Feed Roundup

At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Palm surprised everyone (including Epic Games) by having a working demo of the Unreal Engine running on the company's Web OS.

CPU hog Adobe v HTML5

When Steve Jobs badmouthed Adobe Flash to The Wall Street Journal, he said it was buggy, littered with security holes, and a "CPU hog." It's hard to argue with the first two, but a new study claims the Apple cult leader was wrong about hog bit.…

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

One week after losing job

A former data analyst for the US Transportation Security Agency has been accused of trying to sabotage a terrorist screening database used to vet people with access to sensitive information and secure areas of the nation’s transportation network.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

Rich Gibson of the Gigapan project stopped by the Make offices today and showed me some of the cool super high res photos he's got online. The barnacle is mind blowing. Be sure to view the full image at GigaPan.org

This barnacle Nano Gigapan is really cool. Take your time, really zoom in and explore this one. The barnacle was found washed up on the back of a crab shell at Mendocino's big river beach. In this Nano Gigapan you can see the crab shell around the base of the barnacle.

This image is composed of 384 pictures taken with a scanning electron microscope, which took me around 5-6 hours to capture. The barnacle is magnified 800x. The penny is really neat, too. Rich said he will soon write a post explaining how he takes these photos.

Nano Gigapan Blog

From Romenesko: "NPR blogger uses all of Tribune CEO's banned words in one sentence" He lent a helping hand to a legendary incarcerated pedestrian lone gunman (the perpetrator who over in a neighboring state, perished in a perfect storm of no brainers and things that went terribly wrong, and was plagued by killing sprees in which he gave 110% only to have his senseless murders marred by the untimely deaths of guys and folks whose fatal deaths came in the wake of auto accidents....

nut writes "Everybody's favourite actor, author and starship captain is bringing some new ideas to the world of social networking. Myouterspace.com is, in the Captain's own words, '...a Sci Fi Social Network for those with a passion for the arts.' Facebook and Myspace should be worried. Sign up now. Go on, you know you want to."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The adorable little boy in this video, whose name is Calen, is sorting out what it means when two fellas get married to one another.

At one point, while face-palming, he says pensively: "I always see husbands and wifes, but this is the very first time I saw husbands and husbands! That's so funny. So—so you love each other! [...] I'm gonna go play now."

Video: Husbands and Husbands. Flip-cammed and uploaded by YouTube user TheColonelFrog.

Alternate video url 1, and Alternate video url 2.

(Dangerous Minds via Oh Have You Seen This, thanks Tara McGinley!).

Company announces Thursday that it will offer mobile device users inventory checks on local stores, allowing them to see if products are available.

Mozilla Messaging updates the Lanikai build of Thunderbird to beta status. Notably, Thunderbird 3.1 beta 1 shares the same Gecko engine as Firefox 3.6.

Visit our new online store, filled with a hand-picked selection of books, toys, games, gadgets and miscellaneous tat that we like. It uses Amazon's platform, which means that we get paid with referral fees cut from their end: the prices to you are the same as usual. We're going to regularly prune it, too, so that the choices are fresh!

Verizon Wireless exec tells The Wall Street Journal it will have a 4G wireless phone on the market within three to six months of launching its 4G LTE network.

MikeChino writes "A group of scientists from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute have devised a way to encode a visible-frequency wireless signal in light emitted by plain old desklamps and other light fixtures. The team was able to achieve a record-setting data download rate of 230 megabits per second, and they expect to be able to double that speed in the near future. While the regular radio-frequency Wi-Fi most of us use currently is perfectly fine, it does have its flaws — it has a limited bandwidth that confines it to a certain spectrum and if you've ever had someone leech off of your connection, you know that it also leaks through walls. LED wireless signals would theoretically have none of these downsides."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google apps 'postponed' on China carriers

Motorola will soon push Microsoft's Bing search engine onto Android phones in China, after announcing an alliance with the Redmond software giant that will see Bing appear on Androids across the globe.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

Now in the Boing Boing Bazaar: chunks of aerogel! $50 buys you a pair of aerogel discs. Silica aerogel, the infamous and ethereal material comprised of up to 99.98% air, can be yours at last. Known for its superinsulating abilities, ultralow density, and its use on the Mars rovers, silica aerogel is just one member of the amazing class of materials known as aerogels, which promise to revolutionize everything from buildings to electric energy storage to hydrogen to lightweight structures.

These discs here are the old-fashioned "Classic Silica" flavor of aerogel and are composed of 96% air. While in principle capable of supporting 2000 times their weight in applied force, remember that 2000 times almost nothing is a small number, and that in its classic form, silica aerogel is fragile. This form factor of aerogel, what we call "monolithic" aerogel, is best for curiosity, display, shooting lasers through, etc.

Aerogel chunks in Boing Boing Bazaar

Previously:

• Chaotic Pendulums for sale in Bazaar
• Miniboss T-shirt in the Bazaar
• Get a P8TCH at the Bazaar
• Hine's felt camera cases in the Bazaar
• Tiny glass bell jar display case
• Zombie shadow maker
• Hollow spy coins for all your micro-smuggling needs

CNET Reviews has overhauled its Blu-ray testing for 2010 by adding inline charts, more systematic image quality tests and a detailed spreadsheet for easy comparison.

Sanyo's new eneloop hybrid bicycle recharges while it's being pedaled; Iwatani showed off a fuel cell bike that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell stack.

HvitRavn writes "SolarPHP 1.0 stable was released by Paul M. Jones today. SolarPHP is an application framework and library, and is a serious contender alongside Zend Framework, Symphony, and similar frameworks. SolarPHP has in the recent years been the cause of heated debate in the PHP community due to provocative benchmark results posted on Paul M. Jones' blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Note the conspicuous lack of smut! Frame from a Seattle Post-Intelligencer gallery of Playboy founder hugh Hefner's teenage doodles, sent to his high school sweetheart in the early 1940s. The full collection is for sale at a price well into the 6 figures. Apparently, rare book dealer Lux Mentis will send you a PDF of the contents upon request. (Via Roger Ebert)

j00bhaka writes "I am a US citizen attending university in Nova Scotia, Canada. I currently have the Verizon America and Canada plan (also known as the North American plan). My bill is currently around $80-$100 per month. I chose this for a couple reasons. One, I have had my number for about 7 years. Two, I do not permanently live in Canada. I live in Canada for 8 months out of the year at school, then travel home for the summer months. Either way, I would be dealing with international roaming without having both countries in my plan. Currently, I obviously don't have a smartphone. Through Verizon, I could purchase one, and add their international unlimited data plan on top of my (already) hefty phone bill. I have looked into Telus and Rogers here in Canada and cannot find anything better. As a student, my budget is obviously limited. Is there any way to reasonably have (and utilize) a smartphone while I am living in both countries? If so, what do you suggest I do?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

To kick it off, designer Chad Pugh created two WordPress personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell.” These two designs are a great way to show the WordPress love, even if you’re only showing it to yourself.

The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of old-fashioned printing presses and the mechanics of working with type. This persona might appeal to WordPress developers and users who appreciate the way things work under the hood.   “Inkwell” is more of a palimpsest* & watercolor hybrid that might appeal to the artists among us. Music, script and spills of color combine…

Okay, I’m starting to feel like an art critic so I’ll stop there. Check out the WordPress personas for Firefox and decide for yourselves.

* I never thought I would have occasion to use the word “palimpsest” in a dev blog post. Never.