Ordinarily we’d take one look at Moixa’s Sphere interactive display ball around this time of year and immediately dismiss it as an April Fools joke, but something tells us not even the most dedicated would-be pranksters take the time and expense to patent their little diversions. That said, we’re definitely not so sure this thing will make its planned 2010 ship date, since it’s just a render right now, but if it does, we’ll be first in line — a folding multitouch display with an always-on net connection and gyroscopic interface elements that can also be used folded flat sounds pretty amazing to us. We want to believe.
Read – Sphere site Read – Sphere patent
Read the rest of this entry »
Panasonic’s HD Micro Four Thirds shooter honestly can’t arrive soon enough, with its continual autofocus while shooting, on-the-fly aperture switching and all around loveliness. Thus, it’s with a heavy heart that we present to you the following tidbit: according to Doug Borbath, a senior project manager at Panasonic Canada, the DMC-GH1 won’t ship to North America until “late May,” though the pricing remains pretty much in line with what we’ve been hearing. It’ll sticker at $1,899CDN, which equates to just over $1,500 here in the United States. That price does include the pretty astounding 14-140mm (28-280mm in Four Thirds terminology) stock lens, though it doesn’t include the optional external microphone ($200; available “around the same time”) nor the super wide angle Lumix G Vario 7-14mm/f4.0 ASPH (price unknown; available at GH1 launch). Check the read link for some seriously enviable footage.
[Thanks, Jive] Read the rest of this entry »
The Conficker worm has infected millions of Windows computers—and is set to be unleashed on April 1st, 2009. Here's what you need to know to keep yourself safe.
Microsoft released an update in October to resolve a critical security hole in the Windows “Server” service. Since people aren’t as diligent about patching as they should be, hackers created a new worm that spread like wildfire, leaving systems completely under their control. Security researchers have determined that the virus is expected to go "live" on April 1st, 2009, causing your computer to do bad things—but since the worm uses a P2P protocol it's nearly impossible to identify the source.
According to several readers and our very own Lifehacker Gmail account, Google has finally started a wide rollout of themes in Gmail for Google Apps—meaning all of the very cool Gmail new themes are now an option for Google Apps users.
If themes are enabled on your Google Apps Gmail account, just click through to Settings and then find the Themes link on the far right of the Settings page. Alternately, just copy and paste the following URL, replacing lifehacker.com with your domain:
lifehacker.com
https://mail.google.com/a/lifehacker.com/#settings/themes
Turn a boring old spreadsheet into an interactive web-based map, timeline, or table with some simple HTML using the free, open source Exhibit project.
Exhibit takes data sets up to about 500 rows, plots locations on a Google Map, dates on an interactive timeline, and displays images and links in a tabular or thumbnail view. The viewer can sort, search, and filter data in any Exhibit view without reloading the page. You can make Exhibit do all this with a single HTML file and a spreadsheet–no hardcore programming required.
To try it out, yesterday I threw together my first Exhibit visualization called Broadway Shows I’ve Seen in the Past 17 Years. Why? Well, I’m looking to get rid of the stack of Playbills gathering on my shelf, but I want to remember what shows I saw and when. So I photographed each Playbill cover (see this Flickr set), entered information about each show into this Google spreadsheet, and plugged the two into Exhibit using HTML and CSS ripped off from other Exhibit examples. Play with it for yourself here, or take a tour of of what it produced below.
Unless you’ve got an Apple TV or computer next to your TV, your purchased iTunes movies are limited to your monitor. Wired details how to burn those movies to a DVD for the bigscreen experience.
Their method involves removing the DRM copy protection and burning the resulting file to a DVD using a couple of shareware applications, namely Tunebite for DRM removal and Aimersoft DVD Creator to burn the DVD. We’re not keen on the cost of the software (Tunebite does offer a free trial), but if it’s something you’ve been dying to do, Wired’s guide could do the trick. Still, the DVD burning software they highlight doesn’t appear to do anything you can’t get from a free alternative, so you could probably save yourself $35 using something like previously mentioned DVD Flick to burn your DVDs after removing the DRM.
If you’ve ever been down this road and have your own methods, let’s hear how you burned your iTunes purchase to a DVD in the comments.
The rest of the mobile industry might be gearing up for CTIA to start, but Apple’s phone elves are toiling away — iPhone OS 3.0 beta 2′s just been released to developers, along with the go-ahead to start developing for push notifications. Thankfully, beta 2 also apparently includes a number of stability and performance enhancements, which will hopefully make our tester phone tolerable again — we’ve been restarting beta 1 basically every day since we sacrificed it to the hands-on gods. Devs and beta testers know what to do to snag the upgrade, let us know how it goes!
Filed under: Cellphones
Mind mapping is in an increasingly popular way to brainstorm, and last week we asked you to share your favorite mind mapping applications and rounded up the top five. The votes have been tallied and the champion in the mind mapping face off is FreeMind.
FreeMind is both open-source and implemented in Java, making it about as cross-platform friendly as it comes. Following FreeMind is MindManager—nowhere near free at $349 but packed with features aimed at corporate users. Finally, the third place slot goes to XMind, notable for being free, portable, cross-platform, and loaded with a surprisingly polished interface for a freeware application. For more information on the winners and the rest of the Hive Five nominees, check out the original post here.
NextStart is the latest Y Combinator-esque startup incubator to emerge to support young entrepreneurs and their ideas. The Greenville, South Carolina-based organization is offering a summer immersion entrepreneur development program to attract promising entrepreneurs to the Carolina region.
The program works similarly to other incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars in providing seed money, VC connections, and mentoring to company founders to develop their ideas, incorporate their companies, and then help find funding for their startups. NextStart will give startups $5,000 to $10,000 in return for “founders stock” of 5 to 10 percent. The twelve week program will run during the summer in Greenville and will give entrepreneurs office space, internet access and other professional services. Startup teams will be immersed in a business planning program, FastTrac by the Kauffman Foundation, to develop a solid business plan and will also work with the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Clemson University.
NextStart joins a constantly growing number of programs trying to appeal to young entrepreneurs. Aside from Y Combinator, which pioneered the idea, other incubators include TechStars (Boulder and now Boston), LaunchBox Digital (Washington, D.C.), DreamIT Ventures (Philadelphia), and Shotput Ventures (Atlanta), and Capital Factory (Austin).
