Over drinks yesterday, my friend shared an insight. Thanks to my hangover, I’ll have to paraphrase everything:
Him: “Would you know how well retailers did during Black Friday?”
Me: “Not yet, I think it’s too early to tell. I’m sure a report will come out soon.”
Him: “Well, all I’m saying is that if people don’t buy this year, even with the low prices, things must be really bad.”
Me: “From what I’ve seen, things look good. Did you read about that Wal-Mart temp employee killed in a buyer stampede?”
Him: “Oh yeah… so there were lots of buyers right?”
Me: “Well if that case is any indicator, yes. You need lots of people to trample someone to death.”
Tags: Black Friday, Black Friday Carnage, Black Friday deaths, Black Friday promos, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart
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What do you get when you combine a flagship industrial design with three action-packed interfaces and an oh-so-beautiful 1.5 terabytes of magnetic mayhem? A pirate’s wet dream The Seagate FreeAgent XTreme, that’s what! With multiple-revision automated backups and a name too good for the initial ‘E’, will you need to ask your geek if you are healthy enough to handle the XTreme? We’ve managed to pull it together and get our hands on one, so press on for our in-depth review to find out.
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Even as a manly-man who’s never read the Twilight series, geeksugar’s feature on Bella’s upgraded geek set is worth the read. It asks “Should Book Technology be Updated for the Movie Version?”, a question that’s truly relevant to geeks, a wide-reaching demographic that ultimately, loves analyzing the most mundane of details.
Turns out that in the original book, vampire-loving lead Bella relied on a desktop computer to gain more information about Edward the pasty pretty boy—and she didn’t own a cellphone. That changed in the movie when she did her research on a black Macbook, and kept in touch through her Nokia phone.
Personally, it really doesn’t matter. Commenter “bowwowza” does have a point (”ya gotta keep up with the times for the movie or it looks old”). But in the greater scheme of things, I’d rather watch a movie that presents a well-developed cast of characters and a compelling story. It’s really more about the narrative, rather than what gadgets our heroes are using.
Story- and character-wise, Twilight quite honestly fails to provide. At least it’s a great way to show a lady-friend how much you care about her interests—though she’ll be the first to admit the franchise is only good for romantic thrills. Now she’ll return the favor come Star Trek.
(image from Wikipedia)
Tags: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, gadgets of Twilight, Stephanie Meyer, Twilight
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If you are looking for GPS project ideas here is one that interfaces a serial GPS module to a PIC microcontroller and saves the data directly to a SD memory card. Schematics and code are available.
"The data from the GPS is logged every second with the raw NMEA sentences being written to the SD card. The data written to the card is the GSA, GGA, RMC and GSV sentences which by excluding the carriage returns this should never exceed 512 bytes per second. The data contains:
- GGA - 78 bytes - time, fix, lat, long, altitude, horizontal dilution of precision.
- GSA - 69 bytes - fix (none, 2D, 3D), satellites used, dilution of precision.
- RMC - 78 bytes - time, lat, long, speed, course, date.
- GSV - 74 bytes - satellite information (4 messages).
The total active power consumption is about 40mA to 45mA when active which in theory should give 48 hours on rechargeable batteries with 2000mAh capacity. In practice I have measured a time of 40 hours."
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Every year many people die in car accidents, which is a disappointing fact. Quite often it is because of high-speed blow-outs, or when driver forget to check the pressure. Even the small gap can be deadly at high speeds. It is even more critical in military, when tires are very vulnerable to damage. There were many interesting improvements to tire design to make them more durable and resistant to damage, like “run while flat” feature. Although they were safer than usual, they just couldn’t offer good protection from explosives or shrapnel. Military engineers were thinking how to make a tire that would be protected from shrapnel and even explosives, and they found a solution - tires without air at all!
Not so long ago we wrote about new unannounced yet smartphone from Nokia with QWERTY keyboard. Motorola tried to not fall behind its competitor, and officially announced its own QWERTY slider, named Motorola Hint QA30. After all rumors in the past several days, Motorola finally presented its new phone, which is made with text message lovers in mind. Taking in consideration, that Motorola rarely releases something new nowadays, it doubles the interest to its new product.
The Motoman SDA10 is an agile dual-arm industrial robot that is capable of frying you an okonomiyaki (pan-fried batter cake). It was shown at the International Next-Generation Robot Fair in Osaka. It is a product of Yaskawa Electric, designed to work independently together with humans in the workplace. The Motoman SDA10 measures 135-centimeter (4.5 ft) tall, weighs 220-kilogram (480 lb). It has 15 joints, 7 in each arm and one in the torso. The many joints allow it to move easily and follow a wide range of motions. It works by speech recognition technology to take verbal orders and then executes them efficiently. Check out the video after the break.
[via New Launches]
Tags: robot, motoman sda10
Every now and then there appear gadgets that carry some new technologies but are of a very little use or are simply funny and pathetic. Recently, probably one of above named has been leaked in Louisiana State University AgBot robot. They have determined AgBot as a surveillance gadget but it has some additional features that have nothing to do with surveillance. Anyway, as long as students are developing some interesting technological devices, we are going to take a look at them and seize their perspectives. So here it comes, AgBot from Louisiana State University.
The winter is just round the band which is two fool days since now and that is a concern for people who expect or probably have already spent some of their time having great fun in the first perfectly white snow. What comes afterwards is usually some melted snow inside of gloves and boots. Sure thing you will want it to dry out as soon as possible and thankfully guys from Pacific Outdoors have though the entire thing out. And this is what they have come up with a dryer for gloves and boots. The Glove and Boot dryer as it is called is up to be your best friend in moist and snowy seasons for 43.61 USD.
If you ever wanted to mount a camera onto a model rocket this article makes for a good read. A custom mold was made to securely hold the camera in place.
Project page.
"So here is the awkward part. The camera must be TURNED ON when I install it in the rocket. It doesn’t need to be recording, that can be controlled with the poking stick. But it must be turned on when inserted because once in the rocket, there is no way to access the power button. It’s not a real big deal, but it does take a little time, and at a time when time is precious. I get the rocket all ready to go, altimeters, parachutes, ejection charges, motor, all installed. Then go check in with the RSO, get them to call in for a waiver, go to the launch pad and install the camera. That means turning it on, wedging it into the lower plug, pressing in the upper plug, positioning the nose cone section, and screwing in all those little screws. It takes 2 minutes, not counting time spent looking for dropped screws - I’ve learned to take a few extras, and a magnet. Then when the ignitor is installed, and the rocket is up on the rail, I would stand on a tippy little stool, poke the RECORD button, and strain to see if it were actually recording. My fear is that I would "bounce" the button, stopping the recording. More recently, I’ve started the camera recording with the rail horizontal, where it is much easier to work on and to see. I can even cover the camera section and my head with a towel to reduce the glare, see if it is recording or not, and get the guys at the flight line to laugh at me. Then it is raised to firing position."
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