- Major League Baseball claims that Slingbox, the device that allows people to watch their home TV feed remotely over the internet, is illegal. Legal experts say users are not breaking any laws by using the device. The Slingbox, essentially…allows people to watch cable they’ve already paid for from another location. Cable or satellite prices can be high enough, especially when we have to buy 800 channels to get the three we actually want…now we have to pay because we want to see it when we aren’t at home?
- This spring, the XPower Powerpack Solar, a 10-amp battery with a 5-watt solar panel will hit shelves. The $169 device can run a laptop for 3 hours and a TV for 45 minutes. It takes 40 hours of sunshine to charge it…so it may not take off as much as the company hopes…although they expect people will charge it at home and top it off on the road…Green is in…is that green?
- Scientists at the University of Utah have succeeded in building small devices to turn heat into sound and then electricity. The devices could be used to produce electricity from waste heat in various industries. For the home, it could cool electronics, specifically the cooling of computers…it would also make them more energy efficient. A thermo-acoustic cooling device could cost about $100-200.
- The Free Software foundation has launched Playogg.com to promote awareness of the open-source multimedia format OGG as an alternative to MP3 and AAC, which are proprietary. Support for OGG on desktops is fully mature, with a variety of programs….hardware players are limited, although various ones do and several others can be hacked. We use OGG on some of our systems…
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