Author: Serkadis

Boy, if it’s not car dashboards, it’s thermostats — you just can’t get away from touchscreens these days. The latest 7-inch temperature regulator from Silverpac comes with a bunch of extra goodies to entice the touch control-loving generation into the energy conservation game. With WiFi built in, the Silverstat 7 can pump data out to the internet or your home network, and is equally adept at streaming photos, music and other content back from those connections. A full week’s worth of water temperature instructions can be programmed into the device, which can also inform you of weather conditions and your home’s energy consumption. The latter part is most intriguing, as you’ll be informed of power usage on a per-appliance basis, which can be mighty beneficial when a certain bit of home hardware gorges on electricity without you knowing. June 2010 is set as the release date, but the wallet damage remains unrevealed.

Silverpac Silverstat 7 provides energy usage data, responds to touch originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Formula One fans that have bought (or will buy) tickets for this year’s season opener event in Bahrain will be offered a real treat. According to the Sakhir circuit’s boss Martin Whitaker, the Formula One representatives have worked hard in securing the presence of all living F1 champions at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

If you’re wondering what’s the occasion, you might not be such a die-hard racing fan after all. Otherwise you’ll know that the premier automobile racing series will celebrate i… (read more)

Google has made one of the biggest moves in its history by saying that it wants to drop all censorship in China, even at the risk of leaving the market altogether. This is a bold move by the company and a very rare one among big foreign companies with interests in China. Some human rights activists commanded Google on the decision while others remained skep… (read more)

BAR International Series, Archaeopress

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Andras Zboray
www.fjexpeditions.com/

Details are as follows:

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

The Guardian, UK (Florence Evin and Brigitte Perucca)

Last September, after political infighting on a scale rarely seen at Unesco, Irina Bokova, 57, originally from Bulgaria, was elected as the first women to head the organisation. Last November she travelled to Egypt to rebuild connections with Farouk Hosni, her rival for the job. “The election is behind us, we have turned over a new leaf and I am very optimistic”

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Lots of interesting commentary in the wake of Google’s bombshell blog post from yesterday about its decision to stop censoring its search results and possibly withdrawing from the Chinese market all together after being hit with severe cyber attacks on its core infrastructure. You can follow the conversation on Techmeme, but there’s one item that just hit the news aggregator that I felt compelled to set straight.

Thomas Crampton correctly notes that Baidu.tw, supposedly owned by Chinese search leader Baidu, is currently getting forwarded to the Google Taiwan homepage (albeit only when you put www in front of the domain name). But it’s false to assume that the site was hacked, and there’s a number of ways you can tell.

Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Crampton here. After all, the Baidu.com domain name was hacked just yesterday so his assumption isn’t that far-fetched.

However, a simple WHOIS search reveals that the domain name isn’t owned by Baidu but by another entity, either an individual or an organization. The identity (Zheng Xiaodo) and contact details that were given for registration are likely fake, and I seriously doubt the owner really lives in China.

The person who registered Baidu.tw, back in 2005, has used the generic contact e-mail address for at least 99 other domain names in the past. He or she signed up for a generic email account on Chinese portal 21cn.com, an ISP under ownership of a holding called Century Dragon Information Network, which can be perfectly done by anyone outside of the country.

Furthermore, this person used Malaysian registrar (Web.CC) to secure the domain name, and the nameservers that are currently configured for the Web address are also located in Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia. For its other domain names, Baidu uses its own nameservers. It also uses taiwan.baidu.com for its Taiwan operations, although the site is currently offline for me.

Also, when you look at the cache for Baidu.tw, you can see that just a couple of days ago the domain led to Szhot.com, another domain name registrar.

Finally, when you go to Baidu.tw right now and click around (apart from the top menu), you’ll see that there was simply a change in domain name record settings, likely following the flurry of news about Google’s China stance and the role Baidu plays in all this from yesterday.

In conclusion: Baidu.tw was not hacked; someone is just trying to play a number on Baidu.

(Image via Thomas Crampton)

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Radio Times

Includes a number of ancient Egyptian items.

In what marks a unique public service partnership, the BBC is joining forces with the British Museum to tell humankind’s story through the things we have made, from the Mummy of Hornedjitef to the modern credit card.

A History of the World in 100 Objects will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 weekdays from Monday 18 January (9:45am/7:45pm/12:15am). Written and presented by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, each of the 100 editions (which are split into three tranches over the course of the year) focuses on a particular object.

Here we reveal the list of 99 objects – the 100th is still to be selected. “We’ll leave choosing it until the last moment, so that it’s as relevant as possible,” says MacGregor.

Browse the list below and let us know what you think the 100th object should be…

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Heritage Key

As Dr Gomaa and his team progress deeper into the Tomb of Montuemhat, Sandro’s lens captures the work that archaeologists put into the digs, documenting their finds and making notes about the wall paintings.

Sandro Vannini is an established photographer of Egyptology artefacts and ancient tombs, having spent that past decade capturing some of the world’s greatest treasures, including the Golden Mask of King Tutankhamun. Working with Sandro, Heritage Key is working to bring these images to the internet and give an insight into our fascinating past. To watch a slideshow of the photographs of the Tomb of Montuemhat, click any of the thumbnails below.

Inside the Tomb of the diplomat Montuemhat, Sandro used a Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n to capture photographs of the archaeologists as they excavate the tomb, and try to understand more about the discoveries they make. These front line images, coupled with the video, gives a fantastic insight into the archaeological dig at TT34.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Wade Roush wrote:

If you’re seeing electronic displays on every wall, window, billboard, and passing dirigible, it’s a sure sign that you’re stuck in a science-fiction movie. While a few real-world destinations like New York’s Times Square and Tokyo’s Ginza district are plastered with outdoor displays, such technology is still too expensive and electricity-hogging to put everywhere.

But this might not be true forever. In fact, Prysm, a San Jose, CA, startup that came out of stealth mode yesterday, is working to ease the biggest limitations on large-screen displays, especially their power requirements. The company says that screens using its new laser phosphor display (LPD) technology suck up only one-quarter as much electricity as screens using today’s dominant liquid-crystal display (LCD) or light-emitting diode (LED) technologies.

Moreover, Prysm’s LPD screens—which the startup plans to manufacture at a plant in Concord, MA—can be built in any size or shape, from square tiles to long, thin ribbons, meaning they could turn up almost anywhere someone wants to convey information or advertising, day or night. “We can make it as big and bright as you can imagine,” says Roger Hajjar, Prysm’s co-founder and chief technology officer and the primary inventor of the company’s LPD technology. “That’s the goodness here—the size and brightness are scalable. If you need more brightness, you just add more laser power.”

Hajjar and Prysm CEO Amit Jain, who have been friends since their undergraduate days at Boston University, co-founded the startup under the stealth name Spudnik back in 2005, with venture funding from Artiman Ventures of East Palo Alto, CA, and Partech International of San Francisco. Hajjar says large LPD-based screens—which actually have more in common with old-fashioned cathode ray tubes (CRTs) than they do with LCDs—became practical for the first time in the 2000s thanks to the development of new phosphor materials by the LED industry and the increasing power and efficiency (and declining cost) of laser-light sources. Unlike many hardware startups, Prysm won’t merely license the intellectual property it has developed to other equipment makers, but plans to manufacture and sell LPD products under its own brand.

The company isn’t saying yet exactly which applications or markets it will pursue first, and it’s only showing off its prototype displays in private, invitation-only settings such as a booth at the Integrated Systems Europe audio-video trade show in Amsterdam next month. But a glimpse at the Prysm website shows where the company’s thoughts are heading. In Prysm’s glossy version of the future, LPDs will light up theaters, casinos, trade shows, stadiums, shopping malls, broadcast studios, train stations, airports, command centers, financial exchanges, hotel lobbies, museums, even churches.

LPD screens may initially cost more to install than LCD or LED screens, but Prysm vice president of sales and marketing Dana Corey says they’ll cost far less to operate, since they use less power and …Next Page »

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Heritage Key (Ann Wuyts)

Never before the Book of the Dead has been the focus of such a major exhibition as the one upcoming at the British Museum in November this year. Rumours of the exhibition started to surface (or at least, reach my ears) ever since the Colloquium on the Book of the Death last year, but was only recently confirmed. ‘Journey through the afterlife: the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead’ will focus on how the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead was thought to guide the deceased safely through the dangers of the underworld, ultimately (hopefully) ensuring eternal life. The Book of the Dead is not a single text, but a compilation of spells – often with illustrations of the underworld – of which the content evolved over time.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

23 January – 7 February 2010

Rooms 17a & 18a
Free admission

In this display, The Metropolitan Police Service’s Art and Antiques Unit will showcase some of the investigative methods involved in detecting and preventing the increasingly sophisticated crime of art forgery. Using historical and contemporary criminal cases, the broader financial and cultural impacts of art forgery on modern society are considered. Exhibits will include the diverse body of work assembled by the forger, Shaun Greenhalgh, who executed such fake “masterpieces” as the Egyptian Amarna princess and paintings purporting to be the work of the English artist, L.S. Lowry.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

drhawass.com

The photo is on the above page. Here’s the caption.

Dr. Hawass stands in the Osiris Shaft. During his excavations of the Osiris Shaft in 1999, Dr. Hawass found the remains of four pillars surrounded by a wall. Inside the pillared area was part of a large, granite sarcophagus with the lid thrown off. This discovery reflected the words of Herodotus when he said that Khufu was buried inside a granite sarcophagus and there was water near Khufu’s pyramid. People have always wondered about these words, but no one ever discovered the exact location. Even Herodotus admitted that he never saw the burial with his own eyes, because he was never able to go down into the shaft; he must have based his writing on the words of guides. (Photo: SCA)

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Automotive information provider Polk announced during one of the 2010 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) events the winners of its 14th Annual Automotive Loyalty Awards. For this edition, four new awards were presented, as well as three new ethnic loyalty awards.

The manufacturer which got it all is Toyota, who outdone GM and received the Overall Loyalty to Manufacturer award, a prize given based on he manufacturer’s ability to retain previous customers (for Toyota, the fact that … (read more)

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Although he seemed as one of the most promising racers currently part of Red Bull’s young driver development programme, Italian 20-year old Mirko Bortolotti must have done something wrong in recent days, or else nobody could explain why he was suddenly ousted by the Red Bull programme.

Until a few days ago, Bortolotti was seen as a potential replacement for Spanish driver Jaime Alguersuari in the Toro Rosso lineup for the 2010 Formula One championsip. Now, according to Turun Sanomat correspon… (read more)

Did not see this one coming at all. Four years ago, there was tremendous attention paid to Google’s announcement that it was offering a search engine in China, which would censor results in accordance with Chinese law. This resulted in a massive amount of criticism directed at Google, and Google’s PR response was quite weak, with waffling explanations. The company did eventually make a reasonable (to some) argument that it hoped it could effect more change from within the system, by doing things like alerting users to the fact that results were censored. However, many were still quite critical of Google’s position, even as most people assumed that Google felt it had to do this just to get access to the lucrative Chinese market.

But in a surprising blog post discussing an online attack that tried to access a bunch of Gmail accounts of people seen as activists for human rights in China, Google also announced that it found the situation in China to be untenable and it would no longer censor results in China (it’s at the very end — talk about burying the lede):

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I have to admit that my first thought is that there’s something much bigger happening behind the scenes to lead to this. I doubt that this decision came out of some hackers trying to access Gmail accounts. The real question is what China does now — and whether either side is bluffing?

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Cool cars and hip-hop music are already an image we’ve got used to over the past years, so the news that Grammy Award-winning artist Nelly will include the 2011 Mustang 5.0-liter V-8 in his upcoming album’s artwork is no surprise for us. The album, set to launch this spring, will feature a 2011 Mustang GT customized by DUB Magazine.

"I don’t care where you grew up, everyone knows the Mustang. At some point, you’ve had a conversation about a Mustang – and it was probably one about you wan… (read more)