Nanotechnology enables ultra high-def LCDs, cheaper stacked-electrode OLED screens

Pixel density enthusiasts, pay close attention, because science is ready to blow your minds — the University of Michigan has developed an LCD technology that can display their logo in a space just nine microns high. By creating a filter made of microscopic metal gratings with differently sized holes just a few hundred nanometers wide, researchers discovered they could precisely capture wavelengths associated to red, green and blue light, producing pixels roughly eight times smaller than those in the iPhone 4’s famous screen, and entire images that could practically fit inside a single dot of Kopin’s microdisplay.

Meanwhile, OLEDs (which don’t require filters to produce their color) saw a nanotech breakthrough of their own last week, as a group at the University of Florida have discovered that carbon nanotubes can revitalize a once-inefficient but promising vertical stacking technique. Layering thin sheets of aluminum, carbon nanotubes, organic material and finally gold on top of a glass substrate, scientists have created OLEDs that promise to be cheaper, faster and require one-tenth of the power of those using polycrystalline silicon, and could theoretically be printed as a flexible display as well. Here’s hoping we’ll see the fruits of these fellows’ labors soon — we can’t wait to pen a follow-up to this epic fight.

Nanotechnology enables ultra high-def LCDs, cheaper stacked-electrode OLED screens originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TG Daily, OLED-Info.com  |  sourceTechnology Review, University of Michigan  | Email this | Comments

Pikachu is really, really excited to charge your Nintendo DSi

Pikachu is really, really excited to charge your Nintendo DSi for you

The last time we plugged in our Nintendo DSi to recharge it all we got as thanks was a little light. It turned on, the electrons flowed, and we continued our humble existence. Just think how much more exciting that menial act could have been if only we had this sucker. Hori‘s Pikachu charger accepts a DSi or DSi XL into its faux-poké ball slot and, presumably, jumps up and down excitedly as lightning bolts dance from its maniacal little fingertips to juice up your dead cell. Or, maybe it just pulls power from an AC adapter and sends it through the connector. Either way, it’s certainly more exciting than most other simple charging stands we’ve seen but, at 3,981 yen (just shy of $50), it’s also rather more expensive.

Pikachu is really, really excited to charge your Nintendo DSi originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Friday Poll: How will Apple music event play out?

With Apple’s fall music event coming up in days, technophiles are busy tossing around speculation on what will be announced. So, what’s the most sure bet?

New Biomega ‘LDN’ Bike is an ‘Urban Tool’

Today we point and laugh at yet another ill-conceived bike design, only this one will actually make it into stores and is the spawn of big-name Brit designer Ross Lovegrove, not just some dude with a CAD app.

The first thing I though when I saw the LDN (for “London”) was “How the hell do I lock it?” You could run your D-Lock through that hole in the frame (there to lighten the bike and let you hang it on the wall) but then you’re left with two unsecured wheels. And because the carbon-fiber frame lacks a down-tube, the front-wheel can’t be locked to it. The only answer is three D-Locks, inferior cables or heavy chains, hardly practical on a “London” bike. And that’s before we even get to securing the saddle.

Lovegrove designed the LDN for Biomega, and it is clearly billed for city use. It has a couple of saving features: hub-gears and a shaft-drive keep things clean (both in looks and non-dirtiness) and, well, that’s it. The Lady thinks that it would be hard to ride in a skirt, and I wonder why the rear-wheel mounts on track-ends, especially as the shaft-drive means no chain pulling on the wheel, and no real need to move the wheel back and forth for perfect tension.

One more thing: The press release somewhat naively states that “LDN [is] a true urban tool.” Indeed.

Cüratorial Biomega: LDN & NYC (Press release) [Cyclelicious via Bicycle Design]

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MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

Think of it as an autonomous, swarming, photovoltaic legion of seagoing Roombas (or don’t, if you’re easily upset). The Seaswarm project at MIT takes a thin, hydrophobic material and drags it behind a robot outfitted with GPS and WiFi for determining its location and communicating within a swarm. When deployed, the group finds the outer edges of an oil spill, and works its way into the center, coordinating the cleanup with minimal human interference. The material itself can take on twenty times its weight in oil. And yes, the whole thing is re-usable. According to researchers, 5,000 of these relatively low cost devices could have cleaned up the BP oil disaster in a month — which is more than we can say for Kevin Costner! See it in action after the break.

Continue reading MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Switched  |  sourceMIT  | Email this | Comments

Two-Man ‘Adventure’ Tent has Parking Garage

The Ténéré Expedition Tent from Nomad is a tent with a parking-garage. Designed by two touring riders, the Ténéré is a shelter for two men and their motorbike.

And when we say two men, we mean two big, burly men: the product blurb says that if the tent were measured by normal means, it would be rated for five, so you have plenty of room to stretch out and stow some gear.

But the bike part is the most interesting. When you arrive at camp, you pitch the outer-shell first and then drive the bike right in and zip out the rain. From there, the inner-chamber can be erected from the inside. The outer-shell has no ground-sheet, so there’s nothing to damage when you park, and the tent is tall enough to stand in.

It weighs 13-pounds packed, which is a lot for a hikers tent, but nothing when you’re on a bike. Nervous about your bike falling on you while you sleep? The tent can’t do anything about that, but the guys at Nomad offer some advice: just make sure the bike is leaning away from you when parked up on uneven ground.

The Ténéré is $400. Not cheap, but cheaper than a stolen bike.

Ténéré Expedition Tent [Nomad Tent]

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Viewsonic ViewPad is an OlivePad rebadge?

Remember when Viewsonic was a respectable company? It made modest but reputable monitors that seemed to define the product category. Now the company is slapping its colorful finches onto just about any OEM device it can grab. Next on the agenda is the 7-inch Viewsonic ViewPad tablet, expected to launch at the big IFA show next week with an Android OS and 3G and WiFi connectivity. Thing is, the device leaked to Pocket-lint (pictured above) is the very same tablet known since July as the Olive Pad VT00, aka, “India’s first 3.5G Pad.” So line up now if you like your seconds served stale and without originality.

Viewsonic ViewPad is an OlivePad rebadge? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New Digg Theme for Pligg – Will it get Pulled Soon?

This article was written on February 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

There has been all kinds of controversy in the Digg arena the past week with two big companies, Dell and Yahoo, both creating Digg-like sites to receive user feedback. While both sites credited Digg for their style, Yahoo! decided to leave things alone and not mention anything else about subject…after all they didn’t want to try and feed the fire. Dell, however, wanted to make sure that the public knew their intentions were not to compete with Digg:

Dell IdeaStorm is not a news site. Its purpose is to allow customers to voice and discuss ideas that they’d like to see. We are not building a Digg competitor and have no intention to do so.

The thing that makes this whole thing so funny in my mind is that these are just feedback/suggestion sites! Sure they are being released by these large corporations but they aren’t trying to pull users away from the Digg community. In fact, they probably won’t even get that much traffic. So maybe the Digg crowd should focus on some of the real Digg-clones…

Pligg is a piece of software that you run on a server to create a community driven site similar to Digg. The funny thing is that this software is being used all over the Web with other people hoping to create the next Digg. The default theme has a really nice appearance to it that gives a site a nice look out-of-the-box, and far enough away from Digg’s default look that it shouldn’t be much of a problem (test out the default theme with the Pligg Demo here). However, there are always some people out there who want to create Digg sites that look so much like the original Digg that you will have to do a double take. One example that we had previously mentioned is SuperGu which had a similar layout to Digg and even sported a Digg Spy clone. Now there is a new Pligg theme in town I reckon that it wants to be just like Digg:

Digg Pligg

Even though that is in Chinese I’m sure you can see the resemblance to the original Digg site. There is an English version of the theme available (download mirror) so anyone can make their own site that looks just like Digg. Unfortunately I didn’t see a demo available of this theme so I am just using the screenshot that the theme developer posted, but it is probably exactly what it looks like.

I’m not sure if Digg can really do anything about this theme being made available since they don’t have a copyright on the site’s style, but I’m sure the Digg crowd would give a lashing if they found out about this.

Download the Digg-like Theme for Pligg (Mirror)

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It’s Another QWERTY Keyboard, Now for TV

We’re living in an age of multiple connected screens, where even our media-savvy televisions demand some occasional typing to search for a videogame, TV show or Netflix rental. Problem is, typing (more like hunting and pecking) with a game controller or remote control is a pain in the butt — and that’s the world into which the TiVo Slide is being born.

The TiVo on-screen software keyboard has been semi-affectionately dubbed “the Ouija Board input” from the way users slid and hovered the remote over each letter to search for titles. As TiVo added more and more text-dependent features, Ouija-hovering got more and more obnoxious. With recent software updates, Premiere and Series 3 users can use a USB keyboard or mouse, or a wireless device with a USB Bluetooth dongle. (That’s actually how the Slide connects.) But for one-stop remote/keyboard shopping, the Slide is your guy.

It solves a few technical problems that have haunted keyboard-style remotes for years. The slide interface is one: We’ve gotten so used to handheld devices that almost nobody wants to use a keyboard for everything. The bigger deal may be Bluetooth, which, among other nice things, performs the essential task of letting you use the keyboard sideways. It also lights up in the dark — there are other TiVo remotes that do this, but typing text with your thumbs makes this feature pretty much essential.

Yes — you have to type with your thumbs. If you’ve used a smartphone hardware keyboard like most BlackBerries’ (or a slide-out like the Droid’s), this is familiar stuff. If your typing skills are optimized for a keyboard, or you’re not much of a typist to begin with, it’ll take some getting used to.

It’s surprising, actually, that we’re not seeing more innovation and experimentation in alt-keyboard devices. There’s nothing sacrosanct about the QWERTY keyboard layout other than that it’s what most typists in the English-speaking world have come to expect. Most people know that it appeared on early Remington typewriters because it kept the keys from clashing; if a rifle maker knew anything, it was precision-manufacturing a device not to jam.

But whether it’s hardware or software, we don’t have to worry about keys jamming on keyboards now. And yet, even swiping, chording and hovering software keyboards use the QWERTY layout. Why not try an alphabetic keyboard — something designed for people who don’t do much typing at all? The last time I checked, relatively few people with TVs sit in front of a computer most of the day.

Or, if you’re targeting experts and speed freaks, why not try a version of the Dvorak layout?

Dvorak is an alternative keyboard configuration patented in 1932 and named for its inventor, August Dvorak. If QWERTY is the MS Windows of keyboards, Dvorak is the Mac. What its adherents lack in numbers, they make up in devotion. In “Seven Reasons to Switch to the Dvorak Keyboard layout,” Red Tani of WorkAwesome makes a good case:

In QWERTY, only 32 percent of keystrokes are on the home row. Which means most of the time, typists’ fingers are either reaching up for the top row (52 percent) or down for the bottom row (16 percent). So not only does QWERTY do nothing for typists, it actually hinders them.

Dvorak further increases typing speed by placing all vowels on the left side of the home row, and the most commonly used consonants on the right side. This guarantees that most of your strokes alternate between a finger on your right hand (consonant) and a finger on your left (vowel). Alternating between fingers from either hand is faster — just imagine texting with one hand or drumming with one stick.

On a tiny mobile device, DVORAK could be comparatively even faster. More comfortable, too.

QWERTY beat out DVORAK because typists who’d learned the first were faster and more accurate using that layout than on the second. It’s a classic example of what economists and other social scientists call path-dependence and increasing returns: An inferior technology can beat a superior one if it’s adopted early and widely enough to lock out the competition.

So maybe somewhere out there is a new kind of phone/remote controller-sized keyboard that blows the QWERTY keyboard away. The trouble is, most of us would be better off typing with something else, if they were giving superior machines away. The new TiVo remote acknowledges that this is the world we live in.

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Photos: TiVo.com, Wikipedia

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Viking Modular’s SATADIMM jacks an SSD into your memory slot

Explaining the differences between DRAM and non-volatile storage is about to get that little bit harder, thanks to Viking Modular. The company’s decided to “borrow” the DIMM form factor for its latest enterprise SSD offering, equipping it with a 240-pin array to draw power from your spare memory slots. Of course, you’ll still need to hook up a SATA cable to get data flowing to this SSD — at a very respectable 260MBps for both read and write — but we must admit we’re in love with the very idea of it. This new design offers another option for consolidating storage right onto the motherboard and should help case modders yearning for ever-slimmer enclosures. Alas, the SATADIMM is only available to enterprise and OEM clients for now, but we can’t think of any reason why it won’t test the consumer waters as well — if not by Viking, maybe someone else?

[Thanks, David]

Continue reading Viking Modular’s SATADIMM jacks an SSD into your memory slot

Viking Modular’s SATADIMM jacks an SSD into your memory slot originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Gizmag  |  sourceViking Modular  | Email this | Comments