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Submission + - How to Ditch the Grid With a Woodstove and a $100 (motherboard.tv) 3

Submitted by HansonMB
HansonMB writes: Given one of my more immediate life goals is to be living in a somewhat self-contained cabin somewhere far away from all of this — yet still have a way to keep my deer meat frozen and my laptop charged — the Volo Stirling engine is very relevant to my interests. Basically, it’s a lot like an internal combustion engine, except instead of the heat coming from inside the engine via exploding gasoline, the heat comes from outside the engine, like from a woodstove. It’s an old concept, dating back to 1812, that got shoved to the side with the advent of the grid and the internal combustion engine. Detroiter Tim Sefton and his Volo Designs are aiming to bring it back, with plans to have a consumer-ready Stirling engine capable of generating a household’s worth of electricity ready by spring 2012, for less than $100.
China

Submission + - China Blocking The Tor Tunnels In Its Firewall? (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: In recent months, administrators of services with encrypted connections designed to allow users secure remote access say they’ve seen strange activity coming from China: When a user from within the country attempts to reach a server abroad, a string of seemingly random data hits the destination computer before he or she can connect, sometimes followed by that user’s communication being mysteriously dropped.

The anti-censorship and anonymity service Tor, for instance, has found that many of its “bridge nodes”–privately-placed servers around the world designed to connect users to the rest of Tor’s public network of traffic re-routing computers–have become inaccessible to Chinese users within hours or even minutes of being set up
Cloud

Submission + - Amazon's Kindle Fire 'split' Silk browser benchmar (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "One of the Kindle Fire’s most hyped features is the Amazon Silk web browser. Amazon took great pains to explain how its idea of a browser was unique on tablets. The powerful Amazon Web Services (AWS) back end is used to compress, cache, and serve content to the Kindle Fire, thus accelerating the page load process. Amazon also suggests that Silk can outsource JavaScript execution to AWS, theoretically speeding up surfing and squeezing more life out of your battery. After some hands-on time with the Kindle Fire, do the claims of a faster web experience hold up?"
NASA

Submission + - Energy firm wants to be first to mine the moon (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "By 2020, the Shackleton Energy Company says it intends to be operating the world’s first lunar base and propellant depot for all manner of spacecraft.
To make this ambitious plan possible, the company this week said it had begun its initial fundraising campaign via a company called RocketHub which defines itself as a crowdfunding outfit that helps raise money for a variety of entrepreneurial pursuits."
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Broken Heart Syndrome (ama-assn.org)

Submitted by NicknamesAreStupid
NicknamesAreStupid writes: The Journal of American Medical Association reports that stress cardiomyopathy or, more specifically, takot subo cardiomyopathy can cause real damage to human hearts. It seems to affect female hearts almost eight times as much as males'. This extrapolates to saying a metaphorically "broken heart" is actual physical damage to the human organ. Warning: slash-dotters should not be such heart breakers.
Network

Submission + - Erbium will boost fiber optics, solar cells, compu (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "It seems graphene, the single layer of carbon atoms that can supercharge computer chips, optical circuits, lithium-ion batteries, and solar power generation, might have a competitor: a rare earth element called erbium. Erbium salts, like graphene, have very desirable optical properties — and today’s discovery by researchers at Arizona State University is a new erbium compound that will allow photonic and material engineers to use up to 1,000 times more erbium in optical fiber, photonic switches, and solar power cells. Erbium has two very desirable properties: It emits photons at a 1500nm wavelength, which is often used for optical communications, making it an inline signal amplifier — and it also absorbs parts of the solar radiation spectrum that silicon otherwise ignores. Erbium salts are already used extensively, but too much and it degrades the quality of the fiber or solar panel. This new erbium crystal is a nanowire with a much slimmer profile, and thus more erbium can ultimately be packed into an optical fiber or switch. This means we might see more efficient solar panels — but also, the researchers seem confident that this new erbium compound will allow small, conventionally-fabricated silicon chips with integrated optical switches."
Windows

Submission + - Windows 8 secure boot already defeated (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by phaedrus5001
phaedrus5001 writes: Windows 8 isn't even out yet, and already its touted security feature, the so-called Secure Boot, seems to have been defeated by security researcher Peter Kleissner. While Kleissner is waiting for this year's MalCon to release the details of his findings, he stated on his Twitter feed "the new bootkit, called Stoned Lite, has an infector file that is only 14 kilobytes in size, and the bootkit can be started from a USB drive or CD."
Ubuntu

Submission + - How to compile a new Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) kernel (avirtualhome.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As Ubuntu 11.10 was released it’s time for another article in my “How to compile a kernel for Ubuntu ” series. This article will show you how to get the latest kernel from the Ubuntu kernel maintainers for Ubuntu 11.10 and create a kernel which you can modify to make it more suited for your computer.

Submission + - 20 year old kids make $6,000 movie that's better t (vimeo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: These kids made a full length movie and put it online for free. It held my attention all the way to the end. Much, much better than I expected. Pretty amazing what they were able to do with such a small budget.
Social Networks

Submission + - Sued Twitter-user @NoahKravitz speaks up (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
richi
richi writes: "Remember the recent hoo-hah about an employer that asked its departing employee to give it back "his" Twitter account? Here's the ex-employee's side of the story... As you may recall, this employer — PhoneDog Media (PDM) — wants its ex-employee — Noah Kravitz — to hand over the password to his Twitter account, and pay damages of $2.50 per month for each of its 17,000 followers. The eight months between the end of the employment and the lawsuit make a total of $340,000. Yes, three hundred and forty thousand dollars."
IT

Submission + - IBM illuminates solar power system aimed at data c (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "IBM said today that is rolling out a solar-power array system designed to run high-voltage data centers. IBM has installed the first iteration of the system on the 6,000 square-feet of rooftop of its India Software Lab in Bangalore. The solar array is capable of providing a 50-kilowatt supply of electricity for up to 330 days a year, for an average of five hours a day."

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