The Ekip, a pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship that weighs in at 500 pounds. For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space
How fast is fast enough? That is the question buyers of Wi-Fi wireless local area network equipment are asking themselves in the wake of new standards and claims by vendors that they can deliver data at eye-popping rates. In reality, the systems for small business and home networks rarely approach those rates
The Heliodisplay is an interactive technology that projects into the air above the machine still or moving images that can be manipulated with a fingertip. The images are two-dimensional, and they are not holograms. The Heliodisplay’s inventor, Chad Dyner, says the technology could one day replace conventional cathode-ray tubes, liquid-crystal displays and plasma screens
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands reaffirmed that it is lawful to make the filesharing software KaZaA publicly available. This court is the first Supreme Court or other national high court ruling on the legality of peer-to-peer technologies such as KaZaA. The outcome of the case, brought in a counter-suit by music rights society Buma/Stemra, has been closely watched by the entertainment industry, technology businesses and consumer advocates. This victory sets the precedent about the legality of peer-to-peer technology across the European Union, and around the world
Australian researchers have worked with their US counterparts to develop a way of making public key authentication ubiquitous and more accessible by encoding it as a sound
The luddites at the PM’s Press office have just sent out a 10MB PowerPoint presentation to everyone on the PM’s media list. It consists solely of pictures of the PM’s staff having a high old time on a single page. Printing down to PDF it’s a mere 250+KB. They have therefore unnecessarily clogged up mailboxes up and down the country — those that even allow PowerPoint documents through the firewall. They need a cluebat from Edward Tufte
US federal regulators are expected to set aside a swath of spectrum for a new wireless technology that would let motorists use small display screens to get traffic updates, buy fast food or find a nearby hotel
Swiftel engineers are close to finding the cause of a lengthy outage that left its Victorian ADSL customers without service Monday
XML syndication and peer-to-peer meet to extend the power and efficiency of Web-based information distribution
A world first wireless webcasting system has been launched in Melbourne. SquizBiz is a hardware and software package that converts a standard video camera into a wireless webcasting system. It is currently being used by farmers and vets for virtual consultations to overcome the tyranny of distance faced by people living in remote areas
Konfabulator, a web site that offers desktop widgets for the Macintosh desktop, is gearing up to provide similar gadgets for Windows
All I want for xmas =
dual 2GHz G5
23″ Apple studio display monitor
17″ PowerBook G4
Belkin iPod Media Reader
The Adobe Creative Suite
Maton electric guitar, MS2000 DLX in purple grape burst
This Nathan J print, or this one
Nathan J Scarygirl and Toycat figurines
This Shag print, or this one, or any of his books
Anything from Emily the Strange
A new day job (in illustration)
A house
A cat hair picker-upperer that works superbly
If you were wondering why the site was down yesterday, it was due to a corrupt database. Berkeley DB spat the dummy over a locked file and threw a spanner in the MovableType works.
After a very late night of reinstalling MT, all posts are back online. Unfortunately a few comments posted over the last six weeks got eaten in the move. And reimporting the posts has meant they now have exciting new locations, which is a bit of a bugger for anyone linking to the site.
With any luck, the back end will soon be moving to a more stable MySQL database and this sort of problem won’t be happening again.
The Canadian Copyright Board has ruled that Canadians can legally download peer-to-peer music files, although uploading them is still illegal. So long as music is being recorded purely for personal use, and not being sold, rented, or otherwise disseminated to other people, its use is legal. It does not matter whether the source of the recording is a pre-owned track, a borrowed CD, or a track downloaded from the Internet, the board said. The combination of the latter two rules means that recording a CD for a friend is illegal, but handing the CD to the same friend and letting them make a copy for their own use is legal
Number three ADSL internet service provider TPG has jumped on the download bandwagon, offering a true unlimited service after Telstra and Optus both changed their download allowances
Australians will be offered an array of new pay-TV services next year after Foxtel reached an historic agreement with the competition regulator, securing the green light for its $550 million digital upgrade
Sanyo is launching a TS41 mobile phone in Japan that you can use just by pressing it to your face. Tiny vibrations from the phone travel through bones in the face to the ear. NTT DoCoMo, has an experimental model called Finger Whisper that is merely a wristband with a microphone and earphone in it. Users talk into the wristband while sticking a finger in their ears, sending it vibrations that the ear and the brain convert to sound
Fancy a glowing rubber duckie USB key ring drive? Shame it only goes up to 16MB. As you’ll need somewhere to plug your duck, may we recommend the Hello Kitty USB hub. Hello Kitty responds to your keyboard motion by talking and moving in either Japanese or English.
The T-Cube is a new tiny, orange, cubic PC intended for sale in China. It runs some wacky OS called T-Engine.
Be the envy of your friends with a fuel cell toy. Pour in the water and watch it separate into hydrogen and oxygen, forming a gas to power your vehicle across the floor.
If you’ve ever wanted to eat a hologram, LightVision Confections are selling giant lollipops with edible holograms embedded in them.
MAME is a project to allow for the emulation of every video-game ever minted, but what if you’re more the pinball type? No fear: a group of MAME hackers are building virtual pinball machines that lovingly emulate every jot and tittle of every pinball table under the sun.
If you’re not into geek toys, why not try a jelly bath. This stuff turns ordinary bath water into a soothing puddle of brightly-coloured aromatherapeutic slime that looks like weird alien porn.
My favourite selection is the Catapult Watch that fires teeny projectiles from your wrist. How can you not like a company that has an entire section on trebuchets? They come in sizes ranging from the annoy your workmates desktop model through to the 1/10th scale Warwolf that is still large enough to have your neighbours firing off complaints to local council.
Pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more reliable than electronic means. However, while there is still the occasional packet loss, this is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking
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