Brian Covey, Super Support Ninja for [OmniGroup|http://www.omnigroup.com/], joins us to discuss [OmniFocus|http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/]. The geeks also discuss geeky April Fools jokes, and other news.
Get your triweekly dose of useful keyboard shortcuts for the Mac. I also cohost Geekspeak, a weekly tech radio show and podcast. (geekspeak.org)
Daily tips on how to use Windows without a mouse, or at least how to use your keyboard more and your mouse less.
The LHC is the world’s largest physics experiment, and is attempting to recreate conditions in the Universe when it was only a fraction of a second old. At that point, pressures and temperatures were so high that the laws of physics were somewhat different than we’re used to. These conditions are extremely difficult to duplicate, which is why it’s taken so long to get the LHC running. The collider uses extremely powerful magnets to guide and accelerate two beams of protons to nearly the speed of light. They go around the collider in opposite directions, then are tweaked to smack into each other. The huge energies of the collision create particles and conditions that can be detected and used to test theories of how the Universe behaves.
There were some minor glitches before the protons could be injected into the main collider last night, but once things got going, the beams were sent at each other at full power. The energies were ramped up to 3 TeV, or three trillion electron volts (a unit of energy).
An unusual periodic table where each element represents a different science blogger. Bio sites are green, grey for physics, mathematics blue medical, red chemical, black are space, my sites are in gold, bronze gen’l/uncategorised. Let me know via twitter if any links change or you want a colour. Based on Wikipedia’s familiar-looking PT as opposed to the spiral, 3D or stepped PT discussed elsewhere on this blog. For now, this is the one that everyone recognises even if it has its faults.
Don’t like the smell of your dog but can’t face being scratched as you wrestle to wash your beloved pooch? Well, a company in Japan has the answer: a dog wash. (March 16)
CAFE standards, issued by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, cover cars and trucks for model years 2012 to 2016. Automakers will be required to meet a fleet-wide average of 35.5 by 2016.
Although the new requirements would add an estimated $434 per vehicle in the 2012 model year and $926 per vehicle by 2016, drivers could save as much as $3,000 over the life of a vehicle through better gas mileage, according to a government statement. The new standards also will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and cut carbon dioxide emissions by nearly a billion tons over the life of the regulated models.
The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.
Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).
Moto.com did some robotic testing of the sensitivity and precision of the latest crop of smartphone touchscreens and the iPhone wins the day.
The test consisted of using a robot to slowly draw straight lines in a basic drawing app, making it easy to see the difference in touchscreen resolution from one phone to the next. The results are pretty telling. Perfectly straight lines indicate a high degree of sensor accuracy; less-precise sensors show the lines with wavy patterns, stair-steps, or both.
Now that it is April 2, the laughter has died down and we can get back to real tech news. Everyone seems to love posting an April Fool’s Day-related post, and sometimes they’re so good that it’s hard to tell if it is real or not. Here are just a few of the best ones I found.
SEATTLE, April 1, 2010 –Starbucks announced today the introduction of two new beverage sizes in stores in the U. S. and Canada this Fall. The announcement follows a year of research and direct customer feedback through MyStarbucksIdea.com requesting even more choice in beverage size.
“Whether customers are looking for a large or small size, the Plenta and the Micra satisfy all U.S. and Canada customers’ needs for more and less coffee,” said Hugh Mungis, Starbucks VP of Volume. “Our size selection is now plentiful.”
For around 18 months, drivers parking up in one of the Lake District town’s busiest shopping areas have found their electric key-fobs will not work.
Telecom watchdog OFCOM decided to investigate and sent field engineer Dave Thornber to Windermere with specilist scanning equipment.
Adobe® Flash® Professional CS5 will include a Packager for iPhone that will let you publish ActionScript 3 projects to run as native applications for iPhone. These applications can be delivered to iPhone users through the Apple App Store.*
