As if the entire office full of guitar-controlled lights wasn’t enough to make any holiday complete, some enterprising geek has taken it upon himself to give you a rendition of Jingle Bells played on his graphics card heat sink. He probably wont debut at Carnegie Hall, but I’ll give him points for effort.
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mrcgran writes “The Chicago Tribune is running a feel-good story about the effects of OLPC on a remote village in Peru. ‘Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they’re dozing off in front of them — if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines. Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed.’”
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Roland Piquepaille writes “A new report from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) looks at the future of the military’s unmanned systems over the next 25 years. This 188-page report covers air-, land- and sea-based unmanned technology from 2007 to 2032. The long document notes that drone aircraft and ground-based robots have already proved they could be useful in Iraq and Afghanistan by saving soldiers’ lives. The report also integrates contributions of combat commanders pointing out possible improvements to today’s systems, such as ‘better sensor technology for use on unmanned systems to identify underwater mines and land-based improvised explosive devices.’ This report also looks at how developments in artificial intelligence and robotics might lead to ‘autonomous, ‘thinking’ unmanned systems that could, for example, be used in aerial platforms to suppress enemy air defenses.’”
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tripmine writes “The Orlando Sentinel has a story about a geek who can’t get enough Christmas light. ‘This Christmas, tech-savvy people such as Hansen are increasingly building the biggest, most elaborate holiday lights in neighborhoods across Central Florida and throughout the country. They typically work in fields such as computer programming, Web development, engineering or audio and visual services and are armed with a technical knowledge that the average person lacks. They trade tips and stories on message boards and set up Web sites with step-by-step descriptions of how they installed their lights as well as pictures and videos of the finished product.’” Many cities have neighborhoods where the spectacle takes up blocks at a time, not just individual houses, too, as anyone who’s strolled down Austin’s 37th Street can attest. Links invited (in comments) to the best / worst light-spectacles you know of.
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Engadget has noted a report in the New York Times that that the US has “passed a law barring stores from selling incandescent light bulbs after 2012. ‘Course, the EU and Australia have already decided to ditch the inefficient devices in the not-too-distant future, but a new energy bill signed into law this week throws the US into the aforementioned group. Better grab a pack of the current bulbs while you still can — soon you’ll be holding a sliver of history.”
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davidwr writes “The island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system. The system would use low-orbit satellites to transmit power to a receiver in bursts, unlike some other plans which rely on geostationary satellites. The initial 1-megawatt project is supposed to go online ‘as early as’ 2012 for a cost of $0.8 billion. Time will tell if this can be made cost-effective compared to traditional solar or other sources of power.”
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mrneutron2003 writes “This guy just doesn’t know when to stop. Johnny Chung Lee graces us with yet another one of his inventive Wiimote projects. This time it involves using the Wiimote and a pair of inexpensive LED safety goggles (with the standard LED’s replaced with InfraRed ones) to allow positional head tracking , achieving an effect similar to what is experienced with three dimensional displays and CAVE systems. The video dramatically illustrates the effect. Game developers take note. This simple little variation on infrared tracking could allow for some seriously immersive gameplay in the future.” This guy deserves a medal.
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mrneutron2003 writes “This guy just doesn’t know when to stop. Johnny Chung Lee graces us with yet another one of his inventive Wiimote projects. This time it involves using the Wiimote and a pair of inexpensive LED safety goggles (with the standard LED’s replaced with InfraRed ones) to allow positional head tracking , achieving an effect similar to what is experienced with three dimensional displays and CAVE systems. The video dramatically illustrates the effect. Game developers take note. This simple little variation on infrared tracking could allow for some seriously immersive gameplay in the future.” This guy deserves a medal.
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akintayo writes “Digitimes reports that first-tier notebook manufacturers are increasing the standard installed memory from the current 1 GB to 4GB. They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market. The glut is supposedly due to increased manufacturing capacity and the slow adoption of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. The proposed move is especially interesting, given that 32-bit Vista and XP cannot access 4 GB of memory. They have a practical 3.1 — 3.3 GB limit. With Vista SP1 it seems that Microsoft has decided to fix the problem by reporting the installed memory rather than the available memory.”
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An anonymous reader writes “Kontron, a giant among industrial single-board computer vendors, yesterday revealed a credit-card sized board apparently based on a single-chip x86 chipset that clocks to 1.5GHz and supports a gig of RAM. It targets portable devices — not x86’s usual forte. Kontron isn’t saying whether the board uses a Via or an Intel chip(set) — both vendors reportedly have single-chip chipsets in the works, part of their respective missions to drive ‘x86 everywhere.’”
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