Author: Terren

North Korea has called South Korean artillery drills on a front-line island a ‘reckless military provocation’ but said it would not retaliate, backing away from earlier threats to strike back.

Android: We recently showed you how to get the fantastic Gingerbread keyboard on your rooted 2.2 Android phone, but some kindly folks over at XDA-Developers have made their own package for rooted or unrooted phones running 2.1 and above. More »

Hacked your Kinect recently? Then you probably know something most regular Xbox 360 gamers don’t — namely, that the Kinect’s infrared camera is actually capable of higher resolution than the game console itself supports. Though Microsoft originally told us it ran at 320 x 240, you’ll find both color and depth cameras display 640 x 480 images if you hook the peripheral up to a PC, and now an anonymous source tells Eurogamer that Microsoft wants to do the very same in the video game space. Reportedly, Redmond artificially limited the Kinect on console in order to leave room for other USB peripherals to run at the same time, but if the company can find a way around the limitation, it could issue a firmware update that could make the Kinect sensitive enough to detect individual finger motions and inevitably lead to gesture control. One of multiple ways Microsoft intends to make the world of Minority Report a reality, we’re sure.

Microsoft seeking to quadruple Kinect accuracy? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google hacked site notification notifies you if your site is hacked (repeat this five times fast) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Dec 2010 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FOX is 100% committed to Fringe, just not the Fringe you’ve been watching. In comments made to EW’s Jeff Jensen, FOX execs described their game-plan to save the show – which doesn’t need saving, according to them (confusing!) – by reinventing the image of Fringe from dense character driven adult SciFi to rebellious-teen targeted horror.

A train from Baltimore to Philadelphia stalled on the tracks for ten hours last night. With doors locked and electricity waning, passengers cried and fought for emergency rations. A local news reporter happened to be on board, and tweeted it. More »

North Korea warns South Korea to stop planned artillery drills on an island the North bombed last month, saying its retaliation would be even more intense than its original attack.

Lindsay Powers
The net released a movie-style trailer to declare the show won’t go off the air when it moves…

Full story at The Live Feed

Windows: We’ve learned to stop worrying about antivirus software since Microsoft released their great Microsoft Security Essentials suite, but today it gets even better, improving Windows Firewall integration, network traffic inspection, and an heuristic scanning engine. More »

Collaborating on a spreadsheet is different than collaborating on a text document—if someone messes up a cell, for example, it's harder to see the change in the bigger picture. No longer, at least if you're using Google Docs, which has implemented revision history for spreadsheets, a feature which even Microsoft Office doesn’t seem to offer in Excel. [Docs Blog] More »

Every so often an idea comes along that perfectly realizes the potential of its platform, leaving us in complete awe. Simple, yet brilliant, and executed just right. Today that idea is embodied in Word Lens, an augmented reality iPhone app that uses Optical Character Recognition to translate words from one language to another. Word Lens will grab an image, interpret it, and draw the words right back onto the screen–but in another language.

If you’ve ever need proof that augmented reality is the future of mobile technology, this is it. Watch the video below–you won’t be disappointed.
 
 

   
 Word Lens is a free download on the App Store, but the two currently available dictionaries–Spanish/English and English/Spanish–cost $5 each. The app only works on iDevices with video cameras, which should be obvious given its augmented reality nature. Because Word Lens is primarily a word-to-word translation system, it’s not going to retain the nuances of grammar or sentence structure. But it’ll get the idea across.

With more languages likely to come in the future from developer Quest Visual, Word Lens and Google’s Text-to-Voice ambitions may revolutionize international travel and communication within the next few years. So long as you have a smart phone, anyway.

RIM dropped an intriguing hint about a likely release date for the BlackBerry PlayBook during its Q3 earnings call this week — namely, that the company expects the first revenue from the dual-core tablet to arrive in the first quarter of the company’s fiscal year. “There are no PlayBook revenues included in our Q4 guidance, and we expect the first revenue impact from PlayBook will be in RIM’s first quarter,” a RIM spokeswoman said, adding that the PlayBook is still slated to ship in the first quarter of the calendar year. If that still sounds like financial gibberish, let us clarify a tad — RIM’s first fiscal quarter doesn’t start till March, which happens to be when the first calendar quarter ends. Oh, RIM can certainly revise its guidance to shareholders and launch the BlackBerry PlayBook earlier or later if that’s what execs deem fit, but if both of RIM’s statements remain true, then March is when the PlayBook will ship. Isn’t logic wonderful?

BlackBerry PlayBook will ship in March, assuming inertial momentum originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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