Gui’s posterous

Here’s something that won’t be coming to the iPhone any time soon – an app store for Porn.

Apple keeps ‘adult-only’ content off the iPhone. On Android there are no such restrictions and one company has taken that to its natural conclusion by launching the world’s first mobile store for porn.

Although you won’t find MiKandi in the official Android Market you can download it from MiKandi.com. Once installed, the app gives you access to all sorts of over-18s-only apps. Categories include ‘Fun and Games’, ‘Adult News’, ‘Erotica’ and ‘Eye Candy’.

No matter what you think of pornography, there’s no doubt that it’s a huge business. Regardless of the technological breakthrough; videos, software, mobile phones – the porn industry has been quick to take advantage of it. The biggest surprise here is probably that it’s taken so long to for an adult app store to arrive.

MiKandi is only just starting out and is currently Android-only. It has plans to expand (check their jobs page: “self-righteous, ignorant and/or annoying people need not apply”). Support for more platforms is coming in the near future – just don’t expect to see it on the iPhone any time soon.

[via Phandroid]

The Head Up Display was invented for the military during World War II, projecting imagery on to the cockpit canopy so the pilot did not have to look down at his instruments. These days HUDs are standard in all sorts of aircraft and cars, and there are even swimming goggles which will display a lap counter for you . Researchers at the University of Washington are inching closer to the next step: contact lenses as display devices.

As National Defense magazine reports, the difficult part is integrating the electronics with the lens. The process for dealing with this sounds like magic: the device assembles itself. Although they look like a fine white powder, each of the individual components – sensors, antennae, semiconductor circuits and LEDs – is a particular shape. They are floated over the polymer substrate, which is etched with tiny holes corresponding to the shape of each component. The components fall into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and are then locked into position.

Bringing batteries into this assembly line would be tough. So the contact lenses are powered remotely by a beam of radio waves. The energy level is only on a scale of microwatts, but for safety reasons they have not yet been tested by a human subject — that’s why the picture above rather incongruously shows a rabbit wearing the high-tech lens.

If they can ever get humans to wear the lenses, though, there may be some distinct military advantages.

It’ll allow troops to wear sunglasses, protective goggles, or a night-vision device while still getting HUD-style info.  The lenses might also act as a sensor, providing a non-invasive way of continually monitoring and displaying blood glucose and other health factors.

At an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference, University of Washington engineering professor Babak Amir Parviz (we’ve covered his work before) showed how a grid of red LEDs just 25 microns could display text. For now, it’s just a fuzzy single letter “F.” Later on, he hopes to increase the pixel count to produce clearer images, and also to introduce color. That would open up a whole new range of possibilities. One suggestion is that the lenses could be used for immersive gaming, creating a whole virtual reality around the wearer. It would provide a simple way of receiving text messages unobtrusively, like a visual version of those radio earpieces worn by Secret Service agents. Or it could act as a SatNav system which would guide you without having to take your eyes off the track ahead.

But there would also be some applications specific to the military. It might be useful to have images from a gun-camera like the Smartsight beamed direct to a contact lens, so you can shoot around corners without exposing your face. Or it could display imagery from an Eyeball or other tactical robot going into buildings ahead of troops.

As with the original military aircraft HUD, it would be valuable in any situation where the user needs to keep looking ahead rather than glancing down. However, when this sort of expensive electronics is involved, losing a contact lens might be more than a minor inconvenience.

Image: University of Washington

Cars that run on compressed air may seem like the ultimate green vehicle, but new research says that’s an illusion.

Compressed air cars have been most vocally supported by the French outfit Motor Development International, which says its cars will be on the market by 2012. Such vehicles run on compressed air stored in a cylinder; the air is used to drive the pistons in the engine. The technology has been around since the beginning of the last century and has in recent years been offered as the ultimate alt-fuel.

Rsearcher Andrw Papson and his colleagues say it ain’t so. They argue a compressed air car is, like an electric vehicle, powered by the grid but uses a tank instead of a battery to store energy. You’re better off with a battery electric vehicle, they write in “Economic and Environmental Evaluation of Compressed Air Cars.”

“The life-cycle analysis of the compressed air car, however, showed that the CAC car faired worse than the BEV in primary energy required, GHG emissions and lifecycle costs, even under our very optimistic assumptions about performance,” they write in the paper published last week in Environmental Research Letters. “Compressed-air energy storage is relatively inefficient technology at the scale of individual cars and would add additional greenhouse gas emissions with the current electricity mix. In fact, the BEV out-performs the compressed air car in every category.”

The big reason the technology falls short, they argue, is thermodynamic efficiency loss. Papson also says compressed air contains less than 1 percent of the energy found in gasoline.

The researchers don’t completely dismiss the technology, however. They say a hybrid using an air tank recharged by an internal combustion engine is more efficient and “could eventually compete with hybrid electric vehicles.”

Rendering of an AirPod air car: Motor Development International

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Because you’re not going anywhere for a while. Wired has a great article up right now that reminds me of Wired magazine content in their glory days in the early 2000s. The object of the piece is to examine the feasibility of disappearing completely in the digital age. They gave writer Evan Ratcliff a month’s head start to plan his means of vanishing, then set the entire internet on him once he’d executed his plan.

I’m only about halfway through it right now but it’s an easy recommendation if, like me, you’re lolling on the couch, sipping coffee and browsing the net. The conclusion is not too difficult to imagine; I haven’t read it yet, but I’m guessing that some circumstance or minor slip-up caused Ratcliff to reveal his location — an emergency cash withdrawal, a particular item delivered to a PO Box, or something like that. After that it was just a matter of time before those on his trail ferreted him out.

Of course, it’s one thing to track a person used to living and working online, with known habits and telltale tendrils extending all over both the real and virtual region. I suspect that if you took the measures he took (which you can read in the article), the trail would eventually fade; after a year of living on cash, under a fake name, and being paid under the table, it would be nearly impossible to locate someone without some serious inside information.

Tesla Motors is on the verge of going public.

So says Reuters, citing two sources “familiar with the matter” who say an IPO filing from Tesla is coming any day now. No one’s offering specifics on when or how, but as Reuters notes, an initial public offering can take months. Tesla Motors has never commented publicly on IPO rumors and isn’t starting now.

“We don’t comment on rumor and speculation,” said company spokesman Ricardo Reyes.

That said, CEO Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO could come in 2008 or 2009. And he’s undoubtedly watched battery company A123 Systems, which saw its stock climb 50 percent on its first day of trading on Sept. 25. That company saw its third-quarter revenue exceed expectations but A123 still posted a loss.

More info when we have it.

Photo: Jim Merithew / Wired.com

The Paris-Dakar Rally is a race so crazy competitors have been taken out by land mines. To say it’s grueling is like saying Carrie Prejean likes shooting video. Just what sort of vehicle is required to take on a race where normal conditions include searing heat, towering dunes, ginormous rocks and weather conditions that would give a crab boat captain pause?

Volkswagen has the answer in their new Touareg for the next Dakar.

 

The cars, trucks, bikes and buggies that run in the Dakar rally are tech porn of the highest order. Take a look at what VW has to offer for the 2010 running of the race, which will be run through Argentina and Chile. (The name comes from the days when the race ran from Paris to Dakar, Senegal.) The Germans made history last year by taking the checkered flag in the first diesel-powered entry in the automobile class. It entered the diesel ‘Reg in the Baja 1000, too.

This time around, the Touareg features such cool features as a carbon fiber-reinforced outer skin that weighs a mere 50 kilograms, a braking system capable of exerting pressure equal to that of 700 meters below sea level and a data acquisition system that can store 250 MB of data that is read and analyzed by race engineers at the close of a days stage.

Just the run of the mill specs for the Touareg shows you how serious of a challenge the Dakar is. The VW is powered by a 2.5-liter five-cylinder TDI diesel engine with two-stage turbocharging system with exhaust turbochargers and intercooling. The mill, mounted longitudinally behind the front axle, puts out approximately 280 horsepower and more than 440 pound-feet of torque. Gotta love diesels for buckets of torque.

All that power and grunt is put to the ground — no matter what kind of ground it is, tarmac, sand, gravel, rocks, you name it — via a longitudinally mounted sequential five-speed gearbox and a permanent all-wheel-drive. More slick hardware includes selectable viscous locking mechanical differentials and an hydraulically actuated three-plate ceramic clutch. Stopping power comes from 320 mm ventilated disc brakes squeezed by aluminum calipers with six pistons up front and four out back. The Dakar Touareg even has power-assisted rack and pinion steering.

All this is done in a surprisingly lightweight package that tips the scales at just under 4,000 pounds. The Dakar Touareg can hit 100 km/hr from a standstill in 6.1 seconds on firm ground and tops out at , on hard ground, and will top out at approximately 118 mph, which may not seem like much.

Unless you’re running flat-out through the desert.

Photos: VW

 

 

California is the birthplace of the coming EV invasion, but a tiny town in Iowa wants to be the birthplace of a “Pony Express” of charging stations that will keep those cars going.

Businessman Mike Howard has erected four charging stations in Elk Horn, a town of 650 people about an hour east of Omaha. He has plans to install four more soon. No, that’s not many at all, and they’re in the middle of nowhere. But Howard says you’ve got to start somewhere, especially if you envision a network of charging stations stretching from Denver to Chicago along Interstate 80. He likens his network to the Pony Express.

“They had to have stations to continue on to deliver the mail,” Howard told the Associated Press. “This is a modern-day Pony Express.”

Many automakers are developing electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, and cars like the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf are expected by the end of next year. The big question has been where people are supposed to plug them in when they aren’t home. We’ve seen campaigns to create “charging corridors” spring up in California and Arizona, and of course Better Place has an ambitious plan for a charging infrastructure people would subscribe to. The Obama Administration is providing $3.4 billion in grants this year to spur development of EVs and bolster the grid.

But Howard wants to bring chargers to the heartland, even though there are, according to the AP, just 96 electric cars in Iowa and only one in Elk Horn.

“He’s definitely being progressive, but you know, somebody’s got to be first,” Pat Davis, program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Vehicle Technologies, told the Associated Press.

Amen.

Photo: General Motors

Rumors of an electric Rolls-Royce Phantom are back, with the word being the super-luxe automaker could have one on the road within 12 months.

We’ve been hearing mumbling about this car for more than a year. It started when CEO Tom Purves said an e-Rolls would be perfect for well-heeled city dwellers. The car, he said, could build upon the drivetrain in the Mini E. The rumors picked up again in September when a Rolls spokesman let slip that an electric Phantom was under consideration back in Goodwood (or, more likely, Munich, since BMW owns Rolls).

Now AutocarUK cites an unidentified “company source” saying the e-Phantom could be on the road by the end of next year. Why the rush? Because BMW is a big sponsor of the 2012 Olympics in London, and my wouldn’t it look green bringing a flotilla of electric land yachts to the games?

Personally, we think an electric Rolls makes perfect sense. Most owners simply tool around town, so range isn’t a big issue. It could save owners some serious coin on emissions and road taxes in cities like London. And electric motors provide boatloads of torque and they’re quiet — two hallmarks of a Rolls-Royce.

Besides — we love the idea of a Rolls plugged into a socket. “Jeeves, please do remember to plug the car in.”

Photo of a regular ol’ gas-burning Phantom: Rolls-Royce