Heratech

Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive is a packed with awe-inspiring, high-resolution images of space that, incidentally, work great as desktop wallpapers. But NASA doesn't offer an easy way to grab everything. Command-line tool wget to the rescue! More »

silverpig writes "Cisco has released a whitepaper on mobile data usage which has some interesting data in it. The top 1% of users consume 20% of the bandwidth, but that share is down from 30% previously. 'Regular' users are catching up as they watch more video. High-bandwidth users of today will be relatively average users by 2015, so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's iPad 2 announcement brought many enhancements, but like many past iDevice announcements there was no increase in storage space. The max is still 64GB and the poor man's iPad still starts off at 16GB. Fortunately, there are several ways to work around these storage limitations. Here's how. More »

Today we've got a big collection of great car-centric desktop and mobile wallpapers. Just click through the gallery to view them all. You'll find a download link below each wallpaper. More »

peter.hill.1980 writes "Wall Street's money making formulas need to be as explicit as possible for efficiency purposes. An old, existing and famous formula — binomial options pricing formula — has now been scrutinized for theoretical optimality in a forthcoming paper by Evangelos Georgiadis of MIT using Gosper's Algorithm, proving that no general explicit or closed form expression exists for pricing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today Apple announced the new features coming in iOS 4.3. While there's not too much to speak of, it will bring Wi-Fi hotspots to all iPhones, faster JavaScript performance to Safari, and a few other enhancements to Apple's line of iDevices. Apple's posted a rundown here, so go check it out. You'll be able to grab the official update on March 11th, 2011. More »

What is a preference card? It's a card that surgeons fill out so that things can be set up for them the way they prefer. How can putting together your own personal preference card help you, being that you are (most likely) not surgeon? It may just help you feel more confident about your choices. More »

Steve Jobs was on hand today deliver a speech at Apple's iPad 2 event. The new iPad will feature Dual-core processors, 2x faster CPU, and 9X faster graphics, front and rear cameras. And it's 33% thinner. Prices range from $499 to $829 depending on if you want 3G and 64 gigs and it ships March 11. iOS 4.3 will ship at the same time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although this week's featured desktop doesn't come with many bells and whistles, inaudiblewhisper did something really neat: created a desktop with a dynamic piece of paper where the handwritten note changes based on statistics and other activity. More »

Muad writes "Maik Schmidt is our guide in the Pragmatic Bookshelf's venture into the world of electronics. This is a compact work, like all others in the series, it goes straight to applicable examples and makes you get your hands dirty with real work. The Arduino platform has been described in many ways, but the best I have heard so far insightfully labels it 'The 555 of the future,' referring to the ubiquitous timer chip so many simple electronic projects make use of. If you haven't been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you have doubtlessly seen the plethora of material on the subject that's out there: even O'Reilly, which usually does not ship multiple titles on a single subject, has a variety of them. Most of these works are rather similar, the ones I prefer are Massimo Banzi's Getting Started with Arduino (O'Reilly, 2008), by one of the original developers of the platform, and the strongly related Getting started with Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. These are brief books in the 100-page range, not exhaustive works, but covering the core philosophy and basic operation of the tools is sometimes the best way to jump into a new subject. Read below the rest of Federico's review

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some days are better than others, and on those bad days we can have a tough time thinking rationally. While there are ways to beat a bad day, when you feel bad you can often feel like a completely different person. If you just can't shake those bad feelings, treat it as an opportunity. Study your behavior, keep track of what helps you out, and write it all down in a personal handbook that you can reference in the future. More »

Facebook, Twitter, IM, and several other potential time-wasters are things that creep into our days whether we're supposed to be working or not. Does that make them bad? Should they be banned from the office altogether, or is banning them a terrible idea? More »

gamricstone writes "Scientists have produced the world's most powerful optical microscope, which could help understand the causes of many viruses and diseases. Previously, the standard optical microscope can only see items around one micrometre — 0.001 millimetres — clearly. But now, by combining an optical microscope with a transparent microsphere, dubbed the 'microsphere nanoscope', the Manchester researchers can see 20 times smaller — 50 nanometres ((5 x 10-8m) — under normal lights. This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy. 'Seeing inside a cell directly without dying and seeing living viruses directly could revolutionize the way cells are studied and allow us to examine closely viruses and biomedicine for the first time.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gizmodo's covering the iPad 2 announcement's live, right now, at live.gizmodo.com. Or just go straight to the live-updated details page for the iPad 2. Or, you know, wait and read about it after the event's over! You do have a job, right? More »

How to Get More from Your Home Theater Without Paying a Dime More »

doperative writes "A consultant hired by SCO in 2004 to compare UNIX and Linux, with the thought he could be used as an expert at trial, says that, after days and days, his comparison tool found 'very little correlation'. When he told that to SCO, it paid him and he never heard from SCO again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unless you had your home theater set up by a professional, chances are you aren't getting the best possible video and sound out of your existing setup. These simple tweaks will take just a little bit of time but will make a world of difference. More »

suraj.sun writes "Bing has overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January and increased its lead in February according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market." Just a little more plagiarizing to go!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've shared one tool that expands truncated RSS feeds, but free service Full Text RSS Feed Builder does an even better job: Just plug in a feed and it will give you a new one containing each article's full text. More »

The new Panasonic LUMIX FX77 camera can take the red out of your eyes and add it to your lips and cheeks. Released last Friday, the camera has a "beauty re-touch" feature that can whiten your teeth, change the size of your eyes, and can apply rouge, lipstick, or eye shadow. From the article: "There has been huge customer demand for such a product, said Akiko Enoki, a Panasonic project manager in charge of developing the camera. 'According to data we've acquired, around 50 percent of our digital camera clients are not satisfied with the way their faces look in a photograph,' she said. 'So we came up with the idea so our clients can fix parts they don't like about their faces after they've taken the picture.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.