Need to convert petabytes to gigabytes? A g-unit to galileos? Your US shoe size to its UK equivalent? Or maybe you need to convert your newly found zeptogram measurement to daltons? If so, chances are good that OnlineConversion.com has the tool to convert it. If you’re really bored, you can even convert a phrase to Pig Latin, pick some lottery numbers, or convert English to Haxor. Read more »

Via AppleInsider According to sources, Apple earlier today declared build 8A428 of Tiger gold master. Sources expect Apple to announce the completion of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger as early as tomorrow, April 1st. Don’t forget you can pre-order Tiger from Amazon with a $30 rebate. Read more »

According to this source, there are currently two million Xbox units left, with 400,000 of those dedicated to the European market. Once those are gone, there will not be any more made. However, Microsoft has indicated to key retailers that it plans to having around a million Xbox 360 hardware units available in time for Christmas of 2005… Further proof that the release of the XBox 360/Next/whatever is close at hand. Also proof that current XBox titles will be compatible with the next generation Xbox. Read more »

A while back I posted a link to a site that allowed you to check your Gmail account from your cellphone using a WAP browser. Here is a tutorial for fowarding your GMail messages to your cellphone, complete with numbers for the major U.S. carriers. If you are in Canada, check the first comment on that site. That reader has given the numbers for some Canadian carriers. Read more »

Bloglines has announced that it will begin offering package tracking I think this is a great use of RSS. A few months ago, Ben Hammersly released a PERL script that did the same thing, but only with FedEx. It also had to do a screen-scrape and pull the information out. I actually used it to track a package and it was nice not having to go through the hassle of visiting the site, entering the tracking number and waiting for the detailed status to show up (which was usually two clicks away anyway). I could just let my RSS reader run and when the status was updated, I was updated. Read more »

Is it possible to robotically construct a house? Maybe, maybe not, but Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor, sure seems to think so. He has even completed a prototype for automated building of concrete walls. From there, he believes a revolution of building construction as we know it is possible. Ultimately, it would work like this: On a cleared and leveled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet farther apart than the eventual building’s width, and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in Read more »

Here’s something for the “boggles the mind” category. Scientists have now created scales that are able to detect weights as small as a zeptogram (10^-21 g). That’s roughly the equivalent of a single protein molecule (yes, a molecule, people). The key to the scales is a small blade that vibrates in a magnetic field, generating a voltage in an attached wire. When atoms or molecules are placed on its surface, they weigh it down, lower the vibration frequency and change the voltage. The next step is to increase scale precision to yoctograms (10^-24 g) in order to be able to identify protein molecules by weight. The article suggests uses for Read more »

When I first read that Matthew Mullenweg created WordPress, Inc. I was a bit skeptical seeing how it was an open source project and I could kind of see where he was going with this. However, after reading this over at waxy.org you just have to assume that he is doing everything wrong here and exploiting the userbase that has made the project so popular to begin with. For a project to become successful it takes a lot of hard work and dedication from a number of people. It can be argued that without Matt, WordPress wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is now. However, it’s still an Open Read more »

According to this Ziff-Davis article, Apple is on track to ship Tiger by mid-April. Just the other day Apple released Tiger Build 8A425, which was basically labeled as a release candidate. There are only two major issues existing in this most recent build, one dealing with Japanese language support in some Carbon-based apps, and the other some issues with Nvidia GForce video cards. This seems to be in line with what the rumor sites have been saying. On a related note, Amazon has been offering $100 – $150 rebates on items like iBooks, Powerbooks, and the Powermac G5. The rebates are only applicable if you purchase a system by April Read more »