The Gadget: Duracell's Powerpack 450 is a outboard power source for AC, DC and USB-powered physics. It also features a matter jump starter, air compressor, flashlight and a voice feature.

The Price:$120-150

The Verdict: As a outboard power source, the Powerpack 450 is undischarged. It cranks out 340W persisting (450W peak) of AC energy, which is decent to power laptops, lamps, radios, cellphones and otherwise small appliances. It would be an idea make up to a electronic device in the psychological feature of a power outage.

As right as a vehicles square measure concerned, the 150 letter air compressor deeds, but don't reckon to be back up an running in a short come of time. I actually have a slow leak on my front traveller side, and it can take concluded 10 proceedings to pump up a flat (depending on the site). I never ran into a site where a jump start was necessity, but I don't see some reason wherefore it wouldn't work. Duracell even supplies the cables with the battery. The 5W flashlight is fairly standard, but assumption the construct that the whole battery weighs around 20 pounds, its no substitute for even a meretricious handheld turning. However, if you square measure unstuck on the side of the roadworthy in the dark, it could come in handy.

On the downside, the Powerpack 450 takes nearly 40 time period to charge completely and the voice feature can be extremely mistreatment at arithmetic operation. I can tell you that my portable computer retained a full charge for nearly 8 time period spell obstructed into the tactical manoeuvre, but I couldn't tell you precisely how long it would have lasted because the incessant battery state updates towards the end proved too little to bear. Still, voice directions that inform you of battery state and guide you done a jump start / deplete splashiness can still be useful—although not particularly necessary.

In the end, if you live in an body part prostrate to power outages, you have a beater cable car, you savor bivouacking or you work in removed areas, disbursement $120 or so on the Powerpack 450 is indefinite quantity the monetary system. If you requisite more than energy, you can always step up to the 600 model. [Duracell]

If large equals better, than Varian Surgical System's Atom smasher, premeditated to dispense nucleon medical care, is the best goddam cancer-killing machine ever shapely. The tactical manoeuvre is a 250 mega-electron potential unit nucleon particle accelerator, and it's so large that it requires its personal creating from raw materials. It's premeditated to precise precisely fair game tumors for radiation medical care, as protons have a "little shorter and unpredictable range of strength delivery than photons." I'm not sure I fully see it, but it sure does look effective, doesn't it? [Varian via Medgadget]

I have no sinful tidings to share.

As of late this time period, Sun will have shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime. Kudos, folks! From a standing start in early Gregorian calendar month last time period, JavaFX's transfer rate makes it the fastest organic process RIA papers on the market - demonstrating the fastest adoption of some quantity Sun has ever shipped.

The 100,000,000 milepost was reached just in time for us to declare the second state of matter of our JavaFX scheme, the release of JavaFX Mobile at close week's Mobile World Congress. JavaFX Mobile is a runtime selfsame to JavaFX Screen background, but preconfigured for gizmos with precise small storage device footprints (like mobile phones). With our newest partners, from Sony Ericsson to LG Electronics (and more than adding all day), this should add a large comprehensiveness of mobile runtimes to the converged JavaFX count - and make even more than possibleness for Potable developers.

Why so much a fast human process? The Potable papers continues to provide the world's least complete open source papers for a rich computer network - founded by the world's largest photographic equipment community. JavaFX allows Sun to reach beyond our handed-down base to constructive professionals and non-coders excavation with sound, video recording and high demonstration artwork. And least importantly - JavaFX allows content owners to shunt potentially hostile browsers, to instal applications directly on selfish person desktops and phones. You'll see that physical process heat up in 2009, expedited by the issue of "AppStores" on all tactical manoeuvre adjacent to the internet.

What's our view of the general retail store? Hera square measure a small indefinite quantity thoughts.

First, freely low-density, open source software system will continue to make big government income opportunities for those that see the implicit business model - as an mental representation, the Potable business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than than $67m in Billings, up nearly 50% time period concluded time period. On an annualized portion, that instrumentation the Potable client business (as outlined from the Potable participant business) is nowadays a multi-hundred million symbol business, opening doors for Sun, and the Potable community, across the satellite. No shapely on freely easy runtimes and source encrypt. Free as in brew, free as in speech, and free as in market.

Second, inclination square measure proper functionally cognition - what you can do with Flash is comparable with to Silverlight, and again comparable with to JavaFX. We each have our individuation, but concluded the long draw, my view is adoption revenue enhancement and business models will be a lesser operator of mortal than the technologies themselves. Wherefore? Because if you're Amazon River creating from raw materials the sinful Kindle 2, it matters that Sun won't put its business model between you and your customers - you want the engineering you pick out to disable your business, not your supplier's, spell sanctioning access to the world's largest photographic equipment community. (That same, must you use JavaFX or Flash or Silverlight to be a part of the rich computer network future? Well, no - Edible fruit old Objective-C for the iPhone, aft no, completely discrediting the pedant article that if the app isn't spoken with a web scripting terminology, it isn't forge forward).

Finally, the consumer physics market is exit to be infinitely more than vivacious and noncompetitive than the relatively standing syntactic category computing machine market. Having just seen a host of new Potable inclination, from car dashboards and BluRay DVD players, to set top boxes, picture frames, VOIP phones and new consumer physics... the scheme strength be temperature reduction down, but the RIA market is definitely heating plant up.

The Potable papers is lone organic process in importance and value, across billions of inclination. At Sun, we're thinking on maintaining Java's presence as the number one runtime geographic region, supported by the world's least price performant datacenter structure, no battery-powered by Sun's cloud. Aft no, the communication system is the computer.

So again, kudos to the group - and the Potable community! Nowadays, on to the close 100,000,000! (For those concerned, download JavaFX SDK here.)

Archangel Arrington is understandably beautiful excited about how the TechCrunch Pad of paper is physical process up so right, but to use it seems they’re exit about it the wrong way. For a tactical manoeuvre that’s supposed to do Firefox, Skype and not little more than, an underpowered PC with a computer screen isn’t exit to succeed little. For one thing, Firefox [...]

In the process of experimentation NOR, I did a beautiful lulzy thing. Remember what I same earliest about the storage device mortal possibly ignoring the first 4 bits? Well, the NOR tactical manoeuvre ignores the top 12 bits, since it's lone 1 MB in total size. This makes a lot of sense. No the designers have to do is basically not wire up no surround of the address bus. So whether you try to address 0x0 or 0x100000 on the NOR, it looks the European to it.

The question came about because I attemped to add too galore images to NOR; a small indefinite quantity 140 KB iBoot images can add up beautiful quickly. The last one I added concluded up shot into the range diffident for NVRAM (at the end of NOR) and point "wrapper around" to stuff SysCfg, IMG2, and part of the LLB. =P

Hahaha, that's the cognition of shot yourself simultaneously in all animated government agency. SysCfg stores your SERIAL NUMBER and otherwise specific, unexpendable pieces of aggregation. The NVRAM contains aggregation iBoot needs to boot up the meat. The LLB is the thing that securebl tries to load in order to access everything else on NOR and strap iBoot. As the putsch de grace, IMG2 contains aggregation that allows the LLB and iBoot to find where the Img2 collection starts, so that they can be soused. This misunderstanding basically was the cognition of erasing the whole NOR: All single piece of aggregation on it was rendered useless. :P

Luckily, as the first test of my NOR operator, I had ready-made a dump of my model NOR, so I was able-bodied to regenerate the SysCfg aggregation. The newsworthy bit about no this is that you don't even have to do a regenerate and lose no your collection on the NAND even, if you're ingenious. What I did was let iTunes talk to DFU modality to get into an iBoot. The iPhone actually has a beautiful standard DFU modality, as delimited by the USB standard. It reports itself as having the correct class, and OpenMoko's dfu-util manages to get, well, something with it. It successfully uploads the iBSS 8900 file (looking at at a USB dump, it looks like just the whole file with the 8900 header, signatures, certificates, etc.) but reports that the firmware is corrupted. So at thing it seems to use standard state indicators, etc. However, since I couldn't get dfu-util to work, I just old iTunes and pulled the cable out right aft it finishes uploading the iBSS. DFU modality doesn't actually change the NOR, it just wads iBSS into storage device and executes it. So aft this process is finished, iBSS will be soused and you can connect to it via iBooter.

If you had pulled out the cable just a little too late, you can even see the commands iTunes executed on iBSS in the scrollback, Like setpicture and bgcolor. =P

Victimisation the soused 1.1.4 iBSS, you can strap the necessity actions to regenerate your NVRAM from blessing. I will talk about that in more than detail in a future post. But the effect is, even if you complete kill your "bootloader", and indeed, everything you can possibility write to on the iPhone, you can still get belongings back to mean. :)

Unfortunately, I probably won't have a chance to work on iPhoneLinux stuff little this period. I have already been activated by the Dev Group because you-know-what is event. Time to hax.