Adidas Springblade: Shoes with Actual Springs Might Be a Good Idea?

Adidas has another new running shoe, this one even more divergent than its Boost shoe and its new foam . It’s a bunch of springs, basically, strapped to your foot. And it sort of makes a lot of sense. Read more…        

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Adidas Springblade: Shoes with Actual Springs Might Be a Good Idea?

OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

Apple’s 2013 MacBook Air and new Airport Extreme Base Station are the company’s first 802.11ac products, and there are some bugs that need to be worked out. Apple Apple’s 2013 MacBook Air doesn’t look like much of an upgrade from the outside, but the story is different on the inside. We’ve spent the better part of a week using the new Air and measuring just how Intel’s new Haswell processors , the PCI Express-based SSD , and the 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter change the laptop compared to last year’s model. The new Wi-Fi chip was the change that I was the most eager to get my hands on. I’m always looking to boost my network speeds, but I’ve been waiting for hardware based on the new 802.11ac standard to become more widely available before upgrading everything on my network. Reviewing both the new Air and Apple’s new 802.11ac-capable Airport Express Base Station simultaneously would give me a chance to see just how close the lauded “Gigabit Wi-Fi” would come to fulfilling its promises. I was unpleasantly surprised by the results. Both the 2012 and 2013 MacBook Airs use four antennas to transmit data—two to send data and two to receive it. Each set of antennas can theoretically send and receive 150Mbps (or 18.75MBps) using 5GHz 802.11n for a total of 300Mbps (37.5MBps). Under 802.11ac, the size of each stream is increased to 433Mbps, making for a maximum theoretical link speed of 866Mbps (108.25MBps) in the 2013 MacBook Air. Actual network transfer speeds rarely (if ever) come within spitting distance of these theoretical maximums, but we would at least expect the actual 802.11ac transfer speeds to increase by a similar percentage compared to 802.11n. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X is holding back the 2013 MacBook Air’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi speeds

Implanted invisible headphone

Rich Lee, a “grinder” (someone who has surgical enhancements and/or modifications conducted upon their person), implanted a magnet in his ear that he can use as a speaker; he wears a coil on a necklace that he can use to transmit to it (he was inspired by this Instructable ), and is now branching out into some serious experimentation: Listening to music is nice and probably the most obvious answer, but I intend to do some very creative things with it. The implant itself is completely undetectable to the naked eye. The device & coil necklace are are easily concealed under my shirt so nobody can really see it. I can see myself using it with the gps on my smartphone to navigate city streets on foot. I plan to hook it up to a directional mic of some sort (possibly disguised as a shirt button or something) so I can hear conversations across a room. Having a mic hooked up to it and routed through my phone would be handy. You could use a simple voice stress analysis app to detect when people might be lying to you. Not to say that is a hard science, but I’m sure it could come in handy at the poker table or to pre-screen business clients. I have a contact mic that allows you to hear through walls. That might be my next implant actually. He also wants to hook it up to an ultrasonic rangefinder and learn to echolocate. He’s going blind, so being able to use his hearing for physical nav is going to be important to him. He also wants to hook it up to a Geiger counter. DIY Headphone Implant ( via M1k3y )        

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Implanted invisible headphone

Microsoft’s ‘Project Mountain’ puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud

Microsoft really, really doesn’t want your Xbox One’s online services going offline. In a near $700 million investment ($677.6 million), the company’s opening a new data center in Iowa specifically aimed at powering Xbox Live and Office 365. Microsoft’s Christian Belady told Iowa’s Des Moines Register that the data center “supports the growing demand for Microsoft’s cloud services” — a much lauded function of both the Xbox One and Office 365 . Alongside the $700 million investment, the company’s getting a $6 million tax rebate from the state to move in, effective for five years. As for Microsoft’s cloud, we’ll assuredly hear more about it — for both Xbox One and Office 365 — this week at Build . Filed under: Gaming , Internet , Software , Microsoft Comments Via: NeoGAF Source: Des Moines Register

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Microsoft’s ‘Project Mountain’ puts $700 million into data center powering Xbox One and Office 365 cloud

NSA Releases Secret Pre-History of Computers

An anonymous reader writes “The National Security Agency has declassified an eye-opening pre-history of computers used for code-breaking between the 1930s and 1960s. The 344 page report, entitled It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis (pdf), it is available on the Government Attic web site. Government Attic has also just posted a somewhat less declassified NSA compendium from 1993: A Collection of Writings on Traffic Analysis. (pdf)” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NSA Releases Secret Pre-History of Computers

Semi-Restore Restores Your iPhone without Losing Your Jailbreak

Windows/Mac: SemiRestore is a new app for jailbroken devices that makes restoring your iOS device to a stock-like version as easy as a click of the button. Read more…        

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Semi-Restore Restores Your iPhone without Losing Your Jailbreak

12th-century latrine still holds parasites from the crusaders’ feces

The medieval crusaders may be long gone, but some of them left behind something a bit personal. In a ruined castle in Cyprus, researchers discovered a latrine that still contained the fecal parasites of the European invaders. Read more…        

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12th-century latrine still holds parasites from the crusaders’ feces

A Typeface Designed To Thwart Spying Computers

If people are snooping on your textual communications and you don’t like it, there are a couple of things you can do. You can try to block the prying eyes, you can stop saying things you don’t want to be seen, or you can make your messages make no sense to the outside. The anti-authoritarian typeface ZXX is shooting for that last one. Read more…        

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A Typeface Designed To Thwart Spying Computers

Cross-section photographs of bullets are strangely fascinating

Sabine Pearlman ‘s photographs find beauty in the destructive engineering of ammunition with this series of cross-sections of bullets cartridges from a Swiss bunker. They reveal the complexity inside each case. Read more…        

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Cross-section photographs of bullets are strangely fascinating