Chad's News

Barnes & Noble has made a dramatic entrance into the e-book arena with a new reader called the Nook. The cost is $259. It’ll be available in stores sometime during the week of December 7^th and is already so popular that pre-orders have exceeded the expected supply for the rest of the year. I had the opportunity to view a mock-up, and they’re pretty small. You can increase the font size, but I’m not sure this would be a good purchase for people with bad eyesight.

An advantage of the Nook is that it supports a variety of e-book formats, including ePub. This means books can be purchased from a wide variety of sources, most notably Google’s huge catalog of 400,000+ titles, and that these purchases will work on devices other than the Nook. Contrast this to the Amazon store which uses a proprietary format that locks the buyer into the Kindle. Also the Nook has more options for connecting to the Internet and a battery that can last up to 10 days on a single charge. To see how the Nook stacks up against the Amazon Kindle 2, here’s an admittedly biased comparison chart.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Amazon has a free promotional code for MP3 downloads, worth $3.00 (essentially three songs). There are no limitations on which songs you can choose, but the code is only valid through November 30th—so use it or lose it.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Here’s an interesting article about fulgurites (glass structures created by lightning strikes). And if you like those, you may also like the Lichtenberg figures in the second article.

Link #1: http://webecoist.com/…
(via digg)

Link #2: http://www.capturedlightning.com/…
(via The Presurfer)

Aside from confusion between “their,” “they’re,” and “there,” the apostrophe is one of the most misused grammar/spelling items on the internet (and elsewhere). We even have problems with it here at Chad’s News, despite all those English courses taken in high school and college. The linked article explains the correct usage in a simple and straightforward way.

Link: http://apostrophe.me/
(via Neatorama)

Amazon has added MySQL database functionality to its growing list of cloud-based web services. This could be useful, as you wouldn’t have to migrate your database when you move to a new web hosting company, and upgrading database servers would be a thing of the past. I’m not sure how well it works performance-wise, and there are potential security issues if you’re storing sensitive information. Also, there’s always the possibility that the service will suffer outages that could bring down your operations. So I’m not sure this service will be heavily utilized.

Link: http://aws.amazon.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Here’s an interesting concept: a GPS-aware box that will only unlock when it’s at a specific location. It includes a button that, when pressed, tells you the distance to that location. Even though it would only take three readings to get a rough estimate of the location, I still think it’s a neat idea.

Link: http://arduiniana.org/…
(via engadget)

Astute Chad’s News readers already know that the State of California has severe financial problems, and that its politicians are desperately looking for ways to make ends meet. Their latest idea is to increase tax withholding by about 10 percent. Note that they’re not actually increasing the tax rate, just the amount that is withheld by employers. In essence, this forces California citizens to give short-term, interest-free loans to the state.

Here in Colorado, our finances, while a bit strained, are not even close to being as bad as California’s—primarily because of the TABOR amendment which put serious curbs on the expansion of government spending.

Thanks to Ciro for this link.

Link: http://www.latimes.com/business/…

So you’ve protected your laptop by encrypting the hard drive. Are you safe? Not if you leave it in your hotel room where an “evil maid” can access it. All the maid has to do is boot the machine from an external drive (or even a CD), then overwrite your boot loader. This is yet another example of why physical security is so important.

Link: http://it.slashdot.org/story/…

I remember when having 8MB of RAM on a graphics card was a big deal. But Matrox has just announced the M1988 PCIe x16, which supports eight monitors and has 2GB of memory. Not for the faint of heart, but imagine what you could do with such a system.

Link: http://hothardware.com/…
(via engadget)

Campbell’s has embarked upon an advertising campaign that claims each can of its chicken noodle soup has 32 feet of noodles. A Seattle TV reporter put it to the test, on a football field no less! The linked video shows the result.

Link: http://www.king5.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

Researchers have shown that there is a physical basis to the placebo effect. They measured pain-related nerve activity in the spinal cord and found that it vanished when a placebo was used.

Link: http://www.newscientist.com/…

A critical security issue has been identified in the free Adobe Shockwave Player used by many web browsers. Adobe recommends installing the latest version (11.5.2.602). Since the Shockwave Player is not something that’s automatically updated or even checked for the need to update, you’ll have to do it manually. Note also that it may be necessary to perform the install multiple times, as there are different installers depending on which browser you use to download the software. Yes, really. But I think you only need to do it twice, once for Internet Explorer and once for everything else (on a Windows system).

Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…