The city also gives its name to the famous beer Cerveza Quilmes, as this is where it was first brewed.
We’ve seen physically broken Nexus One devices recently, but this may be the first time one of the phone’s peculiar user interface issues has been captured. Is it really the phone or just the fingers? Let’s go to the video.
I’m leaning toward it actually being a phone issue, but time will reveal that. Has anyone else experienced a similar issue? [Android Central]
my 2.5 year old son was looking up at my dad, and looked up at his nose. he asked my dad "Dampa, why do you have a beard in your nose?"
i’m still laughing out loud! my dad was in stitches!
kids are hysterical! 😀
Q: Is there anything that shouldn’t be stored in the fridge? I have a large fridge that tends to be mostly empty because I live by myself. At the same time I have limited shelf space.
Is there anything that I couldn’t put in my fridge that normally is on the shelves — canned goods, flour, sugar, etc?
Sent by Jessica
Every week we bring you our favorite posts from our friends at Serious Eats. This week, can you guess the top 10 most-Googled recipes of 2009? What were people cooking? We have the answer below, plus a hot-looking dish of shrimp tikka masala, a banana peanut butter smoothie, and evidence that Trader Joe’s was paying attention in grammar class.
Crytek’s highly anticipated tech-shooter, Crysis 2, is not only going multiplatform this time, it will also invade a new type of jungle. Yes folks, you can forget about the tropical island as the latest Crysis incarnation is
By the time Palm announced the Pixi Plus and Pre Plus at CES earlier this month, there wasn’t a whole lot left to reveal. From the names, to the specs, all the way down to the carrier the handsets would launch on — just about everything had made it into the realm of public knowledge by way of the rumor mill.
However, there was at least one feature that Palm managed to keep hidden up their sleeve: Mobile HotSpot. With the flick of a switch, the Mobile Hotspot application turns the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus into a WiFi router for up to 5 users simultaneously, fueled by Verizon’s 3G network. We’ve spent the last few hours tinkering with a pre-release copy of Mobile HotSpot – read on for our impressions.
The Setup:
Attempting to explain how simple it is to set up Mobile HotSpot is probably more difficult than actually setting it up. You install it, flip the switch from “off” to “on”, and then choose a password. Bam! Within about 5 seconds, you’ve got a new WiFi hotspot waiting for you in your list of available networks. Remember the first time you plugged in a mouse via USB and it fired right up while you were digging around for the instructions on what to do next? It’s like that, except you’re not even plugging anything in.
Operation:
Like the setup process, keeping it all running couldn’t be much simpler. Want to change the name of the network? Tap the name, punch in a new one. Want to change the password? Same deal. If you forget your password or need to share it with a friend without shouting it to the entire room, they’ve got a “Show Passphrase” button right at the top – tap it once and your password is revealed, tap it again and it’s obfuscated. Palm has made this as absolutely, drop-dead simple as they possibly could have, and it’s a really great experience.
Oddly, there’s no way to manage connected users. While you’re alerted the instant someone connects and there’s a running list of everyone who is currently connected, there isn’t any means of disconnecting users without changing the password. This probably won’t be an issue as long as you play it smart with your security info, but it’s still something we expected to see.
Also strange: there’s no data usage meter. Considering that Verizon’s charging $40 bucks (on top of the normal voice/data plan fees) for 5 gigs of 3G Hotspot access with an overage fee of 5 cents per megabyte (or roughly 51 bucks per gigabyte), I’d imagine that people are going to want to keep a close eye on just how much data they’re gobbling up. Sure, you can find these numbers in your Verizon account pages – but why can’t the application pull that same information down, or at least provide the data for the current session for the sake of keeping tabs on things?
Battery:
This is not something you’re going to want to run all the time, unless you’re near an outlet. As we probably could have expected out of any application that is simultaneously pulling and pushing a ton of data, Mobile Hotspot hammers the battery. Even when no clients are connected, we were noticing the battery drain about 50% faster than it otherwise would.
The more people you’ve got connected simultaneously, the faster it’ll drain the battery; with 2-3 people pulling down a fair share of data, you can probably expect to drain this thing dead in about 3 hours.
Speed:
Ah, speed. Once you’re all setup, it’s the most important factor.
Unfortunately, our tests in this department were.. inconclusive, to say the least. Verizon seemed to be having some issues in my little corner of Central California today; while the network seemed stable enough at first glance, the speeds I was seeing were considerably slower than normal.
I ran speed tests across the Pre Plus, Pixi Plus, and Verizon Mifi, all of which were averaging about 85 kilobytes per second for both upload and download. I generally see download speeds that are very, very much faster than that. With that said, I’ve seen no evidence that suggests the Mobile HotSpot app pushes data out at speeds any slower than a MiFi or a dedicated Verizon mobile broadband dongle; as far as I can tell, it’s matching them kilobyte-for-kilobyte. Up until we sat down to do the formal testing, Verizon’s network — and the Mobile HotSpot app — were awesomely fast.
Your mileage will obviously vary from region to region, but I wouldn’t expect Mobile Hotspot to be the bottleneck. I’ll run a few more tests in other locales over the next few days and update accordingly.
Conclusions:
Simple to set up? Check! Simple to use? Save for a few trivial nitpicks, check! Nice and speedy? Well, as much as my local Verizon towers will allow at the moment.
While AT&T continues to promise that tethering on the iPhone is just around the corner, Verizon and Palm have launched what is quite possibly the slickest tethering solution to ever grace a mobile handset. The $40 monthly price tag seems a bit steep considering the 5 gigabyte cap, but that same 5 gigabyte plan would set you back $60 if you instead opted for a MiFi.
At this price, it’s certainly not for everyone – but if you’ve got a need for multi-person mobile broadband and were already looking to pick up a Pre Plus or Pixi Plus, it’s your best bet.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Do you remember that TV show Out Of This World with that girl who could stop time (+100 obscurity bonus)? Probably not, but I always wished I could do that. It’s also the inspiration behind this concept watch.
No, not the television show—the idea of stopping time. Locking in that perfect moment. Of course, you can’t actually lock anything down, so it only serves a reminder that time continues to march toward the inevitable. [Yanko]
Filed under: Etc., Technology
There are a lot of reasons for invention that goes beyond necessity, and pure want is right up there at the top. A clever gent named Dave tired of making the 15-minute walk to his freezing cold car, so he built a long-distance remote starter from a prepaid cellphone.
To make it work, Dave removed the vibrating mechanism that would signal a call after receiving pulses from the phone’s circuit board. Then he wired the phone to send those pulses to the remote starter’s switch, and voila: two rings and the car starts up. He is no longer limited by proximity when using the remote start; as long as the phone gets a signal, he’ll have a warm car whenever he gets there. Clever, no?
Total cost of the hack was $71.03, but that doesn’t include the remote starter unit you’ll need to buy and install in your car. And speaking of installing, should you try this out you might want to conceal your handiwork. These probably aren’t the safest days to have someone coincidentally poking under your hood and finding a cell phone wired to your engine…
[Source: Dave Hacks via Engadget]
Build your own remote starter with a pre-paid mobile phone originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Do you have one of the seven smartest dogs? You’ll soon find out if your pooch made the cut.
Miller-McCune magazine recently reported on leading canine researcher Stanley Coren’s dog talk at the 117th annual convention of the American Psychological Association. Coren said that dogs are just as intelligent as 2-year-old children. Plus, they can comprehend more than 150 words. As you may already know, dogs can also be “consciously deceptive” in order to get what they want!
According to Miller-McCune, Coren’s top Smartest Dogs List includes:
No. 1: Border collies
No. 2: Poodles
No. 3: German shepherds
No. 4: Golden retrievers
No. 5: Dobermans
No. 6: Shetland sheepdogs
No. 7: Labrador retrievers
Coren arrived at this smartest dog conclusions by studying information from more than 200 dog-obedience judges in the US and Canada. He used the data to find the differences in working and obedience intelligence across dog breeds.
If you have one of these breeds, what examples of their intelligence can you share?
(Image via flickr.CorradoDearca)
Post from: Blisstree
WSJ says Apple’s been researching e-textbooks, as well as newspapers and magazines. Welcome to 2009 when we broke this story with 6 sources. But to credit, there’s a lot more. And it’s interesting.
Apple’s been talking to CBS and Disney to get a monthly TV subscription deal going, and working with EA to demo how well games would work on the tablet. The Journal also reinforces the Bing on iPhone rumor we heard yesterday, making it seem like Apple’s really taking an anti-Google stance.
Another bit we didn’t know is that the tablet is supposedly shared among various people in the house, complete with sticky notes that you leave to other people. And, with the built-in webcam (which Gruber denies) it’ll recognize you automatically. If all these rumors pan out, the tablet is kind of an all-in-one media consumption device, slurping down basically every sort of mass media humans have made since the printing press. [WSJ]
Proforma
Costo Total US$710 milliones
Detalle
Antes que nada la via no va a ser una via del todo terrestre sino que va a ser tambien fluvial lo cual es novedoso para este paìs, pero no me convese mucho factor tiempo.
Habrán 4 rutas en toda la Repùblica de oeste a este que conectarán algunas al rio Napo
Y al Rio Morona para llegar a la ciudad de Iquitos de un millon de Habitantes
Descripcion tal como se ve en el mapa
Pacific Carbon Trust helping with carbon offset business
BCLocalNews “We're here to help if you are interested in developing a carbon offset business.” The trust is expected to deliver up to one million tonnes of carbon … and more » |
We’ve discussed peer-to-peer lending sites in the past, though mostly with respect to regulatory questions revolving around their attempts to securitize the loans. However, every time we mention those sites, we get comments or emails from people insisting that such sites are terrible and much riskier than they make out. Right after the economy crashed back in 2008 the various P2P lenders all stepped up their PR campaigns, claiming that such P2P lending could step in and provide credit where the banks were pulling back. Of course, now reports are starting to come out suggesting that, indeed, peer to peer lending is incredibly risky with extremely high default rates:
To look at the results of Prosper’s loan marketplace, though, is to see not a solution to the credit crisis, but a microcosm of it. Loans to unqualified borrowers; reliance on mathematical models that turn out to be a lot less useful than they seemed; failed hopes that high interest rates could make subprime loans profitable; sky high default rates–Prosper has it all. Prosper’s Web site advertises returns of 6 percent to 14 percent for lenders. But the reality is that the lenders who loaned $188 million through Prosper have not earned anything like these returns. On the contrary, the majority of them have lost money, as they’ve watched their loans go bad at shockingly high rates.Much like the loans made by banks during the mortgage boom, Prosper’s loans have gone into default at rates much worse than predicted by historical credit data. In November, 2007, Larsen told the Associated Press that Prosper’s default rate “hovered at around 2.7%.” That, however, included many new loans that simply hadn’t had time to go bad. Larsen refers to this obliquely in the AP story, noting that as more loans matured the rate would rise, but there’s no hint of just how steep that rise would be. Prosper’s data now shows that now shows that close to 36% of the loans made before Nov. 27, 2007–the date of the AP story–have ended in default, roughly thirteen times what a casual reader would have thought from Larsen’s comments. That is close, coincidentally, to the total 39% (or roughly two in five) default for the Prosper loans that have reached the end of their three year term.
The article goes on to highlight more and more ugly looking data concerning these sorts of loans — noting that for those who try to counter the high default rate with higher interest rates, the default rate goes up sharply. This is not a surprise — it’s basically how it should be based on your typical risk/reward tradeoff — but when the default rate on certain types of loans is over 50%, that’s not exactly a reliable investment strategy.
And from there, the article highlights how Prosper appears to mislead potential lenders with some sleight of hand:
In other words, only by cutting out more than two-thirds of its loans, does Prosper manage to eke out the positive results for AA to E rated loans that prospective lenders see on Prosper.com. Or you can look at it another way and ask how many investors have actually gotten returns in the 6 percent or 14 percent range that would-be lender see blazed across the Prosper.com front page? Thanks again to Eric’s Credit Community, we have a pretty good idea: Of investors with a portfolio of loans that are an average of at least two years old, folks who have lost money outnumber those who’ve earned 6 percent annual return by more than six to one.
The article goes on and on in that vein, and it’s really damning to the claims from some of these sites. Given how many articles have praised such services as potentially “revolutionizing” how people raise money for things, it’s definitely worth highlighting these questionable results.
Update: A few folks are suggesting that Prosper is different than others in the space…
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We’ve documented here at Sidecut Reports the ongoing struggles AT&T has had keeping its iPhone customers from congesting its wireless networks. Now apparently it’s Verizon’s turn to see how good its network is, if the rumors about Verizon getting the 3G contract for the also-rumored Apple tablet and Verizon getting the iPhone in June turn out to be true.
While there’s still a lot we don’t know — for instance, how much data plans for the devices might cost, what the data download limits might be, etc., etc. — our initial guess is that Verizon might be better equipped to handle a bigger traffic load, if only because Verizon has been aggressively building out for its Long Term Evolution (LTE) launches, still theoretically scheduled to start happening this calendar year. Since LTE installs will likely take place in a lot of the same 3G tower locations, it’s a good bet that Big Red has been beefing up cell-site backhaul in advance of these launches — instead of having to play catch-up like AT&T recently admitted it is now doing. If the rumored tablet appears and is as successful as the iPhone was, Verizon will find out very quickly how good its network really is.
Where is Clearwire, Sprint and WiMAX in all the tablet hulaballoo? Our finely tuned WiMAX radar hasn’t heard any hints of a WiMAX chip being inside the iTablet, not really a surprise given the still low market penetration of WiMAX services. Could that change later in the year or next year, if and when Clearwire launches services in San Francisco, New York and LA? Perhaps… but until then we might suggest that iTablet users take a look at Sprint’s Overdrive as a connectivity option — even if the tablet doesn’t have WiMAX it will almost certainly have Wi-Fi, allowing Sprint’s pocketspot (or the Clear Spot from Clearwire) to provide a 4G “local backhaul” where it is available. Just in case Verizon’s network isn’t as fast as you might like.
Ingredients:
1 Tbsp. shallots, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. fresh ginger, grated
1 1/2 lbs. mussels, scrubbed and cleaned, discard any mussels with broken shells (about 24 to 32 medium sized in the shell)
1 – 13.5 ounce can coconut milk, well shaken
2 Tbsp. Thai green curry paste (or to taste)
1 lime, juiced
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
thaibird chile or jalapeno, sliced (optional)
vegetable spray
Heat large saute pan coated with vegetable spray on medium high heat and add shallots. garlic and ginger. Saute a minute or so and add the green curry paste. Saute another minute to cook the paste, stirring so it does not burn. Add coconut milk, lime juice, half of the cilantro and chilies if desired and blend well with the curry paste. Add the mussels, cover and cook for about 5 minutes, until all of the mussels have opened, occasionally shaking pan back and forth. Make sure to discard any mussels that have not opened. Finish with balance of cilantro.
Nutrition Facts
4 Servings
Amount Per Serving
Calories 256.1
Total Fat 17.4 g
Saturated Fat 15.2 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 0.0 g
Monounsaturated Fat 0.0 g
Cholesterol 28.0 mg
Sodium 516.9 mg
Potassium 32.0 mg
Total Carbohydrate 5.9 g
Dietary Fiber 0.6 g
Sugars 4.0 g
Protein 14.6 g
Filed under: Motorsports, Subaru, UK, Racing
Prodrive has had a number of clients over the years. They’ve raced Ferraris at Le Mans, racked up innumerable victories for Aston Martin, and even ran Honda‘s Formula One team until they took the reins themselves. But few associations have put the British racing consultancy on the map as much as its collaboration with Subaru in the World Rally Championship.
Unfortunately for David Richards and company, Subaru withdrew last year from the WRC. But that hasn’t kept Prodrive from tweaking out another rally-prepped Impreza, as if to show it still can. Homologated to production-based Group N specifications, the Impreza N2010 packs a twin-scroll-turbocharged two-liter boxer four with competition-spec fuel injectors, catalyst and ECU for an extra 20 horsepower over stock and a wider torque band. It’s also riding on an adjustable Ohlins suspension, with differentials front, center and rear, kept in check by AP Racing brakes and reinforced with an FIA-certified roll cage.
The result is what Prodrive claims is a more competitive package compared to a Super 2000-spec rally machine at about half the price – challengers can pick one up from £120,000 (about $195k), or lease one for two years. Details in the press release after the jump, photos in the gallery below.
Gallery: Prodrive Subaru Impreza N2010
[Source: Prodrive]
Continue reading Prodrive launches new rally-spec Subaru Impreza N2010
Prodrive launches new rally-spec Subaru Impreza N2010 originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
