We’ve got wireless phones. Wireless internet. Wireless peripherals (keyboard and mouse). There’s even wireless HDMI for transmitting audio/video to a properly equipped TV. But one cord just can’t seem to be cut: the power cord.

Wireless power has been talked (and fantasized) about for decades, but there’s been a lot of hype and very little to show for it. A couple days ago, though, Intel actually demonstrated a working model of a wireless power system. So far, it can transmit 60 watts up to three feet with 75% efficiency. There’s a lot of work to be done before it gets anywhere close to consumer-friendly, but the fact that it has now been seen to be functioning is a huge step.

Imagine how fantastic it will be to buy a new TV or computer and not have to connect a single cable. All-in-one computers like the iMac are already very close — if you use WiFi for your net connection and get a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, today’s iMac already is down to a single cord. If wireless power one day makes it mainstream, setup of your computer will involve nothing more than just setting it on the table and pressing a button.

More at NY Times.

An upcoming product called the Golden Shellback (they couldn’t come up with a better name? Sounds like a new type of tortoise) appears to defy the laws of…well, everything we know about water and electronics. It is able to completely waterproof any electronic gadget — from cell phones to laptops — with no ugly plastic shells or annoying rubber membranes. In fact, the devices look 100% normal, except for being underwater. The only thing known about the process is that it’s done in a vacuum; beyond that, the company is being tight-lipped about what exactly they’re using to perform this miracle (understandable — they’re going to make millions from this). Pricing isn’t set, but is estimated to be a relative bargain at $50-$75 per device. If nothing else, I would consider doing this to my DSLR.

A demonstration video is below, with a foreword from TekZilla’s Patrick Norton. In it, you’ll see horror-inducing clips of water being poured on laptops and cell phones and iPods being submerged in buckets of water.

Golden Shellback Waterproof Coating from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

No word on whether the Golden Shellback has passed the ubiquitous “cell phone in the toilet” test.

Many of you have probably read (or at least seen the movie of) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Even if you haven’t, you might be familiar with a certain part of the story that is frequently referenced among fans — that when asked for the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, the supercomputer called “Deep Thought” finally responded with “42″.

I was watching an episode of the History Channel miniseries The Universe this evening, and this particular episode was concerning gravity and its role in the universe at large. Most of the concepts covered in the show were nothing new to me, but I found one particular scenario very intriguing: what would happen if you bored a hole through the Earth straight to the other side, vacuum-sealed it (to remove friction), and dropped something through? How long would it take to reach the other side, considering that it should free-fall until it reaches the core, at which point gravity will start pulling it back and it will slow down?

As it turns out, the most interesting part of this scenario is that by picking any two points on the Earth — New York and LA, Boston and London, Cairo and Anchorage, whatever you want — and boring a hole straight from one to the other, the amount of time required by such a “gravity train” will always be exactly the same, due to the angle of the hole and thus the varying degree to which Earth’s gravity will be able to affect the object. How much time, you ask?

42 minutes.

No matter what two points on the planet you choose, no matter if they’re on opposite sides of the globe or are very near each other, the time to get from one to the other driven purely by gravity will always be 42 minutes. As soon as I heard that, I had to wonder if it was Douglas Adams’ inspiration for the answer to the Ultimate Question asked of Deep Thought. If not, it’s quite a coincidence — and still a really cool physics fact.

More on the 42 minute “gravity train” concept on Damn Interesting, Wikipedia (which references a mathematical proof from my own Purdue University), and a 1966 TIME Magazine article.

This certainly qualifies as one of the most bizarre (and creepy) stories I’ve seen in a long time. Houston, Texas, is being attacked by millions of tiny ants known as “crazy raspberry ants” that are attracted to electronics. They were accidentally brought over on a cargo ship, and have since gone forth and multiplied, screwing up sewage pumps, computers, gas meters, fire alarms, and other electronic equipment in the process. Worse, since they’re resistant to most ant killers and each colony has several queens, they’re practically impossible to kill. They even use the bodies of those that do die to build bridges over pesticide-treated areas. Yeah — like I said, creepy.

Full story on WRAL news

I’ve seen a lot of crazy (and crazy expensive) stuff being built in Dubai over the last few years…everything from manmade islands totaling thousands of miles of beachfront to the world’s tallest building (by far) to the world’s largest mall. The latest thing I’ve learned about is no less crazy: an indoor ski complex!

Given that the area’s oil reserves will supposedly run out within the next two decades, the prince of Dubai has made it his mission to turn the desert city into a lush oasis of tourism and entertainment. So far, they seem to be exceeding everyone’s expectations, helped in no small part by the “spare no expense” mentality that is clearly pervading the developers. I have to admire the grand scale of the vision. However, I have to wonder if this is why we’re paying nearly $4 for a gallon of gas!

More images:

There’s a fun little easter egg in the latest version of the popular FireFox browser (currently in Beta 5 for version 3, final release due out very soon): if you type “about:robots” in the address bar, you get the above screen with some fun info about our mechanical friends. All the “facts” are references to various books, movies, and TV shows — The Day The Earth Stood Still, Asimov’s I, Robot, Blade Runner, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and my personal favorite at the end (“And they have a plan”) is an homage to the cylons in Battlestar Galactica.

Hello what?

As detailed in many places around the web (and to which an entire community is dedicated), a “hackintosh” is a computer built of off-the-shelf PC components that can, with just a little bit of tweaking, run the Mac OS X operating system. Ever since Apple made the switch to Intel processors a couple of years ago (and thus to a platform very similar architecturally to what every other computer vendor uses), this has been a growing community. Fed up with the iMac’s glossy screen and 4GB memory limitation (and partly because, as my wife repeatedly points out, I just always “have to have a project”), I finally jumped in myself.

I built myself a hackintosh, bought a Dell 24″ screen to be the primary display, installed the latest OS X Leopard (10.5.2), and now about 36 hours later I’m not missing the iMac one bit. I’ve been working on my web sites, editing RAW photos from my D40, watching movies, and basically doing everything I can possibly think of to stress-test it, and it’s been absolutely fantastic. For me, this fills a hole in Apple’s desktop lineup. The Mac mini is just too weak and can only run one monitor. The latest iMacs come with crappy-quality displays, at least for graphics work (they’re actually worse than the previous generation — something I didn’t know when I purchased the newer one because I just, you know, assumed that they wouldn’t actually downgrade something on a new model), and they’re limited to 4GB of RAM (I’m going to stick 8GB in my hackintosh eventually). Then from the iMac you jump up to the Mac Pro, which is very expensive and in reality is too much power for me. I don’t need a lot of CPU or GPU power — I just need lots of RAM and big, good-quality monitors. Basically, I’d be happy with a small Mac tower that fell somewhere in between the Mini and the Mac Pro.

For about $500-$600, this is what I bought (which, save for two cores, is very near a $2500 Mac Pro for most people’s purposes):

• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard (if you don’t need as many SATA ports, get the GA-P35-DS3L for ~$25 less)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz (these suckers are hugely overclockable — mine’s currently up to 2.8 GHz and hasn’t even gotten anywhere near hot); add about $150 and you can have yourself a quad-core 2.66Ghz
• 4GB of RAM
• 500GB SATA hard drive
• Silent (fanless) Nvidia 7600GS PCI-E video card — bump up to an 8600GT for ~$40 if you care about gaming at all
• Antec Sonata III whisper-quiet case and efficient 500W power supply
• SATA DVD-RW drive

The install process for this particular hardware set, detailed in this thread, just requires a few extra package installations after the initial boot, and now everything works 100% just as on a real Mac. I’m really quite pleased. It was a fun project, and now I have a more powerful and more flexible machine than my iMac — and a bigger, far better monitor to boot.

I still love my MacBook Pro to death, and money being no object, yes a Mac Pro would be awesome. But I like getting my hands a little dirty, and this was very easy to do. Now of course as mentioned in every other post about building a hackintosh, it’s legally questionable — but I know many who have done this (including myself) buy a copy of OS X Leopard so then at least it’s somewhat morally justifiable (don’t steal OS X — it’s such a great piece of software, make sure Apple keeps developing it!).

If you have a hackintosh, have thought about building one, or have any questions about it, just post in the comments!

Gallery: Hackintosh build

The big news of the last couple weeks (at least in the consumer electronics realm) has been the final and decisive victory of the Blu-Ray high-definition media format over competitor HD-DVD. It happened much more quickly than anyone anticipated (myself included, having written about it less than two months ago). The beginning of the last chapter in HD-DVD’s life was in the first week of January 2008, when Warner — which had been dual-format — announced they were going to be releasing on Blu-Ray exclusively in the future. At the time, I (and most people) concluded that the format war was pretty much over, since Warner was such a huge studio, and the only remaining question was how long Toshiba would let HD-DVD suffer. I personally gave them 18 months; the format war has dragged on for years already, and I didn’t think big companies would move much faster than that. A lot of other tech bloggers gave HD-DVD about six to eight months, at the short end. As it turns out, it took all of six weeks.

With the majority of studios on the Blu side, HD-DVD was already down for the count as 2008 started, and then it got repeatedly kicked in the face as Wal-Mart, Netflix, and Best Buy all announced that they would discontinue HD-DVD sales/rentals (BlockBuster had already done the same last summer). So although the end was inevitable, the speed with which Toshiba admitted defeat was not — but it was admirable. From a purely business standpoint, it makes a ton of sense, because the longer they held on the more money they would lose. No one ever said, however, that big companies always do things that make sense.

So, the format war is over! Blu-Ray has won, we now know what will replace DVD, and we can all run out and start buying Blu-Ray players without fearing they’ll be obsolete before Christmas, right? Not exactly.

The biggest issue is this: current Blu-Ray players are crap. Unless you buy a Sony PlayStation3, I would stay far away from this generation of players. They are buggy, and many can’t even play normal DVDs very well. One Samsung model I read a review for even puts a black box around your plain DVDs — not black bars on the side, but a black box, essentially cheating you out of about 25% of that HDTV you paid for. Firmware updates are sometimes required for the players to be compatible with the latest Blu-Ray movies (since the spec is still evolving slightly), and even then some of them won’t support the full range of Blu-Ray features due out this year. Without boring you with the details, let me tell you what is a pretty safe assumption: by the end of this year, the Blu-Ray spec will be more or less where it’s going to stay, and there will be better, cheaper players available since hardware companies no longer have to hedge their bets on the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD battle. Wait until this holiday season (or later, of course), and make sure to get one of the newer models. The only acceptable BRD players on the market right now are ones that just came out and are running about $800-$1000…in 10 months, that will drop dramatically.

In the meantime, the wife and I are enjoying HD movie rentals via the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Apple TV. A couple clicks, a few bucks on the credit card, wait a minute or two, and you can start watching a high-definition movie without ever leaving the house. But nothing will ever replace a physical copy of a movie you really love, and for those types of films Blu-Ray is the future. Just don’t jump in quite yet.

The University of Michigan (or “That place up north”, for those of you also from rival universities) has created the “most intense laser in the universe,” as Engadget put it. The monster laser, named HERCULES (no, it’s not an acronym — they made it all caps because…well, because it could kill you) has 300 terawatts of power. For comparison, the entire U.S. electric grid has a capacity 1 terawatt. Forget those piddling lasers that can burn your skin — they haven’t said anything to that effect about HERCULES, but I’m willing to bet this thing could punch a hole clear through your body in a millisecond, if not just outright vaporize you. As the team from U. Mich. put it: “If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of [HERCULES].”

Wow.

This is one of those stories that you don’t hear about until it’s too late. It’s like the beginning of a war movie with ultra-secret black ops plots and complicated domino schemes.

In less than a week, no less than four undersea cables to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) have been severed, severely disrupting Internet access and crippling businesses and some government operations for a number of middle eastern and Asian countries. Just *snip* — cut, after years of perfect operation. Four in a week. And things are reportedly “beginning to get suspicious.”

Beginning to get suspicious? I think we’re way past suspicious. Is it just me, or does this seem like one of the unsung ways in which the third world war might start? I see deep sea divers with acetylene torches…

OK, I’m sure I’m overdramatizing. At least I hope I am. But this is clearly serious. Imagine if Internet access in the US went down — credit cards wouldn’t work, banks would be more or less frozen, the stock market couldn’t function, and the government would function even less than it does already, to say nothing of everything you personally depend on the Internet for every day. And imagine that the cause of it wasn’t just a power outage or something, but because four critical cables had been individually cut.

Internet traffic is being rerouted through other cables for the time being, but they’re strained to capacity and apparently not everything is completely operational. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, that’s for sure.