Steve’s Blog

Organized gadget owner Van Mardian cleared his desktop by mounting all his peripherals - external hard drives, USB hubs, network router - under his desk with pegboard and wire.

For under 35 bucks, Mardian hung pegboard under his Ikea desk and threaded wire through it to stow all his gadgets and wires, completely clearing the top area. This coupled with Adam’s cord management solution would make for an attractive, sparse desktop with lots of elbow room. — Gina Trapani

Declutter Your Desk [via A Whole Lotta Nothing]

Stephen :: Feb.28.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »

Its never good when your dive watch is giving you bad info!

Pelagic Pressure Systems is recalling some 2,800 of its Oceanic and AERIS digital dive computer watches, citing a possible decompression hazard for divers relying on them (the exact models affected are listed on the CPSC page linked below). The problem occurs when switching from one gas to another during a dive, which apparently has the dangerous side effect of locking up the watch’s display, leaving the diver uncertain of his or her dive time. That could either cause them to enter decompression unknowingly or ascend prematurely, resulting in the serious problem of decompression sickness. While there’s been two reports of defective watches, they apparently haven’t resulted in any injuries. Those with the watches won’t have to do without them for long, however, with a trip to an authorized Oceanic or AERIES dealer for a software upgrade the only fix needed.

From Engadget

Stephen :: Feb.28.2007 :: Interesting, SCUBA :: No Comments »

Lockheed’s shiny new F-22 Raptor stealth fighters may have owned a few war games, but crossing the International Date Line left them as helpless as a carrot in a rabbit trap, with multiple system crashes causing an emergency detour en route from Hawaii to Okinawa, Japan. Communication, fuel subsystems, and navigation systems were rendered useless and repeated "reboots" were of no help. Luckily, the fleet had clear skies and refueling tankers to guide them back to Hawaii. If they had separated from the tankers, "they would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble," states Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. The voyage suffered a two-day delay on account of the system failures — "a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes." What should have been a showy parade of $125+ million super fighters quickly turned to disaster for Lockheed who would’ve had a lot of explaining to do, had this happened during combat.

[Via Slashdot]

From Engadget

Stephen :: Feb.28.2007 :: Interesting, Technology Related :: No Comments »

If you’re looking for a few new fonts to spice up your presentation or document, head over to UrbanFonts, a site with pay-for and freebie fonts.

I’m no designer but lots of these look fun and interesting. The free offerings especially might contain something that should be in your collection. Urban Fonts free typefaces are available as a download for Mac and Windows. — Gina Trapani

UrbanFonts [via Daily Cup of Tech]

From Lifehacker

Stephen :: Feb.14.2007 :: Interesting, Website Design :: No Comments »

Back in October of 2006 our sharp eyed MAKE readers spotted a strange water craft and ultimately figured out what it was, here’s a story about it’s debut by the SF Chronicle —

“The strangest vessel made its formal premiere Thursday on San Francisco Bay, and it was a sight to see: It looked like a spider, wiggled over the waves like a porpoise, and was fast as the wind.It is named the Proteus, after a Greek god of the sea, and is the first of what might be a long line of wave adaptive modular vessels — WAM-V for short — developed by Ugo Conti, an engineer and inventor. Conti calls it “the prototype of a new class of vessel.” Thanks Wonko - Link.

Original post [MAKE]

Stephen :: Jan.20.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »

 

The main draw of Apple’s iPhone is its touchscreen interface, which can respond to two points of contact. What if you could have a touchscreen with an infinite number of points of contact? What would that do for computing as we know it? How would that change life as we know it? These are but a few questions raised by the ongoing research of Jeff Han, whose work at NYU might not only make him YouTube rich, but might put him in the same category as the Edisons and Farnsworths of the world.

Han has already sold a screen to one of the branches of the military. Companies are already developing rival technologies to prevent Han from cornering the market. And to top it all off, a video of Han feeling up his screen for the cheering mob. – Nicholas Deleon

Can’t Touch This [Fast Company]

Original post [Gizmodo]

Stephen :: Jan.19.2007 :: Computer Related, Interesting, Promising Products :: No Comments »

You might have already seen this HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photo of the Tokyo skyline at night from Boing Boing or JeanSnow’s blog. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, so here’s a post. It was taken by an unspecified Pentax DSLR, according to flickr’s metadata. Of course, the magic to HDR is done post shot, in photoshop, where a filter can comb through three photos of the same scene bracketed -/+2 stops to capture the best possible fidelity in different brightness ranges for hyper cool looking photos like this.

What I’d like to know is, cameras can autobracket exposure as it is. Why can’t we build this into cameras as a feature? And then, my eyes. –Brian Lam

Tokyo HDR Shots on Flickr [via Boingboing, Jean Snow, Gridskipper]

Original Post [Gizmodo]

Stephen :: Jan.18.2007 :: Computer Related, Interesting :: No Comments »

The iPhone’s new touch interface might be nice, but it’s nowhere near as involved as the future UI envisioned in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise could drag objects across the screen and manipulate them in all kinds of ways, or “push” them aside to bring up something new. Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU’s Courant Institute, has come up with such an interface, which responds not only to touch and gestures, but to varying degrees of pressure. He flips photos across the screen, zooms in, throws them away, and calls up new ones, among a variety of other cool uses of the interface. It looks startlingly responsive and natural, far more so than a standard PC setup. It’s hard to describe here how intense and possibly revolutionary the setup is, so you really need to check out the video and article for yourself. With any luck, his new company Perceptive Pixel will be bringing it to our eager fingertips before too long – Matt Buchanan

Video [Fast Company's FastTV]
Can’t Touch This[Fast Company]

Original Post [Gizmodo]

Stephen :: Jan.18.2007 :: Computer Related, Interesting, Promising Products :: No Comments »

 Drivl.com | Every Mythbusters Myth ON ONE PAGE

Stephen :: Jan.16.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »

by Ryan Irelan
Photo by jessicafm

These days we spend a lot of time managing our email inboxes, but what about the snail mailbox? You can de-clutter your mailbox with some easy techniques that reduce unwanted paper and streamline what you get delivered to you.

After moving into our new house a couple of years ago, I found that our postal mailbox was overflowing with junk mail, circulars and paper bills. Sorting through the mail each day and keeping track of what came in became an annoying task and a recipe for misplaced or discarded bills or important letters.

See tips at original page [lifehacker]

Stephen :: Jan.11.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »