hardware

Blip Festival's medium of choice: Old home computers and video games

Starting Thursday at the Eyebeam Gallery in Chelsea, the four-day Blip Festival celebrates the new(ish) musical genre "chiptune" and its associated fat-pixel video aesthetic. Brooklynites, run down there, would you, and report back on the "40 artists adopting and repurposing familiar but forgotten hardware--such as the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari game console and home computer line, and the Nintendo Game Boy."

Read the full story at The New York Times .

Sun's growth problem may be open source, says a former Sun executive

By all accounts, including its own, Sun Microsystems has a growth problem. Savio at IBM thinks it's best solved by selling more hardware (servers and storage). I've argued that software offers an answer.

Larry Singer, former vice president of Global Information Systems Strategy at Sun, suggested that an overemphasis on open source is not the right answer:

"The hard part is we were spending all of our time and attention inside [Sun] on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company," said Singer.… Read more

Bug Labs: The Lego of gadgets

Today it is possible to mash together Web services into a passable site with only a hobbyist's knowledge of programming. Tools like Yahoo Pipes get you started with the concepts, and then the APIs for products like Google Maps make things like the Chicago Crime Map buildable without requiring a large investment in original technology.

The same has not been true for hardware, but Peter Semmelhack at Bug Labs wants to change that. The company is releasing a hardware development system made of sensing and input modules that snap into a low-cost central Linux-based core, allowing you to mash … Read more

Almost the Google PC: Everex gPC available at Wal-Mart

On Thursday, WalMart begins selling the Everex Green gPC TC2502, a $198, low-power, Linux-based PC designed primarily for running Web 2.0 applications.

When users first fire up their gPC, they'll get a Mac-like desktop with a series of program icons "docked" across the bottom. The icons are bookmarks to popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors. There are icons for Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp, but the novice … Read more

Handvertising: Marketing (re)discovers the human body

Advertising space is scarce. No wonder advertisers are innovative when it comes to taking advantage of underutilized real estate--such as the human skin.

Handvertising USA is an Orange County-based company that connects advertisers with customers willing to display ads on their hands.

"Almost everyone has been to a county fair, swap meet, bar or club and had had their hand stamped for proof of entry. We have found a better use for this space that could make everyone happy," says CEO Mike Brown. "We find venues also use the stamps to increase business. For example, venues are … Read more

A new approach to securing USB flash drives

USB Flash drives are great. Securing them, however, is not so great. They are easily lost and the more you use one, the more likely it will contain files you consider sensitive. Corsair recently came out with a product that takes an entirely new approach to securing flash drives.

Seeing as this is a Defensive Computing blog, it goes without saying that my personal flash drives are secure. I use a free, open-source program called TrueCrypt. There are however, three problems with this approach:

The hassle of installing TrueCrypt and learning how to use it. There is a portable version … Read more

What makes a good surge protector--Part 1

Everyone knows to use a surge protector for their computer. But which one? How do you choose? Welcome to surge protector school.

As their name implies, surge protectors prevent voltage spikes from entering a computer (or whatever else is plugged into them). They are available in a variety of types and, to paraphrase the manual that came with a Dell server, usually provide a level of protection commensurate with the cost of the device. In other words, you get what you pay for.

A surge protector is not a power strip, although a low end model may look like a … Read more

BugLabs grows the open-source hardware ecosystem

In the beginning was the Chumby. And on the second day the community created the BUG, the latest entrant in the open-source hardware market.

Open-source hardware hasn't really taken off...yet. But Dave Rosenberg today alerted me to a new player in the space from BugLabs, which hopes to develop in much the same way that open-source software does. Here's BUG's premise:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don't define the final products - you do.

Silicon Alley Insider took a look and likes what it saw. But the most interesting thing from its report was how small the (initial) market is:… Read more

Graphic content at GH2007

During my time at Microprocessor Report, I watched the growth of the market for 3D graphics chips grow from just a handful of seed companies (notably 3dfx, 3Dlabs, PowerVR, and Rendition) to a virtual forest. At one point, I was tracking over 50 companies, most of which never launched a product.

So in 1999, when the organizers of the Siggraph/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware (a name wisely since shortened to simply Graphics Hardware) were looking for someone to help… Read more