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Solar power will give you non-stop water during bike rides

If you’re a cyclist, you know the anxiety that comes with running out of water in the middle of a bike ride — the last thing you want is dehydration when you’re miles away from home. Design student Kristof Retezàr may just set your mind at ease, though. He recently developed Fontus , a bike-mounted device that uses solar power to convert air moisture into water for your drinking bottle. The key is its use of thermoelectric cooling. Solar panels generate electricity that cools the top of the device, where air comes in as you ride; as the moisture condenses, it drips water into a bottle below. The bottom stays warm, but that only accelerates the condensation process above. This is a design exercise at the moment, but Retezàr is looking at both crowdfunding and investors to turn this into a shipping product. It won’t need much refinement to be both cheap and effective, at least. The Fontus prototype cost less than $40 to make, and it actually works best when conditions are at their worst — it produces half a liter (17 fluid ounces) of water in an hour when subjected to hot and humid air. That may not be completely satisfying if you’re extremely thirsty, but it should be enough to tide you over until your next rest stop. Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Via: Huffington Post , Nerdoholic Source: James Dyson Foundation

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Solar power will give you non-stop water during bike rides

Court rules Google can arrange search results any way it wants

With the First Amendment behind it, Google is now free to put search results in whatever order it wants, according to a recent ruling by a US court in San Francisco . The company has been fighting to earn this right for years , but it wasn’t until last week that a judge in the Bay Area decided to grant the search giant such a thing, citing freedom of speech as the main influencer in the decision. It all started back when a site known as CoastNews filed a lawsuit arguing that Google was knowingly lowering its rankings in search results ; the tech giant supposedly viewed it like a competitor and, thus, didn’t want it to succeed. Shortly thereafter, Google quickly answered with an anti-SLAPP motion , which is often used by defendants to guard against litigation that would deter free speech . Sure, this doesn’t mean Google will be protected forever from other angry websites, here at home or elsewhere around the globe . But, should a similar lawsuit arise, it does allow the company to argument that a court has already agreed with it once before. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Google Comments Source: Gigaom

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Court rules Google can arrange search results any way it wants

Times Square’s new digital billboard is almost the length of a football field

New Yorkers passing through Times Square will see (whether they want to or not) the biggest, most expensive digital billboard (at least in the US) when it turns on this Tuesday night. The screen is big enough to run a whole block, from 45th to 46th Street along Broadway, and is made up of 24 million pixels. (To contrast, 4K TVs weigh in with around 8 million pixel, although the scale here is massively different.) Oh yeah, it’s also eight stories high. According to the New York Times , the cost of this prime advertising real estate comes in at over $2.5 million for four weeks. Google, a company that has the means , will take over the big screen as the debut advertiser until 2015. But we can go bigger: LG’s already using the world’s biggest billboard in Saudi Arabia, which is 820 feet long. [Image credit: Richard Perry/The New York Times] Filed under: Displays Comments Source: NYT

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Times Square’s new digital billboard is almost the length of a football field

State Department shuts down unclassified email to cope with hack

The US government is no stranger to dealing with cyberattacks , but it just took a rare and relatively extreme step to keep itself safe. The State Department shut down its entire unclassified email system this weekend to bolster its defenses after spotting “activity of concern” (read: potential data breaches) that happened at the same time as an earlier hack that targeted the White House. Officials aren’t naming culprits at this stage — they’ve pinned some previous attacks on China and Russia, but it’s not clear that there was digital warfare involved this time around. More details are expected to come once the security upgrades are in place, so you may get a better sense of what happened in the near future. [Image credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite] Filed under: Internet Comments Source: AP (SFGate)

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State Department shuts down unclassified email to cope with hack

Court order stops Bitcasa from deleting your cloud data, for now

If you’re miffed that Bitcasa not only dropped its unlimited cloud storage option but made you migrate to a costlier limited tier just to keep your files, you’ll be glad to hear that you’re getting a reprieve. Angry customers have filed a tentative class action lawsuit against Bitcasa for allegedly breaching its contract through the sudden switch. In tandem with the suit, the court handling the case has granted a restraining order that forces Bitcasa to save those files until at least November 20th. That’s not exactly a long interval, but there’s a hearing on the 19th that could extend the grace period further. The complaint isn’t meant to make Bitcasa change its mind and bring back its Infinite service. At the moment, attorneys are focused on compensation and giving subscribers enough time to get all their files. As you might imagine, that could take a while when people paid for unrestricted online space. There’s no certainty that the lawsuit will succeed, but it might serve as a warning to other internet storage outlets that are thinking of scaling back their features. [Thanks, Jay] Filed under: Storage , Internet Comments Source: Bitcasa Community Forums , LCHB

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Court order stops Bitcasa from deleting your cloud data, for now

Facebook will filter out excessively promotional Page posts in 2015

Facebook is thankfully taking more steps to show fewer spammy posts on your News Feed — and we’re not talking about traditional web ads. We’re talking about overly promotional status updates posted by Page accounts, like the ones you can see after the break. The social network promised to bury “like-bait” posts (of the “1 Like = 1 Prayer” type) underneath more relevant content earlier this year, and now it’s doing the same thing to Page statuses that fall under any of these criteria: Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads Facebook’s devs have decided push through with this change, after a survey asking users how the News Feed can be improved revealed that people (as you’d expect) want to see more of their friends’ status updates. Non-spammy businesses and individual Pages don’t have anything to worry about, though — they will not be affected when the refreshed News Feed algorithm takes effect in January 2015. [Image credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Misc , Facebook Comments Source: Facebook

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Facebook will filter out excessively promotional Page posts in 2015

With Movie Creator, Microsoft wants to help produce better highlight reel videos

HTC’s done it. So has Sony. It’s available on iOS. Even BlackBerry’s got one. Apps that let you take your favorite clips and images and merge them together into a fun highlight reel aren’t uncommon these days, but that’s not stopping Microsoft from coming out with one of its own — and one that it feels is even better than the competition. Called Movie Creator, the premise is exactly the same as what everyone else has, but Microsoft promises its version will come with more customization, an easier user experience, less time required to create a video and no price tag. It’ll be available as a free beta starting today for both Windows Phone and Windows tablets, and it appears that Microsoft will offer the feature on lower-end devices like the Lumia 530. We won’t spend a lot of time going over what Movie Creator is, because it is essentially the same as the rest of the pack: You can pick out a bunch of your favorite clips and images, choose a song you like and presto — the app automagically produces a short video that you can share on Twitter, Facebook and other services (or keep to yourself, you selfish person). Each company does it a little differently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft is adding its own flavor to the app genre. Movie Creator doesn’t impose any limitations on the length of the clip, and you can choose up to 25 videos and stills (and Cinemagraphs, on compatible devices) to include in the reel. Once you’ve picked out the ones you want, you’re presented with a linear timeline, each clip or image represented by a square. You can rearrange which order the pics are shown in, the music playing in the background (you can use either Microsoft’s music selections or your own library), the duration of each, add captions either on or in between images, rotate them, use filters to change how they look and you can even dictate if and how each clip pans across the screen (it lets you determine where each one starts and ends its animation). There are also plenty of preset themes, but there’s quite a few more available for download if you don’t see one that fits your needs. Themes have been done many times before, but Microsoft made a deal with Dreamworks that adds a unique element to them: You’ll be able to grab themes featuring characters from movies like Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda. In my preview build, these options weren’t available, so hopefully they’ll show up in the final software. Finally, you’ll be able to change the quality of the finished product. Depending on your desired size and network speeds (in case you want to upload and share it), you can choose between low, medium and high quality, and you can even select how many frames per second you’d like the reel to finish up in — you can go up to a maximum of 30fps, so keep that in mind. It appears that the video resolution tops out at 1080p quality as well. Once you’re done, the file gets saved on the phone regardless of your sharing preferences, so it’s going to take up space on your phone or tablet by default. Since Movie Creator is starting out in beta, it’ll likely see some new features sprinkled in between now and its final release. Filed under: Cellphones , Wireless , Mobile , Microsoft Comments

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With Movie Creator, Microsoft wants to help produce better highlight reel videos

Google makes the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ worth $1 million

The Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award is often called the “Nobel Prize of computing.” Every year since 1966 it’s been awarded to an accomplished computer scientist or engineer like Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse. But chances are you’ve never heard of the award at all, despite it being named after legendary Allied Forces code-breaker Alan Turing. That’s because it’s never really been that big — no huge sponsors meant it didn’t get a lot of promotion, and the annual prize was limited to a relatively modest $250, 000. That’s about to change with the 2014 award thanks to the largess of Google. The company’s been a co-sponsor of the award since 2007 alongside Intel, but now they’re taking full control of the prize money, upping the package fourfold to a rather hefty $1 million. We won’t know who the first lucky recipient of $1 million will be until next year, but they’ll join a list of luminaries that includes Silvio Micali . He won the award in 2012 for his work in cryptography, which made it easier to verify mathematical proofs in the study of complex systems. At an ACM event this morning he told an audience of fellow computer scientists that we need to “encourage our young scientists” by rolling out “a bright red carpet on what used to be a dangerous path.” Hopefully Google’s $1 million dollar prize will do just that. Filed under: Google Comments

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Google makes the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ worth $1 million

Bandcamp lets artists create their own music subscriptions

Thanks to Ms. Swift’s recent actions , artist compensation from music streaming is quite the hot topic, and one company has a new option to lend a hand. Bandcamp has been a choice for musicians to sell their music and merchandise for years, and now it’s looking to help sort streaming subscriptions as well. Each artist will be able to create a subscription-based plan for their music, allowing fans to access new tunes as they become available through the Bandcamp app. Listeners can download the tracks too, and acts can decide to offer parts of their existing catalog as a perk for opting in. New albums or songs can be released to subscribers only for a certain amount of time or remain exclusive, and the musicians themselves can set the cost of the plan. For its efforts, Bandcamp takes the same 15 percent cut that it does for regular sales — a fee that drops to 10 percent once the $5, 000 sales mark is reached. “The whole motivation here is that when you get to a point that you love an artist — when you go from liking them to being a real true fan of theirs — at some point you just want everything they make, ” the company’s chief executive Ethan Diamond told The Guardian . [Photo credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Software Comments Via: Fact Mag Source: The Guardian

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Bandcamp lets artists create their own music subscriptions

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s new on-demand and broadcast TV service, launches in 2015

If you thought cramming a PlayStation into your TV with the cloud-based PS Now was crazy, Sony’s now trying to do, well, the exact opposite, bringing broadcast TV (and a bigger dose of on-demand content) to the PS4, PS3 and, at a later date, even the iPad. Another subscription service, you might think. However, Sony has already signed up some major networks and players (Fox, CBS, Viacom and ABC, for starters) and a no-contract setup: you’ll pay month by month — like how you pay for Netflix. More device support from both Sony and non-Sony hardware is set to roll out to the service in the future, although there’s no specifics just yet. Beta testers will see around 75 channels of content, including local networks, when tests start later this month, although there’s one proviso: they have to live in Chicago, Philadelphia or LA. For the rest of us, the entire service is set to go live in early 2015. While the service was originally teased back at CES 2014 in January, this is the first time it’s been given a name — and well, some tangible details. According to SCE, anyone that pays up will be able to save their favorite shows within their account without storage restrictions or scheduling conflicts: it sounds like you won’t be using any offline storage, although we imagine there would be an offline viewer of sorts. Once a show is tagged, you’ll be able to watch it for up to 28 days after. Filed under: Displays , Gaming , Internet , Sony Comments Source: PlayStation

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PlayStation Vue, Sony’s new on-demand and broadcast TV service, launches in 2015