The HYDRA Game Development Kit is brought to you by the crew at XGameStation. It comes with all the parts, and instructions to create what is essentially, a bootleg computer system. When completed, it can play many different types of interface devices, including NTSC/PAL video, VGA video, PS/2 ports and networking. NTSC and VGA formats are displayed with up to 256 color variations.

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P-ISM : A Pen-style Personal Networking Gadget Package, basically its a Palm Pilot in a pen. It has some pretty neat features though: a pen-style cellular phone with a handwriting data input function, virtual keyboard, a very small projector, camera scanner, and personal ID key with cashless pass function.

The best part of them all is that they are all connected with one another through short-range wireless technology. The whole set is also connected to the Internet through the cellular phone function. This personal gadget in a minimalistic pen style "enables the ultimate ubiquitous computing".

Personally, I wouldn’t buy it, but what i think has real promise is the keyboard, although my fingers would get super tough from typing on the hard floor or table all day, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fingers of steel? I’ll take it!

Until next time…

Ermanno Pietrosemoli, president of a networking school in Venezuela, has set a new record for the longest communication link with Wi-Fi…a whopping 238 miles.

Together with Intel tech (which has created a way to electrically steer the signal, which in turn increases bandwidth) and MacGuyver techniques with LinkSys hardware, Pietrosemoli sent an 802.11 signal between two mountains in the Venezuelan Andes.
News.com

Control4, provider of IP-based home control and entertainment systems, today unveiled the Control4® Home Controller HC-300.

This $699 device offers up a multitude of serial, infrared, and video sensing ports, is compatible with standards-based communication technology including Ethernet, WiFi, and ZigBee mesh networking, and can dictate multi-room music, smart lighting, advanced temperature control, and security.

"The Home Controller HC-300 sits at the core of our value proposition of delivering transformative and affordable home automation and control,” said Will West, Chief Executive Officer of Control4. “We are pleased to roll out a major evolution of this foundational and best selling Control4 product line. We have designed the Home Controller HC-300 to not only be elegant but also to maximize the digital home experience across the board from high definition screen graphics to optimized processing and expansion capabilities.”

In addition to managing the home theater, the Home Controller HC-300 is capable of controlling multi-room music, smart lighting, advanced temperature control, security, and many other home automation sub-systems.

The HC-300 is expected to ship in July.
source: Businesswire

Endangered languages like Welsh, Navajo and Breton have regained speakers and popularity in their communities and are now even considered "cool". Welsh language expert David Crystal said the Internet could change the inevitable extinction of about half of the world’s 6,500 languages.

"The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before."
"It doesn’t matter how much activism you engage in on behalf of a language if you don’t attract the teenagers, the parents of the next generation of children," Crystal, who was raised speaking English and Welsh, told Reuters.

Languages at risk of extinction are appearing on blogs, instant messaging, chat rooms, video site www.youtube.com and social networking site www.myspace.com.

According to Crystal, there are 50-60 languages in the world which have one last speaker, and around 2,000 have never been written.

Money is needed for this project and this is a particular problem for African and indigenous South American languages, where resources are low and governments favor dominant languages Spanish, French and English. Native American languages, especially Navajo, are more fortunate as they have many virtual communities on the Internet and are funded by the casinos the Navajos run.
source: Reuters