Blast Proof Fabric - Zetix

Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife. When not shielding from explosions, it can be used as medical sutures that won't damage body tissue. All of this is thanks to a property that apparently defies the laws of physics:

Zetix is built around the principle of auxetics: objects that actually get fatter the more you stretch them. Though it hurts to think about, as you will discover, it actually makes sense.

Comcast vs. Unhappy Consumers

For the last couple of months Danae and I were completely cut off from the civilized world. When Comcast failed to connect our cable TV and internet we discovered that we had begun to experience the darkest reality of human existence. Life without internet was terrifying. For the first couple of weeks I experienced withdrawal symptoms including hallucinations, cottonmouth, paranoia and advanced delusional schizophrenia with involuntary bouts of narcissistic rage. Also I was bored.

Comcast doesn't care about it's customers.

Danae took it harder than me though. She drew up plans to annihilate Comcast’s entertainment empire through organized flying monkey attacks and naked Bremelo (see Sir Mixalot’s song entitled “Bremelo”), picket lines. Comcast has been unreachable while we wait for them to run a cable line to our humble abode. All of my calls go unreturned and any attempt to kidnap a technician has been a failure. We have vowed to unlease plague rats in all of Comcast’s central offices when this is all over.

Last week when I had all but given up the idea of ever having internet I discovered DSL was available to our house without a local phone subscription. 1.5 Mbps didn’t seem much better than having no internet at all but I decided I’ll take whatever I can get. I received a shiny new DSL modem in the mail about 10 days ago and tried to install it the same night. I almost went on a shooting rampage when I discovered there was no phone line attached to the phone connectors in our house. By pulling the boxes off the wall I discovered they only had about 8 inches of phone cord attached to them. The previous occupants of this place were barbarians!

Ultimately the phone technician had to come out the house and run lines in the crawl space, re-wire the connection box and cut about 300,000 feet of excess cable from the phone distribution box on the road. At the end of the day, for the first time in months we were re-connected to the internet. The same day I got a call from the independent subcontractor with Comcast who has apparently been “engineering” a cable down to our house for about 6 months. Any decent man would have spontaneously combusted on the other end of the line due to the waves of white hot anger radiating from my brain. But I guess I shouldn’t expect that kind of courtesy from a company that takes several months to perform a relatively simple task. Why the h311 should I have to beg Comcast to take my money? I want some freaking internet and preferably before we all die of old age. With the hideous price these people charge for broadband the expense of the work would be payed for in a month. Comcast = Worst ISP, VoIP and cable provider in the known world. Verizon Fi-Os save us from the hideous monster of customer disservice!!

Wind Belt - Galloping Gurdy inspired energy source

http://www.humdingerwind.com/windbelt.html

The windbelt is a brand new idea using old technology. Based on a effect called Aeroelastic Flutter.
It used the power of the wind to vibrate a thin strand of material that in turn produces an electric field.

from humdingerwind.com:

The Windbelt^TM technology was originally conceived in 2004, during a trip to Petite Anse, Haiti. This fishing village near the coast was not connected to an electrical grid, and the only lighting available was diesel-powered or kerosene-based.

Shawn Frayne, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option.

However, these difficult constraints of cost and local manufacture led to a new invention, the world’s first turbine-less wind generator.

This could have an incredible impact in the world especially in third world countries where it would be impractical because of cost to have a wind turbine.

Personally, I would love to install about eight of these in a bank on my Gadget Mobile's grill and use it to power a laptop or store energy for the vehicle. I am curious as to the earodynamic hindrance it would cause to the vehicle. Would the drag be an issue? Would the power output be enough to warrant the installation on a vehicle?

M110 SASS - New military sniper system

Mommy!

I think I wet myself.

This Thing Is incredible. I saw a blurb about it on Future Weapons (video part 1 video part 2) and just had to find out more about it. Despite the fact that it's going to be used for killing people... it is simply BAD-BUM.

Knight's Armament designed this gun for a contest and the Army picked it up as the official new sniper rifle system. And I'm glad too, because this thing allows matched accuracy to the old bolt action system with the firing rate of a semi-automatic.

Go to http://www.militarytimes.com/multimedia/video/20071026_rc_m110sniperrifle
for a video of it being demonstrated!

A civilian version of the weapon can be bought for almost 10 thousand dollars. But given the competition, thats not a terrible price.

View a detailed Wiki entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M110_Semi-Automatic_Sniper_System

Nintendo NES PC Tutorial

Old School Systems › News › Original NES PC Tutorial
and
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/

Well, I think this is just about the coolest thing ever. I loved the NES but it's a hassle to have lying around when I could just use an emulator.

So why not just use the Nintendo NES box to be my computer and I could then run and emulator on it.

I love the project at http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/ the most because it fits the whole thing inside the case without having stuff dangling out.
What I would like to do, is have one of these running Ubuntu with full capabilities such as USB and Blue Tooth. I'd want it to be able to handle regular computing Tasks with a little emulation gaming on the side.

-Josh

First dot com .com ever (Symbolics.com) archived

With the recent news on Slashdot About the First 100 Registered Domain Names, I remembered a website that archived some of the oldest websites on the internet.
The first archive does not reach back to the original date of March 15th 1985 for Symbolics.com, (the first website name ever registered). I would assume that it has something to do with the formation of ICANN in 1998. But give that the World Wide Web was still four years off from the original registration date, I find that fascinating.
While the listed archive doesn't give any SUPER old archive shots, it does give what seems to be the oldest web archived page. This archive is dated Dec, 07, 1998 and can be found here

-Josh

Tin Man mini-series Ep.1 synopsis and review

Well, my wife and I are watching The Sci-Fi channels "Tin Man" mini-series. Tonight is the very first episode, and given my background in video production and my love of movies in general, I thought I'd do a first impressions review.

Tin Man
http://www.scifi.com/tinman/

a Sci-Fi channel original mini series

First off Tin man is nothing like the original wizard of OZ films. But thats ok, the producers meant it to be different. It is a modern "epic re-imagining of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that gives the story a heavy science fiction fantasy emphasis and gives only allusionary references to most of the original story." -Tin Man WIKI (Visit for a full Synopsis and list of characters)

Ep. 1 synopsis:
Our main character's name is DG (representative of the classic Dorothy). I don't know if it's meant to stand for anything yet. She basically feels out of place in her hometown and longs to get away.
Cut to the O.Z. (the Outer Zone - an alternate world existing alongside ours), the evil Azkadellia, queen of the OZ, longs after more power. In a "see-ers" vision she see's DG as a threat as sends some longcoats after here. They travel to DG's world in a storm portal (tornado), However DG and her parents escape into the storm portal before the longcoats can get them.
From there DG gets captured by "lawn gnomes" and partners up with Glitch (the scarecrown) to escape. Along her travels she finds an ex-tinman (a ex-cop. called tin-men) and Raw (the cowardly lion) who is also a "see-er".
DG doesn't know what she is doing in the OZ, but soon finds out that her parents were actually robots employed by her real mother to protect her and prepare her for her return to the OZ. She is given a message and some sort of magical tattoo to help her find her way to finding her real mother.
On the next leg of the journey, DG and her ragtag troupe head to central city to seek out the wisdom of the Mystic Man (the wizard of oz) to help in finding her mother. In the Tin Man series, however, the mystic man is clearly out of his mind high on Azkadellia vapors which give a euphoric blissful state. DG's tattoo reminds the Mystic Man of DG's mom and gives them directions on where to find her mother. We also find the DG is somehow a "Key" to restoring balance to the OZ.
DG heads off to the Island of the North ( or ice mountain ) and finds her old family home encased in ice. Using her magical tattoo DG gains access into the mansion. DG finds out that her mother was a queen, Glitch was the queens advisor, and Azkadellia is her evil twin sister. They also find out that the Emerald of the Eclipse is the only way to stop Azkadellia and she must find it.
Azkaellia and her henchmen track DG with the forced help of a see-er and attack DG and her party at the mansion. At the end of Episode 1, we are left with the tin man being shot blowing him through a window and down a huge drop off into the icy waters below the mansion. DG and the rest of her troupe are captured by Azkadellia.

My review:

Tin Man is great! It's quirky, magical, imaginative, and bold with a steampunk style! The characters are so deep. So much more than they seem at first. Tin Man gives you enough info so you feel like you know what's going on without feeling like it's so much of a stretch that they have to spoon feed the info to you.
Without knowing that this is a modern interpretation of "The wonderful wizard of OZ" I don't think it could be fully appreciated though. It can stand alone, but it gets its greatest audience draw by being such a "weird" re-imagining of it.
The graphics seem to be a bit hit and miss as to the quality and believability. But given that there were over 30 different graphics artist working on this, and it's a TV mini-series, I think they did a very good job.
I can't wait to see what the next episode brings.

Slashdot It!

Ancient Turtle Dance Ritual

What the Heck are my turtles doing? Nearest I can tell, it's an ancient turtle dance ritual handed down from turtle generation to turtle generation. It seems they are syncronising their brainwave harmonics so as to jointly broadcast signals to their turtle homeland... any other thoughts?

Channel 28 Awesome news - Muffin Mania

Channel 28 awesome news serves up the latest news in local meaningless events, Complete with the classic oblivious newscaster.

Crazy Rabbit

Hehe, this little rabbit loves your mouse!

http://www.changar.com/archives/go.html

Website: Eee PC interactive online demo

Eee PC interactive Online Demo

Well, in case you havn't heard, there is an awesome new laptop out on the market now called the Eee PC (made by ASUS).
It's basically a miniature laptop running a custom linux xandros operating system. The only real downside to the eee pc I can find, is it's small harddrive size, it's only 4gb for now. But your not even going to get close to that size unless you want to shell out TONS of extra money on a different laptop.

So anyhow, I was so excited about this laptop that I started scouring the internet for information about it. But what I found was just a bunch of shoddy videos and alot of screen caps. I wanted something more!
So what I ended up doing, was rounding up all the screen caps I could find, then organizing them just as they would be in the real Eee PC. Then I put in online.

The responce from the Eee PC community was enormous! over 900,000 views in the first week! HOLY COW! Since then, it's kind of slowed down a bit, but I still get over 1000 views a day.

well, being the enterprising chap that I am, I decided to try my hand at making a little money from some tasteful and content oriented ads. So i signed up for google adsense. Well I couldn't be happier, It's been almost a month now and I have made enough to cover the expenses of my web hosting, plus enough to buy some gas! :D Which is helpful when you just got laid off.

If you want to find out more about the Eee PC, go to www.honeypothack.com/eee/

OHAdev.org A website I created

Well with all the news about the "G-phone" google's new phone in competition with the i-phone. I decided to make a website for people that want to develop applications on the platform.
I did this because it seems, google is not actually going to make a phone. Instead, they have release some software called Android, which is basically the operating system for a phone.
The Android SDK (software development kit) can be found at http://code.google.com/android/ .

The website I made is OHAdev.org which basically means, open handset alliance - developer. There you can find a host of materials and links for resources.

Some humor for the day

Ha, check out this awesome singing Tesla Coil!