David Lidsky's Blog, page 4793

Apple iPad's iBookstore to Carry 30,000 Free Public Domain Books, Challenge Kindle on Bestseller Price

First up: the freebie. Since the iPad supports the open standard epub format, we had assumed that there would be some way to get public domain books onto the device--and a screenshot of the iBookstore confirms that not only will it be possible, but, as reported by AppAdvice, Apple is simply popping the free catalog from Project Gutenberg into the store.

The rules for public domain books typically require 70 years to have passed since the author's death--but that means there's a huge supply of...

Bottled Water Industry Fights Back Against Annie Leonard's "Story of Bottled Water"

Earlier this week, we took a look at The Story of Bottled Water, Annie Leonard's short animated film about the bottled water industry. Apparently, the film hasn't gone over too well with bottled water industry types, who have fought back with one of the worst examples of greenwashing we've seen in a long time.

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The video above, sent out by the International Bottled Water Association, offers up plenty of pretty pictures of nature, along with some fun facts (the industry...

U.S. Slipping Down "Most Networked Nations" Ranks: World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum (the folks behind the yearly Davos meeting) surveyed 133 nations recently to work out how well each is networked up. Measured by a number of criteria, the U.S. slipped from third last year to fifth in 2010.

Before you get all defensive and "The U.S. is a big nation, facing unique hurdles to national broadband" on me, the WEF's index is actually measured against a large list of different criteria, including such esoterica as availability of venture capital funding, and...

Concert Promoters Replacing Paper Tickets with Smart-Chip Wristbands

Live Nation, the world's largest concert promoter, is on the case of paper tickets. The firm has been trialling smart-chip wristbands in an attempt to cut down on ticket fraud, and it is expected that the promoter will roll out the scheme at British festivals this summer.

Although this can only be good for gig-goers--a twelfth of them in the UK claim to have fallen victim to ticketing scams, according to a government report--don't expect environmentalists to be particularly chipper about the...

T. Boone Pickens-Backed Auto Startup Gets Rejected by the DOE

(Possible pieces of the secretive V-Vehicle, taken from a promo video)

Poor T. Boone Pickens. The oil mogul had such dreams of green grandeur--the world's biggest wind farm!--but his biggest ideas are proving too tough to work out. Earlier this week, V-Vehicle, a stealthy auto startup backed by Pickens and Kleiner Perkins, announced that the Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program rejected its request for $321.1 million in federal loans. The...

New Hospital Designs Encourage Greater Privacy, Less Flashing

The British Design Council rethinks hospital design from top to...uh...bottom.

The London-based American fashion designer Ben De Lisi can usually be
found creating jersey knits for Debenham's or red-carpet looks for Kate
Winslet. But a recent joint commission by Britain's Department of
Health and Design Council had the Long Island–born Pratt grad turning
his eye to a rather neglected area of style: the hospital gown. As part
of the Design for Patient Dignity program, which asked six...

Augmented Reality e-Books: Mmm, Smell the Jumanji

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Imagine being able to smell the blueberry as Violet Beauregarde
inflates in front of your face, or the waxy purple of Harold's crayon,
or the soot belching out of the Polar Express. A new augmented reality
e-book technology, currently in development at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, was
recently introduced on South Korean television, proving that the Digilog
technology, which allows readers to view content in highly immersible
3-D, may arrive sooner than...

Play ChatRoulette Bingo!

"Play with your friends, not with yourself."

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Remember how recently we mused that ChatRoulette might readily become a good place to interact with friends, rather than freaks?

Apparently, other people agree. ChatRoulette Bingo, created by AttentionUSA, is just bingo, but populated by all the freakazoid tropes you'd regularly find on CR. On the site, you can enter in how many people are playing, and it spits out a different card for each player. Awesome.

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Will Future MacBooks Be Backlit By the Sun?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is such a tease. First it hints that Apple is working on intelligent power monitoring systems and solar-powered iPhones (and don't forget the solar iPad rumors), and now a patent explores the possibility of sun-lit MacBook displays. AppleInsider points us to a patent entitled "External Light Illumination of Display Screens", filed in 2008 but revealed this week. According to the patent, Apple is developing displays that can be backlit by the sun in order...

Hydropower Flush with Cash from U.S. Government

Hydropower is one of the least sexy forms of renewable energy. It doesn't involve flashy silicon panels, massive turbines spinning amidst Midwestern cornfields, or heat stored beneath the Earth's crust. But hydropower, or power derived from the force of energy of moving water, is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S.--even as its capacity has remained unchanged over the past few decades. And now, finally, hydropower is getting the respect it deserves. The Department of Energy...