kalido asks: "When travelling with gadgets it can be a pain to keep the power flowing, especially in remote locations. Are there any practical methods to recharge batteries and devices when on the go? A bit of googling turns up the PowerFilm, PowerFlex and SolarRoll flexible solar panels. But I haven't seen any reviews anywhere. Have any of you used these or similar devices and how easy is it to use if attached to a pack, bike, jacket, etc.?"

HarvardFrankenstein writes "A Nintendo press release confirms what many people have already speculated: the recent delay of the release of the Nintendo DS game, Metroid Prime Hunters, will give the developers time to implement support for the upcoming Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. From the release: 'Metroid Prime Hunters will launch in the first quarter of 2006, complete with access to Nintendo® Wi-Fi Connection, Nintendo's upcoming online gaming service. Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection will debut before the end of the year with a Mario Kart® and an Animal Crossing® game, and will let players connect wirelessly with one another as easily as if they were sitting in the same room.' This is excellent news, as many people felt that the first person shooter would suffer heavily without online multiplayer support."

Aeonite writes "Cybernetics (that is to say, the sort associated with Cyberpunk) has long been an interest of mine, and so I was eager to dive into Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids , which is about exactly what it proclaims to be about. Sort of. The book does indeed cover everything from Bionic Humans to Androids, but the continuum of artificial beings is heavily weighted towards one end of the spectrum. Overall, the book is quite comprehensive in dealing with physical aspects of artificial intelligences, but when it comes to the nature of intelligence itself, the book barely dips its toe in the water. As the author himself says, the question here is not "Can machines think?", like Turing, but rather 'Can machines live?'" Read on for the rest of Aeonite's review.

bobcote writes "The Boston Globe is running a story about the maintainers of the mainframes getting older and facing retirement. One of the problems is that many computer science programs don't include mainframes in their curricula anymore. From the article: "Amid concerns that America doesn't produce enough technically trained young people, mainframe computer users and developers are especially concerned. Most computer science students concentrate on small-computer technology, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating systems, or the popular alternatives Unix and Linux. Few have been trained on zOS, the operating system that runs IBM Corp.'s massive mainframes."

ChessKnught writes "Dan Ackerman posted a blog on Blog.CNET.com regarding Intel Developer Forum chatter about Intel's branding of it's Media Center PC. Don McDonald, one of Intel's Digital Home Group Sr. VP's, is talking about 'Viiv', apparently targetting entertainment PC users. It looks like it'll be combining CPU, Intel hardware (TV tuner, remote, and easy setup wireless home networking, etc.) and Windows Media Center Edition."

Steve Nixon writes "An unconfirmed report today from Reuters quotes an industry analyst firm iSuppli as saying that Apple plans to buy as much as 40 percent of Samsung's second-half flash memory output. The NAND flash memory cards will be used in a new, 4 GB iPod Mini, which Apple would release in time for the holiday shopping season, the report stated. The current version of the 4 GB mini contains a hard drive. Apple's iPod Shuffle uses flash memory."

Might E. Mouse writes "The next version of Centrino, codenamed Napa, will support RAID. Intel is pushing it as a great way for business users to have added reliability and data backup on their work notebooks. Should boost gaming performance too. Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array? "

shrewd writes "AU News site Whirlpool has news on a huge AUD $37 million investment by Intel in a WiMax project. From the article: 'Australia will become the world's testbed for WiMAX - Intel's wireless broadband technology - with the announcement that the chip giant will invest AUD $37million in the expansion of the Unwired network in Australia ... Unwired CEO David Spence said the investment will make WiMAX an absolutely mainstream technology. 'Unwired will be in the unique position of having access to the majority of the WiMAX-designated 3.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz licensed bands in Australia's major metropolitan areas,' Spence said.'"

It doesn't come easy writes "Japan's Hitachi Ltd. on Wednesday unveiled the world's first hard disk drive/DVD recorder that can store one terabyte of data, or enough to record about 128 hours of high-definition digital broadcasting."

productdose.com writes "A robotic bat head that can emit and detect ultrasound in the band of frequencies used by the world's bats will give echolocation research a huge boost. Sonar in water is a mature field, but sonar in air is far less advanced. Whenever a robot team wants to build an autonomous robot they look at sonar first, but they quickly run into problems due to the simple nature of commercial sonar systems, and switch to vision or laser-ranging. The IST project CIRCE hopes that the research they can now do with the robotic bat will lead to more sophisticated sonar systems being used for robot navigation and other applications."

Eh-Wire writes "The University of Florida has a short article on the "morphing wing" drone they are developing for a small aircraft that can swoop through parking garages, dive into alleys and land on balconies. Close-up video of seagulls in flight was the inspiration for the design of the drone. A still image of the drone shows an aircraft that looks surprisingly gull-like. A video shows the "wing morphing" in action on a static mounted drone. There is also a link to quite a few more videos in the article but it's not real obvious. Some guys get all the phun jobs!"

theodp writes "Educational toymaker LeapFrog is introducing the Fly "pentop" computer, a talking computer hidden within a pen the size of an electric toothbrush. Available in mid-October for $99 at Wal-Mart and Target, the device responds to written commands and is aimed at 9-14 year-olds who can use it as a calculator, a calendar, to create and record music, and to play logic and geography games."

Eh-Wire writes "Roborior, a house-sitting robot armed with a digital camera, infrared sensors, and a videophone is on sale in select Japanese department stores. The house-sitting robot can detect break-ins with its infrared sensors and then call the owners cell phone and stream video to the tiny screen. At $2600 each the Roborior is not cheap. For those that require something a little more substantial, Tmusk, the manufacturer of Roborior, has produced a four legged version called Banryu. This one is the size of a large dog and sells for around $18,000. It's not supposed to shed hair or sleep on the furniture which could make it quite popular."

inditek writes "C|Net's News.com reports that Terrasoft Solutions, the vendor that sells and contributes to the development of Yellow Dog Linux has found, and continues to look for, some hardware alternatives based around the PowerPC now that Apple is moving to Intel chips. They say Apple's move makes for a good opportunity and more open space for a chip they think has a lot of life left in it." team99parody also writes "This is great news for customers like the US Navy who rely on Linux-on-PowerPC for important tasks like sonar imaging systems."

An anonymous reader writes "The battle between Intel and AMD has broken out of the cleanroom and literally into public view with AMD's public display CPU speed challenge to competitor Intel. Should the competition take place, the infamous chip makers will battle their best 2-way and 4-way configurations for the latest title as speed king." From the article: "AMD's proposed dual-core duel would be a live, public performance evaluation between server platforms based on the dual-core Opteron 800 Series or 200 Series processors and the corresponding Intel product. Should Intel accept AMD's challenge, the duel would take place at a public venue to be announced in the coming weeks, with testing conducted by a neutral, third-party testing lab. "

EconolineCrush writes "Intel has revealed its next generation CPU architecture at the Intel Developer Forum. The new architecture will be shared by 'Conroe' desktop, 'Merom' mobile, and 'Woodcrest' server processors, all of which were demoed by Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Rather than chasing clock speeds, Intel is focusing on lowering power consumption with its new architecture. Otellini claimed that Conroe will offer five times the performance per watt of the company's current desktop chips. He also ran the entire keynote presentation on a Merom laptop, and demoed Conroe on a system running Linux."

Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.

Jack writes "ITO published an article on a new secure PDA requested by the NSA. 'General Dynamics inked an $18 million contract with the secretive National Security Agency to design and develop a secure mobile personal assistant for defense workers. The PDA will integrate all types of communications including voice, data and web.'" In related news palmtops writes "Insecure Magazine has a great and in-depth article written by Seth Fogie, the VP of Airscanner.com, about Pocket PC security. His summary of PDA attacks states: 'These devices are easy to smuggle into a business and can be used to propagate an attack against network devices. Don't make the mistake of assuming is a PDA is a simple data keeper. As the cliche' goes... it is how you use it that matters.'"

Davian writes "As reported by the BBC a Vietnamese doctor has managed to create an endoscope using an apparatus consisting of lenses and a webcam, linked to a Pentium 4. Total cost of extra hardware - less than $1000." The doctor plans to also assist other local hospitals that are facing similar budgetary contraints.

Steve from Hexus writes "While at the GC 2005 gaming convention in Leipzig, Germany, Hexus.net encountered a new 1kW PSU from Enermax, called the 'Galaxy'. At peak output it will use 1.4kW of mains power to provide a total of 66 amps across its various power rails. Who will actually have a need for this PSU, and when this amount of power is being consumed, shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems (or perhaps energy efficiency) instead?"