Hasta La Gadget!

Make like it’s 1992 with the Text-Only browser

Back in the swirling mists of the last century, men were men, browsers were text-based and pictures were ASCII. Now you can relive those wild, Deadwood years of the Internet with Text-Only, a — you guessed it — text-only browser.

The free app is built for Android, but there’s a web-based version so you can access it from any browser. And because the web today isn’t really accessible by a text-only browser, it pulls some tricks.

Enter a URL and the app will return a list of articles on that page, without any adds, pop-ups, pictures or other cruft. Think of it as being like Instapaper, only in live browser form.

If the article list doesn’t load, you can give the app the page’s RSS feed address and take things from there. As this involves firing up another browser in order to copy the RSS link, it’s not ideal.

What it is good for is low-bandwidth browsing. And I mean low-bandwidth in two ways: You can pull down the relevant parts of a site when abroad, or when approaching the limit of your monthly data allowance, or just on a slow connection. And you reduce the clutter on a typical page, offering much less distraction.

If bandwidth isn’t a problem, try Readability in your regular browser. Otherwise, Text-Only is nicely old-school. If only it rendered graphics as ASCII art.

Text-Only product page [Android Market. Thanks, Shan!]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• Instapaper 3 Adds Sharing, Curated Articles and Plain Old Speed …
• Catch Clipper Aims to Take On Instapaper

It’s been a busy year for NTT DoCoMo’s research and development division, with the company presenting a goldmine of future accessories at its CEATEC booth. We’re not seeing anything terribly exciting in the smartphone department, beyond a wider adoption of Android, but from the battery with a 10-minute charge time that we saw yesterday to the bad breath, hunger, body fat and food analyzers that you’ll find below, there are certainly quite a few gadgets worth checking out. We’re bundling a few of them here, so jump past the break for our hands-ons with three different health accessories (including a bad breath analyzer!) and a clever food analyzing app.

Continue reading NTT DoCoMo bad breath, body fat and food analyzers hands-on (video)

NTT DoCoMo bad breath, body fat and food analyzers hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I can fit more dials on here, dammit. Just you see if I can’t. Picture: Charlie Nghiem

If something is good, then more is surely better, right? That seems to be the thinking behind Charlie Nghiem’s Rotor Digital Camera.

Taking the popular (and excellent) resurgence of manual dials as his cue, Nghiem’s concept stacks eight (8!) dials on top of each other, nestled into a cylinder of control underneath the regular mode dial up top.

When you turn a dial, a strip appears on-screen right next to it, showing the results if your efforts. It thus combines the vagueness of a menu-driven interface — which requires you to always watch what you are doing — and the awkwardness of finding an individual button to do it.

I don’t see how this is any better than the button-and-dial method on most digicams, especially as those dials look almost impossible to turn (apart from the top one, and the one with the red nubbin).

I’m all for extra, dedicated manual controls. It just seems that, in this case at least, less might be more. Now, why do I suddenly feel like eating a Polo?

Charlie Nghiem: Rotor Digital Camera [Design Boom via Andrew Liszewski]

See Also:

• Canon G10: More Pixels, More Processor, More Dials
• Troika Retro Radio Has Knobs, Dials

Boring laundry could be obsolete, with new tech from UC Davis researchers. Photo Paolo/Flickr

Forget washing your clothes. In the future, you may be able to clean your shirt just by taking a walk in the sun.

Students at UC Davis have worked out a way to mix cotton with a compound that reacts to light. When hit by photons, the compound — 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid — reacts and produces hydroxyl radicals and hydrogen peroxide.

Hydrogen peroxide, you will remember, is used to bleach hair and propel rockets. The released chemical will also kill bacteria and “break down organic compounds such as pesticides and other toxins.” Perhaps you wouldn’t want to actually be wearing this when the light hits it.

Self-cleaning clothes would be great. Imagine a hiking trip. Instead of having to wash and dry your clothes, you could just leave them out on a rock to clean them. Ning Liu, who worked on bonding the chemicals to the cellulose in the cotton, says that the fabric “has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing and farmworkers, as well as military personnel.” Whatever. I’ll settle for claiming back the space the washing machine takes up in my tiny kitchen.

Self-cleaning cotton breaks down pesticides, bacteria [UC Davis via CNET]

See Also:

• Self-Cleaning Shower Uses Nano-Coatings to Destroy Dirt
• Litter-Robot: Self Cleaning Cat Box
• Swedish Self Cleaning Toilet Hoovers Up Cocaine
• Scientists Copy Nature For Self-Cleaning Plastics

This article was written on September 30, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tracking Down Great Software For You!

Windows has a built-in process explorer that isn’t exactly targeted for power users. It only shows you the basic information that you need and nothing else. If you are want to know more about what’s going on in your computer then you should download the free Process Explorer by Sysinternals.

You can find out just about everything that you wanted to know. I can even find out the maximum amount of memory that a process has used since it started running. One of the other features that I find really useful is the process’ right-click shortcut that is labeled “Google”. When you click on that option it will open your browser and do a Google Search for the filename of the process. That helps tremendously for identifying any unknown process.

Process Explorer is completely free and best of all it doesn’t make you install it. Just download the file, extract it, and run it! The simplicity of using it makes it an excellent debugging tool when your trying to figure out what’s slowing down your computer.

Operating System Requirements: Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003, 64-bit versions of Windows for x64 processors, and Windows Vista.

Download Process Explorer (all are 1.47MB):

• Win9x/Me
• 32-bit NT/2K/XP/Server 2003/Vista
• x64 64-bit XP/Server 2003/Vista
• IA64 64-bit Server 2003

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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