RIM’s BlackBerry 9500 “Thunder” captured on camera?
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
[Thanks, Yasim M.]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Rock Band Drum Kit accessibility mod helps everybody rock harder
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
Rock Band Drum Kit accessibility mod helps everybody rock harder
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too (Michael Arrington/TechCrunch)
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too — Lately Twitter has been cleaning house, raising money, doing interviews and actually talking to users. In a blog post last week they did a Q&A session, directly answering questions about Twitter's architecture. — So I have a couple of questions …
Napa Valley winery flips on Flotovoltaic solar array
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
[Via CNET]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Napa Valley winery flips on Flotovoltaic solar array
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
[Via CNET]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Egghub Helps You Organize Your Discs
Egghub is a new service that helps you organize your media. Egghub offers databases for movies, software, music and games. Each disc page offers a variety of content including: ratings, reviews, purchase options, comments and wishlist options. The reviews that are displayed come from Amazon and you can also add your own comments about a disc. I'd suggest they put the comment option at the top - users who contribute to the Egghub community should be rewarded over scraping reviews from Amazon.
You can setup a profile and check out other user's profiles as well. If a disc interests you, there's a purchase option which links to Amazon. The service is good where it is today but it really leaves me wanting more. For example, let's assume I have 200 dvds. Egghub helps me make a list of what I own but what good is that for the actual discs? I'd love to see a way to add a numbering scheme so that I can say that My Little Pony is disc #94 and Transformers (the first movie!) is #213.
How else would I improve Egghub? I'd look at adding exports to the various social networking services. Let me publish my list of discs to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, etc. When I add a new disc, let me tick a box to push a message to Twitter. Since there's no numbering or organization options, the ability to share my lists with friends would be great. This will also drive new users and traffic to Egghub.
Lastly, and this is way out in left field, but what about a friends rental/lending option? If you are on my friends list, you can select a disc to borrow from my available inventory. I can set a price if desired or just do it for free. Egghub can provide the mailers (no postage provided) and sell ads on the mailers. I know this is probably a bit complicated but I think there could be some real potential here for a library-type system for sharing. And if rentals are too far out there, what about a classifieds offering to buy and sell?
While it's easy to look at Egghub and say that it's just a simple disc list site, there's enough potential here to create a very solid offering with a strong business model. Egghub is a startup I plan to keep my eye on.
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This Week’s Top Downloads [Download Roundup]
- UltimateDefrag Moves Apps and Files for Quicker Access (Windows)
"Put your high-priority programs and files in the most easily-accessed parts of your hard drive with UltimateDefrag, a free Windows utility." - vmcNetFlix Streams Watch Now Videos to Your Xbox 360 (Windows Vista)
"Freeware Vista Media Center plug-in vmcNetFlix streams Netflix Watch Now videos to Windows Media Center extenders, including the Xbox 360." - Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 Organizes Your Linux Media (Linux)
"Organize your music, videos, podcasts, and other media through a slick-looking portal with Banshee, a free download for Linux systems." - Status Screen Saver Brings Desktop Notifications to Your Screen Saver (Mac)
"Donationware application Status Screen Saver adds status notification badges for popular Mac apps like Mail, NetNewsWire, and Twitteriffic, to the bottom of your monitor while your screensaver is playing." - iSlsk Soulseek Client Downloads Music to Your iPhone and iPod Touch (iPhone and iPod touch)
"Freeware application iSlsk is a Soulseek peer-to-peer client for the iPhone and iPod touch which can download MP3s from the Soulseek network directly to your device." - Always Show Gmail's CC: Field User Script (Firefox with Greasemonkey)
"If you often use the CC or BCC field in Gmail but you're sick of clicking on the 'Add CC' and 'Add BCC' link to do so, we've got a pair of user scripts for you." - BrowserPlus Offers Drag and Drop Uploads and More (Windows and Mac)
"Yahoo unveils a "sneak peek" of a new product that aims to bridge the gap between your web browser and desktop—BrowserPlus, a desktop utility that enables richer browser interaction, like drag and drop file uploads." - Senuti Copies Music from Your iPhone or iPod Touch to Your Mac (Mac)
"The newest beta release of previously mentioned Senuti—a utility that copies music from your iPod to your computer—now supports the iPhone and iPod touch." - Ophcrack Live CD Cracks Windows Passwords (Windows)
"All systems with access to a Windows partition: The free, open source Windows password cracker, Ophcrack Live CD, has updated to version 3.0 with faster cracking, a better interface, and an all-new Vista version."
Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too
Lately Twitter has been cleaning house, raising money, doing interviews and actually talking to users. In a blog post last week they did a Q&A session, directly answering questions about Twitter’s architecture.
So I have a couple of questions, too, based on a couple of discussions I’ve had with people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture.
- Is it true that you only have a single master MySQL server running replication to two slaves, and the architecture doesn’t auto-switch to a hot backup when the master goes down?
- Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?
- Is it true that the only way you can keep Twitter alive is to have somebody sit there and watch it constantly, and then manually switch databases over and re-build when one of the slaves fail?
- Is that why most of your major outages can be traced to periods of time when former Chief Architect/server watcher Blaine Cook was able to sit there and monitor the system?
- Given the record-beating outages Twitter saw in May after Cook was dismissed, is anyone there capable of keeping Twitter live?
How long will it be until you are able to undo the damage Cook has caused to Twitter and the community?
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
FreeHand puts a pocket on your wrist, L on your forehead
Filed under: Wearables
[Via Coolest-Gadgets]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Electricity Generator Gets Its Power From Waste Heat [Electricity]
Dallas' Southern Methodist University is now recycling energy with one of the first commercial electricity generators that use thermoelectricity—the act of drawing power from waste heat. The machine operates by using heat given off by other processes (such as manufacturing) to boil liquids, which then turn into steam, which then turns an electricity-generating turbine.
ElectraTherm's Waste Heat Generators recover heat from various sources without any specialized electronics or hard-to-maintain components. By boiling water up to 200°F, the generator can produce from 25kW to 1MW of fuel-free, emission-free electricity.
About 50% of all fuel burned by industrial sources becomes "waste heat." Though businesses can try to use fuel as efficiently as possible, nearly seven quadrillion Btu of waste heat still escapes to do nothing but warm the atmosphere. But ElectraTherm says that its products, if used widely, could recover the equivalent electric output of 92 500MW gas-fired power plants.
The company says that the university will recoup its purchase cost in three to four years, with electricity costing about three to four cents per kwH during that time. After the payback period, the cost per kWH will drop to less than a penny. If only ElectraTherm's machines could be hooked up to the hot air our politicians will spew come election day, then all our nation's energy problems would be solved. [Electratherm via Cnet]
LaterLoop’s New Airplane Mode: Zipped Bookmarks On The Fly
It was only ten days ago that Mashable first offered a brief peek into LaterLoop, a bookmarking service created by the Greg Hochmuth, founder of Mento and zoo-m.com, which offers easy online/offline access to pages saved for later reading or referral through the use of a FireFox add-on. Users can also integrate the service with an devices called ScrapBook, or even employ a very basic bookmarklet, sans extensions. If you happen to hold a Google account, you can literally be complete new to LaterLoop and begin bookmarking in seconds.
Today we receive word from the company, featured this past week at the Google I/O conference, that it has launched yet another option to users, something it is calling Airplane Mode. Simply put, users can download bookmarks in three varieties - 30 newest, 30 oldest, or 30 shuffled - as a zip file. Once stored locally, users can open the package, click on the front-end HTML page, and and start browsing.
A word of warning. Some pages may prove visually accurate, while the formats of others are horrendously botched. We suggest sticking to fairly simple sites, where text fonts are reasonably large-sized. We tested pages from The New York Times, Wired.com, and Digg. The NYT went into zip format rather nicely (be sure to save from URLs that show stories as a single page, and not those divided into two or more), while the Wired link didn’t fare quite so well when pressed down into Airplane Mode. If you don’t mind stories delivered in bareboned, Google cache style, reading Digg stories and comments won’t bother you terribly.
LaterLoop does note on its website that the new feature is “still experimental and in testing,” so one would gather that formatting issues will soon be remedied. Let us know how your downloads come out.
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
5 Ways to Use LaterLoop, An Offline Bookmarking Tool
Del.icio.us Facebook Application Now Live
HYPERiGo Offers Inefficient (and Non-Social) Bookmarking Site
LookLater - Instant Searchable Bookmarks
JigJak Doesn’t Do Jack
Share Bookmarks Between Your PC And Mobile With Opera
Microsoft Jumping Into Social Bookmarking
NYC Tech Events Week of June 1 - It’s Internet Week!
Next week (June 3-10) is "Internet Week" here in NYC. Below are the events during the week - I've noted the events CN plans to attend in bold.
Tuesday, June 3
- NY:MIEG - topic, "Shifting the Paradigm: Young Women with Cool Jobs Making a Difference in Digital Media and beyond" - 7:30am
- Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference - all day
- Associated Content's Ultimate Call for Content Contest - all day
- Columbia Business School New Media panel discussion - 12:30 - no link provided - it's at the Columbia University School of Business
- Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2008 - Columbia - $500 - all day (tuesday-friday)
- EconAds: Economics of Ad Deals - $300 - 1:30pm - by the PaidContent people - should be good
- Drinks4Startups - Startup Mixer - CN is a media sponsor - 6:00pm-all night
- NY Tech Meetup - same one that happens every month - back at crappy IAC - 7:00pm
Wednesday, June 4
- Internet Marketing Conference - all day - $700
- Time Warner's Conversations on the Circle: News & Politics - 8:00am
- Advertising 2.0 - full day (wednesday-thursday) - $875
- Future of Media - NYU - 1:00pm - looks good, some big name journalists/bloggers will be speaking
- Live Diggnation - 6:00pm - Brooklyn - you can watch Kevin Rose and the other guy drink beer and talk about what was on Digg
- Financing Your Internet Startup - put on by David Rose and the NY Angels - if you plan on getting funding, you should absolutely attend this event - $10 - 6:00pm
- Forum on Online Political Participation - 6:00pm
- Hatch Match - brings founders and advisors/experts/investors together - 6:00pm
- Red Bricks Media's Panel on Media and Entertainment - 6:30pm
- Thrillist's Information Superparty: Web 1.0 Awesomeness to the Maximum Extreme! - 7:00pm (rsvp asap)
Thursday, June 5
- Time Warner's Conversations on the Circle: Entertainment Culture - 8:00am
- Media Meshing - Mixer - 6:00pm
- Media: Overseas Conversations - panel on media as design - 6:30pm
- Hungry Man - donate your old electronics and join this "old" party - 7:30pm
- Internet and Film Collide: Watch - 7:30pm - at the IFC studios
Friday, June 6
- Time Warner's Conversations on the Circle: Health - 8:00am
- Mashable's Exhibit Hall - 6:00pm
- Sosauce Social - new NYC startup - party with the founders - 6:00pm
- NextNY Softball Match - Founders vs. World - 6:15pm
Saturday, June 7
- Wiimbledon 2008 - play Wii Tennis and win prizes - and let me just say, I will kick all of your arses. - all day
- Festival Travel Channel Beer Bash & Screenings - 7:00pm
Partner Links
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Computer designed to read thoughts from brain scans
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Computer designed to read thoughts from brain scans
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Zefty Manages Allowances for Kids and Parents [Kids]
Web-based account manager Zefty helps kids understand spending and parents manage what they owe the little ones. Manually or automatically "deposit" money into kids' accounts, and they (and you) can see what they've saved. If your tyke's tech-proficient, they get their own login to enter what they withdrew and why, but parents get a super-user account as well. There's also "Zefty Checks" kids can request money with, and an allowance calculator that determines a reasonable pay rate. Zefty is free to use, requires a sign-up.
Steampunk Tea Pots Are Very Rust-Tea [Steampunk Tea]
Apologies to reader Miguel for taking his fantastic creations and shoving a lousy pun on it, but it was either that or "sTEAmpunk". These Steampunk Tea Pots are really, really amazing, and they're all hand-made and unglazed colored clay pots perfect for putting your morning tea into. Mr. T would approve.
GALLERY
Boiler
Encounter
PlanetX
Radial
END
Clearing the air with Twitter (Robert Scoble/Scobleizer)
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Clearing the air with Twitter — Yesterday Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter, his Twitter account is here) wrote me an email telling me he wasn't blaming me and trying to clear the air. I said “can I come over?” to talk more about these issues face-to-face.
SongCast Now Serving Indie Music To Five Top Web Outlets
If you’re part of the indie music scene, you’re often likely to hear that one of the best ways to get your digital media out to the virtual shelves of stores on the Web without much initial investment in distribution is to seek the services of CD Baby. The halfway house built to serve the long tail of the musical landscape represents a great many groups and solo artists and sells albums and singles through venues like iTunes, eMusic, Napster, and Rhapsody. All it requires is a $35 setup fee, plus 9% of any earnings from digital downloads. (CD Baby, as its name suggests, began its life selling CDs to various shops, which it continues to do and takes $4 per disc sold.)
Now, however, there’s a new distributor of digital downloads in the running. Called SongCast, it promises to deliver artists’ songs to a quintet of services. 
Indeed, that clearly results in far fewer consumer channels than are available through CD Baby. Yet it seems that SongCast is offering a connection to one reseller in particular that CD Baby does not list : AmazonMP3.
Of course, many independent musicians may find that CD Baby’s ties with iTunes plenty active. And some many even see SongCast’s limited reach as inhibitive, and thus not worth paying a $25 setup fee and a $5.99 monthly fee. (SongCast artists purportedly maintain 100% of royalties, and the service asks nothing for a UPC code, which CD Baby does to the tune of $20.)
But if AmazonMP3 is the primary market one is looking to serve more than any other, SongCast may be worth one’s serious consideration. It’s not a especially cheap option, relative to CD Baby. And music may not be served to dozens of unique channels. But each middleman has his strength(s). And competition has no downsides in the sales arena.
Giant bunny formed from GPS path
Filed under: GPS
Dealzmodo: 5% Off Anything at Amazon.com [Deals]
Lockergnome has somewhat convoluted way to game the Amazon system to get an extra 5% off of anything in the store, as long as it's actually sold by Amazon.com and not a third-party retailer. It's too long to list here, but the gist of it is that you tell Amazon you already own something, wait a day, and they'll recommend that item back to you at a 5% discount. Not sure how this makes sense, but Lockergnome says it works. Go check it out, cheapos. [Lockergnome]
Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services
Our sister publication Techcrunch UK noticed that a Location services API had been added to Google Gears. The developers behind Gears have been plotting out future API additions for a while, and those plans have included having Geo-data available to mobile app developers (see the spec here). We found out today that Google is backing up their Location API with a large effort to map out cell-phone towers and wifi hotspots, so that a user’s location can be pin-pointed more precisely.
While some cell-phones have an internal GPS, the data is inaccurate indoors and not available on all devices. The other non-GPS method for accurate location data is to use the location of cell towers. Google can store the lat and long of a particular cell tower in their database, and when their software in the future sees that cell tower on a phone, they know exactly where the phone is. To boot-strap the database, both Google and Apple have been using a company called Skyhook, who drive around pin-pointing the location of cell towers. By using this method Google bypasses the need to have deals in place with network providers for positioning data. In addition to cell-phone towers, Google is also mapping out Wifi locations to form a large rogue base station almanac, which is used for both additional accuracy in location calculations, and also to point users to the nearest available access point.
Once the database has been boot-strapped with initial data and launched to developers via an API, users of the service will further refine and improve the service by having devices submit information on towers and signal strength (along with location) back to Google. This means that over time, the service improves itself and will be able to work almost anywhere in the world, regardless of local regulations, network providers or restrictions.
It is expected that the service and associated data will be made available for free to developers using Google Gears (specifically the new Windows Mobile version). For developers of mobile applications, it means that they now have a very accurate way of not only calculating a users position, but also an easy way to pinpoint other locations as a basis for a location-based service. There is also an effort to develop and define a standard API for accessing Location data and services in the browser. As with local browser storage, Google are leading the way here by implementing first and then working with other browser developers on a standard.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video
Filed under: Cellphones
[Via zodttd]
Continue reading Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsPrototype iControlPad proves itself on video
Filed under: Cellphones
[Via zodttd]
Continue reading Prototype iControlPad proves itself on video
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsConvert Your Gas Mower to Solar Power [Weekend Project]
Web site Appropedia describes in impressive detail how to convert your gas-powered lawnmower to solar power. The process involves some serious hacking of your original push mower and an investment in parts, but when you're finished you'll be hacking down grass with nothing but the power of the sun. Not bad for a weekend project, if a little on the expensive side.
College Student Makes Multi-touch Table Out Of Cardboard Box [Multi-touch]
Microsoft's Surface multi-touch table sure is cool, but who has $10,000 to spend on a gadget like that? I personally have maybe fifty bucks to my name right now, so I guess I'll have to fulfill my multi-touch itch with a cardboard box and a webcam like this guy.
Seth Sandler, an undergraduate student at UC San Diego, built a portable multi-touch pad out of a cardboard box, a piece of glass, paper, and his Philips SPC900NC webcam. The camera picks up on the shadows created by your fingers when they're placed on the pad's surface. A tracking software then transfers the motions onto a computer screen. Multi-touch goodness at an incredibly low cost—looks like I can afford to eat this month after all! [New Scientist]
People Of New York: Shop Today, Because Tomorrow You’re Taxed
Do you recall that tax bill sent into law in New York State which requires some Internet retail businesses to require customers to fork over some cash and coin? It received the designation of “the Amazon tax” as a result of sheer caliber of business conducted by the online sales giant. Oh, and the fact that Amazon pledged to fight the state on the issue. That raised the profile of the story quite a bit.
Well, the law hasn’t been reversed since it was passed, and it turns out that anyone shopping from within the empire state have a mere eight and a half hours left before the tax is officially enacted. As mentioned by Allen Stern at CenterNetworks, starting June 1st, companies like Amazon and NewEgg will have to levy taxes on customers’ purchases if they opt to continue to have direct or indirect affiliation with New York based entities. Amazon in particular is known quite well as having prolific ties with affiliate sites.
Amazon is not the only Web-based retailer to feel the measure unjust. Overstock has also seen itself fall squarely under the new ruling. It announced two weeks ago that it would cut ties with partner sites based in New York, and, according to Anne Dujmovic of CNET News, announced just this past Friday that it had filed a suit with the New York State Supreme Court against the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, New York tax commissioner Robert Menga, and the state governor. Overstock’s argument falls precisely in line with that of past opponents of the revised tax law. The company’s general counsel, in referencing a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling titled Quill v. North Dakota, said in defense of its case:
“The applicable United States Supreme Court cases on the question of whether the state can collect taxes under these circumstances make it clear that New York cannot constitutionally require Overstock.com to collect these taxes.”
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
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New York Times’ Free Content is Paying Off
Who’s Investing In Facebook: Google Or Microsoft?
New York Times Sees Sense: Paywall Comes Crashing Down
The New York Times Eliminating 100 Newsroom Jobs in ‘08
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MSI Wind gets terse pre-release review
Filed under: Laptops
It's pretty tough to wrap your melon around, but MSI's Wind has not yet officially launched per se. That being said, it has still managed to end up in the hands of quite a few eager subnote lovers, and Laptop Mag is no exception. Shortly after the UK branch of CNET posted up their initial impressions, along comes yet another mini-review to get you even more worked up about June 3rd. Here's the skinny so far: the screen is amazing, keyboard is as well, the trackpad is simply too cramped and the port assortment is very respectable. All in all, critics were left "seriously impressed," and they even threw together a video and image gallery for checking out afterwards. Head on over, alright?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
@MarsPhoenix Twitters From Foreign Soil. Sort of.
There are a number of technologies whose origins could be found in NASA’s history books. But microblogging most definitely is not one of them. Still, the space agency has developed its own little fascination with Twitter, and Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is spending her evenings channeling the Phoenix Mars lander to speak to 10,565-plus followers, 140 characters at a time, according to Kenneth Chang of The New York Times.
What does she - ahem, Phoenix - speak of, you ask? Stuff. Facts. Humorous notes. Anything short and simple, really. Just a few minutes ago this message was delivered:
“Descent thrusters moved the topsoil during landing, uncovering the ice table. The pic was taken for engineers to check my legs, and voila!”
While NASA covers its missions to quite a detailed degree, sharing photos, videos, logs, educational materials for the perusal of just about anyone outside Mission Control, it hasn’t been known to take up “the tweet” in any official or semi-official capacity. Alas, there’s a first time for everything.
@MarsPhoenix has been actively chatting with Twitter folk for some weeks now, well before touchdown on the red planet. Yet, in that time it’s amassed a five-figure following. More interesting, perhaps, it follows nobody and no thing. Zero. Nada. Is this a play at the age-old “lead, don’t follow” mantra? Or is it Phoenix’s polar solitude amid ice, sand, and dust? But hey, distance shouldn’t stop the lander from making friends. We’re a wireless people now. At the very least, the solar-powered sampler should add a little one-two for its fellow Earth-born inhabitants, Spirit and Opportunity.
We at Mashable wouldn’t mind a hookup either, of course. If you’d like to follow what we here on Rock #3 are saying, these are the links.
Mashable Feed + Pete
Adam Ostrow
Adam Hirsch
Alana Taylor
Kristen Nicole
Mark Hopkins
Paul Glazowski
Sean P. Aune
Stan Schroeder
Tamar Weinberg
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Twitter Mobile Interface
Quick Fix For Twitter Troubles
Don’t Send Bac’n: Use TwitterSearch
Mosio Uses Twitter For Mobile Q&A
Twitter Adds GMail Contacts Import
How Messed Up Is Twitter For You Right Now? [Poll]
30Boxes Brings Us Power Twitter
ReplacementDocs Finds Manuals and Maps for Video Games [Games]
You can find some great deals buying video games used and secondhand, but there's often the trade-off of not getting a manual or the original maps and cheat sheets with your disc—annoying with some games, near-deal-breakers for others, (I'm looking at you, StarTropics.) ReplacementDocs has over 1,000 manuals and reference guides available for games of all kinds, and helpful users are adding to that number. Use the search box to find your game's pages, or browse around by platform. It's somewhat hit and miss, with a lean toward involved role playing games, but a great place to look before throwing up your hands and giving up on navigating that unbeatable level.
