Nanocomp Technologies has managed to weave its’ nanotube fibers into sheets less than a fifth of an inch thick. Upon shooting, some versions of the sheets stayed intact. It’s looking like a lightweight replacement for Kevlar that should be on the market in about a year.
A Kevlar killer comes to market – Sep. 17, 2009.
Because we all know how safe centralised government databases are, the Dutch are now preparing to store all fingerprints the get. At first this will happen per region and later all the databases will be linked and centralised.
Dutch privacy organisations have protested at the EU, but they have declined the protest as the European courts feel other avenues had not been exhausted.
Europa wijst protest vingerafdrukdatabase af – UPDATE | Webwereld.
Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is a full-featured MySQL management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it consist of a single file ready to deploy to the target server.
Usefull if you don’t want to upload all of phpMyAdmin
via Adminer.
Between the planets and moons are gravitational corridors, tubes that intersect at lagrange points, which can be used to travel between celestial bodies using hardly any fuel, only for course correctional purposes. These corridors can be likened to ocean currents. The trade-off is now between speed and fuel consumption: you can use almost zero fuel between a planets’ moons because the distance allows it, but should you want to drift to another planet using just the corridors, this would take years.
Scientists unveil plan designed to cut cost of space travel – Telegraph.
The Dutch ministry of defence has apparently known since 2005 that the budget reserved for the JSF buy (to replace the KLu F-16 fleet) was in nowhere near enough for the planned 85 F-35s they needed. The Dutch MOD has answered parliamentary questions about this with the statement that they expected a budget increase and that this is why they’ve never mentioned the budget shortfall.
So basically the Dutch MOD and KLu have been supporting a fighter buy they knew they couldn’t afford and have been throwing sand in the eyes of the parliament and are now scrambling to cover their arse.
Kamervragen betreffende budgettekorten voor vervanging van F-16 | Ministerie van Defensie.
Someone with way too much time on their hands ported a NES emulator to JavaScript. Feel like playing Super Mario Bros or Zelda at work? Grab a fast browser like Google Chrome and head on over here,
http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
What if we could turn all the plastic waste we create on a daily basis into fuel to power our cars? A Washington, DC-based company called Envion claims it can do just that with a process that turns plastic into an oil-like fuel for just $10 per barrel. According to Envion, the resulting fuel can be blended with other components and used as either gasoline or diesel.
via Inhabitat » New Envion Facility Turns Plastic Waste into $10/Barrel Fuel.
This is an interesting article about someone who wore a North Paw (available as kit or with DIY instructions here for a while.
The North Paw is an ankle bracelet that continuously signals where North is by vibrating in that direction. Apparently this leads to some interesting results.
via My New Sense Organ | h+ Magazine.
The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing.
Haiku is a continuation of BeOS in open source form. Should be good!
via Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1 | Haiku Project.
The odds of a coin coming down heads or tails are not 50/50: they’re actually 51/49!
A great precis of an article explaining why, and how to leverage it.
The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? – Coding the Wheel.
If you get breathalised, make sure the cop isn’t covering the exit port for the air when you blow, or the purported alcohol consumption will go up!
This thing is beautiful
You can download a template on the site to print and cut it out.
Dessine moi un objet » Blog Archive » Iphone and Itouch paper stand / dock.
The Belkin Home Base plugs into your (wifi) network, and allows you to share USB peripherals with all the computers in your network. It has automatic backup to external HDs as well as Flickr / Picasa sharing.
At $129,- not too bad.
Print, Share, and Back Up Files Wirelessly with Belkin Home Base.
This, the production version of the Mission One Electric Superbike managed to do 150 mph average over at Bonneville over two runs of 1 mile. It has a range of 150 miles on a charge.
Massachusets, USA, is doing something that should have been done a long time ago: Car manufacturers are computerising their cars to a greater and greater degree. This is great – more power, more control, more safety, more fun.
Unfortunately, the software and interfaces for these computers are closed – repairmen are not given access to manuals or other information that allows them to manipulate the computer. Thus they have serious trouble making repairs that they should be able to make easily.
Massachusets is sponsoring a bill that forces the car manufacturers to give over all the information necessary to make repairs on cars to whoever wants them; independent garages, or just you.
This device has several settings allowing you to see kw/hr, view the cumulative useage and displays Volts, Amps, Watts, Hz, VA.
It’s the only device I’ve found you can plug any device into and see how much power it’s really drawing.
There are 3 versions of the product.
Even though they keep supporting Internet Explorer 6, they’re not going to support XP?
Microsoft had stated the reason for continuing support for IE6 was that it came with Windows XP and so they had to keep supporting it. Now it turns out that they’re not supporting XP either. Not exactly their road map, but oh well.
XP is thus fully broken, with a security hole in the TCP/IP implementation.
You’re doing well, MS – it took you long enough to fix the hole for Vista et al as well!
Microsoft: No TCP/IP patches for you, XP.
As an organised activity: websites tell you which lines are particularly good for groping fellow passengers on.
Travellers warned of Tokyo train gropers | Travel News | News.com.au.
It turns out that the 3.1 patch for the iphone removes tethering for any carrier that isn’t a partner of Apple. This means that if you own an officially unlocked iphone and run it on another network, you can’t use the iphone as a modem for your laptop any more.
Well done, Jobs – keep fucking your customers up the arse! They’re your fanboys, they LOVE it!
Apple – Support – Discussions – no tethering on officially unlocked ….
This one is so obvious, it’s incredible it hasn’t been done before: take the fat from a woman’s arse and insert into tits. Voila! Completely natural bigger breasts!
The Press Association: Unwanted fat for breast enlargement.
For under $150,- you can start your own satellite programme – you need: a weather balloon, a digital camera and a GPS enabled phone. Some hand warmers and a styrofoam cup keeps everything warm.
By changing the qdr:nXX parameter after enabling the time parameter in ‘Search Options’, you can get Google to refresh every second and show you the new indexes.
Realtime Googelen met url-hack | Webwereld.
A South African IT firm sent a carrier pigeon 50 miles with a datacard attached to it’s leg. The pigeon was faster than the internet, which after 2 hours had only completed 4% of the transfer. This was in protest at the sucky internet connection available through Telkom.
Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom – Yahoo! Canada News.
Japan has an automated logistics supply vehicle for the International Space Station, which has been launched today for the first time. It’s composed of pressurised and upressurised areas and will be stopped at 10 m from the ISS. Using the robo hand, astronauts can dock it. It’ll stay there as a kind of larder for a month and then decouple and return to earth. In further versions of the HTV they’ll modify it to carry humans, so there’s a third way to get astronauts up to the ISS, but it can also act as a lifeboat.
Japan hurls first space freighter at ISS • The Register.
All those crib sheets with quick command references for shell programming, using Linux or vim, etc. have been collected here for your printing pleasure!
TechPosters: Technical Posters and Cheats for IT Guys.