No wonder Tony Stark managed to do an arc reactor in a desert cave. According to this tutorial, you really only need some LEDs, a 9-volt battery, plywood, 22 AWG gauge copper wire, assorted resistors, and a substance called polymorph—which can be made into any shape—to create your very own virtually-unlimited power source. Or look like the geekiest homeless person at any costume celebration. The mask is even superior.

Unfortunately, it’s just papier-mâché with a great finish. What this guy fails to realize is that being Tony Stark isn’t a matter of arc reactors and metal suits. Tony Stark is a say of mind. One that requires cocktails—and yes, at last it’s Friday. [Instructables and Instructables via Hack’n Mod]

Via [gizmodo]

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Over at Walt Mossberg’s D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7. The short version? Windows 7 looks like Vista with some new Multi touch clothes. The long…

Over at Walt Mossberg’s D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7. The short version? Windows 7 looks like Vista with some new Multi touch clothes. The long version? There really isn’t one.

If you watch the video, which contains nearly all of the “new” features demonstrated at D, you’ll be forgiven your feelings of déjà vu. In fact, it seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The screen used for the demo is made by Tyco Electronics, whose Elo TouchSystems are already found in kiosk hardware.

The pinch-to-zoom feature makes it in, as does a Cover Flow style touch-to-flip, seen here used to display information written on the back of a photograph. Google also seems to have been a muse. The mapping application comes on like a cross between Google Earth and the Maps application for the iPhone, with added touch-screen goodness. Even the little pushpins look familiar. The touch screen piano, too, is old hat if you’ve a Jailbroken iPhone.

In fact, the most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it’s the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu. A pie menu is a circular pop-up menu which appears wherever your cursor (or finger) may be. It lays out the options into radial slices, making it, according to Fitts’ Law, much faster to navigate. Because the positions of the options don’t change, it is also possible to commit them to muscle memory. In the case of Windows 7, pie menus might also relieve some of the strain of holding your arms out straight in front of you all day long.

To be fair, Microsoft is trying not to give too much away. After the Vista debacle, which saw the operating system slough features like a Persian cat molts fur, Microsoft plans to keep things a tiny quieter. Chris Flores at the Windows Vista blog:

We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action. As a result, we have the ability to significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes.

Translation: If nobody knows what to anticipate, nobody will be disappointed. A few things we do know. Windows 7 will not, as has as been speculated, throw out the old OS kernel to begin anew, which is what Apple did when it started over with Mac OS X. Instead it will, according to Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, be “an evolution” of the Vista underpinnings. Supposedly drivers will work just as well as they do in Vista (hardly a great promise). Sinofsky also gives us a launch date, even though it is somewhat cryptic:

the next release of Windows, Windows 7, is about three years after the general availability of Windows Vista.

So, an interesting glimpse at the new Windows, but hardly a window onto its future. We haver ragged the company a little for borrowing others’ ideas, but to be honest, where else could it go? It’s much superior to demo some eye candy that could already easily run on Vista than it is to make promises of, state, a revolutionary file system which might eventaully be dropped. We’re looking at you, Win FS.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer and Windows 7 Preview [All Things D]

Windows chief talks ‘7′ [CNET]

Via [wired.com]

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.Mac Getting a New Name? [Apple]

Aside from the obvious 3G iPhone rumor floating around this year’s WWDC, the other, quieter rumor has been that Apple will be revamping .Mac in a major way. Now one code enthusiast thinks he’s found some evidence in a pile of 10.5.3 strings that points to a name change (which we think points to a revamp). He explains:

Nearly everywhere “.Mac” has been replaced with %@, which means that the name of Apple’s on the web service will be inserted programmatically by applications.

You can spot the %@ in places like Apple’s mail client and iCal—you know, spots that would reference .Mac.

Here’s hoping that our assumptions are right and Apple is just using “%@” as filler. Because typing “the service formerly known as .Mac” would be a bitch. [Coding Robots via TUAW]

UPDATE: AppleInsider reports that the new brand may be “Mobile Me.”

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A few days ago, a story about an “artist” (advertising student) using DHL to create the biggest GPS drawing in the world surfaced and, like most cool stories, it turned out to be a complete fake. However, the concept itself was fantastic—and the good news is that there’s a guy out there named Antti Laitinen who is the real deal.

Laitinen has been drawing his face across maps of various European forests and cities for some time now, and despite the fact that the results look like something a drunk guy would draw using a pen tucked between his buttcheeks, we still have to give him credit for being authentic. And if there is any doubt about its authenticity—take a look at that photo one more time. And if that still isn’t enough, he also provided details on his GPS recorder and how the project was done. Another artist named Esther Polak has also been creating GPS art since 2002—although here work is more abstract. [Antti Laitinen and Esther Polak via Wired]

Via [gizmodo]

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Apple has added the usual lineup of Television shows to the French iTunes Store today: Desperate Housewives, Lost and Bob L’eponge. The French store also adopts the variable episode pricing which debuted along with HBO at the US store two…

Apple has added the usual lineup of TV shows to the French iTunes Store today: Desperate Housewives, Lost and Bob L’eponge.

The French store also adopts the variable episode pricing which debuted along with HBO at the US store two weeks ago. Episode will cost either €1.49 ($2.33), €1.99 ($3.11) or €2.49 ($3.89). There are also some freebie first episodes for a couple of weird looking cartoons: Kid Paddle (which might or might not be some kind of child punishment device) and Spirou & Fantasio.

Product page [iTunes]

Via [wired.com]

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Valve’s Steam Cloud Brings Cloud Computing to Gaming Masses [Steam]

In the next update to Valve’s Steam client, which distributes and manages Personal computer games, and is probably the best digital distribution setup around (other software companies wish they had a setup half as good), Valve will be throwing cloud computing into the mix. Called Steam Cloud, the update will let you store profiles, keybindings and all of your save games on the web, in addition to social networking features like calendars and stuff. The cloud storage is free. Why is this a massive deal?

A game company is taking the lead with two very hyped developments in how we consume software—digital distribution and cloud computing. Steam was already groundbreaking in the way it eliminated physical media from the large software equation on a mass level, and and Steam Cloud does something similar, bringing cloud computing to the masses. (It’s been so successful Steam sales are about to overtake box sales for Valve.)

Google does this to an extent with Google Docs but by integrating it with the Steam client, Valve takes it a tiny further—it doesn’t matter whose Personal computer you’re on, all of your stuff is there, waiting. Ironically, as much as Microsoft’s trying to fend off the cloud, Xbox Live presents a pretty awesome opportunity to dive into it and do something similar—they already do with respect to software distribution. [Maximum Computer]

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It’s thanks to our sponsors that we’re not on a crazy island with polar bears and commando dudes and Scottish guys that are actually kinda really awesome. Thanks AT&T, Arkadium, AutoTrader, Canon, Chevy Fuel Solutions, Cingular, Coors Light, Dash Express, Glyde, Jet Blue, Kicker, Lenovo, Linksys, MS Office Small Business, Netgear, Nikon Coolpix, Nokia, Nuance, Peer 1, Symantec, Toshiba, Toyota, True Blood, Unscrew America, Windows Live Search, and Zune.

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VIA Nano Processor Announced, Prepare Ultraportable for Ludicrous Speed
Last January we saw tech conglomerate VIA announce its line of Isaiah processors. These clever chips were designed to revolutionize mobile computing through a mix of lightning fast computing speeds and low power consumption. Today it has announced a new…

Last January we saw tech conglomerate VIA announce its line of Isaiah processors. These clever chips were designed to revolutionize mobile computing through a mix of lightning fast computing speeds and low power consumption.

This day it has announced a new processor family and dubbed it Nano. Guess what kind of computers the processors are designed for? The very first 64-bit superscalars and speculative out-of-order processors ever made by the Bejing Taipei based company should provide owners of ultraportables some insane boosts in performance and function.

Now you’re probably wondering why you should care.

Envision now if you would, an utraportable personal like state, the Asus Eee PC. Small computer, great cost, performs reasonably well … for something of that size. Now imagine the same personal with VIA’s Nano processor. Now the computer is running Photoshop without a hiccup. Now the personal is playing Blu-ray movies without a snag. Now the personal is running Crysis at a frame rate that’s actually playable.

The new Nano processors will run up to four times faster yet consume the same amount of power as the Isaiah chipsets VIA currently offers. The Lab can’t wait to get ahold of a super small lappy running one of these processors inside. Imagine, fragging fools in Crysis on a new OLPC. Ah, the dreams of geeks.

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Apparently, a video showing real, live space aliens will be shown to the media on Friday by completely not-crazy Jeff Peckman. The Denver resident is pushing to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to deal with interacting with the interstellar visitors that he claims are all over the place. Think the video might be a fake? You wish! It was totally verified by an instructor at the Colorado Film School, an institution that’s apparently the expert in videos of aliens.

The video shows “an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera.” That all sounds well and good to me, but I wonder just how convincing any video can be in today and age. When an amateur special effects creator can make an incredibly convincing UFO video in his spare time, I highly doubt that some fuzzy night vision footage of an alien peeking in someone’s bedroom window is going to win over skeptics.

Also, just look at Peckman’s eyes! If those aren’t crazy eyes, I don’t know what are. Those eyes alone are enough to convince me that he’s full of it and his video is a fake. [Rocky Mountain News]

Via [gizmodo]

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SanDisk has unchained their new Extreme III PRO-HG Duo cards and they’re tearing ass all over the place with superfast 30MBps read and write transfer speeds. For those of you keeping track, SanDisk’s non-HG Extreme III’s can only muster 18MBps speeds. Naturally, the PRO-HG will be aimed squarely at users with high end cameras and camcorders who don’t mind dropping $90 and $150 on a 4GB or 8GB card. Available starting in June. [SanDisk via Electronista]

Via [gizmodo]

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