Sony became the latest to jump on the app trend bandwagon, but not with a product you’d automatically equate with downloading itty bitty widgets. The company has released an App development kit for its line of Bravia television sets. It expects people to create things like small multiplayer online games, weather and news data aggregators and anything else you can program onto 1.3MB of memory.
And here you have it! A couple of hours later, we have our first screen from the new Microsoft ad campaign. Now THIS represents me as a PC-user… I hang with SHARKS, man! [New York Times]
You know graphene, the super material that’s strong enough to withstand diamond cutters? Turns out that not only may it replace silicon as the de rigeur component of microchips, it’s on track to becoming the next megabattery as well. Engineers at the University of Texas in Austin have found a way to store electrical charge in graphene-based ultracapacitor devices, and their discovery could revolutionise the renewable energy industry.
If I was one of those people who liked peanut butter – and I’m not – then I’d be all over this kitchen gadget like, well, like peanut butter on toast. Stick your peanuts in, select whether you’re a crunchy or a smooth (but never oily or dry – wait was that the Kraft Peanut butter ad from years ago coming back to haunt this post? Anyway…) kind of guy and then blend away.
The best part is that it’s not just peanuts that can be butterised – stick in macadamias, sunflowers, cashews… whatever nut job you want, it’ll handle.
Of course, it’s a $US50 US-only product at the moment, but one day we’ll get the freedom to make our own nut butter down under.
Damn that sounded wrong…
[The Lighter Side via Babblebaby]
Putting it firmly in a price point to compete with the iPhone, the Android-running HTC Dream will cost $US199, according to the Wall Street Journal. The smartphone will also get an “aggressively priced” data plan from T-Mobile and receive some heavy Google branding. It’ll be interesting to see whether Google’s open source platform gives Apple’s apps a run for their money on Sept. 23. [Wall Street Journal via Techland]
Columbia professor Douglas Irving Repetto designed this crazy looking project which allows humans to write obsessive thoughts on scraps of paper, deposit them in one of seven squirrel cages, and spin them round and round to let the machine obsess for them. Made with grape arbor, glue, rubber bands and a laser cutter, the apparatus utilises “parallel processing to the age-old problem of broken human minds.” Yeah, I’m not sure I quite get it either, but it sure is pretty. Check out Repetto’s site to see a video of his Distributed Squirrel Cage for Parallel Processing in action! [Douglas Repetto via MAKE]
Rather than bore you with some tedious statistics about the number of people who lose all their precious memories because they don’t back up their hard drive, I’m just going to tell you that if you don’t enter this competition, you’re an idiot.
Why? Because it’s free, it’s easy, and you can walk away with a 640GB external hard drive (which is Mac-ready, Apple fans) which you can use to save all those special videos and images you keep on your PC’s hard drive, should it decide to commit suicide. You know, the ones that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling? Yeah, that’s them.
To enter, just hit the link and follow the steps. If the criteria seems too hard to enter, just think about how hard it would be to replace that rare collection of photos from Scandinavia. That’s what I thought!
Get cracking – entries close September 30, 2008.
On Friday, we introduced you to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, a tiny interchangeable-lens camera that’s not a DSLR, but rather built on the new Micro Four Thirds standard will most likely shoot HD video, even though the original US press releases were mum on the subject.
Back when the latest iteration of Foxtel’s iQ launched, one of the most interesting aspects was that there was a 4th HD digital tuner inside, except it was just lying there like some kind of fairytale princess waiting to be woken up by a digital Prince Charming.
Well, the good news is that the digital prince will be rolling out to iQ2 boxes around the country starting next week to activate the sleeping 4th tuner. Once it’s been woken up, Princess Tuner Number 4 will allow you to record two channels at the same time as watching a third channel live (at the moment you can only record two and either watch one of them, or watch something already recorded to the HDD or watch one of the On Demand movies or shows).
All iQ2 subscribers should be getting the update rolled out by December 1, but you won’t be notified when it’s been upgraded. It’s also a staggered rollout, so you’ll just have to keep trying to record Futurama at the same time as The Daily Show and Star Trek Voyager to see if you’ve been updated yet.
[Foxtel]
Alas, the Abbott and Costello-esque partnership between funny man Jerry Seinfeld and billionaire nerd Bill Gates is now officially over, after Microsoft decided to go with a slightly less ambiguous advertising campaign. In their place is a direct shot at those Apple “I’m a Mac” ads, where a Microsoft engineer resembling John Hodgman’s character greets you, “Hello, I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”
