Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled:
Yes, the price is $4.95, but nonetheless, a long-lasting, efficient LED bulb for $4.95 is a win! The announcement was just made a few minutes ago, as Lemnis unveiled three new lines of its Pharox LED replacement bulb. The 200-lumen Pharox BLU is the bulb selling for $4.95, and the 350-lumen PHarox Blu is selling for $6.95. They are, apparently, only sold through the Pharox website.
[That’s a small step. More please.]
Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security:
An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail, online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.
The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) to be presented at a cryptography conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million 1024-bit RSA keys published online. By subjecting what’s known as the “modulus” of each public key to an algorithm first postulated more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek mathematician Euclid, the researchers looked for underlying factors that were used more than once. Almost 27,000 of the keys they examined were cryptographically worthless because one of the factors used to generate them was used by at least one other key.
“The fact is, if these numbers had the entropy that they were supposed to have, the probability of even one of these events happening in 7 million public keys would be vanishingly small,” James P. Hughes, an independent cryptographer who participated in the research, told Ars. “We thought that was rather startling.”
[Oy.]
Every Little Things Capistrano Does Is Magic : Ruby Fleebie:
During all these years, Capistrano has been for me a magical gnome that I invoke by saying “cap deploy, my magical friend!” and then I close my eyes, sing a happy song in my head and when the gnome has finished his magic, I hit F5 to see if all went well. And of course, if it didn’t, I blame the damn elf.
[Blame the elf! Blame the elf!]
Why should your dock last longer than you use your current phone model? A lot of those remaining products are not being passed on when devices are sold, so people happen to collect them or even throw them away.
Not the greatest use of material, if you ask us.So why not make some of your supporting hardware match this cycle, so it won’t last that long? This would only make sense if it can be made a lot more eco-friendly and way cheaper.
So here we go: Welcome to the Papercraft series. Made from recycled cardboard and laser-cut with carbon free energy.
[Nice idea. Now if we could locally source these things for everyone we’d be making a dent. It relates to that whole 3D printing thing. Sell the design (the cad file or what have you, either by charging a “wholesale” amount for the design the lisc. to reuse, or some such) and have it locally produced by a shop. This will further lower the environmental impact, designer gets paid, local shop gets paid, and we don’t ship finished goods around the world. Win.]
Honeywell sues Nest for patent infringement:
Honeywell makes crappy, ugly thermostats. They’re the market leader, but they’ve been sitting on their asses, not doing much. So thermostat innovation and design has been pretty stagnant for years.
Nest’s is by far the most innovative thermostat we’ve seen for a long time, but it looks like they’re going to have a lot of problems with these Honeywell patents, which will probably impair (or, at worst, prevent) them from pushing this stagnant industry forward.
Remind me again how the patent system promotes innovation.
[Yeah, what he said. And shame on Honeywell…]
Source: Marco.org
Will energy consumption stay private?:
A significant byproduct of the connection revolution is that things that were private because they were difficult to measure will no longer be private. When devices can talk to each other, the information rarely remains private. It’s not going to stop with energy, of course. Just about all our buying decisions are going to be shared, and that changes the marketers job.
In a world of horizontal marketing, where tribes are aware of what their members are up to, I think it’s going to happen quicker than most people expect.
[It’s not a question of “whether”, we already share this stuff a lot. It’s a question of how easy it’ll be to access it. Will you be notified if I look at your purchase history?]
Source: Seth’s Blog
Is Facebook really a good business?:
Facebook offers nothing that you can’t get elsewhere on the internet in terms of building an online presence, sharing with friends and family, and keeping up with people in an extended circle—it’s simply that right now, many people find them the most convenient way to do that. A long-term bet on Facebook is a bet that this will still be the case 15 years from now—or a bet that, 15 years from now, Facebook will have pivoted in a way that still keeps them just as relevant. That’s a very tall order.
Source: Coyote Tracks
Neil Young was working with Apple on super high-def music format:
Young spoke at length about the lack of quality in today’s mainstream digital music formats, arguing that the “low-res world” of MP3s provide just 5% of the data present in the original studio recordings, paling in comparison to the quality of vinyl records back in the 70’s.
[If you watch the video, Neil Young said “Piracy is the new radio”. Interesting to hear from someone like him. I’ve long felt the same way since must of us toil in obscurity, and care more about being heard at all than the nonexistent lost sales. The fidelity thang has been long time issue for him, he’ cared about this as long as I can recall. I hope Apple doesn’t drop work on this altogether.]
Bootstrap 2 brings a plethora of changes and new features to the toolkit, many added as a result feedback from the community. In addition, much of our work was guided by our experiences of working on Twitter.com’s latest redesign where we created a flexible and durable design system. We took the same approach to Bootstrap 2 and came away with more features, better documentation, smarter default styling, and more.
[Allez!]
Apple updates Final Cut Pro X with multicam, broadcast monitoring:
What’s really different in Apple’s implementation of multicam is how the company does its automatic syncing. Of course, you can sync camera angles by using the timecode or the less accurate method of using the time of day, but Apple has a new way of syncing camera angles — audio waveforms.
[Nice.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 