A base on Mars is right behind a base on the moon in terms of space expectations. Despite that, the closest we’ve come is sending rovers to send back pictures and take samples. Sure, we’ve discovered water on the red planet, but we’re still a long way away from sending people to Mars. The Wikipedia page for Mars exploration is lacking in almost any detail about manned missions, as is NASA’s page. The “Mars to Stay” wikipedia entry and the page for Manned missions to Mars both feature a lot of good information about putting humans on Mars, however the fact remains that the earliest dates for launch are placed many years out- with NASA hinting that they might be ready by 2037. 27 years from now.

Teleportation

We can probably thank Star Trek for making teleportation something that we expect in the future. The technology has showed up in countless video games and films, being treated more like a given future tech than a barely plausible possibility for transportation. This article from IBM research is a good read, and has links to other articles, but makes the point that we are nowhere near being able to teleport objects, let alone people. Teleportation is an incredibly difficult concept, presented in an extremely simplistic way in pop culture. Consider that we aren’t close to sending people to Mars, and teleportation is- at it’s core- the disassembling and reassembling of atoms in the same way they were assembled before being transmitted. Imagine how difficult it would be to send something as simple as a die from one place to another, and then consider how complex humans are compared to dice. Any opinions?

The really cool thing about these boxes is that they don’t have to be so big. Their power comes from 25kw fuel cells, which are combined to form a 1kw stack. This stack can power a full house, and is smaller than a toaster. Stacks can be added together to form a 25kw module, and 4 of those can be added together to create 1 100kw energy server. Imagine paying a one-time fee for energy, and not ever having to worry about the grid going down. Currently the price is a little too high to be extremely attractive, with estimates for a Stack sitting around $3000, and a server at $700-800,000. Bloom says that after a 3-5 year period, the price will be paid back, assuming a fixed energy cost.

The CEO of Bloom Energy puts the life of the boxes at around 10 years, but the CEO of eBay has stated that since installing the boxes late last year, they have saved $100,000 in electricity bills. At this point that puts the boxes in a good position for large businesses, but the price is still high for everyone else. Like everything though, it can be expected to go down in the near future, as the power output goes up. Read more about the Server at its Wikipedia entry, and tell me what you think. Are Bloom Boxes going to be as big a deal as people think they’ll be?

Screaming Bee claims that PocketFart is the best farting software for your Windows Mobile device. Actually, it may be the only farting software for your Windows Mobile device. We can only hope…

Anyhow, if you’ve always wanted to be able to create the sounds without the olfactory evidence, and if you have a Windows Mobile device, this software is for you – and the rest of your 9-year-old buddies (sober; 30-year-old drunks will probably like it, too). Enjoy!

Header image stolen gleefully from Scott Johnson and used without permission. I don’t know where he got it. I don’t really care, either.

Weapon of choice of Aliens, Moon Men, and future humans. The problem with ray guns is that while they’re a great idea, no one ever really sat down and figured out how they would work. Because of that, (and probably other things), we’re still firing bullets at each other.

In addition, our ideas of future weapons have changed, perhaps to accommodate our realization that ray guns aren’t as simple as we had thought. Sure, Star Trek and Star Wars still utilize ray gun type weaponry, but the more recent additions to our ideas of the future still use bullets. Halo, Mass Effect, Avatar- humans travel around space in all of them, but despite that, still use bullets.

This video illustrates the sad excuse we have for a ray gun today; more a “hot tickle” gun than a red or green laser blast.

What do you think, are ray guns still the future of weapons? Personally I think that railguns, coilguns, and energy weapons are the new ray guns. Sure, there may be some point in the future when the typical soldier is issued an Lasgun or phaser, but I think those days are a very long way off.

Sure, you might consider a Roomba a robot maid, but while it may clean your floor, it’s no butler. If a massive amount of science fiction literature was to be believed, we should all have had android Alfreds by now. Japan is getting closer to this particular prediction, because for whatever reason they seem to like robots a whole lot more than we do. When Honda’s ASIMO grows about 2 feet taller, and can walk up stairs safely, we’ll at least get the drink serving robot. Then we just need to put vacuum cleaners in its feet and call it a day.

Moon Colonies

One of the quickest ways to tell if someone is a nerd is to ask how they feel about NASA having to scrap their plans for a moon base. Besides that however, moon colonies really felt (and feel) close to happening! After all, 41 years ago we managed to land on the rock, you would have thought that somewhere between 1969 and 2010 we would have set up some sort of permanent structure. At this point our best bet is probably a privately funded moon base, so Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Google, do the future a favor and help us start moving off this rock on to others.

The Future Isn’t Here… Yet. is a new weekly column that will look at predictions that science fiction and pop culture were sure we would have by now. To suggest anything, please comment!

Bypass Heavy-Handed Web Filters with Your Own Proxy Server

Your IT Department installs filters for a number of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• The lawyers told them to.
• HR told them to.
• Your manager would rather that you work while you’re getting paid for it, and browse random Web sites on your own time.
• Many thousands of Web sites contain malicious code that will silently install itself on your computer – and your employer’s network – simply by you visiting the wrong site (which could be the New York Times or Wall Street Journal – both have had third-party advertising banners that contained malicious code).

So, while it may be fun to think you’re “getting away with it,” you probably aren’t (the IT Department keeps logs, and the proxy won’t protect you from that), depending on your employer’s policies, you may be putting your job at serious risk by circumventing the filters IT put there.

Just do something smarter, OK? Like, maybe, work at work, and play at home.

BattCursor shows the remaining battery charge in percent directly under the mouse cursor, and offers many other battery-saving features, including dim down the display brightness when inactive, automatically disable the Windows Sidebar, Aero Glass and much more.
And the best part: It costs nothing, worth seeing

BattCursor (no relation to the Caped Crusader) gives you a free method of managing your laptop’s battery usage that is so much better than the built-in “management” tools in Windows, you’ll wonder why Microsoft didn’t steal it think of it themselves.

The author’s native language is apparently German, but the translation is perfectly understandable in the application itself, and only mildly odd on the Web site.

Recommended!

First, take a look at the Spanish language version of the fix. I suggest you open it in a new tab.

Now, here’s the English translation, courtesy of Google:

Spanish to English translation

Problems with laptop battery Windows 7: workaround
Many users of Windows 7 are taking warnings related to problems with their laptop battery when in fact there is no problem.
Microsoft is currently investigating this issue with hardware manufacturers. Apparently the problem is related to the BIOS and look for an immediate update of firmware.

Consider replacing your battery “Consider replacing your battery” is the annoying error message that appears frequently in Windows 7.

As Microsoft releases the final solution for this error, then a temporary solution is to disable the error:

- Open the Control Panel Device Manager or write in the search box on the Start menu
- Select the Device Manager
- Expand and select Battery with Battery control method for ACPI Microsoft
- Right click and select Disable

And there you have it!

Beer: Now A Health Food!

If you haven’t already yelled out to the Little Woman about this discovery, show her the full report!

Source

By way of EXTRALIFE

For under a C-note, it’s a pretty good deal. You can check it out here.

So off I went to the Amazon.com Web site, and placed my order, using PayPal as my preferred method of payment. Two weeks passed. No Roku. No email saying the order was delayed. No tracking number. Nada. Zip Zilch. And Amazon (mercifully) had not charged my PayPal account. A few emails back and forth, and I figured out that Amazon had totally dropped the ball on this order; somehow, it fell through the cracks, and Roku was never notified that I wanted their product. So, I canceled the Amazon order, and ordered direct from Roku (for exactly the same price, and the same shipping). Three days later, a smallish purple package arrived; not much thicker than a standard desktop encyclopedia (the dead-tree kind, not the desktop PC kind), it was lightweight and said “Roku” in large white letters.

I eagerly opened the box, of course. Now, I am not the kind of guy who thinks an “unboxing” is a major event (I rank it right up there with the “unbagging” of the groceries), so I didn’t bother to take pics of that. The contents, though, are pretty interesting. the most important ones have photos here.

First, here’s the Roku Player, the remote for the Roku Player, and a standard sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 printer paper for size comparison, sitting on a 1-inch square grid (my wife’s sewing pattern guide, if you must know).

Roku with Remote

As you can see, the Player is a mere five inches square, give or take a quarter-inch. Here you can see the back panel, with the plethora of connectors, and note that the Player is only about 2 1/2 inches thick. This is a very tiny device!

Roku Back Panel

And the front panel:

Roku Front Panel

Note that there is no power switch whatsoever. I’ll talk about that more shortly. I neglected to take pics of the power supply, but it’s a tiny “wall-wart” style unit, about the same as the one I use for charging my cell phone. Here’s a pic of it from the Roku Web site (you can buy replacements for the power supply and the remote for only about ten bucks each):

Roku Power Supply

The player comes with the usual red/white/yellow RCA cables for lowest-possible-video-quality connections. I had purchased an HDMI cable in a separate order from Amazon, which they managed to handle correctly; actually, I got two cables, at 1 cent each, and $6.98 shipping for the two of them together, so I have an extra. There is also a fold-out “Getting Started” guide. The Web site also has a more detailed  User Guide. Anyhow, I finished getting everything out of the box except the superfluous RCA cables, hooked everything up (power, cat5e network cable, and HDMI to the TV), turned on the TV, and was rewarded with a fast system software update to the Roku box. At some point, I think it asked me if I was going to use a wired or wireless connection (Wifi is built in, but I prefer my high-speed wired network). Anyhow, after the software update, the player rebooted itself, and asked what kind of TV I have – HDTV, old-school 4:3, or 16:9 anamorphic, if your widescreen TV doesn’t support 720p video. This can be changed later if you get a new TV, of course.

Finally, you’ll be asked which service you want to use. Right now (September 2009), Netflix Watch Instantly, Amazon Video on Demand, and MLB.com are supported. When more services are added, they’ll show up after your automatic software update. I chose Netflix, because while I have an Amazon account, I never use the VOD option; and I am about as interested in MLB.com as I am in having my chest waxed.

The first question you’ll be asked after selecting your service boils down to, “do you already have an account, or do you want to open a trial account?” I have a Netflix account, so a code was generated which I had to put into a Web page using my PC. Simple enough, I have a PC in the entertainment center; here is a pic showing the Roku Player, a DVD clamshell case for size comparison, and the humongous Dell PC all together:

Roku, DVD case, and Dell PC

By the time I had the TV switched back to the Roku Player, it was showing my Netflix Watch Instantly queue. I selected an episode of “The IT Crowd,” waited a couple of seconds while Netflix determined my Internet connection quality (which vastly exceeds the 4 Mbps required for HD streaming; I have 20 Mbps FiOS), and was enjoying a great HD comedy series almost immediately. Even better, the Roku Player remembers where you are in the queue, so if you are watching a series, you can come back to the next episode the next time you feel like watching it; no need to scroll through the queue if you haven’t watched something else in the same queue in the meantime.

Now, about that no power switch thing: The Roku Player goes into deep sleep mode after a few minutes of no activity. The power light (the only visible sign of life on the front panel) goes off. Even at the maximum possible power draw from the wall-wart, it’s under 7 watts, so you’re not going to save a lot, but it’s nice to know that Roku is as “green” as humanly possible.

Bottom line: If you have a good, solid, fast Internet connection, and your monthly download bandwidth is uncapped, and you want great HDTV streaming video, the Roku Player is a great piece of equipment. For me, it’s the best hundred bucks I’ve ever spent on an electronic entertainment device.

UPDATE: 1 December 2009
Last month, Roku added 10 more channels to the available lineup. You can read about them at Roku’s site. However, that’s not what I want to talk about now. Right now, I feel I should give you two warnings: First warning: Roku’s tech support is pathetically bad. As is normal for anything tech-related nowadays, the “technicians” are very obviously in India; that would be OK, if they were actually competent to answer questions, but they are not. Email support is pretty much non-existent; they never actually address any questions you ask them. The toll-free support line is simply some guy reading a script (also, unfortunately, quite normal in the industry), which is bad enough, but even after you tell him you have already done several of the obvious steps, like disconnecting the power, waiting a few minutes, and reconnecting it, he will read that question off the script and ask you again. I’ve called several times, and this is not just one guy; apparently it is company policy to assume all customers are liars and idiots. And that brings me to the Second Warning: Under no circumstances should you give an email address to Roku if you don’t want spam at that address. Mind you, it’s not a lot of spam, but Roku is now trying to sell me the exact same box I already have, via “email marketing” (also known as “unsolicited bulk email,” or “spam” to normal people). I get enough spam, as I am sure everyone else does; I don’t need more from Roku, especially when it’s such brain-dead content.

Meanwhile, my update has failed to happen, and I haven’t been able to manually update, either. Tonight I’ll try performing a “factory default reset” and see if that does the job; the downside is that, even if it works, I will have to re-associate the Roku player with Amazon and Netflix, which while not difficult, is annoying.

I’m still glad I bought the device, but I will forever rue the day I let Roku know my email address.

UPDATE: 21 December 2009
Belated report on the firmware update: As it turns out, the “factory default reset” which was advised by Roku’s India-based “customer support” was not merely unnecessary, it was counter-productive, since I had to re-associate my Roku player with my Netflix and Amazon VOD accounts afterward, and still didn’t get the update. I found out that it was unnecessary by reading through the Roku customer forums for a couple of hours, until I discovered a post that claimed the update could be forced to happen by trying it twice within 20 seconds. I tried it, and viola!

At this point, I would strongly advise anyone who is not a dedicated technogeek to avoid this device (and probably any other Roku products), until they get some real technical support on board, and dump the script-readers in Mumbai. I could have bought two more Roku players and some DVDs with the value of time I spent reading forums to get self-help advice.

Rare is the person who comes away from a ‘con unscathed.  In light of the recent events regarding PAX and the presence of an uninvited guest (Swine Flu), I thought the topic should be discussed. Sure, you could walk around in a surgical mask and a pair of latex gloves to protect yourselves from germs, but the ‘con is the perfect venue to be a bit more creative.  I’ve compiled a list of the top 5 costume genres you can use to keep other peoples’ germs at bay.

1. Ninja/Power Ranger/Snake Eyes/ Cobra Commander

The key feature here is some type of cloth facial covering that could easily hide a surgical mask and make you look quite dapper as well.  The requisite pair of gloves also protects your hands from germy game demos.  All these costumes are fairly readily available from various costume retailers or are simple enough to put together yourself.

2. Storm Trooper/Darth Vader/ Boba Fett

Again with this genre is the mask to hide a less aesthetically surgical one, but this time they are hard masks.  Plus, the odd sound your voice will make coming through the various layers will only serve to enhance the cosplay experience. And, again, the gloves are part of the outfit.  These, however, are probably better for the more die hard fan, as purchasing one or making one yourself can be quite daunting.

3. Steam Punk/WWII Soldier/Psycho Mantis from MGS

The big draw here: Gas mask.  Rather than use a fake one, get a real mask and outfit it with a couple of filters rated to keep biological microbes and you’ll be all set. All in all, it’s fairly simple to put together a decent outfit from thrift or army surplus stores. A pair of thin leather gloves will make button mashing easier and safer.

4. Transformer/Gundam

While certainly not the easiest costume to move around in, you could probably hide an entire respiration system within a good cardboard robot.  Make sure to bring a friend, though.  Maneuvering by yourself could prove quite hazardous.

5. Mascot-style Characters

While this is certainly something I would never encourage, there’s certainly no better way to keep everyone away from you than by dressing up as a terrifying large headed stuffed animal.

I hope that now before you head off to your next convention that you’ll remember what you’ve learned here and will take the necessary, geeky precautions.

So it’s Monday, Labor Day, around nine PM, and I don’t feel like going to bed yet. So I asked the wife, “Want to watch a movie?” She says, “Do we have time?” “Sure!” I reply, “We can watch a dozen or so!”

So, during the next hour, we watched Freddy vs. Jason, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pulp Fiction, Highlander, The Big Chill, Night of the Living Dead, Titanic, The Shining, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Exorcist, Alien, Jaws, War of the Worlds, Star Wars, King King, and Rocky.

“How is that possible in just one hour?” I hear you wondering. Well, we watched the 30-second Bunnies Theater condensed versions of all of those movies (which actually are closer to a minute long each). They are all rated “AC” for “Adult Content,” and I would not recommend them for young children, but honestly, of the actual movies I have seen versus the 30-second Bunnies version, I would have to say the the bunnies did it better; not “just as well,” but better!

To quote from the Netflix synopsis: “If you don’t have two hours to watch your favorite movie, get the 30-second, laugh-out-loud version here, acted out by adorable animated bunnies. Jennifer Shiman created this award-winning series and she, along with Douglas McInnes, provide the voices.”

So, to make this review as condensed as the 30-second Bunnies Theater, I’ll cut it short here, and just tell you that there are 3 seasons available on Netflix Watch Instantly, and I look forward to watching all of Season 3 tonight! Don’t wait: Get your bunnies on!

1. Netflix:  missed your favorite show?  Who cares, just queue up the season DVDs to be mailed (or, if you’re lucky, it’s available to watch immediately)
2. Hulu:  Why not just stream the show for free?  Hulu will even let you build up a queue complete with subscriptions
3. Over-the-air HDTV:  pull in those local channels, for free, using a simple antenna and your fancy new flat-screen (or an older TV with a converter box)
4. BitTorrent:  plenty of ways to find espisodes of shows for download as well, though this is, at best, a bit of a grey area when it comes to the legality.
5. Digital stores (Amazon/iTunes/etc):  just purchase your favorite episodes to watch at your leisure

Now, admittedly, a lot of these require you to have high-speed internet (any digital download or streaming) and/or pay (Netflix, digital purchases), but the options are varied.   However, DSL is reasonably priced ($20-30/month); slap a Netflix subscription on top of that for another $15 or so, and you’re still coming out cheaper than anything the cable company (well, that I’ve seen from Comcast) has to offer – plus you’ve got high-speed internet to boot.

I guess what remains to be seen is how the cable companies will adapt to the new technology.  Yes, cable internet is most likely the fastest that most people can get ahold of (unless they’re in a FIOS market), but that doesn’t give you any discounts on your cable bill.  Will the Comcast’s of the world fight back against the pressure of free HD and online programming?  Only time will tell, but I’m not holding my breath.