Surrounded by outlets no further than an arm’s length away, it’s easy to forget just how nice it is having power everywhere. Then the power goes out. Or you go camping. Or you’re living in a remote area of Africa, and you’ve got to walk a few miles to juice up your gear. How’s a smartphone junkie supposed to survive? Fortunately, there’s one power source that never* goes out, and that pretty much everyone has access to for just shy of 12 hours a day: the sun. Meet the Umeox Apollo, just announced at Mobile World Congress. While we’ve seen a few promises of solar-powered Android phones in the past, this is one of the first we’ve actually seen head for production. → Read More
Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.
A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.
Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”. → Read More
Here’s a project for a rainy year: a DIY Apollo Guidance Computer with 4K RAM, 32K words of ROM, and a 1Mhz processor. One John Pultorak built his own replica in 2004 and released the plans to the world, giving us a glimpse into what was essentially the first pocket calculator on the moon.
The Apollo AGC itself is a piece of computing history, it was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it was a quite amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 Mhz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.
Lowry Digital in Burbank has been restoring old Apollo footage for a while now and NASA just released a small sample of the work. Now, the restoration doesn’t do wonders to the 40 year old stock, but it’s at least better than nothing. Maybe now we can make out that damn coke can more clearly as it bounces across the “Moon surface.” (kidding) More footage will be released this fall. Click through for two more clips. → Read More
