If your iPhone is feeling a bit sluggish after recent carrier updates from AT&T or T-Mobile, iTweakiOS has a guide for installing your own custom carrier bundle that should bring increased speeds. Read more…
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Get Faster Data Speeds on Your iPhone with This Hacked Update
Undergraduate mechanical engineering students at Rice University built a shoe that recovers and stores energy generated by walking. This energy could be used to power small electronic devices, such as cell phones: The Agitation Squad – Carlos Armada, Julian Castro, David Morilla and Tyler Wiest – decided last fall to focus their attention on where the rubber meets the road to create a shoe-mounted generator. Another device to draw energy from the motion of the knee had already been developed and patented and led them to analyze other sources of energy. Working with the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, the team determined the force at the heel delivered far more potential for power than any other part of the foot. “We went to the lab and saw the force distribution across the bottom of your foot, to see where the most force is felt,” Morilla said. “We found it would be at the heel and at the balls of your toes, as you push off. We went with the heel because, unless you’re sprinting, you’re letting gravity do the work.” […] The prototypes deliver an average of 400 milliwatts, enough to charge a battery, in benchtop tests (and a little less in walking tests, where the moving parts don’t move as far). They send energy through wires to a belt-mounted battery pack. A voltage regulator keeps it flowing steadily to the battery. The PediPower hits the ground before any other part of the prototype shoe. A lever arm strikes first. It is attached to a gearbox that replaces much of the shoe’s sole and turns the gears a little with each step. The gears drive a motor mounted on the outside of the shoe that generates electricity to send up to the battery. You can watch a video of their device at the link. Link -via Inhabitat
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College Students Invent a Shoe That Generates Electricity with Every Step
Late last year we told you about Scanadu and its real-life tricorder, called the SCOUT . Within 10 seconds of direct contact to your left temple, the SCOUT analyzes, records and spits back your vitals, including temperature, respiratory rate, ECG, blood pressure (systolic, diastolic), stress and oximetry levels. Today, Scanadu is announcing three upgrades to Spock’s once futuristic tool, in addition to an update to Project ScanaFlo, a disposable urine analysis device. Read more…
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The Real-Life, $150 Star Trek Tricorder Is One Step Closer To Reality
Quantenna announces the first 4×4 (quad-stream) 802.11ac chipset. The new chipset, which offers a cap speed of 1.7Gbps, is slated be used in products later this year. [Read more]
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Quantenna’s new chip turns 802.11ac Wi-Fi up a notch
While SSDs are blisteringly fast, they still can’t offer the capacities that the humble hard disk provides. Especially this one, because with 1.5 TB squeezed into its tiny little frame, it’s the most memory-dense drive you can buy right now. Read more…
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This 1.5TB Laptop Drive Is the Most Memory-Dense You Can Buy
Here’s the money shot: the back of the console has a power connector, HDMI in and out (for the purposes of hooking your cable box up to the console), optical audio out, two USB ports, the Kinect port, an IR Out port, and an Ethernet jack. Kyle Orland The Xbox One is full of technology and after its big reveal, Microsoft talked a little about what’s going into the console, giving some tidbits of info about what makes it tick. Hardware Microsoft says that the Xbox One has five custom-designed pieces of silicon spread between the console and its Kinect sensor. It didn’t elaborate on what these are. There’s a system-on-chip combining the CPU and GPU, which we presume to be a single piece of silicon, and there’s at least one sensor chip in the Kinect, perhaps replacing the PrimeSense processor used in the Xbox 360 Kinect, but what the others might be isn’t immediately clear. Possibilities include audio processors, on-chip memory, and USB controllers. One of the key questions about the AMD-built, 64-bit, 8-core SoC is “how fast is it?” At the moment, that’s unknown. Microsoft claims that the new console has “eight times” the graphics power of the old one, though some aspects of the new system are even more improved; for example, it has 16 times the amount of RAM. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Microsoft talks about Xbox One’s internals, while disclosing nothing
U.S. Congressmen Ed Markey and Henry Waxman pen a report outlining the increased hacks on power grid computer systems, saying that one utility receives about 10,000 attempted cyberattacks per month. [Read more]
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Power utilities claim ‘daily’ and ‘constant’ cyberattacks, says report
Engadget There have been rumors of Qualcomm’s MEMS-based Mirasol display for years now. Once advertised as the “future” of e-reader displays, the company is now showcasing its proofs-of-concept. Engadget snagged a preview of both a 5.2-inch panel display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and 577 ppi embedded into the chassis of a common smartphone body, as well as 1.5-inch panel on what looks like a smartwatch. A representative at SID Display Week, where the prototype was being shown, told the site that the displays were merely mock-ups, but that the screen will likely show up in other third-party devices. The Mirasol display is touted for its energy-efficiency. It offers a six-times-over power advantage compared to both LCD and OLED displays, which means it would be the kind of display that a smartphone would make great use of. It’s made with a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) based on Interferometric Modulation (IMOD) technology, which Qualcomm says “offer[s] users a convergent display experience with paper-like readability in almost any ambient condition, while consuming significantly less power than any other display available today.” Ars Technica alumni Jon Stokes explained why the Mirasol display is so energy efficient in 2009: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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This is cool: Qualcomm shows off its Mirasol display
Here’s a mesmerizing gallery of “Fabrege Fractals” created by Tom Beddard , whose site also features a 2011 video of Fabrege-inspired fractal landscapes that must be seen to be believed. They’re all made with Fractal Lab , a WebGL-based renderer Beddard created. Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard, using his WebGL-based fractal engine, Fractal Lab. ( via Colossal )
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Fabergé Fractals
Ben’s engagement ring is awesome not only because it lights up, but because it lights up when he and his girlfriend hold hands: Putting a battery of capacitor inside a ring is nigh impossible, so [Ben] decided to power the LEDs with an inductive charging circuit. A coil of wire wound around kapton tape serves as the inductor and a small SMD capacitor powers three very bright and very tiny LEDs. The inductive charging unit itself is a masterpiece of hackery; [Ben] wanted the ring to light up whenever he and his ladyfriend were holding hands. To do this, [Ben]‘s inductive charger is also a wearable device: a large coil of wire is the charger’s transformer and was would to fit around [Ben]‘s wrist. The entire charging circuit can be easily hidden under a jacket sleeve, making for a nearly magical light-up ring. You can watch a video of the ring at the link. Link
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LEDs in an Engagement Ring