Do you have any ideas how a robot can solve sudoku puzzles? Hans Andersson the guy that built Tilted Twister, the rubik’s cube solving robot back in February 2008 has proved that robot can also solve sudoku puzzles. The robot was built with Lego Mindstorms NXT kits which is basically a set that comes with Lego and Lego Technic pieces, sensors, electric motors, and a CPU-powered programmable brick.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp8Y2yjV4fU
Sudoku which known as the Rubik’s Cube of the 21st century is the current rage among number puzzles. Solving sudoku may takes hours to fill out the puzzle but robot nowadays can do the specialized things much better than we can. They have the ability to solve algebraic equations quickly and hence solve the puzzles faster. However, they may lack the ability to innteract to their surrounding which make mankind smarter than them.
First time I saw BlackBerry Storm I already feel in love with its stylish design and it looks very cool. The BlackBerry Storm is known as a glossy looking phone which draw out attention of those looking at it. From the specification given, the weight is quite similar to the iPhone 3G but Blacberry Storm perhaps is a bit wider. Unlike the iPhone, the battery for BlacBerry Storm can be removed after you opened the black aluminum battery cover. It also come along with a removable 8Gb MicroSDHC which is quite big for your digital storage! It also included a Verizon SIM card and it could be easily unlocked if you wish to use another cellular service provider.
The screen is what make this phone very cool. It has 3.25″, 480×360 pixel screen which make it very easy for us to read text along with the bright backlight. Just like iPhone, this BlackBerry Storm come together with the accelerometer. However, the transition between landscape and portrait quite lagging which is approximately 4 seconds. Unlike the older version of BlackBerry, BlackBerry Storm used different keyboard layout because they are now part of the touch screen and are activated by “clicking” in the entire screen while your finger is over the corresponding button. The screen acts as one giant button that you press in with every letter press, icon click, or menu selection.
There are some useful application that come together with BlackBerry Storm such as VZ Navigator. It is a turn-by-turn GPS application that has a lot of good Points of Interest and other neat features. Unfortunately Verizon charges $10/mo for this feature, so you really need to consider whether is it worth for you to use this feature or not. One of the biggest changes in BlackBerry Storm is the web browser. The web browser definitely benefits from the much higher screen resolution on this phone, and actually renders real pages in a very readable way.
Not to forget, this phone also equipped with 3.2 Megapixels camera with an auto-focus features, so you would be able to focus on close items and still have the texts readable. Yeah, the battery life for this phone seemed to be pretty decent but just like any other smartphone, the more you utilized the phone the more you would draw the power.
credit to cnet.co.uk
You got to travel? but still want to connect to internet or bring along all your fancy electronics stuffs? Here is some gadgets that will keep you doing that but with a less pain.
Personal hot spot from Novatel Wireless
If you ever used “aircard” or cellphone modem for high speeds internet access then you would know that the stuffs can only be used for a limited devices or simply to said it only can be connected to one device at one time. To overcome this problem, Novatel Wireless has come out with their own product called Sprint and Verizon. Both products offer a better solutions to the conventional ways of connecting to the internet. They provide a personal password-protected hot spot to you. You can connect up to 5 devices at one time to the hot spot.
Entertainment accessories
If you are a music lover and not willing to leave your high tech streo headphone at home, then you might be interested with this little gadgets. Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB charger has everything for your iPod, smartphone and a Bluetooth headset. It come along with the power strip or power adapter that has USB power slots. Conventionally, your iPod, smartphone and Bluetooth headset come with a charger that have two parts, one for connecting the device to another devices and the other one is for power that connected to the USB plug. But, if you’ll be in a car, then the Griffin PowerJolt Dual Universal Chargers will let you use your car’s power outlet to charge two USB devices at once.
Portable Laptop or Netbook
Why a laptop needs to be defined as portable since it’s already portable? If you ever experience carrying tou 15″ or 14″ laptop on your back then you might know what the pain was. People now are moving to the netbook that proved to be lightweight since they only come out with 10″ or even smaller. So it would be very convenient to put on your lap while doing you works. Some of the models that you might consider for netbook are Acer Aspire One, The Asus Eee PC and the Dell inspiron mini 10.
With the high tech development in visual and graphics, 3D movies are made possible and it slowly beat their 2D counterparts. In the past five years, about 20 3D movies have been produced with the latest one is “Up” by Disney’s Pixar. There are about 50 more 3D movies in production and is expected to hit the theaters soon. Why movies producers are getting crazy in producing 3D movies or animation? One reason for the surge is that theater owners have found they generally can charge more for three-dimensional films than their two-dimensional counterparts, analysts and industry experts say. What’s more, 3-D movies tend to sell more seats per showing, they say.
In Hollywood, 3D movies are proven to be profitable said some of the experts. They are now planning to put this technologies at home! Already you can find computer monitors and televisions that say they are “3-D ready.” If we traced back the development of 3D technologies, we would find it started since the early days of still photography and moving images. They try to trick the brain into registering a three-dimensional image by tapping into people’s stereoscopic vision. Each eye is shown its own image that naturally overlaps with one seen by the other eye. The brain puts the two together to create a three-dimensional picture.
In 1950s, 3D images were produced by two different images by overlapping blue- and red-tinted images. spectators were able to see a 3-D image by wearing goofy glasses with one red lens and one blue one that canceled out the tints on screen. Then, the techniques were further developed by using polarized glasses to watch 3D images. Viewers had to wear glasses with lenses polarized in two different ways. A polarized lens or filter acts like the teeth of a comb; only light of the same polarization will pass through the glasses (i.e., whose waves are parallel to the comb’s teeth can pass through.)
The latest iterations of 3-D still typically require viewers to wear glasses but with a bits advancements – i.e sometimes polarized glasses, sometimes glasses with electronic “shutters” that alternately close over each eye. But they rely on computer technologies, such as digital video projectors and computerized production, to get the 3-D effect.
In general, electronics advancement especially in virtual images are really benefits those who crazy to experience the beauty of 3D movies or animations.
Sometimes we’re just curious when did we purchased our PCs or laptops or maybe we just want to know the ages of our PCs or laptops. The easiest ways to know this is by figuring out the date of the windows installation (I assumed you used windows for your laptops or PCs). Here is a simple trick that could help you trace back your windows installation date. First, open your command prompt (CMD), Start ->Run -> Type CMD -> Enter or if you are using windows vista, Start ->All Program -> Accessories -> Command Prompt
Now, in the command prompt, type systeminfo | find /i “install date” or systeminfo | find “Original Install Date”
Then hits enter, your command prompt should produce result such as C:\Documents and Settings\user>systeminfo | find /i “install date” Original Install Date: 2/19/2006, 01:10:58 PM
Sometimes it’s very weird to note that even the famous and mature browser like firefox be so vulnerable to crashes! Yup, sometimes I’ve experienced the crashes when I opened heavy contents web material like PDF files from internet, it hanged and eventually I need to restart the browser. Now, do we need to blame firefox for the crashes or perhaps it could be problems from our own computers? Some people say if firefox still crashes in safe mode then it’s really firefox problem, but if the crashes didn’t occurred in safe mode, then it’s probably due to your computers.
There are couples of reasons why modern browser like firefox experienced crashes. One of the reasons is the addon problems. Yes, since firefox is an open source browser which means that it’s distributed freely over the internet and there are thousand of firefox addon developed by browser developer. Even though most of the addons in Mozilla are tested and approved but the nasty mix of addons could lead to the firefox failures. Two perfectly stable addons could create issues when used in tandem. Likewise there’s list of addons with known problems, so try to use your firefox with these addons disabled.
If you’re experience yourself firfox crashes, then try to take these actions. Note the circumstances when the crashes occurred particularly the likelihood of the crashes such as does it happen randomly or when you execute a particular tasks. If you want to go advance, then try to simulate the crash at will and if it’s really matters of firefox, then file the bugs with relevant information in Bugzilla.
However, you can take some precaution by using stable version of firefox, those who used beta version might highly exposed to the crashes.
With the rapid development of semiconductor industry we had seen lots of changes in consumer electronics products. Currently, manufactures are chasing each others in producing laptops that is portable enough to carry and yet have the full specs of real laptop. While surfing over the internet, I’ve found that this one laptop or to be exact netbook do really inspired me. It was Acer Aspire One 10.1 Netbook which have a trendy design with various selection of colours. To those who have been lugging a 15 or 14 inch you would be surpriced to notice that Acer Aspire Netbook is really lightweight since it’s only weights 2.95 pound, which is very transportable and ideal for those small airplane trays or to put on your lap.
The 1.6Ghz N270 Intel Atom processor is a single core processor but it is pretty snappy and certainly more than enough for most office type usage. The Netbook ships with Windows XP Home w/SP3 installed instead of Vista so to me it feels as responsive as (or better than) a Core 2 Duo based laptop running Vista. From my reading, the screen is 1024×600 CrystalBright (shiny) type LCD but very comfortable to read under various light conditions. Included with the packages is the integrated 0.3M megapixel (640×480) webcam and microphone embedded in the screen frame. Ideal to use a video phone/conferencing software like Skype, etc.
