Jedi Mind aka Mind Technologies

A small PC device company wants to bring thought-controlled apps to the Android market. Mind Technologies (once known by the cute name of Jedi Mind) has promised to make it so. Mind Technologies makes PC devices (a game controller and mouse) that work with the strange-but-true Emotiv headset. Emotiv uses brain waves to operate machines. Although it sounds far fetched, electroencephalogram (EEG) controllers do work, but the products on the market so far are not as easy to use, let alone master, as their makers claim.

Watch Mind Technologies Master Mind Video

3d printing

Well if you follow the current trends in the 3d printing market you know that the technology has come a long way in the last years. Does that mean that you will be able to print replicas of your favorite products? Simply put, no.

But then that isn’t their intended use either. Still 3d printer manufactures may be putting themselves in the firing line.

For all they know, people might start producing cheap replicas of all of the latest and greatest gadgets, wait they already do.

“A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowledge says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge.”

You can read more in the original post.

Would a pre-emptive assault from patent holders cripple this fledgling market? Probably not. 3d printing is still in its infancy, it still has a long way to go before you’ll be able to print objects like this at home.

I am not sure if the traditional printing industry was against the desktop printer, though they probably had more to lose than other manufactures.

In closing I will leave you with this image.

Current state of 3d printing

Comet Hartley 2

Sometimes accidents turnout to have wonderful results. That is what happened with the Hartly 2 comet fly-by. You see in all rights we shouldn’t see Hartley 2, NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft wasn’t even supposed to film it.

The reason NASA took pictures of comet Hartley 2 was because they couldn’t find their original target. I guess that is understandable, after all there is plenty of space to loose something in.

Here is a little more information about comet Hartley 2:

NASA’s EPOXI mission spacecraft successfully flew past comet Hartley 2 at 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) Thursday, Nov. 4. Scientists say initial images from the flyby provide new information about the comet’s volume and material spewing from its surface.

Hartley 2 Gallery

More NASA related posts:
Astronauts’ Skin-Tight Bodysuits Could Protect From Bone Loss
New NASA MMO

Netflix bandwidth usuage?

So you’re sitting at your computer and you’ve waited forever for this page to load. Well, it’s Netflix fault.

Okay, that is a little bit of a stretch, however, I read an interesting article on slashdot about Netflix bandwidth usage.

While this isn’t something that I would normally post about, I thought that it brought up an interesting point and thought it was worth sharing.

Here is an excerpt from the article.

Netflix is swallowing America’s bandwidth and it probably won’t be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That’s one of the headlines from Sandvine’s Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That’s an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent.

20% is an impressive amount of bandwidth usage for one company. What is even more impressive is that they are using it to watch Sean Connery classics like Zardoz.

NASA Skin-tight Bodysuits

Have you ever wondered why everyone needs to run around in skin-tight body suits in space? No, it’s not what you’re thinking, there is actually a science to the sexiness. Well, at least there is now.

Bone loss is a major problem for today’s astronauts. In fact, for every month in space they loose up to 2% bone density.

For a stay on the ISS this number might be acceptable, but think about effects this would have on the human body over a prolonged stay in space.

With current level of technology it would take NASA astronauts a minimum of 6 months to reach Mars. ESA is also planning a trip to Mars that would last 440 days. The Russian space program is planning the longest mission to the Red Planet, a staggering 2 year mission. As you can see, the math doesn’t add up, and certain areas need to be addressed before we can take a road trip through space.

That is where the skin-tight body suits come in.

MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory into using “superhero-style” skinsuits to combat the effects of extended stays in microgravity on bone density in astronauts. (Abstract.) Quoting: “Astronauts lose 1 to 2 percent of their bone mass for each month they spend in space. As far back as the Gemini missions, conditioning exercise regimes have been used to slow the rate of bone loss, but a 2001-2004 NASA-sponsored study showed that crew members aboard the International Space Station were still losing up to 2.7 percent of their interior bone material and 1.7 percent of outer hipbone material for each month they spent in space. … With stirrups that loop around the feet, the elastic gravity skinsuit is purposely cut too short for the astronaut so that it stretches when put on — pulling the wearer’s shoulders towards the feet. In normal gravity conditions on Earth, a human’s legs bear more weight than the torso. Because the suit’s legs stretch more than the torso section, the wearer’s legs are subjected to a greater force — replicating gravity effects on Earth.

I don’t know about you but it doesn’t sound very comfortable.

There isn’t any question about the power of linux/unix on the server and desktop level, but a little acknowledgement never hurts.

I recently posted about the release of Ubuntu 10.10. While this isn’t as fresh, it is equally as interesting. Dustin Kirkland, a core developer of Ubuntu Server at Canonical posted in January about how Weta uses Ubuntu at their studio.

In his post Dustin mentioned how he had a chance to sit down and talk to Paul Gunn, the Systems Administrator at Weta Digital.

It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today’s blockbuster movies. They have a 2 Petabyte disk array, 10gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.

That is a pretty respectable data center! And Unbuntu is at the heart of it. The OS is currently running on all of the rendering nodes as well as 90% of the studios desktops. That means that all of those breath taking scenes you enjoyed in films like Avatar made their way through the sudio’s Ubuntu render farm.

I first saw this on Christer Edwards blog, Ubuntu Tutorials. He noted a couple of other films that Weta Digital has work on, these include such blockbusters as:

• Avatar
• District 9
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• King Kong
• Jumper
• Lord of the Rings
• Fantastic Four
• i-Robot
• X-Men
• Eragon

Where they also rendered on Ubuntu? That isn’t confirmed but with the size of their render farm you can be sure it didn’t spring up over night.

Ubuntu 10.10

Ubuntu 10.10 was released on 10/10/2010, wow, that’s a lot of tens. And what is even more impressive is Maverick Meerkat. This release improves many aspects of the Ubuntu line of operating systems, everything from Server Edition, Desktop and Netbook.

Improvements for the Server Edition come in the form of cloud computing. If you’re not sure what this is, it’s the next be advancement in the way data is stored and transferred.

Cloud computing: The configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images (cloud-init) has gained new features in Maverick Beta, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format. Cloud image instances can now manage their own kernel and upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by using pv-grub, provided by Amazon.

If you’re a netbook user Ubuntu has you covered there, too. The Netbook Edition of Ubuntu 10.10 has a new look thanks to the Unity interface, which has become the standard interface.

Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Screenshot

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It includes places for launching applications and browsing files, semantic search through the usage of zeitgeist, optimizing vertical space with a global menu bar and maximizing application by default. A launcher is also available for keeping and dealing with mostly used applications. All favorites from UNE lucid or gnome panel items and desktop shortcuts are automatically transitioned to the launcher on first run.

In addition to that, the date and time indicator now has a real calendar
widget and is included by default. Evolution is now performing a special
mode more suited for netbook screen size.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell and UNE comes will all goodness of the Desktop Edition too.

UNE needs graphical driver acceleration to be able to run. Otherwise,
you should be warned about missing them and will be logout and proposed to run standard ubuntu desktop session.

We can’t leave the home users out, and Ubuntu’s desktop release has seen some nice improvements and changes as well.

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.32 versions. This includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30.3 version, which operates much faster than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s
authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to
improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the
new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history, too.

New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new
icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to
Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in
process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Ubuntu One Mobile

Ubuntu 10.10 Release Video

Blender

Recently, the Blender Foundation rolled out the beta for their 2.54 release. While this is a beta release, stability shouldn’t be a problem if you want to try it out.

I took a moment to test it the other day and had more than a million polygons in Sculpt without any slowdown. In fact it is faster than the current Sculpt mode thanks to the upgrades to the multiresolution meshes, memory usage during sculpting and the brushes.

While sculpting, meshes are now internally split into smaller parts, for quicker editing of local parts of the mesh. Sculpting, multiresolution and subdivision surfaces have also been fully multithreaded.

Drawing speed is drastically improved by keeping the mesh on the GPU, and for very detailed multiresolution meshes it is now possible to show the low resolution while navigating the view.

This is just one of a huge list of new additions and upgrades to an already superb application. You can view the full list of update on the official Blender 2.54 Beta release page.

If you’ve yet to do so, I strongly suggest downloading the beta for yourself and giving it a try.

Deep Shadow Maps in Blender 2.54

Well, for gamers old enough to remember the 3DO, Panasonic once again wants to compete in the gaming market. Here is a quick excerpt about the Panasonic Jungle.

Panasonic Jungle Handheld System

In a move that will instantly conjure up memories of the infamous 3DO failure, Panasonic has once again decided to throw its hat into the gaming ring, unveiling an online-focused handheld called the Jungle. It features a high-resolution display, a D-pad, a touch pad, and a full mini-keyboard in addition to standard gaming shoulder buttons. Wireless support is a given, as Panasonic is talking heavily about the console’s online features, but whether that’s Wi-Fi or 3G remains unclear. M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon said, ‘The Jungle is a highly specialized dedicated portable for a non-existent market. This is an unprecedented hardware strategy, and probably for good reason. If MMO players want to go more portable than a laptop, I guess this would be the way to go. Frankly, this looks like a non-starter.

The news last week that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be in the “goldilocks zone” and could therefore hold liquid water and alien life got everyone all excited, with good reason. A potentially habitable planet–and only 20 light years away! But to put things in perspective, here are a couple of estimates on what it would take to travel to Gliese 581g. One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself.

Is the planet home to alien life? If it is I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting to find out, I don’t think that we’ll find out anytime soon. Until then it looks like we’ll just have to explore the “alien” lifeforms on our own planet.

Gliese 581g alien world