When a disaster strikes, it’s often difficult to get shelters up in time for displaced residents. Enter Concrete Canvas’s new Concrete Cloth, a durable waterproof building material made of cement sandwiched between fabric. The cloth, which won Material ConneXion’s Material of the Year 2009 award, can be molded into any shape when bonded with water — and it takes just two hours to set!
Read the rest of CONCRETE CLOTH: Flexible Material Makes Durable Disaster Shelters
Read the rest of this entry »
You’re probably paying good money for broadband, but you might not be seeing the high-speed numbers your ISP promised. How do you know if you’re getting what you’re paying for? In the first of a three-part series on getting the most out of your broadband connection, we show you how to tell.
Not everyone has a 4GB USB key or SD card just lying around, which was required to run Hexxeh’s first build of Chromium OS, and we’d say that 8GB keys are exponentially more rare, which is what Dell requires with its build of the Chrome OS open source variant. Well, you can cancel that Fry’s run, because Hexxeh is back with a Chrome OS Diet flavor, which cuts the fat and gets the OS onto a 1GB drive. It supposedly doesn’t cut anything features-wise, and actually improves WiFi support since it’s based on a newer build — check out that compatibility list source link for the full story on that.
Chrome OS ‘Diet’ version fits on a 1GB USB key, brings more WiFi support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
You might find this suprising, but the top social gaming companies on the iPhone are not the same ones you know of from Facebook and MySpace. Zynga, despite $54.2M in funding, has hardly made a dent on the iPhone. Neither has Playfish, which was recently bought for $300M. Playdom hasn’t done squat, either. Although “the big three” of social gaming are great at online games, they aren’t doing too well on the iPhone. For example, Zynga’s Mafia Wars game hardly hit the top 25 throughout its time on the App Store.
There were some interesting panel discussion today at the NOAH conference – a new event in London aimed at presented tech companies to the private equity and banking sector – but the plethora of suited and booted attendees were shocked out of their chairs a little when Klaus Hommels, (one of the first angel investors in Skype, QXL and XING and recently a venture partner with Balderton (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe) spoke his mind.
The panel he was on had been beating about the bush on investing in tech startups, until he broke into the discussion to make some salient points:
“Structurally we fucked it up. European tech companies would normally have been picked up by media companies in Europe but they are in such a bad state this is not possible. So before anyone puts money into new companies, we need to ask: who is going to by all the shit in our existing portfolios?!” (I think he might have meant to say ’stuff’, however…)
Have you ever felt guilty after watching a robot dance? Don’t worry, you will soon. Worse than that time you “accidentally” sat through four episodes of Sailor Moon. Worse than that time you watched the Helicopter Boyz video and then sent it to all your friends. Worse than that time you got a J-pop song stuck in your head and tried to hum it to Shazam so you could identify it and buy it on iTunes. So much worse. Video is after the break.
Continue reading Doka Harumi’s robot dance routine fills us with shame for humanity, but mostly Japan
After five million or so words, Cormac McCarthy bids farewell to his portable Olivetti.
Was Roger Avary, below, a screenwriter of “Pulp Fiction,” moved from a prison work furlough program to a county jail in California because he was tweeting about his prison experience? Depends on whom you ask. Mr. Avary, who shared an Academy Award in 1995 with Quentin Tarantino for “Pulp Fiction,” was sentenced in September to one year in prison after pleading guilty to charges of vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving. In October posts began appearing on Mr. Avary’s Twitter account in which he described his jail setting (“The building is an imposing example of the Brutalist architectural movement,” he wrote) and details of his furlough program. On Friday, The Ventura County Star reported, Mr. Avary was taken off the work furlough program, owing to what Capt. Ross Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department called a “security-related” issue. “I wouldn’t doubt that it had something to do with those tweets,” Captain Bonfiglio told The Star. But on Monday he told The Associated Press that Mr. Avary’s Twitter posts had not played a major role in Mr. Avary’s incarceration.
As the movie industry struggles to find its footing, the takeover of Universal Studios by Comcast may serve as a learning experience for everyone.
Eager to play with Google’s just-released Chrome OS but don’t want to waste your time if your hardware isn’t supported? This simple chart from Google helps you figure out whether or not your equipment can work with current Chrome OS builds.
Populated by developers who’ve played with Chrome OS and gotten it up and running on their systems, the chart specifies how (and if) features like Wi-Fi, trackpads, and suspend/resume work on each system. You can also read about any caveats or other comments from the developers who’ve played canary-in-the-coalmine. Currently most of the hardware in the list is of the netbook variety, but it’s a good place to get started if you’re an early adopter but you don’t want to waste your time if your hardware’s not going to play nice.
Remember that Chrome OS is still extremely young and still rough around the edges, so unless, as Google puts it, you “aren’t afraid to take a screwdriver to [your] computer,” you’ll probably want to wait for Chrome OS to mature a little.
