By Casey Chan, Gizmodo – December 07, 2010 at 09:20PM
Berlin doctors have captured the first ever MRI images of a baby being born. It’s nice to know that the miracle of birth is just as disgustingly beautiful inside, as it is outside. More »
By CmdrTaco, Slashdot – December 07, 2010 at 05:00PM
Arvisp writes “As predicted, the a ‘mega-filament’ of solar magnetism erupted on Dec. 6th, producing a blast of epic proportions. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action as the 700,000-km long structure lifted off the stellar surface and–snap!!–hurled itself into space. The eruption produced a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by the STEREO-A spacecraft: video. Earth was not in the line of fire; the cloud should sail wide of our planet. Earth-effects might be limited to pretty pictures.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
By Alasdair Wilkins, Gizmodo – December 07, 2010 at 03:39PM
Graphene is a special form of carbon that’s a only single atom thick. One of the world’s only two-dimensional objects, it won its designers the Nobel Prize. And you can make your very own sheet with a couple everyday objects. More »
By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – December 07, 2010 at 02:00PM
Google searches are pretty smart and tend to be relevant to your search terms, but if you want to get really specific you can specify the proximity of your search terms with the undocumented AROUND operator.
While the AND operator, used to ensure the inclusion of two search terms (e.g. “Bert AND Ernie”), is great when you just need those search terms to appear anywhere in the results. Often times, however, you might search for Bert and Ernie but come across several articles that focus on Bert and Ernie’s name just shows up in a contextual link somewhere else on the page. This situation is a job for the AROUND operator, which lets you specify the proximity in which your search terms appear in the results.
For example, if you were searching for “Bert AND Ernie” before, you could now use “Bert AROUND(1) Ernie” instead. This will tell Google that you’re looking for Bert and Ernie to appear in close proximity to each other. If you want to extend the range a bit, increase the number (e.g. AROUND(2), AROUND(3), etc.).
By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – December 07, 2010 at 12:00PM
When it launched, millions of us grabbed free Gmail addresses, and associated Calendar, Docs, Voice, and other apps followed. But personal domains are cheap, and claiming an @yourname.com address to use with Google Apps is easier than ever. Here’s why you should.
It’s scary, but it’s true: There’s a possibility that Gmail might not always be the coolest email service in the world. For all we know of the future, there might be two hackers in a garage right now re-inventing the inbox. There might be some desktop software that merges the convenience of the cloud with killer OS integration. Or you might just decide some day that, heck, Yahoo has more of what you need, or that Google’s reach across your data is too deep.
You should have an email address that’s as portable as your cellphone number—meaning you can switch email providers without losing your current address. With your default @gmail.com address, that’s not really an option. With your personal domain, it is.
Sure, if you’re using a Gmail address, you can technically access your account from other clients through IMAP, auto-forward email, and otherwise stream your messages out. But if you ever decide on a new line of work, a different kind of username (sayonara, SpookyPrince15@gmail.com), or a new email service, you’re better off having your own domain. Your options for forwarding and import are more robust when you control your own domain, and you never have to send one of those click-and-pray “Hey everyone I’ve ever emailed throughout time—my address has changed!” messages.
With Google Apps installed on your own domain, your data is still running through Google’s own servers. But Google’s pretty good about portability, and if it starts looking like they won’t be down the road, you’ve got side door where you can step on out and maintain your identity elsewhere. The great part about using your own domain is that you’re not tied to any one email service provider. You can pick up and move your domain to another email provider any time you want.
Maybe your Gmail address is a bit better than PookieLuv4Life@gmail.com. Gmail, too, holds a more proper imprimatur than AOL, Hotmail, or other eyebrow-raising domains. It still holds true that having an email account on your own server, with a name you can change at any time, makes good sense.
If you do freelance work on the side, it’s easy to create another account (design@smith.com), one that pipes into your main personal account (john@smith.com). If you decide to help organize a fundraiser, it’s a few minutes to create another account for that (fundraise@smith.com), one that doesn’t give away your personal address to folks you’ll only message once or twice. When your kids get to the age where they get web-savvy, you can set them up with an email address (tina@smith.com and johnjr@smith.com) that you have ultimate control over. And for relatives with occasional tech troubles, you can throw them a lifeline and set them up on your server, too.
The hardest part about getting your own domain name these days is finding a URL that isn’t taken—and that’s only hard if someone has already registered your exact name. Get a little creative, use a reliable but cheap name registrar, buy a little hosted space and set up the free Google Apps on that domain—some hosts do that automatically for you. And nearly every mobile platform where Google offers some kind of syncing, an Apps address works just fine.
Note: For a full walkthrough of switching from a Gmail account to Google Apps, read Whitson’s detailed take on migrating your entire Google account to a new one.
When you’ve got a domain name and space, you’ll find that nearly all of Google’s services are available to Apps users. Not every single app, as commenter mawcs points out, but if you can live without History, Buzz, Google Storage, Health, Powermeter, and Profiles, or at least live without for the time being, you’re on your way. Even if you have other Google-assisted domains to log into or control, there is an early version of multi-account sign-in available that covers the Apps basics.
In other words, it’s possible to live out the entire Google experience—Mail, Calendars, Sync, Docs, even Voice—with your own domain name, rather than Google’s Gmail.
That’s just one editor’s thoughts on Gmail, email, and data portability—and after writing it, he’s pretty set on practicing what he’s preaching himself. Share your own thoughts and decisions on migrating from Gmail to Apps—or why you won’t—in the comments.
By (author unknown), The Big Picture – December 07, 2010 at 11:45AM
By Sam Biddle, Gizmodo – December 07, 2010 at 10:20AM
There are plenty of ways to get a camera in the air—but few are cheap. Even fewer of them are as clever and (downright pretty) as cinematographer Tom Guilmette’s floating balloon and fishing rod contraption. And it’s HD! More »
By nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson), Ars Technica » Infinite Loop – December 07, 2010 at 12:30AM
The original MacSpeech Dictate was a decent product with some real flaws. Its best feature, the stunning voice recognition engine, was licensed from Nuance, so we’ve been waiting eagerly to see just what Nuance could do with the product after it purchased MacSpeech last year. Now we know.
The newly christened “Dragon Dictate” appeared last month, and we’ve been putting it through its paces ever since. The new release does bring Dictate more in line with its excellent PC counterpart, but the changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary. If you want better control over your machine, nice vocabulary editing tools, and an improved recognition engine, you’ve got it in Dragon Dictate. If you want to be free from the shackles of Dictate’s “golden rule”—about which more later—you’re out of luck.
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By Gareth Branwyn, MAKE – December 06, 2010 at 06:00PM
Man, and I thought the hacks on the Wii sensor bar came fast and furious. Amazing what people are doing with the Xbox Kinect and how viral all of these hacks quickly become. This one, an autonomous quadrotor, uses the Kinect Sensor for navigation and obstacle avoidance. It was done as part of the STARMAC Project in the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley (EECS department). [Thanks, Blake!]
Quadrotor Autonomous Flight and Obstacle Avoidance with Kinect Sensor
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By jacqui@arstechnica.com (Jacqui Cheng), Ars Technica – December 06, 2010 at 04:20PM
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to mimic the efforts of its music industry counterpart and put pressure on universities to curb student piracy. The organization notified its partners this week that it would begin sending out letters to college and university presidents in the US “calling their attention” to the anti-infringement provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The letter—copied to the campus CIOs—asks universities to cut off infringing students or face potentially crippling consequences.
What are those consequences? The HEOA now requires universities to take steps to stop copyright infringement on campus in order to receive state funding and student aid. Of course, the MPAA isn’t capable of pulling university funding over some shared movies, but the organization is capable of spending millions of dollars to lobby state and federal officials to enforce those parts of the HEOA.
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