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Lifehacker
If you get distracted with brilliant blogs written by unspeakably handsome writers and forget about your laundry only to find your clothes smelly and gross in the machine five hours later, this hack's for you.
Corey Menscher, in a fit of fatherly devotion, constructed a device that notifies him when his unborn baby kicks inside the womb. Even better, he's training his kid to post on Twitter right from conception.
Stephen Fry is many things to us: a brilliant comedian, a font of great wisdom and knowledge, and most importantly, a prolific gadget writer. But last night, he lost it over Vista—luckily for us, on his Twitter.
Over the last few weeks here on Giz, the Mars Phoenix Lander, already a prolific Twitterer, became the first spacecraft to blog from its cold, unforgiving home tens of millions of miles away on Mars as its mission came to end--culminating in a touching goodbye this past Monday. As some of you may have guessed (and, for the rest of you, hate to burst the bubble), Phoenix had some help. Meet JPL's Manager of News Services Veronica McGregor, the voice of Mars Phoenix Lander.
We knew this day would come, but who knew it would be so soon? The Mars Phoenix, as planned, is shutting down major systems to offset its diminished solar power collection during the Martian winter. The little robot, which - nay, who — has been making monumental discoveries on the Red Planet for nearly six months is not expected to wake up come Spring. The first significant casualty will be the heater for the Phoenix's robotic arm, which was instrumental in scraping up evidence of water, among other things.
Back in February we showed you a slightly botched-together system that lets your houseplants Twitter, but now there's a complete kit available. After soldering it together, you simply shove it deep into your plant's pot, connect it up to with an ethernet cable, and when its moisture sensors detect that you've been a bit lax in watering it'll Twitter with a "water me please" prompt. Ignoring it won't work as it'll step up the game with an urgent Tweet, and over-watering'll earn you a scolding. It's possibly the only way I'd remember to feed Reg, my sadly dessicated lemon tree...though at this rate of digitizing the average home is at risk of networking overload. Out now for $US99. [ via OhGizmo]
Twitter is great for grassroots organising—Obama and McCain both use it to relay biddings to acolytes. That same, real-time insta-blast networking quality would also make it a jee-golly-awesome organizing tool for terrorists, according to a draft Army intelligence report. Mix Twitter with mobile phones and you've got highly mobile, connected terrorists using the same tools you use to tell your friends about the zit on your butt that just won't go away. There are three scenarios the Army is worried about, and one of them is genuinely scary.
Eye-Fi keeps kicking arse with their wireless SD cards, adding feed publishing capabilities through Twitter and RSS in a free software update. It was only a few weeks ago that another downloadable upgrade boosted download speeds and threw in MobileMe support, adding to an already massive list of support photo sharing sites. Owners should get an Eye-Fi Manager Software update pushed through automatically, and new customers can now find the cards on the Eye-Fi website. Note to other hardware manufacturers: DO MORE STUFF LIKE THIS. [Eye-Fi via Crave]
Even if politics and Presidential debates bore you to the point where you need to nap like a 72-year-old, credit is still due to C-SPAN for making the whole process slightly more interesting with its ambitious Debate Hub. The social media-packed, live-blogging saturated, video clip bonanza, pulls content from a variety of sources—including YouTube, ADD microblogging tool Twitter, and C-SPAN's spin-free video coverage—and crams it all into a clean little web page. At the conclusion of each debate, C-SPAN guarantees to have all video clips linked to the official transcript, as well as a tag cloud detailing each debate's central themes. Dare I say it, this could be the future of covering live events. It's liveblogging, on steroids!
The Mars Phoenix Lander has been Twittering away its mission details since landing on Mars in May. But lately, you can see a sense of impending doom starting to creep in, slowly: "It's noon, Sol 81. I've spotted frost around my landing site in AM," tweeted Phoenix a few weeks ago. "Seasons are longer here...I'll be surrounded by ice & don't expect to survive til Spring," comes a few days later. But unlike other eerie autobiographical accounts of impending death, the wildly successful Mars Phoenix Lander has a trick up its sleeve for a potential reincarnation after the thaw.
