Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Worldwide LCD TV shipments surpass CRTs for first time ever

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/237885899/

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Just days after Sony vaulted to the top of North American LCD sales charts, DisplaySearch is now reporting that worldwide shipments of LCD TVs have overtaken CRT TVs for the first time in the history of the universe. More specifically, LCD TV sales rose some 56-percent year over year, and 47-percent of the world's TV market is now held by said technology. Reportedly, the transition from CRT to LCD was seen as a logical one, considering that it could extend down to sizes smaller than 20-inches and satisfy desires for large-screen sets. We know you're just itching to go diving head first into more numbers on the subject, so feel free to toss on those wire-rimmed glasses and hit the read link below.

[Via TGDaily]

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Goolag.org, CdC's new web data auditing tool, launches

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/238000039/goolagorg.html

Oxblood Ruffin shares word that Cult of the Dead Cow just launched a large-scale scanner project, Goolag.org:

SECURITY ADVISORY: The following program may screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.
LUBBOCK, TX, February 20th – Today CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc), the world's most attractive hacker group, announced the release of Goolag Scanner, a Web auditing tool. Goolag Scanner enables everyone to audit his or her own Web site via Google. The scanner technology is based on "Google hacking", a form of vulnerability research developed by Johnny I Hack Stuff. He's a lovely fellow. Go buy him a drink.
"It's no big secret that the Web is the platform", said cDc spokesmodel, Oxblood Ruffin. "And this platform pretty much sucks from a security perspective. Goolag Scanner provides one more tool for Web site owners to patch up their online properties. We've seen some pretty scary holes through random tests with the scanner in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. If I were a government, a large corporation, or anyone with a big Web site, I'd be downloading this beast and aiming it at my site yesterday. The vulnerabilities are that serious."
Goolag Scanner will be released open source under the GNU Affero General Public license. It is dedicated to the memory of Wau Holland, founder of the Chaos Computer Club, and a true champion of privacy rights and social justice.

GOOLAG SCANNER FUNCTIONS AND FEATURES
GoolagScan is a standalone windows GUI based application.
* Configuration. gS uses one xml-based configuration file for its settings.
* Data-House-holding. All dorks coming with the distribution of gS are kept inside one file.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Highlight an Image in HTML Code [Fun]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/236110595/highlight-an-image-in-html-code

Entice and excite your friends with a strangely addictive trick that utilizes some interesting CSS techniques to allow you to see a highlighted image within text. Choose your desired phrase (a paragraph works too) and input the URL of any image in the text boxes. Then press generate. Voila! You'll see a huge chunk of text. Now, highlight the text and watch it turn into the image of your choosing. The code can be downloaded to put on any web page so that you can share the love on your own site too. For other cool toys, check out developer Erik Kastner's Spell with Flickr.

Text + Image + CSS3 = Crazy Delicious

New solar cell cuts out the middle man, harvests hydrogen from water

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/237005071/

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Transportation

Some Penn State researchers are taking a cue from nature and have built the first solar cell that can effectively split water to harvest the hydrogen. While the technology and efficiency of electricity-gathering solar cells has been humming on nicely, cells that can pull hydrogen out of water directly (instead of using solar-harvested electricity to do it) have found that the catalysts conducive to separating hydrogen and oxygen are usually pretty good at putting the two gases right back together again. The folks at Penn State have now developed a process that more closely mimics the photosynthesis process in plants, and while we won't pretend to understand all the nitty gritty of dye usage and other such nonsense, we do know that such a system could eventually attain 15% or so efficiency, providing a nice and clean way to gather power for that fuel cell car of the future.

[Image courtesy of MTU.edu]

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Mtron announces a 1.8-inch 128GB SSD

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/237209423/

Filed under: Storage

We've already seen a couple 2.5-inch SSDs hit 128GB, but Mtron, our new favorite crazy storage vendor, has just announced a 1.8-inch 128GB SSD. That's the same size as the drives in the MacBook Air, Latitude XT, and Lenovo X300 -- and since drive height isn't as closely related to storage capacity for SSDs, look for 1.8-inch SSDs to become the new standard in most new laptops as capacities increase and prices fall. Of course, "prices fall" is the operative phrase here -- Mtron's 1.8-inch 128GB disk will probably set you back some $1600 when it ships in April. Yeah, we'll stick with the platters for now.

[Via jkOnTheRun]

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Friday, February 15, 2008

Can photographers be plagiarists?

The father-and-son photography team of Horst and Daniel Zielske caused a stir in September when their show, "Megalopolis Shanghai," opened at MKG, a museum in Hamburg, Germany. But it wasn't the sort of stir any artist could relish. Another German photographer, Peter Bialobrzeski, accused the pair of ripping off two images from his highly acclaimed series "Neon Tigers"—right down to the luminous, Blade Runner-like glow that was the "Neon Tigers" signature.

Top: Peter Bialobrzeski, Shanghai, 2001 (#57). Image from www.pdnonline.com. Bottom: H. & D. Zielske, Nanpu Bridge, Shanghai, 2002. Image from zielske.de.

Tefal Quick Cup Boils Water Faster Than You Can Read This Abnormally Long Headline That We Are Stretching Out OK Done [Gadgets]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/235157723/tefal-quick-cup-boils-water-faster-than-you-can-read-this-abnormally-long-headline-that-we-are-stretching-out-ok-done

Does the ability to heat eight ounces of water in three seconds interest you? Then take a look at this Teal quick Cup, which produces hot (we're not sure if it's near boiling) water by spinning the cold water you pour in around the spiral heating element. Not only is it fast, it's supposedly more efficient than a standard kettle or hot water heater because it only needs to be "on" for those three-ish seconds. Useful for your instant cups of tea or filling up a bathtub the dumb way. [Quickcup via Giz Mag via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Self-reconfigurable Matrix-style camera array soon to be self-aware

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/235019764/

Filed under: Digital Cameras

We're pretty sure this camera setup won't be putting the Wachowski Brothers out of a job any time soon, but some folks at Carnegie Mellon slapped this Matrix-style rig together for a "mere" $22,000. The cameras are mounted on linear guides, making them self-reconfigurable, and each can shoot 640 x 480 video at 30 fps. Their purported aims are "Image-based rendering," creating 3D objects with little scene geometry info, but we're sure they're doing plenty of bullet time scenarios in their free time. Coming to a YouTube near you: Matrix Restitutions.

[Via MAKE]

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CompactFlash-based SSDs get tested

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/235365942/

Filed under: Laptops

You know how much we love SSDs around here, but getting one the legit way currently involves poking a rather large hole in your wallet -- so we were pretty interested to see how a jury-rigged SSD built using that CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter we spotted a while back would hold up. While we probably would have sprung for something a little larger than the 4GB drives used in the test, the results are pretty encouraging: DIY SSD drives were overall faster than the 1.8-inch traditional drive found in the MacBook Air, and even a little faster than the VAIO TZ's 64GB SSD. The drives were bested by a 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive and a 128GB SATA SSD, as you'd expect, but what we weren't expecting was the negligible hit on power consumption -- it looks like SSDs really don't use less power, as the unchanged battery life of the SSD MacBook Air hinted. Still -- you know we want one. Check out all the results and a little howto action after the break.

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Princeton's tiny Bluetooth adapter with big 300-foot range

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/235442403/

Filed under: Wireless

Yes sir, you're looking at a tiny 4.5 x 23 x 14-mm USB Bluetooth adapter with a hearty 100-meter range. It's also Bluetooth 2.0+EDR so you can expect to push a data rate of up to 3Mbps. Princeton's 10-meter adapter released in August now looks like school on Sundays -- no Class 1. Look for the PTM-UBT4 to hit Japan and beyond for ¥2,980 (about $28) later this month.

[Via Impress]

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Lightway OLED Shutters Could Mean It's Curtains for Curtains [Lightway]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/234932131/lightway-oled-shutters-could-mean-its-curtains-for-curtains

Louvered shutters may not be everyone's idea of a great time, but Damian Savio's spangly, light-up version sure is mine. The 23-year-old industrial design student designed them for his final-year show at the University of Western Sydney. Using OLEDs and advance transparent Photovoltaic Nanoscale technology, the Lightway shutters allow the sunlight in during the day, whilst storing energy in solar cells to power the crazy lights at nighttime. Suddenly I feel like I want to party.

[Swongled]