In the following video, science educator Roy Gould and Microsoft’s Curtis Wong give an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope — a technology that combines feeds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and weaves them together holistically to build a comprehensive view of our universe.
By Mark O’Neill
Are you an environmentally-friendly geek? Then how about discarding your plastic keyboard and having a bamboo one instead?
Judging from a quick Google search, it seems that the concept of the bamboo keyboard came first from Japan, and now, it is gradually making it way across the rest of the world for a very reasonable $60, mouse included.
Just don’t show it to your panda neighbours when they come round to visit.
The Nokia Morph is a flexible, two-piece concept device that can adapt its shape according to the task its user wants it to accomplish. Thanks to nanotechnology, Morph can sense its environment, harvest solar energy, and also clean itself automatically.
Featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, the Morph concept device is a bridge between highly advanced technologies and their potential benefits to end-users. This device concept showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) – nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices that open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game that allows you to draw objects and then unleash them upon a 2d world to accomplish certain objectives. Check it out in the following video:
Looks fun, doesn’t it?
It’s no secret that boats have been used by man since the dawn of time. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that wind can easily be harnessed for locomotion. It does take a genius, however, to create a vessel powered by waves.
In the next few weeks, a well known Japanese adventurer named Kenichi Horie will set sail on his wave-powered boat for a 7000 kilometer journey starting in Hawaii and ending in the Kii Channel in Japan. The 3 ton catamaran is fabricated out of super-thin recycled aluminum and can cruise at up to 5 knots. His trip is estimated to last about 3 months.
The Suntory Mermaid II propulsion system works by harnessing the power of waves via two fins in the front of the boat. Said fins act similarly to a Dolphin’s tail, moving up and down according to the waves, thus propelling the ship. If this little project still isn’t green enough for your taste, all onboard electronics are powered via solar panels.
[Via PopSci]
By Mark O’Neill
These days, with 6GB+ Gmail accounts and unlimited Yahoo accounts, email addresses are being used for more than just email. Many people email themselves backups of many things including important documents, music, photos, video files and much more. This way, they are not screwed if the original copy is destroyed or goes missing. Plus their files are accessible from any internet-enabled PC.
But it can be a drag. First you have to open a new email window, then you have to click on the attachment link, find the attachment then fill out the email address… there must be an easier, faster way to email yourself a backup of something right? Well there is – the rather unoriginally named BackupToEmail.
This nifty little program installs an option in your Windows Explorer right-click menu which enables you to right-click on a file, choose the backup option and have it immediately sent to your designated email account. It also installs a link in your right-click “send to” options which zips and sends the file to you.
When you first set it up, you need to tweak the program to suit yourself :
The beauty of this is that it is not locked into one email service – whether you use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or a really obscure service, it still works. It also supports multiple email addresses.Now just right-click on your desired file in Windows Explorer, choose “Backup to email” and it immediately starts sending via a SSL SMTP server :
The file arrives in your email extremely fast, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to give me cause for concern. It does what it claims to do. If you like, you can also alter the registry settings if you don’t like “Backup to email” in your right-click menu. You can easily change it to “Gmail This!” or “Yahoo It!” if you’d prefer to give your menu that personal touch. Using this program, you can email backups to yourself in a matter of seconds – and you’ll wonder how you managed to survive without it up to now.
By Patrick Biz
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Geeks hate listening to commercial radio on their way to work. Hollywood gossip and local news are not the types of content computer-savvy people are raving about. What if, come Monday morning, you’re in the mood for tech news? Then on Tuesday’s commute, you want home theater reviews, and Wednesday, you want the latest pop news from Steve Jobs? Good luck finding all this on your AM/FM portable tuner.
Well thanks to podcasts, now you can listen to what you want, whenever you want. Podcasting is one of the best things to come out of the Internet . It is an audio or video file syndicated via the Internet that plays on portable media players, such as an iPod. Like radio and television shows, you can find podcasts on any subject you can think of. But for geeks looking for distinctively geeky content, here’s a list of what I consider to be the best technology and computer podcasts.
After a few weeks of digging, AppleInsider has allegedly uncovered the details of Apple’s new MacBook Pro line-up. They’ve confirmed this based on new MacBook model numbers which have appeared in Apple’s inventory management systems.
Long story short, they will be available tomorrow sporting the newest Core 2 Duo Penryn chips running at 2.6GHz. They’ll also come packed with the new MacBook Air touch-pad, although we think that could have been taken care of with an update. The current line-up is already somewhat gesture compatible.
The prices will remain unchanged at $1,999, $2,499 and $2,799. Once again, the reputation of one of or favorite sites hangs in the balance. If the infamous yellow post-it shows up in the online store tomorrow, we will continue to love AI. If not, an all out protest will be staged containing much profanity.
There are few people who work with the Internet who understand how truly vulnerable and weak the core infrastructure really is. Nothing demonstrates this basic weakness better than the troubles experienced by YouTube over the past weekend when Pakistan, under orders from its government, put new BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) entries in one of their routers to block YouTube. The result was not just a block for Pakistan, but for vast chunks of the whole Internet.
From Brian Krebs at the WaPo here:
Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country’s ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom – the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan – forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.
The result is that the Pakistani backbone Autonomous System (AS) announced to all of its peers via BGP that it was now authoritative for the DNS IP range of YouTube.com. And this announcement was sent up the chain to its peers, and its peers’ peers, resulting in requests for YouTube.Com to be routed through Pakistan, which of course was not really routing for the site. After a while, the peers noticed the route poisoning and filtered out any BGP announcements coming from Pakistan, and restored the connection to YouTube.
Was this the equivalent of Islamic Jihad against the internet in response to the Danish cartoons? Some on NANOG certainly suspect this was a political move at least by a nascent government. Others suspect it was more of a simple misconfiguration. Danny McPherson at Arbor Networks provides an excellent analysis on how this happened and thinks it was an accident. He writes:
I fully suspect that the announcements from Pakistan Telecom for YouTube address space were the result of a misconfiguration or routing policy oversight, and seriously doubt impact to YouTube reachability [beyond Pakistan’s Internet borders] was intentional. The route announcements from Pakistan Telecom have long since been withdrawn (or filtered).
But this clearly demonstrates that you don’t need a huge botnet to take a corporation off the Internet. All it takes is fat fingers by an AS operator to sink your online presence, and no amount of content distribution or built-in redundancy can save you. But I know this garnered the attention of World Government organizations such as the US Department of Homeland Security, and they will be having a chat with the operator of the AS this morning.
Ever wondered what would happen to a wind turbine that is exposed to too much wind? Here’s exactly what happens:
Quite spectacular, wouldn’t you say?