Researchers Develop Bionic Contact Lens

Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision

University of Washington researchers have been developing an electronic contact lens that could someday display important information in your field of vision. Early prototypes have been tested on rabbits for short stints without any adverse effects and the researchers say lenses that can display a few pixels worth of information will be available soon.

The research is being funded by the National Science Foundation and scientists recently presented their findings at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ conference. Using super-thin plastics and electronics just a few nanometers thick, they managed to fashion some circuits and red light emitting diodes into a lens. These lenses were then placed onto the eyes of rabbits for up to 20 minutes.

A working bionic lens could be a boon to tech workers who need quick access to important information. Of course you can bet the military would be very interested in this technology for their soldiers.

Lotus Notes on the way for iPhone

lotus-notes-and-iphone.jpgIt’s looks like Lotus Notes will soon be available for the iPhone, IBM (who own Lotus Notes) look like being the first official iPhone third party application to be available.

“we have a lot in common [with Apple]. We’re going to cross-pollinate.” Said IBM

It’s kind of an interesting development that will give would give the Mac platform a serious competitor to Microsoft Office and, in the case of the iPhone and I guess the iPod touch give it the productivity software all detractors claim currently prohibits it from being a true smartphone.

No formal announcement has been made about this by Apple yet but we await to see what happens.

The Best Companion Tools for YouTube and other Web Videos

Sites like YouTube, MySpace and Google Video host millions of video clips that you can either watch online or embed them in your web pages. And then there are “unofficial” tools to help you download YouTube movies to the hard drive.

You know them all so let’s look at a different set of YouTube tools that are incredibly useful and yet very simple.

If the owner has removed the video from YouTube servers or the YouTube staff have deleted the video on their own for violation of policies, DelUTube may help you watch the video as it could be still residing on one of the YouTube servers.

Blu-ray future limited for some

Owners of Blu-ray DVD players may find themselves frozen out of future developments in the technology because their machines are not upgradeable.
The Blu-ray camp has recently rolled out new features for players, which include picture in picture options.

But the majority of Blu-ray players sold to date do not have the necessary hardware to offer the features.

Some discs already come with a note telling users that they may need to upgrade software in their machine.

In some discs, the note reads: "To ensure the best possible viewing experience, your Blu-ray disc player may need a firmware or software update."

But these updates relate to improvements in playback and do not offer a pathway to the new features.

The issue has arisen as Blu-ray attempts to offer new features to compete with rival standard HD-DVD.

When the first Blu-ray machines were launched the hardware requirements for manufacturers did not include provision for planned developments.

The guys that bought the first Blu-ray players are the guys who bought the first laser discs. They know the risks.

Alastair Upham, DVD Review

Instead Blu-ray players were divided into so-called "profiles", with all machines released before November 2007 designated as profile 1.0.

Machines released onto the market since November are called profile 1.1, but none of the standalone Blu-ray players can be upgraded to accommodate this profile.

Films will still play on the machines, but access to extra features is limited.

Later this year the Blu-ray camp will offer profile 2.0, called BD Live, which will allow the players which support the feature to connect to the internet to download related content, such as ringtones, trailers and photos.

But because internet functionality is not a mandatory requirement in current players, none on the market today will be able to access the feature.

The only Blu-ray player which can upgraded to use all the features is Sony's PlayStation 3, because it comes with the right hardware built-in and online access.

The Best Free Software for Windows

We pick some of the best software programs and utilities for your Windows computer that are completely free and still extremely useful. Given all these wonderful choices, why pay?

Audio Editing: If you ever wanted to do some basic audio recording, look no further than Audacity - it can record, remove noise from audio and also mix multiple sound track. With little effort, you can use Audacity to record live streaming music from Internet radio stations.

Video Editing: For videos, Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft is a good choice. It has all the basic video editing tools plus a good collection of transitions and video effects. For advanced usage, get the powerful VirtualDub - it has a number of filters (like video rotation), can create videos from image sequences, split videos or even extract sound from video tracks.


Instant Messenger: If your friends are spread across different services like Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN and others, get Pidgin and connect to all popular IM services using a single software. Pidgin provides a tabbed interface so the desktop won’t look cluttered even if you are simultaneously chatting with multiple buddies.

Computer Security: Your computer needs a firewall program like ZoneAlarm or Comodo Pro to stop spyware programs from connecting to websites secretly and for blocking any Internet intruders. For removing viruses from infected systems, AVG Antivirus and Avast are very reliable and unlike other commercial software, they are not heavy on system resources.

Multimedia Players: You may already have Windows Media Player and iTunes on your computer but they are not capable of playing all audio and video formats. For this reason, I recommend VLC Media Player that is light-weight and supports almost everything including DVDs and Flash Videos that you have downloaded from YouTube. Another option is GOM player.

Digital Photography: Taking photos with your digital camera is just half the job . For organizing your vast picture collection, get Google Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery. With Picasa, you can create Screensavers and Picture Collages while Live Gallery has a wonderful photo stitching feature for making panoramas. Both let you transfer pictures from the desktop to Flickr. For advanced photo editing, use Paint.NET or GIMP.

Windows Enhancements: If you like using keyboard more than the mouse, get Launchy - it helps you start your favorite programs (and documents) without touching the Windows Start Menu. TweakUI is another desktop enhancement to help you control the appearance of Windows, change the location of default folders and so much more.

Spring Cleaning: WinDirStat gives you a visual overview of files and folders that are consuming the bulk of space on your hard drive so you know where to hit the delete key when the drive is full. CCleaner with automatically find and remove all the unnecessary temp files from your computer reclaiming valuable hard drive space. It also clears all the junk from Windows registry so your system runs faster. MyUninstaller will help you remove software that do show up in Windows Add Remove control panel.

Desktop Email: If you like checking and replying to your web email from the desktop, Windows Live Mail and ThunderBird are worth considering. They let you check multiple e-mail accounts in one place, apply filters to incoming email, add another layer of protection from junk email, built-in RSS reader and best of all, you can work offline.

DVD Tools: For creating backup copies of your DVD video disks onto the hard drive, use DVD Shrink. For extracting movie scenes and MP3 music from DVDs, HandBrake is a good choice. It can also be used to export your DVDs into portable players like the iPod.

Other Worthy Mentions: HTTrack helps you create a mirror copy of any website on the hard drive for offline reading. Orbit Downloader lets you save streaming music and videos from almost every website. Copernic Desktop is an excellent software for finding emails, documents, photos and other multimedia files on your computer. Microsoft SyncToy provides a visual interface for synchronizing file folders between computers and external drives.

Do you think we are missing some really good software here ? Please share in the comments.