Jacket Grows From Living Tissue

I’m sorry but this story is just creepy.  Give me a dead cow coat any day over one that is still living!  Eeeeeek.  All I can hear is “it puts the lotion on its skin!”

Put off by the idea of wearing jackets made from dead animal skins, a team of Australian researchers attempts to grow a stitchless coat from live cells. By Lakshmi Sandhana.

[Wired News]

BeyondTV and RSS feeds

Someone out there want to help me on this?  What I would like to do is make some sort of RSS feed that would allow me to aggregate my “Now Showing” list on my BeyondTV.  Then I could use something like iPodder or something to suck down the shows and have them on my iPaq for watching at lunch time…  I already have all of my shows transcoding to wmv at a frame rate and video resolution that works well on the TV and on the iPaq.

 

Since BeyondTV already provides links to the shows I guess the only thing I need is something that would write the xml code for the RSS feed and keep it up to date.  Anyway, just my rambling thoughts today.

Now, for Your PC: Mac OS X

This is cool.  I tried to get it but it seems the store is broke (or over worked).  Also, it looks like they were /.’ed so maybe it’s still on the mend. 

A Hawaiian company claims to have developed a $50 software emulator that allows a Windows PC to run Mac OS X. A legal expert says it's likely Apple will have some objections. By Leander Kahney.

[Wired News]

Iris Scanning Hotel Rooms

Now this is just too darn cool. 

A Boston hotel called Nine Zero is using biometric iris scanning to replace room keys, allowing guests to gain access to their rooms with just a quick flash of the eyeball. Using a system from LG, first-time guests have a picture of their iris scanned, which is quickly encrypted to a hashed numeric code and the source image deleted (meaning they don't keep a copy of your iris on file, just the results a scan of your iris would provide). Because the data can be held on to indefinitely, returning guests can make reservations and gain access to their rooms without ever talking to a clerk, booking a room by email and getting their room number in response.

Your Iris is the Key [HotelChatter]

[Gizmodo]

Microsoft Releases WMP10 Mobile

Seems it won’t run on my iPaq! L

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.aspx

 

They always updated the devices before…  Argh! 

Beyond TV 3.5 and SnapStream's Medusa PVR

Coolio.  I would love to have two or three more Hauppauge 250 tuners myself.  So far, BTV 3.5 has been awesome!

To inaugurate the release of SnapStream’s Beyond TV 3.5 (and perhaps also to piss off Sony, whose Vaio type X costs about five times as much for about as many TV tuners), they’ve assembled a white-box PC with six Hauppauge tuners and a measly 5400RPM 40GB hard drive. They’re calling it the Medusa PVR, and funny as it may be, the $1,200 machine works, and works well. Though it doesn’t have 1.5 terabytes of storage, it’s still good enough for us in that over the top ridiculously excessive kind of way.

[Engadget]

PodCasting Without an iPod

I was just thinking this yesterday.  There was a great deal of discussion on this at Gnomedex.  Since I still don’t have an iPod I thought “why *cant* I have this timeshifted content on my iPaq? 

Why not call it NetCasting or TimeCasting or TimeShifted News…  Oh well.

 

So PodCasting—the ability to time-shift internet radio and the like and listen to it on your iPod whenever—is pretty cool, I guess, but its name is a little confusing, implying that it only works with iPods (probably because the first popular variant uses a program called 'iPodder'). Thing is, you can use iPodder along with Windows Media Player to PodCast on a variety of devices, including Pocket PCs and non-Apple music players. Jake Ludington has even written a handy tutorial to explain how to do it for at his "Media Blab."

So maybe we should—and I know this is just crazy talk—call this stuff something other than PodCasting? Probably too late, huh?

Podcasting with Windows Media Player [JakeLudington]
[Gizmodo]