CrunchGear Week in Review: Animal Shots Edition

Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear: ?Rotary Mechanical? Cell Phone Concept Isn?t Practical, But It Looks Great Lomo?s New La Sardina Camera Is Cheap And Sardine-Can-Like Panda Itazura Bank: Super-Cute Piggy Bank (Video) Meet The Robostir, A Robotic Soup Stirrer SugarSync Adds Mobile Device Management To Send Files To Devices From [...]

Source: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/06/20/week-in-review-animal-shots/

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Adblock Plus developer pokes holes in Mozilla's new add-on performance tests

Wladimir Palant, developer of the most popular add-on in the world, Adblock Plus, is also an active contributor to the Planet Mozilla blog community. Over the last few days, in response to Mozilla's new name and shame list of slow add-ons, Palant has been investigating whether Mozilla's testing methods are actually accurate.

Rather surprisingly, it turns out that Mozilla's numbers could be significantly wrong -- and if they're not wrong, the factors that Mozilla uses to tabulate an add-ons final score should definitely be made more transparent.

In the first set of tests, Palant shows that FlashGot's position in the top 10 is probably due to a fault in Mozilla's testing setup, and that add-ons can perform very differently depending on which operating system they're being tested on. In the second analysis, Palant uncovers an irregularity that doesn't seem to have an obvious cause -- but it could be due to an I/O bottleneck on Mozilla's test machines. Basically, even though performance testing of Read It Later is disabled because of a bug, it still (somehow!) manages to record a 14% slow-down on Windows 7.

Palant concludes both analyses by scolding Mozilla for going public with the performance data before its testing methods had been confirmed accurate. It definitely looks like Mozilla has been more than a little reckless, considering the importance of Firefox's add-on ecosystem.

Adblock Plus developer pokes holes in Mozilla's new add-on performance tests originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 05:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/08/adblock-plus-developer-pokes-holes-in-mozillas-new-add-on-perfo/

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RIM patent application puts pressure on sensitive touchscreens for a possible unlock alternative

Image

RIM's been busy on the patent application front lately, filing off concepts for anything from smartphone docks to rotating keypads -- even flirting with potential forays into forensics peripherals. Perhaps sensing the crushing need to differentiate its ailing BlackBerry brand, Waterloo's taken to the USPTO with a doc submitted last November that could do just that. The pressure-sensitive input scheme and touchscreen interface described therein would respond to a user-set pattern of force by granting access to a handheld device's features and applications. Sure sounds a heckuva lot like a new password protection implementation, but that's just our humble take. What it actually is, where it goes from this legal limbo and whether or not it ever winds up in BB 10 tech is truly up in the air. What you can count on, though, is a continued flood of in-process IP procurement from a company close to the edge.

RIM patent application puts pressure on sensitive touchscreens for a possible unlock alternative originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 May 2012 18:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/24/rim-patent-application-puts-pressure-on-sensitive-touchscreens-f/

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Google Talk Guru answers questions via your IM app

google talk guru answersBots -- like the kind which automate IRC rooms and Google Wave -- are a good thing to know about. There are plenty of useful bots worth knowing about, too, including the Google Talk Guru.

Just add guru@googlelabs.com to your GTalk buddies, and you can start firing off questions. Lifehacker suggests that the same types of queries supported by Google SMS will work, though we didn't have any luck getting a response out of the Guru with phrases like "score detroit red wings" or "sushi R3N 1Y1."

Still, Guru does answer a good variety of questions and it works right within your favorite IM app. It's well worth adding to your friend list, especially for getting answers on the go on your mobile device of choice.

Google Talk Guru answers questions via your IM app originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/30/google-talk-guru-answers-questions-via-your-im-app/

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Snag a copy of ?Laptop Buying Guide 2012?

Laptop Buying Guide 2012 [affiliate link] is an eBook for readers who are getting ready to buy a new laptop and need help making a decision. This guide includes information on hardware, brands, and the experience you’ll have after the laptop is home. By the end you will be prepared with all of the information needed [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2012/05/24/snag-a-copy-of-laptop-buying-guide-2012/

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Tiny Welsh Burg Paints the Town Wiki

Monmouth, Wales, has become the first "Wikipedia town," making it an area of international interest as it informally redubbed itself "Monmouthpedia." The Saturday event was attended by 70 to 75 people, said project leader John Cummings -- a sizable group for the area. That day, some 1,100 QR codes that Cummings, volunteers and city officials had placed on various points of interest around the town went live.

Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632000/s/1f8f9cd7/l/0L0Stechnewsworld0N0Crsstory0C751560Bhtml/story01.htm

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First Firefox 6 build next week, Firefox 7 by May, and aurora channel introduced

Firefox 5, 6, 7 and release channels
Mozilla's Engineering Project Manager, Christian Legnitto, has detailed the release schedule for Firefox 5, 6 and 7. If all goes to plan, Firefox 6.0a1 will be released next week, April 12, and Firefox 7.0a1 in the middle of May. The final build of Firefox 5 should be released on June 21, exactly three months after the release of Firefox 4.

Along with the faster 6-week release cadence, Firefox's new Chrome-like release channels have also been given names and anticipated update frequencies. The most notable change is the introduction of a new alpha channel -- which is analogous to Chrome Canary -- that will be called 'aurora' and will update nightly. Aurora will be where fixes and features are tested, and either approved for Beta, or backed out to Central. Aurora will have a new icon, too.

The Nightly (mozilla-central) channel will remain unchanged in name and frequency, but it will gain a new 'nightly icon.' The Beta (mozilla-beta) channel will remain as-is, with new builds rolling out weekly. The Release (mozilla-release) channel will also remain as-is, with security and stability updates coming every 6 to 12 weeks.

It should be noted that the names (including 'aurora') are not necessarily final, but it's unlikely that they'll change. We're also awaiting the arrival of the new 'channel switching' technology, which should arrive in the next few days -- in time for the release of Firefox 6 aurora!

First Firefox 6 build next week, Firefox 7 by May, and aurora channel introduced originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 05:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/07/first-firefox-6-build-next-week-firefox-7-by-may-and-aurora-ch/

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O'Reilly helps Japan, offers entire e-book catalog for 50% off, today only

O'reilly make some of the best computer books in the world. They also sell them as DRM-free e-books in a bunch of formats, including PDFs and Mobi for Kindle.

They usually offer one "Deal of the Day", which is a 50% discount code for a book chosen for that one day. But just for for today, they've created a discount code -- DDJPN -- that gives you a 50% discount on their entire catalog, and they give a part of the proceeds to aid Japan relief efforts.

So far they've raised over $60,000, and the day is still young. So if you've been recently hankering after some nerdy book (or three), now would be a great time to grab one.

O'Reilly helps Japan, offers entire e-book catalog for 50% off, today only originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/22/oreilly-helps-japan-offers-entire-e-book-catalog-for-50-off/

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Google Talk Guru answers questions via your IM app

google talk guru answersBots -- like the kind which automate IRC rooms and Google Wave -- are a good thing to know about. There are plenty of useful bots worth knowing about, too, including the Google Talk Guru.

Just add guru@googlelabs.com to your GTalk buddies, and you can start firing off questions. Lifehacker suggests that the same types of queries supported by Google SMS will work, though we didn't have any luck getting a response out of the Guru with phrases like "score detroit red wings" or "sushi R3N 1Y1."

Still, Guru does answer a good variety of questions and it works right within your favorite IM app. It's well worth adding to your friend list, especially for getting answers on the go on your mobile device of choice.

Google Talk Guru answers questions via your IM app originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/30/google-talk-guru-answers-questions-via-your-im-app/

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Why the Leap Is the Best Gesture-Control System We?ve Ever Tested

On Monday, Leap Motion wowed technology enthusiasts with a video of its new gesture-control platform. We were suspicious, but a hands-on demo proved out this new platform is much, much more powerful than Microsoft's Kinect.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/why-the-leap-is-the-best-gesture-control-system-weve-ever-tested/

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