Those of you who follow the tech of F1 closely will be well aware of Craig Scarborough. Craig blogs a lot regarding modern F1 tech, and was the first to publish details about Mercedes’ 2012 DRS-activated blown front wing.

Craig’s writing is always clear and informative, with excellent accompanying technical drawings (sample below).

If you’re not so up on these terms or the ins and outs of modern F1 aero and systems, Craig has started authoring a series on gocar.gr with an excellent introduction into the world of F1 tech.

The first post is about the main components of F1 cars, and the second uncovers what happens inside the car under the covers. Well worth checking out.

Illustration by Scarbs

Passing through Google Reader I noticed some trashy blog post about when its appropriate to take pictures with your iPad (answer: never). This got me thinking.

Why would Apple put the decent quality camera on the back of the device? Why not the front?

I don’t have an iPad with a camera, but I’m pretty certain that if I did have one, I would make most use of the camera on the front – for video calls. Surely that would be a better reason for a nice quality camera? I would argue for no camera on the back, or an essentially useless camera on the back for those who absolutely need it.

There are a number of reasons Apple could have deemed this a bad idea (or the one engineer who thought it up never mentioned it). Firstly it would be larger, and hence would blight the front of the iPad with a horrendous circle (you could put it in the home button perhaps?). No camera on the back would basically be suicide for the device I imagine (but then the original iPad did OK without any camera). I suppose video calls could not have been that popular on iPhone / iPad – perhaps mostly because of stupid carrier restrictions on not using FaceTime™®© over 3G (its not us in the UK’s fault that US carriers decided to boost profits rather than boost network capacity and therefore couldn’t handle it – no such issues over here!). There is also the potential that the increased camera quality would not be translated into better video quality for some other reason (bandwidth / algorithms / processing power limit etc).

I love video calling over the web (over a mobile phone call not so much, mostly due to the stupid prices) so this would be a cool thing to add to improve that experience (especially with the better screen). Perhaps then I may consider switching (but I much prefer Android for now).

I was in Austin for SXSW a week or so ago, and coming up in November is the first US Grand Prix for a number of years hosted at a circuit that is being built just down the road.

Hamilton in Australia

Austin is by no means a stranger city to huge events arriving in town – between the hundreds of thousands of people at the three SXSW events and the motorcycle convention one local told me would rock up every year, it’s used to having huge volumes of people descending on the town. Meanwhile Downtown hotels have already sold out for the Grand Prix weekend, and by the looks of it prices were up 3 or 4 times over their usual rates.

I spoke to some Austinites while I was there, and there was general apathy towards the event. They didn’t seem to understand why the race was going there in particular. One resident I spoke to – who had let out their room on AirBnB for SXSW – said they were going to do the same for the GP weekend to cash in.

We’ll have to see what the Americans make of it when they get there.

While at SXSW at the weekend, Google hosted an all-day Lego Mindstorms hackathon on Sunday to see who could built the best all-terrain Lego robot.

Here's the robot testing out the course

My design focus was pretty simple – I only had an afternoon so couldn’t go all out on decoration too (it would also have slowed it down!). The idea was to keep it as small and light as possible (somewhat hindered by the massive motor housings and horrendously heavy battery for the logic unit) and with the centre of gravity as low as possible. Tracks were also an obvious choice for me as while they were slower than the wheels, they gave significantly more control and could allow the robot to climb over anything the course forced in its way. An additional benefit was they were positioned just correctly so that the robot could run on its front (with some extra pieces to stop it falling on its back).

Here are some videos of the victories. Right at the bottom is the full 90-minute tape of the live show. Skip to 1hr 25mins to see their cut of the final battle.

Thanks to James Jardine of Qiqqa for recording and his (mostly) pleasant commentary, and Alesis for his “technical analysis” and cheering so loudly the Google people told them to be quiet

First up, Round 1:

Round 2:

And the final (which got a bit hairy towards the end):

Full 90 minutes show:

As everyone knows the BBC have made a royal faux pas with F1 and have given up basically all the live coverage to Sky. They have also scheduled odd highlights times and so forth for the rest of the season.

So, in order to keep myself on top of what I should be watching and when (paying Sky is, of course, not an option), I made a calendar with all the scheduling in it. This calendar is meant to be in compliment to the F1 calendar (you can get it in a super nice format here, thanks Ian for the reminder) as all sessions will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 5 Live (5 Live Sports Extra for the practice sessions) – so refer to the session calendar for when that will be on (it starts 5 minutes before and ends 5 minutes after the sessions usually).

Here are the links to the calendar: XML (for RSS readers and the like); ICal (Google Calendar, iOS, etc.) and HTML (for embedding in web pages).

Please send any errors or omissions to me using the Contact link above, e-mail usually gets to me fastest. So far the BBC have only published times for the first two races, so I will try and keep up with them as they publish (it would be handy if they published it all now really).

Here we go!