You’ve seen the Godzilla of Khazakstan and sure, it’s an impressive piece of machinery. But it’s a Tonka Truck compared to its big brother, the Bagger 288. This 13,500-ton leviathan chews the tops of mountains clean off. More
Ultraportable notebooks are finally fast enough that we can use them as our main machines. But damn, the SSDs they pack are small—how are you supposed to fit your entire music library on one of these? You're not. More
The beta version has been available for over a month, but those that prefer to play things safe can now download the final version of Skype 5.5 for Windows (and Windows only, at the moment). According to Skype, that version includes a number of additional updates based on user feedback, but the standout feature remains the deep Facebook integration, which will let you call and IM your friends, update your status, and engage in other Facebook-related activities. Skype is also promising “enhanced video call reliability,” and it’s made yet more design changes that promise to “improve your overall Skype experience.” You can judge that yourself by downloading the application at the link below.
Skype 5.5 for Windows now available, complete with deeper Facebook integration originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The new IEEE 802.22 standard has been published and will finally allow manufacturers to start producing standardized devices that will use the white space vacated by analog TVs over two years ago. The standards will provide networking in areas over a 62 mile radius at speeds of up to 22Mbps.
In theory, that means as few as 307 devices could cover the entire United States. (In reality, it would likely take many more than that.)
The use of white space was mired in debate for years, even after television stations were no longer using the analog channels once they’d switched to digital. The frequencies now available, from 54MHz to 698MHz, can maintain signal over vast distances, so a single device may provide an incredibly large coverage area.
According to the new IEEE standard, 802.22-capable equipment will broadcast WRANs (wireless regional area networks) that can deliver signal to around 62 miles away at rates of up to 22Mbps. In the context of the push for gigabit fiber, 22Mbps doesn't seem that fast—and remember, that's a theoretical maximum speed.
However, 802.22 will have a huge impact on areas without access: the standard would make it very easy to blanket rural areas in wireless broadband and could also see use in developing countries.
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New white space standard: up to 22Mbps over 12,000 square miles
Automated, computer-targeting machine guns are okay in a pinch, but sometimes putting 180 25mm slugs down range every minute just isn’t enough. Sometimes you need a little more energy, and that’s when you strap a laser on the thing. Boeing and BAE are partnering up to take the existing Mk 38 Mod 2 Machine Gun System, which offers a 25mm M242 barrel, and pair it with Boeing’s directed energy system. The resulting beautiful machine is called the Mk 38 Mod 2 Tactical Laser System, offering the ability to fling both hot metal and even hotter photons against whatever targets would dare come in range. This integration is said to allow for these upgraded turrets to be easily installed and controlled on our naval vessels, vessels that are, for now, still stuck on the water. Apparently we’re still a few years away from the Wave Motion Engine and FTL battleship travel.
Boeing and BAE partner to put a laser on a machine gun, make the world a better place originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
iOS: Evoz is a free app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that replaces yesterday’s limited-range baby monitors with your Apple devices so you can listen to your baby wherever you may be (away from your baby). More
deadeyefred writes “Even though it's still only in alpha, it appears as though the forthcoming version of Ubuntu, version 11.10, will be much faster than earlier versions, according to this story. Quoting: 'After installing the OS onto a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive, we stop-watched boot-up time at 12 seconds — more than three seconds faster than the previous best time we’ve measured.' It looks as if the switch from GDM to LightDM will have a significant impact as Ubuntu gets closer to 'instant on' status.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubuntu 11.10 Down To 12-Second Boot
An anonymous reader writes “Dons at Oxford University were on the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ program this morning asking for help from listeners to transcribe unearthed ancient Egyptian texts and scrolls via their website. Visitors to the site are asked to match-up letters on scanned fragments of papyrus with an on-screen Greek alphabet. By doing so, they can help reveal some of the amazing documents that the ancient Egyptians last read. You too can become a papyrologist!”
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Crowdsourcing Ancient Egyptian Scrolls
Clutter Magazine announced the winners of the inaugural International Designer Toy Awards (DTA) on Friday at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Designer toys have become a hot topic within the last decade and with that we’ve seen an entire industry built around them. Although, at first, these toys may not seem like a true part of industrial design, designer toys are truly just another type of product to design. At Core77 we value the intense design and manufacturing processes behind these products that are also works of design art. Now, here are our favorite picks from this year’s awards:
Artist of the Year: Ashley Wood
Ashley Wood of threeA Productions has already seen a little Core77 coverage by way of his collaborations with graphic designer Tom Muller. Wood is mostly known for his comic book illustration on titles such as Tank Girl, Metal Gear Solid, and Popot. His most recent venture was founding threeA Productions with Kim Fung Wong in 2008, a Hong Kong production house for creating products based on Wood’s characters. The toys threeA has produced in the past few years are ripe with extreme detailing, weathering and graphics. Given their quality, I find it hard to believe that these are produced en masse and not merely one-offs.
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2011 Designer Toy Awards Winners: Our Faves
Every time we read printed material, we’re interacting with a font. It’s easy to take them for granted, but every typeface has an inventor and a story. Let’s take a look at the origins of five common ones.
The ubiquitous typeface that fills our computer screens and books owes its existence to the British newspaper The Times. In 1929, typography expert Stanley Morison had blasted The Times’ printing and typeface for being too difficult to read and aesthetically unpleasing. The paper’s publishers accepted Morison’s criticism and asked him to develop a new face for The Times. Morison collaborated with the paper’s in-house draftsman Victor Lardent to create a new font that became known as Times New Roman.
The new font debuted in The Times on October 3, 1932. The paper held a one-year window of exclusivity on the typeface, and once the font hit the open market it quickly became a favorite of book publishers thanks to its readability.
The widely used typeface began its life with a less melodious name: Neue Haas Grotesk. Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffman developed the typeface for Switzerland’s Haas Type Foundry in 1957. The font’s neutral design made it useful in a huge number of applications, but the name wasn’t as marketable. When German company D. Stempel AG began marketing the typeface a few years later, it wanted a fresh name that could be used internationally. The company settled on one that paid tribute to the font’s Swiss roots; Confederatio Helvetica was the Latin name for Switzerland.
The typewriter-esque typeface on your computer was originally a typewriter font. IBM commissioned the typeface from Howard “Bud” Kettler in 1955, but the company failed to secure legal proprietary rights to the font. That oversight meant that when Courier debuted, it was fair game for anyone in the typewriter world to grab and use on their typewriters. It soon became one of the world’s dominant typefaces.
When Kettler was working on the typeface he referred to it as “Messenger.” However, shortly before the font’s release he changed the name to Courier. His reasoning: “A letter can be just an ordinary messenger, or it can be the courier, which radiates dignity, prestige, and stability.”
Not everyone still thinks the typeface radiates dignity and prestige. For years, the U.S. State Department used Courier New 12 as its default font for treaties and other official diplomatic documents. In 2004, the department announced that it was banning Courier from its official documents and replacing it with Times New Roman 14. Although Times New Roman is the older of the two fonts by 23 years, the State Department explained the move by saying the font provided more modern look than Courier.
The much-maligned font favored by Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert is the creation of former Microsoft designer Vincent Connare. Connare created the font in 1994 as a casual, kid-friendly offering for Microsoft products.
In April 2009, Connare explained the font’s birth to The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft had been designing their user-friendly interface Microsoft Bob, and the test version of the children’s edition included a talking cartoon dog. Connare didn’t like that the words in the dog’s speech bubbles were written in Times New Roman, so he consulted two comic books, The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen, and spent a week working on a new, less stolid font. The font’s name came from the comic-book inspiration and the lack of serifs – small projecting features at the ends of strokes – on most letters.
Over the years, the font has become commonplace in situations where a more serious counterpart would probably have been a better option, and typography nerds love to hate and mock Comic Sans. To Connare’s credit, he seems to get a kick out of the violent hatred of the font. As he said in the aforementioned WSJ story, “If you love it, you don’t know much about typography. If you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
As ridiculous as Comic Sans seems now, one of its more absurd little flourishes has fallen by the wayside. The font’s original rendering of the currency symbol for the euro had a small eyeball on the top right of the symbol. Connare has said Microsoft dropped the eyeball after the European Union threatened to sue company over defacing its symbol.
The popular Web font was also the brainchild of Connare. The name springs from a joking conversation about trebuchets, or large medieval catapults, that Connare heard in a cafeteria on Microsoft’s campus. One Microsoft employee asked another, “Can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away?”
Connare was almost finished designing the new font and was on the lookout for a good name. When he heard the word trebuchet he said, “I thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet.”
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Originally posted here:
The Fontastic Stories Behind 5 Common Typefaces