Author: Serkadis

New Sun Glasses for Outfielders

HERE is what the up and coming outfielders are going to wear this season. These trick sun glasses fasten on the visor of the cap so that the player can follow the ball’s flight even when looking into the sun. There’ll be no pop flies falling safe in the sun “gardens” when these glasses are used. They are fastened on with small screws.

Self-employed ad man Sam Butterfield, who describes himself as “an ideas person”, has created possibly the world’s most pointless iPhone application iPhonePilot.

That said, with it’s ability to turn grown men into excited children, it may also be a work of pure genius.

The app turns the iPhone itself into a WW2 fighter plane that you hold in your hand and fly around the room, accompanied by flying and shooting noises, and attachable paper wings.

Check this out:

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The flurry of e-book readers that are descending upon us has prompted investors to take a closer look at companies set to ride the wave.

Wattpad this morning announced that it has secured a round of funding with a number of private investors, although the e-book community operator and mobile app developer declined to disclose the size of the round.

The consortium of angel investors that injecting capital into Wattpad include Harvey Beck and Alan Levine, former co-CEOs of ICOM and Bert Amato, co-founder of Delrina.

Launched in January 2007, Wattpad is a YouTube-like community that allows its members to read and share e-books on the Web and on mobile devices. According to the company, the site’s catalog boasts ‘hundreds of thousands’ of novels, short stories, fan fiction, essays, jokes and more. Example: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Wattpad says it has delivered hundreds of million of pages from its 120,000 strong e-book library to mobile devices, having developed custom applications for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Java alongside a mobile website at m.wattpad.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Bad Liquor Causes Liver Disease

A DANGEROUS liver disease accompanied by the deposit of iron compounds in the skin is believed to be caused by drinking liquor containing copper from the stills used by incompetent distillers.

Physicians have long recognized a condition called hemochromatosis in which the cells of the liver are killed or damaged; resulting, among other things, in the partial destruction of the red corpuscles. The red iron compound of these corpuscles is then changed chemically into other compounds which may be deposited in the skin, turning it bronze in color.

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YOU Can’t Always Believe What You See

by Walter E. Burton

HAS this ever happened to you?

You go to a photographer, look handsome or pretty as the case may be, and have several portraits made. When you get the proofs you select the pose that looks the most flattering, and order a dozen prints. When you receive the finished pictures, nicely mounted, you are delighted . . . and then it dawns upon you that there is something wrong with the pictures, but you do not know exactly what it is. If you have had this experience, you have encountered a common illusion that follows nearly everyone through life. That is the impression of your appearance.

“Surely, I know how I look,” you exclaim. “Haven’t I seen myself in mirrors often enough?”

That is just the trouble. You see only the mirror-image of yourself—the right side of your face on your left; while everyone else, including the photographer and his be strictly rectangular? If you do, the grain of the wood undoubtedly is quite prominent —unless the frame actually is untrue. The curved grain of wood may exert such an influence upon your vision that you swear that the picture frame is crooked—and only are convinced of its straightness by actual measurement. Similarly, the end grain of boards will influence your eyes so that the board may appear perfectly flat when in reality its surface is far from plane; or a really straight edge may look curved.

Your impression of the length of lines is influenced by the position and dimensions of neighboring lines. For example, a line four inches long that is perpendicular to another line of the same length, and whose end joins this second line in the center, seems to be considerably longer. Similarly, a picture of a tower sometimes appears to be longer than it is wide, even though the length of the base line and the tower are the same.

If you are building a house, you can make use of perspective by lay- ing the roof shingles so that the exposed length is greater at the bottom than at the top, and gradually changes between the two extremes. Thus your roof seems to be much greater in expanse than it really is. In a like manner, a tower or office building of moderate height can be made to appear taller by making the height of its successive stories or sections decrease more rapidly than normal perspective requires.

Shifting attention is responsible for the effectiveness of designs often used in posters, quilts and other places where the eye is to be attracted. One of the most common of these “restless” designs is that consisting of rows of cubes which seem to change their arrangement with regularity. This effect is obtained because the eye sees the figures in first one and then the other of possible positions. In fact, you never look at any point steadily for any great length of time. Your attention is constantly shifting.

The next time you are out walking, you can try an interesting experiment with an illusion that often is noticeable in moving pictures. Carriage wheels in the movies sometimes appear to stand still or revolve backwards while the carriage or motor car proceeds forward. This is caused by the intermittent photographing of the wheel spokes in their same relative position. By watching a spoked wheel revolve while exhaling your breath forcibly so that your lips or tongue vibrate to such an extent that your eyes in turn are caused to vibrate, you can obtain the same effect. Sometimes, when walking, you will notice that automobile wheels apparently pause in their turning at the instant your foot strikes the ground. Here, again, jarring of your optical apparatus causes the illusion.

All of which goes to prove that you can’t always believe your eyes.

Santander may have chosen to go the Ferrari way in the future years of Formula One, but that isn’t to mean their preferred UK-based Formula One team will be neglected through the 2010 season. And one evidence of that is Lewis Hamilton’s latest public appearance, which happened during a Santander event in London’s Tottenham Court Road.

According to the official site of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team, Hamilton was present with Banco Santander chairman Emilio Botin to launch the rebr… (read more)

• Key Competitors: Ford Flex, Honda Pilot, Lincoln MKT, Acura MDX.
• Power: 3.6L SIDI V6 – 288-hp / 270 lb-ft.
• Transmission: 6-speed automatic.
• Availability: 3rd quarter of 2010.
• Pricing: TBA

General Motors was kind enough to loan us a 2010 GMC Acadia AWD for our trip to Michigan for the 2010 Detroit Auto Show. While we really enjoyed our 10-hour comfortable ride, we would’ve much rather traveled in bling-blingin’ style in the new 2011 GMC Acadia Denali; however, the Acadia Denali won’t be available until the third quarter of 2010.

Adding onto its base sibling, the Acadia Denali will get a mono-color exterior and chrome honeycomb grille with HID headlamps, a new lower front and rear fascia, body-colored lower cladding and rocker moldings, body-colored-rear fascia and fender flares, unique body-side moldings with chrome accents and Denali badges, dual chrome exhaust tips, 20-inch two-tone chrome wheels and five exterior colors (Quicksilver Metallic, Summit White, Carbon Black, Red Jewel Tintcoat and White Diamond Tricoat).

Buyers will be able to choose the 2011 Acadia Denali in front and all-wheel-drive and 7 or 8-passenger configurations.

Hit the jump for more live high-res images.

2010 Detroit: 2011 GMC Acadia Denali:

All Photos Copyright © 2009 Stephen Calogera – egmCarTech.

2011 GMC Acadia Denali:

– By: Stephen Calogera

France has been pushing forward with its plan to protect rights holders even at the expense of its citizens’ freedom online. Despite numerous setbacks, the so-called “three-strikes law” was supposed to go in effect starting January 1, 2010. This has been met with another delay as the law has failed to receive the approval of the country’s… (read more)

A few weeks ago I talked about how a company called Hydrogenics was double dipping by building both hydrogen fuel cells for cars and hydrogen fueling stations (using electrolyzers). It seems that this company has their hands inside anything to do with hydrogen.

A week ago Hydrogenics announced that it was teaming up with Rosetti Marino to build a utility scale hydrogen power plant. Hydrogenics would once again supply both electrolyzers and fuel cells system for the project.

On Friday January 8, 2010, Hydrogenics announced that it has teamed up with the Canadian Space Agency to supply both electrolyzer and fuel cell for a Moon mission. According to the press release, “Hydrogenics Corporation, a leading developer and manufacturer of hydrogen generation and fuel cell products, today announced the award of a contract for the development of a next generation power system to be used for surface mobility applications on the moon. The scope of the contract includes an electrolyzer that produces both hydrogen and oxygen using solar power and a fuel cell system to be used for mobility, auxiliary, and life support systems.”

Now, NASA is known for carrying fuel cells aboard the Apollo spacecraft when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969. At that time fuel cells were used for auxiliary power.

What caught my attention about this press release from Hydrogenics however is that hydrogen is not only to be used for auxiliary power or even life support systems (oxygen and drinking water) but for “surface mobility” as well. Could this tie into the fact that NASA found significant water on the Moon in November 2009? And if so, will this water be used to help provide power for this spacecraft?

These are questions that haven’t been answered yet, but are quite intriguing. I’m sure more information will follow on what this new spacecraft will look like and precisely how it is powered.

Chromium OS, the open source build of Google’s upcoming web-focused netbook system, was made into a thumb-drive-friendly build early on by a helpful hacker named Hexxeh. His latest build, ChromiumOS Zero, adds Chrome extension support, speed boosts, and other goodies.

Here’s the official list of updates at Hexxeh’s blog, with notable improvements in the delay suffered by Broadcom-based Wi-Fi and the Chromium browser at the heart of the OS. The build still fits on a 1 GB USB drive, surprisingly, can be updated in-system from this release forward, and is offered as a BitTorrent download from Hexxeh’s site.

Wanna give ChromiumOS Zero a go on your own laptop from the safety of a USB stick? Check out Gina’s human’s guide to running Google Chrome OS, which details running a Hexxeh-based build from a thumb drive.

ChromiumOS Zero is a free download, and boots (usually) on non-Mac systems.

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While electric bikes are gaining more and more ground in Japan, the situation in the rest of the world (at least for highly advanced models) is quite different. These vehicles seem to have a hard time in America in particular, although there’s anecdotal evidence the concept does have the potential to catch on in the US as well – basically speaking.

But most of the makers of these bikes, powerhouses such as Panasonic or Sanyo, never tested waters outside Japan. Yamaha, another such company, now announced [JP] a total of five electric bikes over the weekend, all of which are likely to never find their way outside Japan. The new models are part of Yamaha’s series of PAS electric bikes.

Yamaha says the main selling point of these new models is their “smooth” driving behavior, especially when accelerating or going up a hill. Weighing between 23.2kg and 27 kg, all bikes are powered by a lithium-ion battery. Drivers can choose between three modes: automatic, “power” and “auto-eco plus”.

The flagship model, the PAS-CITY M, for example, weighs 27kg and boasts an assisted travel range of up to 32km in auto-eco plus driving mode. It takes two to three hours to fully charge the battery.

Yamaha says they are targeting women in particular with the new PAS lineup that includes bikes in “cherry pink” and “cosmetic orange” (both are pictured). Prices vary between $1,100 for the most basic model and $1,300 for the PAS-CITY M. But, as indicated above, don’t expect these to become available outside Japan anytime soon.

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We missed this one. But then again, the onle mention of the Chumby Sunfury tablet at CES ‘10 was in the Marvell booth. We were too busy palling around with Stan Lee to notice anything else. Good thing the nerds from technabob has our back and managed to get a spec sheet.

Now, I must state before we go any farther that this tablet might never make it to market. The concept could very well have been mocked-up for Marvell’s CES showing. After all, the Sunfury is listed with a Marvell PXA168 CPU. Chumby might be getting out of the cut-throat hardware business and into licensing its novel software like with the Chumby-powered Sony Dash. Still, there is a part of us that hopes we’ll eventually see a Chumby-branded tablet. Who doesn’t heart Chumby?

The Sunfire is reportably going to rock the aformentioned CPU, 802.11 b/g, 128MB or 256MB of RAM, microSD card slot, and loaded with Chumby widgets. It will also be able to playback MOV, H.264, AVI, MPEG-4, MP4, and MJPEG files. The Marvel PXA168 and Adobe Flash Lite will be tapped for most of the heavy lifting which means the Sunfire will basically be void of any real computing power and will be just a larger-screen Chumby. That’s still cool in our book.

If the Sunfury is really in the works and not just a PR scheme, we still think the hardware will be picked up by other companies and sold under their name. Chumby would likely provide the interface though. No word on price or release date.

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The drink driving limit could be reduced to the equivalent of one pint of beer, or half a glass of wine, according to some recent plans announced by Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis. Furthermore, it could also see the implementation of a new drug driving limit. The current drink limit is 80mg of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. The consequences of exceeding this limit is an automatic 12-month driving ban.

An independent expert has been appointed to examine possible changes t… (read more)

Last year, China became the world’s greatest automotive market and the effects are starting to show. Top automakers’ 2009 sales reports for the world’s most populous country reveal a strong growth when compared to the 2008 statistics, as reported by SinoCast via Gasgoo.

The greatest increase, a indescribable 93,6 percent, was posted by Beijing Hyundai Motor Company and can be translated into a figure of 570,000 units. Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Motors Corporation reported sales… (read more)

After rumours had been floating around all of last week, Pete Carroll resigned yesterday as HC of the USC Trojans, a position he had had for the last 9 years. It is expected that he will be named head coach of the Seattle Seahawks today, the job having just been vacated by the firing of first year coach Jim Mora. Carroll, who had a 97-19 record and won two national championships while in Los Angeles, brought respect back to a long dormant USC program.

The timing of the departure seems about right, with the Trojan’s seven season conference title winning streak ending this year and with the entire school still under NCAA investigation for a host of possible violations. Originally a NFL refugee when hired at USC, Carroll has oft been mentioned as one of the colllege coaches most likely to make the jump back into the pros.

Now the search for a new coach can be done in earnest. There are many possibilities, but one name that came out early was Oregon State’s Mike Riley, who was originally in the running for the USC job back in 2000. It is now thought that Riley will not make a move from Corvallis, having just inked a three-year extension that runs through 2019.

USC enters the coaching sweepstakes a bit late, with less than a month left before national signing day. I think that as a result, you’ll see them name someone probably this week. Updates to come.

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Last May, I pointed out the massive difference between Twitter and Facebook was how Twitter was built with openness at its core. The very default was to share everything. Facebook came from the other extreme, with privacy at its core. The defaults had you sharing very little, and you had to be explicit about who you would share anything with. At the time, I noted this would make it difficult for Facebook to “become like Twitter,” because it wasn’t easy to shift its entire focus given the way it was set up and the legacy issues involved. That wasn’t a bad thing necessarily, because people can use Twitter and Facebook in very different ways, if they choose to. However, as you may recall, a few months back, Facebook tried to make that big shift anyway, pushing many people to reveal what had previously been private.

And now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to explain this away by suggesting that social norms online have changed so much that privacy is a thing of the past and open sharing is just more expected:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

He’s right, of course, that a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and the legacies of what they had done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that just shoving everyone over the cliff makes sense. The problem with those legacy issues is that even if people had become more comfortable sharing stuff and being open elsewhere, that wasn’t how many people used Facebook, and the idea of suddenly opening up what had been private can be pretty troubling.

Furthermore, as multiple people have pointed out, given Facebook’s dominance in the market, it’s a bit disingenuous for Zuckerberg to claim that ignoring privacy had become a social norm and Facebook was just keeping up with the times. For many, Facebook is the social norm, and it helps define how people act, rather than the other way around.

My guess is that Facebook was beginning to get Twitter-envy — despite Facebook being many times bigger than Twitter. After all, people have said that Zuckerberg is notoriously aware of “innovator’s dilemma” type situations, and greatly (and smartly) fears being undercut by the next hot thing. In reacting to that, Facebook believed that without a more open system, it couldn’t really compete where Twitter competes. I don’t think that’s true, though. There were many areas where Facebook could do things differently, without necessarily knocking down the old privacy barriers. In the end, I doubt this will harm Facebook as much as some people think (people will adapt), but it does seem odd for Zuckerberg and Facebook to be suggesting that social norms mandated this massive change rather than upstart competitive pressure.

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