See anything odd about that pic above?

Watch a short video of the NASA vertical treadmill in action on Earth, this is cool!

From the NASA Press Release:

NASA is using a new treadmill that allows people to run while suspended horizontally to help astronauts prepare for long-duration missions to the moon and beyond.

A team of engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland built the Standalone Zero Gravity Locomotion Simulator to imitate conditions astronauts experience while exercising in space. Exercise in microgravity helps lessen the harmful health effects of long-duration space travel, promoting astronauts’ well-being and mission success.

NASA currently is sending astronauts on six month missions to the International Space Station and plans to launch humans on missions to the moon by 2020. Crew members will benefit from data NASA gathers from bed rest studies conducted with the device. NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, will manage the studies that will be conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. NASA will use the locomotion simulator to develop improved exercise routines for astronauts during spaceflight.

Here’s more pics of the treadmill.

Here’s more information on the NASA exercise projects.

Said user, myself, finally went ahead and installed a fresh Ubuntu 7.10 and then quickly installed KDE4. Why? Curiosity mostly. But I also wanted to keep up with the proverbial “Joneses”. And from what I had been reading, KDE4 was cooler, smoother, and faster than any UI yet.

I was excited about what I would find.

I was, unfortunately, disappointed by the reality.

Truth be told KDE4 is NOT ready. What I experienced was no better than a beta release that crashed constantly, had little to offer, and (much to my surprise) looked a little too much like a combination of the iPhone interface and Windows Vista.

What gives? Why in the world take something that was, up to this point, one of the more solid of the feature-rich Desktops in the computing world and turn it into, well, the opposite? I understand the “widget-ing” of the PC world - it was inevitable (thanks, but no thanks, to Dashboard.) But within the world of Linux? Remember, Linux was the last bastion of true creativeness in the computing world (at least from my perspective.) Linux still has Enlightenment, AfterStep, and a host of other desktop environments/window managers.

Of course what this did for me was to remind me just why I migrated to Enlightenment so many years ago. Enlightenment is reliable (well, e16 is), fast, pretty, and doesn’t take up huge amounts of space. Now, granted it seems like years since e16 has been with us (8 to be exact) and e17 seems to perpetually be in development. But even in development phase, I’ll take e17 over KDE4 any day.

I hate to say this but I am really disappointed in the KDE team for releasing to the public what, to me, is nothing more than Beta software. They should have held it back and squashed what is probably a HUGE amount of bugs before they brought it to the public.

So, if you’re jonesin’ for KDE4, wait until the KDE developers come to a more reliable conclusion with a new release. And once there are plenty of, shudder, widgets to add KDE4 just might be an outstanding desktop. But I seriously doubt it will ever replace Enlightenment for me.

This is not a story about the Zune, it’s about an application that turned my hate relationship with DRM into a tolerable relationship to ensure I have a good Zune experience. I don’t have philosophical problems with DRM or with a need to ensure that you aren’t abusing a trust relationship. But I do have a beef with purchasing farkloads of DRM’d songs and then not be able to listen to them on the durn-blasted device.

Last Christmas the wife got me a 30GB Zune (brown). I love the thing, though at first I winced when I opened the gift because it was a first generation Zune and thought ‘oh no, it won’t have some of the cool functionality of the second gen’. I was wrong, except for a minor control pad difference the firmware and UI could be installed on the first gen device. 

So anyway, I fell in love with the Podcast option right smack on the front menu. More on this another time.

But the heartache started when I ported about 2,000 songs from my PC to the Zune the day after Christmas. The songs were mostly WMA with a few hundred MP3s.

After syncing and listening I decide to build my playlist of favorites and found that some of my favorite songs didn’t make it on to the Zune, yet I could still see them sitting there fat, dumb and happy on the PC’s library. Manually syncing them failed as well.

Soon, I learned what the missing songs had in common - they were all DRM’d WMA songs! It was then that I learned that the Zune doesn’t support some (a lot) of DRM’d music except for that which you purchase from the Zune Marketplace. DRM is Digital Rights Management and locks the audio or video or lots of other objects to a particular user or PC or device.

Off the cuff I would have been just a tad upset, but what really set me off was that all these WMA files that the Zune wouldn’t take had been purchased from MSN Music over a couple of years, how pitiful is that?

Today, everything is A-OK because I fixed this little ‘problem’. You’re probably thinking “oh, he just purchased one of those DRM strippers that produces a DRM-less version by illegally cracking the file and removing the license.” Nope.

What I did was turn to Tunebite.

This application’s tagline is “Tunebite frees your music, audio books and videos from DRM copy protection.”

Technically, this is achieved by re-recording the copy-protected files. Afterwards, the recordings are converted to a new format of your choice, one that works with all your PC audio equipment and mobile devices.

So essentially I wind up with a new file that is created by ‘listening’ to the song being played, and records back to disk what was heard.

There are several cool thing about the application but the one that saved me many hours of trouble is its High-speed Dubbing technique that accelerates the recording step by a certain factor which is comprised by the number of used recording slots (virtual sound card drivers) and an acceleration factor per slot. In layman’s terms it’ll playback at 2x or 3x speed, so instead of having to sit around for a 3 minute song to playback in order to get the recorded new version of it, you’ll have in about 1-2 minutes.

In all I ‘fixed up’ about 200 songs in just a couple of hours so that they could now play on my Zune.

Now I’m happy.

Oh, and I’ve resolved to never again purchase a DRM’d song, I get all my music downloads from Amazon now. But if I need to break that promise at least I’ll have Tunebite to ‘fix’ the DRM issue.

This Aquamate Inflatable Solar Still is light, compact and simple to use. It uses solar radiation to distill and collect pure drinking water from sea water or other impure water, like urine.

It’s much like the device used by Kevin Costner in Waterworld, the post-apocalyptic movie where there is no land and little fresh water after the polar ice caps melt.

The manufacturer says this still will produce 500 to 2000 ccs (1 to 4 pints) of water per day and has been used by military and civilian services throughout the world for the past 40 years.

BTW, you can get this from Landfall Navigation for $200, other stores are a little more expensive as high as $226. And for probably just $5-10 you could build your own using plastic sheeting and other cheap parts in your garage, though it probably won’t float.

[via Green Daily]

Through the month of January I paid particular attention to our Pirate Geeks and identified plenty of fun for all. Or, I irritated the heck out of you but at least you learned about lingerie for your Pirate Gal and why 15 men sat on a “Dead Man’s Chest”. And who could forget about the Pirate Laws!

Welp, this here is my final list of Pirate links for a long, looong time ya scurvy dogs! Enjoy:

- Arrr, so ye be wantin’ t’ go to sea an’ ye don’t be wantin’ t’ end up in Davy Jones’ Locker. Then ye best be learnin’ t’ be talkin’ like a buccaneer. This page converts your English phrases or web pages into Pirate Speak.

- Blackbeard’s Rugged brand tampons. “Fer pluggin’ that bloody hole afore th’ sharks smell ye!”

- History’s most notorious, bad ass female pirates

- A comprehensive list of famous pirates.

- Here’s a very short animation (1:30) of a pirate attack on a settlement, nice twist at the end.

- Pics of real maps and documents from Pirates.

- Learn your Pirate name . I happen to be ‘Dirty Dave Roberts’