Introducing the Suntory Mermaid II: A wave-powered ship

Suntory Mermaid II

It’s no secret that boats have been used by man since the dawn of time. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that wind can easily be harnessed for locomotion. It does take a genius, however, to create a vessel powered by waves.

In the next few weeks, a well known Japanese adventurer named Kenichi Horie will set sail on his wave-powered boat for a 7000 kilometer journey starting in Hawaii and ending in the Kii Channel in Japan. The 3 ton catamaran is fabricated out of super-thin recycled aluminum and can cruise at up to 5 knots. His trip is estimated to last about 3 months.

The Suntory Mermaid II propulsion system works by harnessing the power of waves via two fins in the front of the boat. Said fins act similarly to a Dolphin’s tail, moving up and down according to the waves, thus propelling the ship. If this little project still isn’t green enough for your taste, all onboard electronics are powered via solar panels.

[Via PopSci]


Back up files to email with just one right-click

By Mark O’Neill

These days, with 6GB+ Gmail accounts and unlimited Yahoo accounts, email addresses are being used for more than just email.   Many people email themselves backups of many things including important documents, music, photos, video files and much more.  This way, they are not screwed if the original copy is destroyed or goes missing.  Plus their files are accessible from any internet-enabled PC.

But it can be a drag.  First you have to open a new email window, then you have to click on the attachment link, find the attachment then fill out the email address… there must be an easier, faster way to email yourself a backup of something right?   Well there is – the rather unoriginally named BackupToEmail.

This nifty little program installs an option in your Windows Explorer right-click menu which enables you to right-click on a file, choose the backup option and have it immediately sent to your designated email account.   It also installs a link in your right-click “send to” options which zips and sends the file to you.

When you first set it up, you need to tweak the program to suit yourself :

The beauty of this is that it is not locked into one email service – whether you use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or a really obscure service, it still works.  It also supports multiple email addresses.Now just right-click on your desired file in Windows Explorer, choose “Backup to email” and it immediately starts sending via a SSL SMTP server :

The file arrives in your email extremely fast, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to give me cause for concern.  It does what it claims to do. If you like, you can also alter the registry settings if you don’t like “Backup to email” in your right-click menu.  You can easily change it to “Gmail This!” or “Yahoo It!” if you’d prefer to give your menu that personal touch. Using this program, you can email backups to yourself in a matter of seconds – and you’ll wonder how you managed to survive without it up to now.


Nine Must-Listen Podcasts For Geeks

By Patrick Biz
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Geeks hate listening to commercial radio on their way to work. Hollywood gossip and local news are not the types of content computer-savvy people are raving about. What if, come Monday morning, you’re in the mood for tech news? Then on Tuesday’s commute, you want home theater reviews, and Wednesday, you want the latest pop news from Steve Jobs? Good luck finding all this on your AM/FM portable tuner.

Well thanks to podcasts, now you can listen to what you want, whenever you want. Podcasting is one of the best things to come out of the Internet . It is an audio or video file syndicated via the Internet that plays on portable media players, such as an iPod. Like radio and television shows, you can find podcasts on any subject you can think of. But for geeks looking for distinctively geeky content, here’s a list of what I consider to be the best technology and computer podcasts.

Continue reading ›

New Mac Book Pro’s tomorrow!

Mac Book ProAfter a few weeks of digging, AppleInsider has allegedly uncovered the details of Apple’s new MacBook Pro line-up. They’ve confirmed this based on new MacBook model numbers which have appeared in Apple’s inventory management systems.

Long story short, they will be available tomorrow sporting the newest Core 2 Duo Penryn chips running at 2.6GHz. They’ll also come packed with the new MacBook Air touch-pad, although we think that could have been taken care of with an update. The current line-up is already somewhat gesture compatible.

The prices will remain unchanged at $1,999, $2,499 and $2,799. Once again, the reputation of one of or favorite sites hangs in the balance. If the infamous yellow post-it shows up in the online store tomorrow, we will continue to love AI. If not, an all out protest will be staged containing much profanity.

Apple Insider: New MBP Model numbers

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YouTube DoS’ed Off Net By Pakistan

There are few people who work with the Internet who understand how truly vulnerable and weak the core infrastructure really is.  Nothing demonstrates this basic weakness better than the troubles experienced by YouTube over the past weekend when Pakistan, under orders from its government, put new BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) entries in one of their routers to block YouTube.  The result was not just a block for Pakistan, but for vast chunks of the whole Internet.

From Brian Krebs at the WaPo here:

Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country’s ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom – the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan – forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.

The result is that the Pakistani backbone Autonomous System (AS) announced to all of its peers via BGP that it was now authoritative for the DNS IP range of YouTube.com.  And this announcement was sent up the chain to its peers, and its peers’ peers, resulting in requests for YouTube.Com to be routed through Pakistan, which of course was not really routing for the site.  After a while, the peers noticed the route poisoning and filtered out any BGP announcements coming from Pakistan, and restored the connection to YouTube.

Was this the equivalent of Islamic Jihad against the internet in response to the Danish cartoons?  Some on NANOG certainly suspect this was a political move at least by a nascent government.  Others suspect it was more of a simple misconfiguration.  Danny McPherson at Arbor Networks provides an excellent analysis on how this happened and thinks it was an accident.  He writes:

I fully suspect that the announcements from Pakistan Telecom for YouTube address space were the result of a misconfiguration or routing policy oversight, and seriously doubt impact to YouTube reachability [beyond Pakistan’s Internet borders] was intentional. The route announcements from Pakistan Telecom have long since been withdrawn (or filtered).

But this clearly demonstrates that you don’t need a huge botnet to take a corporation off the Internet.  All it takes is fat fingers by an AS operator to sink your online presence, and no amount of  content distribution or built-in redundancy can save you.  But I know this garnered the attention of World Government organizations such as the US Department of Homeland Security, and they will be having a chat with the operator of the AS this morning.

Is there really such a thing as a "geek defense"?

By Mark O’Neill

hansreiser A computer programmer is on trial accused of murdering his wife and the evidence against him is damning.   So his lawyer has uniquely resorted to what many have called "the geek defense".

So what is some of the evidence against computer programmer Hans Reiser that his lawyer dismisses as weird geek behavior?

  • He purchased two books on murder
  • He took no part in the search for his missing wife
  • He had removed the battery from his cell phone
  • The floor of his car was soaking wet as if it had just been cleaned
  • He had removed the front passenger seat of his car

So this has intrigued me to ask the geek readers of this blog – are the above actions typical of a geek?   Do you remove the battery from your cell phone on a regular basis?    Would you consider it normal for a geek to remove the front passenger seat from the car?   If you were a juror in the case, would you accept the "geek defense"?

* NOTE : the above Washington Post link requires free login to view the news article.  If you don’t have an account and you don’t want to register, you can bypass the login screen using BugMeNot.

AquaSkipper: Don’t just float on water, hop on it!

The Aquaskipper is an innovative human-powered watercraft that rests on hydrofoils, propelling itself forward when its driver hops up and down on it. According to its manufacturer, this is the fasted human-powered water vehicle on the planet. Built out of aircraft aluminum and fiberglass, the Aquaskipper only weights 26 pounds and goes at a top speed of 17 MPH. See it in action in the following video.

HD-DVD: We hardly knew ye

Did you actually think that HD-DVD was going to die gracefully? Perhaps with a solemn mourning ceremony and a tribute to the next-gen format that could have been?

You didn’t think about how retailers were going to dump their excess HD-DVD players though, now did you?

Apparently. both online and brick-and-mortar stores, are renaming HD-DVD players as ones which simply upscale plain old DVD’s. Ouch. Oh sure, HD-DVD playback is listed as a feature but this has got to be a pretty painful slap in the face. It has been a tough few weeks for HD-DVD and instead of dying quietly, it has attracted all sorts of terrible –and terribly hilarious– attention.

Looks like the “unnecessary” Bluray functionality of the PS3 suddenly became very necessary. Lem Kutaragi must be rolling over in his grave.

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[via Eng]

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