Blog

Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional wind turbines don't scale down wellâ??there's too much friction in the gearbox and other components. "With rotary power, there's nothing out there that generates under 50 watts," Frayne says.

View the video to see it in action.

If someone (by someone I mean a Power Generation company) can adopt this method of generation for the villages, we can provide power to almost all of the villages.

[Via EcoGeek Via Popular Mechanics]

Amazing funny Toyota Ad ...

Microsoft is now allowing users to download IE7 without with Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check either at the download or at the time of the installations.

This means that even those who have pirated copies of the Windows XP can even download and install IE7.

I wonder why Microsoft is doing this now ? Maybe they want bring all the Windows XP system on par as far as internet security (safe browsing plateform). Or maybe they are just worried about the increasing share of the Mozilla Firefox. Or maybe they are just laying the foundation for there next version of the Internet Explorer. Who knows! Your guess is as good as mine.

Windows XP users will be able to download Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Update or from Microsoft's IE7 home page.

[Via DownloadSquad]

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.

Now only if they start accepting exams online, I can just have my degree from UC Berkeley sitting right here in my home ...

Microsoft is now selling DRM-free music (currently 1 million songs) on its Zune marketplace. Isn't it the same company that pretty much invented the DRM (or better known as labyrinth of pain in online music buyers).

I don't know whether Microsoft is trying to be project this hip new attitude by starting selling DRM-free music. Or maybe it is realizing that this is the way to the future of online music selling as all the other major players are doing it. (That is after iTunes and Amazon's MP3 DRM-free music store started)

Whatever maybe the reason, it is good to hear and see Microsoft doing something like this.

[Via DownloadSquad]

I have started to use Firefox 3 Alpha as my primary browser for a week now. This one seems to be faster than Firefox 2 and seems to consume less memory when running for a while.

Although there seems to be some caveats, (some of them maybe because of the web design) but on most part, all the sites that I visit regularly seems to be displaying fine as they should.

Will keep you posted.

Folding @ Home has crossed the 1 petaFlop mark. That is pretty awesome. Much of it is being helped by the PS3.

View the Folding @ Home client stats by OS.

A petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). If you'd like to imagine this enormous computation capacity, think about calculating a tip on a restaurant bill, now do that for 75,000 different bills, now do that every second, and lastly, imagine everybody on the planet is doing those calculations at the same second- this is a petaflop calculation. Now you see why I say say enormous ...

[Via PlayStation Blog]

Just after few days after being available in Mumbai gray market, iPhone is now available in Delhi. To get the coolest gadget of the year, you just need to hit the shadowy "grey" Gaffar Market in Karol Bagh from anywhere Rs. 35,000 to 45,000.

[Via Hindustan Times]