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

The last thing you want when things are getting hot in the battlefield, is for things to start heating-up under your desk too. Digital Storm’s been back in the lab, looking for ways to prevent just that, and thinks it’s cracked it with the new Aventum system. It’s the first to be kitted out with the PC-maker’s Cryo-TEC liquid cooling mechanism, and boasts a thermal exhaust, five software-regulated “zones” and no less than 13 configurable fans. The range starts with an Intel i7 2700K core, 16GB RAM, 120GB SSD (1TB HDD) and a GeForce GTX680 for $3,859. If your pockets are even deeper, then you might fancy the 2x dual Xeon E5-2630 hexacore-totin’ system with 32GB DDR RAM, and three-way SLI (with the same GeForce GTX680) for a jaw dropping $7,856. With a price like that, however, it’s probably your credit card that’ll need cooling down. Digital Storm is taking orders as of today, and full details of the range in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Digital Storm launches Aventum range with Cryo-TEC cooling system

Digital Storm launches Aventum range with Cryo-TEC cooling system originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digital Storm launches Aventum range with Cryo-TEC cooling system

Rovio’s bird-flinging physics game hit the 10 million mark this weekend, the developer said on the official Angry Birds Twitter account this morning. Angry Birds Space came out on March 22. [Angry Birds] More »

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Angry Birds Space Blasts 10 Million Downloads In Three Days [Blip]

Jessica Lloyd Jones creates rather unique representations of vital organs out of blown glass, then she adds neon to each piece to add a glow of life energy. Here’s what Jessica has to say about her works:

Blown glass human organs encapsulate inert gases displaying different colours under the influence of an electric current. The human anatomy is a complex, biological system in which energy plays a vital role. Brain Wave conveys neurological processing activity as a kinetic and sensory, physical phenomena through its display of moving electric plasma. Optic Nerve shows a similar effect, more akin to the blood vessels of the eye and with a front ‘lens’ magnifying the movement and the intensity of light. Heart is a representation of the human heart illuminated by still red neon gas. Electric Lungs is a more technically intricate structure with xenon gas spreading through its passage ways, communicating our human unawareness of the trace gases we inhale in our breathable atmosphere.

Link –via JazJaz

Continue reading here:
Blown Glass Sculptures Of Human Organs

shreshtha writes “Huawei says it has ‘recently introduced … Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps — over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks.’ It claims to have achieved this with ‘key breakthroughs in antenna structure, radio frequency architecture, IF (intermediate frequency) algorithms, and multi-user MIMO (multi-input multi-output).'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Huawei Claims 30Gbps Wireless 'Beyond LTE'

Square’s Card Case rechristened ‘Pay with Square,’ is first to bring geo-fenced hands-free payments to Android originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Mar 2012 21:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Square’s Card Case rechristened ‘Pay with Square,’ is first to bring geo-fenced hands-free payments to Android

Maybe you’re a Dropbox devotee. Or perhaps you really like streaming Sherlock on Netflix. For that, you can thank the cloud.

In fact, it’s safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it’s the platform on which some of the Internet’s most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

If you’ve ever wanted to drop terms like EC2 and S3 into casual conversation (and really, who doesn’t?) we’re going to demystify the most important parts of AWS and show you how Amazon’s cloud really works.

Read the comments on this post

See the original article here:
Cracking the cloud: An Amazon Web Services primer

Long-distance communication at a relatively high speed (compared to carrying messages) came about with the invention of the optical telegraph in France, fifty years before the electrical telegraph.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

1,380 kilometres an hour

Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.

The technology spread through Europe, but was confounded by wars and governments. It eventually faded when the electrical telegraph came into use. Read all about this amazing but obsolete technology at Low-tech Magazine. Link -via the Presurfer

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The Optical Telegraph

Briam Lam figured out the best LED lightbulb, and explains why it will eventually pay for itself: “They’ll last 15-25 years compared to about a year for regular bulbs [and] 1/5th of the power … so they can eventually save you hundreds of dollars.” [Wirecutter]

Originally posted here:
The LED light bulb you’ve been waiting for

For when you really want your office to “go green.”

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There I Fixed It: Ch-ch-ch-Chyeah!