Leather-Core Plywood!

The “living hinge” you see molded into clamshell packaging has always been the domain of plastic; metal and wood don’t like the repetitive stress of bending. But Bavarian fabrication firm Ackermann  has worked out a way to do a living hinge in plywood. The trick is to laminate a sheet of synthetic leather into the center of the veneer stack. With miters precisely cut just shy of the leather layer, it yields a tough, hardware-free hinge. The leather can also be laminated to the outside of a material like MDF. Larger corner radii can be achieved by inserting a tube. As for what the practical applications are, Ackermann isn’t saying; the techniques were either developed as contract work for a client—”We provide services for craftsmen, trade fair and interior construction industries [ranging] from the simple milling of an individual component to the serial production of entire objects, ” they write—or out of pure experimentation. The company has some 120 employees and 14 apprentices, with traditional carpenters, designers, CNC operators and fabrication technicians all working side by side to master various materials. “I enjoy nothing more than the discovery of new techniques, ” says Manfred Weid, Manager of Technical Operations. “With permanent development we stay in proximity to the pulse of the times.”

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Leather-Core Plywood!

Amazon’s Giving Away 26 Premium Android Apps and Games For Free

Amazon’s running another one of their signature Android app giveaways , highlighted this time around by the likes of Plants vs. Zombies , Wolfram|Alpha , Runtastic PRO , and Osmos HD . If you own an Android device, take a minute to check out the full list and download anything you might want before the deal ends. [ Amazon Appstore ] Read more…

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Amazon’s Giving Away 26 Premium Android Apps and Games For Free

LA’s school board would like all of that iPad money back now, please

Look up the word bungled in a dictionary, and you’ll find the definition of the word, so if you want to see what it looks like in practice, head to L.A.. The state’s problematic program to get iPads into the hands of low-income students has backfired so spectacularly the school district is now looking for a complete refund. According to the L.A. Times , the state’s education board has been having secret meetings with lawyers and has already told Apple and Pearson that it won’t accept or pay for future deliveries of tablets and software. The $1.3 program has attracted plenty of controversy, and even the FBI has been called in to investigate if a dodgy deal had been made. The paper has also dished the dirt on an internal report from March made by program director Bernadette Lucas. She found that only two out of the 69 schools in the program used the software created by education partner Pearson. The company draws plenty of fire, and is accused of not producing enough content and giving little thought to students whose first language wasn’t English. Apple and Pearson may be the most notable names on the district’s shit list, but similarly nasty letters have also been sent to Lenovo and Arey Jones for similar projects. The paper’s report ends by saying that the school districts are hopeful that affordable and useful technology will make its way into education, but until that point, officials have just authorized the purchase of new mathematics textbooks. Filed under: Tablets , Apple , Lenovo Comments Source: L.A. Times

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LA’s school board would like all of that iPad money back now, please

Edit Office Documents From Inside the Dropbox Website

To continue to compete with the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive and iCloud, Dropbox really needs an online office suite to call its own—so it’s borrowed Microsoft’s. You can now edit any .docx, .xlsx or .pptx file from right inside the Dropbox web interface, with no extra software required, and here’s how to go about it. Read more…

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Edit Office Documents From Inside the Dropbox Website

Blocked Italian toilet leads to thousands of years of buried history

A restaurateur in Lecce, Italy dug up the plumbing for his perennially blocked toilets and discovered thousands of years’ worth of tunnels beneath the building, including a Messapian tomb. Read the rest

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Blocked Italian toilet leads to thousands of years of buried history

A Compact Semi-Portable Keyboard With Genuine Mechanical Keys

There’s just nothing quite like the sound and feel of typing away on a keyboard with genuine mechanical switches under each key. But while most mechanical keyboards are giant and designed to permanently live on your desk, the TEX Yoda has a much smaller form factor and footprint making it easier to travel with so you’ll never have to settle for typing on a portable keyboard’s Chiclet keys ever again. Read more…

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A Compact Semi-Portable Keyboard With Genuine Mechanical Keys

Samsung SSD On a Tiny M.2 Stick Is Capable of Read Speeds Over 2GB/sec

MojoKid writes: Samsung has just announced its new SM951-NVMe SSD, the industry’s first NVMe SSD to employ an M.2 form-factor. Samsung says the new gumstick style drive is capable of sequential read and write speeds of 2, 260 MB/sec and 1, 600 MB/sec respectively. Comparable SATA-based M.2 SSDs typically can only push read/write speeds of 540 MB/sec and 500 MB/sec, while most standard PCIe versions muster just north of 1GB/sec. The Samsung SM951-NVMe’s performance is actually very comparable to the Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe x4 card but should help kick notebook performance up a notch in this common platform configuration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung SSD On a Tiny M.2 Stick Is Capable of Read Speeds Over 2GB/sec

GTA V PC Runs Pretty Well In Ultra HD, If You’ve Got The Hardware

Having played Grand Theft Auto V on the Xbox 360 and again on the Xbox One, I didn;t grab a copy of the PC version for the story or the multiplayer—I got it for those sweet 3840 x 2160 ultra HD graphics. So far I’m very pleased. Read more…

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GTA V PC Runs Pretty Well In Ultra HD, If You’ve Got The Hardware

A Hidden Treasure Trove of Dead .Gov Websites

DolphinSafe.gov . CouldIHaveLupus.gov . GovGab.gov . These were real, registered websites at one time until they were terminated. In some cases—take CyberSafe.gov or Americorpse.gov for example—it’s easy to see why. Read more…

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A Hidden Treasure Trove of Dead .Gov Websites

19 Things I’m Dying to Carbonate With SodaStream’s Magical New Machine

Being able to carbonate water in your own home is awesome. Not being able to inject the same magic bubbles into every other liquid you can get your hands on? That’s a drag. But no longer! The SodaStream Mix is a new machine that can bubblify anything . Are you quaking with glee yet? I know I am. Read more…

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19 Things I’m Dying to Carbonate With SodaStream’s Magical New Machine