March 27, 2012 – Ken May

OnStar’s Family Link tracking package launching in mid-April (updated: hands-on)

Looks like OnStar’s finally ready to go live with the Family Link program it was talking up last summer. The service, which lets family members track vehicles for the low, low price of $3.99 (on top of an existing OnStar package), is set to begin a phased rollout next month. Family Link revolves around two primary, similarly named features: Vehicle Locate and Vehicle Location Alert. The first lets concerned relatives view the vehicle’s location on a map and the second sends an alert at a chosen interval, letting the vehicle’s location be known via text or email. The initial roll out will be open to select subscribers in April, with more invitations hitting in June and a more complete rollout later in the year.

We went hands-on with the service at an OnStar demo in New York City, tracking vehicles in both New Jersey and Detroit. Family Link was able to locate a connected truck in Detroit in a mere five seconds, zeroing in on the vehicle’s precise location at OnStar HQ in Michigan (note: we had tracked another vehicle in New Jersey a few minutes before — that time with a roughly 20 second delay). It’s not designed for constant tracking — you won’t see the car icon moving down the map as you drive — but it appears to be an excellent solution for keeping tabs on your kids as they drive OnStar-equipped vehicles. We also took a look at those handy text vehicle location alerts, that OnStar will push directly to any mobile device or email address at user-selected intervals. Jump past the break to see our hands-on with both Family Link components.

Gallery: OnStar Family Link hands-on

Zach Honig contributed to this report.

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OnStar’s Family Link tracking package launching in mid-April (updated: hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What Does Google Get Out of Voice?

itwbennett writes “Assuming Google isn’t offering Voice out of the goodness of their hearts, what’s the payoff? One likely, if cynical, possibility is that Google Voice is ‘just another feeder for their vast database on you,’ writes Kevin Purdy in a recent plog post. Or maybe Google just wants to get better at speech-to-text, and collecting your voice messages is just one big voice mining effort. ‘They already did it with GOOG-411, the free phone directory service that mined voices across the country to launch Google Voice’s current transcription offering,’ says Purdy. For its part, Google says it has no plans to monetize Voice beyond the international calling and number porting fees that it currently charges.”

Don’t bother buying Adobe Photoshop CS6 for your 32-bit Mac

Don't bother buying Photoshop CS6 for your 32-bit Mac

Look, how many bits you choose to process in the privacy of your own home is entirely your business, but don’t expect the latest Photoshop to work on anything less than a 64-bit multi-core Mac running a minimum of Snow Leopard. Adobe’s update brings a compute-heavy ‘Mercury Graphics Engine’ as well as better 3D and video manipulation, with the sacrifice of 32-bit support unless you’re running Windows — although even then certain features will be limited. The message is clear: jump on the upgrade treadmill or sacrifice 65 user-feedback-inspired features and a new crop tool.

Don’t bother buying Adobe Photoshop CS6 for your 32-bit Mac originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Drug Turns Immune System Against All Tumor Types

sciencehabit writes, quoting an article in Science: “A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a ‘do not eat’ signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.”

The abstract and full paper are freely available. It seems fairly promising: “In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment — colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped.”

XBMC 11.0 released with new Ubuntu-based live CD and iOS support

The developers behind the XBMC project have released a major new version of the program. XBMC 11, which is codenamed Eden, brings better performance, broader platform support, theming enhancements, and a number of other improvements. The developers have also created a new XBMC live CD environment based on Ubuntu.

XBMC is a highly portable open source media center application with a sophisticated library management system. It indexes the user’s video content and provides an intuitive remote-friendly user interface for browsing and playing media. XBMC and its derivatives, such as Boxee and Plex, are popular among home theater PC users.

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Comcast: Xbox 360 On Demand streams won’t count against data caps

It looks as if Comcast is preparing to move from a limited beta test to a wide release for its long-promised Xbox Live streaming video app, with some details appearing on the company’s support pages. Probably the biggest revelation about the service is that streaming Comcast’s On Demand videos through the Xbox 360 will not count towards customers’ 250GB monthly data limit.

Comcast says the Xbox app gets special treatment because the video is “being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet.” This gives the service a potentially large advantage over not just other video streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but also over Comcast On Demand content streamed through the company’s website and mobile apps, both of which count against the data limits.

Streaming video can eat up limited data rather quickly, though you’d have to stream around 100 hours of Netflix per month before having a chance of bumping up against Comcast’s 250GB limit (assuming you didn’t use the Internet for anything else). Canadian ISP Shaw announced last year that its “Movie Club” service wouldn’t count towards users’ monthly data caps, because it is delivered though existing cable infrastructure.

Elsewhere in its Xbox FAQ, Comcast clarifies that cable subscribers who use a different Internet service provider won’t be able to stream content through their Xbox 360, and that the service requires an Xbox Live Gold subscription as well as at least one cable box elsewhere in the home. The FAQ also notes that Comcast has no plans to follow Verizon’s lead in offering live TV content through the Xbox 360, but offered that the “service will evolve over time.”

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Geek Busts Teen’s Party with Technology

The
folks are away, so it’s time to party! Or so David Rowe’s teenage daughter
thought. How could her dad find out if he’s hundreds of miles away?

The geek way, of course, by measuring his house’s power consumption using
Fluksometer:

On New Years Eve 2011 I was in Geelong at a restaurant, 800km from
my home in Adelaide. This year I happened to be away from my children,
who were staying elsewhere in Adelaide while I was interstate. My home
was supposedly vacant. However I knew it was very hot in Adelaide that
day (40C) and I wondered if this would affect my power consumption,
for example an increased duty cycle on the fridge. I am just that sort
of power-geek.

So I checked my Fluksometer via my 3G android phone. I was surprised
to see 1000W being used since 1pm – about what my Air-con uses.
I also noticed that around 7pm the power jumped by a few 100W, just
like the lights had gone on, or perhaps the TV.

Looked like some one was in my home. On New Years Eve. Hmmmmmm.

Damn you, technology! Link
– via Gizmodo
Australia

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Geek Busts Teen’s Party with Technology