Hasta La Gadget!

It’s always been possible to run webOS on a PC using the emulator built into Palm’s SDK, but it turns out that the OS image used for the emulator can actually be installed on an IDE hard drive and booted from — which is exactly what one enterprising member of the PreCentral forums did with his Dell C600 laptop. It’s not too surprising webOS can do this, since it’s built on Linux, but don’t get too excited yet; the OS runs in a funky aspect ratio in a small portion of the screen and the lack of a touchscreen means you’re stuck using the keyboard to navigate. Still, it’s hard not to watch this without visions of webOS running on all manner of HP hardware in the very near future — a tablet, perhaps? Video after the break.

Continue reading webOS booted up on a PC, just for kicks (video)

webOS booted up on a PC, just for kicks (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 May 2010 23:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s rush hour, and you’re headed due West on your evening commute — the sun burning holes in your eyes. You could flip down a window visor, trading your field of view for visibility. Or, with a prototype shown off at Intel’s 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair, you could simply let the windshield darken on its own. Two San Diego students (both accustomed to copious amounts of sunshine) rigged a Toyota Prius to do just that by stringing up electrochromic panels, which dim when voltage is applied. The trick is figuring out when and where to apply it, because when the sun is shining the panels themselves all receive the same amount of light. So instead of gauging it at the glass, Aaron Schild and Rafael Cosman found that an ultrasonic range finder could track the driver’s position while a VGA webcam measured the light coming through, and darken the sections liable to cause the most eyestrain. We saw a prototype in person, and it most certainly works… albeit slowly. If you’re rearing to roll your own, it seems raw materials are reasonably affordable — Schild told us electrochromic segments cost $0.25 per square inch — but you may not need to DIY. Having won $4,000 in prize money at the Fair, the teens say they intend to commercialize the technology, and envision it natively embedded in window glass in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping GM gives them a call. See pics of the Prius below, or check out a video demo of their prototype right after the break.

Continue reading Auto-dimming electrochromic panels reduce glare when driving (video)

Auto-dimming electrochromic panels reduce glare when driving (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 May 2010 12:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint and Verizon may have shunned the Nexus One, but that doesn’t mean the handsets can’t be put to good use: these Android-controlled, Arduino-powered Cellbots now feature the one true Googlephone as the CPU. At Intel’s 2010 International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, we got our hot little hands on the DIY truckbots for the first time, and found to our surprise they’d been imbued with accelerometer-based motion control. Grabbing a Nexus One off a nearby table, we simply tilted the handset forward, back, left and right to make the Cellbot wheel about accordingly, bumping playfully into neighbors and streaming live video the whole time. We were told the first handset wirelessly relayed instructions to the second using Google Chat, after which point a Python script determined the bot’s compass facing and activated Arduino-rigged motors via Bluetooth, but the real takeaway here is that robots never fail to amuse. Watch our phone-skewing, bot-driving antics in a video after the break, and see what we mean.

Continue reading Cellbots get Nexus One upgrade, ad-hoc motion control (video)

Cellbots get Nexus One upgrade, ad-hoc motion control (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 May 2010 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hacking your netbook to run OS X? That’s so 2008. Modding your iPhone to make it run Android? Now you’re talking.

PCWorld’s David Wang has been documenting his progress porting the full Android OS onto an iPhone 3G. With the Approid (OK, I just made that name up) he can now connect to Wi-Fi, browse the web and send and receive SMS texts. He can also run Android Market apps, as long as they don’t require audio support. After Wang gets audio support up and running, he plans to post the binaries and instructions for anyone to turn their iPhones into Appdroids.

The point? Maybe there isn’t one, other than simply the joy of accomplishing a difficult technical hack. Indeed, the iPhone isn’t the only phone being hacked this way. Recently, Wired.com reported on DIYers modding Windows Mobile handsets to run Android. Connor Roberts, a software engineer, posted a step-by-step tutorial on running the Android OS on the HTC Touch. According to people who have run the mod, the process was extremely easy.

Now that the computer category is blending in with mobile, with ever-more-powerful processors and operating systems, we’ll likely see modders and DIY types focusing their attention on smartphones and tablets. This would be a logical trend succeeding the Hackintosh era. In past years, many curious DIYers, including Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel and yours truly, have experimented with installing the Mac OS on non-Apple PCs. Perhaps at some point we’ll see someone cram the iPhone OS onto a different piece of hardware, such as the Nexus One.

See Also:

• DIYers Hack Windows Mobile Phones to Run Android
• Six Months With a Hackintosh Netbook: It Ain’t Pretty
• Eight Months with a Hackintosh Netbook. Conclusion: Fantastic …
• Hackintosh With Genuine Glowing Apple Logo
• OS Xbox Pro: The Ultimate Hackintosh?
• All Sound Finally Working on Wind Hackintosh

This article was written on February 24, 2009 by CyberNet.

Last week Hulu announced that they were going to be blocking access for Boxee and TV.com because of pressure from content providers. This obviously makes sense because Hulu still looks as though they are having a hard time capitalizing on advertisements when being compared to what they’re able to sell on TV. So it should come as no surprise that they don’t want online viewing directly competing with their broadcast television, and when users are given the choice between the two they may lean towards the online viewing since there are less commercials.

I thought Hulu handled themselves as good as they could given the situation. A lot of companies would have probably just blocked Boxee without ever saying a word, and yet Hulu is openly allowing comments on their blog regarding the news. For that they do deserve credit.

The community, however, has channeled their negative energy and turned it into something good. Lifehacker has a step-by-step guide of what you need to do in order to get Hulu working again on Boxee. It will take a little bit of work to get it all up and running, but I’m sure it will be worth it for those users who used Boxee primarily for the Hulu support.

It will be interesting to see how things end up playing out now. Will Hulu ever unblock Boxee? Are other content providers going to follow down the same path?

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