Micah Toll’s Barak Electric Bike Conversion Kit turns ordinary bikes into electric ones. Read More
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Here’s An Affordable Mid-Range Electric Bike Conversion Kit To Speed Up Your Commute
With over 8 hours of battery life and a legitimate Haswell processor, the Acer C720 is one of the best bets in the Chromebook space, and you can get a refurb right now for an eminently reasonable $117 . Read more…
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Pick Up One of the Best Chromebooks on the Market for Just $117
An anonymous reader writes: Caffeine is a staple of most workplaces — it’s rare to find an office without a coffee pot or a fridge full of soda. It’s necessary (or at least feels like it’s necessary) because many workers have a hard time staying awake while sitting at a desk for hours at a time, and the alternative — naps — aren’t usually allowed. But new research shows it might be more efficient for employers to encourage brief “coffee naps, ” which are more effective at returning people to an alert state than either caffeine or naps alone. A “coffee nap” is when you drink a cup of coffee, and then take a sub-20-minute nap immediately afterward. This works because caffeine takes about 20 minutes to get into your bloodstream, and a 20-minute nap clears adenosine from your brain without putting you into deeper stages of sleep. In multiple studies, tired participants who took coffee naps made fewer mistakes in a driving simulator after they awoke than the people who drank coffee without a nap or slept without ingesting caffeine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Coffee Naps Better For Alertness Than Coffee Or Naps Alone
It doesn’t yet have a name, but Ecuador’s new government-backed virtual currency is coming. That’s the thrust of a new report from the Associated Press , anyway — the country’s Central Bank is said to be gearing up for a launch sometime in December, though the juicy technical details and the mechanics of how citizens can get their metaphorical hands on these things are still shrouded in mystery. What does seem clear at this point is that Ecuador’s current cash (in the form of US dollars) isn’t going anywhere, and that people will be able to conduct transactions with each other from their mobile phones without big fees eating into them. If everything goes according to plan, this’d be the first time a national government has launched its own official digital currency, though that’s not to say some cryptocurrency nuts haven’t aimed to affect change on a national scale. Enthusiasts in the Czech Republic launched the CzechCrownCoin a few days ago in a bid to bolster online business in the country, and the Auroracoin folks made the virtual equivalent of $380 available to all the fine folks of Iceland… only to see its value tank over time. Comments Source: AP (PhysOrg)
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World’s first government-backed digital currency to launch in December
If you combined the SkyMall catalog with the Christmas list of some spoiled rich kid you’d end up with Hammacher Schlemmer: an impossible menagerie of everything from shoe polishers, to talking scales, to this amazing set of underwater thrusters that you wear like a pair of Iron Man’s pants. If there’s a better way to spend $31, 000 we haven’t seen it. Read more…
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You Can’t Buy These Underwater Iron Man Thrusters Without Gov’t Approval
There’s just enough time to pop off for a far-flung holiday before summer ends, and Sprint’s trying to make calling home from Guangzhou a little easier. The canary-hued carrier announced the other day that it’s launching free international WiFi calling for a handful of compatible Android smartphones. For better or worse, some older hardware is getting the nod first: Samsung’s Spark-friendly Galaxy S 4 will get the update before the ten other devices capable of making WiFi calls. Curiously enough, the name Sprint chose is actually sort of a misnomer. Yes, you can gab with your folks back home over WiFi, but you can fire off messages free of charge too. Just remember that it’s only WiFi calls to the US from abroad that don’t cost anything — WiFi calling Bangkok from the States will hit your wallet, as will international Wi-Fi calls to non-US numbers. Got it? Good. Comments Source: Sprint
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Sprint offers free international WiFi calls for your next overseas jaunt
Amazon has built its brand around consistency—it rarely follows popular user interface trends, and its design mission has always been ruthless pragmatism. But now, for the first time in many, many years, it’s given its login page an overhaul. It’s the end of an era, and it could signal broader, site-wide changes. Read more…
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Amazon Redesigns Its Login Page For the First Time In Decades
Alienware is famous for two things. One: selling ever more powerful gaming computers. Two: making them look like they were designed by aliens. But its latest full-size desktop gaming PC isn’t just another box sculpted to look like it’s out of this world. In fact, the new Alienware Area-51 is trying to challenge the assumption that PC gamers need a “box” at all. Read more…
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The New Alienware Area-51 Is the Weirdest Gaming PC I’ve Ever Seen
Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it
The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers have found a 5.4 Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Gliese 15A, a red dwarf in a binary system just 11.7 light years away (PDF). Other exoplanets candidates have been found that are closer, but they are as yet unconfirmed. This is more evidence that alien planets are common in the galaxy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Astronomers Find What May Be the Closest Exoplanet So Far