This is a cool video on a presentation at TED on a new medical device for retrieving bone marrow from donors. The current way of harvesting bone marrow is pretty painful and brutal. This new device is pretty interesting and quite ingenious.
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Mining for goods!
Thursday, July 16th, 2009Boxee Update
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Well after fighting with Linux for about a week I finally decided to scrap it. I fought trying to get the audio to work properly and it never would really work 100% and even when it would work it would stop working for no reason after a short time. So I installed Windows 7 x64 RC, installed Boxee, plugged in my digital optical cable, changed default output to SPDIF and everything worked like a champ first time with no issue. It even play’s ISOs with sound which I never did get working in Ubuntu.
I guess this is probably why Linux will never make it in the mainstream desktop market.
Its Name Was Boxee…
Monday, July 6th, 2009
So in my quest to create a media center PC MythTV didn’t hold the Holy Grail that I had hoped it would. It seemed to be geared more towards recording content and playing it back than playing currently stored content for which I was primarly searching. I’m not saying MythTV couldn’t do that, but it required more plugins and configuring that I wanted to spend.
I decided to move on to XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I had previously had XBMC installed on an old XBOX that I had and really liked how it worked and played. They had more recently come out with a version that would run on Linux so I figured it deserved a shot. After playing with it for a bit I was somewhat satisfied with it, but it was still missing the Hulu plugin that I was hoping for as well. This brought me to Boxee which is an extension of the XBMC project.
Boxee has a very nice UI and includes pretty much everything that I was looking for in my Media Center. It will play Hulu as well as a number of other streaming content, has built in bittorrent and plays almost every format known (including ISOs). The only thing that it doesn’t do currently is play Netflix, but I think there are some work arounds for it as well as they are working on solving that issue.
I had some difficult time getting the digital audio to work properly mostly due to issues with Linux (isn’t it always? 
), but I think I have it mostly ironed out now. I still can’t get the sound to work when I play an ISO file, but I’m sure I’ll get it figured out eventually and that isn’t deal breaking — yet.
I found this article where someone built a pretty decent set top box using boxee and a slim computer case that I might do as a second box for my bedroom.
MythTV
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
http://www.mythtv.org
So I’m thinking of taking a crack at installing MythTV on a Ubuntu box and setting up a little media center computer. I’ve been using my Xbox for along time and just reading off a share on my main computer, but I’ve been having a lot of issues with my Xbox being able to see media as well as the Xbox doesn’t support a number of codecs and hopefully MythTV will have better support. I think I will start with just playing stored media content and then move up to recording my HD feeds and perhaps my satellite feed later on.
First Spaceport Ever Begins Construction this Friday
Thursday, June 18th, 2009Cool…enough said .
New Hybrid vehicle mod from INL
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009KTVB is reporting (through the AP) that the Maui Mayor is testing a new hybrid vehicle modification from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Supposedly the car is a modified Toyota Prius that includes an extra battery that can be recharged from a standard electrical outlet. The story reports that the mayor reported getting around 1,175 miles on $87, $47 for gas and $40 for electricity.
Now I’m all for being green and trying to do some part to limit mankind’s impact on the environment, but my Nissan Altima gets about the same mileage for around the same cost. So not only are you not saving any money by doing this you are also really just shifting the burden of fuel from one limited source to another. Depending on the source electricity is no better of a solution than gas. If the electricity is created from a coal power plant for example then are you really making any progress? Arguably some sources of electricity are better than others, but the problem still remains.
I think more time and resources need to be spent into looking at completely alternative resources and improving effieciency. Hydrogen would be a good example, but even then you have to pay attention to the environmental costs of actually manufacturing the parts of a hydrogen car. Automotive plants don’t exactly run on Mr. Fusion.
