimedes did mechanical astronomy here 100 years earlier and this could be from his home city, it could have been inspired by his work, or it could have been a local tradition that he started,” said Alexander Jones from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, who examined the fragments with British researchers John Steele and Tony Freeth.

The mechanism is likely to have survived only through the good fortune of being aboard the ill-fated vessel, since bronze and other metals at the time were frequently melted down to make other objects when they fell into disrepair or were no longer needed.

“There must have been an unbroken tradition of craftsmen doing this kind of work, but they didn’t write it down in books for the most part, they were teaching through workshops and appreticeships, so we’re not going to get much other evidence,” Jones added.

Further images of the mechanism revealed a previously unknown sporting calendar that marked the times of the Olympiad cycle, naming the prominent Nemean, Isthmian, Pythian and Olympic games. The events were so popular that truces were often called in times of war to allow people safe passage to attend them.

The unexpected discovery of the sporting calendar suggests the device was more than a mere tool for teaching and popularising the workings of the cosmos. “The machine as a whole was not just showing high science, showing astronomy, but was linking science to the cultural cycles of the Greeks,” said Jones.

The machine, which was probably driven by a hand-operated crank, used a collection of inter-meshing gears to calculate the positions of the sun and moon, the dates of eclipses, and possibly the positions of the five planets known about at the time. “Our idea of what ancient astronomy was doing at the time is very much a patchwork of fragmentary bits of evidence that start fitting together when we relate them to this,” said Jones.

Freecom Media Streamer 450 with a one-terabyte hard drive that can play to your TV, I wanted so much to like you. For that vast, vast hard drive, for one thing: with 1,000GB of storage, you’d never run out of space. Surely. And for having both wireless and wired connections, for another.

The metal body is neat, though admire it from a distance; close up, the plastic fronting is held on with some hefty screws, but not in enough numbers to make it stable. There’s the now-obligatory blue LED on the front to show it’s working, and a few buttons, but really you’re meant to operate it from across the room, using the remote.

That’s where the disappointments start. First of all, it’s only a media streamer - it can’t record content from your TV, which these days begins to feel like a necessity. Second, the onscreen interface is truly awful, with horrible, blocky type. Why not aim high with the interface? There’s an HDMI (high definition) output, but I didn’t get the chance to try it. Would the blocky type look any better on that, I wonder? For £350-odd, can’t someone find a designer?

Third, how do you enter a hex number (0-9, a-f) using a remote control that only has 0-9? (You have to be a bit inventive, it turns out.) Fourth, I simply couldn’t get that vast, vast hard drive to play nicely on my network, whether via wireless or Ethernet: it remained somewhere out there in the ether, refusing to answer my machine’s requests to speak to it. So I had to go with what was on the loan machine.

So it’s a huge hard drive - don’t forget that - which (in theory) you can use to store anything. It can also work (again, in theory; I couldn’t confirm it) as an FTP server over the network and the net - though I have to say that I wouldn’t recommend this, since you’d have to change the default user and password. Truly, the setup menu is a confusing mess. At least the main screen - where you choose what to play, whether audio, photos or video - is better, and it can play tons of (especially video) formats. One point: the hard drive is fanless, which means the box gets hot.

But in my continual search for the best possible way to both record and play back content from your TV, the Freecom Media Streamer comes up short in the first part (doesn’t record). On the playback side, why do you need a hard drive right by your TV? Might as well separate the hard drive from the playback part - which is what Neuros Technology’s OSD, reviewed here in February, does: it can record and play back via your TV over the network or a local drive, the interface is good, and while it doesn’t do HD, it does everything but. That’s still the one to beat. Pity. I liked the idea of a terabyte drive.

Pros: Large hard drive; can act as an FTP server

Cons: Awful screen menus; no TV recording

freecom.com