Cranking out news for the geeks, music buffs and gossip junkies, my way. -Greg

Genius, land lines are the 1 thing that pretty much any can get in any part of the country. This gives everyone in lesser technically advanced parts of the country to catch up. Of course AT&T is going to make a few extra dollars, but hey I’m sure most people will agree that it’s a lot better than waiting for new tower to go up. Just wish I would have thought of it first.. -Greg

Posted: 21 Sep 2009 05:45 AM PDT

The advent of femtocells is nothing short of fantastic. Think about it: A carrier has terrible service where you live or work, so what do you do about it? You get a device called a femtocell that will let you use your land-based broadband internet connection (that you pay another company for) to make calls and use data on your phone. Of course you don’t get a discount for using land-based broadband instead of your carrier’s cellular network, but you just mutter under your breath and fork over the cash anyway. The best part? Word on the street suggests AT&T — the final among the big four to bring a femtocell solution to market – will be charging $20 per month for the privilege of using another company’s land-based network as a band-aid for its crappy cell coverage in your area. Awesomeness. For those dying to fit into this scenario, the MicroSite is now live and a launch is imminent.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Read

by David Carnoy

That is awesome, I’m so doing this. Thats $148 well spent on getting your own pictures from space! Lynn and I are still needing some pictures to hang on out wall in our home. After I get complete project “Mighty Mouse”, yeah thats what I’m calling my mission to 93,000 feet, I’m going to blow one of these nice pics up and put it right over our bed! -Greg

By Charlie Sorrel September 15, 2009  | 7:54 am  | Categories: Cameras

Actual picture Taken from the project at about 93,000feet!

The $150 Space Camera.

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

Launch

Two weeks ago, on September 2nd 2009, at the leisurely post-breakfast hour of 11:45AM, the balloon was launched from Sturbridge MA. Lee and Yeh took a road trip in order to stop prevailing winds from taking the balloon out onto the Atlantic, and checked in on the University of Wisconsin’s balloon trajectory website to estimate the landing site.

Because of spotty cellphone coverage in west Massachusetts, it was important to keep the rig in the center of the state so it could be found upon landing. Light winds meant the guys got lucky and, although the cellphone’s external antenna was buried upon landing, the fix they got as the balloon was coming down was close enough.

The Photographs

The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight.

The picture you see above was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took forty minutes to come back to Earth.

What is most astonishing about this launch, named Project Icarus, is that anyone could do it. The budget is so small as to be almost non-existent (the guys slept in their car the night before the launch to save money), so that even if everything went wrong, a second, third or fourth attempt would be easy. All it took was a grand idea and an afternoon poking around the hardware store.

The project website has few details on how the balloon was put together — but the students say they will be selling step-by-step instructions for $150 soon. That means you will soon be able to launch your own balloon for just $300 — $150 for the instructions and $150 for the parts.

Project page [1337 Arts]

Photo credit: 1337 Arts / Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh

Stunned, I’ve only begun to think of the possibilties for this type of technology. This will change alot of how we use our phones to get information. Imagine traveling out of town, you wouldn’t need to get a telephone book (not that anyone does now), you wouldn’t need to get out you laptop and get on Google maps, no need to even ask the locals anything. Scan your camera phone around the block and you have a complete city guide at your finger tips. Names and types of businesses, contact information, hours of operation, menu’s, prices, recent peoples comments and or suggestions. I mean this could create a sorta sub-website, that is based soley on a person standing there looking at a building with their Android-Layar enabled camera phone, instantly having ever possible piece of information about it. Crazy… I wonder when Android will become self aware? -Greg 

By Kevin Purdy, 5:00 PM on Fri Sep 11 2009, 1,151 views

In a true-to-form augmented reality app, a phone’s camera would be used to provide a live video stream, and the application would analyze objects in that stream and interact with them in some way. This video demonstrates what the future will likely hold for motion-sensitive, GPS-enabled, decent-camera-toting phones—with zombies:

Until phones catch up to developers’ ambitions, we have half-breed apps like Layar that pull in geographic data from your phone’s GPS location, check it against web databases, and then show the locations of nearby subway stations, restaurants, and more overlaid on the image of your surroundings from your phone’s camera. Android phones allow apps to access the video stream for overlays, while the iPhone 3GS picked up that ability with the 3.1 firmware update, as ReadWriteWeb details. Here’s how Layar’s developers demonstrate the app in their native Amsterdam:

 

For a real-world, smaller-city test, I grabbed a T-Mobile G1 and headed to Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue commercial strip, with a side venture to Main Street, to see what Layar could show me. The app has a single view and function that pulls in your camera’s video stream, but you can switch up what “layer” you see over it on the fly. The layers, listed at Layar’s web site, come from web services with big geographic data piles, like Wikipedia, review site Yelp, real estate finder Trulia, and sites that mash up social apps like Flickr and Twitter. Yelp and Flickr (pulled in as “FlickAR” in this app) are, as you might imagine, the most densely packed of the apps I tried. You normally turn your camera, or yourself, to get thumbnail data on any “blips” that come up in Layar. When you come up with clusters of results in layers like Yelp, though, you’ll end up switching to the less impressive list view, because trying to pinpoint individual finds will have passersby wondering why it looks like you’re trying to rotate the world with your phone.

I didn’t get any results for local tweets or Trulia real estate findings, but an architectural society layer and Wikipedia yielded a few fun surprises. If you were new in a city and looking for something to check out, Layar might well be worth the time (and battery drain) to check out. Who wouldn’t want to check out the spot where President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, or the seriously creepy spires of the H.R. Richardson “State Lunatic Asylum”? Layar is neat stuff, and will probably get better as more developers buy into it.

Layar is a free download for Android phones only. If you’ve used the app for something useful, fun, or something in-between, tell us about it, and post pictures, in the comments.

I’m pretty tech savy and when I think about upgrading my PC, its full blown warfare. I have to research (lets just say motherboard’s) on what I already know, or think I know. Then I have to go back and read millions of endless EU comments about every review I’ve read. Ok, so now I narrowed it down to a few possibilities , so I have to start thinking about price. Well when I finally decide on a MB I goto the next item, lets say CPU. I have to go through the whole process again, except now I have to make sure my MB supports my final decisions, which can help the initial norrowing down. This whole process may take me a couple days or weeks, even months. Ok, now I finally have everything, but yes I said even months, so you know by now ALL the prices have changed, most of the technology has changed and I’m beginning to start looking at a little newer stuff because its the same price of something I was looking at a month ago.. It’s war I’m telling ya!!  So whats the point, well now it looks great the new i5 chips are really cheap, wait they don’t support hyperthreading, I’m not going to upgrade my chip unless I move up to hyperthreading. So I’ll get an i7, now wait a minute this is getting more expensive and I can only use sets of 3 or sets of 2  sticks of RAM.. Do you see my point yet, Intel is just not making this any easier, tech is just getting outta hand.. lol makes me think about when I’m playing xbox, what happened to 2 buttons, A and B? -Greg

September 8, 2009 1:00 PM PDT

by Brooke Crothers

The main message of the new Core i5 chip is simple: it’s cheap–even cheaper than Intel chips based on older technology.

The i5, which brings Intel’s new “Nehalem” microarchitecture into the mainstream PC market, immediately makes many, if not most, of the older desktop processors obsolete. Consumers need look no further than pricing on sites like Amazon. The i5-750 lists for $250, while the older–based on Intel’s last-generation “Core 2″ microarchitecture–Q9650 lists for $319.

The official pricing from Intel in quantities of 1,000 units makes the price gap even more stark: $196 for the i5 and $316 for the Q9650.

“The new Core i7′s and Core i5′s bring pricing to more mainstream levels, with the Core i5-750 at a 1KU (1,000 units) price of $196, which is well below the Core 2 Quad Q9650 at $316,” said Intel spokesman George Alfs.

“We are very serious about bringing all new Core processors to new price points and you’ll see this trend continue with Westmere,” he said, referring to Intel’s upcoming processors based on a next-generation 32-nanometer manufacturing process.

Comparing the old with the new, some consumers might point out that the older Q9650 has, for example, more on-chip memory and a higher clock speed than the Core i5. But the writing is on the wall: consumers will almost always opt for new over old when new is less expensive.

On Tuesday, Dell began offering the Studio XPS 8000 tower with the Core i5 starting at $799 and packing 4GB of “Dual Channel DDR3 memory” and a 500GB hard disk drive, among other features. Adding a 20-inch monitor hikes this to $979.

The message is more muddled, however, for the updated Core i7 processors because they maintain the same “i7″ identifier as their predecessors–first launched in November–but offer different features that are not readily apparent to less-sophisticated buyers and potentially vexing for some savvy consumers.

“It gets confusing for the more technically knowledgeable buyer, and for us as system builders,” said Kelt Reeves, president of enthusiast PC maker Falcon Northwest. “Buying a Core-i7 950 model? Well then you can have a maximum of 12 gigs (gigabytes) of triple channel memory and you buy your memory in sets of 3 sticks. Buying a Core i7-870? Well then your memory is installed in pairs and the max you can have is 8 gigs,” he explained.

Reeves continued. “For instance, if you’re a heavy Photoshop user having 12 gigs of the fastest memory might be very important to you,” he added, saying in that case a consumer would want to opt for a Core i7 900 series over the newer 800 series.

There are other gotchas too. On the i5 processors a feature called hyperthreading is not included, as CNET’s Rich Brown pointed out Tuesday. Hyperthreading effectively doubles the number of tasks–or processing threads–a chip can do. “Heavy multitaskers and those who use multithreaded software will feel the loss here,” Brown said.

This is awesome, a great step in high tech! Now if they could just make wrist watch model! -Greg

Tue Aug 4, 2009 2:54PM EDT

What’s the fun in squinting at snapshots on a two-inch LCD? Instead, try projecting your latest stills and video clips onto the nearest wall, courtesy of Nikon’s latest (but pricey) compact camera.

Announced today and set for release in September for a hefty $429, the 12.1-megapixel Coolpix S1000pj looks like your typical compact digicam, complete with a 28mm wide-angle lens, flash, and a 2.7-inch LCD in back.

But the Nikon has a cool trick up its sleeves: a tiny, built-in projector capable of throwing a 40-inch image onto any nearby surface, good for showing off individual snapshots, slideshows, or even clips you’ve captured with the S1000pj’s video recorder.

Expect VGA resolution from the Coolpix’s pico projector, according to Nikon, as well as an hour of battery life. Also in the box: a projector stand, as well as a remote that controls the projector or acts as a shutter release.

Nikon also promises that the S1000pj won’t shirk its usual imaging duties, packing in 5x optical/4x digital zoom, image stabilization, “face-priority” auto focus, and a “best shot selector” mode that takes a burst of shots and picks the one with the sharpest focus.

Overall? Pretty cool, despite the stiff price tag. Indeed, I hope we see a lot more of these itty, bitty projectors in cameras and cell phones in the future—and as pico projectors become more and more common (as I hope they do), we can expect prices to fall accordingly.