Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion is seemingly off to a great start. With over 200 new features, iOS-style streamlined simplicity for your Mac and more the $20 upgrade price is worth it indeed. While these numbers aren’t quite official, some math done over at HotHardware has Mountain Lion mauling the download charts with around 2.11 million already.

The popular web tracking firm Chitka has posted some numbers confirming a rough estimate of around 2.11 million Mac users are now running OS X (10.8) Mountain Lion. If those numbers are accurate Mountain Lion could be the fastest released and adopted operating system of all times. That isn’t all either. If estimates are correct, assuming 90% of users paid the $20 upgrade fee, the Lion just racked in $38 million in revenue for the Cupertino folks in the past 48 hours.

With iCloud, Siri like Voice dictation, improved trackpad options, tons of features and options brought over from the iPhone and iPad, and well over 200 new features this is the best Mac OS to date. If you haven’t upgraded yet or don’t know what you’re missing you’ll surely want to check out our Mac OS X Mountain Lion Review. Go ahead and upgrade now because the $20 will be well spent. More details on your upgrade path to Mountain Lion can be found below.

Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion racks up over 2 million downloads in 48 hours is written by Cory Gunther & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

When publishers are ramping up on advertising for an upcoming game, Facebook ads don’t seem like a natural place to start. If EA’s success with Facebook ads for Battlefield 3 is anything to go on, however, maybe they should be. In a recent investor call – Facebook’s first one since its IPO – Facebook COO Sheryl K. Sandberg highlighted Electronic Arts‘ success in using Facebook ads to push the extremely popular game, saying that Electronic Arts spent $2.75 million on ads and now attributes $12.1 million in sales to the marketing campaign.

That’s a whopping 440% return-on-investment for the publisher. It isn’t just EA that hit it big with Facebook ads either, with Sandberg stating that independent analysis shows a hefty percentage of campaigns delivering a return of 3x or better:

Independent analysis of more than 60 campaigns, 45 of which were completed in the first half of this year, show that 70 per cent of those campaigns delivered a return on ad spend of 3x or better. And 49 per cent of those campaigns delivered a return of 5x or better.

The write-up on GamesIndustry International points out that EA’s methods of figuring out its return weren’t made clear, but even if EA’s numbers are off by a bit, that still leaves plenty of room for the publisher to make a significant return-on-investment. This is a really encouraging report for those considering rolling out a Facebook ad campaign, so if anything, expect to see more video game companies using Facebook to push their latest games in the future.

Battlefield 3 Facebook ads led to 440% return for Electronic Arts is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve seen a variety of hacks and mods based on the Etch-a-Sketch, but none of them messed with the way it makes images. That’s exactly what Christopher Monaco did. He built his own take on the drawing toy, but instead of aluminum powder he used LEDs.

Because Monaco built his toy from scratch, the project is quite complicated. He used a variety of electronics from Sparkfun and Digikey, including an ATmega328P microcontroller, four 8×8 LED matrices and a MintyBoost kit. Then he designed the logic and the drivers for the board and the matrices, wrote custom software and made his own enclosure. Here’s the product of his efforts:

The funny thing is that the toy is more technically advanced, yet functionally worse than the original. But as with most hacks and mods, half the fun is in building it. Plus Monaco can always improve on his model, maybe make a larger one with different colored LEDs and so on, and before you know it he’ll have an LED version of Photoshop.

[via Instructables via MAKE]

While the whole world is too occupied and busy with their own lives, the Japanese unmanned H-2 Transfer Vehicle-3 that was launched last week, is poised to arrive at the International Space Station today, Friday – just in time for the London Olympics. Apart from the usual cargo that it brings, the vehicle is also bringing on board a set of tiny amateur radio satellites that can write Morse code messages in the sky. If you think that’s way too unrealistic, Japan’s Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT) has a name for the cubesats – FITSAT-1.

The Japanese researchers said that its FITSAT-1 will be used to write messages in the night sky using Morse code, helping researchers test optical communication techniques for satellites. FITSAT-1 is just under 3 pounds and it is outfitted with high power LEDs capable of producing extremely bright flashes. The signals from FITSAT-1 will be received by a ground station at the Fukuoka Institute of Technology. For now, FITSAT-1 will remain on the ISS until September. FIT professor and project leader Takushi Tanaka says that the cubesat will likely be deployed on the 6th of September by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide using a robotic arm.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: CleanSpace One janitor satellite set to clean our atmosphere, Project Calliope wants to turn atmospheric measurements into music,

I would suppose that another hugger which will certainly make most grown men wet their pants would be the Facehugger from the Alien movie franchise, and here we are with a real life hugger – albeit not one that has acid blood, coming in the form of the Affetto infant robot. Hailing from Osaka University, the Affetto infant robot might seem cute at first, but it actually isn’t all that cut out to be – as those who check it out might get creeped out . Sure, Affetto is able to hug you like a real baby (although it will not smell like one), it now comes completely fitted with the relevant limbs, which makes it far more advanced than what it was 1.5 years ago, where back then it was nothing but a robotic face. Being fitted with new limbs, not to mention coming draped in a grey hoodie, among the improvements made to the Affetto infant robot include 20 pneumatic actuators which will help him move his arms, neck, and spine freely.

Right now, this project would fall under the umbrella of “cognitive developmental robotics,” which will involve the field of robotics to study human development. The main point would see the interplay between caregivers and developing babies. According to Osaka University laboratory’s site, Affetto can be seen “interacting with the environment and people nearby is an important factor in development. In order to create the same conditions as with a real child, we’re developing a child robot that’s the same size, with a soft body, rich facial expressions, and small hands.”

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Water strider-like robot jumps on water, Mantabot travels through the seas without much effort,