Posted 09/23/09 at 08:38:53 AM by Paul Lilly

In a blog post on Monday, Kyril Faenov, a general manager at Microsoft, announced that the software maker has acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), a company whose bread and butter has been porting the power of parallel computing over to the desktop.

"This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC) and will bring together complimentary technologies that will help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing problems that can be parallelized," Faenov wrote.

Faenov added that Bill Blake, the current CEO of ISC, will make the transition to Microsoft and work at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA. Blake and others will put into motion Microsoft's plan of integrating ISC technologies into future versions of Microsoft products, although exactly what products have yet to be announced.

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Posted 09/22/09 at 10:00:00 AM by Alex Castle, Norman Chan, and Florence Ion

Techies are too often tempted by the lure of new technology, leaving perfectly good hardware drifting in the wake of compulsive upgrading. And while we love getting new gadgets as much as the next geek, we also like how a new purchase gives us the opportunity to take apart and tinker with our older gear in the Lab. Whether it’s by soldering circuit boards or loading open-source firmware, we pride ourselves on being able to stretch the lifespan of older electronics by performing undocumented (and sometimes warranty-breaking) hardware hacks.

The projects we’ve included here range from relatively safe software tweaks to more challenging technical exercises. You’ll learn how to bend USB connections to your will and imbue home routers and digital cameras with robust new features. We’ve also taken some inspiration from projects we’ve seen online, including building a blue laser gun and making a digital picture frame you can mount on the wall of your office. These hacks will help you showcase your craftiness and give you a better understanding of how your electronics work. And the best part is that your old hardware will be faster, cooler, and more awesome afterward.

So, let’s get hacking!

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Posted 09/09/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Alex Castle

If you were born in the 70s or 80s, chances are good that a big part of your childhood was spent wasting quarters at the local arcade, or in front of the Pac-Man machine at your local pizza place. Sure, games have become a lot more complex since then, but the old titles had a lot of charm, and in some cases a level of skill and patience-rewarding challenge that hasn’t been matched since.

Sadly, the arcade is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Now that PCs and game consoles have become so powerful, the only way for arcades to compete has been to offer games with enormous, complicated controls, which end up costing a dollar or more per play. And besides, that’s only if you happen to live next to one of the very few remaining full-sized arcades. For most people, the closest thing they’ve got to an arcade is the worn-out Initial D machine at their local multiplex.

But you can bring the classic arcade experience back to life, in your own house. With a MAME arcade machine, you and your friends can play your favorite old games, on the authentic controls they were made for. In this article, we’re going to show you, step-by-step and with a lot of pictures, exactly how to build the custom arcade machine you’ve always dreamed about using old PC parts. We’re going to describe how we built our MAME cabinet, but we’re also going to describe all the choices we made along the way, including cabinet style, monitor and controls, so you can put together a machine that’s just right for you.

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Posted 06/26/09 at 09:54:35 AM by Paul Lilly

You probably have an old processor lying around that you ended up modding into a keychain, but to take your geek cred to a whole new level, try wielding a blu-ray laser like a light saber the next time you fumble around for your house key.

Not only can it be done, but "jayrob," a DIY lasers expert, has posted a worklog of how he built his own using a keychain light made from a solid piece of brass that he picked up from Lowe's. In short, Jay stuffed a laser diode and a larger battery inside, did a little drilling, and ended up with the coolest keychain we've ever seen.

Read all about it here.

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Posted 06/09/09 at 04:26:02 PM by Andy Salisbury

While the concept of a scanner being reworked into a camera isn’t entirely new, someone creating one that can take photos at 130-megapixels is.

A yet unnamed Japanese man with some tech know-how was able to create this beastly camera by fusing a 1200 dpi Epson GT-S620 scanner and old Cannon FD 50mm lens together. He says that he chose this scanner because it has a CCD sensor, uses a camera-like lens and has LED lighting.

If you want to see photos taken by the camera, you can check out his Flickr stream here.

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Posted 04/07/09 at 12:00:00 AM by Alex Castle

It all started while we were researching an article on future user interfaces. Touch interfaces are hardly futuristic at this point, but multi-touch hardware like the Microsoft Surface or the iPhone is just starting to become a big deal, and we decided to see what big things are going on in that field. What we found that surprised us the most wasn’t anything about the future of multitouch; it was about something that people are doing right now.

There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. The process isn’t exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft’s $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget. “Future UI article be damned,” we thought, “we’ve gotta build one of these for ourselves.”

And so we did. We documented the whole process, from start to finish, so that you can try building one of your own, if you’re so inspired. We’re not going to claim to have done everything perfectly the first time, so think of this article as more of a build log than a definitive how-to. Still, we’re very pleased with how the table turned out. We’re so pleased, in fact, that we put together a video showing the table in motion.

 Read on to see the video and find out how we made it!

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Posted 01/29/09 at 02:00:54 PM by Paul Lilly

If you followed David Murphy's path to building a budget PC with a cardboard chassis, then why not compliment it with your own homebrewed Surface, also with a cardboard exterior?

Microsoft technology evangelist Paul Foster posted a YouTube video showing how you can build a functioning multi-touch surface using budget parts. Items you'll need are paper, scissors, picture frame with glass, tape, cardboard box, a webcam, and multi-touch software such as Touchlib.

From start to finish, it takes Foster less than four minutes to complete the project and run a short demonstration. Of course, that's with a cardboard box - skilled modders will want to invest a bit more time coming up with custom enclosure.

Watch the video here and tell us what you think.

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Posted 11/03/08 at 04:48:06 PM by Andy Salisbury

For many of us, the idea of building your own laptop seems pretty farfetched. But OCZ is looking to change all of that with a recently announced 15” DIY gaming notebook. The notebook will be based on Intel’s Centrino 2 processor and ATI’s Radeon HD3650 integrated graphics. According to OCZ, these will “provide a premium gaming experience that lets gamers power through all of today's most advanced and graphic-intensive games and applications with DirectX 10.1 compatibility.”

“At OCZ, empowering the enthusiast end-user in the mobile gaming space is an exciting opportunity for us, and with the powerful technology found in our latest Intel Centrino 2 based notebook we are again at the forefront of this growing market,” states Ryan Edwards, Director of Product Management, in OCZ’s the press release. “With OCZ DIY notebooks, end-users have complete control of the cost/performance ratio of key components, giving consumers the opportunity to personalize a true gaming and multi-tasking powerhouse notebook by using a validated component list and our easy to follow step-by-step manual included with every DIY package.”

While the notebook isn’t one that you’ll be building from the ground up, there are plenty of great options to give it a DIY feel. In the box you’ll get the case of the machine, which features a 15” screen, optical drive, and motherboard while the HDD (or SSD), memory and processor are your call. Thanks to some conveniently placed covers, all it takes to install the components is a screwdriver a little bit of know-how. OCZ even provides a catalog of components that work in each slot, so you’ll have a short list of parts to choose from when deliberating on what to use.

For true DIY’ers, this isn’t much to concern yourself with. But if you’re someone looking for a way to get your feet wet in the DIY scene (and it truly is the place to be), this isn’t a bad place to start. Follow the simple instructions and the fundamentals of building a PC are all yours.

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