Previously we’ve highlighted a guide to screws, this guide to bolts and fasteners will round out your DIY knowledge. Know the difference between a sex bolt, a mating screw, and a shoulder bolt? No? Read on to find out. More »
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Know Your Bolts; An Infographic Guide to Fasteners [Tools]
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Friday Ratings: ‘Fringe’ Steady in Second Week
Philiana Ng
Fox’s decision to move Fringe to “Fridays” is paying off.
read moreFull story at The Live Feed
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Watch TV commentators in 1994 have no idea what the internet is [Video]
In this 1994 clip from The Today Show, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric are completely befuddled by the notion of the internet. We laugh now, but remember that we’ll be the ones immortalized as rubes when psychic data clouds debut. More »
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Breakups and Lies
I got a philosophy degree so no one could ever break up with me. It’s pretty effective.
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Google announces Android event for February 2nd
Had enough Honeycomb this week? Perhaps — but next week is a whole new week, and Google’s got your back. Mountain View has selected Wednesday, February 2nd for an event that’ll include “an in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos,” so by all accounts this seems to be more than a mere wrap-up of everything they’ve announced in the past few weeks. New tablets? Honeycomb for smartphones? Android 2.4? Something else entirely? We’ll be there to find out, of course.
Google announces Android event for February 2nd originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 18:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wireless electricity enables next generation of annoying packaging
Yep, these cereal boxes light up. They’re using a new branded-technology called eCoupling that provides electricity via induction, which means the shelves have a coil with AC power running through it. The “printed coils” on the boxes allow inventory control and data exchange presumably thanks to a low-power microcontroller. But in the video after the break you can see that the printed lighting on the boxes lets them flash parts of the box art as a way to attract customers’ attention. We’d bet that they’re using electroluminescent materials but we weren’t able to get find specifics on how this is done. We just hope advertisers don’t start rolling noise-makers into their packaging.
[Crave via Laughing Squid]
Filed under: wireless hacks
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Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support
Thought Honeycomb was just for tablets? Well, it’s not! Sure, tablets might be Google’s main thrust with the release, but we’ve been able to dig up enough evidence in the preview SDK’s emulator released yesterday to suggest that these guys are still keeping their eyes on the smartphone prize.
Here’s how it works: the emulator can be set to load at an arbitrary screen resolution. By default, that’s WXGA, 1280 x 768 — perfect for tablets, but obviously a wee bit large for even the biggest smartphones. Well, it turns out that setting the emulator to WVGA (like you might find on a modern mid- to high-end smartphone) triggers a moderately different shell UI that lacks most of the whiz-bang home screen stuff Google’s shown on the Honeycomb tablets. In fact, the default launcher crashes out entirely, which means you need to install a replacement (Launcher Pro works nicely) just to play around.
Once you get in, it’s pretty raw, but you immediately notice that the emulator’s got some traces of smartphone support. Notably, the status bar reverts to a more smartphone-friendly form, albeit one with pre-Gingerbread background coloration and incorrectly-inverted font colors. The lock screen (pictured above) is back to its old form, not the webOS-esque circular lock in the Honeycomb tablet UI. The browser — which has been completely revamped in Honeycomb — works, though without visible tabs; Google might be thinking that they’d take up too much real estate on a screen this small.
Again, you can’t glean much here, but it’s interesting primarily because the emulator knows to revert to a smartphone UI layout at the lower resolution — a possible sign that Honeycomb will be a true dual-mode, dual-purpose platform from day one. And even if it isn’t, it looks like they’re setting themselves up for a two-UI strategy down the road.
[Thanks, Andrew]
Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator has traces of smartphone support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Internet Blows Lid Off of KFC Secret
Is nothing sacred, the Internet? Colonel Sanders’s long-protect military-style secret of 11 herbs and spices has apparently been revealed for all the world to see. Oregano, chili powder, basil–honestly, most of these things are readily found on in the average garden, save for one super-secret element (hint: it’s pretty much MSG).This is the iPhone 4, Wikileaks cables, and Santa Claus's social security all rolled up in one. No clue as to the source of the alleged leak, but if this is true, it could shake up the Kentucky-style chicken deep-frying industry forever. -
Remembering the Challenger [Video]
Twenty-five years ago today, the nation watched as the most diverse space crew in history took off into the sky. But after just seventy-three seconds that journey turned into a technological catastrophe like none we had ever seen before. More »
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SASKATCHEWAN CONTINUES TO LEAD THE COUNTRY IN WAGE GROWTH
For the second month in a row, Saskatchewan wage-earners have experienced the largest year-over-year earnings jump in Canada.
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Visualized: Google’s periodic table of APIs
The world of Google APIs and developer tools can be a confusing one, but the company has now at least brought a bit of order to the chaos with its own take on the periodic table of the elements. As you can see above, Android occupies the top spot normally reserved for hydrogen in the actual periodic table, and the remaining APIs and developer products are all grouped into their appropriate categories — and, of course, linked to their respective websites. Hit up the link below to check out the table in its interactive form.Visualized: Google’s periodic table of APIs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Kinect Projects A New Hope In Holographic Tech
Microsoft’s Kinect has already brought us invisibility, motion-tracked underwear and giant animated Minecraft cats. Now, it’s taking us to a galaxy far far away, thanks to researchers from the MIT Media Lab. Using Kinect and a PC equipped with three off-the-shelf graphics cards, the researchers were able to create a three-inch holographic Princess Leia running at around 15 frames per second, according to the university’s news office.
One of the students in the group dressed as Leia and re-enacted the famous scene from Star Wars in real-time at a conference in San Francisco last weekend. It might not have quite the resolution as R2’s projector in A New Hope, but its one of the fastest methods of projecting a hologram around today. According to an article on ScienceNews.org, a team at the University of Arizona was able to create a large hologram with much higher resolution using 16 cameras and a series of lasers. Unfortunately, this method was 30 times slower than MIT's Kinect hack, refreshing the image once every two seconds.Maybe the most impressive thing about this hack was that the MIT researchers only got their hands on a Kinect around the end of December, giving them about a month to not only create the hologram, but double the frame rate from 7.5 frames per second to 15.Before you run out and wire up your own droids with appeals to Ben Kenobi, keep in mind that there is still one component of the setup that can't be bought in stores. The holographic display used in the project has been developed by MIT since the late-1980s by two groups of professors and their students. The current display, called the Mark-II, is the successor to the original. Professor Michael Bove said his group is developing a larger and cheaper display using the same technology.Here’s a video of the hologram, projected in real-time over the Internet:[via MIT News Office, ScienceNews.org] -
Internet Explorer 9 RC to launch on February 10
Microsoft has just sent out media invites to an Internet Explorer 9 event on February 10th. The announcement will take place in San Francisco.
Earlier today, screen shots of IE 9 build number .6018 began surfacing on the web which indicates that someone outside of Microsoft now has a copy of…
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Ridley Scott’s Prometheus could still have Xenomorphs! [Movies]
Even though Ridley Scott pronounced his Alien prequel dead, his new movie is leaking new details that A) creep us out and B) hint that Scott’s Prometheus will fit perfectly into the Alien mythology that Scott created years ago. More »
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When Lightning Strikes Erupting Volcanoes [Imagecache]
Shared by Terren
Whoa!! Looks to me like the lightning is coming out of the Volcano and not actually striking it.
Japan’s Mount Kirishima is experiencing its biggest eruption in 50 years, sending smoke and ash 5,000 feet up into the air. And for the hell of it, a lightning bolt decided to strike the volcano at the same time. More »
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New research suggests our brains delete information at an ‘extraordinarily high’ rate
The mysteries of the brain may be virtually endless, but a team of researchers from two institutes in Göttingen, Germany now claim to have an answer for at least one question that has remained a puzzle: just how fast does the brain forget information? According to the new model of brain activity that the researchers have devised, the answer to that is one bit per active neuron per second. As Fred Wolf of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization further explains, that "extraordinarily high deletion rate came as a huge surprise," and it effectively means that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be delivered — something the researchers say has "fundamental consequences for our understanding of the neural code of the cerebral cortex."New research suggests our brains delete information at an ‘extraordinarily high’ rate originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Samsung Tabulates 2 million slates, 80 million phones sold in Q4 2010, breaks revenue records
Score one for Samsung in its eternal struggle against South Korean nemesis LG. Whereas the Life’s Good crew were licking their Q4 2010 wounds yesterday, Samsung’s had the pleasure of announcing that the final quarter of last year helped it bust through all its previous fiscal records: total revenue ($139b), net income ($14b), and operating profit ($15.5b) all reached all-time highs. The fourth quarter’s contribution was $2.7b in operating profit, 80.7 million mobile devices sold, 12.72 million flat panel TVs shipped, and two million Galaxy Tabs distributed to Android lovers yearning for some Froyo. That last number’s pretty important as it shows the Tab’s sales have almost doubled over the last month of the quarter — it reached one million sales in early December — indicating that there is indeed a hunger for slate-based computing. Oh, and if you’re wondering what Samsung’s planning for the future, there’s a reminder that a device with a Super AMOLED Plus screen and a dual-core processor is coming to replace the Galaxy S in the first half of 2011. Good to know.
[Thanks, Tascien]
Samsung Tabulates 2 million slates, 80 million phones sold in Q4 2010, breaks revenue records originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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BlackBerry Curve Touch leaks out
The BlackBerry Curve has always been our favorite ‘berry because of its solid keyboard and lack of pretension to any functionality beyond great messaging, but it looks like things are about to change fast: you’re looking at a leaked image of what CrackBerry says is the Curve Touch, codenamed “Malibu,” and it’s all touchscreen — unlike the rumored Apollo, there’s no keyboard in sight. We’ve only got specs on the CDMA version, and they’re right in line with what you’d expect for a midrange device due out in late 2011 / early 2012: 800MHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor, 3.25-inch HVGA screen, 5 megapixel camera with HD video, 1GB storage with microSD expansion and 512MB of RAM, GPS, and NFC. Of course, CrackBerry says those are just “proposed specs,” so anything could change, but man — are we crazy for thinking an all-touch Curve definitely seems to redefine everything about what a BlackBerry is and is not?
BlackBerry Curve Touch leaks out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Keep the Windows Desktop from Crashing by Sandboxing Explorer Windows [Windows Tip]
The Explorer process runs a lot of important things in Windows, and when it crashes, it can really slow you down. It turns out, however, that you can sandbox Explorer windows so if one crashes, it doesn’t drag your whole system down. More »
