Category: GReader

At 2:46 p.m, Tokyo time, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan sent a powerful wall of water inland, destroying coastal towns and property. More »

The Saskatchewan government has decided not to hold a province-wide vote on whether to change the clocks each spring and fall.

The Dalai Lama said Thursday that he will give up his political role in Tibet’s government-in-exile, shifting that power to an elected representative.

Major NHL sponsor Air Canada threatened to withdraw its sponsorship unless the league moves to impose sanctions to reduce potential serious injuries such as the one that Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty suffered this week.

Do you have a go-to restaurant you love – a place where everybody knows your name? If you’ve been checking in there from Google Latitude in Google Maps for Android, we want to help you get a little extra love right back. After launching check-ins for Latitude last month, today we’re rolling out our first check-in offers at more than 60 great places in Austin, Texas.

Checking in from Google Latitude lets you easily share the places you go with friends, and you can even choose to get check-in notifications or automatically check in to make it even easier. In addition to sharing places, you can also gain status as a “Regular”, “VIP”, or “Guru” at places depending on how often you’ve checked in there. You can even see your progress along the way by tapping your current status. I’ve been checking in almost everywhere I go, and after a steady stream of caffeination at my favorite coffee shop, I’m proud to be a Guru there!

From the Place page, find available check-in offers (left); tap your status to see where you stand and find your check-in history (right).

In addition to pride, you can now unlock check-in offers that places have created for your status level. So, a restaurant or shop can give their Regulars a reason to keep coming back and their Gurus an awesome reward for their loyalty. Check-in offers can be as creative as places want for any of the three status levels. You can find places where check-in offers are available in Google Maps for Android search results and Place pages.

See if a place has check-in offers available in your Google Maps for Android search results.

You’ll be able to see both available and locked check-in offers. And once you gain status and unlock a check-in offer, just tap Redeem and show your phone to use it. Learn more at google.com/mobile/checkin.

See locked offers and ones available at your status level (left); tap an unlocked one and redeem it (right).

• Free coffee for Regulars at Frank
• Free sundae from the cafe for VIPs at Toy Joy
• Buy a slice and get one free during certain hours for VIPs at East Side Pies
• 10% off any upcoming event book for Gurus at BookPeople
• 20% off select merchandise for Gurus at Waterloo Records

Charlie Sheen brought his verbal war against Warner Bros. and the executive producer of ‘Two and a Half Men’ to the courtroom on Thursday, filing a $100-million US lawsuit seeking to recoup his salary and wages for the show’s crew.

The developers behind Angry Birds, Rovio, had been searching for investors for a while and today, the Finland-based company announced that it has managed to secure over $40m from a collection of investment companies, one of which is connected to Skype. The companies to come on board are Accel Partners,…

No surprises here, just the straight-up news that RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook is one small step closer to retail: it’s gotten FCC clearance. Well, at least the WiFi-only version has — no sign of the WiMAX-capable version for Sprint yet — but RIM’s actually sneaked all three capacities of the device through on one filing (16GB, 32GB, and 64GB). There’s still quite a bit of material protected under the company’s confidentiality request with the feds, so we can’t see internal or external pictures or the all-important user’s manual… yet. But that label document is certainly cute in blue, isn’t it?

BlackBerry PlayBook hits FCC in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB flavors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What you’re looking at in the psychedelic photograph above is the result of an overturned tractor-trailer in Peabody, Massachusetts that was carrying a load of — you guessed it — printer ink. Fortunately the spillage isn’t believed to cause any environmental damage, but unfortunately you can’t just take your empty cartridges down to Peabody for a quick fill-up. No word on how this may affect HP’s bottom line, but since the markup on ink is absurd, we’re sure they’ll have enough dough to cover the loss. Bonus shot after the break.

[Image: Boston.com]

Continue reading Visualized: Overturned ink-carrying tractor-trailer paints the town red… literally

Visualized: Overturned ink-carrying tractor-trailer paints the town red… literally originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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sblaufuss:

vegkat:

knitwise:

chuushite:

The Whale… If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

This just made my day.

 I’m not crying.  I’m just cutting onions to make lasagna for one.

I have something in my eye. IT’S TEARS

Oh man. I have got to get bigger things on my daily to do list.

P.S. This is really old news item, but it checks out.

TELUS, Bell, MTS, Videotron and now SaskTel have all shifted to branding their wireless networks as “4G”. Today SaskTel has gone 4G too. A press release just went out that states their first “4G” product will be the Novatel Wireless MC547 Mobile Internet Stick in late April: “SaskTel is pleased to announce that its entire […]

Related posts:

1. Rogers begins to build out HSPA+ wireless network
2. TELUS to “deploy HSPA+ Dual Cell technology” in 2011 (and increase revenues 3.5% to 6.5%)
3. SaskTel, TELUS & Bell ink Network Sharing Agreement that brings HSPA devices to Saskatchewan by 2011

Pwn2Own, the annual three-day browser hackathon, has already claimed its first two victims: IE8 on Windows 7 64-bit, and Safari 5 on Mac OS X. Google Chrome looks set to survive for its third year in a row.

Internet Explorer 8 was thoroughly destroyed by independent researcher Stephen Fewer. “He used three vulnerabilities to bypass ASLR and DEP, but also escape Protected Mode. That’s something we’ve not seen at Pwn2Own before,” said Aaron Portnoy, the organizer of Pwn2Own.

Safari 5, running on a MacBook Air, was compromised in just five seconds by French security company Vupen. Both attackers netted $15,000 for successfully compromising a browser.

The contest continues today and tomorrow. Firefox 3.6 is yet to be attacked, and tomorrow will see the very first mobile browser deathmatch. Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and RIM OS, all with their stock browsers, will be attacked by security researchers to find out just how secure mobile browsing is. Again, $15,000 is available for the first person or team to compromise each of the browsers.

Google, Apple and Mozilla, incidentally, all rolled out updates to their browsers just before Pwn2Own. It was not a coincidence.

Internet Explorer and Safari first to fall at Pwn2Own 2011, Chrome and Firefox still standing originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, remember when Jolicloud told us yesterday that it was going to release its Joli OS 1.2 sometime in the future? Well, the future is now! That’s right, you can download the OS or test out the web app in Chrome right this second. Naturally, we had to try out the new version for ourselves and we put it to the test on an Acer Aspire One 522. For those that have never downloaded the OS before, Jolicloud makes it incredibly easy — you can simply grab the .exe file from its site and the installation process takes care of the rest. Those that wish to download the ISO can do that as well. There’s also that new Chrome web app, but we’ll get to that soon.

Sure, the OS has dropped the “cloud” part of its name, but ironically, it’s more cloud based than ever. The entire OS has always been centered around web apps, and now the focus is on making those easier to share, discover, and create. The latter is probably one of the biggest changes — as you can see above, we made an app that launches the Jolicloud Engadget tag page. All we had to do was type in the URL and add a picture to the shortcut. You can also star an app easily from the main menu, which will flag it for your followers. (For those that aren’t familiar with the social aspect of the OS, you can follow others and see their apps, etc.) Other than that, the UI has been polished a bit and Dropbox has been integrated so you can easily access files from any of your Joli OS devices. And that’s where the new HTML 5 Chrome app comes in — you don’t have to install Joli OS on all your computers, you can now simply log in on any system that has a Chrome browser, although local apps, like OpenOffice won’t work. All in all, we’d say Jolicloud continues to make its cloud OS better and better — but don’t let us tell you how it is, hit the source link and try it out for yourself.

Joli OS 1.2 available now, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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