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Hardware Hacking

Combining Two Kinects To Make Better 3D Video 106

suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about improving the Kinect 3D video recordings we discussed recently: "[Oliver Kreylos is] blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive."
Earth

MIT Unveils Portable, Solar-Powered Water Desalination System 117

An anonymous reader writes "A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Field and Space Robotic Laboratory has designed a new solar-powered water desalination system to provide drinking water to disaster zones and disadvantaged parts of the planet. Desalination systems often require a lot of energy and a large infrastructure to support them, but MIT's compact system is able to cope due to its ingenious design. The system's photovoltaic panel is able to generate power for the pump, which in turn pushes undrinkable seawater through a permeable membrane. MIT's prototype can reportedly produce 80 gallons of drinking water per day, depending on weather conditions."
Worms

Submission + - Maxtor/Seagate Ships Drives With A Virus

An anonymous reader writes: I bought a brand new Maxtor 3200 drives today and it came with a virus:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/personal_storage/ps3200-sw
And if you want to exchange them for an uninfected one, plan to spend hours on the phone with support and then you still have to pay the shipping to return the drive! And then they send you a refurbished drive to replace your brand new drive! Oh, and did I mention that you get a virus as an added prize.
Software

Submission + - Nissan turns to high-tech to stop drink driving

StonyandCher writes: As part of its drive to reduce road deaths and injuries, Nissan Motor has installed in a car three prototype high-tech systems designed to stop drink driving.

The first attempts to directly detect alcohol in the driver's sweat and gear shift lever. A second system in the car uses a camera mounted in front of the driver to monitor eye movement. If the driver is drowsy it triggers the seat belt to tighten and this movement will hopefully snap the driver out of their drowsiness or prompt them to take a rest. A third system monitors the path of the vehicle to ensure it's traveling in a straight line and not weaving about the road, as is common with a drunken driver.

Comment Fortify (Score 1) 398

I don't know if you've used or seen fortify but I found it a wonderful tool to not warn and resolve memory issues in C++.

It is very fast, compiles switches into nothing and incredibly helpful.

-- Snip
Fortify is a powerful C++ debugging aid. Detects and pinpoints memory related bugs. It supports alloc/calloc/realloc/strdup/free and new/delete. It traps memory leaks, writes beyond and before memory blocks, writes to freed memory, free twice, freeing memory never allocated, and removes all randomness from reading uninitialized or free memory.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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