.::REALITYRECALL::.

The Army Corps of Engineers has broken ground on a serious construction project: a 150,000-gallon-per-second, $500m pumping station charged with keeping the city of New Orleans a little, uh, dryer than it has been in the last few years.

The pump is just a small part of a larger $14bn plan to seal up New Orleans’ levees and bolster the city’s disaster preparedness, but it’s without a doubt the most visually impressive. PopSci’s thrown together a couple of diagrams to give us a sense of scale, and trust me, they're necessary—see that little white thing next to the diesel engine? That's a full-sized human being. There aren’t a whole lot of companies that make combustion engines that cartoonishly huge, so my money’s on something from a company like Wartsila-Sulzer, which makes engines like this to spin the props on ultramassive cargo ships, and conceivably, pumps:

At any rate, the pump is expected to be operational—and NOLA slightly safer—by 2011. More at [PopSci]

No matter how many times I see this photo—of a squirrel crashing Melissa and Jackson Brandts' photo opportunity at Lake Minnewanka, in Canada's Banff National Park—it always makes me laugh. The fact that it's 100% real definitely helps:

Windows/Mac/Linux: The free Adobe Shortcut App gives fast access to look up keyboard shortcuts for the entire array of Adobe products from one simple place.

Once you’ve installed the Adobe AIR application, you can choose a program from the buttons on the top, and find a shortcut using the search box, browsing, or even adding them to a favorites list. You can switch between viewing Windows or Mac shortcuts, or even view the cheat sheet in PDF format. It’s a quick and easy way to look up the shortcuts without having to pull out the help file. Adobe Shortcut App is a free download for all platforms, requires Adobe AIR.

Looks like Microsoft’s working on a snazzy new glass lens Webcam capable of 720p video at 30fps (in full 1280×720 resolution). Other features are expected to include 4x digital zoom, and a built-in noise-cancelling microphone.

The camera is made from aluminum and has a stand designed to work with both desktops and laptops. Pocket-link goes on to say that:

The LifeCam Cinema is of course compatible with Windows Live Messenger, but also with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery. It’s also compatible with Windows 7 out of the box, as well as Windows Vista and Windows XP.

We’ve seen 720p Webcams before but the video specs on this one look quite promising. The Lifecam Cinema is expected to be $80 when it hits stores on September 9. [via Pocket-Lint]

Windows only: Good news for Chrome early adopters: Xmarks, the browser add-on that syncs bookmarks between Firefox, IE, and Safari, has now released an alpha version of the bookmark sync tool for the developer channel of Google Chrome on Windows.

To try it out, you’ll need to sign up for Xmarks beta testing and then click on the sign up button to test Xmarks for Chrome alpha. It’s a limited test, and our admittance is still listed as pending, so we’ll try to update with screenshots when we’re able to try it out. In the meantime, you may want to sign up yourself if you’re willing to test both the latest developer release of Chrome and Xmarks for Chrome alpha.

Xmarks for Chrome is a free download, currently invite only and Windows only.

Thanks Sam!

Filed under: Laptops

Jolicloud beta gets a thorough going over, Microsoft still not worried originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An increase in public awareness about aliens and UFO likely contributed to the record number of sightings reported to Britain’s Defence Ministry in 1996, according to Britain’s National Archives UFO consultant, David Clarke.

The Pocketables crew keep teasing us with more visuals of a purported unbranded Android MID, this time throwing up a good size comparison in the form of a Sony VAIO P lurking in the background. Very little can be said at this point without exploding the story into wild speculation — we’ll leave that part to you, dear readers — so we’ll stick to the seemingly self-evident stuff. The above screenshot indicates SD expansion and phone capabilities, and there are a few more after the break that show off an impressively svelte physique. Of course without a substantiated source and millions of skilled Photoshop artists out there, these pictures could still be fake — but aren’t they pretty?

[Via Slashgear]

Continue reading Mysterious Android MID gets more pictures, still no name

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Tablet PCs

Mysterious Android MID gets more pictures, still no name originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you thought 100nm was about as narrow as lasers could get, huh? Well think again brother, because scientists at Norfolk State University have now demonstrated a 44nm ‘spaser’ that performs a laser’s functions by the alternative means of surface plasmons. By using such an unorthodox technique, the researchers have been able to overcome the minimum size limitation to lasers, and they even claim spasers could be made as small as 1nm in diameter. Peeking into the (not too near) future, this could improve magnetic data storage beyond its current physical limits, and even lead to the development of optical computers that “can operate at hundreds of terahertz” — and here you were, thinking that your brand spanking new Core i7 system with Blu-ray was future-proof.

Filed under: Science

World’s smallest laser cracks open the door to THz CPU race originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CRISTAL is a research project that moves the universal remote to a Microsoft Surface-type table with incredibly intuitive gestures. Want to watch a movie? Drag the cover to your TV. It even lets you trace a path for your Roomba.

Throw away everything you thought you knew about the truth. This is the one. We can’t wait to stuff one awkwardly into the fake keyboard tray of our fake MacBook Micro and live life just how Apple rumor sites have always wanted us to live it. Granted, Nowhere Else has gotten some pretty great scoops in the past, so we won’t rule anything out just now. The pic above lines up pretty well with all the rumors we’ve heard so far — which sort of helps and sort of hinders its veracity in our eyes. Nowhere Else isn’t calling it either way, if that helps you in your soul search for the truth. Another pic is after the break.

Update: Eagle-eyed tipster Terry points out that the “Welcome” graphic is an easy spot on Google Image Search, with that exact configuration and timing of converging letters from Leopard’s intro video showing up in the very first result. Try it for yourself! Not a good sign, folks.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

Continue reading Apple tablet pic ‘leaked’: this is the real one, we can feel it

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Apple tablet pic ‘leaked’: this is the real one, we can feel it originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thanks to a combination of RSS magic and Twitter API, it’s possible to search the tweets of everyone in your Twitter network with Google Reader. Here’s how to do it.

First, though, why would you want to do this? The native search tool provided by Twitter only tunnels back about a week and a half. Anything beyond that is lost in the ether. Thanks to a handy little tool created by Dave Winer, you can turn your follower list into an RSS feed and import that feed into Google Reader, which turns the data from the Twitter feeds into a search-friendly mountain of feed items. How do you do it? From ReadWriteWeb:

It couldn't be much simpler. Just put your Twitter username into this link, instead of mine, and load it up in your browser: http://tw.opml.org/get?user=marshallk&folder=1

It may take just a minute, but the end result will be an OPML file. You can either go up to your browser’s File menu and select “save as” or you can View Source and copy and paste the source of the page into a text document. Save it with a memorable name and either .xml or .opml as the file type. It’s really quite easy.

Now if you want to put this puppy into Google Reader just log in, click on “manage subscriptions” and find the import/export button. Import that file into Google Reader and you’re ready to rock and roll!

In our test of the service, we were able to mine all sorts of things from the feed we created. How much did our band of followers talk about Texas? Quite a bit more than we expected. Check out the full article at the link below for additional information or use the technique quoted above to jump right in. Have a favorite Twitter-centric hack of your own? Share it in the comments.

Google have announced that today they have added Picasa Web Albums as another source of user-uploaded, geo-tagged images within Google Street View.

When you open Street View in Google Maps you will now see pictures from Picasa as well as from Panoramio. Google’s new ‘Photosynth’ type navigation in Street View seems to work fairly seamlessly between photos from Picasa and photos from Panoramio.

Check out the photographs in this little hack I created a few weeks back. You should be able to see Picasa photographs as well as pictures from Panoramio.

Via: Google LatLong: Picasa photos in Street View

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Get your suicide pills ready, because there may not be an Apple tablet in 2009. That’s what Apple mavens John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple’s “very reliable sources” are saying: No tablet till 2010.

Jim Dalrymple says:

Very reliable sources familiar with the product have said speculation of the tablet being introduced during the September event are flat out wrong. The Apple tablet, they said, would not see the light of day until the first part of 2010.

The event in September will be focused on music, which means we could see new iPods and perhaps some updates to iTunes. The tablet computer will not even be mentioned as part of the event, my sources said.

While in response to Brian’s account on the conversation with someone claiming to be in the know, Gruber has this to say:

I’m almost certain there’s no tablet coming this year. It’s a 2010 thing.

Both seem adamant about it. Unlike the usual rumor sites—who are a random hit-or-miss most of the time—Gruber has an almost perfect track record when it comes to breaking news about upcoming Apple products, usually right before an event.

Still, the truth is that very little is known about Apple’s super-secret new products outside of a handful in the Cupertino campus. And while that handful may spill at some point, the information is usually vague until very close the release date. In other words: While the sources pointing to a 2009 Apple tablet release may be wrong, Gruber and Dalrymple may be wrong too.

Heck, for all we know, everyone may be wrong, and this whole tablet thing may end being a just a wet dream. Or maybe everyone is partly right, and there will be a September announcement and the tablet will be available sometime in 2010, similarly to what happened with the iPhone. That will give time to iPhone app developers to prepare their software for the new format.

I don’t know. I don’t give a damn. I just want someone to give me the damn thing already. In the meantime, we are taking the Apple tablet meter 20% down. [Loop Insight and Daring Fireball]

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