Samsung’s developed a new battery for small form factor laptops that it’s going to be selling to American PC manufacturers, likely to HP and Dell, according to rumor.

They’re using a new technology that gives the battery a 10% longer charge than previous generation batteries as well as a faster charging time.

No word yet on if, like Sony’s, the batteries will explode and cause a fire, burning you and your family alive.

Valve is having another Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend to celebrate the latest big map release and achievement/unlockable pack. What this means is you get to use a state-of-the-art digital distribution system to play a fantastic game all weekend, for free. It’s super easy and it’s a lot of fun. If you haven’t tried using Steam yet, you’re in for a treat. This is the future of content distribution - pushed updates, free media, and a library of games only a click away. Check it out already.

Don’t worry about being new to the game, there will be a surplus of medics healing up everyone they see, trying to get the new achievements. Now’s a great time to start.

What it does

Usually when you think about social networking, you picture creating a unique profile page for yourself. Now, think outside the box- Insoshi grants you the freedom to create an entire social network. The site is an open source project to construct the most dynamic social networking platform to date. The actual pages are simple and straightforward; the format is similar to Wordpress, if it was a social network. The project was created by Michael Hartl, a programmer and entrepreneur that wrote the book “RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails.” Michael has also provided an Insoshi developer site, a network for individuals that use Insoshi.

In their own words

“Insoshi is a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product!”

Why it might be a killer

Why not bring social networking into the hands of the people? The site layout is simple and was created by a leader in the field. It also includes everything that you would look for in a social networking site- contact lists, chat, messaging, etc.

Some questions

Will this site transform social networking sites into the new blogs- giving anyone with a fleeting interest in social networking the means to create a site?

Updates


 » original news

Finally, a UMPC I’d want.

Someone got the idea into their head to install Leopard on an OQO UMPC. It dual boots from Windows to Leopard, and appears to run rather slow, but it does work.

I’m not a fan of the MacBook Air, but something like this is what Apple should work on.

The folks at Google are evidently in the mood to flood the Web with news today. There came word of enhancements made to the iGoogle platform. The company also spoke of ambitions related to its newly-secured DoubleClick acquisition, saying that the graphic ad giant is busy working to turn into sprawling financial success in the mobile ad market. And then there came mention of a tool dubbed Google Ocean, which, according to Elinor Mills of CNET News, is expected to be “similar to other 3D online mapping applications [released by Google].” Such a product would follow past launches of mapping utilities for all above-ground terrain, Google Earth, and Google Sky, a research and educational creation purposed for exploration of the cosmos.

Now Google seems to be getting into aquatics. This is apparently what the company’s employees deliver when given 20% free time to dabble in personal projects independent of their objective to, in the words of temporarily nameless friends and foes of Mountain View’s star child, take over the world.

Mind you, this new effort by Google to dip 20,000+ leagues beneath the sea, all around the globe, isn’t necessarily just for entertainment. Unless you’re one to think bathymetry is really damn cool. The company has brought together “an advisory group of oceanography experts” to consult for the project and even invited some specialist researchers to the Googleplex late last year to discuss plans for the service. Sound like serious business? Perhaps.

Because Google is keeping mum about the project for the time being, there’s no telling whether the company will do with “Google Ocean” what it did with Google Sky’s browser-based edition, or whether it will integrate seabed details and things like weather patterns and temperatures and so forth within Google Earth. Granted, our home planet is home to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, among others, so it would make sense to have such an item included as a new feature along with a future release of Google Earth.

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Thank You!

HP Labs has built a “memristor,” a nanoscale component that can store data without power. It is far denser than current hard drives and faster than RAM memory. The components can function in digital model, on/off, or analog mode in which they’re set to a specific value.

The unlikely invention of the memristor took about 40 years. It started in the early 1970s when electrical engineer Leon Chua was looking at the interplay of electrical forces in the basic elements of circuits: resistors, capacitors and inductors. The same math that explained those three elements indicated that there should be a fourth, which he named the memristor (short for “memory resistor”) in a 1971 paper. A memristor would change its level of electrical resistance if charge were applied and retain or “remember” that resistance until another charge were applied. Like the Higgs boson “god particle,” the memristor made perfect sense on paper, but no one had ever seen one.

Don’t expect these in your MacBook anytime this year. These things will take years to become usable in real applications.

Explains Rob Pegoraro (washingtonpost.com) Time Capsule “combines a fast 802.11n WiFi router and a massive external hard drive in an enclosure no bigger than a regular AirPort Extreme router.” Working in conjunction with Time Machine, it “allows you to back up every Mac in the home over your home network.” And, notes Pegoraro, since he began using it, “its primary trait has been a near-complete lack of drama.”

Filed under: Desktops

Engadget NYC might have gotten to play with Apple's latest and greatest iMac yesterday, but we keep it dirty in the Chi -- yep, we've got the first Psystar Open Computer shipped out for review. We're just getting it set up, but check out the unboxing below, and hit us up with anything you want to know in comments -- you know we're going to put this thing through its paces.

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Using excess or leftover corn as a fuel source sure sounded like a good idea, especially here in the U.S. Let’s get our farmers from, I don’t, Iowa, to set aside a certain percentage of arable land for the production of fuel corn. (The term “fuel corn” may or may not exist, but it should if it doesn’t.) This corn, rather than being used for food, would be used for the production of ethanol, an alcohol that can power combustion engines. Follow the logic: grow corn, which is fairly inexpensive to do, create ethanol, power car engines. Simple, direct and seemingly a possible solution to our reliance on foreign oil and all the bonus adventurism that comes with that. Grow corn at home, or meddle in other people’s affairs for access to oil?

Onward! to our bright, biofueled future. Wait, what?

There’s a word in that opening paragraph that suddenly no longer applies, apparently. What if all that corn (and other sources of biofuel) is no longer “leftover”? What if, you know, we should be using all that corn (etc.) to feed people? (Food used to feed people? Madness!) What if the price of food, for some reason, skyrocketed, and the poorer peoples of the world look longingly at all that “excess” corn being used to fuel your dumb automobile?

It would seem we, Westerners, are stuck between a rock and a rock. Big rocks. With sharp edges.

If you read any of the Big Papers, like the Financial Times, the Guardian or the New York Times—please don’t watch cable “news,” which has devolved into infotainment—you’ll have noticed an uptick in the number of stories covering some sort of food crisis. The Readers Digest version of the crisis is, as a result rising oil prices (increases transportation costs), poor climate (lots of droughts in food-producing regions) and—ding ding ding—the diversion of food-for-food to food-for-fuel has increased the price of food around the world. My local coffee place recently increased the price of a small cup of coffee by 25 cents. I mention that not for the “woe is me” factor (woe unto me for altogether different reasons), but to illustrate the fact that rising food costs isn’t merely a problem “over there.”

So we’re looking at quite the dicey situation. The world’s poor (40 percent of people live on less than two dollars a day) can no longer afford the most basic of foodstuffs, while the West hums along producing fuel to power its automobiles and other near-luxuries. (I say “near-luxuries” because, frankly, try living without a car in the U.S. outside of a few major cities; they’re “luxuries” compared to food. Call me crazy.) What should we do, how should the West react? Personally, I’m a cynical jerk, and I truly believe Americans are more concerned with who’s going to win American Idol or whether or not they’ll 100 percent GTA IV than whether some invisible foreigner can afford a loaf of bread or cup of rice. Not to be a whiny liberal, but you gotta figure most Americas are more concerned with their needs and wants than someone else’s; it’s only rational, I think. So when Americans pay, what, $4 per gallon of gas and they hear about some sort of weird “corn gasoline” that could be cheaper and can be grown in Our Backyard, you try convincing them to keep paying $4 just to save some poor person they’ll never see and never know, certainly never care about, to alter their lifestyle. It’ll take some sort of sticker shock at the supermarket for Americans writ large to even notice any food crisis.

Back to biofuel. There’s so many competing interests here that I’d rather hop on a message board and argue with a 13-year-old from Ohio whether or not the PS3 is “cool” or not. Are we gonna tell Iowa farmers to stop growing heavily subsidized and hugely profitable biofuel corn? Not if you’re an office-seeking politician, you’re not. Remind me again of Clinton, Obama and McCain’s views of ethanol? I have zero faith in politicians standing up to the ethanol pushers. Americans at home certainly aren’t going to support any schemes that prevent them from lowering their petrol bill. More biofuel, then, nuts to the rest of the world.

So we can “go green” (again, I think going green is a load of hogwash given China’s not-give-a-damn attitude toward pollution) and embrace biofuel, which doesn’t put filth into the atmosphere leading to a happy, Greener Earth, or we can actually grow food for food’s sake. I have no idea where I stand, which is how I am politically on most issues. I don’t like the idea of people starving, but if I have to be inconvenienced to make a difference… eh, I’d rather not be inconvenienced.

What dreams may come.

T-Mobile is now offering $1 per day calling with free T-Mo to T-Mo calls and unlimited 7pm-6:59am calls. The details:

Pay By The Day gives customers the wireless value they want without long-term commitments. The new prepaid plan only costs $1 per day for the days the phone is used. In exchange, customers get free T-Mobile to T-Mobile calling all day and unlimited nationwide calling from 7 p.m. to 6:59 a.m. All other domestic calls are just 10¢ per minute and text messages are 10¢ to send and 5¢ to receive.

Pay By The Day joins a growing family of prepaid options from T-Mobile, including Pay As You Go (previously named T-Mobile To Go) and Sidekick Prepaid (previously named Sidekick To Go). With no annual contract, no credit check, and no monthly bill, prepaid plans are a simple, direct way to go mobile.