.::REALITYRECALL::.

A basic human desire is to look for life beyond Planet Earth. We look at the stars wondering if a tentacled creature is gazing back at us and we ponder if life on Earth was spawned by alien bacteria hitching …

Designer Damjan Stanković has a novel solution for street pollution, and it doesn’t involve biofuels made from bunnies or boxy concept cars. His Red Dot Award-winning Eko traffic light brings the progress bar to the streets, eliminating those frustrating 90 seconds that we endure at intersections.

Stanković is not, however, attempting to assuage your annoyance at having to wait; instead, the progress bar is intended to show motorists exactly how much time will pass before the light goes green. During this lull, drivers can shut off their motors to conserve gas and prevent idling emissions.

Continue reading Traffic Light Counts Down To Green, Promotes Eco-Awareness

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Traffic Light Counts Down To Green, Promotes Eco-Awareness originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox: If you need a simple screen recording tool but don’t want to install an extra application just for the task, the CaptureFox extension brings screen recording to Firefox.

Once you install the extension, a small icon is placed in the right hand side of your status bar—for those of you who have banished your status bars for extra screen space, you can hit CTRL+SHIFT+U or open it from the Tools menu instead—clicking on it pulls up the menu you see in the screenshot above.

After you select the settings you want, you can begin capturing. The capture can be limited to the Firefox windows or cover the whole screen and you can select your video quality, frame rate, codec, and filename. Check out the video below to see it in action.

If you’re looking for a stand-alone or web-based screencasting tool, check out our recent Hive Five on best screencasting tools. Have a tool for screencasting you couldn’t live without? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

You can visit the CaptureFox site at the link below for additional information or jump right to the Mozilla Add-on page for CaptureFox here. CaptureFox is free and works wherever Firefox does.

If you use Zoho for its customer relationship platform, Zoho Mail, or as a secondary document space, but keep some files in Google Docs, the web suite has made it very easy to upload and attach documents from Google’s service.

It’s not officially announced yet, but a wiki page and Zoho Show presentation show off the new Google Docs uploading powers that many Zoho products have added. We’d say that “nearly every” Zoho product has added Google Docs uploading, but there are so many tools at Zoho’s platform that we’d be remiss to even try and cover them all.

Here’s how Zoho shows off its Google Docs integration:

Are you a Zoho user who also digs Google Docs, or vice-versa? Tell us how you use Zoho and Google to get things done.

Well, we’ve known for a while that Google was throwing considerable weight behind HTML 5, and that one of the purposes of the markup language is to do away with plug-ins for Internet apps, so it makes sense that eventually Gears would go the way of the Dodo. But so soon? Linus Upson, the man in charge of both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS engineering teams, has announced that the company is done developing the software. “We are not driving forward in any meaningful way [on Gears],” the man said in an interview with PC Magazine. “We are continuing to maintain it, so that applications will continue to work; we don’t want to break anything out there.” If you listen to this guy, it sounds like this was the plan, all along: “When we started the Gears project, three years ago… we did it because we couldn’t get the browser vendors interested in building offline applications.” He then details the mind trick: Google ships Gears, and suddenly browser vendors are “very interested in adding capabilities to build offline applications,” paving the way for the capabilities in the next version of HTML. Clever, Google. In the same interview, Upson stated the company’s plans to move all its apps to standards-based HTML 5 APIs. Now that it’s convinced the world that it wants — nay, needs — rich Internet applications, we hope that the company will promise to use its powers of persuasion for good, and not for evil.

Google halts development of Gears, makes room for HTML 5 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Florida Highway Patrol says it will issue Tiger Woods a careless driving citation for a car crash outside the star golfer’s Orlando-area mansion last week.

Fritz Henderson has resigned as chief executive officer of General Motors less than a year after taking over the position.

A number of automakers posted solid Canadian sales increases for the month of November.

Calgary captain Jarome Iginla is providing the bulk of the Flames’ offence, and the NHL rewarded him Tuesday by naming him the league’s player of the month of November.

Web users perform billions of searches every year, leaving the folks at Google with a fount of interesting information. When the year ends, GOOG rounds it all up into their yearly zeitgeist. This year, Twitter and Michael Jackson lead the way.

A bit more about how Google puts their zeitgeist together:

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.” All of the search queries we studied are anonymous-no personal information was used.

The Google Zeitgeist always provides an interesting overview of what was on our minds in any given year, so give it a look and share what interesting finds you can dig up in the comments.

Ho. Lee. Crap. The first (real) teaser trailer’s coming in December, but after seeing this poster, I don’t know if I can’t wait that long. And yes, I know tomorrow is December. [Yahoo via Ain’t It Cool]

A profanity-laced tirade at last summer’s U.S. Open has earned tennis star Serena Williams a record $82,500 US fine and two years of probation.

Michael Arrington announced the death of the CrunchPad on Monday morning in a blog post heavily spiced with angst and drama.

According to Arrignton, the Cruchpad — a 12-inch Web tablet expected to be priced at about $300 — was just days away from launch. At the last minute, however, Arrington received an email from Chandra Rathakrishnan, the chief executive of manufacturing partner Fusion Garage, apparently trying to cut Arrington out of the product on the eve of the launch. Fusion Garage, according to Arrington, would market the device itself under its own name.

“Err, what?” Arrington wrote. “This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone,
notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving
ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from
Apple.”

Arrington claims that the company had overcome obstacles at every stage
in the business, securing preferred pricing for the Atom processor with
Intel, negotiating with a “major multi-billion-dollar retail partner”
for a retail launch and up-front payments, and securing venture capital and
angel investments to finance the company going forward.

“Mostly though I’m just sad,” Arrington wrote. “I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge
business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume
the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open
source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money.
It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the
same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible.”

It's possible that the CrunchPad could still emerge in some form,
although Arrington has vowed to file multiple lawsuits against Fusion
Garage and its employees.  For now, however, the CrunchPad will
inevitably take its place among the most heavily touted vaporware of 2009.

When it came down to discussing the dollar value for his eight-year, $62.4-million contract extension, Columbus Blue Jackets forward Rick Nash says he chose his team over money.

This infographic makes me so glad that we came up with storage methods other than floppy disks. Imagine replacing your 2TB hard drive with 1,422,222 floppies. No thank you. Update:

Reader Drew just noticed that the artist updated the graphic. I’ve replaced the image. Looks like the guide inconsistencies you all noticed have been fixed, at least for the most part. [Curtiss Spontelli via fellow Gizmodian Kyle. Thanks dude!]

The Florida Highway Patrol said it expects to release tapes of the 911 call on Sunday and it will investigate Tiger Woods’ crash as a traffic accident.