Remote control Airsoft gun MacGyvered out of Wiimote

What do you think about Wiimote-controlled airsoft gun? As we see on Engadget feed says:

It’s the weekend, folks, and you know what that means — time to blow off a little steam. By way of example, the folks that brought us that Wiimote coil gun a while back have returned to the scene with a little something they like to call OfficeDefender. Using the very same servo and ioBridge module as the last time, this hack finds the gun replaced with a Beretta 9mm replica airsoft gun. Also note the nice use of Construx in a non-beer or iPhone related context. If that weren’t enough, this bad boy has a full-auto mode, moves 180 degrees horizontally, can be sighted with the head-mounted webcam and fired via Wiimote. More on Remote control airsoft gun MacGyvered out of Wiimote, ioBridge, and Construx.

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OQO Rumor: Expansys Pulls New Model Off Web Site

jkOnTheRun feed posted: “The title of the smallest full-featured Windows PC is still held by OQO, the tiny pocketable computer that has been around for a few years. I spent a good half hour with the newly announced Model 02+ early this year, the latest model that OQO was getting ready for release. That new model has not hit the market yet and rumors flying around a major OQO enthusiast web site have me wondering if it will ever be released.” More on OQO Rumored to Be Looking for Buyer: Expansys Pulls New Model Off Web Site.

Engadget feed posted: Oh no, OQO. According to some chatter on the OQOTALK forums, the company’s in dire financial straits and is looking to sell, and that the Model 2+ may be the last OQO device made, if it ever gets released. More worrisome, European retailer eXpansys is reportedly canceling orders for the MID and removing all the company’s products from the site, due to what it’s telling customers is “uncertainties to stock availability.” Ouch. Whatever’s going on, right now it’s not sounding too good — guess that Model 2+ Lie to Me cameo wasn’t enough to rile up overwhelming support. More on OQO looking for buyer, Model 2+ future in limbo?

source : hottestelectronicgadgets.co.uk
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Nokia Rolls Out E52 Smartphone

Nokia released another device in its E Series line of smartphones, and the E52 is aimed at corporate professionals who need to stay connected while on the go.

Unlike smartphones such as the E71x, the E52 lacks a full QWERTY keyboard and opts for a traditional nine-key input method. The E52 has a sleek and slim design with a metallic finish, as well as a 2.4-inch screen that has a 240-by-320-pixel resolution.

The lack of a full keyboard doesn't mean the E52 is a messaging slouch, though, as it can receive corporate e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes accounts. Additionally, the Symbian-powered handset will come packed with Nokia Messaging, which gives users free push e-mail from the likes of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and other ISP or Web-based accounts.

To stay connected, the E52 has EDGE, Wi-Fi, and 3G connectivity that's capable of getting 10.2-Mbps downlink speed. The handset also has a GPS chip that can be used with cellular data for assisted GPS services such as location-based searches and navigation features.

Nokia's smartphone is also a capable media player, as it can play multiple types of video and audio files. It also packs a 3.2-megapixel camera with an LED flash, Bluetooth 2.0, an FM radio, and expandable memory via a MicroSD slot.

The handset boasts an impressive eight hours of talk time, and Nokia said it can get up to 23 days of standby time. The E52 will ship in the second half of the year, priced about $325 before taxes and subsidies. It's likely to ship in major European markets first, and then expand to other regions.

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HUBBLE'S NEW SUPERPOWERS

When astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis open up the Hubble Space Telescope for its final extreme makeover, much of the work will be aimed at fixing what's been ailing the world's premier orbiting observatory. It'll get fresh batteries and brand-new gyros, and if all goes well, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph will be back in full working order for the first time in years.

But this is not just a fix-up mission. Two new instruments are due to be swapped into the mix, and those enhancements should give Hubble superpowers it never had before: for example, three-in-one vision that spans the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared, and the ability to make out the cosmic cobwebs that stretch out between galaxies.

"We're all looking forward to seeing how well the new installations and the instrument repairs go," Ken Sembach, Hubble project scientist at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, told me this week. "We're looking forward to an improved Hubble."

The new instruments, known as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3, or "Wiff-see-three") and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (or COS), should open the way for new wonders and speed up the pace of discovery during Hubble's final five years. They're designed to complement the two instruments being repaired - or replace them in case they can't be fixed.
Here's a quick guide to Hubble's future superpowers and how they'll mesh with the space telescope's pre-existing capabilities:


WFC3: Superman's three-in-one vision
The $75 million Wide Field Camera 3's superpowers have their roots in its enhanced sensitivity in wavelengths ranging from the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, through visible wavelengths and into the infrared.

"This camera basically is doing the work of two or even three cameras, if you think about the previous generations of instruments," Sembach said. He said its sensitivity to infrared light is 10 to 30 times that of Hubble's old workhorse for those wavelengths, the now-dormant Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, a.k.a. NICMOS.

WFC3 takes full advantage of manufacturing standards that just weren't available for earlier instruments - such as the camera it's replacing, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2, or "Wiff-pic-two"). During image processing, engineers usually have to work around the small blemishes caused by imperfections in the camera detectors, but with WFC3, "we can remove almost all of those to very high precision," Sembach said.

Once the camera gets to work, you can expect bunches of eye-popping, color-enhanced images that combine ultraviolet, visible-light and infrared data. "One of the real drivers behind this camera, scientifically, was really wanting to understand what's going on in star-forming regions," Sembach explained.

The infrared detectors can pick up the light that filters through warm clouds of interstellar dust, while the ultraviolet/visible light detectors can spot the hot blue stars that are just crackling into existence. "You can start to build up a more complete picture of how these stars are forming, and how they're interacting," Sembach said.

To get an idea how observations from multiple wavelengths can be put together, check out the Hubble/Spitzer/GALEX image of the galaxy M81, and the Chandra/Hubble/Spitzer/GALEX view of the galaxy M51.

WFC3 also is equipped with "grisms" - grating-equipped prisms that can analyze the spectral signature of light and determine how distant a celestial object is, based on its redshift.

"One of the other things that WFC3 was really designed for is to look back at earlier times of the universe and pick out really red things, as a precursor to what we'll be doing with the James Webb Space Telescope in the 2013-2014 time frame," Sembach said. "It's going to be a very interesting time to look at, when galaxies are just first coming together."

The new camera could help Hubble double or triple the rate of discovery for extremely distant supernovae. Those are just the kinds of observations that can help sort out the mysteries surrounding the accelerating expansion of the universe. For more about that and other WFC3 wonders, check out this NASA Web page.


COS: The Flash's speediness for spectroscopy
We've already mentioned how WFC3 can analyze the characteristics of light from distant galaxies to figure out how far away they are. When it comes to ultraviolet wavelengths, the $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is built to conduct that kind of analysis with far greater sensitivity than WFC3 or the space telescope's other spectrograph could manage.

The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, performed a similar duty before it broke down in 2004. But COS is built to handle light far more efficiently. "In STIS, there are many, many bounces before the light gets into the detector. In COS, there's only one bounce. ... You gain a lot just by not absorbing that light," Sembach said.

As a result, COS will be 10 to 30 times more sensitive than STIS was, depending on the brightness of the object you're observing. "If you want to take a spectrum of a star or a quasar or galaxy, what normally would have taken you 10 orbits will just take one orbit," Sembach said.

And when it comes to dimmer objects, COS can do more in two weeks than STIS could do in a year. That opens up whole new vistas in astronomy. Job No. 1 is to chart the ethereal cosmic web that apparently provided the framework for galaxy clusters soon after the universe was born - hence the reference to "Cosmic Origins" in the contraption's name. Learning more about the cosmic web may also tell astronomers more about the mysterious unseen stuff known as dark matter.

"That cosmic webbing can't currently be imaged with Hubble or any other observatory up there," Sembach said. "There's no way to study it other than to observe the light that's processed through it. You're looking for the 'fingerprint' of that stuff on the light, basically."

Eventually, COS' scientists will use hundreds of fingerprint analyses, pointing in all directions into the sky, to build up what they call a "CAT scan of the universe."

But wait ... there's more: COS should be able to track the flow stellar winds and even sample the starlight shining through the atmospheres of alien planets. "For example, you might be able to see whether a planet's atmosphere has hydrogen or carbon or oxygen in it," Sembach said.

COS will be installed in a slot currently taken up by a corrective-optics package known as COSTAR. Spacewalkers installed COSTAR back in 1993 to compensate for Hubble's incorrectly shaped mirror. But now all of Hubble's instruments have their own built-in corrective optics, so COSTAR is no longer needed. It will be brought back down to Earth aboard Atlantis, along with WFPC2.

What's ahead: The League of Extraordinary Instruments
If everything goes right, Hubble will have two cameras, WFC3 (new) and ACS (repaired) ... and two spectrographs, COS (new) and STIS (repaired). Does it sound as if there's some NASA-style redundancy going on? Maybe a little bit. After all, it's by no means certain that ACS and STIS will be repaired.

When it comes to taking pictures of the dusty protoplanetary disks around stars, or even directly imaging planets around other stars, ACS will be the instrument of choice because it has a coronagraph that can block out a star's glare. WFC3, which was designed before ACS went on the fritz in 2007, doesn't have one.

That doesn't mean WFC3 is totally incapable of seeing an extrasolar planet. "If conditions are right, it might be possible to get a direct image with some clever observing techniques," Sembach said. But the example does show that the old instruments can still do some things better than the new ones.

It's the same with STIS: "It's capable of spectroscopy at optical wavelengths, which COS is not," Sembach said. If STIS is returned to working order, it will be the instrument of choice for analyzing alien atmospheres and watching black holes gobble up gas. Generally speaking, COS can gather light more efficiently, but STIS can study areas of the sky in higher resolution.

Having instruments with overlapping capabilities is a good thing, Sembach said: "Being able to do something two different ways provides validation that what you're seeing is correct, or maybe confirmation that it isn't."

Sembach and his colleagues on the Hubble team should find out how much capability they'll have soon after each of the Atlantis crew's five spacewalks. First there'll be an "aliveness test" to make sure all the circuitry is hooked up correctly. If the connections needs tweaking, the job might have to be handled during a later spacewalk. Later, Hubble's engineers will conduct functional tests and calibrate the instruments.

"We'll start interleaving some science observations with the calibration observations sometime in July and August," Sembach said.

Meanwhile, the Hubble team will try to bring NICMOS back online as well. "It relies upon a cooling system that has been off since September of last year, and we've been unable to restart it," Sembach said. "We will try again to restart it this summer."

Look for the first fruits of Hubble's new (and restored) superpowers to be revealed shortly after Labor Day.

Source : cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com
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Your Facebook Relationship Status: It's Complicated

For many people, the manner in which they present themselves on Facebook has come to mirror how they see themselves in real life. Photos broadcast the fun they're having, status updates say what's on their mind and a change in relationship status announces their availability, commitment or something in between.

Of these mini-declarations, relationship status is the only one that directly involves another person. That puts two people in the social-networking mirror, and that, to borrow a Facebook phrase, can make things complicated. (Read "How Not to Be Hated on Facebook")

There are six relationship categories Facebook users can choose from: single, in a relationship, engaged, married, it's complicated, and in an open relationship. (Users can decline to list a status, but Facebook estimates that roughly 60% of its users do, with "single" and "married" the most common statuses.) The first four categories are pretty self-explanatory, but when should you use them? A Jane Austen of Facebook has yet to emerge, let alone a Miss Manners, and no one seems to have a grip on what the social norms ought to be.

"You change your Facebook status when it's official," says Liz Vennum, a 25-year-old secretary living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. "When you're okay with calling the person your girlfriend or boyfriend. Proper breakup etiquette is not to change the status until after you've had the 'we need to talk' talk. Then you race each other home (or back to the iPhone) to be the first to change your status to single."

Not everyone agrees, of course. Some couples are together for years but neglect to announce their coupledom to their social network. "Some moron tried to convince me that [my relationship is] not legitimate because I don't have it on Facebook," says Annie Geitner, a college sophomore who has had the same boyfriend for more than a year. "So that made me even more determined to not to put it up there." Others, like Trevor Babcock, consider the Facebook status a relationship deal-breaker. "I'm not willing to date anyone exclusively unless she feels comfortable going Facebook-public," he says.

One common theme among romantically inclined Facebook users is that there are almost infinite ways for the Facebook relationship status to go awry. There's the significant other who doesn't want to list his or her involvement (causing a rift in the real-world relationship); the accidental change that alerts friends to a nonexistent breakup (causing endless annoyance); but worse than both is when the truth spreads uncontrollably.

Lesley Spoor and Chris Lassiter got engaged the night before Thanksgiving. The couple thought about calling their families immediately, but instead decided to wait a day and surprise everyone at Thanksgiving dinner.

The problem, of course, was Facebook. The morning after the big night, Spoor changed her relationship status. "I got all giddy since I'm old and engaged for the first time," says Spoor of her switch from "in a relationship" to "engaged." "I thought it had to be confirmed by [my fiancé] before it would update, though. Apparently not."

The wife of a guy who went to high school with Spoor's fiancé — a woman Spoor barely knew — was the first to post a congratulatory message on Spoor's Facebook wall. Spoor realized her mistake and deleted the message, but by then it was too late; her future in-laws had seen the message, and the status update, and called to ask what was going on. How do you explain to your family that you told the Internet you just got engaged before you told them? "It caused a huge fight," she says.

But relationship status doesn't have to be a source of confusion and despair. Emily and Michael Weise-King were in complete agreement about their status: they decided to change themselves from "engaged" to "married" in the middle of their February 2009 wedding reception.

"It was after cocktails but before the first course at dinner," says Mrs. Weise-King. Still in their bridal attire, the couple whipped out their iPhones — they'd done a test run ahead of time and determined that they had to use the web browser and not the simple iPhone app — and switched status in front of bemused wedding guests. (They also uploaded a photo.) Throughout the rest of the night, Weise-King would occasionally glance down at her Facebook profile, "the way I'd glance at my ring when I first got engaged." Their status has not changed since.

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10 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site

Below are some ways to help maximize your site’s traffic.

SELF-PROMOTE
To help secure readers, add a favorites or bookmarks option so visitors can add your Web site to their reading list. Along the same lines, add an “e-mail this” and “share” tab at the bottom of each post. You might also try creating a weekly newsletter that highlights your best content. Blast it out to readers who sign up.

Comment on online forums and blog posts and link to your Web site each time. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation. Do not spam. Also add your blog or Web site to your e-mail signature, Twitter, Facebook and other online accounts. Claim your blog on Technorati and look into submitting content on StumbleUpon and Delicious. Also, create a “lens” or page on Squidoo.

DON’T WAIT ON GOOGLE
Be proactive. Send your site to Google and other search engines. If you rely on them to crawl your content, you may be waiting a long time.

WRITE USEFUL, ORIGINAL CONTENT
This sounds obvious, but it bears mentioning. Attract readers by writing well and regularly. Then keep them interested by continuing to do so. When you’re building a base, try to post new, original content at regular intervals. Use blogging software that lets you set an automatic publishing time so you don’t have to physically get up early in the morning, for example, to manually post your content at that time. Also pay attention to your headlines. Use simple keywords to describe the subject of your posts.
BRING ON GUEST BLOGGERS
Another way to increase traffic is to use an established name to bring the desired traffic to you. Find someone who writes well on your topic and ask them if they’d be willing to contribute to your Web site or blog.

MAXIMIZE TECHNOLOGY
Don’t just rely on text to attract readers. Use video, podcasts, slide shows and other multimedia to create dynamic content.

LINK AND TAG
Link to other sites within your post and ask other blogs to link back to you and add your Web site to their blog rolls. Another option is to submit your site to blog directories.

Use headers, title tags and meta tags to optimize your site for search engines. Use keywords to describe what your Web site is about. Also make sure that your site’s content matches your meta data and other tag phrases. HitTail is one service that helps you home in on key words. Don’t forget about your images. Make sure they, too, are search-engine optimized.

ENGAGE THE READER
Respond directly to e-mail and comments. Even a short mass e-mail message will begin to open a two-way dialogue. Showcase your personality by sharing personal anecdotes where relevant so that you can establish a rapport with your audience. Another option is to conduct a reader survey or poll so you can improve on your site based upon your readers’ preferences. Tracking and analyzing your statistics also helps. You might also try joining a syndication service such as BlogBurst.

PROVIDE AN RSS FEED
Feedburner and FeedDemon are two sites that can set you up with this.

THINK GLOBALLY
Remember, the Internet spans the globe. Even if your Web site is local in nature, it can still attract readers in another country, so don’t limit your base. If you’re able to add language options to your site, all the better.

DON’T FORGET THE OFFLINE WORLD
Sure, the Web is great for spreading the word about your site, but so is in-person communication. Use word of mouth and, if you can afford it, a well-placed print advertisement.

BE PATIENT
Building traffic takes time. Set short-term goals for yourself, but understand that this is a long term process.

What have I missed? What other ways can you get more people to check out your site? Comment away.

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Canon Adds Rebates on D.S.L.R.’s and Lenses

Just in time for Mother’s Day (or whatever shopping excuse works for you), Canon is offering instant rebates of up to $300 on two of its popular D.S.L.R. cameras and up to $500 on a slew of lenses.

Not all retailers are participating in the rebate program, so it will pay to shop around. For instance, Canon has an instant rebate of $200 on a Rebel XSi kit (which includes an 18mm-55mm lens) when purchased with an additional 55mm-250mm IS lens. At B&H Photo, the pair costs $849 with the $200 instant rebate. Without the instant rebate, the bundle will cost you $1,100 at Ritz Camera or $954 purchased separately at Amazon.com.

Canon is also offering $300 off an EOS 50D kit that includes an EF-S 18mm-200mm IS lens, for a total of $1,599.

Instant rebates are available for 18 lenses, some very mainstream and some very specialized (and expensive). Also look for instate rebates on three Speedlite flash units.

Canon says the instant rebates aren’t available everywhere but should be available at many authorized dealers and larger shopping sites. I did a quick survey and found the rebates at B&H Photo, but not Amazon, Best Buy, Buy.com, or Ritz Camera.

You need not be quick on the trigger, however. The instant rebates will be in effect through July 11.


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