FlashLadyBug.com

Here is a very nice piece of software. When you get tired of being oh so good to your computer and feel like playing with some dangerous download, or am letting someone use the computer for a while and you know their going to screw the computer up, Windows Steady State is here. What I find very odd…is that its released free by Microsoft, without any fanfare.
But heh, it works and its free. It makes a cache file which includes all the system changes, when you revert, it simply clears the cache.
Check it out: Microsoft Windows SteadState

Here is a very interesting company, Flatwire. They make and sell cables that are extremely flat/thin and can easily be hidden by paint.
They make data cables, video/audio and even electrical cables. What I find very nice about this is that its so thin it makes installation very easy, without the need of ripping through walls or ceilings.
The only problem i find with this, is the price. Its rather expensive for a simple ethernet, but heh, very cool.

Check it out: Flatwire

NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) are developing the Hyperwall-2, a 23 by 10 foot liquid display wall, 128 screens, 128 GPUs, 1024 cores, 74 teraflop processing power, and half a petabyte of storage.
Impressing, though, to be completely honest…i don’t fully comprehend the true use of such a gigantic display…as long as the supercomputer crunches it, it should be easily seen on normal screens, its not like the zoom function doesn’t exist.
But heh, if NASA wants to make a giant screen with ridiculous backend, I won’t say no…heck, let me at it
Thanks NASA for all the fun

Funny…Comcast High Speed internet is slowly throttling their bandwidth, cutting off their customers slowly, have crappy customer service, and what do they do?

Lets install a super high def video demo at our HQ of 10 million pixels and let the 1 person who walks in marvel at our awesomness

But, enough with that, Comcast installed this “screen” of 10 million LEDS at their headquarters and demonstrates super HD video quality.

It includes an automated video room that handles the 27 terabytes of video that is required to fully use the thing.
Check it out at DVICE

FF3 has a large number of improvements to FF2, but a few of them have been auto disabled because of performance hits. Firstly is the improved color management system which, if turned on will make a performance hit of ~10%. Then again…if your on a modern computer with relatively good cpu and ram, I doubt you can see a difference. However…if you are like me and regularly open high res images that are enormous…proceed with caution.
Type about:config into the address bar.
Convince FF3 that you will be careful
type gfx.color_management.enabled into the filter field and change it to True.
Restart FF3, and you’ll get much better looking images.

Long before GPS, ships have been using a system called “LORAN” to navigate the worlds oceans. LORAN, or Long-Range Aids to Navigation is a land-based positioning system run by the Coast Guard to allow ships to track their positions at sea. (Both GPS and LORAN work on the same principles – you can triangulate your location based on two or three fixed points provided you know how far from each one you are.) The 30-year-old system will get a $34.5 million upgrade from the Department on Homeland Security to upgrade the transmission equipment, and add a data channel that will transmit detailed information and a constant time-keeping signal.

Popular Mechanics says that LORAN is a good backup for GPS because :

Story and quote from Popular Mechanics
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4266972.html

I mean, think about what would happen if GPS failed. It’s everywhere. Its used to locate millitary airplanes, ships, and weapons. Hikers and other outdoor professionals use it to navigate rough terrain and not get lost. We’ve got it in our cars to give us directions on how to get from here to there. It’s used to track the location of other commercial equipment and packages. A major GPS failure could take quite a while to recover from. A backup plan is always a good idea.

on Thursday, IBM unveilied their design for an internally-cooled computer chips. The new chips have thousands of tiny water passages that run between the chips layers. Each tube is only 50 microns in diameter, and is hermetically sealed using silicon walls and solicon oxide around each connection between tubes. At only 10 microns, the seals require fabrication accuracy almost 10x more precise then is required for current computer chips. The entire chip sits in a silicon cooling container, with water pumped through the chip, in one side and out the other. IBM says that the technology could become commonplace in consumer products within five years.

(Graphic from link)

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/06/06/ibm.shows.water.cooled.cpu/

“Flat screens for computers? They will soon be passe if the vision of Queen’s University computing professor Roel Vertegaal takes off outside the lab.

The Ontario school’s Human Media Laboratory is cooking up futuristic
computer screens on Coke cans that can receive RSS feeds and videos (as
seen above) and even on paper (as seen below) that blow away some of the other PC form factor improvements on the market or in the works”

Read more about this technology, and take a look at some photos showing what could be here
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28371

So, Firefox 3 is coming closer to release and so are all the pros and cons of an update to firefox. Theres always the problem that alot of extensions that you have come to depend on go pop, and many developers do not continually update their plugins.
For FF3, quite a few improvements are slated. A new Bookmark system is being implemented, its become more of a searchable tool and lets you filter bookmarks.
A very useful tool, Whole-page zooming is also being developed. We all know what happens when you jack up the text size, it becomes huge, layout dies, images stay tiny. Well…whole page zooming will solve that I wonder how well this will work with multimedia, but we shall see.
Major performance fixes are in place, so hopefully it won’t start sucking ram and cpu. I know I can’t wait for this, as I check my ram usage and see that FF is using an enormous 1.3 gigs of ram (I blame too many tabs)
It’s also changed the address bar so that what you type there searches your history, be it in the page, the title, the url, its pretty nice when you can’t remember the url of a page you’ve visited in the past.

All in all, some very good features and fixes for FF3, I just hope my beloved extensions don’t all bite the dust

“Polaroid recently announced it will launch its PoGo portable photo printer later on this summer. First seen
at CES 2008, the printer, whose name is short for Polaroid-on-the-go
according to Polaroid, achieves its compact 4.7- by 2.8- by 0.9-inch
size by not requiring any ink cartridges. Instead, it uses Zero Ink technology and ZINK Photo Paper as its medium.”

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/06/06/polaroid.pogo.printer/

The printer (Shown above) can spit out a 2×3 color photo in under one minute. The “ZINK” paper gets its color from clear cyan, yellow, and magenta dyes that are activated and turn color by heat (applied inside the printer), which causes the ink to change color. The printers will be available @ Target on July 20, for $149 each. Paper is 10 sheets/ $4, or 30 sheets / $10.

I think its about time we finally saw a new innovation in digital photo printing. I mean, we’ve seen some neat things come around with digital photography, like the ability to email photos, and do our own touch-up and cropping, etc., etc. But nothings really changed in the past year or two. I mean, this new printer isn’t revolutionary. Theres a few odd things about it, like the fact that it does 2×3 prints, and not 4×6, which is pretty much the standard these days. (The small print size may be due to the small size of the printer – 4.7 x 2.8 inches, by only .9 inches thick.) I’d love to see one, and see what the print quality is. It would be neat if you could get pre-done sticker paper, or something like that, so that you could directly print and stick your photos anywhere.

Regardless of what the quality may or may not be, or the price of the paper (33 cents a print isn’t bad, especially realizing theres no hidden ink costs), its nice to finally see a truly portable photo printer.

Check out the Zink website here
http://www.zink.com/