moonbuggy

This is what happens when you laptop batteries overheat or get damaged.

see it here »

see it here »

`A 46-year-old German motorist driving along a busy road suddenly veered to the left and ended up stuck on a railway track – because his satellite navigation system told him to, police said.

The motorist was heading into the north German city of Bremen “when the friendly voice from his satnav told him to turn left”, a spokesman said.

“He did what he was ordered to do and turned his Audi left up over the curb and onto the track of a local streetcar line. He tried to back up off the track but got completely stuck.”

The police spokesman said about a dozen trams were held up until a tow truck arrived to clear the car off the track.

Several German motorists have crashed their cars in recent months, later telling police they were only obeying orders from their satnavs.’

British Telecom uses the voice of Tom Baker aka Dr Who for the automated reading of SMS messages. This site has a compilation of lots of amusing sentences said by the synthetic Tom Baker. 🙂

`Parts of the original DARPAnet were built like a tank to survive a thermonuclear holocaust. But much post-modern net construction is utterly gossamer, all air and microwaves. Wherever the two come together, boxes full of integrated circuits bear labels that specify how much power they can handle, and solid state textbooks reveal how much of the silicon gets hot, and how much just sits around. In short, you can do the math.

A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz, straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields much the same result. [..]’

`Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp’s precise longitude and latitude.’

`The birth of a rhino is to be captured on a BBC-run webcam in what zookeepers believe will be a world first.

Sita, a one-tonne black rhino, is due to give birth this month at Paignton Zoo, in Devon, where cameras are being trained on her paddock 24 hours a day.

The zoo said there was no existing footage of a black rhino being born in a zoo anywhere in the world.’

`Memory Infinite has a USB male connector at one end and a female connector at the other, providing an “add up” concept for USB finger discs. By connecting one Memory Infinite with another to add up the storage capacity, the user won’t waste the old storage capacity when getting a larger one. The user can choose to combine or separate Memory Infinite, making the usage of USB finger discs more convenient. And when Memory Infinite connects to a computer using its male end, other USB devices still can connect to its female end without having to occupy another USB port on the computer.’

These people are selling a monowheel for ~$4000US.

Unfortunately, it looks remarkably like the monowheel Mr Garrison invented in South Park. I think South Park has ruined monowheels forever, because now they just look like buggery machines.

This guy has apparently wired up bits of his house so you can control them over the internet. I was just switching his Christmas tree lights on and off.

There’s a webcam so you can see what’s going on in the room.

`NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may have doomed the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which abruptly fell silent last year after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.

The space agency said that theory is just one of several that may explain the probe’s failure. NASA on Wednesday announced the formation of an internal review board to investigate why the Global Surveyor lost contact with controllers during a routine adjustment of its solar array. [..]

The software was aimed at improving the spacecraft’s flight processors. Instead, bad commands may have overheated the battery and forced the spacecraft into safe mode [..]’

`It is no secret that the MPAA and other anti-piracy organizations track down alleged pirates by uploading fake torrents. Up until now it was always unclear where those files came from, and how to identify them. [..]

The server boxes that host these torrents fall in serveral ip-ranges, and are not yet blocked by blocklist software like peerguardian. Here are a few of the ranges that were discovered recently. You can easily add these to the blocklist of your torrent client (if it supports one), filewall, or blocklist manager.

# 66.172.60.XXX, 66.177.58.XXX, 66.180.205.XXX, 209.204.61.XXX, 216.151.155.XXX’

`Has Sony gone mad? Prominent adult movie producer Digital Playground says it is forced to use HD DVD instead of Blu-ray, because Sony does not allow XXX-rated movies to be released on Blu-ray.

It does not matter how you stand to porn. It is here and it is a massive business. It is also an industry that is an early adopter for new media technology. VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it.

[..] In the interview Joone says he was forced to use HD DVD, because no Blu-ray disc manufacturer would make his discs, because Sony was against it and they would loose their license.

If this holds true, Blu-ray is at a major disadvantage and could fail.’

`Designed by Sunman Kwon, this is The Finger Touch concept phone, and as you can see it has a Samsung logo on it. A very unique concept of all the phone concepts i’ve seen.

The keypad is projected from the round part of the actual device onto your hand, while your fingers act as the keypad. Sort of like the Bluetooth virtual laser keyboard, only on your hand.’

`If piped music and bleeping scanners get on your nerves at the supermarket, things could be about to get a whole lot worse.

Tins of food could soon be calling out to you from the shelves.

Scientists working on silicon chip technology have developed a tiny plastic screen which could be wrapped around tins, flashing up special offers as shoppers walk past.

If combined with a speaker and mini processor, tins could even call out recipe suggestions.’

`You saw the stories that dominated the headlines in 2006: the war in Iraq, North Korea’s nuclear tests, and the U.S. midterm elections. But what about the news that remained under the radar? From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports, FP delivers the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006.’

Here’s some comments some fellow left for his bosses when he quit Verizon.

It’s vaguely amusing..

`They say money talks, and a new report suggests Canadian currency is indeed chatting, at least electronically, on behalf of shadowy spies.

Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence.

Security experts believe the miniature devices could be used to track the movements of defence industry personnel dealing in sensitive military technology.’

`A college student who mistakenly submitted a compact disc loaded with child pornography images to his professor last week is now facing felony kiddie porn possession charges.

Andrew Erickson, 18, of 57 Lee’s River Ave., Swansea, was arrested by Fall River and Swansea police late last week. He has pleaded not guilty to the charge and was released after a family member posted his $500 cash bail. [..]

Police reports quote an e-mail Erickson sent to his professor, in which he appears to attempt to shift ownership of the disc from himself to an unnamed friend.

“Oh snap, I am sorry. I accidentally gave you my friend’s mixed music CD that I meant to keep here and install the music on my computer,” Erickson said in an e-mail to his professor. “I found the CD with the (final exam) on it. If there’s some way I could send it to you, that would be great. [..]’

`A laundry engineer was trapped in a washing machine in chest-high hot water after he got stuck while trying to repair it.

Raymond Bloomer, 42, suffered burns and torn ligaments when he became tangled in clothing and was pinned to the back wall of the washer.

Sheffield JPs heard he was caught for 20 minutes before a colleague heard his cries.

Laundry firm Abbey Glen admitted breaching Health and Safety regulations and was fined £5,000 for having no rescue procedure in place.

A spokesman said: “We learned a serious lesson.”’

`Possibly the neatest piece of kit we’ve run into at CES so far is a simple keyboard with coloured lights behind it. It is called the Luxeed by a small Korean company named Luxiium.

There are two versions, a semi-transparent key model and a black one with lit letters. They both have the same software, basically a keyboard layout and a color picker. You pick your color, paint the keys, and click apply and it lights that color.’

`But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [..]

The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.’

‘By putting chunks of raw graphite in the microwave with a clear dome to capture the plasma…’

see it here »

`The leading certifier of US electronic voting systems, Colorado outfit Ciber, Inc., is no longer permitted to issue certifications, after federal investigators discovered appallingly haphazard testing regimes, the New York Times reports.

Ciber, which certifies the majority of US election devices, was unable to document how it supposedly tested the machines for accuracy and security. Due to the oddities of US elections regulations, no government agency is assigned this role; rather, device manufacturers pay whoever they wish to rubber-stamp their kit.’

`I was just fooling around on my computer and I came across a strange color. Whenever you have a video playing in Windows Media Player, this color will become transparent no matter what program you are in, and let you see through to the video.’

This is pretty cool actually. 🙂 The magic colour, btw, seems to be #100010.

This page has a lot of pictures of power generating wind turbines.

These things are huge. The shot of the fan blade on the back of a truck gives you a good idea of scale.

`Cooler, quieter computers and [possibly] warmer pool water with very little extra cost and added energy savings.’

`Canada’s wind power business could face a tough year in 2007, with increasing doubts about this green energy source promising to buffet the industry. [..]

There are two main controversies that have popped up to trouble the wind power business: local opposition to turbines from people who live nearby, and concerns over the reliability and efficiency of the electricity produced by wind farms. Increasingly, the two issues are being linked.’

`On New Year’s Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 — 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.

Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.’

`While 99% of our readers might be scratching their heads wondering why release a product with so much power, George Ali from Ultra can answer that for you. “It’s not so much that we believe personal computers today need as much as 2000W of power,” explains George Ali, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Ultra Products. “In fact, most household circuits can’t even provide the AC power this unit would require in order to put out 2000W of DC power. But there’s the always-inevitable questions of ‘Do I have enough power?’ or ‘Does my power supply have enough juice where my high end components need it.’ That is why we have put together this 2000W unit [..]’