Wednesday, September 05, 2007

How To: Boost Your Wireless Signal With a Homemade Wifi Extender

Popout It's amazing what a few sheets of tinfoil can do for the strength of your wireless signal. As shown above, by carefully folding tinfoil into a parabola, you can boost your wireless strength tremendously. The fellas in the video saw gains from 82% to just under 100%, though I only saw boosts of around five percent, so your mileage may vary. This project should only take about three minutes and will hopefully leave you with impressive results. If you don't want to attach unsightly parabolic boosters and you're using the same basic router as the fellas in the video, you can also upgrade your firmware to DD-WRT—a free hack that will turn your $60 router into a $600 router and allow you to boost your Wi-Fi signal from your router's control panel.

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Meridian's iRIS iPod dock upscales videos to 1080p via HDMI

If you're having a flash of déjà vu, fret not, as this device certainly isn't the first from Meridian to output 1080p content from your iPod. Unveiled today, the iRIS universal dock for iPod claims to pump out your stored videos in resolutions as high as 1080p via HDMI, all thanks to the "high-end video upconversion processing." Of course, we're admittedly skeptical about how well this thing truly walks the talk, but nevertheless, users who opt for component outs instead of HDMI can purportedly witness 720p / 1080i content straight from their Pod. Notably, the Qdeo technology is said to "further incorporate advanced DSP for per-pixel, motion-adaptive video processing that corrects both color and contrast losses," and while there's no word on whether this thing plays nice with the new family of iPods, users will enjoy the coaxial / optical audio outputs, headphone and line-level outs, and the HDMI input for external sources. We know you're intrigued, so look for this bad boy to land in November for $379.

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Copy-Paste Text Minus The Excess Baggage, Strip the Formatting

It's a common problem. What you get from the clipboard is not what you want.

When you copy some text from a web page or a Word document to the clipboard and then paste that text inside an email message or another rich text editor, the formatting (font sizes, colors, images) stays intact.

For Microsoft Word and other Office programs, you can use the "Paste Special" command that will auto-convert the pasted content from rich text as plain text format.

remove html tags

But if you copy-paste text between browsers, a neat solution is Clipboard Scrubber, which as the name suggest, automatically strips the text of all formatting as soon as you copy it to the clipboard. Everything that gets to clipboard after you hit Ctrl+C is converted to plain text.

You can also (optionally) remove all HTML tags from the clipboard text, which is excellent for copying and pasting things from the web, without getting all the extra markup.

Clipboard Text Scrubber [via Eddie Awad]

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Ross Levinsohn And Jonathan Miller To Announce New Buyout Fund Next Week

This news has been simmering for a while. When Ross Levinsohn (pictured left) resigned as the President of Fox Interactive Media late last year it was rumored that he intended to raise a large fund to acquire Internet startups. He soon partnered with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online and the two have been out raising capital for the last few months. Their new entitiy is called Velocity Investment Group.

They’ve found their partner - $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic. Details on the amount of capital committed to the new fund are scarce, but General Atlantic issued a press release today announcing that Levinsohn and Miller have become advisors to the fund. The timing is interesting - 5:14 pm EST on the Friday before the long weekend. The press was circling on this story, and the release was obviously made to preempt the news from breaking.

More news should be coming next week as details leak - size of the fund, etc. The new venture will compete with Demand Media and others for acquisitions. Demand Media, which has raised $220 million in capital, was founded by former Intermix Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Ironically, Intermix Media, the parent company to MySpace, was acquired by Fox during Levinsohn’s tenure there.

Update: We beat the WSJ by 16 minutes on this one. Their story is here.

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Genwi: Browse and Share Syndicated Content

As if to demonstrate how powerful internet syndication technologies like RSS can be for the discovery of new media, Phoenix startup Genwi has been quietly developing an entire social network centered on RSS-syndicated content.

The site, which looks very similar to Facebook, provides all the basic social networking features: profiles, friending, messaging, etc. However, it also incorporates media from across the internet that users can discover and share with one another.

Content feeds - whether for videos, blogs, podcasts, or news - are pulled in as “channels” and each has its own page. These pages display most recent items, suggest related channels, and solicit consumer opinions.

Genwi’s wide-ranging selection of channels can be either searched by term or browsed by category. When you find a channel that you like, you can subscribe to it. Recent items from all of your subscribed feeds will show up on a personalized mashup page. If you can’t find a particular feed, you can manually add it to the site’s collection.

So far, this sounds very much like any other feed reader (although the browse, search, and discovery capabilities of Genwi are arguably better than even Google Reader’s). Genwi distinguishes itself primarily by its attempt to build a social network around the sharing and discussion of feed items. When you come across a feed or item you particularly like, you can opt to share it with all of your friends through your profile page.

It will be interesting to see whether Genwi can pull off an entirely autonomous social network centered around the concept of content sharing. RSS sharing is already possible within Facebook so Genwi will have to come up with ways to really enhance the media discovery experience. My hunch is that users will not be drawn in large numbers to the site until the company beefs up Genwi’s feature set to match Facebook’s non-RSS offerings.

Genwi may sustain an edge over other social networks by rolling out premium content integration, which it plans to do first with music sales. The co-founders Killian McKiernan and PJ Gurumohan were involved in the development of the MediaRSS standard, and they plan to use what they learned from that experience to turn Genwi into a distribution channel for a variety of ad-supported and paid content.

Genwi has been under development since early 2006 but only respectable since early 2007. It claims 100,000 uniques per month and about 4,000 registered users. The founders have operated without external funding so far.

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Animoto Mix

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MetaCard: The World’s First Virtual World Credit Card

metacard.jpgSingapore based FirstMeta has launched MetaCard, a credit card for Second Life that is claimed to be the world's first virtual world credit card.

The MetaCard works in the same way as a normal first life credit card works. Applicants are provided with a credit limit and present the card when purchasing goods at merchants who accept the card.

MetaCard comes in two flavors: Basic and Gold. The Basic card is subject to a avatar check and provides a credit limit of L$5000 ($18.60) per month. A Gold MetaCard offers a credit limit of L$10,000 ($37.20) per month and can only be obtained by providing real world credentials and a real life credit card for automatic payments. Interest is charged at between 0.13% and 0.15% per day, which would we roughly 54% per annum, but compounding. Payments are 2% of the total amount used plus fees outstanding at the end of the month, and users have 21 days to make their monthly payment. MetaCard holders must also spend L$500 ($1.86) per month or face a monthly maintenance fee of L$300 ($1.12).

FirstMeta also offers MetaCard holders a savings account under the MetaSavings brand, offering interest rates of between 0.06%-0.09% daily.

Although the amount of credit offered by FirstMeta is (in real life terms) rather low, it will be interesting to see how services like these develop in online worlds given that in effect they are financial services that would likely be subject to real life laws. Whilst Second Life companies such as the World Stock Exchange clearly state that they are in effect pretend outfits (ie: games), and therefore are not subject to real world laws, FirstMeta is actually providing credit that is tied to a real world account; in effect by securing their credit services they have crossed the line into the real world.

(in part via SL Insider)

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Panasonic shows off big and bright LED display

It's far from the biggest LED display we've seen, but Panasonic's new Astrovision/AZ-LE12F series display is certainly impressive enough in its own right, thanks in no small part to its blinding 5,000 cd/m2 brightness rating. At over 13 feet across and nearly ten feet high, it's also hard to go unnoticed, which appears to be the intention as the first such display has now been installed in the new "Qiball" building in Chiba City, Japan. Passers-by should also be able to get a good look at the display thanks to its wide 145 degree horizontal viewing angle and 80 degree vertical viewing angle, with the display also promising "excellent RGB blending" from its 3-in-1 LEDs. Sadly, there's no word on a home version just yet, so it looks like you'll have to make do with some of the slightly smaller options currently at your disposal.

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Amazon, Google, Yahoo, And Others Sued For Automating Their E-mail


The companies are accused of violating a patent on automatic message routing held by Polaris IP. The patent has a long history in litigation, but all the cases have been settled out of court.



Six major Internet companies have been sued for using computers to process their e-mail.

AOL, Amazon(AMZN), Borders, Google( GOOG), IAC, and Yahoo(YHOO) stand accused of violating a patent on automatic message routing held by Texas-based Polaris IP.

Attorneys representing Polaris IP filed a claim of patent infringement on Monday in U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, Texas.

The lawsuit charges the companies with implementing systems that "comprise interpreting electronic messages with rule base and case base knowledge engines" as described in the patent held by the plaintiff, "Automatic message interpretation and routing system."

The lawsuit seeks an injunction against continued infringement. If granted -- a remote prospect at best -- the injunction would have a significant impact on the defending companies.

A more likely scenario appears to be a payday for the plaintiff. "It looks like Polaris IP is in the business of licensing patent rights and has no desire to enforce its requested injunction," said Dennis Crouch, associate professor of law at University of Missouri School of Law and the author of the law blog Patently-O, in an e-mail. "I expect that Polaris IP will be willing to settle these cases for what it believes is a reasonable six- or seven-digit figure."

Crouch pointed out that the message routing patent at issue has been involved in litigation many times. "There are no published opinions associated with these cases and they have all been settled," he said.

Polaris IP, Crouch observed, "appears to be part of a web of IP-related companies associated with attorney David Pridham." These companies include Orion IP, Constellation IP, IP Navigation Group, Cushion Technologies, CT IP Holdings, Triton, Circinus IP, and Firepond.

Pridham did not respond to a request for comment.

The method and system detailed in the patent describes a way "for automatically interpreting an electronic message including the steps of (a) receiving an electronic message from a source; (b) interpreting the electronic message using a rule base and case base knowledge engine; and (c) retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source."

The Eastern District of Texas has become a favored venue for filing patent lawsuits. Polaris IP has launched three other patent cases there in the past two years against numerous technology companies, including Art Technology Group,Oracle( ORCL), and Sirius Satellite Radio. All three of these cases have involved the same patent, which has a long legal history.

"The Eastern District of Texas has seen a flood of patent litigation in recent years based on its reputation as a patent-friendly court," said Crouch. "Interestingly, that reputation is rapidly changing as the court invalidates more patents."

Attorneys representing Polaris IP did not return calls seeking comment.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Floating Russian Chopper Seems to Fly Without Spinning its Rotors

This Russian helicopter is shown flying around with its rotors not moving. Have the Ruskies reverse-engineered some alien technology to create hovering helicopters? If so, why did the jackasses bother to put rotors on? Allow me to answer those questions. It's a normal helicopter — no alien technology here, unfortunately. It's actually an optical illusion caused by the video camera. It's shooting at a high frame rate, high enough to match the speed of the rotors. What results is every frame capturing the rotors in the same position, making them seem motionless with no blur. So there you have it; the Russians still can't build hovering helicopters. But hey, you never know what they're working on. [Boing Boing Gadgets]

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Epson to Ship Lowest-Priced 1080p Projector Yet

epson_front_PowerLite.jpgWe just got the scoop from Epson: the company says it will indeed deliver that new-and-improved 1080p projector that we told you about earlier today to the United States this December. It will be called the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB, and most startling of all is its price: $2699, a full $300 less than its predecessor and the lowest price yet for a 1080p projector. That's full 1080p, 50,000:1 contrast ratio and 1600 lumens. Take the jump for the full fact sheet scoop, ship date and a gallery of pics.


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Calvin College duo creates cheap, portable supercomputer

Just months after scientists were able to run a quantum computer simulation on an everyday PC, we're now hearing that a Calvin College student / professor tandem have created an inexpensive, portable supercomputer for crunching massive chunks of data on the go (and on the cheap). Dubbed Microwulf, the wee beast is hailed as a "machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet," and when not being checked as baggage on a flight, can reportedly process 26.25 gigaflops of data per second. The system itself touts "four dual-core motherboards connected by an eight-port gigabit Ethernet switch," and when initially constructed, it cost just $2,470 to build. Talk about a solid price-to-performance ratio. [Via Slashdot] Student, prof build budget supercomputer August 30 , 2007

Tim Brom stands next to supercomputer MicrowulfWhen Tim Brom 07’ set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England.

Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet.

“It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom.

This may prove useful next summer when Brom and others from his graduate program travel to England to do work that will require “a significant amount of computing power.” And as the price of commercial supercomputers is often prohibitive for many educational institutions, bringing a “personal” supercomputer like Microwulf could be a cost-effective solution for the group of graduate researchers.

“So far as we can tell, this is the first supercomputer to have this low price/performance ratio—the first to cost less than $100/Gflop,” said Adams.

This is a significant achievement considering that Microwulf is more than twice as fast as Deep Blue, the IBM-created supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and cost only a fraction of the $5 million spent to build Deep Blue.

Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.

Design of supercomputer Microwulf

Supercomputers like Microwulf are used to solve problems that take too much number-crunching for an ordinary desktop to handle, either because its processor is too slow, or because it doesn’t have enough memory, said Adams. Truly huge supercomputers (more than 100 times as fast as Microwulf) are used by organizations like the National Weather Service to process meteorological data and by the United States Missile Defense Agency to simulate nuclear tests.

Microwulf is considered a Beowulf cluster, a group of networked computers that run open source software and work in parallel to solve a single problem. Beowulf clusters are so named because their homemade, cost-effective nature liberates researchers from expensive commercial options for super-computing, much like Beowulf of the Old English poem liberated the Danes from the tyrannical rule of Grendel.

Do Brom and Adams see themselves as “liberators” by unveiling of a system like Microwulf?

“We’re taking the liberation a step further,” said Adams. “Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own.”

Just two years ago, building a personal supercomputer like Microwulf for the price of a high-performance desktop was out of the realm of possibility for Adams and Brom. But when they saw a portable Beowulf cluster called Little Fe at a conference in October 2005, they began to think about building their system.

Learn More

Learn more about Microwulf from a report at Cluster Monkey.

Visit Joel Adam's Web site to find out more about Microwulf's design, performance and pricing.

Discover the world of Beowulf clusters and the Little Fe project.

Read about Joel Adams' grant to build a new supercomputer for Calvin.

“I was really enjoying my high-performance computing class and wanted to keep working in that area after the class ended. I was also thinking about graduate school at the time and a project like Microwulf looks good on a curriculum vitae,” said Brom.

So by the summer of 2006 when the price of hardware materials needed to build Microwulf had gone down, Adams asked his academic department to provide $2500 for the project. He also asked Brom, then beginning his last year at Calvin, to help him build the supercomputer. In January of 2007, they began to piece together their system and by March, they were running tests to see just what Microwulf could do. In the end, the project came in under budget with Microwulf donning a price-tag of just $2470. With current hardware prices, another system like Microwulf would cost half of what it cost Adams and Brom to build earlier this year.

Though supercomputers are typically evaluated on their price/performance ratio, Adams built Microwulf giving attention to its power/performance ratio as well. In other words, he wanted to pay attention to the system’s energy consumption.

“This is becoming increasingly important, as excess power consumption is inefficient and generates waste heat, which can in turn decrease reliability,” said Adams on his Web site.

Adams and Brom managed to build Microwulf so that it could plug into one standard 120V wall outlet. This feature only enhances the system’s portability, allowing it to be taken to classrooms and other research labs where large power supplies are unavailable.

Adams isn’t going to let Microwulf gather dust in the supercomputing lab in the Science Building. Instead he’s going to take it out on the road, mostly to middle school and high school classrooms to try and get teenagers hooked on computer science.

Microwulf’s inventors aren’t set on keeping their blueprints for the supercomputer a secret. In fact, they’ve just published a detailed description and evaluation of their project on Cluster Monkey so others can build their own portable and affordable supercomputers.

It remains to be seen whether Brom will be able to get his wire-filled personal supercomputer past airport security next summer.

~written by Allison Graff, web communications coordinator

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UK comes together on mobile micropayments

Carriers in the UK have started to roll out PayForIt, an industry-standard solution for micropayments -- charges totaling less than £10 (about $20.16) in this case -- to their subscribers. Though there are already plenty of ways to pay for odds and ends likes games and ringtones through cellphones, that in itself is a problem; with payment services like premium-rate text messages, customers are left with a confusing experience that leave them wary of the whole process and less likely to use it again. PayForIt, on the other hand, leaves buyers with a standard receipt page regardless of what they're purchasing along with some semblance of assurance that the system is secure. Purchases show up on the next month's phone bill, at which point purchasing 650 ringtones may seem like a distinctly poorer plan (not to say we've ever done that or anything). No word on when we might see the service outside the British Isles; companies involved over there seem to be pretty amped, though, so if everything pans out, we imagine a broader launch will be in the cards.

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Epson eats their own, launches TW2000 1080p 3LCD projector

Here it is, Epson's latest 3LCD projector to take advantage of their new 0.74-inch HTPS panels already spotted in Mitsubishi and Sanyo projectors. The EMP-TW2000 starts with a trio of Epson-built, 0.74-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 C2FINE LCD panels with D7 process technology, 12-bit LCD driver, and updated OptiFocus engine with DeepBlack phase compensation technology. They then bust a rated 50,000:1 dynamic contrast at 1,600 lumens off a 170W UHE (E-TORL) bulb while supporting x.v.Color over a pair of HDMI v1.3 inputs -- component, S-Video, and D-Sub 15 PC input sprinkled in for fun. Nicely done Epson. Yours in Japan later this month for about ¥350,000. That'll be a tax-inclusive $3,020 when it comes Stateside under the PowerLite Pro Cinema branding. Pics of the backside, front and huge-ass, plastic remote control after the break.

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Google Flight Simulator Easter Egg

google_flight_sim.jpg

If you were thinking, "Those guys at Google are going to pack in a secret flight simulator into the new edition of Google Earth," pat yourself on the back, as that is exactly what they have done.Apparently, the latest version of Google Earth has an easter egg: a flight simulator. It's not quite like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it's a promising start. How to see this feature. Make sure you have Google Earth 4.2. Open the application, click on the globe and then press Ctrl+Alt+A. You should see this dialog that lets you choose one of the two aircrafts (F16 "Viper" and SR22) and an airport. Here's the initial view from London Heathrow Airport: ... and here's a nice view from Kathmandu: To fly, you need to read this list of keyboard shortcuts, but you can also use a mouse or a joystick. "To disable or enable mouse controls, left click (single click on a Mac). Once mouse controls are active, the pointer shape changes to a cross on your screen." Marco Gallotta, who found this feature, has some tricks: "Moving on though, you can get a quick start by holding Page Up for a few seconds to increase to maximum thrust (thrust meter is the left bar of the lower-left meters). Once you've accelerated to a sufficient velocity use the arrow keys to take-off. The keys are in reverse as one would expect with any flight simulator, so use the down arrow to take-off. When you've gained enough altitude then stabalise the aircraft to a straight flight path. It can be rather tricky to get the hang of as the controls are quite sensitive." This easter egg could become a standard feature in the next versions of Google Earth and it will bring even more fun to the application.

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