Hasta La Gadget!

Observatories don’t just gaze into the endless starry abyss above our heads; sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes they shoot righteous 40-watt lasers into the great beyond too. Obviously it looks awesome, and this stellar timelapse showcases exactly how awesome. (Spoilers: very awesome.)

Read more…

If you’ve ever been in a grade school science class, you probably know that the electrolytes in potatoes generate a small amount of electricity when connected to zinc and copper electrodes. So is it possible that with enough potatoes wired together, you could provide enough energy to power your entire house?

Well, the guys over at Movoto don’t know the scientific answer, but at least they’ve done the math for us and put together this handy calculator which figures out how many spuds it would take to power your house, based on the average current produced by a single (boiled) potato, the square footage of your home, and how long you’d need the power:

I live in a pretty big house, so I’ll need about 10,000 potatoes, at a cost of over $3000 to power my house for one day. Guess that’s not particularly cost-effective, since my current electric bill works out to be about 5 bucks a day. In fact, powering most homes with potatoes for a year would cost more money than double the value of the home itself.

On the plus side, you’d never run out of mashed potatoes.

[via Movoto]

Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you’ll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.

Lost to the Ages
by Emily Yoshida, …

This article was written on May 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

Adobe has announced that the first Beta of Flash Player 10 is now available for everyone to download. It comes with al kinds of really nice features and improvements, but the best thing that we’ll probably see come out of this is the newly available 3D effects. One example that they gave of where this could be useful is taking 2D images and arranging them in a rotating 3D carousel similar to that seen to the right. Making your own Cover Flow clone wouldn’t take too long either then.

Concerned about performance? According to Adobe they are pushing some of the graphical processing onto the user’s video card so that the processor can be used for rendering special effects:

One of the best things about the creative features now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is that they won’t slow down performance. With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more – such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic.

Here’s a list of some other notable new features in Flash Player 10 Beta:

• 3D Effects – Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
• Custom Filters and Effects – Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
• Advanced Text Layout – A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
• Enhanced Drawing API – Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
• Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

It will probably be a little while before we start to see developers making use of the new technology offered in Flash Player 10, but once a majority of users have upgraded the developers will be all over this like a kid in a candy store. 😉

Get Adobe Flash Player 10
Adobe Flash Player 10 Release Notes

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Attention, Mac people who just bought or are about to receive a new iPhone. If your old iPhone is still fairly new, you don’t have any kids yammering for an iPod Touch (that you want to give them), and you have no other reason to keep it, you should probably sell it.

Read more…