Boot up: 3D printing, black box or data?, don't drone Africa!, and more

Plus brighter days ahead for LEDs, HTC halts KitKat for One in UK, progress bars through the ages, and mor

Black box from the Russian Superjet 100 that crashed into an Indonesian mountain, killing all on board in May 2012. Photograph: AFP/Getty

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Solidoodle 4: Testing the home 3-D printer >> Slate

Seth Stevenson:

When the Solidoodle 4 — retailing for $1,000, and vaguely resembling an obese microwave — arrived at the Slate offices, I eagerly unpacked it in my cubicle. I threaded the spool of filament (like a bobbin of yarn, if the yarn was made of ABS plastic and the bobbin was the size of a paint can) into the printer's nozzle. I connected the printer to my laptop's USB port. I fired the thing up, with a whir and a hum. I assumed I'd soon be awash in an endless supply of newly conjured 3-D stuff.
But the moment I attempted to print my first object, I realised that this device isn't really designed for the average, moderately tech-savvy consumer. It's made for people who possess either A) infinite patience, B) a preternatural attention to detail, or, preferably, C) a post-graduate degree in mechanical engineering. For example, the program you download to your computer so you can control the printer is full of buttons labeled with phrases like "Go Dump Area" and "Flow Multiply" and "Kill Slicer" and — somehow both reassuring and worrisome at the same time — "Emergency Stop."
This last function made me acutely aware that a powerful machine was perched upon my desk.

The photos are wonderful.

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Malaysia air crash: why do airlines keep 'black box' flight data trapped on planes? >> Businessweek

The answer is mostly about one issue: cost. Sending all the data from each flight in real time via satellite would be enormously expensive. A 2002 study by L-3 Aviation Recorders and a satellite provider found that a U.S. airline flying a global network would need to spend $300 million per year to transmit all its flight data, even assuming a 50 percent reduction in future satellite transmission costs. And that's just a single airline. Commercial airline disasters, meanwhile, are becoming even more uncommon as technology and techniques improve—in part thanks to lessons from past crashes—so there's little incentive for investing heavily in real-time data.
Businessweek last explored this question in July 2009 as French and Brazilian authorities searched a wide section of the Atlantic Ocean for a missing Air France (AF:FP) flight. The data recorders aboard the Airbus (AIR:FP) A330 remained missing for almost two years, some 2 miles beneath the surface, before searchers finally recovered them.

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Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy >> The Globe and Mail

Iain Marlow lets rip:

This is an international export of the libertarian ethos that tends to afflict innovators elsewhere in the Valley, such as PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who wants to build an independent island country (coincidentally, with someone who used to work at Google) or those promoting Bitcoin. Why do Google and Facebook want to soar over extremely complicated but opportunity-rich countries such as Nigeria, Mali and the Central African Republic? The answer is obvious: They want to avoid the messy realities on the ground. Presumably, they also want to avoid paying taxes. I spoke to a telecom infrastructure executive in Lagos, Nigeria, who was getting his towers blown up by Islamist extremists in Northern Nigeria. That's an unacceptable risk to most established corporations, outside of the energy sector. That's why most handset and Internet companies tend to do their encouragement of Internet adoption in Africa indirectly, such as funding innovation hubs like the Co-Creation Hub (CCHub) in Lagos…

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Nano-dot patterned sapphire substrate for LED >> DisplayBlog

Jin Kim:

Compared to a conventional flat sapphire substrate with a 385nm wavelength, the front luminance of a nano-dot patterned PSS is more than double, and total luminous flux is 1.8x. What does this mean? To attain the same brightness:
The same LEDs can be driven at 50% power.
The number of LEDs can be halved.
Of course brightness can be more than doubled using the same number of nano-dot PSS LEDs. New displays using nano-dot PSS LEDs will sport roughly double the brightness or double the battery life or somewhere in between.

Customer samples in April 2014; manufacturing intended to start in... 2016. Darn.

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KitKat update for HTC One pulled in the UK following 'difficulties' >> Android Central

While HTC America managed a speedy rollout for Android 4.4 on the HTC One, things haven't gone quite so smoothly in the UK. The country wasn't included in the first raft of European territories to get KitKat in late January. And now, a week after the company tweeted news of KitKat's arrival in Blighty, there's official news of the update being withdrawn due to "difficulties."
An HTC statement given to Android Central reads —
"We are aware that a limited number of HTC users are experiencing difficulties with the KitKat update. As a result, all FOTA updates have been temporarily suspended.…"

The US rollout wasn't trouble-free either. No word on a restart. (Here's the status page.)

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It's time for the Pebble appstore on Android, new partner apps, and SXSW! >> Pebble Blog

We're excited to announce that the Pebble Android app featuring the Pebble appstore is now available for download from the Google Play store. It's taken a bit longer than expected, but we wanted our Android users to enjoy the same seamless and delightful experience we recently provided to Pebblers on iOS.

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Who made that progress bar? >> NYTimes.com

Daniel Engber:

At a 1985 conference on the nascent field of computer-human interactions, a graduate student named Brad A. Myers presented a paper on the importance of what he called "percent-done progress indicators." "I had the sense that they were useful and important, and not used as much as they should have been," Myers says today. (He's now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.) He told his colleagues that progress bars made computer users less anxious and more efficient, and could even help them to "relax effectively" at work.
To prove his point, Myers asked 48 fellow students to run searches on a computer database, with and without a progress bar for guidance.

Even though progress bars lie, they're a lie that we like.

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Increasing adoption of tablets and smartphones continues to hamper Saudi PC market >> IDC

The Saudi PC market declined 7.5% year on year during the final quarter of 2013, according to the latest insights from International Data Corporation (IDC). The global research firm's most recent findings show a total of 442,818 units were shipped during Q4 2013. Shipments of portable devices slumped 16.9% over the same period to total 335,418 units, which is consistent with the global trend.
These declines were widely anticipated as the market is still recovering from the major declines suffered during the previous two quarters. "The major inhibitor to the PC market's growth in Saudi Arabia is the perpetually rising demand for tablets and smartphones across the Kingdom," says Abdulaziz Alanazi, a research analyst at IDC Saudi Arabia. "The lack of consumer familiarity with Windows 8 is also an issue, as the new operating system is installed on most new PCs, which is delaying many purchase decisions."

There were also local effects (government labour legislation). But it's the same story as in so many places.

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