Bag of Beans

TechBlog has posted a Top 10 list of some pretty crazy contraptions.  Anyone need a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID?

• Link (via Digg)

An article at Wired News says that implanting a small magnet in your fingertip allows you to sense electromagnetic fields and metallic objects through your finger!

According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. “It is a light, rapid buzz,” he says.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

PC World has posted their list of the worst tech products they have seen since they began publishing.

Of course, most truly awful ideas never make it out of somebody’s garage. Our bottom 25 designees are all relatively well-known items, and many had multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns behind them. In other words, they were made by people who should have known better. In fact, three of the ten worst were made by Microsoft. Coincidence? We think not.

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A new research initiative seeks to discover what type of society might evolve with millions of software agents.

Future disaster victims rescued by robots may perhaps owe their survival to the software agents currently being prepared for life in the NEW TIES engine – which, within a few months, will be running across a Grid of 60 computers. “No one has ever created an engine of this complexity,” says Eiben, adding that it will support about 1,000 agents at first, building up to millions – each one a unique entity with its own characteristics, including gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism. The agents will not be labelled, but will have their own distinguishing characteristics to make them recognisable. Their traits will be inherited from their parents, and passed on to their offspring, but they will be able to learn from their own experiences and from each other.

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This incredible display projects an image onto a “transformed” plane of air. Check out the video of this thing in action.

Now this is sweetness. IO₂ Technology has the coolest sounding display I have ever seen called the M2i. The device projects a 30″ diagonal 4:3 aspect ratio display into the air. That’s right, into the air like a hologram. The entire projection unit is designed to be hidden out of site so that only the display image shows.

• Link (via Digg)
• Direct link to video on YouTube

Skype has announced that SkypeOut calls to landline and mobile phones within the US and Canada are now free, at least until the end of 2006.

Is it really free? What are the strings attached?

Yes. It is really very, very free. There’s no prepayment, no minimum use, no subscription, no monthly fee, no nothing. You just download and install Skype and then you start calling. Both the caller and the number called must be in either the US or Canada. There are no strings attached.

The only condition is that we have said free SkypeOut within the US and Canada is guaranteed to last until the end of this year — that is, until December 31, 2006. We’re not quite sure yet what we will do after that. Maybe we extend the free period, maybe not. You’ll hear more about this towards the end of the year.

Until then, happy calling.

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This article examines the often-repeated myth that NASA spent a billion dollars to develop a pen that would work in space, while the Russians just used a pencil.

Space has its urban legends of course, and the Million Dollar Space Pen is one of the more enduring ones. It is neither as outlandish nor as unbelievable as the story about faking the Moon landings, and even though it seems more credible than a massive government conspiracy, it is probable that fewer people have heard it.

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Researchers can use the noise profile of digital camera sensors to identify whether a set of images came from a certain camera. From MetaFilter:

Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity. Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or “fingerprint” of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera. Fridrich’s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.

• Link (via MetaFilter)

Freedom to Tinker has an interesting post on how HDCP could be broken.

Every new HDCP device is given two things: a secret vector, and an addition rule. The secret vector is a sequence of 40 secret numbers that the device is not supposed to reveal to anybody. The addition rule, which is not a secret, describes a way of adding up numbers selected from a vector. Both the secret vector and the addition rule are assigned by HDCP’s central authority. (I like to imagine that the central authority occupies an undersea command center worthy of Doctor Evil, but it’s probably just a nondescript office suite in Burbank.)

• Link (via Boing Boing)

This article explains why current CDs are not taking full advantage of their digital medium, and in fact are sounding worse and worse.

Then, one day we awoke to a new technology. It was called “digital recording.” Wow, now with a dynamic range of over 90 dB, our recordings could almost rival a live performance. Well, in theory. However, the music industry had other ideas.

Rather than use this new technology to take advantage of it’s wide dynamic range, the music industry went in the opposite direction. They decided that louder is better. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a race to see whose CD was the loudest. The only way to make CDs louder was to keep compressing the signal more and more. That’s where we are today. Everyone’s trying to make their CD sound louder than everyone else’s. The term that is used for this process is called, hot. Yes, most of today’s music is recorded hot. The net result, noise with a beat.

• Link (via Digg)

Nathan True has hacked together a wireless music player using a Netgear WGT634U wireless router. It might be hard to locate the Netgear router since it has been discontinued, but still a nice hack.

The Mission

When I began this project, I knew I could not settle for anything less than:

• A small, low-power networked music player, which
• Runs Linux, and
• Can connect either wirelessly or wiredly, that
• Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum, and
• Accepts commands remotely from a PC or PDA, in addition to
• Displaying song info such as Artist/Title on a display local to the device.

This is an extremely detailed guide to sharpening your kitchen knives for optimal performance.

Knife sharpening is not difficult. It is not shrouded in mystery. With a little knowledge, a little geometry, a couple of tricks and some inexpensive tools, knife sharpening can be fairly easy and extremely rewarding. At the very least it’s a great skill for the toolbox. You’ll come away from this clinic with a better understanding of edges, steel and how to maintain your knives yourself. Or, if you decide to send them out, you’ll know how to make sure you’re getting what you want – and what you pay for.

Andrew Carol is building a Difference Engine that Charles Babbage designed in the 19th century but was never able to complete. And he’s doing it with LEGO.

Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes.In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine.

Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers.

Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.

Some tips on how to get the most out of your portable devices. The rest of the site also contains tons of information on batteries in general.

A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles. The battery prefers a partial rather than a full discharge. Frequent full discharges should be avoided when possible. Instead, charge the battery more often or use a larger battery. There is no concern of memory when applying unscheduled charges.

An article that discusses whether or not LED lighting is really that great.

Light Emitting Diodes are just now (in 2005) claiming to double the lumens-per-watt of typical incandescent bulbs. HID (High Intensity Discharge) lamps are still 4 or 5 times higher, and LEDs may never reach that efficacy. LEDs caused the lighting industry to think in new terms, like “wall plug efficiency” and LED marketing has become more clever. Here we discuss a few hopeful ideas or rumors, and some of the reality to support or dispel them.