Hasta La Gadget!

The biggest threat to the future of the Internet? To many it’s the possibility of an end to net neutrality. Not to Jimmy Wales. The Wikipedia founder told a crowd in Bristol, England that the largest threat to the openness of the Internet is the presence of walled off app stores from companies like Apple.

“People talk about net neutrality as an issue but the real action is in thinking about whether apps are a threat to the openness of the system,” said Wikipedia’s 44-year-old co-founder.

Wales added,

The action is taken place in the development of the apps model which is undergoing an incredible boom because there are some amazing things going on. However, the concern is that in order to make software and distribute it for free, you have to get permission from Apple so that chokepoint is very dangerous and something I’m concerned about.

Wikipedia turns ten years old tomorrow. The user-supported site boasts more than 17 million editions in hundreds of languages.

Evan Solida’s Rael is yet another concept bike, although this one doesn’t dicker with the time-tested double-triangle frame, wheels and chain. Instead, it aims to make a regular carbon-fiber road-bike safer to ride.

What you don’t see is Solida’s Cervellum Hindsight digital rearview camera hidden in the seat-stays. It continuously records a loop of video and if it detects a crash with its accelerometer, it keeps recording for ten seconds and then stops, keeping the footage as evidence. The Cervellum can also be hooked up to a 3.5-inch transflective (viewable in sunlight) LCD screen mounted on the handlebars, giving you a digital rear-view mirror.

The part you do see is the redesigned brakes and handlebars. The drops have been refashioned into pistol-grips, and the brake levers flipped to point up instead of down. The point is to let the index fingers get to the levers whether you’re riding on the hoods of the brakes or down in the drops.

Everything else is pretty standard, as it should be, although far from pedestrian. the gears, for example, are Shimano’s Di2 electronic-shifters.

The bike may be a concept, but the Cervellum camera is on its way to market, although there’s still no launch date. And as concept bikes go, this one looks like it would actually be good to ride.

Rael: a road bike concept by Evan Solida [Bicycle Design]

Cervellum camera product page [Cervellum]

See Also:

• Two Brakes, One Hand: How To Stop a Polo Bike
• Coasties: Fixed-Gear Style, Only With Brakes
• Peugeot Concept Bike Channels Tron
• Commuter Cycle Concept is Bike and Briefcase

This article was written on March 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

We haven’t really heard much about the Zune since it launched, other than an update here and there. The last we heard was when it became Vista Compatible back in December. The latest news is that Update 1.3 will be available soon.

According to Zune Insider, around March 20th, or mid-march, Zune Firmware update 1.3 will be available with a few new changes. The changes they list include:

• We’re fixing the skipping problem that some users were experiencing – that is, content acquired from Zune Marketplace will no longer skip when played on the device.
• Improved device and software reliability, when it comes to device detection, and improved sync’ing.
• We’ve made some changes to the FM Tuner so it no longer drains the battery when in sleep mode.

People have been waiting patiently for this update, and from the sounds of it, people are already disappointed with the slim list of changes. They expected more features from Microsoft, but it appears Microsoft focused more on the bugs.

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It’s time again to look at the rapidly changing face of home computing. The last time we got an IDC report on US PC sales it showed generally rosy figures, with everyone other than Dell growing and Apple making a huge jump. This time we have numbers from both IDC and Gartner, and while they don’t agree on everything, it’s clear things are rather less positive. Overall growth in this quarter is negative (6.6 percent decline for Gartner, 4.8 for IDC) and Apple is now in position number five, dropping from number three, with the other top four comprised of HP, Dell, Toshiba, and Acer — though Toshiba and Acer swap places as you move from IDC to Gartner. Both reports cite tablet sales (i.e. the iPad) as being at least partly responsible for the decline in traditional computer sales, a trend that’s predicted to continue in 2011. Based on what we saw at CES, we’d say that’s a safe bet.

IDC and Gartner: US PC sales drop as tablets shake things up originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, the students know what makes a worthwhile project. The AutoFrost is a robot which has one delicious purpose: frosting cakes.

The human operator enters some basic cake-stats, like size and color, and then hits the splendidly-worded go-button: “I’m ready to design an amazing cake”. He is then dropped into a paint program with a circa-1990 interface, where the designing is done. This custom-coded app then controls the AutoFrost ‘bot itself.

A pair of stepper motors and threaded rods move both the icing nozzle and the cake. They are controlled by two Arduinos and stepper motors. The frosting plunger is manually positioned at the right height over the tasty cake and the frosting is squeezed out using a servo motor on a rack and pinion system.

There’s still a little work to be done (apart from slicing and eating the cake) – to change colors, a human has to swap on the new frosting before the AutoFrost can resume – but so what? It’s a frikkin’ robot that decorates cakes. If you watch the video all the way through you’ll see that the icing on the cake, as it were, is when the ‘bot finishes up its task by crossing the “t” and dotting the “i”, just like the operator did when when designing the cake.

Future plans include different nozzle sizes, auto cake-size sensing, and more than a few brisk walks to combat calories gained in the name of research.

AutoFrost Cake Decorator [Olin via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Nikon D700 Birthday Cake
• Hilarious Thumb-Drive Cake Mistake
• MacBook Cake is Lighter Than Air
• Katamari Wedding Cake Is a Great Ball of Geekery