Friday, May 02, 2008

My 15-Monitor Setup Sure Makes Up for My Lousy Childhood! [Ridiculous]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/282139881/my-15+monitor-setup-sure-makes-up-for-my-lousy-childhood

Oh, look at you with your three monitors. I bet you think you're king nerd of computer mountain, don't you? Well you know what? You suck. That's right. That's because I have fifteen monitors strung together making my screen bigger than all of yours. Did you hear me?! I HAVE THE BIGGEST SCREEN! Finally, I win at something!

This monster of a display setup is made possible by 9X Media's multi-display setups. Sure, it's likely to topple over and pin me down, leaving me to slowly starve to death in my own home, my cellphone just out of reach up on my desk and no one coming to visit me or check on me because I've alienated all of my friends and family with my constant bragging and boasting about my gigantic monitor setup, but the fragging I'll do before that happens will make it all worth it.

This scalable setup will allow you to link between two to thirty monitors together and beyond, as long as you've got the juice to send your picture to that many screens and don't mind your $500 monitors to be handing 8 pixels each. But hey, it's not the quality that counts, it's the ridiculous size, right? [9X Media via BornRich]


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Get Free Wi-Fi Access on Your Laptop at Starbucks, Barnes and Noble [Free Wi-Fi]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/281690282/get-free-wi+fi-access-on-your-laptop-at-starbucks-barnes-and-noble

free-wi-fi.pngOur gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here's how:

To masquerade as an iPhone, you'll need to tweak your browser's user agent, which web sites use to identify your browser when you connect to the site. In Firefox, you can install the previously mentioned User Agent Switcher. In Safari, you can select the iPhone user agent through the Develop menu (which you can enable by navigating to Preferences -> Advanced and checking "Show Develop menu in menu bar." Likewise, Opera has user agent switching built in. On the non-Safari browsers, you'll have to manually add a new iPhone user agent like so.

new-user-agent.pngNow that you're all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you've got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you're done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.

I haven't actually been able to verify this yet (though there are reports of success), so if you give it a try, let's hear how it worked for you in the comments.

*One Gizmodo reader using his unlocked iPhone with T-Mobile reports that entering his T-Mobile number worked, but your mileage may vary.


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Chinese Facebook Clone Xiaonei Raises $430 Million

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/281174754/

x.jpgChinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat.

Xiaonei was founded in December 2005 by Qinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Jacky, then was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. As of November 2007, the site was said to be the most popular social networking site among university students in China, with 15 million registered users and 8.8 million active users.

The company likes to call itself the Facebook of China, and we’d never guess why (note, shot as run through Google Translate, they don’t offer an English version from what I could see):

xianei1.jpg

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Benq C36 Cellphone Thinks it's a Webcam and Radio Recorder Too [Cellphones]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/281470232/benq-c36-cellphone-thinks-its-a-webcam-and-radio-recorder-too

Benq's new C36 cellphone is labelled a "Music Phone" but it also squeezes in a 1.3 megapixel webcam function and has a built-in FM radio with a recording function. This last even has a scheduling function, so you won't miss your shows. It plays MP3s, WAV, MIDI and AMR, has a 2-inch color LCD, built-in speakers, records voice notes, has microSD memory expansion and 180 hours standby and 2.4 hour talk time. The phone even has a "Health management" option, dealing with BMI and menstrual matters—we'd love to have been at the design meeting where they dreamed that up. The little 0.17-pound phone is available in blue, in Indonesia in May at first, with other countries to follow. No info on pricing. [Benq via TFTS]


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Dragon Power Station Harnesses Kinetic Energy From Passing Vehicles to Power Stuff [Energy]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/281596556/dragon-power-station-harnesses-kinetic-energy-from-passing-vehicles-to-power-stuff

truck-traffic-hh001.jpgTerry Kenney's Dragon Power Station prototype works by harnessing the kinetic energy of trucks passing over plates buried in the road and turning that energy into electricity. The system he's got set up now in the Port of Oakland, with 2,500 trucks passing over it in a day, is enough to power 1,750 homes. It's a very interesting concept that can be extended to busier streets, harnessing a little bit of the energy that would otherwise be lost.

It's not all free energy, however, as these trucks slow down ever-so-slightly as they depress the plates in the road. TreeHugger supposes that this would be even better for the times when you actually do want to slow down, like going down a hill, where they could load up on these plates and slow down cars enough to not have to ride the brakes the whole way. Sounds good to us. [Treehugger]


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