Technology Blog

10-Year-Old Girl Lists Grandma on eBay…Borders Pulls Yet Another B&N…In Case of Stroke, Heart Attack or Physical Trauma, Please Register Your iPod…Lenovo’s Laptop Lost and Found

Don’t you hate when your disabled grandma comes home from the hospital after painful surgery, moaning and doped on painkillers? Worst of all, your parents make you do chores for her, so that she can just lie there, lazing around like a good-for-nothing! It’s just not fair. But can you make things better by auctioning Gran off on eBay? No, it turns out, you can’t. It’s “against the rules.” Way to make little girls sad, eBay. [Daily Mail UK via Pocket Lint]

The story is that Borders got free Wi-Fi, which is nice news for the last three people who actually think Borders is anything but a money suckhole. But I more particularly enjoyed Engadget’s phrasing: Borders had “pulled a B&N.” I like it—I am not just making fun—and it got me thinking. When hasn’t Borders pulled a B&N? Borders’ annual reports could consist solely of listings of the latest B&Ns they’d pulled, opening internal coffee shops, gobbling up old-school mall bookstore chains, selling CDs at their laughable MSRPs and, ultimately, licking Amazon’s muddy combat boots. So Borders has pulled yet another B&N. Cool. Why change horses in mid-cliff-jump? [Engadget]

One of the starkest signs that we’re well into the digital years is that personal electronics serve as electronic dog tags—even ones we choose not to laser-etch with our vitals. A 23-year-old jogger in Atlanta was hit by a car and rushed to the emergency room. She had no identification, but carried an iPod. A nurse got the serial number of the iPod, and used it to track down the Jane Doe’s name and address, eventually reaching her mother. The woman was last reported in critical condition, with her mom by her side. This isn’t the first time an iPod performed this unintended, tragic public service, and it certainly won’t be the last. [Fox 5 Atlanta, CBS Atlanta; Thanks Michael]

You know when you find a laptop just lying around, and you have to open it and start it up, search it for porn or personal financial data, maybe check what games are on it, or read some private emails, all before you stumble across identifying information that will help you return it to the rightful owner? Lenovo wants to free you from this tedious process by providing an 800 number you can call to return the laptop without copying the contents of the hard drive to your home server. Oh, and that laptop with the 800 number? It’s got a tracking system on it too, so don’t even think about making it your own. [Engadget]

We don’t hesitate to show excitement over non lethal and less-than-lethal weapons, but the reality is that they’re kinda scary. In particular when we’re starting to see hand-held heat weapons which leave little to no trace of ever being used.

A long time ago we heard about the UK considering testing out some non lethal directed energy gear. Basically a beam-based weapon which would cause a burning sensation to discourage a victim (or attacker), but not actually damage skin or leave burn marks. This is what the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, JNLWD, has been exploring since 2005. But according to project engineer Wesley Burgei, they’ve still got a few bugs left to work out:

“We have established the minimum irradiance to cause a sensation and have characterised where thermal injury begins,” he says. “But the exact operating irradiance which balances a useful military effect with a conservative margin of safety has not been nailed down yet.”

In plain words? There are some itty bitty safety issues. Thankfully those will be ironed out before the weapons ever hit the streets due to some UN protocol on blinding laser weapons. It turns out that they forbid weapons which would penetrate the retina and cause blindness. It seems odd that a beam-based weapon could affect skin without damaging eyesight, but, according to Burgei, it’s entirely possible to use a “retina safe” wavelength.

It’s great that safety is a priority in the design and creation of these beam-based weapons, but Steve Wright, a non lethal weapons analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University, raises an interesting point about them:

“Persuading by pain rather than brain - through conversation - has led to push-button torture in the past. If it leaves no mark on the skin how will anyone prove it’s been abused?”

Tasers and the like leave evidence, marks and traces of use, but once they’re within proper safety limitations, beam-based weapons like the one being built by the JNLWD won’t. Not to start the “Oh, no! They’ll be abused!” train, but how will we regulate them? [New Scientist]

There are 2,000 in that container. And there are 112 such containers in Microsoft’s $500 million Chicago data center. It may seem somewhat ridiculous, but this container-based data center design is absolutely brilliant (and environmentally sustainable to boot).

While we haven’t seen Microsoft’s newest data center, we hear that it has 700,000 square feet of space, really, really high ceilings, and 40-foot stacks of server-filled containers. Thinking about the stacks may leave me with vertigo, but thinking about the ingenuity of the design leaves me impressed: Microsoft has built something which’ll “deliver huge benefits in cost, energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.”

All those containers are plug-and-play in a way, complete with corresponding bays, and can be set up by “as few as four employees” in hours. Yes, they’ve designed it so that moving 60 ton stacks of servers requires only four people. If that’s not incredible then let’s consider that the place has a huge focus on being energy efficient: Despite the facility having a 30-megawatt power capacity, steps have been taken to make it as economical and sustainable as possible:

[T]he Chicago site employs water-side economization [which takes] advantage of cool outside air to reduce the data center’s reliance upon power-hungry chillers to produce chilled water. Air economizers introduce fresh air into the data center, while water-side economizers use cooling towers to remove waste heat.

Basically Microsoft is cutting down energy waste, saving on labor, and being all-around economical. While the modular, server-in-a-box approach might not get the stamp of revolutionary, the way Microsoft is approaching it is something worth paying attention to because it might just be what’ll help “meet the demand for cloud computing at scale.” [Data Center Knowledge]

It takes a lot to get Australians riled up, as they’re all descendants of violent criminals (just ask Giz’s Danny Allen, whose grandparents murdered a Prime Minister). But a new version of Vegemite called iSnack 2.0? Get the pitchforks!

The name came from a failed case of crowdsourcing on Kraft’s part.

Now, obviously this is a name that has nothing to do with the product and looks like a mere exploitation of cliches in digital product nomenclature.The lesson is equally obvious. Even when they’re being asked for input or sourced for ideas, consumers want brands to be able execute some level of judgment, filtering out awful ideas at minimum.

Rowan Dean, creative director of advertising agency Euro RSCG, summed it up to The Australian. “The idea of getting the public to create the new name of the product the way they did with the original Vegemite is fantastic. But iSnack 2.0 is totally irrelevant to the iPod, Web 2.0 generation, and if they don’t change the brand name it will disappear from the shelves in six months.” The original Vegemite name was chosen through a public competition in the 1920s.

In Kraft’s defense, iSnack 1.0 would have been a really stupid name. 2.0 is a bigger number, however, and is therefore better. [Ad Age via The Awl]

If this $40 remote actually does what it says it does, then it might be one of the most useful HTPC remotes out there. It looks like a Motorola Q, but communicates over RF to its USB receiver.

Once your signals hit the receiver, you can support Windows, Linux, Mac or Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii (supposedly). Hard to tell whether or not it can actually do all of these things, since the website looks like one a kid would make for his dad’s business over the summer between Jr. High and High School, so we’ll have to see for ourselves to be sure. [EFO via The Gadgeteer via Oh Gizmo]