2013 - The End of Cassette Recorders?

Sony still makes cassette recorders? Who knew!
Sean Buckley ... Putting the cassette to bed: Sony to discontinue handheld tape recorders in 2013

The Walkman's retirement wasn't quite the death of the cassette tape, but the format's final days aren't far off: Sony's calling it quits on the tape recorder. Final shipments for the company's TCM-400, TCM-410 and TCM-450 cassette recorders are due early next year, marking the end of the product line.

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Photo by INDEED - http://flic.kr/p/7FA2N

15 Current Technologies A Child Born Today Will Never Use

Good list! I think some of them are already out if not on their way out - can't remember the last time I used a landline phone or a fax machine. 15 Current Technologies A Child Born Today Will Never Use:

1. Wired Home Internet

2. Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders

3. Landline Phones

4. Slow-Booting Computers

5. Windowed Operating Systems

6. Hard Drives

7. Movie Theaters

8. The Mouse

9. 3D Glasses

10. Remote Controls

11. Desktops

12. Phone Numbers

13. Prime-time Television

14. Fax Machines

15. Optical Discs

Tear-Off Cardboard USB Flash-Drives

From Cory Doctorow … Tear-off cardboard USB flash-drives - Boing Boing:

Here's a cute concept-design for tear-off, disposable flash-drives from Art Lebedev

12 Technologies to Watch in STEM Education

12 Technologies to Watch in STEM Education:

On Thursday, Sept. 20, the New Media Consortium for the first time released a technology outlook for science, technology, engineering and math .

The report identifies 12 technologies to watch in these fields over the next five years. Of these 12 technologies, four did not make it onto the short list of either of the reports on K-12 or higher education that the consortium released earlier this year. These four include collective intelligence, massively open online courses, social networking and wearable technology.

The $9 Cardboard Bicycle

Amazing!

From Jason Kottke …The $9 cardboard bicycle:

Izhar Gafni has designed a bike that weighs 20 pounds, costs between $9-12 to build, can hold up to a 485 pound person, and it made out of cardboard.

Flexible Cable Batteries

From Jon Fingas … LG Chem develops very flexible cable batteries, may leave mobile devices tied up in knots:

LG Chem has developed a flexible lithium-ion battery that's not just better-suited to our bigger gadgets but could out-do previous bendable energy packs. Researchers found that coating copper wires with nickel-tin and coiling them briefly around a rod results in a hollow anode that behaves like a very strong spring; mating that anode with a lithium-ion cell leads to a battery that works even when it's twisted up in knots. Join multiple packs together, and devices could have lithium-ion batteries that fit many shapes without compromising on their maximum deliverable power.

How Earphone Remotes Work on a Single Wire

From LoRNix … Earphone remote in sound jack as X input:

Those 'special' headphones or earphones which can be used on specialized devices to control media players, volume and mute usually have FOUR connections on the plug, versus the typical THREE a normal headphone output jack has.

The usual three are Left Channel, Right Channel and Ground (common), while the fourth is often set up as a multi-value resistance, each button when pressed presents a particular resistance on the fourth wire (+ ground), which the media device can sense and from that determine what function is needed. Pretty slick method of getting several buttons to work off one wire without resorting to expensive digital signal generators and stuff (all packed in that little blob on the wires!).

Four buttons might use four resistances (of any unit):

volume up:	1 ohm
volume down:	2 ohms
stop:	4 ohms
play:	8 ohms

If this looks suspiciously like a binary encoding scheme... it is!! (You're so smart!!) Using values similarly ratio'd, you can sense 16 different outputs, even handling multiple keys pressed at the same time. Taa Daa!

…

There will be 16 different values, not necessarily in an ascending or descending value... the various values can be sensed. It's only 'binary' in the sense that it's a matrix of 4 buttons with either on/off positions.

Photo by roberthunt1987 - http://flic.kr/p/87jKin

How Noise-Canceling Headphones Work

At the left, two normal waves (bottom) and their combined waveform (top). At the right, the two bottom waves are mirror images of each other, and the combined waveform on top is null, or silent.

Great post from Kirk McElhearn ... Three-Minute Tech: How noise-canceling headphones work

The technology works using tiny microphones on the outside of the headphones that monitor ambient sounds, along with special circuitry inside the headphones that turns those sound waves upside down and feeds the resulting inverted waves through the headphones to your ears. This results in destructive interference—when you take two sound waves that are out of phase (each a mirror image of the other), they cancel each other out, resulting in silence. In other words, that external noise is, well, canceled.

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The Nerd, Dork, Geek Spectrum

Where do you fall in the spectrum? I'm somewhere between Nerd and Geek (self-diagnosed), but often veer hopelessly into Social Ineptitude.

From Dustin … Nerd, Dork, Geek:

Why do we almost always use “three” circles for venns? Could this diagram have benefited from another circle?

CCD: The Heart of a Digital Camera

Bill Hammack, better known as The Engineer Guy explains the CCD.

via Engadget

Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper

Very cool!

Evan Ackerman … Anti-Wi-Fi wallpaper is the ultimate in network security:

Trust me, all of your neighbors have already figured out that the password to your Wi-Fi network is the name of your cat, and they're busy pirating movies and software and when the MPAA breaks down the door you're the one who's going to a labor camp in Siberia. Don't let this happen to you, install wallpaper that keeps your Wi-Fi contained.

This wallpaper contains special patterns of silver crystals that have been arranged to block certain wireless frequencies, specifically, the frequencies that your Wi-Fi router operates in. When the wallpaper goes on sale in 2013, it'll cost about the same as mid-range traditional wallpaper, and if you don't like the snowflake pattern, you can cover it up with paint or whatever. This particular version doesn't block phone signals, but by altering the silver pattern, it can be tuned to screen out whatever frequencies annoy you most.

via Gizmodo

Interesting Data on Young People and Digital Technology

From the Pew Internet Center's presentation Baby Boomers and Digital Technology:

Kids:

• more likely to have a cell phone
• less likely to have a desktop
• more likely to have laptop
• more likely to have an iPod or MP3 player
• more likely to have a game console
• more likely to have an e-reader
• lore likely to have a tablet

Free EPUB Versions MakeUseOf's Free Manuals

Great stuff from Justin Pot – lots of great, free resources available, whether you're a student, a teacher, a techie, or a caveman!

EPUB Versions Of Our Free Manuals Now Available!:

Like our free manuals, but find them a pain to read on your e-reader, tablet or phone? You’re in luck! We’re proud to offer the ever-growing MakeUseOf manual collection in a new format: EPUB!

If you’re sick of reading tiny text, or constantly scrolling just to read a single page, this is the change you’ve been waiting for. The EPUB format is open source and designed to work well with both phones and e-ink devices.

Head to our manual download page and you’ll see most of our manuals are now available as EPUB files. Enter your password, as usual, and you’ll find the link to the new EPUB file.

 

 

Hollywood Versus Technology

Cory Doctorow shares a great Infographic: Hollywood's long war on technology that illustrates that SOPA is just the latest effort by Hollywood and media-owners to lock down their content.

a handy guide to the pig-ignorant campaigns that Hollywood has waged against new technologies since the industry's founders ripped off Thomas Edison's patents and fled to California.

Infographic: Why the movie industry is so wrong about SOPA

10 Dying or Dead Tech Skills

10 Tech Skills Heading the Way of the Dinosaur from Randy Muller:

The IT industry is one which evolves rapidly - some would say too rapidly. As a consequence of this rapid change, IT professionals must also update their skills more often than most other industries. Accountants must learn new tax laws; IT pros must learn new operating systems. Doctors learn new techniques or have new pharmaceuticals at their disposal; IT pros must learn new programming languages. Some IT skills have been around for decades - just ask your friendly COBOL programmer. New IT skills emerge faster than old ones retire. IT pros must continuously learn new and expand current skills or they will become extinct, just as the systems and applications they once supported. Let's take a quick look at some skills that are on the endangered species list for 2012.

1. Email

2. Computer Hardware Support

3. COBOL

4. Adobe Flash Mobile

5. Windows 2000 and before

6. Traditional Telephony

7. Networking

8. Silverlight

9. Software and Network support

10. ColdFusion

 

Profile of a Master Thief

Really interesting story from Joshuah Bearman ... Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief I find it interesting because I see students all the time with similar inate mechanical, electrical and computer aptitudes and my challenge is to harness that aptitude in the classroom.

Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.

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I Love Technology

Great use of GPS;)

annoyed says FML:

Today, my husband changed the voice on my car's GPS to Mr T's. I don't know how to change it back. I've been saying, "I pity the fool" over and over again ever since.

How Easy is it to Copy a Captured Drone?

David Axe reports that It Won't Be Easy For Iran To Dissect, Copy U.S. Drone:

Prepare the dissection table. Iran says it’s planning to disassemble its prized acquisition: a CIA-operated drone that apparently crashed on its territory. Its goal: to learn how the drone, apparently a stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, evades radar and how its top-secret sensors work. Which has the U.S. worried about Iran copying its advanced flying robot. ”There is the potential for reverse engineering, clearly,” U.S. Air Force Chief Gen. Norton Schwartz conceded.

But Iran will probably need help from arms exporters Russia and China in breaking down the flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — meaning the RQ-170′s secrets could ultimately fall into the hands of, well, pretty much every country with an interest in sticking it to Uncle Sam. Luckily for Washington, however, reverse-engineering a high-tech drone is easier said than done, according to two UAV designers who spoke to Danger Room on the condition we not print their names.

When Will Batteries Get Better?

Moore's law has provided us with dramatic improvements in CPUs, memory, hard disks, etc, but has had little impact on batteries. While the iPad has great battery life, this is due mostly to being almost all battery internally.

Louis Bergeron reporting … Stanford develops new batteries:

Stanford researchers have used nanoparticles of a copper compound to develop a high-power battery electrode that is so inexpensive to make, so efficient and so durable that it could be used to build batteries big enough for economical large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid – something researchers have sought for years.

Thailand Floods and Technology

Nick Bilton on the impact of the recent floods in Thailand.

Thailand Floods Could Affect Cloud Computing:

Thailandis under water, and as a result, some Internet companies could be facing problems.

Flooding in the country has now shuttered more than 1,000 factories — some of which make computer hard drives. The government has warned that waters could continue to rise until the end of the year. When the rains do finally stop, it is estimated that factories could take months to clean up computer equipment damaged by floods and to re-calibrated tooling.

The impact on PC makers has been widely discussed. The cost of hard drives is expected to rise as makers scramble to secure supply. But it could have a wider impact on every company that stores data in the cloud. Facebook, Google,Microsoft and Amazon all of depend on storage devices in data centers. The same is true of the thousands of companies that stream music or store music. Apple, for example, recently introduced iCloud, its online storage software that can back up music, photos and documents online. As demand for those services rise, they need more storage, which will be hard to come by in the coming months.