satellite

The Las Conchas wildfire, a 92,735-acre blaze extending around the community and national laboratory of Los Alamos, N.M., often moves faster than the officials who monitor it. That can be frustrating for people who want to see where the fire is burning.

But NASA has an automated answer for the impatient: the MODIS satellite. It records fire data, and the U.S. Forest Service packages it up so Google Earth users can get a rough but useful view of the fire's behavior.

Here's how to take a look. But first, I'll share a sobering NASA photo taken from the International Space Station on Monday, the second day of the fire.

It's a daunting image for anyone like me who knows the area and the scale involved. There are 752 people fighting the fire right now, including four bulldozers, 28 fire engines, and five helicopters. Since the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which burned hundreds of Los Alamos homes and thousands of acres of Los Alamos National Laboratory property, the lab has taken new fire counter measures including more forest clearing and automatic fire-suppression systems. So far today, physical risks to the lab are lower than earlier in the week, LANL Director Charlie McMillan said. … Read more

It seems the iPad's limited internal storage and lack of peripheral ports provide ample opportunities for storage vendors.

About a month ago, Seagate Technology introduced the GoFlex Satellite as the first mobile hard drive that can stream content to the iPad. Today, G-Technology, a subsidiary of Hitachi Storage that focuses on external storage solutions, announced a similar product of its own: the G-Connect wireless storage product.

The G-Connect is similar to the GoFlex Satellite in multiple ways. It's another compact 500GB portable hard drive that has a built-in Wireless-N access point that can stream stored digital content to up to five wireless devices (the Satellite can only stream to three devices).

The G-Connect has one major advantage over the Satellite: it also comes with an Ethernet port for connecting to an existing network, and hence is capable of also offering an Internet connection to the connected clients. Clients can surf the Web and check e-mails while streaming content, such as music, at the same time. This makes the device almost an alternative for the iCloud service recently announced by Apple.… Read more

LightSquared, which is building a nationwide 4G LTE network, said today it has a fix that will ensure its network doesn't interfere with GPS navigation equipment.

The company said it is setting aside spectrum that is in the spectrum band adjacent to the one used for GPS or Global Positioning Systems. LightSquared has worked out a deal with satellite provider Inmarsat to use frequencies lower in the spectrum band that is further away from the GPS spectrum. These frequencies are not expected to interfere with GPS gear.

Originally, LightSquared had planned to move into that band of spectrum over … Read more

Your HDTV, HD cable box, Blu-ray player, and even most DVD players and receivers will "upconvert," or scale, a standard-definition image to fill the screen of an HDTV.

Despite the marketing hype, this doesn't make SD look like HD, but it can make it look better than regular SD. The better the source, the better your TV will look. So how well a piece of gear can make standard definition appear is one of the major performance differences between two products. Recent TVs and Blu-ray players have gotten quite good at this.

The irony is, as good as scalers or upconverters have gotten, they're becoming obsolete.… Read more

Livio Radio, developer of a free car Internet radio app for iPhone and Android, and Dice, developer of audio integration kits for OEM car stereos, have teamed up to provide a solution for streaming Internet radio to your car without ripping out the stock receiver. It starts with an app on your iPhone and ends with hardware that takes over your car's satellite radio input.

Livio's app delivers more than 45,000 Internet radio stations and Internet streaming AM and FM radio stations via your smartphone's data connection. (The app's free version steps down to 300 … Read more

NASA is set to end the 30-year space shuttle program next month with the final mission of Atlantis, but the craft may help extend the life of satellites orbiting Earth, thanks to a handyman robot.

Atlantis will carry a unique robotic experiment during the 12-day STS-135 mission to the International Space Station.

The Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) is designed to help figure out what's needed to refuel satellites in space. As NASA describes it, "RRM is expected to reduce risks and lay the foundation for future robotic servicing missions in microgravity."

The experimental platform will attach to the exterior of the ISS, where remote-controlled maintenance robot Dextre will practice gassing up satellites that are not designed to be refueled. To accomplish that, it would have to get past the seals that typically close a satellite's fuel compartment permanently. … Read more

We've often commented on Toshiba Satellites becoming a confusing galaxy of letter-based lines that share similar looks. Today's announcement of the back-to-school Satellite P700 series should help in this regard, since it's effectively replacing the Satellite A660 and M640 lines, both of which we've reviewed in a variety of versions at CNET.

The P700 isn't anything truly new chassis-wise: it's available in 14-, 15-, and 17-inch variations, and share a Fusion X2 finish we've seen on many models. These laptops do, however, offer the newly announced AMD A6-3400M processor with discrete Radeon graphics, … Read more

Update, June 10, 2011: CEA President Gary Shapiro responds

The Consumer Electronics Association recently commissioned a poll that found that fewer than 8 percent of US households use over-the-air broadcast as their sole means of receiving television programming. This number has been descending, according to the CEA, since 2005.

It is the CEA's position that because fewer and fewer households are getting their TV from over-the-air (OTA), the wireless spectrum used for these broadcasts should be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

In other words, do away with free over-the-air broadcasts as we know it.

While it's true … Read more

Hot on the heels of Seagate launching its GoFlex Satellite wireless external storage device for iOS devices, Kingston has trotted out its own flash-based external drive--the Wi-Drive--which offers very similar features.

With mobile devices like the iPad offering limited memory (and no expansion slot), the idea behind these accessories is that you'd store large video files, as well as other content (including photos, documents, and music) on the drive and then wirelessly access that content via a direct Wi-Fi connection (you don't need an actual Internet Wi-Fi connection to stream content; you stream directly to and from … Read more