Month: March 2013

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – December 12, 2010 at 11:00AM

If you were impressed with the five minute bread recipe and want to take your bread making skills to the next level, this DIY sourdough starter will help you bake bread with an awesome local flavor.

Food-centric blog Serious Eats shares a great and detailed tutorial for creating your own sourdough starter. You’ll need a minimal number of things like flour, water, a jar to put them in, and some other very basic kitchen supplies. The benefits of creating your own sourdough starter are numerous, including introducing truly local flavor into your breads and pizza crust:

But now that every grocery store stocks dry yeast, why bother with sourdough? The simple answer is flavor. You’ll never get the same results from dry yeast that you will from sourdough. Another reason is uniqueness. Sourdoughs cultivated in different areas will result in different breads. Not only will the flavor be different, but the crust, crumb, and rise will be different. It’s as far as you can get from the concept of nationwide mass-produced industrial bread.

Whenever you create a sourdough starter the yeast that cultivates it is natural yeast from your locale—this is why San Fransisco sourdough bread tastes uniquely, well, San Franciscan. Check out the full guide at the link below to see how you can whip up your own starter today.

By Vlad Savov, Engadget RSS Feed – December 12, 2010 at 06:31AM

Did you know that it takes nearly seven and a half million pounds of thrust to get a Space Shuttle off the ground and into the final frontier? NASA opts to generate that power by burning through 1,000 gallons of liquid propellants and 20,000 pounds of solid fuel every second, which as you might surmise, makes for some arresting visuals. Thankfully, there are plenty of practical reasons why NASA would want to film its launches (in slow motion!), and today we get to witness some of that awe-inspiring footage, replete with a silky voiceover explaining the focal lengths of cameras used and other photographic minutiae. It’s the definition of an epic video, clocking in at over 45 minutes, but if you haven’t got all that time, just do it like us and skip around — your brain will be splattered on the wall behind you either way.

Continue reading NASA’s Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible, incredibly spectacular

NASA’s Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible, incredibly spectacular originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Darice de Cuba, ForeverGeek – December 10, 2010 at 03:39PM

Living in an apartment and with a baby boy on the way, Brandon and Emma Peat had to get creative with decorating the baby room. Painting the walls is not allowed so they were left with few options, posters and prints. Luckily for them they are both artists, so they decided to create their own illustrations.

They created the Star Wars alphabet, an illustration for each letter representing a character from Star Wars. Only characters from the original trilogy were considered. I’m not a Star Wars expert but apparently the true fans do not like the prequels that much.

Besides the ‘no characters from the prequels’ they had one more requirement, that the illustrations would be kid friendly.

We also tried to keep the illustrations as non-violent as possible (in the words of Wuher, “No blasters!”) for maximum kid-friendliness.

The Luke and Leia illustration is too funny, not to mention Vader’s illustration.

If it wasn’t for copyright restrictions, Brandon and Emma would be very successful at selling the illustrations. I bet these illustration will be hanging for years to come in their kids room.

See the whole Star Wars Alphabet.

By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo – December 10, 2010 at 01:59PM

In the near future, US Navy ships won’t use explosive cannons. They will destroy targets 100 miles away with the monster 33-megajoules railgun shown in this video. In the words of Rear Admiral Nevin P. Carr: This “really changes several games.” More »

By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – December 10, 2010 at 01:30PM

We loved the Wunderlist desktop app for Mac and Windows and the iPhone app makes a perfect companion. With the same simple features, attractive interface, and syncing support, you can now easily manage your Wunderlist from your pocket.

By John Biggs, TechCrunch – December 10, 2010 at 08:46AM

Katie Goldman is a cute little first grader who lives in Evanston, Illinois. She’s 7 years old and loves Star Wars. For a while she carried her Star Wars water bottle to school and then, one morning, she asked for the pink one instead. She told her mother that some kids at school had bullied her, telling her that Star Wars was for boys. Heartbroken, she resolved to fix the problem by backing down instead of calling them womp rats.

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By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – December 10, 2010 at 08:20AM

The good news is that with this chart of optimal Tic-Tac-Toe moves, you’ll never lose another match. The bad news is that this would’ve made War Games a whole lot less suspenseful. More »

By Robin Wauters, TechCrunch – December 10, 2010 at 06:37AM

Want to check out WikiLeaks on one of its thousands of mirrors hosted around the globe? You might have to click around quite a bit to find one that’s available and fully up-to-date.

Opinion site Antiwar.com has now launched a tool that automagically directs visitors of the site wikileaks.antiwar.com to the best WikiLeaks mirror site in his or her area.

It takes the guesswork out of finding a reliable mirror site when you wish to check out tens of thousands of leaked diplomatic cables but you’re actually in too much of a hurry to spend a couple of seconds clicking about.

Or you can just go to WikiLeaks.ch, I guess.

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – December 10, 2010 at 12:44AM

We’ve pointed out how badly many universities have fallen for the myth of magical profits from tech transfer efforts. In the last 30 years or so, there’s been this massive effort for some universities to try to profit off of “commercializing” their research. What they did was set up expensive “tech transfer” offices that were in charge of taking university research, patenting it, and then trying to find buyers. The theory, then, was that the university would make lots of money and companies would get access to all this great university research. The reality is that this hasn’t worked out at all. First of all, that whole theory skipped over the part that prior to locking up all that research, companies already had access to it — and were able to actually make use of it quickly because they didn’t have to go through a crazy and expensive licensing process.

The other problem is that, since these tech transfer offices are focused on making money, and all they have to sell is patents, they started to overvalue the patents themselves, making them prohibitively expensive, which actually decreased the ability to get those ideas out to the commercial sector and to turn that research into big money. And, did we mention how expensive it is to set up and run some of these tech transfer offices? A study from a few years back found that the majority of tech transfer offices lost money, with only a tiny handful (somewhere around a dozen) actually making money.

Oh, and on top of all that, this focus on putting up locks for the sake of charging has actually made basic research much harder as well, since much of it is based on freely sharing ideas — which is made more difficult when you want to hoard the idea in order to get a patent.

At some point, you would think universities would recognize this. They’re losing money, harming their own research and going against their basic principles as institutions for disseminating knowledge. Thankfully, some are finally starting to get the message. James Boyle points us to the news that the University of Glasgow has announced that it will be offering up most of its research under a free license. It is still reserving a few “key” bits of research for fee-based licensing, but it appears the default will now be free, which seems like it should be a good thing in terms of actually commercializing the research out of the university.

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By Sean Michael Ragan, MAKE – December 27, 2009 at 10:00PM

Transparentius, by noted Russian design firm Art Lebedev, consists of a semi-trailer equipped with a projector that displays the view from a forward-looking camera on the back of the trailer. [via Neatorama]

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