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Hitting the Books: 'Dirty bomb' fears spawned America's nuclear spy force
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Meet the world's smallest camera-equipped drone
The Axis Vidius is a quadcopter that fits in the palm of your hand -- it's roughly 1.5 inches square -- yet it's able to livestream and record video in 420p. Axis says its Vidius model is the smallest-ever camera-equipped drone, and it's so tiny that users don't have to register it with the Federal Aviation Administration (meaning it weighs less than .55 pounds).
Social browser app Rockmelt bought by Yahoo, pulled from App Store
Rockmelt, a social web browser that originally launched in 2009 and moved to mobile with an app in October of last year, has been bought by Yahoo for between US$60 and $70 million, according to AllThingsD. The app itself -- which was available as a free download -- was reportedly set to remain on the market until the end of August, but at the moment it appears to already have been removed. It could, of course, reappear... Rockmelt's main draw was its promise to simplify web browsing by turning browsing into a personalized experience, complete with the ability to share pages with friends and tag them with various emoticons. Yahoo has been trying a number of different things in the past few years to become a staple in the mobile browsing space -- remember Axis? -- so we might see Rockmelt's vision for web browsing resurrected with a purple Y soon enough.
Yahoo! Axis delivers synchronized browsing for iPad and desktop
Want your desktop browser pages to show up on your iPhone or iPad, so you can keep on browsing where you left off? There are a few products already offering this feature, including the capable Firefox Home, but Yahoo's mobile product team didn't want to stop with a simple sync engine. They decided to deliver a new search plugin for the desktop, and a new browser for the mobile space: Yahoo! Axis. Billed as "a new way to search and browse," Axis aims to give your searches more flexibility and flair with predictive results, swipe-to-view search thumbnails, and the aforementioned synchronized recent pages. The overall result is pretty easy to use, if not exactly pretty-pretty -- the theme is very dark gray, compared to Safari's lighter look. Axis includes sharing options for Pinterest and Twitter, plus emailing URLs. Logging into the iOS browser and installing the desktop plugin (for Safari, Firefox or Chrome on the Mac, and those plus IE on Windows) enables the synchronized open tabs & recent searches features. Bookmarks in the app also sync across, making it easier to track your favorite sites on the go. Axis has still got a few rough edges, especially on the desktop plugins. The Chrome plugin I tested had some issues with page content and didn't seem particularly happy with YouTube playback. Still, Yahoo is definitely putting some energy (technical and promotional) behind this offering -- it's not bad now, and it's going to get better. For a quick demo of the product, Yahoo has thoughtfully posted the video below. (Link via The Next Web) And here's the rather silly TV ad for the iPad version of Axis. Watch out for that caber, laddie!
LG Axis comes to Alltel... with Android 2.1
We know it's tough for the little guys to get great handsets without a top-tier carrier's exclusivity agreement getting in the way, but goodness -- launching an Android 2.1 device in early 2011 for nearly $100 on contract seems odd, doesn't it? That said, the few wireless markets that remain under the Alltel brand (they're down to around 800,000 customers in six states now) are nabbing a device called the Axis this week, featuring a 3.2 megapixel camera along with a 3.2-inch WVGA display -- specs that put it roughly in line with the Ally found on Verizon. Want it? It should be available to you now for $89.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate on a two-year contract; follow the break for the full press release.
Runes of Magic takes up the warhammer with their version of public quests
When dealing with a game that's already known for incorporating the best features of many different MMOs into its core design, it was only a matter of time until some aspect of Warhammer Online showed up inside of Runes of Magic. And now, that piece of design has revealed itself -- public quests in the form of new "public encounters." Runes of Magic has announced their first encounter, "Attack on Segarth Outpost," as a battle between the defenders of Segarth Outpost and the wolves of the forest. The setup for the encounter is a classic public quest setup featuring 3 waves of wolf attackers that concludes with the appearance of Axis, the wolf king. If players should be successful in destroying Axis, he will leave behind a treasure box filled with all sorts of goodies for players to collect.This is only the first of the public encounters, and Runewaker Entertainment's Tony Tang has hinted at more coming in the future, possibly even involving the Demon Lord himself!
Axis unveils its first HDTV network camera
You know that epic heist you were planning? Yeah, that one. You should probably double check your security schematics and ensure that whatever building you're about to invade isn't planning on upgrading to these bad boys anytime soon. Axis has just introduced its very first HDTV network camera, the January-bound Q1755. Obviously ideal for airports, casinos and other crowd-filled locations, the 2-megapixel security camera features a 10x zoom, H.264 compression / Motion JPEG support, 16:9 aspect ratio and 1080i / 720p recording. You'll also find a built-in SD / SDHC card slot for extra storage, and it can get all the energy it needs via Ethernet. 'Course, no security cam would be complete without enhanced "video motion detection, audio detection and detection of camera tampering such as blocking or spray-painting," and we suppose all those niceties somewhat justify the $1,499 price tag.
WWII Online: Battleground Europe to honor servicemen and women
World War 2 Online: Battleground Europe will be holding cease-fires today at 2 PM and 8 PM CST to honor the men and women who gave their lives during the actual World War II. This will mark the culmination of a week's worth of activities and events centered around the celebration of the game's seventh anniversary.The treats began on the 6th with seven days of free game time, and continued with events such as the veteran's brigade challenge on the 7th, and the best fighter pilot challenge on the 8th. The following days let players take arms against Cornered Rat employees in various locales, with the chance to win big prizes. Full details are available on their site.The cease-fire will last for 15 minutes and be held on the bridge at Dinant, and is open to all players, whether Axis or Allies.[Thanks, Al!]
CNC hot-air gun used to draw faces, text on toast
Slicing up ole Xbox consoles or using immensely powerful lasers to heat your morning cup of joe are certainly entertaining ways to make industrial machinery a bit more fun, but the CNC Toast printer ups the ante by providing an over-the-top replacement for those plastic molds we used as youngsters. By hacking a CNC hot-air gun to respond to a "computer-dictated X-Y control system" and affixing it to the carriage of a printer, the evil scientists were able instruct the toasty (ahem) blaster to move around in a user-selected pattern in order to print images and text onto pieces of toast. Cleverly dubbed "digital toast imaging technology," the apparatus was able to affix a number of slightly awkward faces on slices of bread, and even imprint "Hello World" onto one piece in particular. Still, you can't get the full impression of how geektacular this truly is without seeing it in motion, so that's why you should click on through right about now and hit play, cool?[Via HackedGadgets]
Six axis controller constructed from three mice
We've seen some rather interesting mouse mods in our day, with some admittedly being more worthwhile than others, but an engineering mind over at LushProjects has definitely raised the bar quite a bit with his latest. Dubbed Three Blind Mice, the project consisted of two waves and more work than he ever expected, but yielded a very successful six axis (not that SIXAXIS) controller to use in 3D graphics applications such as VVVV. After realizing that panning and shuffling around camera angles with a 2D mouse / keyboard tandem was wasting entirely too much of his life, he embarked on a journey to "run three threads round three rollers from old mechanical mice." After realizing that Windows wasn't exactly keen on making things easy, he diverted his efforts into connecting the mice to the PC via an AVR microcontroller connected to the serial bus. By adding weights to an "opto-mechanical mouse with two horizontal rollers," as well as mounting a shaft and shaft-encoder through the middle of a mouse, he was able to realize all axes and utilize "mind bending math" to translate the mice data to on-screen orientation. While the full skinny is entirely too complex to be covered here, be sure to hit the link if this stuff suits your fancy, but make sure you've got oodles of time before even considering duplicating this one at home.[Thanks, Harry]
