Slashdot Mirror
Domain: phormix.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to phormix.com.
Stories · 6
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Using Sun's Energy to Split Water Means Solar Power All Night
phorm writes "Reuters is carrying an article about a recent MIT development which may pave the way for solar-energy to be collected for use in low-input periods. According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods. This would allow storage-cells to function as a form of battery for other forms of energy-collection, such as solar panels. The new method is also much safer (and likely environmentally friendly) than current methods, which require the use of a dangerously caustic environment, and specialized storage containers." sanjosanjo points out coverage of the process at EE Times, which features the MIT group's press release. -
Bell Wants to Dump Third-Party ISP's Entirely
phorm writes "Not only is Bell interfering with third-party traffic, but — according to CBC — they want third-party ISP and phone carriers off their network entirely. Bell is lobbying to have lease-conditions on their networks removed, stating that enough competition exists that they should not longer be required to lease infrastructure to third-parties. Perhaps throttling is just the beginning?" -
Making Use Of Old LCDs?
phorm writes "Not so long ago, higher-definition LCD's used to be quite hard to come by, with laptops and other hardware tending to use old non-TFT-style LCD's which ugly bleeding colors and poor refresh. Nowadays, almost everything has a nice TFT (Thin-film-transistor) display, including laptops, PDA's, digital camera, and often even cellphones. However, not all of these devices are as dependable as they once were, and many of them end up as little more than paperweights. With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity, is there any way to salvage and use these parts for home projects? I personally have an 8" notebook display, and a 1.5" digital camera LCD which are just begging to be recycled as something useful such as a projector component, status display, or something else useful. So far I've had little luck discovering a way to get these components to work outside of the original hardware, so I was wondering if any enterprising hardware-nerds on Slashdot have had better luck than I and could offer a few pointers. Are these components doomed to end up in a landfill, or can somebody offer a way to make them useful again?" -
DVD Authoring Under Linux?
phorm asks: "After getting a much-awaited DVD-burner for Christmas, I've yet to use it to actually burn a video DVD. The main reason thus far: I've yet to find decent DVD-authoring software (either for Linux or Windows) that does what I want and doesn't have a high pricetag. So far, Freshmeat projects seem to be extremely alpha/beta quality, with not much support for buttons, animated menus/backgrounds, and all the other things that make commercial DVD's truly beautiful. Does anyone know of any affordable/free DVD authoring software that has these features? Preference to open-source or Linux software, but Windows software will do if there's nothing better." phorm is not alone in this quest, read on for another query on this topic.To add on to phorm's query, smz420 asks: "A few months ago, I acquired a DVD burner and have had a lot of fun creating discs. While they come out well, they're very much cookie-cutter, due to the software I've been using to create them. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of flexibility built into the consumer level authoring systems out there, and I'd like to take my discs to the next level. Can anyone in Slashdot-land recommend books, links or software packages that could lead me down the road towards 'prosumer' DVD authoring? I'd like to be able to take full control over authoring: design my own button shapes and structures; place text where-ever I want on a menu page; create custom navigation structures, and possibly plant an easter egg or two. So far, I've tried Pinnacle Studio 8, Sonic MyDVD and Nero on Windows 2000. While each had very good aspects to them, all of them fell short of enabling 'next level' DVD authoring. Any advice would be most appreciated."
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Automatically Installing Linux from Bootable CD?
phorm asks: "While there are newer many distributions of linux that come bootable from CD, I've found that some are a bit difficult to customize and wonder how hard it would be to create my own. Currently we are looking at replacing some of our Windows desktops at work with Linux test-machines - and it would be nice to make the installation process as simple as possible. How hard would it be to create a bootable CD that would automagically install Linux onto the first detected hard-drive? How would you go about 'imaging' an existing machine to use as the base? I suppose that in many cases a tar-gzip of the entire OS would work, provided you could partition the drive correctly, recreate some important handles as in /proc, and run lilo/grub to install a boot loader. Does anyone here have experience with this? I know morphix/knoppix make nice bootable distros but what I really want is a basic Linux bootCD which installs a preconfigured version of the OS of my choice." -
Flaming Cellphones
phorm writes "Many of us have heard the urban legend of cellphones causing fires at the gas pump, but how about the hazards of replacement batteries? Reuters is carrying a story about a woman whose cellphone burst into flame, causing her superficial burn injuries. According to Nokia, the problem has occured before, and is related to non-brand replacement batteries. For various reasons, these batteries may overheat and catch fire, or even explode! So far I haven't found much info on whether this has happened with other brands of phone, though I do know that my little flip-phone gets very hot when running in analog mode. Perhaps some slashdot readers have had a similar experience?"