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PARITy differential keeps your MAV flying level even if you clip its wings
Ever wonder how the single driveshaft in your car manages to power two (or more) wheels simultaneously? The answer is the differential, a device capable of splitting torque dynamically. There are a variety of different types of diffs, from fully unlocked to more pricey limited-slip models, but none are quite like the one created by Harvard graduate student Pratheev S. Sreetharan and professor Robert J. Wood. Dubbed the PARITy (Passive Aeromechanical Regulation of Imbalanced Torques), it's only five millimeters long and, while such a tiny thing would evaporate if mounted between the rear wheels on a Mustang GT, it's destined for rather smaller applications: tiny, winged micro air vehicles. The scientists proved its effectiveness by clipping one wing on a PARITy-equipped drone and, despite the imbalance in lift surface, the robo-bee maintained level flight -- differential automatically flapping the tinier wing more quickly to compensate. You know what that means: keeping our robot overlord's spies grounded just got a little bit harder. %Gallery-101468%
PTR Notes: Patch note watch 2/20
We already highlighted some of the most important changes in the updated 2.4 PTR patch notes, but here is every difference in full, brought to you by the unblinking eye of diff. Anything that looks particularly significant to me, that wasn't in the previous post, is bolded. This includes a new Mage talent, a reworking of Power Infusion, and more...take a look! Druids Lifebloom healing coefficient has been reduced. Many shapeshift form tooltips have been updated to be consistent with each other. Natural perfection reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%. Nurturing Instinct increases your healing spells by up to 50/100% of your Agility, and increases healing done to you by 10/20% of your Attack Power while in Cat form. [Hunter] Improved Mend Pet now has a 50/100% chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
Changes hits 1.0
Ian Baird at Skorpiostech has been hard at work polishing up Changes, the new OS X directory comparison and file differencing utility, for a 1.0 release. We covered the beta at the end of last year and the program received a significant amount of feedback from testers in the months following, producing a high-power app that makes managing the differences between files and folders a breeze. Changes is Leopard-only and leverages Core Animation and Quick Look for a refined user experience. If you're a FileMerge user, you'll probably find the power and ease-of-use of Changes to be a welcome step forward. And it fits into just about any workflow with a CLI utility, a TextMate bundle, BBEdit menu scripts, TextWrangler menu scripts, XCode integration and F-Script support, in addition to Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, git, Perforce and other SCM systems. And its support for MacFUSE mounted volumes is ready for prime time. Ian also tells us he's looking for a clever tagline for Changes (think BBEdit's "It doesn't suck"). He's given TUAW 2 free licenses to award to the best contributors, so take a stab at it in the comments! And for those less inclined to witty prose, Ian's offering $10 off of the $39.95 price tag (25%) with the coupon code TUAW, which is valid for the next 2 weeks. You can get a fully-functional, 15-day trial and licenses are available for purchase starting today.
PTR Notes: Patch note watch 2/15
Since the blues told us any new changes to patch 2.4 would show up in the PTR patch notes, I decided it might be profitable to save copies of the patch notes every so often and run diff on them to see if anything's changed. It looks like there were some changes today; here's what I found that we haven't discussed in full yet: The benefits of drinking out of combat have been delayed. It will now take five seconds before the full benefit of the mana regeneration will come into effect. Hunters will no longer spin around if they cast Aimed Shot or Steady Shot while facing away from their target. Arcane Explosion: The damage cap for area of effect damage on this spell has been increased by approximately 50%. Drain Mana: This ability no longer increases in power from bonus spell damage effects. Base points of the effect increased by 50%. Queue times for arena matches have been reduced. Players will now be able to enter matches faster than previously.
Beta Beat: Simple sync with Changes
This one is ostensibly for developers, but if you ever rock a revision control system or get excited about a little late-night diff-and-merge for whatever reason, your life may have just gotten easier. Changes is an app designed to simplify project synchronization and differencing for groups or individuals working locally or remotely. It provides a GUI and an impressive list of features for an initial release, including MacFuse support, Subversion and other SCM integration, a TextMate bundle and a command line utility. Yes, it bears a resemblance to FileMerge, but Changes offers features and options well beyond Apple's aging utility. Because it uses existing systems (chdiff) and provides a plugin SDK, it's both easy to implement and extensible. The command line utility and F-Script support provide additional options for incorporating Changes into your existing workflow. I appreciated the familiar interface and was impressed by how simple it was to integrate Changes into my existing TextMate/Subversion workflow with a few keystrokes. Changes, which is a Leopard-only release, is currently in beta and is available for immediate download. As of today, the download requires registering for a beta key but the developer has let us know that an upcoming build will switch to a simple time-locked beta. If you dig the software you can get a pre-release discount on a full license, receiving $10 off the $39.95 release price, but the offer is only good until the end of the beta period. And, less importantly, I made it through the whole post without a Bowie reference. Phew. Update: The new build mentioned above has been released and no longer requires registering for a beta key. An email address is still required for download, but it's less hassle now.
