Hitachi reveals Blu-ray / HDD / SDHC DZ-BD10HA high-def camcorder
Filed under: Digital Cameras
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August 11th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Xbox 360’s new Dashboard game install demoed on video
Filed under: Gaming
[Via Xbox-Scene News]
Continue reading Xbox 360's new Dashboard game install demoed on video
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August 11th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
BBtv: “WWII Boatpunk,” aboard the SS Jeremiah O’Brien with Todd Lappin
BBtv guest correspondent and blog pal Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics takes us inside a steam-powered World War II "Liberty Ship," the SS Jeremiah O'Brien.
We marvel (!) at the cool old retro-technology that kept this behemoth boat running to and from the beaches of Normandy, and we meet the volunteer caretakers -- obsessive nerds just like us, only with white hair! -- who keep her ship-shape today. Did you know that shipyards in the San Francisco Bay Area once churned out Liberty Ships like this in 4 days or less, during the heat of the war? Watch and learn, li'l skippers.
Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscribe instructions.
Todd has a rockin' photoset of images from the ship, too.
Shot for BBtv by Eddie Codel, during the Long Now Foundation's Mechanicrawl.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off
See What Facebook Connect Looks Like
On Monday, Facebook released a sample site that demonstrates how Facebook Connect (previous coverage), their new authentication methodology for logging into third-party web sites, will work. On the demo site, instead of registering for an account, you're presented with an option to use Facebook Connect instead. The Facebook team built the site so developers interested in using this technology could see how it works. The source code was provided as well.
The sample site is called The Run Around and it's just a simple site that lets runners log their runs and chart progress on their workout routines. From the homepage, you're presented with two options: on the left, you can login with a username and password and on the right, you can click the Facebook Connect button.
Of course, before you can login, you have to register. When you click the link to register, you have the option of filling out the fields to provide your username, password, name, etc. Alternatively, you have the option of clicking Facebook Connect.
When you do so, a dialog box appears and all you need to do is click the "Connect" button to authenticate with the site (assuming you're already logged in). Note there's also a checkbox that you can leave checked (the default) or uncheck. It reads: "Let this application publish one line stories without my approval."
Click the button and you're in.
Once you're logged in, you'll see that any of your Facebook friends already using the site will already be added for you. Although you know that's one of the main purposes of this application, it's pretty amazing to think that at last, the tedious process of finding and adding friends will finally be over.
You'll Never Have To Add Friends Again - You Just Have To Add Them To Facebook
Let's assume for a minute that Facebook Connect really takes off and is available on every social web site you can think of. If that's the case, then the only way to really make that friend graph of yours portable and easy to use is to add all of those friends to Facebook...does anyone have a problem with that?
Not long ago, Facebook established itself as a place to share your personal activities on the web. Here people share family photos, videos from social gatherings, and post personal comments on each other's walls. Facebook, at least back in the beginning, was a social hangout - not some place where you would want to "friend" your colleagues, or heaven forbid, your boss. In fact, people using Facebook tended to use it for personal - as in "real life" - friendships only. Not a place where they friended everyone under the sun. (That was MySpace, if you'll recall.)
But on the new social web, nothing is really private anymore. People are lifestreaming their every action and friending complete strangers on sites like Twitter and FriendFeed solely because they share the same interests. If those relationships are valuable enough to you that you want them to be portable, then you'll need to start friending everyone on Facebook, too. Since that's the case, it looks like you might want to dig into those privacy settings after all.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
Magnify Improves Search and Adds Support for MySpace Video and More
Video search and aggregation tool Magnify has an update today, which is something we haven’t seen explicitly from the company in a while–it’s been busy launching completely new features and spin-off services.
There are two major prongs to Magnify’s release today: one addresses the need for additional video sources that it aggregates from, and the other concerns the search capabilities of its service. With the added support for video sites including MySpace, Hulu, Vimeo, College Humor, Howcast and MTV Overdrive, Magnify is broadening the Web content from which it pulls, so that you can have a bigger pool in which to cast your net.
This particular upgrade seems like a no-brainer, but it also reminds us that there’s a growing number of sites where video content can be found, and that there’s an added value in supporting more than just YouTube and a handful of other video-sharing sites for its aggregation purposes.
And as expected, Magnify has tweaked its search tools, which goes hand in hand with the added support for the handful of new video services. Magnify has more than doubled the speed of its Automatic Video Discovery service, which means you’ll be able to search all of its supported sites very quickly. It also allows Magnify to reportedly increase its potential for new videos added, from 100,000 daily to 1 million per week.
Speed isn’t the only factor that Magnify improved for its search capabilities. Its search has been enhanced with new channel options allowing users to search by other users, date, and review scores. Search results can then be exported via RSS as well.
What’s particularly beneficial to Magnify’s upgrades is the fact that the company has spent so much time building out its feature set, to include certain webcam support, social network features, and an integrated search tool for bloggers. Given Magnify’s growing platform, the addition of new sites, improved search and filter and sharing capabilities means that Magnify already has an established set of services that will immediately be improved as a result of this new roll-out, affecting its entire user base, regardless of the type of user that employs a certain Magnify service.
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Remember 9/11: A Tribute from Magnify.
Magnify’s Custom Options Increase for Video-Sharing Channels
Magnify.net Reports Big Growth, Eyes the Upper Tier of Video Sites
Magnify’s Public Launch Of Webcam Vlogging Network
Magnify.net Growing Fast with 1.2M Videos
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Segway gets a BigFoot facelift
This video shows an incredible 6 tire mod to a standard Segway, which turns it into a cousin of "BigFoot", the original monster truck. This might even scare away the cops who ride Segways.
via Street Use
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in make | | Comments Off
Another Reason to Be Like Paris Hilton: You2Gov’s Campaign Video Ad Contest
The presidential race between Obama and McCain has been the biggest political celebrity face-off in decades, and now actual celebrities are getting involved one way or another, including JLo, Scarlet and even Paris Hilton with her “campaign ad” video posted to Funny or Die on Monday night.
Meanwhile, You2Gov is giving you yet another opportunity to show your support for one of the presidential candidates and get paid. The site is holding a contest to find the most creative 30 second television ad in support of either Obama or McCain, with $1,000 in cash prizes for the best in show for each political camp. There’s also the chance of having the ad run on television sometime before the election. The challenge starts today, and runs through September 30. Winners will be announced on October 16.
You2Gov, a recently launched site for connecting with government leaders, is a network of citizens that can form groups around topics of interest in order to affect change. With chat, research capabilities, and organizational services available on You2Gov, the hope is that this Web-based resource will offer some of the very tools necessary to find other like-minded individuals and work with them to get a particular message across.
While You2Gov is contending against a very large number of similar sites, this particular contest may help the fledgling startup gain some attention. Because we secretly all want to be like Paris Hilton, even when she’s forced to stick her nose into politics.
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Make Your Own Obama Logo, With Your Face
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Interview with the Chicago Tribune
Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).
There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner's inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, "We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games." Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.LinkWe have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We've really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off
Lotus’ Safe and Sound technology gives hybrids a voice
Filed under: Transportation
[Via Wired]
Continue reading Lotus' Safe and Sound technology gives hybrids a voice
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Ford Sync, Linking Your Car with Social Media in ‘09?
After getting the iPhone 3G, my boyfriend and I quickly discovered how easy it was to take advantage of many of its applications, and realized that the iPhone was well on its way to becoming the center of life. While in the car a couple weeks ago, we pulled up the Pandora application, plugged the iPhone into the car (it’s already outfitted with the cords necessary for plugging in a handful of devices), and played personalized, recommended music through the car stereo system.
I know that a lot of you have already discovered the joy of synchronizing your iPhone’s apps with your car (or other devices), and experiencing things like complete independence from the car radio. And many of you may also recognize the ease with which you can now do things like hear a song thats playing in your car (via your iPhone), and bookmark it for later purchase on iTunes, which can also be done on your iPhone. But this “duh” moment was reiterated by Ford Motor Company today when I got to go to Dearborn to test out some of its 2009 models, outfitted with Sync. Ford recognizes the necessity to synchronize your car with your mobile devices, including mp3 players and smartphones.
While it’s a bit trickier to find practical ways in which to integrate the two, at a speed that makes sense to consumers (think of how many cell phones and iPods you’ve purchased in the multi-year timespan since getting your last car), Ford is still hoping to provide ways in which to experience the Internet while driving. This means map integration, topical search for gas stations (with real-time price comparison) and movie theaters (with show times), cross-device delivery of your car health via email and/or SMS (with future integration with social media), and limited access to your text messages through your car’s dashboard.
Much of this relies on Sync’s voice-activation, which Ford is heavily reliant upon for interaction with the Internet in a non-distracting manner for the driver, also suggesting additional use case scenarios for integrated services that treat the voice as an application, not just a feature. You can check out my nauseating test drive video here, but more importantly, my follow-up interview with Ford Flex engineer Jay Ward can be seen below. He discusses the larger initiative of Ford’s Sync integration, new features with the 2009 models, and what’s in store for the future.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Faux-CNN Spam Blitz Delivers Malicious Flash
CWmike writes "More than a thousand hacked Web sites are serving up fake Flash Player software to users duped into clicking on links in mail that's part of a massive spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications, security researchers said today. The bogus messages, which claim to be from the CNN.com news Web site, include links to what are supposedly the day's Top 10 news stories and Top 10 news video clips from the cable network. Clicking on any of those links, however, brings up a dialog that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected and that tells users they needed to update to a fake newer edition, which delivers a Trojan horse — identified by multiple names, including Cbeplay.a — that "phones home" to a malicious server to grab and install additional malware."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
Treasure Hunting with the iPhone 3G
When you watched The Goonies for the first time, did you start digging under porches and searching hollowed out trees for buried treasure? What if Chunk truffle-shuffled his way to the treasure with a GPS and exact coordinates? Seriously. How much easier would that have been?
If you’re not familiar with Geocaching, it’s a treasure-hunting game based on the community over at Geocaching.com. Their website boasts that Geocaching is “the sport where you are the search engine.” According to Wikipedia, Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica.
To sum it up Twitter-style in 140 characters or less: Geocachers hide a cache somewhere in the world and log its GPS location. Others find the cache, log its find & replace it with something new.
A serious network of Geocachers over at Geocaching.com enables all of this. Some serious Geocachers also use geo-location video sites like Seero to post videos of their finds that sync with the trail from their GPS devices.
You can also use GeoGraffiti (available as an iPhone app) to leave shout-outs for other Geocachers when they get to the cache coordinates.
TomTom vs. iPhone 3G Apps
There are a variety of GeoCaching applications, but since there’s so much hype with the iPhone 3G and its supposed GPS, I wanted to test it against a more primal form of GPS: TomTom One.
The contenders in this 2-day Geocaching mission were: $1.99 GeopherLite App for iPhone 3G, the free Google Maps app for iPhone 3G, and a TomTom One GPS device.
#1: GeopherLite app for iPhone 3G
This nifty app costs $1.99 in the Apple app store. It gives you insanely easy access for finding caches. From the app, you can search for caches from your current GPS location on Geocaching.com. It lets you select a cache from the site and view all of the information about the cache. When you select a cache, it gives you the longitude and latitude needed to find the cache, which you can then enter at the top of the app.
With these coordinates, you can either then hit the “map” button and chart your course in Google Maps or use the application as a compass. The app shows you your current location as well as the cache location so that you can use your navigation skills to hone in on the target location.
Why the GeopherLite app was good:
- This app is fantastic for easy access to finding new caches if you don’t plan ahead and want to look them up on the go.
- Two options for navigation: walk around trying to match your current coordinates with your cache coordinates (like the TomTom One) or just use Google Maps.
Why the GeopherLite app was bad:
- Current location was consistently different from the TomTom One by at least 10 feet, and it never found a cache on its own.
- It gives you quick access to the Geocaching website, but there’s no back button, so actually surfing the site looking for caches is somewhat painful. Having the Geocaching website within the app is a great feature, but it doesn’t integrate enough to be that useful.
- The compass in the applications assumes that you know what direction North is, which you probably don’t.
#2: Google Maps app for iPhone 3G
This painfully inaccurate app for the iPhone works with Google Maps to get directions from your current location. It offers satellite view, which shows you a satellite image of your location, or you can choose to view it normally. Your current location is mapped by a little blue ball on the map that moves as you move.
Why Google maps was bad:
- Consistently off target, I’m talking significantly off every single time. It would follow our location, then stop and say we weren’t there yet when we’d in fact reached the location minutes before.
- Incredibly frustrating to use for such a simple application. For start-up time, this app took the longest to get going.
Why Google Maps was good:
- Satellite view will show you terrain so that you know what’s coming up ahead and you can tell if your cache is in an open area, along the road, or in the woods (or water).
#3: TomTom One
The TomTom One is a standard GPS device that goes for about $150 bucks.
Why TomTom One was bad:
- TomTom One doesn’t perform well in park areas. It literally has a brain fart of amnesia and has no idea where you are going or where you’re headed.
- You need to be moving at least 1mph in order for it to catch up to your location, so take turns sprinting to refresh your current location.
- You can’t plot exact coordinates and have it tell you where to go (like the iPhone 3G). The device will bring you as close as it can to the target, then you need to watch the screen and compare your current coordinates with the cache coordinates until you zero in on it.
Why TomTom One was good:
- It always found the cache. And what’s more important in Geocaching than actually finding the cache?
Afterthoughts
One thing to keep in mind is that this is an outdoor activity. So when it starts pouring out (like it did when I was doing this test), the TomTom One is a more viable answer for inclement weather. It also has a much longer battery life than the iPhone 3G which only lasted three hours before needing to be recharged as opposed to the TomTom One which lasted seven hours before waning down.
I was rooting for the iPhone, but the bottom line is that the GPS on the iPhone 3G just isn’t accurate enough to use as a Geocaching navigation tool by itself (yet). It was proven very resourceful for finding information, just not for applying that knowledge. If you want to get serious about Geocaching, I’d opt for a higher-end Geocaching-optimized device like the Garmin Colorado 400t which has Geocaching software right on it.
But If you decide to try out the iPhone 3G for yourself and it sends you on a wild Geocaching goose chase, just remember: Goonies never say die!
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Carnegie Mellon brings adhesive arms to the burgeoning pillbot scene
Filed under: Robots
[Via Hack a Day]
Read - Controlling a Gut Bot's Position
Read - Creepy action videoPermalink | Email this | Comments
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
No Linux IdeaPad For Lenovo’s US Customers
narramissic writes "When Lenovo's new IdeaPad 'S' series netbooks hit stores in October, U.S. buyers will only be given one option: Windows XP on the IdeaPad S10 (making it not so much a series as a single offering). Meanwhile, people in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the U.K., will be offered both of the company's new IdeaPad netbooks (the S10, which has 10.2-inch screen, and the S9, which has an 8.9-inch screen), and the choice of either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS. Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, consider the price tag: the S10 will sell for £319 (US$629) in the U.K., but in the U.S. the starting price is $399." Liliputing (a cool site for anyone interested in sub-notebook computing) has posted a few bits on the IdeaPad, including some short videos.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
Rejaw is Not Just Another Twitter Clone
Rejaw is not YATC (Yet another Twitter Clone). Sure, it has some similarities but it’s really more of a hybrid of twitter, Plurk, and Meebo. It’s a micro-blogging service with a hint of chat. Here’s the quick and dirty rundown of its best features.
The first thing you will notice is the different terminology they use. For example, a public message on Twitter is called a Shout and a private direct message is called a Whisper.
The other difference is the size limit of messages. Rejaw allows messages up to 1,000 characters instead of the 140 characters that Twitter allows.
One of the most refreshing (pun intended) things about this service is that it isn’t as static as twitter because the messages automatically appear on your screen in real-time. This adds a much needed instant messenger feel to the microblogging experience. The most unusual thing about Rejaw is that it has a Mac client called Rejaw Radar for the desktop, but not a windows version yet! That is in the works though.
The un-twitter-like ability to add audio, video and images within a message post via links is very nice. This means no files to upload as on services like Pownce and Utterz. Simply paste the URL in your message and the picture, song or video will be instantly embedded within your post.
Every Post is an Island?
Every shout or whisper has a Permalink (permanent URL) which makes it easy to link directly to a conversation. By the way, all conversations are locked after three days of inactivity.
No Account Necessary!
Something unique here is that you can invite friends to join your conversation by sending them the permalink to your shout and they can join the conversation even if they don’t have an account on Rejaw. No signing up required. Nice.
Third-Party Tools
There’s already a full API, which means you can expect many cool third-party apps and services like we’ve seen with Twitter. The question will be whether or not any developer will invest the time and effort to build anything for a new unproven service.
Conclusion
Do we really need yet another communication platform similar to the ones we’re already using? I think the answer will always be yes, as long as it brings something new and exciting to the table. Clearly, Rejaw does offer something unique and interesting to our online experience. The bigger questions will be how it will scale once they grow. Will they be able to avoid some of the headaches that Twitter continues to endure? We shall soon find out.
If you want to check it out then add Paisano. Give me a shout (or a whisper). 
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Repurpose Your Empty CD Spindle [Video Demonstration]
The video above from DIY web site Instructables demonstrates four different CD spindle-repurposing projects from start-to-finish. We've seen variations on most of these projects before, like the toilet paper dispenser, bagel holder, and cable organizer, but the video provides step-by-step instructions and a few clever tweaks for alternate uses. The bagel holder, for example, becomes a sandwich caddy with an extra cut, and the cable organizer becomes a rope and cable dispenser with a couple of small adjustments. If you've tried one of the repurposing methods since we first covered it, let's hear how it's working out in the comments.
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off
VIDEO: Razing Historic Beijing Homes
 | China is demolishing Beijing homes in historic neighborhoods known for their narrow alleyways, or hutongs, spurring protests. |
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August 6th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off
