Eyebeam Open Lab
Wow, $30k a year too! This Fall, Eyebeam R&D will launch the OpenLab, a new facility dedicated to public domain R&D. We are seeking inaugural fellows to join us at Eyebeam. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible. We encourage artists, hackers, designers and engineers to apply.[via] Link.
“Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months – the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.”
Seems like everyone is tired of waiting for others to fix the problems, so they’re doing it themselves, even if it’s not quite perfect. The UK is turning into a nation of unwilling DIY desktop-security installers, research has revealed. ISPs’ failure to provide desktop protection against internet threats has forced two-thirds of home PC users to take the DIY option, despite the majority lacking the necessary know-how to ensure they are not left vulnerable.

Here’s an ethernet-powered alarm clock. It was made from an old ethernet-to-serial connector and POE wires run to the battery terminals. As someone noted on in the comments, it would be cool to have the clock grab time from
I think we’ll see lots of virtual time pieces become physical soon…it has 4 alarms to alert you of ferry and airship departures, guild shop opening times, or recharge times of your characters special ability or recast times. What makes this so crazy, you may ask? Final Fantasy XI is a persistent virtual world in which events take place in real time, or “Vana’diel Time” as it were.