The Sears Tower Skydeck is four separate glass retractable "protrusions" that can each hold up to five tons, and is probably the best laxative to be found on the 103rd floor. What's holding you up is three layers of half-inch thick glass (plus whatever joints and connectors they have to connect the glass). The visit is included in the $15 admission. [Sun Times]
Continue reading DIY HD projector hits the right note, sub-€500 price range
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DIY HD projector hits the right note, sub-€500 price range originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As a recap, Rojas helped found Nick Denton's Gizmodo, but then left to form Engadget, where he worked with Ryan Block. The fierce competition for scoops between the two sites is legendary. But now Peter and Ryan have launched their new baby, GDGT.
Don't bother clicking on the link right now: The site went down shortly after its launch. The site's Twitter feed is fine though, and currently reads, "So the amount of traffic we're getting is roughly 3-5x our 'even-that-will-never-happen' estimates... doing the best we can!"
Brad Stone at the Times says GDGT, "differs from Engadget or Gizmodo by aspiring to be a gadget-oriented social network. Users of the site can create profiles and specify which consumer electronics devices they have, had or want to buy."
Block says the point of GDGT is to outlive the "lust phase," of users drooling over the latest toys, and instead building a community for users to ogle the gear they already have getting the most out of it until they decide to replace it.
The site is opting out of the review wars that the two founders helped create; they plan to link to the other sites for breaking gadget news and headlines, and instead let their users write most of the news and reviews that runs on their own site. The site will earn money from ads and affiliate programs with online gadget stores. Blackberry parent RIM will be the site's exclusive advertiser for the first month. Apparently RIM's ads look a lot like GDGT content, but are clearly marked as advertising.
Block modestly tells the Times: "This could possibly be the last great gadget site."
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He calls it the Raptor. And he spent 2,000 of his spare hours building it from a 1965 Shelby Cobra body kit.
NBC(via Jalopnik): The car runs on a 3-phase AC induction motor and is currently powered by 290 nickel metal hydride batteries (Atkinson says the next version will use a lithium ion battery). It can reach speeds up to 100 MPH and can travel from zero to 60 mph in about eight seconds. The time it takes to charge the car is typically three hours, which will allow it to travel up to 80 miles depending on the driving environment.
Atkinson estimates the car cost about $85,000, but for some reason thinks it could be made for cheap as an alternative to the Prius.
Our unsolicited advice to Mr. Atkinson: forget the mass market. Go high end. Think Lamborghini, Porsche. You'll make a profit, and you'll be less susceptible to the rise and fall of gas prices. Rich people don't need to worry about getting hurt at the pump.
Atkinson's tracked the progress of the car at Electric Marin Wheels. Here's a selection of photos that chart his progress as the car went from kit to hot rod.
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Residents of California, North Carolina, Hawaii and Rhode Island will no longer be receiving referrer payments for Overstock.com products sold through their websites. The whole issue revolves around sales tax.
The states want Overstock to collect sales tax when an affiliate sells an Overstock item, as if the affiliate was actually a physical store selling its products. Overstock and Amazon beg to differ, since the affiliates are just that-- affiliates, not links in their supply and distribution chain.
Overstock appears to be pre-empting California's e-commerce sales tax legislation, since it hasn't been passed but is likely soon to be reconsidered by a state legislature desperate for revenue. As we noted yesterday, the upside for Amazon, and presumably Overstock, is that while the affiliate program was previously costing them marketing dollars, both companies can now keep revenue generated from affiliates, without actually having to pay omissions!
That's because despite the canceled commissions, the affiliates themselves are unlikely to immediately pull down their Overstock and Amazon links.
The move by both companies is viewed as throwing down a gauntlet to other state legislatures who get any funny ideas about passing new ecommerce sales taxes. All the battle seems to probably be just prelude. As one commenter said yesterday, "This is a constitutional matter and will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court."
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One reviewer said it best: "Forget how 'normal' forums are done - Vanilla strips it back to what's important: the conversations. Not the smileys, the bandwidth-hogging signatures, the mailbox, the forum categories. It pushes discussions to the forefront and uses subtle AJAX to make the experience of communicating with others fast and simple." Read and watch on for a discussion of the product itself as well as open-source monetization and forum culture versus the real-time web.
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Vanilla was selected for this summer's TechStars program, and the public beta for Vanilla 2 was released this April 27.
O'Sullivan actually wrote a follow-up blog post regarding our brief chat about how the real-time web and its constant firehose of information are affecting forum discussions and culture. "There is an intrinsic value in being able to take part in a discussion on your own time," he wrote. "We can't all be online, let alone awake at the same time, so in these situations the real-time web doesn't work. Forums are always on, and they are expected to operate on a different schedule than real-time."
And while O'Sullivan continues to write that there isn't a competition between real-time and forum discussions, he does state that the quality of forum information can often be much higher than info procured from real-time sources, in his opinion.
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Once we got past the site's terrible name (short for "quantum paper" - huh?) and focused on what it was offering, we were intrigued. Using a desktop widget called quanp drop, you simply drag-and-drop files from your computer to the online service, be them documents, photos, mp3s, or whatever else you want. It's a similar concept to the widget used by file-sharing service Dropbox; but unlike the Dropbox widget, installed via an executable file, quanp's widget is powered by Adobe AIR. You can even pick which style you want to use for your icon.
Then, depending on your computer (Mac or PC), you can either download the Windows-only desktop client or head over to the online service at quanp.net. Unfortunately, non-Windows users using the online service miss out on the sexiest thing about this new service: the 3D file browser.
In the Windows desktop client, you browse through your files using its visually stunning interface. Although pretty, visual browsing isn't always the most efficient way to locate a particular file, so quanp's software also lets you search by keyword, tag, date, and more. The client even includes a basic reader for Microsoft Office files so you can see the content without having to launch the office software.
Non-Windows users can use the online site to browse through files, but there's nothing all that exciting about this part of the service. It doesn't even offer an web version of the 3D interface. However, you can view files and their metadata, share them with others, plus upload or download files using buttons provided on the site.
For the most part, a lot of what makes quanp fun to use is its visual eye candy. However, for users of the free Windows Live service, there may be some hesitation in switching. Although lacking a drag-and-drop widget of its own, Windows Live users can upload both photos and videos to online services using Photo Gallery software - and not just to the online service provided by Windows Live, but to flickr, Facebook, and YouTube as well (the last two via plugins). They can also tag files, identify faces, edit photos, and browse through files - just not in glorious 3D.
Of course there are plenty of other online storage services out there, but Windows Live is the most apt comparison since it, like quanp, is a combination of desktop software and an online component - a "software + services" arrangement. Most other online storage services either don't offer desktop tools at all or don't offer tools that also function as a way to elegantly browse and edit your files.
To determine if quanp is the better choice for you, think about whether you need to upload more than just photos or videos - if so, then quanp will work (although visual search of docs isn't quite as fun). Also of note, quanp offers 10 GB to Windows Live's 25 GB. However, the company plans to offer graded pricing in the future for additional storage, but no official decision has yet been made on exactly what that will be.
Of course, for some early adopters, "sexy" beats "practical" any day. If that describes you, then you should sign up for the quanp beta here. (But sorry world - the beta is U.S.-only!)
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Interestingly, Google also notes that image spam, which is generally filtered out quite well by modern spam detection software, has seen a major resurgence. Amanda Kleha, a member of Google's message security and archiving team, theorizes that this might be due to new spammers getting into the market after the shutdown of McColo and 3FN, and these new players are starting out with well established methods, even if they are not very effective. Kleha also notes that spammers might just be testing how well the current generation of spam filters handles these messages in order to perform statistical analysis based on which subject lines and content make it into users' inboxes.
Google also notes that one of the largest spam attacks in the last quarter was based on an old school "newsletter" template (with malevolent links and images thrown in there for good measure). This attack unleashed about 50% an average day's spam volume in only 2 hours. So while it might not have been highly sophisticated, there was surely a massive network behind it that was able to send out this huge amount of spam in such a short time.
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Pingdom gives users a large number of options. You can, for example, choose to have it ping your server anywhere between once per minute or once per hour. Pingdom is also flexible enough to be able to ping specific ports on your server and also check the state of your SMPT, POP3, or IMAP email server - though with the free account, you can obviously only choose one of these.
In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.
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The magazine took a snapshot of the performance of those three major networks in 13 markets during March and early April (specifically, 5443 individual tests from 283 testing locations). Weather, time of day, and other variable factors not withstanding, the magazine found that Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps, and produced uninterrupted speeds in 89.8 percent of tests.
For its part, Sprint's 3G network delivered solid connections in 90.5 percent of cities tested, with average download speeds of 808 kbps across 13 cities, while the AT&T network's average download speed clocked in at 812 kbps. But where reliability was concerned, AT&T delivered only 68 percent of the time.
Take a look at the link below for the full city-by-city results, then let us know your take on PC World's conclusion. Do they match up with your own wireless experience in those cities? Let us know which network you use and how it fares in your location.
aviary.com/.
The speed with which Aviary's Flash-based editor pops open depends on their server load and the content of the site you're trying to paste over—Lifehacker is a "large image," while aviary.com/xkcd.com loads just fine. But the full-length capture works, allows you to save to the desktop (through the "Export" function) and make basic edits like cropping and text and shape addition. Our initial tests showed some real lag, and a few failures, when trying to open the right-hand tools for "Advanced Editor" or "Image Effects" on larger web captures, but when they work, you're getting a pretty neat Photoshop-lite to play with.
Aviary's URL appending service is free to use, requires a free account to save images online and access certain advanced features.
The images were captured by ASTER, ! and then stitched together into a seamless map. ASTER—Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer—is the instrument taking maps of land surface temperature, reflectance and elevation flying onboard NASA's Terra satellite. Once the Global Digital Elevation Model was complete, it was divided into 23,000 GeoTIFF files, each covering 1 x 1 degree of the globe. You can download the map here. [JPL]
The Philips 56PFL9954H Cinema 21:9 uses the same aspect ratio of most movies out there, which means that it eliminates the black bars while watching a Blu-ray title. And while every single consumers electronics expert in the UK is raving about the amazing quality of this 8.3-million-pixel TV set, the Philips Cinema 21:9 still has to do zooming to make the movie to fill its 1080-pixel vertical resolution. In other words: It looks great, but it's still not perfect. [Daily Mail]
See, here's my list of gadgets.
Since the database is user generated, I can't wait to get in there and add some classic tech and offbeat stuff. Using it is peculiarly thrilling. The problem with general news sites is that you don't always get news that relates to the gadgets you own; the problems with forums is that the information is relevant to what you're interested in, but highly unstructured. This fixes both. A year or two ago, we decided to cover less new product, and cover more software and updates you can use to improve the gadgets you already have. gdgt is built upon this philosophy.
The site's just launching today, but Ryan Block and Peter Rojas (Engadget and Gizmodo alum) are only getting started and I've been told the road map is epic and long. (Disclaimer: I advise gdgt here and there, too.)
How do you get started? You sign up. Quickly, so you get the user name you want, I would suggest. I'd explain how it works in depth but Veronica Belmont, has a video here with all the details.
Oh and here's my account. Add me as a friend!
UPDATE: Looks like they're down because of traffic, time to ease up a bit and check back later.
[gdgt]
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