Nice to see articles like this from the NYTimes…Many new multimedia notebooks include built-in television tuner cards and software that let them double as digital video recorders. But you don’t have to buy a whole new laptop just to record your favorite shows… Not bad for $90. Link.
Soon, Romania, Colombia and a high school in San Jose, Calif., will join the space race. An ambitious program called CubeSat, developed at Stanford University and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, is giving students and companies the opportunity to build and launch functional satellites into low Earth orbit, or about 240 to 360 miles above the planet. Link.
Users of Lego Factory and Lego Digital Designer can design their own customizable models using the 3D modeling software. Users have figured out a way to modify the software that allows them to build the models in a more cost-efficient way. All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve Lego’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of. Link.
Something for our MAKE pals in Germany – Hans writes “This is a detailed step-by-step guide to: (1) checking your DVD drive’s coding, (2) finding, (3) downloading and (4) using a DVD code-switching utility (not to be confused with the more complicated process of making your drive code-free). Then just sit back and watch that maker Wallace and is Dog Gromit in German”… Link.
I’ll go and check this out this weekend! Non-fiction books checked out and returned at the Seattle Central Library amount to approximately 37000 items per day. From now on, the circulation of books will float in color-coded streams across six big plasma screens located on a glass wall behind the librarians’ main information desk. Link.
Mag Ads are Insanely Inexpensive – Tip: Ads in MAKE: magazine are dirt-cheap, considering the size of the magazine’s audience (50K and growing), education level (high), income (high), ad-page density (commitedly sparse), and shelf-life (three months). You can get a full page for less than $3K– chump-change for big-company advertisers, and well within reach for many small businesses or even a committed Scout troop. Link. or email.
With this Google maps hack you can see the spammiest places on the planet, well- at least where a lot seems to be coming from. Mailinator is a service that gives you free, disposable email anytime, anywhere. No need to ever sign up. Send first – come to the site later. Mailboxes are created when email arrives for them. This map shows (in semi-realtime) ip addresses that are currently sending the most spam to Mailinator. Link.
