Aereo launched in New York in early 2012 to let people watch over-the-air TV on their gadgets, but a recent hiccup means denizens of the Big Apple can no longer sign up for the service. The culprit? Aereo says it all comes down to capacity, or lack …
The way VW’s gorgeous new Beetle Dune Concept turned heads at the 2014 Detroit Auto Show, you’d have thought a bikini-clad Kate Upton was on the reviewing stand. Unlike the pneumatic supermodel, however, a production version of Volkswagen’s reimagined Baja Bug may soon show up on the streets of your town.
The one thing you can say for certain about the LG G Flex is that it commands attention, mostly because it is curved. Beyond that, the questions start flooding in. Why is it curved? Why is its screen so mediocre? Why would you want to buy it? Unfortunately, after using the phone for several days, I still don’t have an answer.
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Google’s Senior Vice President of Chrome and Apps, Sundar Pichai, is the forerunner candidate for Microsoft’s open CEO position, according to sources who spoke to SiliconANGLE. The source is said … Continue reading
The story behind NASA’s brief embrace of extraterrestrial sherry is a curious one. In the early seventies, the agency’s focus was shifting from short, Moon-focused missions to possibility of longer-term inhabitation of space. A revamped menu was among the most pressing challenges: food on the Gemini and Apollo programs came in dehydrated cube form, or squeezed from a pouch, and was universally regarded as inedible.
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(Credit: N2A Cards)
Is your Nook tablet feeling a little long in the tooth? Before you ditch it in favor of something newer, consider your upgrade options.
Specifically, your OS upgrade options. It may surprise you to learn that almost any Barnes & Noble Nook tablet can run the latest version of the Android operating system, 4.4 KitKat.
That’s thanks to N2A Cards, which offers both downloadable and MicroSD versions of its plug-and-play Android deployment for Nook tablets. The company just announced the availability of KitKat for the Nook Color, Nook Tablet, Nook HD, and Nook HD+. (For the moment, competitors AndroidForNook and Root My Nook offer only 4.2 Jelly Bean.)
For those unfamiliar with it, N2A Cards provides a bootable microSD card (yours or theirs) containing Android. Barnes & Noble’s tablets are fairly unique in their ability to dual-boot this way, meaning your Nook OS (and any books or media you’ve purchased) remains intact if you decide to switch back to it later on.
The instant-download version (which requires you to supply your own memory card) costs $19.99, while preloaded cards start at $29.99. If you’re already an N2A customer, you can get the KitKat update for $9.99.
Of course, savvy users will rightly point out that it’s pos… [Read more]
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Participants in the Global Space Balloon Challenge will be tasked with building a high-altitude balloon that can reach heights of up to 100,000 feet.
(Credit: Screen shot by CNET)
Geeks of the world unite! And fly high, very high.
From April 18 through April 21, teams from around the globe will compete in the Global Space Balloon Challenge, an event aimed at seeing what’s possible when it comes to building high-altitude balloons.
Launched by Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan, the challenge was started “to encourage people of all ages to get their hands dirty building their own space hardware, and to promote the spirit of hardware hacking and international [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] collaboration.”
In a video announcing the challenge, would be participants are urged to take part with this inspiring call to action:
The premise is simple: Some clever ideas, a camera, some rope, a box, and a balloon. Through North America, Europe, Asia, the entire globe, your ideas and engineering potential will take flight. You’ll come up with novel ideas, [and] refine age-old ones to assemble your very own payload. You’ll rig up parachutes, use GPS, Google Maps, and wind pattern software. You’ll drive out to the middle of nowhere, fill up a balloon,… [Read more]
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Looking for a way to get through Friday? Here you go.
Facebook launched a news reader app called Paper. (Teens will love it.) And Google sold Motorola to Lenovo for $3 billion, which made earnings week interesting. And, in the land of startups, we explore a new Carbon 3D Printer and a Keurig Coffee machine. So you can print yourself a cup-holder, which will store your fresh cup of coffee, as you drive to work on this blessed Friday.
We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Romain Dillet.
The Superbowl is in two days, and the work week is almost over. We’re almost there.
We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.
Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS.
Subscribe in iTunes
Intro Music by Rick Barr.
3D printing can help you create prototypes or mockups quickly. Or should I say relatively quickly – it can take a 3D printer hours to print even moderately-sized objects. To speed things up, students from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute tested adding LEGO to their workflow.
Researchers Stefanie Mueller, Tobias Mohr, Kerstin Guenther, Johannes Frohnhofen and Patrick Baudisch call their project faBrickation. The idea is to print just the crucial parts of a prototype, then build the rest out of LEGO. To do that, they wrote a program called faBrickator, where they can open 3D models…
…and “Legofy” it at the press of a button.
Then they just mark the parts of the model that will be printed…
…and build the rest with LEGO using instructions generated by faBrickator.
They can also use faBrickator to go back to a 3D model, modify it and then print only the parts that were changed, once again saving time.
The group claims that on average, faBrickation lets them make prototypes nearly two and a half times faster than using 3D printing alone. I wonder if they can make a reverse faBrickation scanner, so laypeople can start making a “3d model” out of LEGO instead of a modeling software, scan that LEGO model then run the resulting model through faBrickation.
[via Hasso Plattner Institute via PSFK]
Richard Sherman
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