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Nanotechnology can turn your jacket into a battery
There are certainly clothes and wires that can transmit electricity, but wouldn't it make sense if they could hold on to it as well? Researchers at the University of Central Florida certainly think so, since they've just developed technology that lets wires and threads store energy. Their approach sheathes the wire in nano-sized whiskers that, when treated, become electrodes; the sheath effectively becomes a supercapacitor that preserves energy without hurting electrical transmissions.
Ask Engadget HD: How do I hook up surround sound without cables running everywhere?
Sometimes a move can necessitate rethinking one's home theater setup, which was exactly the case for our friend Amani. A shift from a room with carpets to run wires underneath to hardwood floors has him wondering what the easiest and neatest way is to hook up the rear speakers: Ok, here is my dilemma. I used to have carpet in my main area where my TV is and surround sound is. Speaker wire would run under carpet. I just got hard wood floors installed so now there will be wires all over the place for my sound. What creative options do I have to set back up my surround sound but perhaps eliminate the wires or use wireless.connection to connect my speakers. I need help because I can't have speaker wire all over my pretty new floors! Thanks So is the best route to drill right into the walls, some kind of invisible speaker cable, or is there a good wireless speaker setup that doesn't involve falling back to a HTIB? Let us know how you solved this kind of problem and save Amani some heartache and time.
Behind the scenes of WoW's bandwidth
We heard a little while back that it was AT&T who provide data center hosting to Blizzard and this gigantic game (and actually, we've had outage problems before due to maintenance on AT&T's end), but our friend Tamara Chuang of the Orange County Register went straight to the source, and spoke with the big bandwidth provider on just what it takes to keep the servers up. There's some good information in there, especially if you're interested in all of the motherboards and wires that run the World of Warcraft. MMOs are apparently AT&T's biggest gaming customers, and they run the wires for companies like Blizzard as well as Konami and Turbine. They originally helped run Battle.net, and when Blizzard wanted to expand with World of Warcraft, AT&T's gaming division expanded with them.Unfortunately, there's a lot of secrets here -- given that they're selling a service, AT&T doesn't speak too frankly about how much downtime they're really responsible for, and of course as a trade secret they can't give any numbers on how much bandwidth is passing through and where it's all going. But they will say that they've got latency levels down to milliseconds (in their testing, I'm sure -- lots of players would probably suggest it's a little worse, depending on which ISP you use), and that they offer services like Synaptic Hosting. During times of hard usage, Blizzard can ask (for a price, of course) to open the floodgates up and make sure there's enough bandwidth to go around.
Rumors of Steve Jobs' death greatly exaggerated
You have to figure that major news outlets keep obituaries on hand for all kinds of public figures and celebrities -- still, you can't help feeling a bit of a chill upon learning that notice of Steve Jobs' death mistakingly hit the wires yesterday afternoon. A slip-up at news outlet Bloomberg caused the lengthy obituary to roll across a number of screens before being pulled -- but not before a Gawker tipster was able to send off a copy to the gossip site. Under normal circumstances, this would probably come off as a random gaffe with minimal impact, but given recent reactions / over reactions concerning Jobs' health (thanks in no small part to his appearance at WWDC, pictured above), this comes off as a rotten-timed moment in journalistic and technical butterfingerism. We can only hope this didn't send too many investors into a tailspin -- we'd hate to see any War of the Worlds moments caused by something so silly.[Via CNET]
Use a Red Bull can as a radio interference shield
I love the iPhone, save for one thing. It sits on my desk every night, right near my computer, and the speakers I've got hooked up to it. And every 15 minutes, when the iPhone checks email for me, I get that buzzing -- the sound of radio interference flying across my speaker wires. And almost every night, I have to jump out of bed angrily just to shut off the speakers and stop the buzzing. Little did I know, all I've ever needed was an empty can of Red Bull.Yes, someone has fashioned a "shield" out of an emptied and carved up Red Bull can, and supposedly it works like a charm -- just fashion it around the dock that came with the iPhone, use a little doublestick tape to make sure it stays on there (and I would maybe put some around the edges, too, so you don't slice your fingers open every time you pull the iPhone off the dock), and no more buzzing sound.The maker does wonder if it would affect the actual signal of the iPhone at all, but it hasn't so far. If you've got a Red Bull can around to cut up and are driven as nuts as I am by that buzzing noise, here's your makeshift solution. The other option is to buy speakers that don't buzz, of course, but this seems a lot cheaper.
