Here in Vegas, CES is overflowing with computing embedded in devices of every kind — cars, home appliances, booth girls (I’m assuming, anyway) — but one stand is touting a way to cut the computer out of your life, while still receiving email.

The Presto Printing Mailbox is the antithesis of Martha Lane Fox’s digital divide plans: it’s for people who simply can’t understand — or can’t be bothered to understand — how to get email off that infernal computing box.

It’s essentially a cut-down printer, made by HP, with its own email address. Send an email to the Presto’s inbox, and it reformats the message, stripping out the header details and reflowing the text and images into a nice, easy-to-read style.

It can also be setup to print news headlines, a photo of the day, Sudoku puzzles, comic strips, a collection of Andy Rooney columns (I’m not making that up) and reminder messages — basically, it’s the internet printed out on paper for tech-baffled seniors (and to be clear, I don’t think most seniors actually feel this way — my own remaining grandparent certainly doesn’t).

The Presto doesn’t even require a broadband connection; it will pick up messages over dial-up on a standard phone line five times a day

The Presto doesn’t even require a broadband connection; it will pick up messages over dial-up on a standard phone line five times a day. Only approved senders’ messages will get through, so your parents won’t be found buried under a pile of paper spam.

There’s no scanner or other method of input, so the device is useless for sending a reply — which may be a good thing for some. The company’s spokesman noted his firm’s research suggested people who don’t get — or like — PCs prefer to reply by phone, so the Presto is set up to print contacts’ phone numbers at the top of the sheet.

The most intriguing use of the Presto is sending automated reminders, such as for appointments or to take medications. However, it’s hardly telemedicine: there’s no way of knowing — short of a phone call — if your ancient, tech-fearing great-grandmother got the message and popped her pills as told.

Simplicity isn’t cheap: the device is $99, and the Presto service costs $14.99 a month — it might be cheaper and easier to set up a fax machine, although the photos wouldn’t come out so nicely.

Arguably, it’s time to stop assuming older folks are incapable of learning new tricks; email isn’t the hardest skill to learn, and touchscreen smartphones and tablets are designed to be intuitive to use.

However, Presto’s apparently proving popular, with sales of tens of thousands globally over the past few years — while such a device isn’t necessary for readers of this website for obvious reasons, some people will doubtless find a use for it. Indeed, Presto is starting to be sold in Best Buy stores in the US, and is also available over Amazon.

Despite such popularity, it’s hard not to find the marketing a bit sad. The brochure quotes Sherri, from Chicago, who says: “My mother LOVES it! She is 84, and has never touched a computer and has no interest in learning. She says that getting her Presto mail is like someone coming to her house for a visit.”

Sherri: go visit your mother. And, while you’re there, set up a Gmail account for her.

Dell doesn’t have a stand here at CES in Las Vegas, but it does have its name up in bright lights on the Strip – although not in a good way.

A Dell Precision WorkStation 300 Series is clearly used to power one of the giant signs just along from our hotel, but instead of displaying details of Celine Dion’s Vegas Warblefest or some such nonsense, it’s currently displaying nothing but the BIOS screen.

Our colleagues at Micro Mart used to urge readers to send in photos of BIOS screens and Blue Screens of Death in public places. I think we may have just found the biggest… unless you know better.

“Just put your signature there,” said the ioSafe rep. “It’s nothing to worry about. Oh, but one thing. Whatever Dr Megavolt says, do it.”

I didn’t argue, merely noted from the indemnity document I was about to sign that it would be a very, very bad idea to place my fingers outside the Faraday cage I was stepping into.

A few minutes earlier Dr Megavolt had explained what was going to happen: a million volts would be sent through an ioSafe Thunderbolt external hard drive, which was protected by a titanium cover.

Everything would be fine, right? Well, as we were about to discover, things weren’t necessarily that straightforward.

In a city where a woman stood on a street corner dressed as Catwoman didn’t even bat the eyelids of passers-by, it can be pretty hard to grab people’s attention. But Lenovo achieved that feat at CES today, by sending out someone to test drive its new Ultrabook – on the roof of a stretch Hummer.

You might think driving around with a man sat using a laptop on the roof of the car would attract the attention of the local constabulary, and you’d be right…

Except the policeman tailing the Hummer wasn’t pulling the driver over for recklessly endangering his passenger, he was providing a police escort. Only in Vegas.

Convertible laptops and touchscreen desktops could help get around the problem, but eye-tracking firm Tobii has come up with a better idea.

Tobii uses a series of cameras — either embedded in a laptop (Lenovo produced a few last year) or via a peripheral device — to track where on the screen you’re looking. The cameras shine a light up at the user’s eyes, gathering information about two spots — where the light reflects, and the point where red eye would be if it were a photograph — feeding that back to create a 3D model.

Because it’s different for every eye, the system needs to recalibrate for every new users, which takes about half a minute. It works with glasses and even with a single eye.

It then watches to see where you’re looking, and that information can either be used to control the machine entirely, useful for disabled people, or paired with the keyboard or trackpad to essentially cut out the mouse.

It’s this latter mixed-use input that makes the most sense for Windows 8. On the show floor at CES, Tobii has a laptop running Microsoft’s next-gen OS. Rather than mouse to a Metro tile to select it, you simply look at it — no akward mousing required. That’s the basic idea: ditch the mouse, use your eyes to move the cursor, and your hands are left to click to select.

If you’re in one app and want to switch to another, hold down the Windows key to bring up the Metro start screen. Look at the new app, release the key, and it launches. It’s quick, and ridiculously intuitive — there’s no learning curve, for such simple tasks, at least.

It works inside applications as well. Tobii’s Anders Olsson opened up a PowerPoint presentation; flipping between slides required a tap of the spacebar and a glance at the new one.

These are all fairly basic tasks, and working through drop-down menus might have you reaching for a mouse, but once the gaze-based shortcuts are learned and more apps are created, it could get interesting. Olsson showed off a reading tool which keeps the text scrolling at your natural reading rate, with Tobii’s tracker following along with each word your eyes look at.
He also suggested eye-tracking could replace the 3D mouse for applications such as CAD. Rather than clicking on a spot on an image and zooming in with the mouse, he glanced at the spot and scrolled with a flick of his finger on the touchpad. Panning around the image took little more than a glance; look at what you want to see, and it automatically centres on the screen.

Other uses

While Tobii’s system is most intriguing in its potential to solve Microsoft’s Windows 8 touch problem, it works with any OS. The add-on camera is a basic input peripheral; it’s essentially plug and play, and will work with any system that can support a 3D mouse.

If navigating around Windows 8 isn’t eye-catching (sorry) enough, Tobii has also integrated the system into an arcade game; to shoot the incoming asteroid, look at it. It’s gloriously easy and possibly the laziest way to game.

While the arcade example was a fairly basic game, pairing it with a controller could revolutionise first-person shooters — and Duck Hunt.

CES Unveiled is the traditional curtain raiser for CES, allowing a limited number of companies access to journalists for three hours on the Sunday evening before the show starts proper. Autonomy, the company that reportedly cost HP a cool $11.7 billion back in August 2011, was one such company, and we caught a demo of its augmented reality technology.

The video is streamed directly to the app once it recognises the image, and then saved locally so that it can be viewed without eating up your data on subsequent occasions. For people like me, who can’t recognise faces almost a minute after I’ve been introduced to someone, the business card application looks particularly interesting.

At the end of its CES press conference, the company revealed that its stand at CES will include an 85in 8K display containing no fewer than 32 million pixels.

To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of 16 Full HD screens.

We’ll be sure to drop by the stand when it opens tomorrow (Tuesday).

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

I am the opposite. I fix (where I can), and like him I take great pleasure in diagnosis. However, I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick. This is largely because my career in computing has spanned the period during which price of equipment has fallen so spectacularly as to leave me groping for metaphors.

I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick

I can remember a DEC engineer turning up to put a memory upgrade in our VAX. He marched through the door and waved a plastic briefcase. “I’ve got a Testarossa in here!” he declared – meaning that the contents were worth the £60,000 of a then-hot Ferrari. This last month I’ve received 32 times that much RAM, shipped (and dropped) by the US Postal Service, for £250.

It’s difficult to run a perfect warranty upkeep process when prices are low and margins are tight. Unlike my Uncle, I have a “time is money” attitude (if he was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of our family then I’m more like Iggy Pop). When I start to see signs of undermanning or deliberate sandbagging during a server warranty claim and engineering visit, I will occasionally take the view that throwing money at the problem is worth it to keep the project on track or the service level up to scratch. Those who always take the opposite view are surprised when I sympathise, out of character, because I remember my Uncle and his completely different way of doing things.

However, I don’t think either of us would get very far pursuing warranty or fitness-for-purpose claims in the smartphone and app store business. App stores are supposed to be great, easy gateways for developers to reach new markets, and for users to benefit from an intermediary’s validation and quality control processes. However, there are plenty of opportunities for gaps between the promise and the reality.

One early example from last summer was a first generation Windows Mobile 7 phone. These could lock themselves completely as part of the ActiveSync system update, with a message of “take me to your dealer” for a complete factory reset and retry. I had one on test that duly bricked itself; it had a Vodafone PAYG SIM in it so I went to a Vodafone shop to get it sent away and reset. “Sorry,” they said, “not sold through us. Not our problem”. Despite asking around, I couldn’t find anyone who would actually do the necessary reset.

That was irritating, but not as irritating as Navigon’s Android satnav app. It costs a relatively whopping £60, and with Europe-wide maps it also demands at least an 8GB data card. Nevertheless, it seemed like an excellent deal for me, since I could sell my single-purpose satnav unit (also from Navigon) and come out of the overall deal about £20 in profit.

And a good deal it proved to be for the rest of the year, but then I didn’t travel for a bit so the Android phone got a rest. Next time I got it out, several apps (including Wyse’s excellent Pocket Cloud RDP client) had pending updates. Leaving it on charge and updating, I went to pack, and threw the travel kit in a lightweight laptop bag (pre-checked to remove sharp implements, tools and network cable testers – airport security people simply interpret them as Semtex, so far as I can tell).

So when I sat down in the hire car at Zurich airport, I got a nasty shock: “Activation failure,” said Navigon for Android. “There has been a connectivity failure.” While waiting in the queue to change to a more expensive car with included “Navi”, I proved there jolly well wasn’t a connectivity failure, by surfing the net and looking up the address to fire off a complaint, via the Android Market, to Navigon. I might as well have tucked my complaint in the Schnapps barrel of a passing St Bernard – it vanished.

I could go back to the credit card company and invoke the Sale of Goods Act – except it was an update, several months after the purchase, which interfered with the functionality of my property. I can’t even find a rollback button, which is the kind of thing one might expect after we’ve been through 40 years user interfaces and software delivery.

A truly international marketplace also means there’s little likelihood of a consistent approach to regulation. My Motorola DEFY picks up the central Android Market and the transaction is in sterling, so the actual relevant legal domicile for calling these people to account could be California (for Google), or the UK, or Germany (for Navigon) – except that the app store makes no provision for escalating this kind of failure.

So while app stores show every sign of being the way forward, my experience shows that the current invocations leave much to be desired when it comes to the traditional balance between the rights of the vendor and the rights of the customer. In fact, I’m thinking of proposing a new PC Pro award. I’ll call it the Customer Responsiveness APP Award – or CRAPPA for short.

Like most media organisations, we receive a steady stream of press releases here at PC Pro. On an average day I’d estimate we receive around 30 emails and letters from manufacturers, developers and PR agencies, all earnestly drawing our attention to something or other.

Sometimes these releases are useful, and even interesting: a press release might, for example, contain advance warning of a forthcoming product launch, or an important announcement from a major industry figure.

If I’m honest, though, I’d have to say only a minority of press releases are so worthy. Many of them are what I call downright optimistic – in other words, the people sending them are being rather hopeful if they imagine that we will have any use for the information.

Here, for your entertainment – but with some names removed to protect the innocent who are, let’s be honest, only doing their jobs – are ten of the most optimistic press releases we’ve received in 2011.

10. “Security software market to hit $23 billion”

According to a release we received in September, an industry analyst had calculated that “the global security software market will reach revenues of $23.3 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 6.8% from the $16.8 billion it hit in 2010.” What a headline! “Mathematical assumption sees market sector reach arbitrary value in three and a half years’ time.”

9. “Are UK Businesses Prepared for the Olympics?”

This was an invitation to a talk in November on “how businesses in the UK can remain productive and run their operations seamlessly during the Olympics in 2012”. It’s possible that these chaps had come up with some great ideas; but the press release was suspiciously silent on the rather key question of how exactly the Olympics was supposed make businesses in the UK unproductive in the first place.

8. “30 most anticipated games releases!”

Who exactly gets to decide what’s “most anticipated” anyway?

These days we don’t write about games in PC Pro – we leave that to our colleagues over at Custom PC and bit-tech.net. Even if we did cover games, I’m not sure what we’d do with a list of “the 30 most anticipated games due for release in the UK over the next 12 months”. I suppose the idea is just to glance down it and go “yep, I’m looking forward to that.” Or not, as it might be – who exactly gets to decide what’s “most anticipated” anyway?

7. “Nine in ten Brits don’t trust the internet”

The text of this release, which refers to a survey carried out in April and May, makes no reference to “nine in ten” Brits doing or saying anything. We do, however, learn that “one in ten feels unsafe using the internet at least every other day”, while at the other extreme, one in six uses no online security measures. Only six in ten are “cautious of logging onto websites which require email and passwords” and half of respondents are concerned about the safety of banking online and opening email attachments. So the story appears to be “some Brits trust the internet, others don’t”.

6. “New SATA III Cable”

As you probably know, SATA III – also known as SATA 6Gbits/sec – uses the same physical connectors as the older 3Gbits/sec standard. But manufacturers don’t like to miss an opportunity to create new accessories. “With SATA Revision 3.0 compliant devices now more popular than ever, we have created two suitable cables … unlike traditional SATA cables with metal clips that loose [sic] effectiveness with repeated usage due to scratching, these cables achieve secure connection by utilising precision designed and manufactured connector. Wrapped in attractive black sleeve and metallic layer for EMI protection, these new cables are great companions for running SATA 6Gbits/sec capable devices with optimum stability and style.” I do hate it when my old, unstylish SATA cables loose effectiveness due to scratching.

5. “iPhone App to Reinvent Today”

I read it all, and I still don’t really understand what it was trying to tell me

This was a long release, but I read it all, and I still don’t really understand what it was trying to tell me. “Well if you like stories – stories like you are there – you are living it – you exist for it – you exist because of it – you need to get to the iTunes store NOW … Although anyone of us can change the future – it already exists. Recent experiments into time have lead the test scientist to realise that the future exists – what is more it leaks through: if you care to test it. It appears that emotion is the driving force in ‘life’ and by maximizing emotion, as much as it is possible in controlled conditions inside a science laboratory, it proves to be possible to drag the future back into the now.” Got that? The product is a series of iPhone-based story apps, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.

4. “You may now kiss the bride (or groom)”

There are several reasons why PC Pro was never going to cover this release

There are several reasons why PC Pro was never going to cover this remarkable release from last May, but we have to admit it deserved a wider audience. “Host your own royal wedding,” it promised, “and kiss Kate or William, with balcony scene for Xbox 360. It was the moment the world cheered … and now Xbox 360 owners can make their own royal wedding dreams come true – by placing themselves, their friends and family, at the heart of one of the most watched television events in history.” Yes, it is – we believe – the world’s first royal wedding sim. Rumours that a second player can play as Pippa are sadly unconfirmed.

3. “Cookery books soon to be a thing of the past as technology takes over the kitchen”

According to research commissioned by a major laptop manufacturer, over a third of Brits are using their laptops to search for recipes online, with 37% describing themselves as “experimental cooks who like to try new things”. Case closed: the cookery book is dead.

2. “Temmingh, Gubanov and Whitfield added to 2011 European Digital Forensics and Incident Response Summit ”

Now, I certainly don’t mean to insult these gentlemen, who are all very well respected in their fields. And I’m sure the event, which took place in September, was a very worthwhile venture. Perhaps in the not too distant future, we’ll all have reason to be grateful for the security practices and principles that emerge from events such as this.

But just to recapitulate, the story here is that three people you’ve never heard of are going to a thing you’ve never heard of.

1. “Penalty charge notice enclosed”

Presumably working on the principle that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, in mid-December the creators of an iOS app aimed at helping motorists avoid parking tickets hit upon the bright idea sending out press releases disguised as parking fine notices, in official-looking envelopes, to journalists up and down the country. While some reportedly took the prank in good humour, others (myself included) were baffled at the idea that this legally dubious stunt would dispose us favourably toward the app.

The real problem, though, wasn’t the medium but the app itself. “Let’s say that you are a registered user and I am a registered user,” explains the text of the release. “You don’t know me, but you see my car being booked, you punch my licence plate into the app, and within seconds I get an alert saying that my car’s being booked. So does every other registered user within 50 metres. We then run back to our cars and move them before a ticket is issued.” In other words, with just a few taps you can send motorists scurrying to their vehicles. We can’t help but notice a certain scope for mischief here, especially in light of the example set by the app publishers themselves…

Some of the books are honeypots from professional authors, hoping to lure you into their 23-part series that tells the life story of an amazing spy/explorer/dancer/footballer. There’s nothing wrong with this, just go into it with your eyes open.

Some are only briefly reduced to free as a promotion, before being shoved up to full price. You can keep an eye out for such promotions by entering your email address at www.ereaderiq.co.uk (this site also provides a slightly clumsy search mechanism for finding free books).

Then there are some that barely qualify for the terms “books” at all. O’Reilly, for instance, produces a number of very short publications about technology that feel more like extended articles.

So where do you go to find new books? First of all, naturally, you read this article. But after that you should head to www.amazon.co.uk and click on the Kindle Books link. To the right of the page you’ll see a Bestsellers box; click on the “Kindle Store : Books” link and you’ll see a straightforward listing on the right, plus a useful list of categories on the left. Click on the category you’re interested in – let’s say Science Fiction – and you’ll see the bestsellers, both paid for and free.

If using the Kindle itself then Amazon makes it a little trickier to find the free books, but it’s still possible to access the top 100. Select “Shop in Kindle Store”, then “Kindle Best Sellers” under Featured. You’ll find the link “Kindle Top 100 Free” on the top right hand of the screen.

Here’s our pick of the free books we’ve found – feel free to add your own suggestions in comments:

The Penal Colony

A gripping read from start to finish, this novel depicts an all-too-conceivable situation where Britain despatches its most dangerous prisoners to remote islands. Think of it as Lord of the Flies for adults. The Penal Colony is based on Sert, where The Village is the pinnacle of island culture: hot water, limited electricity and a direct link with the prison authorities make it the best place to live. But, as our arrogant protagonist Routledge discovers, you have to earn your place: when he arrives, insisting himself innocent of the murder of a young woman he met on a train, he’s told he can only be allowed in if he survives six days on the outside. But it doesn’t take him long to be captured by the biggest psychopath on the island…

Jane Eyre

The setting may be old fashioned and all too reminiscent of stuffy English Literature lessons, but the story is so strong – and your compassion with Jane Eyre so compelling – that you’ll likely rush through it if you haven’t done so before. As with A Christmas Carol (and for that matter all the Bronte sisters’ works), this book has been lovingly transcribed from the original and formatted for the Kindle by a community of literary do-gooders. If you haven’t read a classic for donkey’s years, let this one guide you back into the fold.

A Little Book of Christmas

Yes it’s twee and sentimental, but if A Christmas Carol wasn’t enough to get you into a festive mood then this book definitely will. It’s a collection of short stories tied together not only by the C word but also sheer niceness. Whether it’s the story of George W Hetherington, a Scrooge-like figure whose anti-Christmas sentiment is swept away when he becomes involved with a poverty-stricken family, or the way a New York Santa helps Little Billee find his way home, if you don’t have a tear in your eye at some point while reading this book your heart is made of flint.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies

There’s no getting away from the fact this is basically an advert for the For Dummies series, but it’s still packed with information. There’s a nostalgic chapter lifted from the first ever Dummies book – DOS for Dummies – plus another about networking in Windows 7, both written in a style you’ll either find chatty or enormously irritating. But it’s impressive by the sheer range of other topics covered: how to keep a relationship happy, enjoying an evening out in French, meditation tips, learning to play rock music on the guitar… and much more.

A Christmas Carol

Everyone knows the story of Scrooge, if only through the various movie tellings – prepare yourself to be shocked, but The Muppet’s Christmas Carol wasn’t the original. Like so many classic novels, it’s been converted to Kindle form by “the community”, and aside from the odd formatting error it has a very professional finish. Certainly you won’t be distracted from Dickens’ most accessible plot, with straightforward storytelling making this just as suitable a read for young children as it is for adults who may, just like Scrooge, have fallen under the magic spell of money.

What is HTML5?

We’re not massive fans of most of O’Reilly’s free books on the Kindle – as we mentioned above, they have a tendency to feel like extended web articles – but this one serves as an excellent introduction to HTML5. The opening pages focus on what it means for the end user, and it’s helped along by a friendly tone, but the target reader is always the aspiring web programmer and so there’s plenty of more meaty information to get your teeth into.

White Fang

There are plenty of children’s books available for free on the Kindle, and Jack London’s tale of survival is among the best. You follow the story of White Fang, half dog, half wolf, as he moves from one perilous situation to another. Most children will love the idea of being this close to the wild – he isn’t a gentle dog, to put it mildly, but most of the violence is hinted at rather than explicitly described – and unlike many such books it does its best to steer away too much from humanising wild animals. A deserved classic.

The Crew

Dougie Brimson was already considered an “expert” in football hooliganism before The Crew, his first novel, was published in the late 1990s, and he brings all that knowledge to bear in the plot. We follow two main characters: an under-pressure cop and a claustrophobic hooligan who’ll do anything to avoid being locked up in a cell. The police use this knowledge to persuade him to work with an undercover officer as they infiltrate an operation being run by the UK’s most notorious hooligan mastermind, with dramatic and unexpected consequences.

South: The Story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Expedition

If you’re hoping for a book with stylistic prose and beautiful descriptions of landscapes then look away now. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton is a man who calls the killing of a seal a killing of a seal, and this journal features plenty of that. But while the prose is straightforward it’s also compelling, dragging you through the long months his ship spent locked in ice while they waited for summer to reappear. It’s a superb record, not only of that trip, but also a historical record to reflect the state of the world at the beginning of the First World War.

The brilliant book of calm

This is just one of the many self-help books that litter the Amazon freebie list, but it’s certainly one of the better ones. You’ll need to be in the mood for it – the one person we know who would benefit from The brilliant book of calm, PC Pro editor Barry Collins, probably wouldn’t make it through two pages before slamming it into the proverbial bin – but if you ignore the awkward humorous asides then it becomes a little more bearable. And actually, on occasion, thought-provoking. Please note this book is no longer free; since this article was written, its price has gone up to around £7.