Category: Cool Stuff

Million Gigabyte thumb drives?

(via Engadget)

Color me skeptical, but according to this announcement from Drexel University, we might in the not-too-distant future see USB keys (or whatever interface dominates at the time) with massive storage capacities.

Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.

Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.

Sounds good to me. I’ll order a couple now, to avoid the early adopters rush.

Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe offrom the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires.

Dang it, there’s always a catch, isn’t there? I predict that before the year is out, we’ll hear that this technology is feasable, but 5 years away. Next year, we’ll get an update that the technology is feasable, but still 5 years away. And let me go out on a limb and say that in 2008, we’ll get an update that this technology is feasable, but is roughly 5 years away.

In case you haven’t kept up with breakthrough technology, everything is roughly 5 years away.

[tags]Massive data storage[/tags]

Microsoft works to protect your sensitive ears

(via Engadget)
Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology to auto-censor audio streams.  Here’s the abstract:

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible. The automatic censoring filter employs a lattice comprising either phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data. If the probability that a phoneme or word in the input audio data stream matches a corresponding phoneme or word in the undesired speech data is greater than a probability threshold, the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible. The censored speech can either be stored or made available to an audience in real-time.

[tags]Audio auto-censoring[/tags]

Portable video players

I nave no reason to get one of these. I can’t afford such a silly expenditure. But man, I wish I could buy any of the recently displayed portable media players I’ve seen over at TechEBlog. Here are just a few of the recent PMPs I wish I could get.

And there are more posted several times a week, it seems. Mostly, they are released in Korea with no announced US release date. So I’ll probably never get one of these, but I really think they are sexy.

[tags]Portable Media Players,PMP[/tags]

Sandboxie for protected surfing and application installation

(via FreewareWiki)

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations.

. . .

For example, if you run the Freecell program to play a game, it starts by reading the previously recorded statistics, displaying and altering them as you play the game, and finally writing them back to disk for future reference.

Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk.

. . .

If you run Freecell inside the Sandboxie environment, Sandboxie reads the statistics data from the hard disk into the sandbox, to satisfy the read requested by Freecell. When the game later writes the statistics, Sandboxie intercepts this operation and directs the data to the sandbox.

If you then run Freecell without the aid of Sandboxie, the read operation would bypass the sandbox altogether, and the statistics would be retrieved from the hard disk.

A run for anything sandbox to contain your programs and limit what they can do to your system.  Sandboxie is free, and looks very, very useful.  It’s going on my system for sure.

[tags]Sandbox, Sandboxie, Virtualization[/tags]

Free IP TV from Channelchooser

(via Lifehacker)
I haven’t checked out the available line-up yet, but Channelchooser looks to be offering TV viewable online.  If you want to see what the next big thing in TV *might* be, watch a little online.  If studios ever figure out how to use the Internet for distribution, this kind of thing could catch on.

[tags]IPTV[/tags]

Keep up with top-rated web sites in one place

I’m not quite sure even how to describe this site, but I’ll try.  There are a number of web sites that track web sites as recommended by surfers like you and me.  You can see the latest hot web topics by watching Digg or Del.icio.us or other such aggregation sites.  If you find all those overwhelming to keep up with, though, you might want to just look into monitoring popurls instead.  Popurls aggregates the aggregation sites, basically.  If you can keep up with the headlines and popurls, you’ll have a pretty good view of the most popular, interesting, and/or useful web sites at a given time.  Of course, you’ll also see a lot of crap, but that’s because most of the web is crap.

[tags]Web aggregators, popurls[/tags]

You just can’t keep up

(via LifeHacker)
This article at headrush really reflects the problem so many folks experience in the internet age.  There’s too much information, and not enough time to keep up with it. I feel the bite of information overload every time I try to catch up with the techie world.  And nearly every day, I find new sources of information to add to my RSS reading list.

Do you have a stack of books, journals, manuals, articles, API docs, and blog printouts that you think you’ll get to? That you think you need to read? Now, based on past experience, what are the odds you’ll get to all of it? Half of it? Any of it? (except for maybe the Wired magazine)

So you let the stack of “things to read” pile up, then eventually when the pile gets to high you end up tossing half of it–or worse, moving it to a deeper “stuff to read someday stack. We have selective amnesia about what we’ll ever get to, but mainly because most of us keep feeling like we have to keep up! Keep up with what?

You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be. You can’t simultaneously be current on:

It’s lenghty, but well worth reading.  That is, if you can find the time.  🙂
[tags]Information Overload[/tags]

1.21 gigawatt laser?

(via Engadget)

Well, maybe not quite Back to the Future levels of power.  But it looks like the military is trying to get funding a super high powered lasers to destroy enemy satellites:

So far a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee has “shot down” the program, which would build on a 1997 Pentagon study of a two-million-watt laser, although the full committee could reinstate the provision following analysis of the full bill. Although certain military interests have pushed for anti-satellite weapons since the Cold War, concern over the space junk that destroyed sats would create has kept the international community from serious pursuit of any “Star Wars”-like programs.

Got that? Two-million watt lasers.  That’s extreme.  Handy for shooting down all those Al Queda satellites, too, I suppose.

[tags]Lasers, military weapons[/tags]

Portable apps

If you happen to get a hefty USB drive (like the 4 Gig drives for <$100 at newegg I listed a couple days back), you should visit Wikipedia dn get a list of portable apps you can put on this stick to run without install on other systems.  Some of these I already use, but some were new to me.  Here are a few

And tons more.  Check out the full list.

[tags]Portable apps[/tags]