This has to be the coolest desktop I have ever seen. Now you're desktop can be as messy as you're actual work space. Now they just have to incorporate this with touch screen capability on a horizontal desk top (table top Pac-Mac style) with a flat panel monitor in front and hello Minority Report!
"BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world." Watch video.
Creator's website link: BumpTop
It sounds like a terrible disease, and dirty too: neophilia. It is neither, actually, but an affliction nonetheless, and one especially common to the bright and overeducated. Moreover, the sufferers seem not to notice, which speaks to its kinship with addiction, to which it is quite similar.
Neophiliacs are people who love everything new or novel. While most people have some element of this trait in their personality, there are some folks who have an almost unstoppable draw to every whizzy new electronic gizmo.
In scientific mumbo jumbo, it seems that genetic differences mean that people produce different variations of a mitochondrial enzyme called monoamine oxidase A. That’s according to research from the Yamagata University School of Medicine in Japan, which was recently published in the scientific journal Psychiatric Genetics and mentioned in the New Scientist magazine.
Now a team of researchers have provided these consumers with just about the greatest excuse ever for justifying their expensive compulsion to buy the newest and coolest. They can't help themselves.
By Heidi Dawley
Read more HERE
Surf the Web from the hammock out back (or the park down the block) with this solar-powered Wi-Fi extender.
The promise of Wi-Fi is freedom—the ability to bring your laptop or PDA away from the anchor that is your desk and into your life. With most wireless routers, however, your life had better stop at around 300 feet, and forget about heading outside. Between the noise generated by other local wireless devices and physical obstacles like furniture and walls, chances are your Wi-Fi signal is little more than a whisper by the time it hits your backyard. So I built a box that can pick up that signal and boost it another 200 to 300 feet. It uses a Linksys Wi-Fi range expander ($100; linksys.com) modified with an omnidirectional 9dBi antenna ($58; pacwireless.com). To avoid unsightly extension cords in the flower bed, I added a lead-acid battery ($22; radioshack.com) and a 10-watt solar panel ($119;sundancesolar.com) for charging.
By Mike Outmesguine, popsci.com- Read more
For step-by-step instructions, click here
As World Cup soccer rages in Germany this month, 350 teams from around the world will convene in the city of Bremen to compete in the robotic equivalent, the 10th annual RoboCup World Championship. The goal, so to speak, of this event is highly ambitious: to create android athletes that could whip the human world-champion soccer team by the year 2050—and, along the way, advance the field of artificial intelligence.
David Beckham need not worry anytime soon. The players, which range from Sony Aibo dogs to dwarf-size bipedal ’bots, tend to topple easily, botch passes, and quit when their batteries run low. Still, by robot standards, they’ve got game: The humanoids can play a 20-minute match, replete with holding penalties and goal thrashing, and teams of networked ‘bots can score without any human interference. Give them 44 more years of practice, and they might well be signing autographs, not to mention million- dollar contracts. Check out video.
popsi.com- Read more
