Jul 01

Fixtation: Bike Repair Stations with Vending Machines

Posted in: Today's Chili, Transportation

The Fixtation is so handy there should be one in every transit station

We’ve covered self-service bike stations before, but the Fixtation at the Uptown Transit Station in Minneapolis is worth a special mention as probably the best example yet — and not just because of its cool name.

The Fixtation combines a repair stand equipped with most of the tools you’ll need for basic repairs, including tire levers, an adjustable wrench, a wheel-wrench, screwdrivers, and a set of Allen wrenches. There is also a pump giving free air.

But it’s the other half of the installation that sets this apart. Next to the repair stand is a vending machine. This can contain whatever the provider wants, but typically you’ll find essential spares like patch kits, tubes, lights, multi-tools along with energy bars and drinks.

The tools and the air are free

The Minneapolis station is open all year long from 6AM to midnight. That’s great for Minneapolitans, but what about the rest of us? Well, that’s the main reason for this post. Fixtation will supply the kiosks and vending machines to anyone who wants them (although they are, not surprisingly, bases in Minneapolis). I’d love to see these in transit stations everywhere. The public but always-staffed nature of these locations would prevent vandalism, and as transit stations are usually in convenient spots, they seem perfect.

FixStation [Fixtation via Urban Velo]

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Jul 01

Skype 2 video chat unofficially enabled on the Galaxy S II, Sensation, and others

Posted in: Android, app, application, gingerbread, skype, Today's Chili, update

The latest Skype update for Android is available to everyone, but it only enables video chat on four specific handsets. Fortunately, impatient modders have gone some way to correcting this profound injustice, by creating APKs that activate video calling on other handsets too. So far we’ve heard of successful ports on the Samsung Galaxy S II and the HTC Sensation, Thunderbolt and EVO 4G. If you’ve got some other handset with Android 2.3, a little experimentation with the APK might also be worth your while. However, we just tried it on an Xperia Arc and didn’t get very far: the app ran, but efforts to communicate with an Xperia Neo resulted in one-way video, a locked landscape mode and plenty of awkwardness. Let us know if you fare better — you’ll find a Thunderbolt-specific download at the DroidLife source link, and a more general APK at TechPetals.

[Thanks, Rashid and JT]

Skype 2 video chat unofficially enabled on the Galaxy S II, Sensation, and others originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceDroidLife, TechPetals  | Email this | Comments

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Jul 01

Crave giveaway: 24-inch Toshiba HDTV, plus Blu-ray player

Posted in: Today's Chili

For this week’s Crave giveaway, we’re offering a Toshiba SL415U LED HDTV and a Toshiba BDX2200 Blu-ray player. Double trouble!

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Jul 01

Make Terrible Drip-Brewed Coffee at Camp with the Propane Coffeemaker

Posted in: household, Today's Chili

If you’re lucky enough to have a Sherpa or pack-mule, you might like to bring a propane coffeemaker on your next camping trip

It is morning in the wilderness. You have fuel, you have water, and you have coffee. You are thirsty, tired and grouchy enough to be banging your tin cup repeatedly against your leg. How do you proceed?

If you have an ounce of initiative left in your caffeine-starved brain, you might just boil up the water in your cup, throw in the coffee and wait*. You’ll get a perfect cup, and you can continue your hike with only your tin cup and pack of coffee to carry.

Or you could try the Coleman Portable Propane Coffeemaker, a chunky piece of kit which takes the familiar kitchen based coffeemaker and puts it into the field. It runs off a 16.4 oz propane cylinder, pushes 4,500 BTU into the water and can run for up to 4.4 hours on a single charge.

It is also extremely non-portable.

But the worst part is that many people will use this to take their miserable home-based coffee habits abroad. A drip coffeemaker starts burning your brew almost as the first drop hits the hotplate-heated jug (stainless steel in this case), and gets worse after that. The coffee never tastes fresh, is never strong enough, and the longer it sits the more bitter it gets.

If you really want to get fancy on your camping trips, take a large-sized moka pot and stick that on your camping stove. It’s lighter, and the result is infinitely better.

There’s one exception here. The product page suggests using the propane coffeemaker at construction sites. The coffee will still taste awful, but putting on a ten-cup pot is a lot easier than brewing a few cups at a time. $90.

Coleman Portable Propane Coffeemaker [Coleman via Uncrate]

* Pro tip: when the coffee is brewed, run a spoon, bowl-down, around the edge of the cup or jug to push the floating grounds gently under the surface. The grounds will sink to the bottom, letting you drink without having to strain the liquid. You’re welcome!

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Jul 01

Screen Grabs: Nokia X7 scores cameo in third Transformers movie, joined by N950 lookalike

Posted in: nokia, symbian, Today's Chili
Screen Grabs chronicles the uses (and misuses) of real-world gadgets in today’s movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dot com.

Nokia’s hookup with the new Transformers movie runs deep — some of its international X7 launches have been themed around the Dark of the Moon three-quel that’s just come out in cinemas — so it’s no surprise to see plenty of the company’s handsets in the film itself. The metal-backed, 4-inch X7 gets the most screen time, quickly showing off Ovi Maps in 3D, but there’s also a portrait QWERTY device which may be the recently launched E6 or an earlier model such as the E72. A lot of consternation has also arisen regarding a third Nokia handset glimpsed in Transformers 3, which could well be an N950 running MeeGo, though if you ask us, there’s no way a MeeGo phone would take 157 minutes to save the world. We’d expect a double-tap to kill the baddies, an edge-to-edge swipe to get the girl, and a simple flicking gesture to turn the lights out.

[Thanks, Nicholas]

Screen Grabs: Nokia X7 scores cameo in third Transformers movie, joined by N950 lookalike originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 01

$2,400 Atom-Based Industrial Tablet Is Living in the Past

Posted in: Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili, Windows

Is the end near for clunky, heavy industrial tablets?

Construction may be one of those fields where tablet computers were actually used, back when they were little more than laptops without a keyboard. The new, semi-rugged GD3015 from General Dynamics does almost nothing to acknowledge the huge changes in the tablet market over the past year, and offers little more than a specialized netbook without a keyboard.

The GD3015 is designed for public safety, utilities, transportation, and warehousing workers. To this end it is dust, water, shock and vibration resistant, has options for 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS and can also be had with an optional magnetic stripe reader, barcode scanner, camera or RS232 port.

But at its heart, the tech is all very 2008. The processor is an Intel Atom chip, the touch-screen “works even with gloves on,” meaning resistive, not capacitive touch, and the battery life is listed at five hours, so in real life it will surely be less. Worse, it runs Windows 7, which offers a thin touch skin over a regular resource-hogging desktop OS.

But the real eye-opener here is the price. The GD3015, as it is known, starts at $2,400, and that’s before you get into all the options above, or make a choice to put in an SSD. Even more astonishing is this snippet from the press release, which shows that General Dynamics actually considers this computer to be cheap.

The GD3015 pairs ruggedness with a Windows-based operating system so budget-constrained IT managers have a computing solution that is easy to deploy, minimizes training costs for users and leverages existing software and operating system configurations.

“Budget constrained.” Ho ho. $2,500 for a netbook in a drop-proof case. How many iPads (or Android tablets) in ruggedized cases can you buy for $2,400? And with a real tablet, you don’t need to worry about 3G, Bluetooth or SSDs being optional.

Call me cynical, but these overpriced, under-specced commodity machines don’t seem to have much of a future.

GD3015 semi rugged tablet [General Dynamics]

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Jul 01

Lego Star Destroyer: 50-Inches Long, 3,000 Pieces

Posted in: lego, Star Wars, Today's Chili, Toys and Games

C-3PO: The odds of successfully surviving an attack on an Imperial Star Destroyer are approximately… Leia: Shut up!

Ever wanted to re-make the opening shot of Star Wars Episode IV in Lego, but could never find a Star Destroyer big enough? If you’d really wanted to do it, you probably would have just bought a whole lot of gray Legos and gotten on with it. But for the lazier film makers, we have just the thing: The Lego Star Wars Super Star Destroyer.

This thing is huge. In fact, I have a feeling the minifigs were Photoshopped into the image above because it doesn’t show the scale: the assembled kit is 124.5 cm long, or just shy of 50 inches, and weighs 3.5 kilos, or almost eight pounds. Lets just say your kids probably won’t be playing with this very often.

The kit has more than 3,000 (mostly gray) pieces, and comes with Vader, Admiral Piett, Dengar, Bossk and IG-88. It also comes with a tiny, cute regular Star Destroyer. I bet you never thought you’d hear the words “tiny” and “cute” used to describe such a hulking death machine.

Predictably, it isn’t cheap. The kit will sell for $400 when it launches in September. That’s a lot for a toy, but still not enough to stop me considering it.

Lego Star Wars Super Star Destroyer [Lego via Uncrate]

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Jul 01

GSM turns 20 today, still rocking the world

Posted in: nokia, Today's Chili, video

Happy birthday, dear Global System for Mobile Communications! 20 years ago today, on July 1 1991, the world’s first GSM call was made by Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri. The historic call used Nokia gear on GSM’s original 900MHz band. Today GSM is all grown up and ruling the world — connecting 1.5 billion people in 212 countries and serving 80% of the planet’s mobile market. GSM gave us a number of firsts. It was the first fully digital cellular system using TDMA to cram more information into less spectrum and provide better sounding, more reliable calls using less power. It introduced the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), the idea of switching handsets at will (something carriers have sought to subvert by locking phones), and the reality of international roaming. Short Messaging Service (SMS) was first launched on GSM networks, along with packet data (GPRS and later EDGE), which made internet access practical on mobile devices. Eventually, GSM expanded to the 400, 800, 1800 and 1900MHz bands and evolved into WDCMA-based UMTS (3G) and later HSPA and HSPA+, followed by LTE (4G) networks. So next time you’re at the coffee shop sipping on that latte while uploading that video to YouTube at 10Mbps using your LTE phone, remember to be thankful for that first GSM call 20 years ago — that’s when the mobile revolution really started.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

GSM turns 20 today, still rocking the world originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 01

Samsung Galaxy Z: Galaxy S II’s ‘affordable little brother’ now ready for pre-order

Posted in: galaxy, galaxy s ii, GalaxyS, GalaxySIi, gingerbread, samsung, Today's Chili

Been lusting after the Galaxy S II, but aren’t willing to break the bank? We hear you, and apparently Samsung does too. Up for pre-order today, on the Swedish arm of Three, is the Galaxy Z — billed as a more affordable spawn from its Korean progenitor. The Gingerbread-toting handset will sport a 4.2-inch Super Clear LCD, 1GHz dual core processor (rumored to be Tegra 2), and 8GB of onboard storage, extensible with microSD. Fret not camera junkies, also present is a 5 megapixel sensor plus flash and “HD” video recording. All that stands between you and this little Galaxy, are 4,000 kronor (about $630) and your undying love of Swedish meatballs.

Samsung Galaxy Z: Galaxy S II’s ‘affordable little brother’ now ready for pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Phandroid  |  sourceSamsung Hub, Three (translated)  | Email this | Comments

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Jul 01

WrapUp: SourceForge Resets 2 Million Passwords, Create Batch Files with a GUI, and More

Posted in: amazon, Gmail, Google, netflix, Today's Chili, WrapUp

This article was written on January 31, 2011 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

sourceforge.jpgSourceForge Resets 2 Million Passwords After Getting Hacked
The SourceForge team sent out emails last week to all two million users explaining that there were password sniffing attempts on the site. They also said that they voluntarily reset passwords to prevent any accounts from being compromised, and users will need to reset passwords to get access to the site.

 

google censors bittorrent.jpgGoogle Censoring Some File Sharing Search Terms
When performing a Google search for words like “bittorrent”, “utorrent”, and “rapidshare” you may find that you are no longer presented with auto-complete and instant results. This is only mildly annoying though since normal search results are not affected.

 

zuckerberg eissenberg.jpgMark Zuckerberg Meets Jesse Eisenberg on Saturday Night Live
Mark Zuckerberg appeared on stage on Saturday Night Live along side Jesse Eisenberg, who portrayed Zuckerberg last year in the film called The Social Network.

 

amazon prime streaming.jpgAmazon to Provide Unlimited Video Streaming for Prime Subscribers?
An Engadget tipster provided a screenshot from Amazon showing that existing Amazon Prime members will get access to over 5,000 movies and TV shows through their on-demand streaming service.

 

netflix isps.jpgNetflix Performance on Various ISPs
Netflix has written a blog post that covers the streaming performance of 16 different ISPs in the United States and 4 in Canada. In the U.S. the top spots belong to Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner.

 

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

gmail notifications.jpgChrome Gets Desktop Notifications for Gmail and Chat
If you look in your Gmail settings you may see that there is a new section for controlling both chat and new mail notifications. As of right now these only work in Chrome, but they are hoping it will expand out to other browsers in the future.

 

wot.jpgWeb of Trust (WOT) Available for Opera
If you’re an Opera user that has been looking for a safer way to browser the web WOT is definitley worth checking out.

 

instascriber.jpgSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Instapaper with Instascriber
It’s possible to use Instapaper as a RSS feed reader thanks to an online service called Instascriber. With the service all articles will automatically be added to your Instapaper account where you can then read them at your leisure.

 

gmail unread icon.jpgGmail Gets Unread Message Favicon in Labs
A new Labs feature in Gmail will give you an auto-updating icon that displays how many unread messages you currently have.

 

dropbox desktop.jpgSync Your Desktop Using Dropbox
Using a little trickery you can get Dropbox to sync all the files and folders located on your desktop across all of your machines.

 

visual command line.jpgCreate Batch Files with a GUI
If you think creating batch files is a cumbersome process you may want to take a quick look at Visual Command Line, which is a tool to help you build batch files without needing to know all the special syntax.

 

–Downloads–

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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