It’s been in beta for the last few months, but for Windows Mobile users who’d rather not risk their phone to be a lab rat in a suit, AIM for Windows Mobile is now in final release form. If you are on your mobile now, just go to this link and hit “products” to make the download. If you are on a Windows Mobile device and you don’t want AIM, then we are truly, truly sorry for wasting your time. Feel free to drop by Brian Lam’s place for a personal apology via back rub any time. No, it won’t be strange at all. [AOL via MobileBurn]
Lenovo’s X301 and HP’s 2530p already use the new chips. The SL9400 and SL9300 running at 1.8Ghz and 1.6GHz, respectively, both have a 1066MHz FSB and appear to be the Core 2 Duo Low Voltage (LV) chips with a TDP of 17W, while the SU9400 and SU9300 are the ULV variants, clocked at 1.4GHz and 1.2GHz with a 10W TDP.
While the clock speeds of the LV chips are the same as the MBA’s, the switch to the 45nm process and faster front-side bus should yield both performance gains and power savings. More importantly, their ready availability for all-comers could make the ultra-thin market a lot more interesting, though we’re kind of afraid at this point of what Asus will do with them. [Ars Technica]
Industrial robots are big, stupid, and dangerous. Walk between an automated welder and the SUV it’s assembling and you’ll find yourself fused to the frame, destined to sit unwanted at the back corner of some dealer’s lot. But, keeping bots and humans separated on an assembly line isn’t always practical. Enter ARoS, a machine that’s not only capable of working safely with people, but being totally condescending while doing it! In a demonstration video it repeatedly tells its hapless helper how incompetent he is, then, after putting on one lousy nut itself, says “I enjoyed your help!” We figure he says that to all the meat-bags, but you can see and decide for yourself after the break.
Sort of like the hacked Wii Balance Board that’ll surf Google Earth, but a little more down to earth, this mod will let you act like you’re strolling through town with Google Street View. You walk to move forward or lean on one foot to turn—it actually seems to work pretty well. With a giant display, you could visit New York and walk around without suffering from the gross and smelly summer, or you know, just use it as another excuse to never leave the massive pillow fort you’ve converted your living room into. [blog.katsuma.tv via Balanceboarding - Thanks Mark!]
In an era when most stunt-driven blockbusters are really half cartoon, Death Race’s director Paul W.S. Anderson insisted on keeping the action real. The shooting philosophy was something along the lines of, “why blow up a fake car when you can blow up a real one?” So the movie features of ton of real cars packed with real armor plating and real machine guns really crashing. And during an interview with io9, Anderson revealed how he rammed these monster cars into cameras without smashing his film equipment into tiny bits.
I wanted to get the cars to drive into the cameras at high speeds, so we built one of my favorite rigs. We built a rig that had a camera and was completely ringed with basketballs. So it was this big giant ball. We stick it in the middle of the road, and the cars would drive at it. There is a shot in the very first race, when the original Frankenstein drives, where the car slides around the corner, and it looks like it hits the camera, and it does. And then the continuation of that is really funny because the camera just rolls away, bounces away, and it hits the wall.
I don’t know about you, but I just got a lot more interested in the movie. Read the full interview with Anderson over at io9. [io9][Image]
One Laptop Per Child. That was the lofty goal set out by NickNeg before Intel ever dreamed of a Classmate PC. Today that goal was realized although perhaps on a smaller scale than the non-profit may have hoped. The tiny, South Pacific island nation of Niue (known locally as “The Rock”) just issued a shiny new laptop to every sticky-fingered, primary and secondary school miscreant — that’s 500 in total for a island of 1,500 people. Seems, high-schoolers have been fitted with the freebie as well to go along with the free Internet access provided to all the island’s inhabitants. Luxembourg, you paying attention?
We’ve seen methods for hooking house plants up with their own Twitter account, but there’s hardly anything more satisfying that building a robot to read back all those feeds from the thousands of people you’re undoubtedly following. Ganzbot is a decidedly low-budget robot that relies on an Arduino Decima to control the head actions and a USB cable to receive up-to-date status information. Have a look at the innards as well as a few words being spoken just after the jump.
Snapture’s one-upped their third-party jailbreak iPhone camera suite with Snapture 2.0, which brings multi-touch gesture zoom, cleaner user interface a delay timer and four color modes. You can also now delete pictures on the “viewfinder” which is nice, or go slightly more advanced with the self-timer and the ability to shut off rotation. It’s free as long as you jailbreak your iPhone, but $7.99 if you want the premium version without ads and with QuickView delete/thumbnail stack/thumbnail enlarge. [Snapture]
Fujitsu’s cute-as-a-button U2010 (or U820, for you USers) was shown off over in Japan at a company event, and while most of the specifications were already hammered out, one particular tidbit at AkihabaraNews took us by surprise. With seemingly every other netbook out there getting blasted for lackluster battery life, the U2010 will reportedly support an extended cell that offers up 11.1 hours of run time. We’ve no idea if that’s a “maximum” number based on “optimal” usage, but no matter how you dice it, it sure beats the (also respectable) 5.3 hour rating given to the standard battery.
A spokesman for Orange in Poland unabashedly proclaimed that they “have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone.” An interesting technique to be sure, we’re just wondering if these actors will give up their places when it comes time to actually buy the phone, or if they’re going to actually go through and get an iPhone (maybe give them out for free after?). It’s not something we would have done, and it would have probably worked had the spokespeople not acknowledged it so openly. “Why yes, that is a sock in my pants. Why do you ask? “[Reuters]
It’s been in beta for the last few months, but for Windows Mobile users who’d rather not risk their phone to be a lab rat in a suit, AIM for Windows Mobile is now in final release form. If you are on your mobile now, just go to this link and hit “products” to make the download. If you are on a Windows Mobile device and you don’t want AIM, then we are truly, truly sorry for wasting your time. Feel free to drop by Brian Lam’s place for a personal apology via back rub any time. No, it won’t be strange at all. [AOL via MobileBurn]
Muffled by the cacophony of like 
In an era when most stunt-driven blockbusters are really half cartoon, Death Race’s director Paul W.S. Anderson insisted on keeping the action real. The shooting philosophy was something along the lines of, “why blow up a fake car when you can blow up a real one?” So the movie features of ton of real cars packed with real armor plating and real machine guns really crashing. And during an interview with 
Snapture’s one-upped their 
A spokesman for Orange in Poland unabashedly proclaimed that they “have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone.” An interesting technique to be sure, we’re just wondering if these actors will give up their places when it comes time to actually buy the phone, or if they’re going to actually go through and get an iPhone (maybe give them out for free after?). It’s not something we would have done, and it would have probably worked had the spokespeople not acknowledged it so openly. “Why yes, that is a sock in my pants. Why do you ask? “[
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