Eden’s (Plantable) Paper Takes the Cake When it Comes to Holiday Gift Wrapping Must-Haves

Half of the fun of the holidays is ripping into presents from family and friends or watching someone else do it . We might feel just a twinge or two of guilt as we crumple shreds of once-pristine paper waste into a trash bag and toss it to the curb for garbage collection, but what the hell, you’re on much-needed vacation and you left all of your cares at the office. Wrong. The facts: In 2011, Great Britain alone racked up 227, 000 miles of wasted paper after the holiday season. (That’s enough paper to wrap the world nine times over around the equator.) And according to a study done by Stanford, if every American wrapped three presents in reused materials, the saved paper would cover 45, 000 football fields. The upshot of the guilt trip is that it leads to solutions like wrapping your gifts in the comics section and recycle it when the present party is done, or, say, reusable packaging . UK-based agency BEAF does the DIYers one better with Eden Paper, wrapping paper for the rest of us that you can plant once you’re finished tearing into those gifts. It’s simple: By planting the used paper in some soil and watering it like a regular potted plant, you’ll see sprouts in no time. As with Democratech’s sprouting pencil and plantable OAT Shoes , the gift wrap is produced with the seeds embedded right into the paper. The brand is currently offering the paper in five flavors—chili peppers, onions, carrots, tomatoes and broccoli—but looks to include various flowers and herbs in the future. The gift wrap looks good, too—as good as it tastes, I’m sure. Design-wise, it’s a much-needed upgrade from a lot of the holiday wrap you see around the time of year. There’s only so much you can take when it comes to iridescent snowflakes and glittery ornaments. (more…)

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Eden’s (Plantable) Paper Takes the Cake When it Comes to Holiday Gift Wrapping Must-Haves

Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

The original Kindle Paperwhite. Cesar Torres Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX tablets have already broken the 300 PPI barrier, but the sharpest of its E Ink readers sits at a much lower 212 PPI. According to a report from TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, that may be about to change—Amazon is apparently working on a new version of its backlit Kindle Paperwhite with a 300 PPI display of an unspecified size and resolution. Since E Ink screens are meant to mimic the printed page, a sharper screen would bring the e-reader that much closer to the experience of reading an actual book. While the new e-reader is still apparently “several months away,” we know a little more about its other planned features. On the hardware side, Amazon will reportedly be adding an ambient light sensor to adjust the device’s backlight based on the light in the room you’re in, and hardware buttons for page turning will be making a return (the current Paperwhite relies on touch input for page turning). On the software side, the device’s UI will of course be upscaled to take advantage of the high-density screen, and Amazon will be introducing some new fonts and other tweaks to improve the Kindle’s typography. Finally, the new Paperwhite’s design will be tweaked to bring it more in line with that of the newest Fire tablets. Amazon isn’t the first to bring a high-density e-reader to market. Kobo’s Aura HD has a 265 PPI, 6.8-inch screen and has been out since May, though Kobo is a bigger presence in its home country of Canada than it is in the US. (The Aura HD was supposedly a limited-edition product, but it’s still on sale for $170 six months later so it’s clearly not  that limited.) The newest Paperwhite  will however be the first E Ink reader with access to Amazon’s gigantic e-book library and the Kindle brand, two potent weapons in the battle for e-book market supremacy. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Report: Amazon’s next Kindle Paperwhite will pick up a 300 PPI screen

$1 Million Heist Reminds Us That Bitcoin is Neither Safe nor Secure

Let’s play a little game called Good Idea/Bad Idea. Round One: Saving money. That’s a good idea! Round two: Saving thousands of dollars in a Bitcoin wallet that’s highly susceptible to hackers and heists. As the customers of Bitcoin payment processor BIPS will tell you, that’s a bad idea. Read more…        

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$1 Million Heist Reminds Us That Bitcoin is Neither Safe nor Secure

Western Digital Black2 drive packs both solid-state and spinning storage

Performance-minded PC users frequently want both a fast solid-state drive for crucial apps and a regular hard disk for everything else, but that’s not always feasible in the tight space of a laptop. Western Digital is making that two-drive option a practical reality through its new Black2 . The design puts both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB spinning disk into a single 2.5-inch SATA enclosure, offering more speed and capacity than you’d find in a typical hybrid drive . It’s potentially an ideal blend for gamers and small form factor PC builders, although they’ll pay for the privilege — WD is shipping the Black2 today for $300, or roughly as much as the two drives by themselves. [Thanks, Metayoshi] Filed under: Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Western Digital

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Western Digital Black2 drive packs both solid-state and spinning storage

Blue Screen of Insomnia.

Blue Screen of Insomnia. Designers Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff analyzed screen colors in tons of science fiction movies, and concluded that future computer screens would be tinted blue. Which is bad news, since our eyes are hypersensitive to blue light, and it keeps us from sleeping . Read more…        

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Blue Screen of Insomnia.