Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve been lucky enough to occupy the driver’s seat of a hybrid or electric vehicle you’ve surely enjoyed the bliss that comes from smoothly and silently pulling away from a stoplight. You’ve also, surely, run over at least a couple of pedestrians while doing it. (We hit at least eight of the poor souls during our latest Volt test drive.) Sadly, here comes John Kerry and the rest of the US Senate to ruin our Carmageddon-esque fun. The Senate has unanimously approved the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, which requires:

…minimum level of sound emitted from a motor vehicle that is necessary to provide blind and other pedestrians with the information needed to reasonably detect a nearby electric or hybrid vehicle operating at or below the cross-over speed

How much sound? Well, they haven’t figured that out yet, nor have they figured out up to what speed it must be required, nor what sort of noise is required, but by golly there will be noise. Those answers will in theory be found through the course of a study that will take no more than 48 months to complete, leaving us wonder if current noisemaker options on the Volt, Leaf, and Prius will meet the need. Regardless, if you want a quiet car you’d better start your financing.

Senate approves Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, ensures a future for noise pollution originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even if the perturbed powers that be are able to take down WikiLeaks, state secrets will never again be as secret as they used to be. A website can be created on a netbook from a cafe anywhere in the world, instantaneously disseminating information to millions. WikiLeaks is like the original Napster–yeah, that site was shut down, but I can still download the new Katy Perry album if I really wanted to.

And like file sharing, the concept of secret sharing is spreading through the wilds of the internet in various incarnations, never to be tamed. This past Friday saw the introduction of Indoleaks.org, a WikiLeak-inspired outlet written in Indonesian and specifically focusing on secrets from that archipelago nation. The site’s tag line “Sebab informasi adalah hak asasi” translates into “Because information is a human right.”

Apparent published secrets on the site date back as far as 1975, detailing meetings between former US President Gerald Ford and former Indonesian President Suharto, and as recent as 2005 with an official document recommending further investigations into the role of government officials into the death of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib.

According to a story on The Jakarta Globe, the site has only been intermittently accessible, but I had no problem getting through whenever I tired. An Indonesian government spokesman said the site is currently not a huge concern commenting “We will only monitor this site to find out what kind of information it will release.”

The US has, by far, been the largest source of published leaks, leading critics of WikiLeaks to call them out as “terrorists” or “enemies of the state.” But, these sites are just emblematic of the new flattened order of the world. The concept of a completely secure secret is a quaint relic. And that’s a reality all nations are going to face in very short order.

Sony has announced three (count ’em) new series of SD cards, giving amateurs, pros, and prosumers alike even more choices on where to stick their pics. First up is the budget Essential Series in 2, 4, and 8GB capacities, offering Class 4 (4MB/s) speeds and little else. Next up is the similarly Class 4 Experience Series, which adds 16 and 32GB models to the list. Finally is the full-bore, Class 10 Expert Series in 8, 16, and 32GB capacities. This is obviously your choice for high bitrate HD recording (hello PMW-F3), but any should do just fine for taking pictures. All come with a handy “memo space” for those with petite handwriting and ultra-fine point pens, and all ship in January, but, alas, none have been assigned MSRPs just yet. Now, who said Sony doesn’t like industry-standard formats?

Continue reading Sony announces suite of SD cards for cameras that don’t work with Sticks

Sony announces suite of SD cards for cameras that don’t work with Sticks originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone takes some great pictures, but when it comes to organizing and, well, doing anything else with those photos, it sucks. LateNiteSoft aims to patch at least one gaping hole with Lab, a detailed photo-viewer for iOS.

Lab tells you everything you want to know about a picture, and it does it with a gorgeous interface that makes it easy to use. Fire it up and you see all the photos in your library (album support is “coming soon”). Tap a photo and you get an almost full-screen view, along with the date the photo was snapped, how many megapixels the camera had, and the file size.

Hit the big “i” button and you get the juicier bits. The photo sits at the top of the screen, like a Polaroid on a clothesline, and the info is arrayed beneath. You get the time and date, the kind of camera, the size in pixels (along with the size info from the previous screen). If the photo has GPS coordinates embedded within, then its position is shown on a map, and below that is a histogram. Finally, exposure information sits at the bottom (ISO, ƒ-number and shutter-speed).

While this is obviously best used on an iPhone, it works equally well on an iPad. The interface is pixel-doubled (and looks fine for it) but the photos are displayed at their proper resolution. The app didn’t do a great job of pulling the metadata out of my photos, though, but that’s more a problem with other apps, and iOS itself, which strips the metadata from pictures: an iPhone 4 HDR, for example, sent full-size from a friend, doesn’t give up much. The sizes and histogram always work, though (the histogram is generated in-app from the photo itself, it seems), as does anything pulled in via the camera connection kit.

LateNiteSoft is also responsible for the great Sketches app for iPhone and iPad.

Lab costs just $1.

Lab product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Why the iPhone 4 Camera Is So Promising
• Hipstamatic Gentrifies iPhone Camera
• Best Camera: 'Like Photoshop for The iPhone'

This article was written on March 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

After all that talk about Apple pushing the Safari “update” on Windows users (here and here), as it turns out, it’s actually “illegal” for Windows users to install it! Read the first sentence in the image below and you’ll see what I mean:

It very clearly reads in Apple’s License Agreement which you have to agree to before downloading Safari, that “This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.” The last time I checked, my Dell computer had no Apple label to be found on it! It looks like Apple needs to take some time to review all of their agreements now that they’re branching out and offering software to Windows users.

What’s even more funny is that when the License Agreement pops-up, it warns to read it carefully. Well, by reading it carefully it was discovered that PC users really aren’t supposed to be using it! It says in big bold/all caps:

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.

Maybe Apple is pushing Safari so hard because they’ll threaten all of the Windows users later on that they must switch to a Mac or face being sued? It looks like us software users aren’t the only ones that don’t read the agreement, apparently those who write it don’t read it either. This was clearly an oversight by Apple, and we imagine it’ll be fixed soon.

Source: The Register – Thanks for the tip Max!

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