“In another sign of the technology industry’s fundamental shift away from PCs and toward mobile communications, the wireless segment is expected to overtake computers to become the world’s leading application market for semiconductor purchasing by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) starting in 2011.”
Sweet! Heathkit is apparently bringing back the kit building tradition.
“Anja Markiewicz, who makes amazing sculpture from paper, each only a few milimeters long. She focuses mostly on the natural world, making tiny rabbits and sea horses — sometimes straying into the realm of fantasy with a tiny dragon — and the occasional geometric figure. The process behind this so-called nano-origami is surely painstaking, and amazingly, she begins with pieces of paper barely an inch wide.” via Geekosystem
Read More → "Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny origami"
A pioneer of the corporate-computer break-in recounts the hacking exploits that led him on a nearly 20-year cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement. via NY Times
Stay Puft Caffeinated Marshmallows available here
Or help out your cube mates by lobbing them some helpful snacks with one of these:
Zebra Shooter
Read More → "These caffeinated marshmallows might be just the thing for the all-nighter you pull, programming around the campfire"
Will history remember this as the dawning of the Age of the Cyborg?
Researchers have created what they call a “living nanowire” using an usual type of bacteria that has long filaments outside its body and conducts electrons better than some metals. This could be an important first step in merging biological systems with electronics for small organic batteries or biological superconductors that are much cheaper to produce than silicon-chip based technologies.
… Read More → "Researchers Create The First Living Nanowire From Bacteria"
This video is remarkable: Ben Wu, an engineer and self-described dreamer, has spent the past year developing a program he calls Quantum Phantom — an Iron Man-inspired system that allows users to control a computer’s cursor using only an ordinary webcam.
With his Windows software onboard, Wu can draw, write and move onscreen icons or widgets, simply by waving his camera in front of a set of dual monitors. The prototype is even sophisticated enough to recognize his own webcam-produced handwriting and automatically convert it to rich text. In most cases, … Read More → "Quantum Phantom prototype lets you control your computer screen with a webcam"
Thirty years ago today IBM officially ushered in what many consider to be the modern computing era with the 5150. What ultimately became known simply as the IBM PC was the first machine to run a Microsoft operating system (the recently acquired PC-DOS) on an Intel processor (the 4.77MHz 8088) and inspired countless clones. The bare-bones model, which cost $1,565, was cheap enough to become a serious commercial success, and spawned an entire cottage industry of machines that touted their IBM-PC compatibility. We won’t spend too much time recounting … Read More → "You never forget your first computer"
Yotel, a chain of luxury hotels created by Simon Woodroffe’s as an extention of his YO! empire has the distinction of having a robotic luggage handler. The only in the world, apparently. According to an aricle in DVICE, guests can “simply key in their confirmation codes into kiosk and the Yobot will accept any luggage(s) of up to 100 pounds and stash it for ya”.
Read more via DVICE
… Read More → "Do you have to tip a robotic luggage handler?"Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.
John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has developed a prototype that can replicate the monitoring abilities of bulky electrocardiograms and other medical devices that are normally restricted to a clinical or laboratory setting. This work was presented today in Science.
The electronic tattoo achieves … Read More → "Stick-On Electronic Tattoos"
