If you’re a video maker, pro or not, here’s your chance to win $10,000.
Cisco, in attempt to find the coolest use of personal technology and home networks, and the exact opposite, the most frustrating stories of technological disasters, is throwing a contest dubbed “Digital Cribs: Heaven or Hell”
Submit a video (up to 3 minutes long) showing off your digital crib for an opportunity to win. Show us how clever and efficient you are with consumer technology and your home network or issue a plaintive cry for professional help. The Grand Prize Winners (one for Heaven and one for Hell) will each receive a prize of $10,000. Additionally, ten finalists (five in each category) win a $500 gift card.
You can start by touring the cribs of Meghan Asha (video tech blogger), Shane Battier (NBA star) and Lincoln Schatz (video artist) here, or you can jump straight to the contest and submit your own video.
Here’s Lincoln Schatz’s video to give you a kick start:
He installs spinning circular saws in gallery floors, and rigs the plug at the end of an electric cord to release 50,000 volts in short bursts.
Artworks that, just like your neighbor’s homemade flamethrower, scream “Stay away, don’t touch!” and then, after the initial jolt of fear, turn out to be super fun.
The Czech artist’s latest cringe-inducing masterpiece, Do it yourself (after Brancusi), is a 23-foot stack of cement bags that tilts dangerously to one side, looming over spectators.
“Everybody has the intense feeling that this tall tower is about to fall over,” Kintera says cheerfully. “It could fall, but it won’t,” he adds, “and I won’t tell you how it’s done.” Those looking for reassurance should visit his website for the list of building materials. Here’s a hint: styrofoam.
Even his non-threatening works are subtly disturbing. Something electric, a coconut that bobbles absurdly at the end of an extension cord, is hardly dangerous, except perhaps to its creator, who built it out of an eccentric motor and a BASIC Stamp microcontroller.
“I blew up many, many models while building it,” Kintera confesses. What’s the point of such a senseless appliance? He responds with a typical artist’s riddle: “I like to use ready-made materials the way other sculptors work with clay. They’re the clay of everyday life.”
Despite all his provocative intentions, however, Kintera is still a handyman at heart. “For me, when a piece is finished, it loses its sense of tension and adventure,” he says. “You can only experience that thrill when you make it yourself.” Or when daring your buddy to touch the sparking end of that live wire.
50Mbps connection might be a dream to many, but soon not for Virgin Media subscribers. Not only that, in a viral campaign they kicked-off today, they’re announcing this uber-sleek and extra-fast DOCSIS 3.0 broadband modem that comes with it. This will allow you to harness the full 50Mbps speeds to download MP3 tracks in under 1 second and bounce around photos of your latest holiday trips to the East in a blink of an eye. UK’s speed-junkies can count on getting themselves the package at year’s end. But what about the rest of us, Sir Branson? [TrustedReviews]
WebKit is a great browser rendering engine. It’s currently used by the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome (and is part of what makes those browsers work so good). But Microsoft? No can do–they’re still using proprietary stuff for their browser, Internet Explorer, which costs real money as opposed to the free and readily available open-source WebKit.
As with its desktop counterpart, Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile also uses a very old version of Microsoft’s proprietary web engine, which tends to make it a pain to use and stink nearly as bad as a dead skunk.
However, there is hope yet in the horizon, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has expressed interest in the idea of using WebKit as Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. Ballmer added that Microsoft “may look at that,” and as such, it could also eventually make its way to mobile Internet Explorer on the release of Windows Mobile 7.
Currently, WebKit is used as the rendering engine in many of today’s top mobile web browsers, including Nokia’s S60 browser for S60-based devices, Apple’s mobile Safari web browser for the iPhone, and Mozilla’s recently confirmed Fennec mobile web browser (which is essentially Firefox for mobile).
Opting for the open-source WebKit in mobile Internet Explorer would no doubt bring new and improved features to the Windows Mobile browser, or at least make it as good as some of its competitors. But it’s up to Microsoft to decide whether it’s worth investing in or not. If you’re a Windows Mobile smartphone user and believe that WebKit is any good, make like a devil and whisper in Ballmer’s ear: “WebKit on Windows Mobile’s Internet Explorer, now!”
Bugs in anything are often annoying things, and rarely amusing. The recently released Android G1 phone wasn’t free of such (being a first-gen device), but I’m not quite sure whether I should file it under annoying or amusing.
A newly discovered bug in its software apparently makes each and every word typed on its keyboard “silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges.” Put simply, this means that any user might unknowingly issue and execute commands before he or she even knows it. Might seem pretty lowbrow at first, but such a bug could actually result in a lot of backfiring. Such as when a user types in the word “reboot,” which automatically makes the phone reboot–no questions asked.
Go ahead, try it (if you’ve got a real phone, and not just an emulator). Type in the word “reboot.” Yep, every single keystroke, the eight of it. “-r-e-b-o-o-t-” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
A report regarding the said bug has already been filed in the Android pages of Google Code, and here I’ve pasted an excerpt below:
“I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded. I had just rebooted my phone and the first thing I typed was a response to her text which simply stated “Reboot” - which, to my surprise, rebooted my phone.”
While the story of how this bug was discovered is funny, for some users the effect could be anything but. Imagine you were working on or doing something really important on your Android G1, and this happened. Woe to all the data you will have lost. And you.
Fortunately, this bug only seems to affect phones with firmware version 1.0 TC4-RC29 and earlier. So any phone that has received the latest firmware update pushed over-the-air by Google should be immune to it. Some users are also reporting that it only works for them while the USB cable is plugged in and the phone is in debug mode. In any case, this is definitely not supposed to be a feature, so it would probably be best if Google or T-Mobile worked to fix it pronto.
Although you might suspect this is a game application for your Symbian device it certainly isnt. Swim is an application made for Symbian which will let you perform periodic synchronization of data with various internet servers like Google Calendar Mobical Zyb and Ovi.
The application comes free of charge and it will use the SyncML support in the system. It uses that and it adds timing capabilities to your smartphone which means you can set it up to sync your data how often you fee
Although its about money the next Symbian software youre going to install is totally free. Money Lite is that mobile money manager you were looking for to install on your smartphone.
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As you might have already noticed it already we are bringing you quite a few Symbian freeware applications today which are meant to make your Symbian life easier. Such is the case of Jbak TaskMan v1.0 which will get you that alternative task manager you have always wanted.
Jbak TaskMan v1.0 is a signed freeware application which has lots of features available. Besides the features you will find listed below you should know that Jbak TaskMan v1.0 also feature a shortcut launcher and
