Shape Shifting Phones

Intel is currently working on developing a material to be used in shape-shifting phones. They are looking at silicon-dioxide hemispheres which roll over each others surfaces due to an electric current; this movement and re-arrangement will cause the object to change its shape. They hope to have this technology in 3-5 years, but as far as being on the market, it's going to be a lot longer than that.

Welcome to High-school Mr. Bond

A school in the UK has introduced face recognition technology to sign their students in and out of school, thereby removing the need for teachers and staff to take up time with taking attendance.

It takes 1.5 seconds per student and apparently, they love it. Who wouldn't right?

It is one of the first schools in the UK to do this, and so far it has been very successful.

Read more about this here.

The government knows your browser history...

Perhaps they do, what if they are keeping tabs on you, what if they know what sights you were on last Thursday when your boss thought you were typing up those spread sheets on Excel? You must be worried now, comrade... (Joking, it's fine, don't fret.)

A new website put out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a website that gives you information on how to protect yourself and your virtual data from government spying, it's called the The Surveillance Self Defense (SSD) Project.

From their site: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it".

One problem here. Most of the people from whom this site is targeted probably will never see it.

Also, I'm not too sure about this site.... -_-

*suspicious look over at it*

Band Member Pirates His Own Album

And guess who that was? Lars Ulrich of Metallica (who vehemently spoke out against file sharing sites in the earlier part of the decade) pirated his own album off a torrent site a couple days after Death Magnetic was leaked on the net last year.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Now he isn't so uptight about torrent sites and file sharing (although he has a right to be), now, he says that "it’s part of how it is these days.”

Kindle as an iPhone App

Well that title was certainty creative. (Sarcasm of course, which I have just painfully slayed by telling you that it was sarcasm.)

Well, now you can have Kindle on your iPhone, and thanks to something called Whispersync you can keep your iPhone and your Kindle both in sync with each other. So if I read The Two Towers on my iPhone, then leave my iPhone at home and take my Kindle with me on a trip, I can continue reading The Two Towers from where I left off, exactly.

This application is only available for books right now, and you can't buy books directly from the app, you've got to go to Amazon's website or use Kindle itself.

Google Verb Meme

I Goggle meme'd myself just now. For those of you who don't know what that is, you can see how to do it here. Basically you search for your name and a verb following it, and make a list of what you get. It's a lot of fun. =)

1. Alex needs more than just a rat trap for this vermin
2. Alex looks like the kind of girl who would take you to the forest and feed you a bunch of mushrooms and then leave you to fend for yourself
3. Alex says "the adventures of an Italian in Silicon Valley"
4. Alex wants to stay as far away from that place as possible
5. Alex does Galactic Domination with pictures, videos, personal blog, interests, information about me and more.
6. Alex hates Rome
7. Alex asks for move
8. Alex likes to scribble and draw with crayons, dig in the dirt outside, and loves anything to do with water.
9. Alex eats babies
10. Alex wears her hat like a mask
11. Alex was arrested for allegedly embezzling two hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars from the post office and for burglary and marijuana violations.
12. Alex loves everything

If you want to do this, just take the "Alex (verb)" and change it to your name, then Google it. Write down what you get and post it in a comment.

Apple releases new desktops

Don't complain about the short blog post today. If you knew what my sleep and work schedule was like, you'd be tired too.

So here goes...

1) The Mac Mini: Core 2 Duo processor, 5 USB ports, RAM up to 320GB, 5400 RPM drive, and NVIDIA 9400M graphics.

2) The iMac: faster Core 2 Duo processor running up to 3.06GHz, NVIDIA 9400M graphics in the 20' one and NVIDI GeForce or ATI Radeon in the 24' one, 320GB , 620GB, or 1T RAM (!), and a 7200 RPM drive. Also has updated Firewire port.

3) The Mac Pro: Quad core Xeon processors (in a 4 or 8 core configuration), something called a "turbo boost" that lets the 8 core run as high as 3.33GHz bursts, NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card or a ATI Radeon 4870 HD one, lets you run 4 of the GT 120 cards to drive up to something like 30" cinema displays. Nice. Oh yah, it has 4 Firewire ports.

All of them are mostly recyclable, are free of PVC and BFR, arsenic free glass on the iMac, and have an EPEAT Gold rating. They are also all available at your local Apple retails, unless something weird happened and the delivery truck took a detour to Yellowknife up in Canada or something and never returned.