hardware

When Microsoft's hot new Kinect motion-sensitive controller was released earlier this month, Phil Torrone and Limor Fried saw an opportunity to subvert what was being presented as a closed system.

Torrone and Fried, the principals behind the open-source hardware firm Adafruit Industries, love almost any kind of culture hacking, and in the Kinect, they recognized a system that presented users far more utility than Microsoft was offering.

Not wasting the chance to raise a bit of a stir, Adafruit said it would pony up $1,000 to the first person who could come up with an open-source driver for … Read more

Speaking with Engadget at the Web 2.0 Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen shared his thoughts about Apple's handling of the new MacBook Air and what Adobe is doing about it.

Narayen says Adobe did not get a MacBook Air before its release a couple weeks ago, leaving Adobe unable to optimize Flash for the SSD-only portable. Apple's decision to ship the MacBook Air without Flash installed stirred an already cloudy pot in the relationship between Apple and Adobe.… Read more

A hacker won $3,000 today for being the first person to successfully create an open-source driver for Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensitive controller.

Last week, open-source hardware developers Adafruit Industries offered $1,000 to the first person or team to complete the task. After Microsoft told CNET that it did not "condone the modification of its products," Adafruit upped the bounty to $2,000 and later $3,000.

Now, Adafruit writes on its blog, a hacker named Hector has created the driver (see video below), and is taking home the three grand.

"Hector has decided to invest … Read more

One of the major components essential for the future of Firefox just landed in the beta build of the browser, and it gives the open-source browser the page-rendering speed boost that it had been lacking.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 7 introduces JagerMonkey, Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript engine that puts the browser in the same ballpark as its high-speed competitors. The old TraceMonkey engine was slow enough to no longer be in the same league as Chrome, Opera, Safari, and the Internet Explorer 9 beta.

Mozilla describes the improvements as incorporating the JagerMonkey JIT compiler into … Read more

Update at 4:03 p.m. PT: This story has been modified with response from Microsoft.

The first person who figures out how to build an open-source driver for Microsoft's much-hyped new Kinect motion controller could win a $2,000 bounty offered by a leading open-source hardware developer.

Kinect, which launched today, is currently available solely for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and may well someday be extended to the Windows platform. But for New York-based Adafruit Industries, that's not enough.

And that's why Adafruit--led by MIT Media Lab alum Limor Fried and Make magazine Senior Editor Phillip … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week the most updates are with hardware-monitoring and management utilities, with one for data recovery and another for system tweaking utilities.

Hardware The main utilities this week are with those that manage the system's hardware, either by providing information … Read more

Replacing hard drives in laptops isn't new, and neither is converting old drives into external backup drives. Yours Truly did both those things about a month ago, taking my MacBook's stock 80GB drive, replacing it with a 250GB drive, and then taking the old drive and adding it to a bus-powered 2.5-inch enclosure to make a portable 80GB HD I can take anywhere.

Other World Computing has new kits that combine both a new drive and an external enclosure, as well as all the tools you'll need to do the upgrade and build the external.

What'… Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week the big updates are with data recovery utilities, but there are a couple of hardware and maintenance utilities as well.

Data recoveryDisk Drill is a relatively new data recovery package that is in development to be released as … Read more