Two Canadian kids have sent a LEGO minifig boldly where few LEGO minifigs have gone before: into space. More »
from Kotaku
From Droid Life: After Update, Google’s Music Manager Allows Download Of All Your Music Straight From The Cloud
Thanks to a recent update to the Music Manager for Google Music, the search giant is now giving users a single button to download all of their previously uploaded or purchased music straight to their hard drives from the cloud. This was a feature we had been hoping for since its inception, but later is better than ever. Has your computer crashed and now your new PC has no music? Then this should ease your worries about losing your collection.
Along with that gem, users can now share YouTube videos of songs they have recently added to their library with their Google+ circles. Once you have uploaded a song, just click the drop down button and hit “share video with circles.†Cheers, Google.
Via: Google+
from Droid Life
From Reviews Tom’s Hardware US: Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook’s Optical Bay
That’s ingenious!! A very good idea indeed!
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You want a performance-oriented SSD in your notebook, but you also need the capacity of a hard drive. Why not just remove your optical drive, drop your hard drive into its bay, and load up a brand new SSD with Windows and your apps?
From Gizmodo: MIT’s Folding City Car Is Finally a Reality
MIT’s city car concept has been in the pipeline for a long time, but until now there’s been nothing other than illustrations and half-size models. Now, however, the real thing is here, and it’s about to go into testing in Europe. More »
from Gizmodo
From Gizmodo: Google Maps Now Also Shows Where You Don’t Want to Be
That will be an awesome feature for travelers… Nice job Google!
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Nothing ruins a road trip like having to ford flooded rivers and dodge oncoming tornadoes. Thankfully, Google Map’s new Public Alerts system should help keep you out of the path of Mother Nature’s rage. More »
from Gizmodo
From Engadget: Quantum dots could increase fiber optic bandwidth up to 10 times
Nothing screams World of Tomorrow quite like quantum dots. Alongside the possibility of paint-on solar cells, the technology could also multiply optic fiber bandwidth by up to ten times. The Photonic Network Research Institute at NICT has been able to crank up the capacity of the data transmission system by combining a light source and photonic crystal fiber. The quantum dots act as the light source, and via the NICT’s new “sandwiched sub-nano separator structure” [above], they can be tweaked to work at 70THz — far in excess of the 10THz frequencies typically used. Aside from optical communications, the potency of these high frequencies allow it to pass beyond skin, opening up the use of quantum dots to medical scanning and high resolution cell imaging. Is there anything these dots can’t do? Catch a slightly more technical explanation in the video right after the break.
from Engadget
From Coolest Gadgets: Command & Conquer coded in HTML5
There are moments in life when we look at a particular object and think, “Now why didn’t I think of this before?†I am quite sure that many of us who spent our teenage years in the mid-1990s would have played the game Command & Conquer at some point in time or another, where the almighty tank could be stopped by something as simple as sandbags, and had hours and hours of fun honing our RTS skills in front of the computer. Well, a hardcore coder decided that playing the game today on a legacy system is just too mainstream, and coded the entire Command & Conquer in HTML5, where the entire thing runs on 69k of Javascript.
Aditya Ravi Shankar built the clone as part of his attempt to improve his coding skills, where he gave himself an entire month to do so, building the game in the browser while going through the original game’s files in order to get sprites, sounds and specs just the way it was. According to Shankar, “In hindsight, I might have wanted to take smaller steps and make a tower defense game instead of jumping directly into an RTS. Trying to do the whole thing in under a month all by myself wasn’t the smartest idea.â€
Still, he got the job done, and there were some glitches here and there during testing, such as tanks getting stuck in the sea, and it works best in Chrome or Firefox. If you want to help improve Shankar’s work, check out the source code here.
from Coolest Gadgets