Perhaps more than anything else previously invented, this pretty black box changed the world of communications, entertainment, commerce, scientific research, and even war forever. In fact, the world as we know it today would have never existed without it. It happened less than two decades ago, when Tim Berners-Lee released version 0.1 of his web server—CERN HTTPd. June 1991 was the month. A Next Cube workstation was the box

Confession: After a day of coffee and a huge XXL Coke, and fighting my bladder for two hours, I had to run to pee during Star Trek. I wish I knew about RunPee then. RunPee is a movie review site. However, it won’t tell you about how bad Terminator Salvation is. It won’t tell you about how bad the Terminator Salvation plot is

According to GoDaddy, you should maybe stop buying .tv domains because Tuvalu, who owns all such domain names , is currently sinking underwater. Once Tuvalu no longer exists as a nation, the domains will also disappear. Sure, the island nation is slowly falling underwater, but all hope may not be lost yet. Valleywag points us to a USA Today article from 2004, which says there are exceptons—.su domains from the old Soviet Union are still active.

On the train today, Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night” came on my iPod, and it shot me back in one of those quick, brain-stem-memory moments, to pre-internet times. The ’80s. I found this card. This has a decidedly ’40s-’50s aesthetic, but still, I can imagine even as a kid in the Reagen years, it would have been considered an incredible service to fill out a post card with a research query, send it out to some no-name town in California, and in a month or so, receive a packet of sourced information from around the world on your topic, for free.

Aside from being able to convert Swedish krona into pesos, millimeters of mercury into pascals and everything in between, ConvertBot looks and sounds beautiful. Also, I think this is the most emotionally touching app demo I’ve ever seen. With the crisp 5D Mark II limited-depth-of-field video, that plaintive guitar music and this guy’s voice, I feel suddenly moved to SPEND SPEND SPEND! In all seriousness though, this is a great piece of work by the guys at Tapbots and well worth the buck. Vote with your dollars and reward some attention to design detail (from the satisfying click noises down to the lovely typography and icons) in the App Store . Lord knows we need all we can get

As sad as it sounds, most of us experience the world through photographs. Now MIT software engineers are taking that idea literally and mapping Flickr photos to regional maps in The World’s Eyes project. By pulling GPS metadata from uploaded photos (and then skinning that data in a neat 3D visualization), users can see how photographers/tourists see a given area. There’s overlap, yes, but that’s entirely the point. It’s a project more about capturing stereotypes (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in NY), than giving a Google Street View objective turn by turn of an area. Add tags like “party” to the mix, and that worldview is altered in very interesting, less predictable ways

I imagine the first thing on everyone’s mind when they return from space is “When the f%&@ can I go back!?” Today, Charles Simonyi became the first space tourist to make a second paid flight. Just short of two years ago, Simonyi spent two weeks aboard the ISS as the fifth private visitor to the station on a ticket booked with Space Adventures . And now he’s heading back on the Soyuz flight that left Kazakhstan this morning; he’ll help scientists with experiments and answer question from Earth via the web until returning on April 7. Having created Microsoft Word and Excel back in the early, early days and now having been to space twice , I think we can officially bestow a crown of ultimate geek cred on Simonyi’s glowing head. Godspeed. [NYTimes, Charlesinspace.com ]

While Kodak’s new Zx1 might be a tad more exciting, Kodak is also keeping at the EasyShare thing with its new Z980 zoomer . We’ve gotten to spend some time with the camera, and while we appreciate the price, the size and the endless zoom, we’re overall none too impressed. Check out our full impressions after the break. Continue reading Kodak EasyShare Z980 unboxing and impressions Filed under: Digital Cameras Kodak EasyShare Z980 unboxing and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

We Americans have Fusion-io’s ioDrive and OCZ’s Z Drive to look forward to when it comes to slamming down a PCIe-based SSD solution in our lightning fast rigs, but what about the savvy Japanese? Enter PhotoFast, who has just revealed a luscious PCIe SSD of its own, ranging from 256GB to one whole terabyte in size. The unit includes a couple of SSDs hooked together in a RAID0 setup in order to provide up to 750MB/sec read rates and 700MB/sec write rates. As with most SSDs, this unit also boasts a 1.5 million hour MTBF and should work perfectly within Windows XP and Vista machines. Those in and around Osaka can expect these to land around mid-October for about the cost of a new TV — seriously. [Via Engadget Japanese ] Filed under: Storage PhotoFast intros 256GB to 1TB G-Monster PCIe SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:43:00 EST.

Sony’s mylo 2 — wait, you do remember what this thing is , right? — could be headed for the grave… as if it wasn’t already there in the minds of most. After Sony hacked a hundred bucks from the asking price during the run-up to Holiday Season 2008, we heard absolutely nothing further until now. Today, the very same order page shows that no new models are available to purchase, leaving prospective buyers with two clear-cut options: 1) walk away or 2) snag a refurb model in black or white for $149.99. So, is this the end for Sony’s own Internet Device