Draw any design you fancy with a laser pointer – and the laser cutter will do the rest
From Gizmodo: Tiny Rooftop Turbine Could Make Urban Wind Farms A Reality
There’s a reason that wind farms are placed offshore rather than in urban areas—the turbines are typically huge, difficult to erect, and need a solid sustained gust to produce any meaningful amount of current. This prototype, on the other hand, will assemble easily and take up little space as it quietly produces kilowatts atop skyscrapers. More »
from Gizmodo
From Lifehacker: Outgrow.me Shows You The Best Kickstarter and Indiegogo Projects You Can Buy Now
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are great platforms for people to fund good ideas or projects, but navigating those sites to find the great projects amidst the thousands of others isn’t easy. So here’s Outgrow.me, which shows you only the successful products/projects you can pre-order or buy now. More »
from Lifehacker
From Lifehacker: SoundGecko Converts Any Article Into an MP3 and Syncs with Dropbox, Drive, or an iPhone App
At its core, SoundGecko is a new webapp that’s essentially a text-to-speech transcription service. Drop a URL into SoundGecko and it converts the article into speech. On top of that it also integrates with cloud services and an iPhone app. More »
from Lifehacker
From Gizmodo: This Is the True Color of the Black Sea
The Black Sea looks crazy right now, as you can see in this photo taken by the MODIS instrument onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on July 15. These intense swirls are the work of a microorganism called coccolithophore, a “calcite-shedding phytoplankton [that] can color much of the Black Sea cyan.” More »
from Gizmodo
From Engadget: Developer won’t patch XBLA game because Microsoft would charge ‘tens of thousands’ of dollars
That is terrible that Microsoft would charge so much to developers for fixing games! Boo!!!
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Seeing as how so much software is moving to online distribution, the significance of this controversy might extend far beyond gaming and XBLA. For now, however, the spotlight is firmly on Microsoft and the way it charges developers for testing their games and patches, after a well-known developer made an unusually public complaint. In a post on its official blog, Polytron said it would not patch a rare game-saving bug in its popular title Fez, because Microsoft would charge it “tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.” It added that “had Fez been released on Steam instead of XBLA,” the problem would have been fixed “right away” and at no cost to the developer, which strongly hints that it’ll jump to another platform as soon as its XBLA exclusivity expires. Responses to the story over at our sister site Joystiq are decidedly mixed, with some folks outraged that Microsoft’s high maintenance attitude could hold back improvements in this way while others suspect Polytron of blame-shifting.
from Engadget
From Gizmodo: This Touchscreen Water Faucet Might Actually Be Good for Your Health [Video]
Ask most people what a water ionizer does, and not only will they probably not know, they probably won’t care. But ionizers like Tyent’s new 9000T, complete with a slick touchscreen display, can make your water even more healthy than it already is. More »
from Gizmodo