Astroid ePaper Pizza

Rock Paper Scissors Robot, Pizza Vending Macine Robot and non-robot stories – full episode of GeekNews with Lindsey, Miles, Ben and host Lyle.

Color Video Animation on ePaper

Plastic electronics company Plastic Logic has demonstrated colour video animation on a flexible plastic display, which it claims is the first example of an organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) driving electronic paper at video rate.

The demonstration proves that the potential uses of electronic paper extend far beyond monochrome text-based e-readers to more sophisticated tablet-style devices that can run colour video, while still keeping power consumption low.

Facebook Hijacks Your Email

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — If you’re a Facebook user, you have a @facebook.com email address, whether you use it or not. Facebook is now automatically posting those addresses to users’ profiles and displaying them as the default email address.
Cue the backlash. Facebook told CNNMoney the change has been rolling out for “a few weeks,” but many users weren’t aware of it until a spate of blog posts and news articles began drawing attention to it on Monday.

Privately and publicly looking for Earth-threatening asteroids

The B612 Foundation is a group of scientists, astronauts, astronomers, and engineers who have come together to do nothing less than literally save the world: they want to find and deflect asteroids that can potentially hit the Earth. While really big asteroids are rare — after all, the one 10 km (6 miles) across that wiped out the dinosaurs only hits Earth every few hundred million years — smaller ones in the 100 meter range are far more common and can still do devastating damage. Even one just 50 meters across (smaller than a football field) can impact and explode with the yield of millions of tons of TNT. That’s in the range of the biggest nuclear weapons ever detonated.

GeekBit: Phlogiston Theory

“Phlogisticated” substances are those that contain phlogiston and are “dephlogisticated” when burned; “in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body.”

Thus, phlogiston was described in a way that was basically the opposite of the role of oxygen in combustion.

Joseph Black’s student Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772 and the pair used the theory to explain his results. The residue of air left after burning, in fact a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, was sometimes referred to as “phlogisticated air”, having taken up all of the phlogiston. Conversely, when oxygen was first discovered it was thought to be “dephlogisticated air”, capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air.

Matt Pizza @ Tumblr

Lindesy’s awesome story about a Pizza Robotic Vending machine lead me to think about this fun Pizza and other cool things Tumblr. — Lyle

It Only Took the Army 16 Years and 2 Wars to Deploy This Network

In October, the Army will do something it’s wanted to do for more than a decade: send a pair of combat brigades to a warzone equipped with a new data network, and the hardware to operate it. It’ll let more than a thousand troops rapidly send voice, text, imagery and data across a warzone and to a soldier on patrol. It’s a milestone, following years of aspirations, setbacks and adjustments. And it arrives pretty much too late for the wars.

TLA Baby!

A three-letter acronym, three-letter abbreviation, or TLA is an abbreviation, specifically an acronym, alphabetism, or initialism, consisting of three letters. These are usually the initial letters of the words of the phrase abbreviated, and are written in capital letters (upper case); three-letter abbreviations such as etc. and Mrs. are not three-letter acronyms.

Lyle uses OmniFocus for task managment - GTD

OmniFocus is designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items. Perfect for the Getting Things Done® system, but flexible enough for any task management style, OmniFocus helps you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on top of all the things you need to do.

Lyle's Spare Ideas on spare-ideas

A good idea is worth 25 cents
As a programmer/developer, father, photographer, thesibian, gamer, atheist, and general geek I’m always thinking up applications and services and not doing anything with the idea. I also get to talk to people who have cool ideas. The thing is, without action, even a good idea isn’t worth much.

So, on this tumblr I’ll throw up my ideas for services, applications, websites, artwork and the like. I might develop some of these at some point, but probably not. If you develop these drop me a note, I’d love to see them!

Instapaper

A simple tool to save web pages for reading later.

Lyle uses this plus some iPhone apps – Instipaper App, to read webpages later. Cool stuff!

Apple Yanks Mac Virus Immunity Claims

Apple quietly lifted part of Steve Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field” on Sunday, switching out a statement that claimed its Mac computers were completely immune to viruses with a less-forward statement: “It’s built to be safe.”

New MacOS X Backdoor

“The application is actually a new, mostly undetected version of the MaControl backdoor (Universal Binary), which supports both i386 and PowerPC Macs. We detect it as “Backdoor.OSX.MaControl.b”.
MD5 ( “matiriyal.app/Contents/MacOS/iCnat” ): e88027e4bfc69b9d29caef6bae0238e8”

American Fundamentalist Schools Claim Nessie is Real

“It sounds like a plot dreamed up by the creators of Southpark, but it’s all true: schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Texas GOP: No Teaching Critical Thinking

“We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

Robot Hand Beats You at Rock, Paper, Scissors 100% Of The Time

“This robot hand will play a game of rock, paper, scissors with you. Sounds like fun, right? Not so much, because this particular robot wins every. Single. Time.”

Americans Think Obama Can Handle an Alien Invasion Than Romney

“In regards to national security, nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans think Barack Obama would be better suited than fellow presidential candidate Mitt Romney to handle an alien invasion.”

Spray-on batteries could change device design

Scinetists have found a way to combine battery components using a spray-on technique for the 5 layers (the anode and cathode [negative and positive], a separating material, and two separate current collectors). This allows form factor flexibility. Practical applications may be limited until a cheaper mass-production method is found.

Texas college students hijack drone aircraft

The Department of Homeland security asked Austin Texas students, led by professor Todd Humphreys, to try and gain control of a drone aircraft. They successfully sopofed the GPS signal sent to the aircraft for under $1000.

Sergey Brin Shows Project Glass Glasses to Journalists

Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). The product (Google Glass Explorer Edition) will be available to United States Google I/O developers for $1,500, shipping early in 2013.

Geek Bit: Let's Pizza!

Would YOU eat an 11-inch pizza for only $5.95 that only takes a total of 4 minutes to make & bake in a vending machine?