Too busy to watch Steve Jobs saunter through his keynote speech for an hour and a half? …there were only 4 topics in his address, and that works out to leisurely 22.5 minutes each! Mahalo & the winsome Veronica Belmont and their awesome new video compression algorithm come to the rescue with a 60 second [...]

“Just a few instances where having the World’s Thinnest Notebook could save the day”.
The Joy of Tech

Most projectors are kind of lame & could be viewed as aiding and abetting ‘death by powerpoint’. We do our best to ignore them, but the Microvision Show, shown at CES 2008, seems interesting. The Show Pico Projector is a hand-held, battery powered, RGB laser projector capable of throwing a 848×480 image onto a surface [...]

The next-generation high-definition optical disk format wars used to be all about Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, and the benefits & features of each opposing camp. Commentators would point to the specifications for Blu-ray and compare and contrast them to those for HD DVD. Many felt that the two rival formats were reasonably closely matched…with HD [...]

Disregarding the Holloman High-Speed Test Track (HHSTT) and the Mach 8.5 that it achieves, the fastest thing ever to move on planet earth was a jet-engined car called the Thrust SSC.
On Oct 15 1997 in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, driver Andy Green ignited the afterburners on his Thrust SSC and the car went supersonic, [...]

The Wallpaper Design Awards for 2008 were announced a few days ago. The striking Ring House located in the town of Karuizawa, Japan won in the Best New Private House category.
Best new private house - Wallpaper, 10 January 2008

The MEMS 2008 conference just ended. It was held in Tucson this year and featured presentations and exhibits about all things to do with Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, which for some reason is usually acronymized as MEMS.These are the folks who build tiny things like strain guages for dragonfly wings & 8mm high joysticks and [...]

The New Yorker revisits the limits of size in an article about Google. Author Ken Auletta describes some of challenges faced by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in expanding out of Google’s core search business. Fear and loathing on the part of Google’s competitors and allies alike have created a kind of informal [...]

It’s almost impossible to shed any light on ajayanite, because virtually none of it comes back. The new material is so dark, it’s the Goth of the material sciences world. Inventor Pulickel M. Ajayan of Rice University says that only 0.045% of the light shone on it, makes it back alive, making it a [...]

The Casio EXILIM Pro EX-F1 was introduced at CES 2008, and at an amazing frame rate of 1200 frames per second, it seems to qualify as the world’s fastest camera. The official description reads as “the world’s fastest burst shooting digital camera”. Specs are available at this link. $1K.
Good for shooting 336×96 slow-mo [...]