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Think of this 26-inch TV from Samsung as any one of last year's larger models, shrunk down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's only 720p, but its bright, detailed picture is impressive and its vivid color is surprisingly accurate for a set this small. It scores surprisingly well in our video-processing tests, even besting many of this year's small models. Sure, this model is a bit challenged in the areas of de-interlacing 24-fps film-based HD sources and removing jaggies from diagonal lines, but then so are many of the 32-inch and smaller TVs we've tested this year. And who really worries about 24 FPS film sources on a 26-incher besides geeks like us? Unlike many small sets,...
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This year, Carol Nissen's crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she's often eating food grown with her own two hands. But Nissen isn't tilling the soil on a farm. She's a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey — one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen's vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots in her yard. "I'm a micro-gardener," she says. "It's a pretty small townhouse. But it's amazing what you can do without much space." The term for this is urban farming — the art of growing vegetables in cities that otherwise resemble the Baltimore...
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2003: Fairbanks is connected to the world's largest storage battery, built to provide Alaska's second-biggest city with an uninterrupted power supply. Fairbanks' remote location and sub-Arctic climate makes supplying reliable power to the city of 32,000 difficult. In deep winter, the temperature in Fairbanks is almost constantly subzero, dropping as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit The situation is complicated by the fact that Alaska isn't connected to the power grid that keeps the lower 48 humming. As a result, Fairbanks used to experience a serious, "cascading" blackout every two or three years, along with a number of smaller failures every month. Since the mountain couldn't come to Muhammad, it was...
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You can't get much greener than photosynthesis, and if you own a house you can take advantage of it. Plant some greens on your roof and you'll have a rich harvest, an insulated (and better looking) roof -- not to mention a cleaner environment. Stop wasting sunlight and green your roof.
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I do not, as of yet, own an iPhone. However, soon my cellphone provider will be unlocking the door, shooing away the rats, taking off my shackles and releasing me from my contract. At that point I will be buying an iPhone. Not because it's a shiny new Jobs-job, not because several of my friends have it and keep waving it at me, but because I clearly need it. I require its functionality for such important business purposes as having an iPhone.  Alt Text Podcast Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast. In the past, technology has often taken me by surprise.
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Researchers demonstrate a serious eavesdropping risk in the internet's fundamental infrastructure, putting proof to a theory that's long been whispered about in national security circles.
 
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This week marks the 30th anniversary of Lego's introduction of the "minifig," the friendly yellow characters that add a human element to those iconic, plastic bricks.
 
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The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are well-known for their thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits. But they're also Hollywood's biggest lobbying organizations. The pair have descended upon Denver for the Democratic National Convention and are headed to the Republican's convention next week in Minnesota -- in a likely move to bolster proposed legislation creating a cabinet-level copyright czar.
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Adobe announced new versions of its Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements suites for editing, cataloging and sharing digital photos and home videos on Tuesday. The tools are aimed squarely at novice users and budding hobbyists, yet they deliver much of what's available in more powerful, pro-level applications.
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Mozilla released a new, experimental add-on for Firefox Tuesday which adds a human-language text interface to the web browser. Now users can manipulate web services by typing one line of text, setting a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications on the open web.
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Vaporware becomes corporeal at last, but this supposedly liberating keyboard-and-mouse combo for gamers fails on a variety of levels.
 
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As the FCC pushes $40 coupons for digital TV converter boxes, complaints about the boxes have grown loud -- for many Americans, the device hasn't delivered an acceptable quality of television reception.
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Army medic Matt Bell couldn't even tie his own shoes, after he was shot by a sniper, just above the left clavicle. Now he has a great deal of his mobility back -- thanks, in part, to his Nintendo Wii.
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Adobe announced new versions of its Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements suites for editing, cataloging and sharing digital photos and home videos on Tuesday. The tools are aimed squarely at novice users and budding hobbyists, yet they deliver much of what's available in more powerful, pro-level applications.
![Add to Google]( "Add to Google")
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A password-stealing virus infected laptops on the international space station, though NASA says no mission critical equipment was affected. It's also not the first time a computer virus has made its way into space.
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If you lose your compass, you could use a cow instead: scientists say cattle and deer have a magnetic sense.
 
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SAN JOSE, California -- Jeff Han has some simple advice for companies thinking about how to integrate the latest interface technology into their products: Start over. "It's like Yoda said, you must unlearn what you've learned," he says, referring to the 40 years that the mouse and keyboard have dictated how we interact with computers. Admittedly, that's no easy task, so the multitouch pioneer and his company, Perceptive Pixel, have devoted the better part of two years to building an entirely new multitouch framework from the ground up. Instead of simply mapping multitouch technology to familiar interfaces and devices, Han's goal is far more sweeping: To use the technology as a...
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Photos of an amateur German bodybuilder's withdrawal from anabolic-androgenic steroids should be enough for anyone not to use the muscle enhancing substance.
 
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Bored with the speeches? Scanner buffs set up a live feed of the Denver police dispatch frequency. You can almost taste the pepper spray.
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Social news site -- and Wired.com team member -- Reddit.com has rolled out some new customization features which allow users to build entire, personalized websites around its link sharing and commenting platform.
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It's been a week since we started asking (and initially got the OK for) an interview with Justin Oullette, founder of the online mix sharing site, Muxtape, to find out about the site's still-cryptic RIAA-induced outage. We're hoping for the best, but just in case, here are five alternative services to help fill the gaping void in your soul where Muxtape used to be.
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News from Portfolio.com 
Also on Portfolio Singapore Fund Flies on Through Economic Maelstrom Not for Sale: Massive Media Conglomerate Partying With the Dems on Hot Denver Nights Subscribe to Portfolio magazine Mike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old IT professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it. So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The...
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China has lifted its general block on Apple's iTunes store, now that authorities have apparently figured out how to block one specific album -- Songs for Tibet -- without cutting access to the rest of the store.
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Michelle Obama's speech on the opening night of the Democratic Convention on Monday meets mostly with praise on Twitter. A few see the event as too staged.
 
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Wired.com's Gadget Lab looks at two applications for reading comics and graphic novels on Apple's iPhone, and finds both wanting.
  
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Facebook pulled scrabulous from its sites throughout most of the world over the weekend. It was already banished from the United States and Canada. Scrabulous remains available in India, where its developers live and where Mattel has filed a lawsuit claiming violations of intellectual property.
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Would society have reacted differently to the O. J. Simpson trial had he been white? That was the question John Plunkett, Wired's founding creative codirector, wanted to raise with the September 1995 cover — a photo altered to make Simpson appear Caucasian. "At the time," Plunkett recalls, "Photoshopped imagery still had the capacity to surprise in a way that's difficult to imagine today." The picture was widely mistaken for a critique of the infamous Time cover that darkened Simpson's face, but that wasn't Wired's intent. Rather, we hoped to make readers examine their assumptions about race. To the staff's chagrin, the manipulated image caused little stir: "It struck us that technology had rendered that debate...
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img {display:block;} .f1 {float:left;margin:0px 12px 12px 0px;width:300px;} .caption {font-family:arial;font-size:0.9em;color:#6487a9;padding:6px;background-color:#EFEFEF;line-height:1.3em;border-right-style:solid;border-right-width:18px;border-right-color:#6487a9;}  Veasey is one of the few people who know how hard it is to get a crisp x-ray of a vacuum tube.1 For starters, the object has very little mass to absorb the radiation. And because the edges of the tube curve away from the film, the x-rays get scattered about, causing distortion. So Veasey shot this tube in a series of 10-second bursts. The succession of blasts builds up the energy necessary to capture the fine details, while their short duration keeps background radiation from clouding the picture. Not many photographers need a linear accelerator. But Nick Veasey isn't...
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1883: Krakatau volcano in the Dutch East Indies roars to life with a volley of ever-increasing explosions. It will culminate the next morning with the loudest explosion in human history. Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) had been rumbling and sending up puffs of ash since May 1883. The eruption turned deadly on the afternoon of Aug. 26, with the first explosion coming at 1 p.m. A column of black ash soon rose 17 miles into the sky above the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. Earth around and under the volcano continued to move, sending a tsunami out around 5 p.m. Others would follow. Explosions continued at night, and lightning jumped between the ash...
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 : Photo: Casey Cramer/Wired.com
PEBBLE BEACH, California -- Nowhere is the old saying "there's nothing new under the sun" more true than in the auto industry, where "innovations" often are updated takes on old ideas. From the wind-cheating aerodynamics that make today's cars more efficient to the navigation systems that fill every dashboard, it's all been done before -- usually in a car that represented some designer's vision of the future. Wired.com takes a walk through the greens at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance to bring you a look at some cars of futures past that influenced that new hunk of metal currently sitting in your driveway. Left: 1956 Buick Centurion You think...
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