Archive for December, 2011

Hey, we know what you’re thinking: what’s up with the Vergecasters? Are they okay? Did they eat too much over the holidays and die? Don’t worry.

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The Vergecast returns, Monday, January 2nd

If you’re in the market for a discounted iPhone 4S on AT&T here’s your chance to get one. But you have move fast. Today only, Radio Shack is offering the 16GB iPhone 4S (in black and white) for $149.99 when you sign a new contract. Sadly though, Verizon and Sprint customers are left out of this deal, as are 32GB and 64GB models on AT&T. Continue reading…

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Good Deal: AT&T 16GB iPhone 4S for $149.99 at Radio Shack today only

If you’re going to rock out , you might as well do so with a video game console from the ’70s as the core of your guitar. In fact, this is precisely what modder cTrix has done with his gATARI2600. In his configuration, he’s able to write and play new music through an Atari 2600 by using an EPROM programmer (a software application he wrote) and daughterboards to feed the new music back through the instrument. The gATARI also features equalizer and flange pedals, a track selector, and whammy bars that allow the player to switch tracks and make changes on the fly. No details have been posted as to how to make your own just yet, but click past the break to watch cTrix jam both thoroughly and effectively at Blip Fest 2011 in Japan

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cTrix forges Atari 2600 and guitar together, mesmerizes nerds (video)

PolygamousRanchKid writes “Ford says its new Fusion, which will debut at the North American International Auto Show in a couple weeks, will be the first mainstream midsize sedan in North America to offer a lane departure system. Lane departure systems are aimed at warning drivers, especially drowsy ones, if their vehicles wander out of their lane. A digital camera mounted on the windshield ahead of the rear-view mirror keeps a watch. The system not only causes the steering wheel to vibrate if it senses an unintentional lane departure, it will also steer the car back into the right lane. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes occur every year as a result of drowsy drivers, leading to 1,500 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses.” I’d just like to know how hard the AI will fight if it misinterprets a driver’s intentional lane change

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Ford System Will Warn, Correct Lane-Drifting Drivers

It looks like SOPA has finally made it to the big time. Ron Paul — one of the many Republican contenders in the 2012 presidential election — blasted the proposed legislation during a talk on the campaign trail. It’s not clear if he fully understands the details of the bill based on his comments that it will “take over the internet” and “monitor everything we do,” but it’s more than clear that he opposes restrictive online legislation, and that’s a good thing. Check out the video below to see it for yourself, and keep following along with all the SOPA news in our ongoing StoryStream .

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Ron Paul blasts SOPA on the 2012 presidential campaign trail

An anonymous reader writes “I’m trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers. A few environmental considerations: They don’t always have live internet in the classroom, or I’d just run to Skype. I’m hoping to make it as much one-touch start/stop as possible to start recording, stop recording, and upload to a server. I’d like to believe others here have already done something similar, so if a package or process worked for you, that would be great to hear

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Best Software For Putting Lectures Online?

We’ve seen a few Steve Jobs dolls in our day, but this one is pretty awesome. And creepy — and we mean damn near Uncanny Valley -creepy. Being sold by an outfit called In Icons “to honor the American icon and great visionary Steve Jobs,” the 1:6 scale “action” figure features the dapper black turtleneck / blue jeans combo we’ve seen at many a keynote. The company wants you to take note of its “piercing eyes of soul” that will “always remind you to stay hungry, stay foolish and to follow your heart in the limited life,” which sounds like a lot to ask of something that will likely collect dust on a shelf somewhere until one of our younger relatives takes it outside to conduct experiments with a Swiss Army Knife and / or some M-80s, but… Continue reading…

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Steve Jobs action figure: less Silicon Valley, more Uncanny Valley

2011 has been a tremendous year for tech — Amazon launched a $200 Android tablet , AT&T and Verizon continued their LTE expansion, Apple killed off the Mac mini’s SuperDrive and Samsung introduced a well-received killer 5.3-inch smartphone . But tiny tech startups made their mark as well, proving that you don’t need an enormous R&D budget to spur innovation. Still, development isn’t free, and unless your social circle includes eager investors, seed money has been traditionally hard to come by.

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Insert Coin: A look back at ten top projects from 2011

smitty777 writes “Forbes is running an intriguing story on a new ‘Superphone’ under development by the folks at Microsoft. According to this leaked MS roadmap document, the plan is to build the Apollo-based phone in the 4th quarter of 2012. FTA: ‘In the end, however, none of this matters.

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Speculating On What a Microsoft Superphone Might Mean

Instapaper developer Marco Arment nails three companies — Apple, Google and Facebook — for spreading bullshit. “Everyone has their bullshit,” he writes. “You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.” Percolate’s Noah Brier, however, takes issue with one of Marco’s picks; namely, Facebook’s claim that “users want to interact with brands.” Brier believes that

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The truth is the best bullshit

Back in June, Google announced that it would be ‘retiring’ Health effective January 1, 2012. Now, everything appears to be on-track for the shutdown, with Google sending out a final reminder to Health customers earlier today. You have until the stroke of midnight to access the service or port your data to a competitor — after which point you’ll no longer be able to view information saved to your account, though it’ll remain available to download in .zip format for another year. Want to know more?

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Google Health’s New Year’s Resolution is to cease to exist, countdown begins to save your data

jones_supa writes “Ville ‘viznut’ Heikkilä presents us with an interesting project. ‘As demonstrated by the video, IBNIZ (Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo) is a virtual machine and a programming language that generates video and audio from very short strings of code. Technically, it is a two-stack machine somewhat similar to Forth, but with the major exception that the stack is cyclical and also used at an output buffer.’ The main goal of IBNIZ is to provide a new platform for the demoscene. Something that would have the potential to displace MS-DOS as the primary platform for sub-256-byte productions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Vision and Sound From the Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo

It had already been posited by security experts back in October that one of this year’s more complex computer viruses — Duqu — was based on the same source code as last year’s infamous (and highly sophisticated) Stuxnet worm designed to harm Siemens industrial controllers. Now, antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab is going one step further, saying that it has identified at least three other programs that appear to be using the same code base. The company has grouped all five pieces of malware into what it’s calling the “Tilded” platform, so called because the developers were fond of using “~d” as filename prefixes. In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to call Tilded a full-fledged virus development platform unto itself: Kaspersky’s director of… Continue reading…

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Stuxnet and Duqu are members of larger malware family, Kaspersky says

By now we’re sure you’re aware that SOPA is more than just a tomato-based noodle soup. The Stop Online Piracy Act’s been stirring controversy with its intentions, and it’ll most likely continue in this path until we hear a final decision . Go Daddy wasn’t shy — before retracting — about its support for the bill, and things have changed drastically since we first heard some of the ” top dogs ” express their feelings. But who else is behind it, who’s got your back, and who’s had a change of heart?

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SOPA: Who’s in and who’s out?

Every year, Ian takes to the streets of London early on Christmas Morning to photograph the normally thronged streets in their state of eerie emptiness. The project was inspired by the scenes of empty London in the film 28 Days Later. He’s posted his third set, from this year’s Christmas. Photos of an Empty London

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London, eerily empty on Christmas morning

Those kind folk at Skype already served up plenty of glorious WiFi waves across US airports this Christmas, and now it’s New York City’s turn. From noon on the 31st until January 1st, if you spy a “Skype WiFi” network, those tasty bytes are yours for the taking. The VoIP don has teamed up with WiFi provider Towerstream for the give-away, and recommends you load-up on the latest version of its famous software to make sure you don’t miss out. If you pack an iDevice, then it’s the Skype WiFi app you’ll be wanting updated in the lead up to midnight. Just make sure you don’t miss that kiss, just for a festive freebie

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Skype gifts NYC with NYE WiFi, so you can miss the ball drop while Skyping the ball drop

EA and Nintendo and Sony’s electronics divisions have renounced their support of the disastrous Stop Online Piracy Act, but their industry association, the Entertainment Software Alliance, still supports it. However, all three companies are members of the Entertainment Software Association, a group that still remains aligned to SOPA. Although their individual express support of the

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EA, Sony, Nintendo pull support from SOPA (but their industry association still supports it)

Any time a new console is released, a global countdown begins until the first intrepid hacker breaks its armor and gains control over its internal hardware and features. The race is now on to crack the recently-released PlayStation Vita , and at least one hacker has shown that code can be executed on the handheld by printing “hello world” and displaying some festive lights on the screen — but that doesn’t mean the Vita has been compromised. That’s because these exploits aren’t actually accessing the Vita’s native hardware, but rather running inside the PSP emulator that allows users to play downloadable PSP games. It’s hard to say if there’s any way to break through the walls of that sandbox to get at the Vita from within. Still, the…

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PlayStation Vita hack prints ‘hello world’ via PSP emulator

The ACLU of Massachusetts is representing an anonymous Twitter user who has been targetted by an Assistant DA who is trying to build a case related to Occupy Boston; the court and the ADA have sealed the proceedings, so no one — not even some of the ACLU staff working on the case — is

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ACLU fights Kafkaesque secret Occupy Boston Twitter subpoena

While Anonymous might the most auspicious organization right now channeling “hacker” efforts, the annual Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin has been doing it before many members of Anonymous were born. CCC’s latest initiative is its most audacious yet, however: creating a global satellite network to build a legislation-proof “free” internet, and eventually putting a man on the moon. As wild as it sounds, CCC actually has a plan to get started. The easiest way for an amateur to get something into space is a balloon, but the devices are often hard to track. CCC’s Hackerspace Global Grid will create a technology and network for tracking those satellites from the ground.

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CCC’s Hackerspace Global Grid plans to put hacker satellites in space

Here’s a gallery of advertisements from the Bohn Aluminium and Brass Corporation, illustrated in super-modernist, streamlined style by Arthur Radebaugh. They run the gamut from future farms to future vehicles to exploded engine diagrams, with monorails and super-jumbos and transparent curvy refrigerators for all. They’re full of wartime pluck, with ad copy like, “When peace

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Bohn Aluminum’s hypermodernist futuristic wartime ads

This week may not have been incredibly packed with news in the mobile world, but it was still easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here’s some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of December 26, 2011: Continue reading Mobile Miscellany: week of December 26, 2011 Mobile Miscellany: week of December 26, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |   |  Email this  |  Comments

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Mobile Miscellany: week of December 26, 2011

Sega is rounding off the year by giving fans something to look forward to in 2012, announcing Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II for release sometime next year. The teaser is light on information, but confirms that long-term partner Tails will return alongside antagonist Metal Sonic. The sequel to 2010′s 2D Sonic revival is coming to PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, iOS, Windows Phone, and Android, with the latter version having enhancements baked in for Tegra 3 devices like the Asus Transformer Prime . If you noticed something missing from the list of platforms, you’re not alone — despite Episode I hitting the Wii, Nintendo fans seem to be out of luck this time.

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Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II: the saga continues on all but Wii

Ever wanted to run third-party software on your 2nd generation Apple TV ? You can, but the current tethered jailbreak process means you have to rehack the device if it’s rebooted or powered off. Thankfully, jailbreak tool Seas0npass has been updated (credits to @pod2g and @NitoTV) to perform an un tethered jailbreak on Apple’s recently released 4.4.4 firmware . If you have an Apple TV and want to install things like a weather widget, RSS feed and a Last.FM plugin, you can download the Seas0npass jailbreak and view the how-to instructions at the source links below. On a related note, developers are working to bring a much more intriguing category of software to your Apple TV — iOS apps

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Apple TV 4.4.4 firmware gets untethered jailbreak, devs close to porting iOS apps

There are plenty of tools and apps out there that automate the essential computing tasks that face us every day. Some are time consuming others are simply monotonous — but they must be done. Dropbox Automator combines time-saving task mastery with perhaps our favorite cloud storage solution. The service watches a designated folder for uploads, when a new file is added an action is triggered — everything from converting documents, to resizing an image or tweeting a link. And that’s just scratching the surface

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Dropbox Automator triggers monotonous tasks with the uploading of a file