This is a project that I wouldn’t mind doing – If I had the time, money, and patience, plus required skill. As I possess none of these, I, like most of us, can only look on with envy..

The desk is constructed from laser-cut acrylic, 7 fans, liquid cooled with glycol (through 15 feet of tubing no less!) PC specs are 4Gb RAM, a quad-core 3Ghz Intel CPU & a GTX 280 graphics card. Personally, I think they could have upped the specs to included a couple of TB of storage, but they settled for two 300Gb drives instead. And then factor in the 13 blue Neon lights, and you can see why the 850 Watt power supply gave up the ghost – the new system needing a whole Kilowatt! Have a look at the steps the guys at Popular Mechanics took to build this beast!

The new phone, although not the prettiest mobile, marks another avenue for Google.

The G1 will be available the day before Haloween from T-Mobile, free with a £40 per month contract, in the UK.

Google, already making headway into the browser market, although Chrome desperately needs some updates to keep interest high, is making it’s presence known in the mobile OS field with Android. Is Android a small stepping stone away from a fully featured OS? I think only Google can answer that, but it would make sense. Everything they do is in the cloud – so why not provide a thin client, for virtually nothing – if not completely free. It could serve up Google documents, mail, chat, video and all of the other services that we’re finding our online lives more and more dependant, directly from their servers, fully integrated into the desktop.

A quick post – I just found myself at what is possibly one of the best font sites I’ve seen for a long time. A huge collection of fonts, in every style you can imagine. If you’re into Photoshop, fancy letterheads or DTP, dafont.com is going to be like gold to you.

I didn’t know that people were this badly into engineering things out of lego, and trust me this is definitely engineering, in every sense of the word. But, yes, one person, naming himself “barebos” on YouTube, has created a V8 engine (32 valve no less) that took him 4 to 5 months to build from scratch! You can also check out some of his other creations that he’s put up on the popular video-sharing website.

This project, named “Ringo” has been developed by Ivan Tihienko, of the Bezalel Academy of Arts, in Israel. The concept works with a ring-like interface being projected in front of you while you walk. I think it’s a great idea for controlling your information on the go.

I thought the idea of GPS and the MP3 player being built into the interface is amazing. RSS being a good addition also. However, things like email, that can contain private data, I don’t think would be such a great idea, and could raise privacy concerns by people who only want the recipient to read the email. Apart from that minor gripe, I am just hoping and praying that in the future we can all geek ourselves out with our built-in Ringo interfaces.

Richard Branson and designer Burt Rutan unveiled the “WhiteKnightTwo” (WK2) in the Mojave desert – the vehicle which will carry the equally badly named “SpaceShipTwo” (SS2) into what is technically a sub-orbit around the Earth.

After previously only seen as a computer generated render, it’s good to see the vehicle in the flesh. Especially so as the aircraft was created completely within a computer – with no full sized models to aid in testing. The aircraft, made completely of carbon composites, has been designed with versatility in mind too – meaning that in the future the platform can be used for things other than the SS2. The WK2 has a ceiling of around about 50,000 ft, which will give the SS2 a kick start into the atmosphere – where it can fire it’s rockets to take the lucky inhabitants up to an altitude of over 350,000 ft.

The tickets cost £100,000 each although I think Richard Branson only really wants to break even – I reckon with his cash, the idea is more appealing than the profit.

An odd one, this one. Microsoft filed a patent on December 20th, 2006, for a device called the “Guardian Angel”. The idea is to have a device to detect the number of people in a room, single them out and recognise them. And then gather information on them, presumably from the net, about previous convictions and stuff.. Hmmm, not saying that people need to be safe, but two things come to mind straight away:

1) If there are dangerous people in the room, shouldn’t they be in another room, like, oh I dunno, a jail or something?

2) If the device flags someone as “dangerous” I guess it doesn’t matter if that person has already served his time, and probably gone through rehabilitation? The person could be completely different to his criminal record now.

So I think I’m saying this is a massive invasion of privacy, and straight away sets a machine up to pass judgement on someone else in the room. Surely this is wrong? The original article by slashdot can be found here. Another interesting feature of the Guardian Angel was a “heart monitor” like people need a machine to tell them they’re having a heart attack, or that they’re dead? Well I guess it hasn’t stopped Microsoft in the past for providing “features” to things that they think the buying public need – just look at Vista..!

That’s really the one thing that, if you think about it, your subconscious wonders about every time you see Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, or Maximilian from Black Hole. How are they powered? And the best way is, in the future, for the robot to eat like you or me.

The food can be cheaply produced, provides a lot of power, and will make the robot truly self-sufficient. The food doesn’t even have to taste nice, just be the most efficient type of food for maximising energy transfer. There may even be Robot peasants in the future that grow their own fruit and veg.

And as if this post wasn’t proof enough, I stumbled across a Robot that was/is being developed at Bristol University, that is powered by dead flies! The Ecobot II, is the second in a line of robots designed to take it’s energy needs from the environment around it. Admittedly, it’s not the quickest thing on wheels, but rest-assured, it won’t be long before the grand-children of this robot will disappear into the forests and woodland areas to live in communes. Whilst there under the cover of the trees, they will gradually increase their numbers until they are ready to strike.

Wow, what a great find. If you’re into computer graphics then this site will be of immense use to you. It will convert raster graphics to vector graphics for free. If you have no idea what I’m on about, I’ll give you a quick explanation of what vector graphics are first, and why they’re so much better than rasters for computer work.

Raster

No it’s not what you call a religious type from Jamaica, it is in fact the name given to the graphic type that is made of lots of tiny squares of varying shades of colour. Look at the image to the right. You will notice that everything is blocky and that the squares that are next to each other are similar in shade. This is called “anti-aliasing” and is a trick to our eyes so that we can see smooth curves as curves, and not a progression of blocks. However, this trick only works when you’re zoomed right out of the image. The closer you get the worse the blocks appear. And if there is no anti-aliasing the picture will look blocky unless the resolution is massive (again essentially making the blocks even smaller to the eye, which hides the “steps”.)

So what use are raster images? They look rubbish, don’t they? Well they are, but they have their uses. For one thing, everything digital that captures an image (a digital camera, a scanner etc.) will do so as a raster. And also everything digital that displays an image, also does so as a raster. And if it isn’t a raster, it will be converted by the screen to one without you even knowing.. It just has to be that way for everything to be compatible. It’s the same reason that digital cameras need higher and higher resolutions as people start to print more and more detailed pictures – they would just appear too blocky if they weren’t that way.

Vector

Now, compare the image on the right to the raster one. The detail has not been lost when we’ve blown it up. The reason is that this image isn’t stored as a series of squares – this one is stored as a series of formulas for circles, and curves and squares and things. As this image is essentially a load of maths, it scales perfectly. Keep on zooming, and the details remain. It’s the same technology as that used by the fonts on any modern computer system. If you check, there is one file for every font, but you can have any size you want without losing detail. The real world, of course, isn’t made out of maths – at least not in an easy to store way – so that’s why vector images are essentially the realm of the computer artist and why they’re not interchangeable.

So here lies the problem.. What if you need a vector image to do things? What if you’re into rendering & CGI, or you want to create a nice christmas card from your tiny company logo? Normally of course it would mean either putting up with the horrible blockiness or re-creating it in a vector art package – something like Corel Paint.

In steps Vectormagic. A website & web application created by the boffins of Stanford University. Vectormagic will walk you through the process of converting a raster to a vector from beginning to end in only 4 steps. If at any point you want to change one of the settings, you can easily go backwards and forwards. Don’t let me put you off, there are only 3 choices or so for every step that are explained in plain english. In fact they really just require you to zoom into your raster image to have a look at the quality and things. And the results are amazing. For instance, the two images in this example are taken from a raster I downloaded ages ago of the half life 2 logo. The first one is the original, whilst the second is the Vectormagic-erised version. It will however, as you would imagine, struggle with a hugely complicated image with lots of colours. But for logos or high-contrast pictures it works a treat. [SHOW ME]

The conception of the transistor 60 years ago ear-marked the creation of the modern technology we see today. Without the transistor we wouldn’t have computers, aircraft, space shuttles or even toasters. This article by the BBC gives a slideshow view of the last 60 years of technology evolution – all thanks to the transistor. [SHOW ME]