Tech Pulse! News for techies

South Korea’s Live Park uses RFID and Kinect to bring your Holodeck fantasies one step nearer

All those long, long drives to Florida in the family station wagon seemed worth it at the time, but now that we’ve found out that those lucky South Koreans have another crazy theme-park, we might just change our minds. Located near Seoul, Live Park uses 3D video, holograms and augmented reality, interacting with RFID [...]

February 14th is Valen… Angry Birds day

Forget poking: from February 14th, show you love someone by flinging a mis-tempered avian toward them. It’s Valentines Day that Angry Birds will finally arrive on the ubiquitous social network — just in time to ensure half the coupled population of the world misses its dinner reservation, in order to get past one more [...]

Google strikes deal to bring 27,000 Chromebooks to US schools in three states

It remains to be seen if they’ll be the big game-changer in education that Google hopes they will be, but the company is making some progress at getting its Chromebooks into schools. The latest push is a deal with three US school districts, which will see some 27,000 Chromebooks land in the hand of [...]

ZTE Light Tab 2 hits the UK next month for £235, still runs Android 2.3

ZTE may have shown off a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.0 at CES, but the company still has a bit of a backlog of previously announced devices to actually push out the door. The latest to resurface is the ZTE V9A Light Tab 2, which we first saw at Mobile Asia Congress back in [...]

Canonical bringing HUD to Ubuntu 12.04, company’s assault on menus continues

Canonical — shepherd of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu — generally doesn’t rock the boat with its LTS releases, but things are going to be different this time around. With 12.04LTS the company is taking its assault on contextual menus to the next level by launching HUD. Mark Shuttleworth’s obsession with simplifying user interactions [...]

Engadget HD Podcast 283 – 01.24.2012

Rested and recovered after CES, we’re back, and where else to get started but…CES. A quick roundup covers some of our favorite products from the show, before we dive into the latest news from Netflix and Hulu. TiVo is also in the news with some interesting DVR stats and wide rollout of its latest [...]

Google, MIT bestow App Inventor to the unwashed masses

Google must be feeling generous: it donated Sky Map to undeserving armchair astronomers and it’s letting the great unwashed get at its App Inventor development platform. The software toolset was cooked up in partnership with MIT: a web-based interface that lets anyone build Android apps without getting elbows-deep in code. Those Massachusetts king-geeks won’t [...]

Nook Simple Touch gets USB host mode support via hack, plays nice with low-power devices (video)

Codemonkeys exhibiting the kindness of strangers? Why, yes, this is such a tale. When XDA Developers member verygreen came across the pleas of one user obsessed with attaching an external USB keyboard to an eReader, he did what any decent hacker would and created a workable solution. Using a loaned Nook Simple Touch, this [...]

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: 300 passenger bus, babyloid robot and a jellyfish-esque LED chandelier

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Sustainable transportation broke new boundaries by land and sea this week as Inhabitat reported that China launched the first 300 passenger bus and the world’s largest solar ship closed [...]

Switched On: Connected Electronics Show

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Compared to CES 2011, which featured an explosion of tablets and high-powered smartphones poised to jump on emerging 4G networks, this year’s edition of Gear and Gloating in Las Vegas was a more muted affair when it came to mobile devices. Sure, Verizon, [...]