Common Paradox Tech Blog

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Take a Linksys running custom firmware, tap into the hardware to power a circuit controlling the locks, and SSH into the router with custom iPhone and Android apps to flip the circuit. Easy, right? [Sunlight via Make via Engadget]

The BBC has a report on a proposal that will be submitted to NASA for funding — a mission to Saturn’s moon Titan that would deposit a lander of its hydrocarbon sea. (We recently discussed the widely circulated photo of sunlight glinting off one of Titan’s seas.) “The scientific team behind the idea is targeting Ligeia Mare, a vast body of liquid methane sited in the high north of Saturn’s largest moon. … ‘It is something that would really capture the imagination,’ said Dr Ellen Stofan, from Proxemy Research, who leads the study team. ‘The story of human exploration on Earth has been one of navigation and seafaring, and the idea that we could explore for the first time an extraterrestrial sea I think would be mind-blowing for most people,’ she told BBC News. … The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) has already been under study for about two years. It is envisaged as a relatively low-cost endeavor — in the low $400m range. It could launch in January 2016, and make some flybys of Earth and Jupiter to pick up the gravitational energy it would need to head straight at the Saturnian moon for a splash down in June 2023.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA’s Spirit Rover just isn’t having much luck, between sand storms and broken wheels, with a second wheel presumed broken and the threat of an icy-cold winter freezing the Spirit “to death” if it doesn’t move on soon.

Stuck in a soft patch of sand since April, its whole right side sounds damaged, thanks to the front-right wheel which hasn’t worked since 2006, and now the back-right wheel that has seized up trying to get out of the sand.

Solar-powered, the Spirit Rover normally rests up each winter with its solar back angled towards any available sunlight, with enough power soaking in to keep its inside-bits from freezing. But if it can’t move out of the sand pit it’s stuck in, the Spirit Rover won’t be able to soak up those vital rays of light.

NASA, if we all collected enough tinned soup and woolly jumpers to send to Mars, would that help? [New Scientist]

Since black roof tiles absorb heat and white ones reflect it, we should all just plain re-do our roofs biannually to save energy as the seasons change. Or maybe just get roof tiles that change color on their own.

A bunch of MIT students came up with this funky-looking roofing material, dubbed Thermeleon, which changes color based on temperature. According to initial studies, “in their white state, the tiles reflect about 80 percent of the sunlight falling on them, while when black they reflect only about 30 percent.” This would translate into about a 20 percent saving on cooling costs in the summer.

Pretty neat, but unfortunately there are no plans to commercialize the tiles yet, and even if there were you’d probably have quite a battle with your home owners association to install them. [MIT News via Gizmag]

Nikon’s Coolpix S70 promised to be a point and shoot built with a love reserved for high end smartphones—very thin, and packing a 3.5-inch OLED multitouch screen. Alas, Nikon forgot about one, tiny detail, the photography itself.

According to Photography Blog’s early review, the $300ish S70’s somewhat low resolution OLED wasn’t found to be much better than an LCD for viewing images, especially in direct sunlight when it’s still not bright enough. As for the photos themselves, they were only of “average quality,” with a particularly noisy ISO even at conservative settings. Too bad. [Photography Blog via Engadget]

One is a rough manufacturing start date for a display component, and the other is an announcement so vague it barely means anything. But lest you forget: Pixel Qi’s multi-mode, e-ink-shaming LCD technology is amazing.

Pixel Qi’s last announced manufacturing date—residue of which still graces their website—was “the second half of 2009.” In big, bold type, they’ve updated the claim: “We are starting mass production of this screen in December 2009,” is proudly emblazoned on Pixel Qi’s worryingly retro website, while “We totally totally promise this time,” a comforting, if slightly desperate adjunct, is not. But this is:

We have begun design of a sub-10 watt HDTV that can be used in hundreds of millions of households that don’t have steady, if any, access to electrical power. The typical HDTV uses more than 100 Watts and often draws several hundred watts. We are working on a way to massively lower the power consumption, and significantly lower the price with a target price of $100. Thus this HDTV can run off of battery that can be charged up when the power is on, or charged with a small solar panel, crank, or so forth.

I’m sure there are about a million different applications for a low-power screen tech that displays full-motion color, static e-ink and works in the sunlight, but don’t get ahead of yourselves: we haven’t seen a single non-prototype device yet. Throw us a bone, guys! And by bone, I mean the name of any hardware partner who’s willing to make a product with this screen tech once it starts shipping. [Pixel Qi via Blogeee via Slashgear]

See that enormous blue funnel in the middle of those buildings? It’s just one of the six canopies that will light up the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. As the close-ups show, the scale of these things defies belief:

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They are not just light sources, however. These LED towers also collect rainwater and funnel sunlight to the multiple levels of the 1-kilometer long Expo Boulevard. [World Architecture News via Inhabitat]

The Living Light Sculpture looks like a giant metal flower, or a man made approximation of a jungle canopy with artificial sunlight coming down through its branches. It’s actually a digital map sculpture reporting air quality in Seoul, Korea.

The design is a rough map of the city’s neighborhood as distinguished by “air boundaries”.
The data is collected from 27 air monitoring stations; every 15 minutes the map lights up in order of highest to lowest air quality. [Living Light via bldgblog]

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angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration’s efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe’s undertaking, in part since PDF is often “non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.” They also say government’s priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they’re displayed in fancy graphs and charts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Layar has a new augmented reality app function for iPhone and Android that’s delightfully depressingly topical: It’ll let you see exactly where bailout money went, via recovery.gov, which is pretty sweet since you sort of own all that stuff!

In the words of the creators:

Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you’re trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for “recovery” or “sunlight” within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts.

I can tell you where the recovery didn’t go. It didn’t go to the bike path near my house because that shit is all torn up. Bigger bailouts, I say! [Sunlight Labs via Boing Boing Gadgets]