From over on boing boing, I saw this interesting post about the fact that LED traffic lights can’t melt the snow that collects in their shade covers.
An interesting calculation would be to see if the energy discipated by the waste heat of the old bulbs year round equals the energy required to keep the lights usable in the winter, in countries that have snow.
We’ve had LED lights here in the greater Sydney region for a while now, and I don’t think anyone has come across this issue here (it doesn’t snow in Sydney).
So Havoc Pennington of former red hat and freedesktop.org glory has posted about his company litl’s latest product.
It’s an interesting concept, and could well take off, though the starting price of 700 USD seems a little steep to me. As Havoc mentions it’s all about build quality and attention to purpose when designing the thing and he does seem to have a point. I know use several different PC’s and laptops around the house to do all the things the litl webbook is trying to wrap in one user friendly device.
On boing boing, this post mentions a new scheme to allow people to order movies at home for $1 using their mobile phone. Once ordered a gadget attached to the TV descrambles the signal, with the money being billed to the user’s mobile account.
Over on boing boing, this post about an awesome invention that enables you to boil water in a cardboard box.
So this invention takes a cardboard box, paints the interior black, throws in some foil and acrylic and then harnesses the sun’s energy to create a cardboard oven.
Over on planet gnome , I read this article about how Orange in Poland downgrades all images over http on it’s network.
Note that the artifacts of the image compression are less visible here than after the jump, as I had to resize the image to make it display properly in WordPress.
This is rotten on so many levels, the most extreme of which is a gross abuse of net neutrality. Data providers are providing just that, a transport for data, and should not be messing with it on its way to my handset.
What would make this even worse, is if they actually charged you for the full quality image.
This mobile news comes from the guys over at boing boing (and not mobile crunch as would be expected). Personally I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that I have in excess of 20 charging adapters lying around the house, each one incompatible with the next one, and then when one breaks I have to go out and buy another one at a stupid mark up.
Go EC
According to this post over on the iPhone dev blog, the iPhone has finally been made able to boot Linux.
So the phone previously known as the Nokia Tube, the Nokia 5800 has made a public appearance and from the look of the specs is sexy as hell.
Some reports seem to indicate that the touchy-ness of the phone is not the best though, which will be a hell-of-a disappointment if that turns out to be true on release.
Having used the iPhone for over a month now I’m getting very, very fed up with the phone (lack of) functionality. Between the poor reception, the dropped calls, the inability to make calls for minutes at a time and a percurliar bug where hanging up will take over 5 minutes (unless you reboot the bastard), I’m starting to wonder if the application goodness and large touch screen is worth it.
And to have all the goodness of a reliable phone OS, including video calls and MMS in a complete package has me drooling.
/me hopes that they fix the touch issue before it launches
Rockbox have just made a major release version 3.0. It’s over three years in the making.
I first contributed to rockbox 2 years ago when I was trying to get a decent firmware to run on my Toshiba Gigabeat X30. Needless to say, Rockbox firmware totally rocks.
Liberate your not-so-new mp3 player today!
Update: Looks like their servers are getting slammed atm, might take a while to get some firmware goodness, it’s well worth the wait.
So apparently XBMC has released a PC beta called Atlantis. Downloaded both the windows installer and the Live CD.
(Update, the image on that blog post seems to load a pop up when viewing full size, so removed the click through)
Had problems getting the Live CD working on a whole host of dell and HP laptops. Mainly due to video card detection. In the end I got the windows binary to work on my Inspiron 6400. Works pretty well, but ran into the following issue:
- Doesn’t seem to support my LCD panel’s native res 1680×1050
- The playback UI seems to lag at times
- Video Calibration seems to be way off.
I know it’s been a while since I fired up my XBOX with XBMC, but this experience reminded me a lot about the time I tried Media Portal (a PC port of the old XBMC source code base). I guess it’s far easier to run a slick system on specific deidcated hardware, than generalist PC hardware.
It’s come a long way, and I’m incredibly impressed, but I don’t quite think it’s ready for the lounge room yet.
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