Radio is 100 years old today

Source: Slashdot

GraWil writes "On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA."

Print, not just publish, your own books

Source: Engadget

Not only can you self-publish, emerging technology allows those looking to buy your books to have them printed at a bookstore in under 7 minutes at a cost of 5 cents per page (maximum 550 pages). Here's what Engadget had to say: As an idea, on demand book printing is nothing new, and we even spotted that Bookmachine monstrosity doing the whole ATM-for-books thing back in 2004, but it looks like the concept is about to take a big step with the new "Espresso" machine from On Demand Books. The $50,000 vending machine is about to debut in somewhere between 10 and 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007, including the New York Public Library in February. The machine can produce two books simultaneously in seven minutes, a time which includes all the printing, binding and cutting involved. The machine even slaps a snazzy laminated full-color cover on its creations. Books top out at around 550 pages, and right-to-left texts are possible. Production cost is about five cents per page, which should be quite a bargain for the roughly one million public domain English works currently floating around the Internets, but we're not sure what the exact costs will be levied by bookstores and copyright holders for the other titles -- there are currently 2.5 million books available for printing by the Espresso.

Free 3D laser scanning

Source: Engadget

The DAVID laser scanner (cool name, obvous sign of intelligence) is not so much a device as a way of using commonly available equipment and a bit of (free) software to perform 3D laser scanning. Instructions on how to do this are available at The Institute for Robotics and Process Control. They don't include a way to stitch different views together, but for those who are interested, search for an algorithm called ICP (Iterative Closest Point) and go from there. The software has a few simple requirements: A webcam, a laser pointer (presumably with a beam spreader, which is just a strip of glass to convert the beam into a laser sheet), and a right-angle corner (easily available to those of you not living in igloos). The technology is simple and very well understood (line scanners have been used in industry for more than a decade). The software simply converts the line of red light cast on the object into a 3D surface map relative to the right-angle corner.

'Tis the season for a Gauss Cannon

Source: Engadget

Just what everyone needs, a Gauss pistol. The GP-219 uses a micro-controller to precisely control the pulse shape, allowing you to fire steel projectiles from a pistol. Granted, the pack of batteries and capacitors probably makes the thing weigh a ton, but the pistol is effective and silent. The future is being made today.