The all-in-one Internet, LAN, Wi-Fi, Alarm Clock embedded, open source device, Chumby One gets the "take-me-apart" treatment for us all to see. iFixit has one again grasped the latest in technology just to give us a glimpse of what lies within the rounded square that Chumby One is. Among the many other devices at iFixit, you can see the full teardown complete with specs and information on how to take it apart yourself at iFixit.
For those who live in the Netherlands and happen to have a jailbroken iPhone, today is not so good of a day. A new virus has come to the iPhone and this time it is specifically targeting those who do their banking while on the go. The BBC is reporting on a Malicious Worm that invades and can gain control of the iPhone without any authentication, acting as a bot-net.
"It is specifically targeting people in the Netherlands who are using their iPhones for internet banking with Dutch online bank ING. It redirects the bank’s customers to a lookalike site with a log-in screen."
The worm is only affecting people in the Netherlands who have jailbroken their iPhones, installed SSH and never changed the password. If you need to have a jailbroken iPhone for any reason then we suggest you quickly change your root password and carry on with your day.
This idea was so out there that I thought it appropriate to pass it along. Instead of a solar panel you have a panel which holds engineered, photosynthetic organisms in a non-freshwater solution. These organisms directly make checmicals and biodiesel from the sunlight and carbon dioxide. The system is expected to go online by 2011 and bring biodiesel fuel at the cost of around $50 per barrel.
"Through advanced genome engineering, we have developed proprietary, product-specific organisms that catalyze the direct conversion of sunlight and CO2 to useful fuels and chemicals".
The technique has been proven using algae, meaning this process is not too unreasonable to think to be true. The real questions is, will the fuel be cheap enough and can it produce enough. We would need tremendous land or available space to produce the fueld. One acre of land covered by these plates can produce 20,000 gallons of Joule ethanol or 13,000 gallons of Joule biodiesel per year.
This amount of fuel being generated makes this a small dent to our fuel crisis, but I would take some nearby to produce enough fuel for the city I live in. Who knows what the future hold, but it’s great to see this sort of technology making progress.
The big area the iPhone lacks the competition of Palm and Android is in multitasking. Oceanobservations on youtube has come up with a concept that seems very fitting for how the iPhone would handle multitasking. See their full explaination after the jump:
The number one requested iPhone feature multitasking is tackled in this "What if iPhone had…" concept by Ocean Observations. There are several benefits of multitasking, and we believe it will come to the iPhone sooner or later.
Our idea is to present the running apps together with the rest of your app icons on the home screen, instead of hiding them behind long pressing some unrelated key. All running apps have a miniature representation in a cover flow at the bottom of the screen. To make room for this, each home screen page will have one less row of icons and the dock is removed completely. But since the running apps often will equal your favourites, they will still be easily accessible.
You can tap or swipe any of the cover flow miniatures to move it into focus. Then tap it again to bring it to full screen. Once an app is full screen, double-tapping the home button brings up the cover flow, letting you jump between running apps. This extra feature could be the new default setting for double-tap, which you could still change in the settings. Tapping the home button once minimizes the app into the running apps cover flow. The apps are arranged by the order you launched them, with the most recently launched app to the left.
A running app is also indicated by a backlighted app icon with a blue text label on the home screen. It’s still possible to bring a running app to full screen by pressing its icon.
To close an app, drag it out of the cover flow and the miniature moves back to the app icon on the home screen. The app icon then changes back to its original state. Depending on the performance of the phone, there could be a maximum number of running apps. In that case, when launching a new app, the least recently used one could be closed automatically.
The rumors have been around for a few weeks that an upcoming Apple event would be coming soon. As usual Apple has chosen an early fall date to focus once again on music. We would expect a new lineup of iPods, both touch and nano and maybe even a "One More Thing" announcement. We’ll be sure to keep you posted to any other rumors around this event.
