Square: Mobile payment device for the iPhone

Miracle machine provides clean water in Haiti earthquake relief effort

	The Emergency Water Station, developed by Aqua Sciences, has provided thousands of gallons of water for earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, since it arrived in the country on . . . more

Barnes and Noble's Nook: Kindle Competitor

Today is the official release date for the Nook, Barnes and Noble's new ebook reader, a direct competitor to Amazon's Kindle. According to Mashable: "Today is the official launch date, and some additional . . . more

Return of Apple Newton developer sign that tablet is forthcoming?

Apple recently hired Michael Tchao, one of the original designers of the Apple Newton, a device that was perhaps too far ahead of its time when it came on the scene some 15 years ago (and perhaps . . . more

iPhone MMS live today

MMS (multimedia messaging service) went live today on AT&T's network for the iPhone. Now finally all those iPhone users can receive picture messages, among other media. It seemed ridiculous to me . . . more

Microsoft Courier sneak peek

The folks over at Gizmodo recently unveiled a sneak peek at Microsoft's answer to the much-anticipated Apple tablet (and possibly a competitor to Amazon's Kindle): the Microsoft Courier. It's apparently . . . more

Kepler Mission to find Earth-like planets: Overview video

In March of this year NASA launched the Kepler observatory into orbit. The Kepler mission is a 4-year mission to observe 100,000 stars in 100 square . . . more

City of the Future: Masdar

Just heard an excellent segment of On Point about Masdar City, currently being built in Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, with the goals to be carbon neutral, produce 100% renewable energy, and generate zero waste. It was a fascinating interview, and I recommend taking a listen and checking out the Masdar website. It's a huge, ambitious project, but it's the sort of thing that can actually be a game-changer, serving as a model of sustainable living for green urban planning and development. Watch some of the videos, including this "fly through" of the city below - those Personal Rapid Transit pods are right out of Minority Report:



Very, very cool stuff. It's also important to see global cooperation take place in the heart of the Middle East to produce innovative technology and information/knowledge exports beyond the UAE's reliance on oil.

It's truly amazing, and it will be interesting to follow Masdar's development. I want to visit.

Exponential Growth

My MacBook is chock full of crap. My hard drive is jammed to the gills; I'm playing with mere megs of elbow room these days as I figure out which of my 3,452 songs I can delete, or finally go through all my photos and clean them up and archive them.

Or get rid of all my "files" on Scotticus.

I was talking with my Dad and of course he had an extra external hard drive lying around collecting dust, so he gave it to me. Score!

He mentioned that he recently bought a 500GB drive for $89 or thereabouts; back when he got our first computer, an Apple IIGS (which was an amazing, superior machine in its day), he eventually bought a 45MB - that's megs, not gigs - external hard drive for about $389, plus another $100 for a SCSI card for the thing - that's almost 500 clams for a mere extra 45MB. At the time, that was a lot of memory.

That's 11,111% more memory for less than 1/5th the price. Of course this was back about 1989 or so, so it was 20 years ago. Still, pretty amazing when you think about it.

Or is the real amazing thing that that was 20 years ago?!? Criminy.

Chills

Talk about Web n.0 - this is unbelievable:



Science!

(Via VSL daily email, which is worth signing up for.)

The Incredible Shrinking iPod

Check out Apple's new ultra-tiny 4 GB iPod Shuffle.



How cool is that?