fire

Factory fire causes laptop battery shortage

Have trouble finding an extra or replacement battery for your laptop? Both Dell and HP say they are experiencing a laptop battery shortage after a March 3 fire knocked out a major supplier of the batteries.

Besides Dell and HP, the fire that gutted a plant owned by South Korea's second-largest battery maker, LG Chem, is also affecting Asus, maker of the popular Eee PC laptop.

"We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up," Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn told Reuters. "The industry is experiencing battery supply … Read more

Wikinear mashes geolocation, Wikipedia using Fire Eagle

Yahoo's Fire Eagle service is very much in its infancy, but we're already beginning to see some early developer applications pour out of the service. One of them, Wikinear is a smart mashup, combining Google Maps with Wikipedia. Every time you update your location on Fire Eagle, the map and related entries will change, which could be useful if you're traveling or feel like learning more about some of the buildings or attractions around you.

The site is optimized for mobile phones with simple text and links. While local services such as Yelp offer quite a bit … Read more

Fire guts historic Silicon Valley building

A fire has destroyed an historic Silicon Valley building at the center of a preservation fight.

An early morning fire on Saturday swept through Building 25 at IBM's Cottle Road campus in San Jose, Calif., according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. The building, which opened in 1957 but had been vacant since 1996, was the site where the flying hard disk drive--an ancestor to the modern hard drive--was invented.

The 40,000-square-foot building was also hailed as precursor to the modern high-tech campus for "creative engineers"...built "in true California style, (with) … Read more

NewsFire RSS reader now free on the Mac

I regularly visit tons of Web sites every day for the latest software updates, blog posts about cool gadgets, and other news sites. But instead of clicking through bookmarks in my Web Browser, I like the ease and convenience of a RSS reader. I recently put together a collection of RSS readers for Windows, but I just found out only a few days ago the developer of one of the best RSS readers for Mac decided to release its product for free.

NewsFire is a full-featured RSS reader with an easy-to-use interface so you can get your news just how … Read more

SXSWi: Hello, Austin!

AUSTIN, Texas--I just rolled off a JetBlue flight where half the passengers were typing on MacBooks and talking about last night's episode of Lost and the other half were wearing worn-out band T-shirts and combat boots. Incoming text messages from Twitter are making my cell phone buzz off the hook. I have this sudden craving for baby-back ribs and a giant margarita.

I guess it must be South by Southwest.

I'll be here through Tuesday night for South by Southwest Interactive, the digital-culture arm of the festival, and I'm pumped. Unlike my seasoned colleague Daniel Terdiman, I'… Read more

FireEagle + Dopplr = Pretty cool

Just a quick post, before I get on a plane, to point out that Dopplr has implemented integration with FireEagle. As I've said before, the variable resolution feature is pretty cool.

Thanks, Ross (via Twitter)

Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there

At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.

Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).

If … Read more

Where we didn't start the fire

EPISODE 46

After a contentious morning with an almost late Wilson Tang and a false office fire, the 404 hosts kick off the show with a look at billboard defacing, MyVu already showing up on Woot, prizes given away, and not so fantastic movies coming out this weekend!

Listen now: Download today's podcast

The flashlight as flamethrower

The Taser may soon have some competition as the personal safety device of choice, from an unlikely source: the flashlight.

We've already seen models capable of blinding an assailant, shooting 800,000 volts, and even resembling a Gatling machine gun. Now Wicked Lasers--the outfit that brought Blu-ray to the laser pointer--has outdone itself with the "Torch."

Though not the first to make fire-starter claims, this one is billed as "the world's brightest and most powerful flashlight," with the ability to "burn plastic, light paper, or even fry an egg or toast a … Read more