Technically Speaking

Here is a hack for those who aren’t faint at heart at electronic customizations. Hack A Day has found information that will allow you to take your iPod to the 75000 song capacity mark. By removing the original hard drive and installing an after market hard drive you can significantly boost the storage capacity of an iPod. The after product doesn’t look all that pretty but I’m sure that if this catches on someone will build a nice little leather case that can hold it all together and look halfway decent. This is a major enhancement so be sure you know what you are doing before you start it.

Source: Hack A Day

A current light weight version of Mozilla’s browser, named Minimo, works only on Linux-based PDAs. A new version, that will work on the Window’s CE OS, is nearly complete. There are still some integration issues that need to be dealt with but all-in-all the port has went well. If you are interested in trying out the development builds you can do so here. The final build may not be ready for some time but pictures of the browser in action have already started circulating the web.

“The first release to the general public will be in about four months,” he said. “We are hoping to be producing nightly builds starting at the end of March. Nightly builds are…for quality assurance and those that live a bit dangerously.”

Minimo developers have already completed basic work on the project, but they are looking for extra developers to work on improving the user interface, Turner said on the MozillaZine news site.

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Photo Source rebron.org. You can find links to more MiniMo images at this site as well.

Sony is making them thinner and thinner. This model isn’t due out til May but I’m sure it will be pretty well received when it arrives. This 1/3 inch model will hit the market with a $500 price tag. Check out the press release…

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The three robot teams, two from the US and one from Switzerland, brought their robotic arms to Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conference in San Diego, California. Each team was hoping to have there devices stand up to the world’s strongest man in a wrestling match. So in moving towards that goal, they started the contest against a slightly weaker opponent, a 17-year-old girl named Panna Felsen. Although Panna calls herself a weakling, she managed to defeat each arm in a matter of seconds.

Despite her lack of strength, training and technique, she was able to conquer the first arm, developed by Environmental Robots Inc. from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in just 24 seconds. Following this, and a pep talk from an arm wrestling expert, it took her just four seconds to beat the second arm and three seconds for her to win the last match.

Two champion arm wrestlers oversaw the matches to ensure that standard arm wrestling rules were observed. The three robot teams are now trying to work out what went wrong.

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It is obvious that the new technology used in this contest needs to mature a bit before the ultimate goal can be reached. EAP artificial muscles, the technology used in this contest, are special plastics that can change shape when activated either electrically or with chemicals.

Nevertheless, the drive to develop EAP artificial muscles is unlikely to be deterred by this setback because of the need to overcome the current limitations with existing actuators and motors.

Electric motors tend to be too weak, while hydraulics and pneumatics are too heavy for use in robotics or prosthetics. EAPs, in comparison are lightweight, quiet and capable of energy densities similar to biological muscles.

The three robot teams, two from the US and one from Switzerland, each used different types of EAPs for their arms. The Virginia Tech group had three sets of chemically activated muscles acting on the shoulder joint, triggered by hydrochloric acid which caused the EAP strands to contract. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it only started to work a few minutes after its match had ended.

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Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have conceived a technology that may exceed the capabilities of the current sophisticated camouflage systems used today. Their concept involves using Plasmon waves, which will reduce the scattering of light when it strikes an object. That scattering of light is what makes object visible to the eye.

The key to the concept is to reduce light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn’t absorb any light) they would become invisible. Alù and Engheta’s plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the illuminating light.

Plasmons are waves of electron density, caused when the electrons on the surface of a metallic material move in rhythm. The researchers say that a shell of plasmonic material will scatter light negligibly if the light’s frequency is close to the resonant frequency of the plasmons. The scattering from the shell effectively cancels out the scattering from the object.

For visible-light shielding, says Engheta, nature has already provided suitable plasmonic materials: silver and gold. To reduce the scattering of longer-wavelength radiation such as microwaves, one could make the shield from a ‘metamaterial’: a large-scale structure with unusual electromagnetic properties, typically constructed from arrays of wire loops and coils.

Alù and Engheta’s calculations show that spherical or cylindrical objects coated with such plasmonic shields do indeed produce very little light scattering. It is as though, when lit by light of the right wavelength, the objects become extremely small, so small that they cannot be seen.

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The idea is still in the theoretical stage but it appears to be sound from a physics standpoint. Also according to theory, the technology will work better on small objects, optimally, it will work best when the wavelength of the light is the same size as the object being shielded, which basically means ‘microscopic’ items. At this point the object can’t be shielded from daylight because it is made up of various light wavelengths, and the Plasmonic cover will work when it is tuned to one specific light frequency. The theory is new and is sure to change when it is understood better. So don’t rule out the possibility of having a cloaking device just yet.

Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, claims that he has been able to produce nuclear fusion. The scientific community is very skeptical of the results and are desperately trying to either reproduce Taleyarkhan’s experiment or expose him as a fraud. Taleyarkhan maintains that the data speaks for itself. Nuclear fusion on Earth would be an abundant, clean power supply for the world that would probably never run out.

It would be clean, last for ever and create no long-term nuclear waste. And Rusi Taleyarkhan claims to have achieved it using simple sound waves.

His breakthrough is based on something called sonoluminescence. It is a process that transforms sound waves into flashes of light, focusing the sound energy into a tiny flickering hot spot inside a bubble.

It has been nicknamed “the star in a jar” by researchers in the field.

The star in a jar effortlessly reaches temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, which is hotter than the surface of the Sun. It was able to do all this by simply focusing the energy of the sound wave into a tiny hot spot.

In order to get fusion, temperatures inside the bubble had to be in the region of 10 million degrees. It seemed improbable that the tiny hot spots could be this hot. But if they were - or if a way could be found to make them so - then a new route to nuclear fusion would be opened up.

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Australia’s CSIRO research organization has released a ground breaking technology for delivering indexed video content. Annodex search tool provides actual video content with detailed summaries, interactivity through video, and hyperlinks to additional material. CMML is the dubbed name behind Annodex, and it allows for website to be constructed using video instead of text. This open source technology is free for download and is currently available in Debian GNU/Linux.

The CSIRO has dubbed the technology behind Annodex Continuous Media Markup Language, or CMML. According to the organisation, “CMML does for time-continuous media what HTML does for text. It allows the user to search, access, navigate and query”.

Project leader Dr Silvia Pfeiffer told ZDNet Australia this morning that the reason the organisation chose Firefox as a development platform over Internet Explorer (IE) was the fact that Firefox’s plugin architecture was easier to work with and the browser was supported across several platforms. The CSIRO had initially tried to develop Annodex for IE, but found that Microsoft’s browser had numerous security holes.

Currently the software only supports playback of media webs that are encoded using the open source Ogg Theora (for video) and Ogg Vorbis (for audio) codecs. Pfeiffer said that the choice to use the Ogg codecs was based on the need for Annodex to be royalty-free and available to all users. In contrast, formats such as MPEG2 or MPEG4 have licences that “have to be paid for”. In addition, according to Pfeiffer, while Theora does not have as high a compression ration as MPEG4, it is “quality wise as good as the MPEG2 format,” and only “one level of quality behind the top-level compression codecs”.

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Checkout the CSIRO website to try the technology for yourself.

If you all haven’t heard yet, iPod’s random feature is really random. MSNBC News ran an article investigating the randomness of the iPod. Apple basically chalks up all the hoopla to people only listening to th e first few songs of the random set. Or better yet, “We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes.”

Apple execs profess amusement. “It’s part of the magic of shuffle,” says Greg Joswiak, the VP for iPod products. Still, I asked him last week to double-check with the engineers. They flatly assured him that “Random is random,” and the algorithm that does the shuffling has been tested and reverified.

More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?

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How much PC power can be put into the shell of a Mac Mini? Here is another example of someone tinkering with a perfectly good machine but this time there seems to be a valid reason behind it. Kevin Rose, of The Screen Savers fame, has taken it upon himself to do an extreme modification of the Mac Mini to see how much PC power per square inch can be put in its case. Of course, the first step would be to gut the Mac Mini and stuff it full of PC components. Using thee parts list below Kevin walks use through the process.

Parts needed:

Nano-ITX Motherboard
Laptop IDE HD 2.5” (any capacity)
40 to 44pin IDE converter
Motherboard risers
Sears Tap kit

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Now I said that this was done for the sake of technology, but Kevin has not given us the benchmarks that answer the initial question; “How much PC power can be put into the shell of a Mac Mini?” I’m confident that we will see the results shortly, we will just have to wait patiently.

Google has done it again. They are now indexing television shows by tapping the closed caption feed and capturing still video to go with it. Currently the system has been launched as a Beta with limited channel selection. Mainly San Fransico Bay Area stations are being indexed but hopefully in a short time many more stations (national network stations) will be added.

Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

Just type in your search term (for instance, ipod or Napa Valley) or do a more advanced search (for instance, title:nightline) and Google Video will search the closed captioning text of all the programs in our archive for relevant results. Click on a program title on your results page and you can look through short snippets of the text along with still images from the show. Visit the “About this show” side panel to learn when this show will air next.

Right now we’re just testing this product, so you’ll find programs only from a limited number of channels, which we’ve been indexing since late December 2004. You can expect to see more and more content as we continue to add new channels.

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During the last few months, IE has steadily loss market share to Firefox. IE’s share has fallen from 95.5% to just under 90% in the last few months since Firefox released their “stable” version. The company, WebSideStory, that collected this data, samples more than 30 million daily Internet users from more than 200 countries to determine the browser-usage shares. Doing the quick math, the numbers suggest that 1.5 million of the daily websurfers have made a switch from IE to some other browser.

The percentage of users browsing with IE has steadily fallen since June, while Firefox and some other competing browser have shown gains. Over that time, IE use has dropped a total of about 5 percent from its perch at 95.5 percent.

Surveys from another Web analytics provider, OneStat.com, have reflected a similar pattern and even put IE’s worldwide share below 90 percent.

Firefox, which is Mozilla’s standalone browser, was released as a stable version in November.

WebSideStory tracks Mozilla’s other browser with a category that includes browsers from America Online Inc.’s Netscape unit. That category dropped slightly to 2.6 percent in mid-January from 2.8 percent a month earlier.

Remaining browsers, which largely are Opera Software ASA’s namesake browser and Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari browser, showed a gain of almost a full percentage point. They reached a 2.1 percent usage share, compared with 1.3 percent a month earlier, according to WebSideStory.

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It is good to see that people are starting the realize that there are other safer and better ways to visit the web. Firefox, being the catalyst of the movement, will build steam as their browser gains the word-of-mouth momentum. Microsoft will really have to examine what the people want in a browser if they are to keep their dominating piece of the pie.

The FBI’s controversial email wiretap system formerly known as Carnivore is reported to be no longer in use. Carnivore, also known as DCS-1000, was designed in 1998 to read online communications between suspected spies, criminals, and terrorists. The suspected price of the system was between US$6 million and $15 million, the actual cost have never been disclosed..

According to the reports, the FBI used commercially available software to conduct court-ordered Internet surveillance in criminal investigations 13 times during that time period.

An FBI spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

The FBI is required by American law to provide detailed reports on how it uses Carnivore, the monitoring system now known as DCS 1000.

FBI agents, after receiving a court warrant, install the system on the suspect’s Internet service provider and filter out his email messages, Web browsing activities and other online communications.

It has come under fire from civil-liberties groups who say it is too invasive and ripe for abuse.

US law enforcers have argued they need Carnivore to keep up with criminals who use online communications to plan and carry out terrorism, spying, fraud, child pornography and other crimes.

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Are you the type of person that just plopped down $500 and some change on a Mac Mini and now you want to crack it open and start tinkering? Well, you’re not the only one! There is already a video circulating the web detailing the intricacies of dismantling the Mac Mini. Follow if you dare. (I am not responsible if you damage your goods. Reader beware!!!) Once you get the cover off you should be able to add additional RAM or upgrade the hard drive.

If you have heard about FreeiPods.com and the company that makes it all possible, Gratis Networks, then you will be happy to know that they are making it possible to get a free Mini Mac. FreeiPods.com has proved to be a legit operation so you can rest assured that the free mini mac offer is legit as well. From what I hear, it just takes a little bit of waiting to receive your goods, but they do come.

If you have forgotten what the Mini Mac has to offer, take a look at its stats below.

The Brand New Apple Mac mini (80GB)

* Fast G4 processor
* Comes with 80GB harddrive
* iLife ’05, Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther,” Quicken 2005 for Mac, Nanosaur 2, Marble Blast Gold
* Built-in Ethernet and modem
* Slot-loading Combo drive
* DVI connector, VGA adapter
* Just 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall
* Weighs only 2.9 lbs

If you are so inclined, help me get a free MacMini

Well once again my attention is drawn to a movie based on the star. When the star is Jennifer Garner how can you blame me? I didn’t see DareDevil, the movie that spawned this, but I’m sure it will be entertaining. From what I gather, the movie is on the level of Mortal Combat. So if you are into Martial Arts / Sci-Fi, this should prove to be interesting.

Following the events of Daredevil, Elektra Natchios (Garner), sai enthusiast and assassin for hire, is revived by the Order of the Hand, a group of assassins who helped train her. Assigned by the Hand’s current leader, Kirigi, to kill a man, Mark Miller (Visnjic), and his 13-year-old daughter, Abby, Elektra soon befriends them and decides to stand up to her ninja peers. Elektra is especially motivated to do so when she discovers that Miller’s grandfather was an ally of her former mentor, Stick (Stamp). Together, they must take on Kirigi’s lethal quartet (which includes Tengu and Typhoid).

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Check out the first five minutes of the movie…5 Minutes of Elektra

Space.com has put together a collection of the most popular space photo wallpapers of 2004. These photos range from SpacShipOne’s Ansari Xprize winning flight to Hubble’s peek into deep space. 21 images are listed in the collection but there are many more for you to download as well.

Best Space Photo Wallpapers Of 2004

Apple announces that their version of the rack mount Xserve with two 2.3GHz processors is now available to all that wants it. They were originally custom made for the System X supercomputer at Virginia Tech but Apple has decided to increase their product line by making both versions of Xserve.

“Now we have it available to our entire customer base,” said Alex Grossman, director of server and storage hardware for Apple’s product marketing group. Apple’s Xserve line had topped out with dual-2.0GHz processors.

Apple is keeping pricing for the Xserve line the same while also improving the optical drive from a CD burner to one that can both burn CDs and read DVD discs. While servers aren’t often used to play movies, Grossman said more companies are distributing software on DVDs. Customers will also now be able to pay extra for a SuperDrive that can burn DVDs.

“If they want to do any kind of archive or backup, they can now do that,” Grossman said.

The system with two 2.3GHz processors will sell for $3,999, while a machine with one 2.0GHz will sell for $2,999. Both include an unlimited client version of Mac OS X Server. Apple also offers a version of Xserve for clustered computers that includes the speedier processor and a 10-user Mac OS X license for $2,999. The 2.3GHz machines also include a faster 1.15GHz system bus.

In addition to the Xserve changes, Apple on Tuesday released version 1.0 of Xsan, a file system for storage gear, which had been in testing for much of last year. Apple had planned to release it by mid-December but last month said it would delay the launch until early this year. Apple declined both then and on Tuesday to state the reason for the delay.

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It is now believed that the 9.0-magnitude quake, centered in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra, may have moved the small islands in the area about 20 meters. Sumatra itself may have moved as much as 36 meters. The shift in mass has changed the map of the region as well as changed the earth’s rotation, a minuscule amount.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another “it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster,” Gross said.

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The new wobble in the Earth’s rotation is nothing to be alarmed about. This must be a common thing for our Earth after such a powerful earthquake. The Earth’s rotation has always had variations to it. Some of the variations may even be attributed to the tides and groundwater shifts.

“That continual motion is just used to changing,” Gross said. “The rotation is not actually that precise. The Earth does slow down and change its rate of rotation.”

When those tiny variations accumulate, planetary scientists must add a “leap second” to the end of a year, something that has not been done in many years, Gross said.

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Here is a quick and easy hack for speeding up your browsing sessions using FireFox and your broadband connection. It will basically lets Firefox make multiple request for data concurrently.

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

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I think the hack worked for me, I opened one of my hefty folders by doing a “Open in Tabs”, I do this quite often, and it really seemed to open a lot faster than normal. I hope it works for you too.

British design engineer Glynne Bowsher and his team has nearly completed their technologically advance steam-powered automobile. Their hopes is to smash the land speed record in the British Steam Car Challenge (BSCC). Not only that, they are hoping hat the vehicle in turn will spur the general public’s interest in cleanly powered vehicles.

Fuels which do not “rot” the environment usually bring to mind images of gently humming electric cars, clean hydrogen, natural gas, or hithane - a concoction of hydrogen and methane.

The most promising, believes Mr Bowsher, is either nuclear or hydrogen fuel.

The public is reluctant to explore nuclear; but researchers and engineers across the world are exploring how best to generate and, more importantly, store hydrogen fuel, one of the main barriers to its widespread use.

Nine European cities are taking part in a pilot scheme to use hydrogen fuelled buses on certain routes, for instance.

But until a viable mass-scale way of storing and distributing hydrogen effectively is developed, it remains limited in use.

Mr Bowsher believes that until then, designers could look to Inspiration for a different take on good old steam.

The key to its potential is the difference between internal and external combustion technologies.

External combustion engines - like steam ones - hold several advantages over internal ones.

They have the potential to produce fewer harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) than conventional cars which use internal combustion engines.

Although steam engines still need to burn hydrocarbon-based fuels like petrol and diesel, which in turn release carbon dioxide, external combustion engines can control the release and the production of CO2 more efficiently.

And because such engines can work well at lower peak temperatures and pressures, the creation of NOx compounds can be almost negligible.

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Current performance metrics are; Performance: Maximum speed 200+ mph (320km/h); Initial acceleration: 0.52G. The current record stands at 763 mph, or Mach 1.02, set by Andy Green in the Thrust SSC II, in 1997. Bowsher’s design will have to nearly quadruple its maximum speed in order to break the record. I suppose he is a good candidate to do it for he worked on the Thrust SSC II and designed the Thrust SSC that set the land speed record in 1983 at 633 mph. Bowsher has designed his vehicle from the ground up.
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