Tech Today w/ Ken May

You’ll need to clear your schedule for the next few minutes, because you really want to dive into this incredible pan-and-scan image taken of the entire night sky.

This incredible work is the brainchild of Nick Risinger, who traveled a hundred thousand kilometers in total to get the 37,440 photographs necessary to make this 5000 megapixel mosaic!

It shows the entire sky, and you can play with the interactive version that has toggled constellation outlines and is mapped into equal-area projection, or zoom in and out of the rectangular image. Both are simply amazing.

The images are sharp and clear, with a lot of detail. You can zoom in on the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, or just something that catches your eye. He used “natural color” (LRGB) filters, with the addition of one that accentuates warm hydrogen gas; you can see that as the diffuse red clouds scattered across the sky. I was floored by the quality of this mosaic, and spent a lot of time just panning around, seeing what there was to see. The region near the galactic center and along …

Continued here:
Tour the galaxy with this pan-and-scan all-sky picture!

We’ve seen it powered down and had it dangled in front of us and now, four months after its launch, we’ve finally had a chance to play with a real, working Samsung Infuse 4G. This 4.5-inch superphone — the biggest Sammy has made to date — feels surprisingly light in the hands, despite its width. That’s largely thanks to its crazy-thin 8.99mm profile, along with a subtly textured backside. The Super AMOLED Plus display — the same kind found on the smaller Droid Charge — which promises to be brighter than Super AMOLED as well as easier to view in direct sunlight, is simply stunning. We were seriously impressed by the punchy colors and deep blacks, although that outdoor test will have to wait for another day.

Blessedly, Samsung lets those vibrant colors speak for themselves — it loaded the phone with Android 2.2 and abstained from saddling it with its TouchWiz UI made its TouchWiz UI less intrusive out of the box. The handset packs a single — not dual — core 1.2GHz processor, but you won't notice or care how many cores it has unless you're a benchmark junkie — the phone launches applications briskly, while the touchscreen is responsive and always precise. We noticed nary a delay as we swiped among the seven home screens and three application pages. Speaking of speed, this is AT&T's first device to promise max speeds of 21 Mbps. Samsung held its press event in a New York City restaurant with poor reception, alas, and we have a feeling the crawling rates we observed off-camera don’t do this phone justice. We’re walking out of here with one of these bad boys, and we’re stoked to fully put it through its paces over the next few days. We’ll be back with an in-depth review, but in the meantime, have a gander at the gallery of close-up shots below.

Updated: Unlike the Inspire 4G, Captivate, and Aria, the Infuse 4G enables app sideloading and features the “Unknown Sources” menu item in the settings. Check out a photo of the appropriate settings screen in the updated gallery.

Samsung Infuse 4G hands-on (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 May 2011 17:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen it powered down and had it dangled in front of us and now, four months after its launch, we’ve finally had a chance to play with a real, working Samsung Infuse 4G. This 4.5-inch superphone — the biggest Sammy has made to date — feels surprisingly light in the hands, despite its width. That’s largely thanks to its crazy-thin 8.99mm profile, along with a subtly textured backside. The Super AMOLED Plus display, which promises to be brighter than Super AMOLED as well as easier to view in direct sunlight, is simply stunning. We were seriously impressed by the punchy colors and deep blacks, although that outdoor test will have to wait for another day.

Blessedly, Samsung lets those vibrant colors speak for themselves — it loaded the phone with Android 2.2 and abstained from saddling it with its TouchWiz UI made its TouchWiz UI less intrusive out of the box. The handset packs a single — not dual — core 1.2GHz processor, but you won't notice or care how many cores it has unless you're a benchmark junkie — the phone launches applications briskly, while the touchscreen is responsive and always precise. We noticed nary a delay as we swiped among the seven home screens and three application pages. Speaking of speed, this is AT&T's first device to promise max speeds of 21 Mbps. Samsung held its press event in a New York City restaurant with poor reception, alas, and we have a feeling the crawling rates we observed off-camera don’t do this phone justice. We’re walking out of here with one of these bad boys, and we’re stoked to fully put it through its paces over the next few days. We’ll be back with an in-depth review, but in the meantime, have a gander at the gallery of close-up shots below.

Samsung Infuse 4G hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 May 2011 17:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A standing desk can help you avoid the health risks of sitting at a desk all day and also burn more calories while you’re at it. This calorie-burn calculator from Just Stand reveals just how many extra calories. More

All winged insects look more or less the same: a main thorax that’s split into three segments, two legs on each segment, and four wings. But there’s one exception, and it’s spectacularly weird. Meet the massive “helmets” of treehopper insects. More

The ideal way to build a national broadband network for access to the Internet would be with a high-bandwidth, bidirectional cable running to each individual household. But sometimes you have to work with what you've got, and in America, what we have are cable TV networks. These networks have the bandwidth, but not the bi-directional part—they weren’t originally intended for two-way communication. Worse, the cables for many neighbors all connect together, so it's not possible to send a signal to just one household. And yet, cable companies manage to provide 100 Mbps bandwidth to their broadband customers using this flawed infrastructure, and they do it without compromising the preexisting cable TV service. The tech behind this magic trick goes by the name of DOCSIS, which stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications.

In this two-part series, we'll take a detailed look at DOCSIS—what it is and how it evolved. If you've ever wondered how cable TV companies manage to get progressively more bandwidth out of the same old cable lines, then this series is for you.

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Feature: Meet DOCSIS, Part 1: the unsung hero of high-speed cable Internet access

Google search engine is one of the best product by Google, but there are many other innovative products as well that Google is developing them in

Last year Dropbox announced that they have 4,000,000 users, a number which is likely to double very soon. In case you’re out of the loop, Dropbox is a cloud-based storage and file sharing service. It’s become very popular, due to its ease of use and the basic offer of 2GB of free storage space.

A new plugin is available that gives you the opportunity to put Dropbox to work for the security of your WordPress site. Here’s how you can set up automatic backups of your WordPress site to Dropbox:

Step 1: Signup for Dropbox if you don’t already have an account.

If the free version is not enough space for you, you’ll need to purchase a plan that will accommodate your website backups.

Step 2: Install and activate the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin.

It’s available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.

Step 3: Authorize the plugin with Dropbox.

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll be prompted to authenticate so that the plugin can gain access to your Dropbox account.

Step 4: Select the day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed.

The plugin’s settings page will show your next scheduled backup and how much space you have available. It also allows you to specify the folder in Dropbox where you want the backup to be placed. You have the option to store the backup locally as well.

One of the most handy features of this plugin is that it allows you to specify how many backups you want to keep, so that you don’t continually go over your limit with Dropbox.

Step 5: Wait for your backups to appear in the specified Dropbox folder.

Once you have the settings configured and have scheduled your backup, wait for a zipped archive of your website’s files and its database to be dropped in your Dropbox. Backups will be prepared automatically for you, so make sure to verify that it’s working correctly before you set it and forget it.

The bottom line is that you know you should be backing up your WordPress site. If Dropbox makes that more convenient for you, then by all means, take advantage of its services. You’ll be glad to find that backup in your Dropbox folder if your hosting fails.

See more here:
How to Automatically Backup Your WordPress Site to Dropbox

Photo: Murdo Macleod

Whisky. Is there anything it can’t do? Here’s what the Scots are going to do with the byproducts of whisky-making process:

It is the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, and now whisky is to be used to create electricity for homes in a new bioenergy venture involving some of Scotland’s best-known distilleries.

Contracts have recently been awarded for the construction of a biomass combined heat and power plant at Rothes in Speyside that by 2013 will use the by-products of the whisky-making process for energy production.

Vast amounts of “draff”, the spent grains used in the distilling process, and pot ale, a residue from the copper stills, are produced by the whisky industry each year and are usually transported off-site. The Rothes project, a joint venture between Helius Energy and the Combination of Rothes Distillers (CoRD) will burn the draff with woodchips to generate enough electricity to supply 9,000 homes. It will be supplied by Aalborg Energie Technick, a danish engineering company. The pot ale will be made into a concentrated organic fertiliser and an animal feed for use by local farmers.

Sure gives a new spin on “drunk with power,” doesn’t it? Link via GOOD

View article:
Generating Electricity with Whisky

From the folks at Vice Magazine comes this mini documentary on the Pakistani Homemade Machine gun market. It gives an in depth look (with photos and video) of how arms are created, bought and sold in that part of the world.

The bulk of Pakistan’s homemade automatic weapons and explosive devices are forged, built and sold at Darra Adamkhel, a village located near Peshawar where main street is an open-air arms market.

Link

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Pakistani Homemade Machine Gun Market