Developages - Development and Technology Blog

As you may have heard, we had an earthquake here in Southern California on Tuesday, July 29th. Measuring a “mild” 5.4 on the Richter scale, it was enough for our house to shake for minutes, the water in the pool to wash over the sides, and to scare us out of our PJs. Seismologists have drilled into us Californians that there is a 99% chance that the big one will hit in the next 30 years, so the common thought that comes to mind is: “Is this it?”

URGENT NOTE: The Red Cross has just established a “Safe and Well″ website for today’s earthquake so make sure to register, or if you can’t find a loved one, input that info under “Search” function. For the best information on what do do after an earthquake, check out this page on the Red Cross site.

Experts recommend that you be prepared to be self-sufficient for at least three days in case of a natural disaster. You need to store your household disaster kit in an easily accessible, yet safe location (i.e., where it’s least likely to have the house come down on it). We have our state-of-the-art EQ kit in a plastic garbage can with wheels so we can move it around - in our case, probably into the middle of the street.

Original post by Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women

WebUrbanist posted a collection of impressive building conversions - the most eye-catching entry of the list is Joanne Ussery’s very sweet Boeing 727 turned luxury living quarters -

What could be better than an amazing house made out of an airplane? A cheap one. The plane itself cost just $2000, though moving it cost $4000 and renovating it for habitation took another $24000 - but that’s still just $30000 for a truly amazing and unique home. The original airplane fold-down stairs were kept and are operated by a garage door opener and one of the original airplane restrooms still works as it always did. And the cockpit suspended over the lake below? Her own personal jacuzzi of course.

Dig that cozy interior - 7 Brilliant Building Conversion Projects

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Boeing 727 room add-on

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

Filed under: Laptops

It looks like those already sold on Dell’s slightly less business-like Vostro 2510 laptop don’t have to wait too long to get their hands on one, as the just-leaked laptop is now configurable on Dell’s website with an estimated ship time of 3 to 5 days. As we had heard, the base price starts at a reasonable $899, which includes a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo T5670 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a better than usual 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card. If that’s not enough, you can push things up past the $2,000 mark pretty easily with a faster processor, a max 4GB of RAM, an Blu-ray drive, and other premium add-ons. Hit up the link below to get started.

[Via Electronista]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

(0Ϩ writes “Some researchers at Columbia University’s Computer Vision Labratory have developed software to automatically replace faces in batches of photos. Practical applications include protecting the identities of people in Google’s Street View, coupling it with a digital camera’s burst mode to create a perfect group photo, or protecting the identities of witnesses or law enforcement and military personnel. Other links to coverage include Boing Boing, American Public Media, and New Scientist.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by timothy

(0d0 writes “Some researchers at Columbia University’s Computer Vision Labratory have developed software to automatically replace faces in batches of photos. Practical applications include protecting the identities of people in Google’s Street View, coupling it with a digital camera’s burst mode to create a perfect group photo, or protecting the identities of witnesses or law enforcement and military personnel. Other links to coverage include Boing Boing, American Public Media, and New Scientist.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by timothy

Filed under: Desktops

So we hate to break it to the good guys at Tom’s Hardware, but while we′re impressed that they managed to overclock a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 to 5.1GHz using a cryogenic cooling system, it’s not nearly close to the world record they’re claiming — we′ve seen P4′s at up to 8.18GHz, and just a couple months ago someone jacked a Core 2 Extreme QX9775 on a Skulltrail board to 6GHz. Still, it’s always fun to watch people pour liquid nitrogen over a mobo — video after the break.

[Via PC World]

Continue reading Team overclocks Core 2 Quad to 5.1GHz, claims world record — too bad it’s not

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Micah Carrick has posted some really excellent docs detailing his creation of a line-following robot, now in its 5th generation. The robot project is part of a series of tutorials he’s done on his site about working with AVR microcontrollers.

FailureBot 5 - A Line Following Robot [Via ladyada’s ranting]

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Original post by Gareth Branwyn

Even when they’re relatively small scratches in an LCD monitor can be an ongoing nuisance. If you’re willing to try reworking the display surface yourself, then consider this strategy using paper mask and spray lacquer - DIY How To Fix a Scratched LCD Monitor

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

The circuit artiste known simply as “bwack” has created what is probably the most excellent sampler I will see in this lifetime (unless a giant-sized trend begins after this). Instead of taps, this things accepts punches as input -

he was commissioned by our good friends from the band family force 5 to construct the largest sampler in the history of live rock music. and, with the assistance of his carpentry proficient padre, don bwack, he has done it. there were a few necessary requirements: one, it needed to withstand much energetic punching, and kicking, and general jovial abuse from one of the rowdiest live bands on the planet. there was also the need for it to dominate space with an aesthetic presence large enough to compete with one of the more style conscious outfits on the planet; the family has panache in spades and this thing had to be classy to occupy a stage such thoughtfully coifed hair and magically coordinated garmentry.

Hmm … a giant synth could turn knob-twiddling into a decent upper-body workout! - bwack is a genius i think - [via Creat Digital Music]

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Original post by Collin Cunningham

Remember Memjet? Silverbrook’s 60-pages-per-minute printer shocked the technology industry in March of 2007, when the startup disclosed its innovative inkjet technology. Soon after, the company started talking about releasing 360-pages-per-minute technology in the future.

Silverbrook’s technology (which will be commercialized under the business name Memjet) was supposed to be released in early 2008, according to what company executives told me then. Now, a company spokeswoman says that the “A4/letter printhead and related
components” will be shipped to OEMs by the end of this year, with products slated for sometime in 2009. This is consistent with “early timetables,” according to the spokeswoman.

Memjet isn’t going to manufacture the printers themselves. Instead, they’re going to sell the components to OEMs, who can put their own stamp on the technology.

Delays associated with new technology are nothing new. Still, in 2007, Memjet officials promised: a photo printer, which the company hoped to sell for less than $150 by the end of the year or early 2008; the 8.5-inch x 11-inch (A4) color inkjet, due to arrive at the end of 2008 for under $200; a label printer; and a large-format photo printer, expected to cost about $5,000, and capable of printing poster-sized prints at rapid speed.

The Memjet technology uses a series of individual MEMS-based inkjet nozzles, fabricated using conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques. Each chip measures 20 millimeters across and contains 6,400 nozzles, with five color channels, the company said. A separate driver chip calculates 900 million picoliter-sized drops per second. For a standard ʎ letter printer, the result is a total of 70,400 nozzles.

However, the Memjet spokeswoman said that the company’s technology is still being shown off to potential customers. “The company has been doing demonstrations for business partners and potential partners for many months, including demonstrations at DRUPA last month.” DRUPA is billed as the “largest printing equipment exhibition in the world,” she said.

Original post by Mark Hachman

s.bots writes “Straight from the horse’s mouth, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has identified water in a soil sample. Hopefully this exciting news will boost interest in the space program and further exploration of the Martian surface.” Clearly, this has long been suspected, but now Martian water’s been (in the words of William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) “touched and tasted.”

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Original post by timothy

Filed under: Wearables

Automatic movement? Sweeping hands? Pish posh. Casio’s looking to impress a few watch aficionados itself with the all new Tough Movement. Designed to slip inside its Oceanus and G-Shock series of timepieces, the new movement “features a high shock resistance and a hand position correction function using LED.” During the 55th minute of each hour, the movement receives time calibration signals from six bases located throughout the world if the hands are off at all, it automatically corrects things to ensure that you’re never a moment off. Reportedly, the first wristwatch to utilize the technology will be the GS-1200, which is currently slated to hit Japan this September for a stiff ¥42,000 ($390).

[Via OhGizmo]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Wearables

We’re not even going to front — some seriously bizarre air conditioning-related gizmos have emerged from the great nation of Japan. The latest concoction to deal with heat wave side effects actually has nothing to do with keeping folks cool rather, AOKI′s deodorant suits are designed to keep businessmen suffering from Hyperhidrosis adequately fresh. Most of the details are lost in (machine) translation, but all you need to know is that these outfits “suck out the smell of sweat using a silver ion.” Yeah, that’s totally worth the ¥61,950 ($575) asking price.

[Via CrunchGear, image courtesy of ListVerse]

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Original post by Darren Murph

porcupinϺ writes “Good news for those that have had a hole in their heart (and Facebook profile) since Hasbro forced Facebook to remove Scrabulous over copyright and trademark issues. The creators of Scrabulous have wasted no time in tweaking the game and have launched a new tile-based game called Wordscraper. In addition to changing the name, they have changed the board look so as not to directly copy the colors, etc of a Scrabble board, and have even made provisions for players to create their own board layout! Interested Scrabulous fans can add the application now. Only time will tell if the changes were extensive enough to keep Hasbro’s lawyers at bay.”

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Original post by timothy

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It looks like a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang (pictured) have found a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever though possible, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers, and optical computers. The key to this new technique, it seems, is the use of a “hybrid” optical fiber consisting of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver, which effectively acts as a capacitor that traps the light waves in the gap between the wire and the metal sheet and lets it slip though spaces as tiny as 10 nanometers (or more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers). That’s apparently as opposed to previous attempts that relied on surface plasmonics, in which light binds to electrons and allows it to travel along the surface of metal, which only proved effective over short distances. While all of this is still in the theoretical stage, the researchers seem to think they’re on to something big, with research associate Rupert Olten saying that this new development “means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.

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Original post by Donald Melanson