If you’ve got any spare change left after the long Easter iPad launch weekend, Apple has another surprise on the way – new model MacBooks are on the way. All Apple’s mobile Macs are expected to see an upgrade, including the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Expect much better battery life, up to 640GB drives, and new (and faster) Intel processors. …
While 50GB on one disc seemed pretty incredible just a few short years ago, some enterprising scienticians are set to make your dual-layer copy of Click look downright quaint. A new version the Blu-Ray disc called BDXL (get it!?) is on the way and promises 128GB of storage space for writable discs. The new tech, which uses three or four layers instead of one or two, is aimed mainly at corporate users looking for a robust backup solution and lonely geeks with terrabytes of smutty films. Okay fine, only one of things is true. Before you get too excited about having all three Lord of the Rings movies on one…
Adobe’s Flash plugin has become a stalwart in online multimedia content with a massive install base, so why is it suddenly the least popular kid on the block? Back when Netscape ruled the web and Microsoft was the pretentious young upstart nipping at its heels, HTML was the most dominant form of content on the web by a huge margin. Nothing about video, audio or multimedia content made it appealing to work with or serve to visitors, but the demand was great, so great that what ended up happening was inevitable, if not entirely predictable. How Flash Rose To Dominance By version 5 Internet Explorer had…
I’m not going to make a joke about how nobody reads books anymore. But I might end up making some jokes about how nobody’s going to read Vooks, either. What’s a Vook? I thought you’d never ask. No, it’s not a big sweaty Slavic man cursing through his moustache. The posted video describes the Vook experience as…well, basically, an experience. ‘Vook weaves together content from incredible writers and professionally shot and edited videos by filmmakers,’ says Yahoo News about the technology. …Right. ‘Weaving’. ‘Blending’. ‘Seamlessly integrating two mediums’….
I could make jokes about this all day, so before I do, please bear in mind that this is actually a pretty good idea: Australian company Simativa has developed underwear that texts when you poop. I can explain, I swear. The SIMsystem, as it’s officially known, is actually targeted at the elderly (SIM is Smart Incontinence Management) and lets caregivers know via SMS message when it’s time to get their hands dirty. It can even broadcast the ‘event’ over a facility’s entire paging system. Classy. The diagram below shows you how it works, though I suppose it’s pretty self-explanitory….
You thought the way the Solar Pebble slapped the sun around was pretty cool, right? Right? Here’s another great way we mancreatures are bringing the sun to its knees as a sustainable energy source. That is, sustainable until the sun explodes in like 5 billion years. But that’s irrelevant. Until then, we have the Sundolier! ‘Bah! I’ve seen this before,’ you say. You would. And, granted, from these photos, the Sundolier would appear at first to be a fairly typical skylight. But let’s not get our lines crossed here – first of all, this thing’s a freaking robot that sits on your roof. …Yeah,…
In 2007 the team at Mozilla, who produce FireFox, jumped into the 3D graphic realm by offering a plug-in that could show 3D graphics within the browser. This plug-in, which is still popular, was called the 3D Tab Effect, would animate the change to another browser tab with a 3D graphic of a block turning. …
(Image Credit: “Evolution of Storage” by Curtiss Spontelli | CC) We consume an amazing amount of data, but we also store an equally impressive amount of data as well, and if you think back to not too long ago, we were having to deal with floppy disks and zip drives and who knows what else. Oh how the times have changed. We should appreciate how far we have come with regards to data storage, and this article is dedicated to displaying a bit of a graphical homage to storage mediums of the past, present, and future: Punchcard Magnetic Tape Floppy Disk Hard Drive Laser Disc CD/DVD Blu-ray Solid State Drive…
All of us tech geeks recall Minority Report, right? Well, for those of you who do, you’ll love what the geniuses over at MIT have come up with: it’s a pointing device. But this one is different, and, unlike a traditional mouse, this pointer is controlled by your hands. MIT students Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez decided to work on this project in 2009, and, impressively, they managed to acquire all the necessary parts for under $100. Similar to the iPhone/iPod Touch, the gloves allow interactions like pinching, grabbing, zooming, and other familiar interactions you have with touchscreen devices….
I’m not big on the whole 3D scene. Trying to fit awkward glasses over my regular ones isn’t exactly comfortable. Likewise, virtual reality is something I’m not too keen on (two words: Virtual Boy). But this, I like. The pCubee (yes, that’s “PEE-kyoo-bee”) is a new spin on an…uh…’old classic’. By utilizing five LCD screens strapped to a plastic cube and sensors worn on the head (think of your Wii, but backwards), the pCubee displays an interactive 3D diorama ‘inside’ the cube. The University of British Columbia, whose team designed this thing, are calling it FTVR, for…
An Israeli company has developed a remote control, robotic exoskeleton to allow paraplegics to walk again. Advances in technology have made this sci-fi dream a reality, and moves the medical community one step closer to being able to replace limbs and create completely bionic humans. Dr. Amit Goffer is responsible for developing the system, which attaches to the user’s legs and torso and essentially replaces all body support for the legs. Unlike other similar systems, it does not rely on picking up signals from nerve endings or muscle movement. Instead it is triggered by the user leaning forward…
We are at war! At war with simplexity — this is where modern day devices are experiencing an identity crisis over their function and form. Gadgets these days are all over the spectrum as far as complexity and simplicity are concerned, and we can’t figure it out, the people that make them can’t figure it, and even the gadgets themselves can’t figure it out. It’s a confusing situation. But let’s start at the beginning. Tools, as we all know, started off as simple machines. Imagine a hammer or a wheel — they served, in majority of cases, a single use: to bash things in or to roll things on. These tools…
