Everybody loves the Hubble!

There's been a surprisingly large amount of recent articles surrounding the Hubble telescope recently.

An entry over at the Homeboy's Astronomy Blog holds a top-10 list for the writer's favorite images captured by the telescope.


The official website for the Hubble space satellite, Hubblesite.org, has announced a new art exhibit consisting of images captured by the telescope. The exhibit, which is being held at the Walter Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, contains over twenty images collected from the satellite. The article can be read here.

Finally, an article from the John Hopkins News-letter reports that on May 6 the Hubble telescope caught images of what scientists claim to be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever recorded. The galaxy, given the very catchy name of "A1689-zD1," will be further observed by the new James Webb Space Satellite which launches in 2013. The article can be read here.

New friend request from your aunt Benice.

The Washington Post has published a really interesting article in their Sunday paper titled "When Mom or Dad Asks to Be a Facebook Friend." The article basically addresses the way the generation gap between parents and children can be seen on Facebook.com.

While some teenagers and college students have no problem in adding their parents to their 'friend's list,' there is actually a large number of young adults who have formed clubs protesting the presence of their parents in the community.

In other news, BusinessWeek reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of a French version of Facebook. According to BusinessWeek, Zuckerberg and columnist Sarah Lacy claim that the community could foster a home for members who wish to organize protests and other political activities. The entirety of the article can be read here.

Ebooks provide interesting alternative to printed word. (a feature)

In this increasingly technology-centric world of ours, you may have noticed an interesting thing. Friends, family, and relatives are spending more time on computers these days than ever before. Within the last couple of years, the amount of time spent vegging out in front of the television set has transferred over to surfing the web, logging onto Facebook.com, and playing games in your web browser.

However, how often have you seen your mom pour a cup of tea, sit down, and read the latest Oprah Book Club selection on her laptop?

For those not in the know, e-books are translations of best-selling novels meant to read on tablet PCs or laptops. Slightly less expensive than their paperback counterparts, e-books run the gamut from popular thriller novels such as Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code to new age theory books such as The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. Although the books themselves are meant for us with actual readers made by major manufacturers such as Sony, e-books come in a variety of formats than can be read on any computer.

Why, you ask, would you someone want to purchase digital translations of their favorite books? Well, for one thing it is far easier to carry around a library’s worth of literature on a small laptop or e-Reader than it is to haul them around. Also, e-books allow the reader to change the size of the text in case they have difficulty seeing small font. The nature of reading on a monitor also means never having to hold open a paperback, so it is more convenient.

However, there are still a great deal of limitations facing e-books. Many people would no doubt prefer having a physical copy of the book they just purchase as opposed to a file on their e-reader. Also, laptops and e-readers both obviously need power, which can be a big deal when one is on the go.

Then of course, there is the matter of price. If you already own a laptop, buying an e-book is certainly a viable option. The e-readers themselves, however, tend to be incredibly pricey.

Take for example the E-reader 6IN Portable Silver E-book Approx 170 Pix/inch, by Sony (seen above). It’s a really nice e-reader, which has a good battery life and can be held like a book. It goes for $299.99.

If you pick it up on Amazon.com, you can get a whopping savings of 99 cents!

Due to the high sales of laptops these days, e-books are beginning to gain momentum. In the past five years, the market for eBooks have grown considerably. In 2007 alone, e-book sales totaled over $31 million. When compared to 2006’s sale records, e-book sales have risen over 24% in the course of the year. While the remarkable growth of the industry doesn’t threaten the longevity of the printed word, it does reflect upon how invested into our laptops we have become.

If you would like to learn more about e-books, or would like to check out the wide selection available, check out E-books.com.

Japanese PSPs gets Skype; what is Skype?

An article today in the technology section of CNN.com has mentioned the release of the Skype software on the Playstation Portable system in Japan later this month (nearly two months after its release in the US and Europe).

Most people are not familiar with Skype, so I suppose I should explain it. Skype is essentially a telephone system that goes between computers or, for a small fee, between computers and cellphones or landline phones. Skype has been around since 2003 and has grown exponentially since then. An article posted in February on about.Skype.com states that the software has tracked over 100 billion hours worth of phone calls since its creation nearly five years ago.

Sony has begun putting Skype's software in its PSP firmware updates in the hope that the system's new phone capabilities may draw in potential customers for the system. Calls between PSPs or between PSPs and PCs are entirely free, although the same credit card fees still apply to calls made between the PSP and phones. Sony's official press release for Skype can be read here.

Who needs privacy anyway?

I came across an interesting little news piece over at CNN.com's TECH section today. BrickHouse Security, a company that creates spy gadgets for home security and other safety purposes, has created a device called "the Ultimate SIM Card Management Solution." This innocuously titled device has been built with the ability to read stored and deleted text messages from another person's cellphone.

Of course, getting the device to read a cellphone isn't as simple as having the number ready. In order to actually active the "Cellphone Spy" (a name given by BrickHouse Security in a PR release for the device) you must obtain the other phone's SIM card in order to link up the device with your own cellphone. By placing the SIM card into a USB device and then into your laptop, all text messages and information can be read on your computer. The optimal purpose of the gadget is to monitor the messages of a possibly unfaithful spouse or to keep tabs on the texts your children are sending and receiving.

The "Cellphone Spy" is a pricey little toy ($149.99), but I suppose if you're the paranoid type you wouldn't mind spending the cash to ensure total safety for your loved ones. Of course, your loved ones may not feel the same when you're scrolling through two years worth of their own personal messages. So results may vary.

If you want to see the original news piece, you can check it out here at CNN.com/tech. The Cellphone Spy Data Extractor can be found here at BrickHouse Security's website.

I personally welcome our new robot masters.

I stumbled across a rather quirky story over at Breitbart.com. The article, titled "Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert," chronicles the use of automated weapons in places such as Iraq as well as the dangers that come along with them. These range from the (slightly) more plausible scenarios, such as terrorist cells capturing the robots and reverse-engineering them, to technological limitations of current artificial intelligence, to the more Isaac Asimov-stylized idea of robo-rebellion.

The "expert" that Breitbart.com consulted was a professor at University of Sheffield in England. He is quoted as saying that "[robots] pose a threat to humanity" at his keynotes. It's somewhat difficult to sound sane when you say that sort of thing in public.

For you robot-lovers (or those wishing to know of the iron-fisted rule of our future cybernetic leaders), the whole article can be read here.

[The above photo is by Dan Coulter of Flickr.com. It is a picture of a band called "Robot Attack!"]

Philadelphia business plans on putting computers in waiting rooms

I was just reading up on the technology beat over at the Philadelphia Inquirer's website and came across this rather interesting story. It would seem that a company called InfoSlates is looking to put tablet PCs into the waiting rooms of hospitals and doctor offices as a high-tech alternative to wrinkled old copies of National Geographic. According to the article, InfoSlate finds that their PCs can be used both as a source of entertainment for those stuck in waiting rooms and also a healthy investment for advertisers. The whole article can be read here.

While the prospect of messing around with a tablet PC while waiting for the doctor to call you in sounds interesting, in a way it feels to me like an invasion. The principle behind InfoSlates' tablets is that they will allow the user to cruise the web and check email, but at the same time the real revenue to InfoSlate will come from the advertisers that invest into the tablets. While cruising the web, InfoSlate could do something as subtle as make the homepage for the tablets an advertiser's site, or they could be more obvious and have small pop-up ads appear. So essentially one of the few places in our modern society where you are not getting bombarded with ads, the waiting room, is now open for solicitation.