Welcome to Darlington Chikezie's Blog

Indonesian searchers battling bad weather in their Efforts to find more remains from AirAsia Flight QZ8501 have so far recovered 10 bodies from the sea, officials said. A day after the first bits of debris from the commercial jet were spotted afloat off the coast of Borneo, the search operation was hampered Wednesday by big waves, strong winds and heavy rain. And answers about why the aircraft, with 162 people on board, fell from the sky Sunday remained elusive.

Back in June,  Google introduced its Android One program  to improve the affordable smartphone experience in emerging markets. The project debuted in India in September, and now it is  making its first expansion  expanding to cover neighboring Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. ( It launched in the UK  last month.)

A whole wing of the Internet just got added to our collective conscience, like websites by Google or knowledge by Wikipedia before it.

Sliders suck. “Little too far to the left. Ugh. Little too far to the right. ARRHGH!!!” The mouse can be a frustrating controller for Photoshop, Final Cut, AutoCAD or even Spotify. But a new input device called  Flow  lets you play your computer like an instrument, with infinite dexterity through feeling rather than sight. The Y Combinator startup Senic’s  ~$100 wireless Flow puck  offers four types of control: motion by waving over its infrared sensor, a programmable touch-sensitive pad on top, haptic response for pushing Flow like a button, and a physical cylinder around the sides that you can twist for ultimate precision. It already works with 30 apps like some of the Adobe Creative Suite, and cunning developers can build custom Flow interfaces for anything they want.

China may be the ‘home’ of global internet censorship, as  recent issues accessing Gmail from the country proved , but India seems to be doing its best to rival its neighbor. Today it emerged that the Indian government has asked internet service providers and mobile operators to block access to 32 sites in the name of its censorship laws GitHub, Archive.org, Imgur, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Pastebin are some of the more familiar names included on the list, a key excerpt of which was made public by Pranesh Pakesh, a director at the  Centre for Internet and Society  in Bangalore.

Downloading the Windows 10 technical preview? You won’t be able to use it  past two weeks after April Fool’s day next year . That’s jolly, because the consumer-facing preview that will follow the current build will be out long before then. But it’s worth keeping in mind: Microsoft is working towards a mid-year release of Windows 10, so the April date is in within that range, but doesn’t mean altogether too much on its own. You could speculate that the operating system likely won’t come out  before  that date, but at some point you leave the arena of reasonable speculation and start talking to yourself.

Inbox , the email startup founded by Dropbox and MIT alums offering modern APIs that allow developers to build new applications on top of email’s aging underpinnings, is today taking steps to make it even easier for developers to get started with the launch of open source email apps. The company is also announcing the pricing for its hosted version of the Inbox API for the first time publicly.

It depends on mind-bending physics and ultra-cold temperatures but quantum computing could bring about a new era in processing power that promises to revolutionize everything from artificial intelligence to high finance. The field of quantum computing is still in its infancy but it was given a sizable boost when Google announced in September that it is partnering with experts from the University of California Santa Barbara to develop quantum computing technology as part of its Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab team . The project also sees Google pairing up with NASA and the  Universities Space Research Association  to create technology that could become the world's fastest supercomputer.

this is the progress so far. am still working on it ...

IMAGINE AN ORGANIC SUBSTANCE that can be sprayed on to any window in a home--making the window behave like a photovoltaic panel, generating electricity . The technology is real, and according to its creators, it's ready for prime time. A company called New Energy Technologies (shown here with scientists from the NREL) claims to have successfully developed and tested such a coating, Their  SolarWindow  prototypes so far look very promising. The idea of a transparent solar power panel is one of many solar technologies  such as solar panels that are  not badly impacted by shading , that  Green Builder' s  Celestia Project  highlights as probable game changers over the next century.

Editor’s note:  Mark Johnson is CEO of  Receipt Reliance Pty Ltd , a company formed to promote the idea of digital receipt storage at your bank. Mark has 23 years experience working in the point of sale industry and is an avid financial technology follower.

Startups have raised millions of dollars to improve every aspect of the classroom experience, but now there’s one focused on making it easier to actually enroll kids in schools. San Francisco-based  SchoolMint , a new company backed with $2.2 million in financing from investors like New School Ventures Fund, Runa Capital, and Crosslink Capital along with education-focused seed investors including: Kapor Capital, Imagine K12, Romulus Capital, Fresco Capital, and EdMentor VC, is looking to erase the obstacles parents and kids face when applying and enrolling into schools across the country.

Facebook has failed repeatedly to get us to use complicated lists and privacy settings to share intimate moments with just our closest friends and family. It’s clumsy and confusing doing that with the same composer for blasting News Feed updates to everyone. But now Facebook is polishing off a new app codenamed “Moments” designed to make this micro-sharing much simpler, multiple sources tell TechCrunch, including one who has seen a live internal version of the app.

NASA has  announced a deal with SpaceX and Boeing  to build space taxis to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station. This deal will end NASA’s reliance on expensive Russian crew transport by 2017. The cost was a whopping $71 million per seat. However, the rising tensions in Ukraine may have also been a factor in the push for U.S. contracts.

Colorado has a history with gun violence so it’s only appropriate that 17-year-old Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder, would want to apply biometric user authentication to firearms. Kloepfer just won the $50,000  Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge for his smart gun prototype.

Speaking with journalists today September 16th in Abuja, President Jonathan appealed to members of the Nigerian Union of Teachers, NUT to return to the classrooms on  Sept. 22  as there is no known case of Ebola in the country at the moment. Below is what he said...

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) says the death toll in the Synagogue Church building collapse in the Ikotun area of Lagos has risen to 40. "It’s now 40 dead,” NEMA southwest coordinator Ibrahim Farinloye, told AFP by text message.

A Nigerian air force Alpha Jet used in the fight against Boko Haram members has gone missing. The military plane reportedly disappeared from radar around Adamawa state after it went for a routine operation attack on Boko Haram men on Friday September 12th. Two fighter pilots who were operating the jet have also been declared missing. The Defence has released a statement on the missing jet. Find it after the cut...

SwiftKey, the predictive keyboard startup that was embedded on more than 100 million Android devices last year, and more than 200 million cumulatively, has demoed its software working on iOS 8 for the first time here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

Apple’s newest and largest pair of iPhones, the  iPhone 6 and 6 Plus , are now available for pre-order in a number of countries, including the U.S. and the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The phones are due to ship to buyers on September 19.

We’re on the verge of a linguistic revolution, made possible by the fact that Apple has opened up its iOS operating system to allow third-party keyboards. One of the first entrants will be PopKey , a project out of the  WorkshopX  creative studio based in Ottawa, which has created on-demand social photo printing service CanvasPop, among others. The Betaworks-style operation’s new project came together because founder Adrian Salamunovic got in the habit of sending animated ‘reaction’ GIFs in conversations with friends, and wanted an easier way to do that then opening Safari, searching for the appropriate image, copying that, and then pasting it in Messages or Mail.

Youvathana Sok looked up and saw more than just stars in the crisp, clear Maine night sky. A colorful, spectacular showing of the aurora borealis greeted Sok,  a CNN iReporter,  and others at Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National park on Friday. From iReporter Youvathana Sok Greens and whites lit up the night sky, treating viewers to a once-in-a-lifetime showing. Thanks to a relatively strong solar storm, those living in northern parts of the United States had a chance to take in the vivid colors that normally can only be seen from extremely high latitudes.

When Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, anticipated his death more than 2,000 years ago, he wanted an army of warriors to guard his mausoleum forever and protect him in the afterlife. So he ordered the creation of some  8,000 terra-cotta soldiers , along with hundreds of terra-cotta horses and chariots, to be buried with him in his tomb. Historians speculate the soldiers were modeled after eight individuals. When the statues were discovered by workers digging a well in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, in 1974, the world was stunned by the spectacular funerary art and the legacy of the powerful emperor. Since then, it's become a major tourist attraction and a World Heritage site.

The sexy rapper showed off some serious under-boob in a crop top and matching skin-tight leggings as she partied away at a night club in Paris on Friday night after performing on stage with Beyonce.

Ugandan forces arrested several terror suspects and recovered explosives in an operation to foil an "imminent" terrorist attack on the city of Kampala, the country's police said Saturday. Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy warned Americans there to stay indoors. The country's security forces have ratcheted up security in all public places, vowing to "effectively defeat whoever tried to endanger the lives and property of the people of Uganda," according to a police press statement. The foiled terror plot was by the Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabaab, the U.S. Embassy in Kampala said;   it did not specify the targets. However, local police said that based on the type of explosives seized, they saw this attack plot as a possible repeat of last September's attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall and were particularly concerned about crowded areas.

Keyboards, schmeeboards, amirite? But wait! Take a look at the Logitech K480, a unique Bluetooth keyboard that can connect to three devices simultaneously and allows you to switch between them using a little dial. The devices sit in a trench over the keyboard and you can swap from, say, a computer to a phone to a tablet.

Over the weekend, 132 teams worked tirelessly at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 hackathon to come up with their ingenious hacks and creations. At the end of a long night filled with Nerf guns, pizza and  very little sleep , the teams presented their hacks to the world on the Disrupt stage for final judging. At the end of the afternoon, the judges convened and decided to award the grand prize to Shower With Friends. And no – it’s not what you think.

Kim and Kanye are currently in Australia where Kanye is performing some shows. Kanye performed at Adelaide Hindmarsh Stadium on Sunday night and this morning, the power couple headed to the local airport to fly out to Melbourne for Kanye's next performance.

Heavily armed Boko Haram men have reportedly taken over Michika, one of the key towns in Adama state. According to Sahara Reporters, the sect men arrived the town today September 7th, chased out Nigerian troops and hoisted their flag in the town. This is coming three days after t he militants seized Gulak town. Residents in the town say the Nigerian military flew over the area but did not attack the sect men. Soldiers from the 23 Brigade in Yola, Adamawa state, are said to have been mobilized to prevent the sect men from taking over Mubi, a key city which is some kilometers away from Michika.

Let me give y'all a translation ... of this pic. 1, M.I is still king. 2, Ice Prince is the most humble Nigerian celeb...next to 2face of course...:-). Translate it anyhow you like. Me I don talk my own...hehe

President Jonathan, who is currently in Germany, is pictured above speaking on the phone with Nigeria's U20 Falconets who are participating in the 2014 FIFA Under-20 Women's World Cup in Montreal, Canada.

I can’t do it anymore. This has been a summer of social media. I’ve used it endlessly, made plans on it, chatted, read it religiously, and watched countless friends and friends of friends go on vacation. I’ve played a game of whack-a-mole with LinkedIn invitations and I’ve streamlined my automatic Tweeting systems. I’ve watched the world buzz by 140 characters at a time. I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos of beaches and old castles and bars and beers and whiskeys and sandwiches and endless  cats  and I don’t want to see any more. I’m done. I’m taking my brain back.

“For software engineers, life must seem like it keeps getting better,”  cheerleads CNet. Glassdoor agrees: our median salary is now  $85K , and  six figures  in San Francisco. (Which actually seems low to me.) And  everyone  predicts that demand for our talents is  skyrocketing . So what is one to make of  a recent claim that , as a class, we are downtrodden, disrespected, and disenfranchised? …Actually, the guy kind of has a point.

CGI has come a long way – from simulating Jar Jar Binks on the silver screen to replacing green screens with King’s Landing. Today, we should add  this video  to the progression. Producer and technical director Nobumichi Asai has used a projection technology called Omote to project makeup onto a live model’s face.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service is experiencing uptime issues around the world. According to the Microsoft Azure status dashboard, ‘virtual machines,’ ‘backup,’ and ‘cloud services’ are the heaviest hit.

The autopsy report of legendary actor Robin Williams is out - he committed suicide by hanging himself with a belt in his home. But before using the belt, Robin had tried to kill himself by slitting his wrist with a pocket knife. When that suicide attempt failed, he used a belt. According to the Marin County Deputy Coroner, Robins Williams was at home alone Monday when he tried slashing his left wrist, but it only left "acute superficial cuts. He then took a belt, tied it around his neck and secured it between the closet door and door frame. Williams was in a seated position, slightly suspended with his right shoulder against the door. " TMZ reports. He didn't leave a suicide note...

Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the two US doctors who contracted the Ebola virus in Liberia, has spoken out for the first time. He released a statement from his isolation room at Emory University in Atlanta where he's being treated after he was flown out of Liberia last week. He is the first Ebola patient that the drug ZMapp was used on. Below is the statement Dr Brantly released to the media yesterday... “I am writing this update from my isolation room at Emory University Hospital, where the doctors and nurses are providing the very best care possible. I am growing stronger every day, and I thank God for His mercy as I have wrestled with this terrible disease. I also want to extend my deep and sincere thanks to all of you who have been praying for my recovery as well as for Nancy and for the people of Liberia and West Africa.

If you want to know more about the Ebola virus, then read this alert from the US Embassy here in Nigeria ... In order to help our Embassy Community better understand some of the key points about the Ebola virus we have consulted with our medical specialists at the U S State Department and assembled this list of bullet points worded in plain language for easy comprehension. Our medical specialists remind everyone that they should be following the guideline from the center for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation. • The suspected reservoirs for Ebola are fruit bats. • Transmission to humans is thought to originate from infected bats or primates that have become infected by bats. • Undercooked infected bat and primate (bush) meat transmits the virus to humans. • Human to human transmission is only achieved by physical contact with a person who is acutely and gravely ill from the Ebola virus or their body fluids.  Continue...

Drogba just  announced on his instagram page that he's back at  Stamford Bridge .  Chelsea manager  Jose Mourinho revealed recently that he wanted Drogba back, and he's made it happen

Yesterday the Lagos State Ministry of Health said a  Liberian  man is being tested for the deadly Ebola virus in Lagos (read  here ). The man,  Patrick   Sawyer , (pictured above) has reportedly died. According to reports, Patrick died yesterday night at the First  Consultant Medical  Centre, Obalende, Lagos where he'd been receiving treatment. His condition was said to have worsened. Sawyer, who was an official of the Liberian  Ministry of Finance , arrived in Nigeria on Sunday July 20th for a conference.

What a man! Pope  Francis  pictured above after he popped in unannounced at the  Vatican  workers' cafeteria  this afternoon where he lined up, tray in hand, along with stunned workers and had  lunch  with them. See  more  photos after the cut...

President Jonathan today July 22nd met with parents of abducted Chibok girls and rescued girls at the State House in Abuja. Present at the closed door meeting was the Senate President David Mark, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Principal of the school, Mrs Asaba Kwambura as well as some Heads of Nigeria's Security Agencies. The media was sent out of the room once the meeting kicked off. See more photos after the cut...

President Jonathan today July 22nd met with parents of abducted Chibok girls and rescued girls at the State House in Abuja. Present at the closed door meeting was the Senate President David Mark, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Principal of the school, Mrs Asaba Kwambura as well as some Heads of Nigeria's Security Agencies. The media was sent out of the room once the meeting kicked off. See more photos after the cut...

President Jonathan today July 22nd met with parents of abducted Chibok girls and rescued girls at the State House in Abuja. Present at the closed door meeting was the Senate President David Mark, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Principal of the school, Mrs Asaba Kwambura as well as some Heads of Nigeria's Security Agencies. The media was sent out of the room once the meeting kicked off. See more photos after the cut...

President Jonathan today July 22nd met with parents of abducted Chibok girls and rescued girls at the State House in Abuja. Present at the closed door meeting was the Senate President David Mark, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Principal of the school, Mrs Asaba Kwambura as well as some Heads of Nigeria's Security Agencies. The media was sent out of the room once the meeting kicked off. See more photos after the cut...

The field of biomimetics is a varied one. From large helicopters to tiny nano-bots, the scope is massive. Scientists have looked to nature for sometime now in order to reproduce it in a way that will be beneficial to mankind. Boston Dynamics , funded by  DARPA , created a running robot called Cheetah, a quadruped that could run at speeds of over 29 mph. To put that into perspective, it is faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet. But they didn’t stop there. In fact the team then created Wildcat, a similar quadruped, which was designed around the Cheetah, but could run at fast speeds over rough terrain. The US is not the only country that is showing great interest in this field. Scientists from KAIST have designed and built a new robot that has almost matched Cheetah’s speed record.  This design wasn’t built around a cat like frame, instead the team opted for something that isn’t alive anymore; the Velociraptor. This two-legged machine, called Raptor, was created by

Computex  2014 kicks off today in Taipei starting with a press conference, followed by an official start tomorrow when over 1,700 companies will showcase their new designs to 130,000 attendees. Asia’s largest technology show is an opportunity for some of the big name and less-known vendors to launch their smart innovations and give us a glimpse of cool technology that is not yet available; here is what to expect from this year’s show. 1. SmarTech This year sees a new area named the SmarTech Area, where everything from smart wearables and 3D printing, to intelligent vehicle systems and security can be displayed. This addition is a sign of just how important smart technology has become and we can expect to see more interesting applications that will reach every area of our everyday lives. It will be here that Acer will launch its first wearable, the Liquid Leap Smartband. 2. Google Glass Alternatives There are some companies keen to produce fierce competition for Google Glass, d

In a classic case of “what not to do when you’re bored”,  a New York man was arrested after he decided to fly his drone outside of a New York hospital . According to the 49-year-old, he had just dropped off his mom for an appointment when he decided to get out his drone  (a DIJ Phantom 2) and fly it around the hospital. I guess the “real” problem began when the drone kept being spotted by doctors and medical staff outside of the hospital’s exam windows as they were examining patients. Staff called the police and the man was promptly arrested for illegal surveillance activities. I don’t own a drone, but if I did, I don’t think I’d fly the thing outside of a hospital of all places, but that might just be me. The man has stated in a Facebook post that what he did was the result of a lapse in judgment and that the drone’s camera couldn’t glimpse anything through the hospital’s windows. Whether that last part’s true or not I cannot say – all I know is it seems the police might’ve thought

The advent of lifelike holograms is upon us.  We have seen celebrities who are no longer around;  appear on stage and ‘converse’ with real people thanks to new standards in holographic technology.  Imagine this type of breakthrough tech being wielded in the palm of your hand?  Well folks, we don’t have to wait too long as the technology, which makes an image ‘float’ as a 3D image in the air, is finally here. The company that has made this breakthrough,  Ostendo , has produced a hologram with a 5,000ppi projector.  It is this type of projector that should interest us, as they plan to fit it into smartphones in the second half of 2015. The hologram is created using six projectors, which layer light to create an image floating in the air,

President Goodluck Jonathan President Goodluck Jonathan has been advised to tarry a little, before attempting to declare his second term ambition. Governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, stated this at a meeting they had with the President at the Presidential Villa in Abuja on Monday night. Though the governors   were in support of the President’s bid for re-election, they said the nation’s mood was not ripe for such a declaration. Investigations by our correspondent in Abuja on Tuesday and Wednesday showed that the meeting considered the plight of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls and security challenges facing the country. It was learnt that based on these two major issues, the governors asked the President to study the mood of the nation more before considering an open declaration for re-election. Two of the governors, who were at the meeting and spoke with our correspondent separately, said that the President was advised to either visit Chib