ion

Boeing was granted permission today to conduct test flights of its 787 Dreamliner as the aircraft maker tries to determine the cause of battery fires that have kept the fleet of planes grounded around the world.

The test flights will be subject to a number of restrictions, the Federal Aviation Administration said today, including limiting the flights to specific airspace over unpopulated areas. Other conditions include preflight testing and inspections, and in-flight monitoring.

"The traveling public's safety is our highest priority," the FAA said in a statement. "These test flights will be an important part of … Read more

Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for overheating, catching on fire, or exploding. Yet, they're in most electronics that people use daily.

One such battery set ablaze over the weekend while in a man's pants pocket, according to the Associated Press. The man was walking around with his Samsung mobile phone in his pocket when the battery caught on fire, giving him second-degree burns and a one-inch wound on his thigh. Officials said the battery was not inside the phone when it exploded.

The incident took place in South Korea, which is where Samsung is based. According to the local … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Achieving DJing glory on the iPad is possible thanks to some pretty nifty apps out there, but there's always been something missing from the experience. A cold flat screen just can't replicate the dynamism and quirks of real knobs and records. Ion Audio is taking a shot at putting the feel back into tablet DJing with a set of tactile controls.

A demo unit of Scratch 2 Go is on the show floor at CES 2013. It consists of a slider control, two round discs for scratching control, and two banks of three knobs each for all the fine tuning. They hang onto the screen thanks to what Ion describes as "industrial suction cups."

The suction cups feel pretty solid. Pull them up and look below to see what makes this tick. Underneath, the spinners have what looks like the tip of a touch-screen stylus. It's nothing fancy, but it works.… Read more

A new version of Firefox released today puts some extra speed into online games and Web apps powered by JavaScript, thanks to a new compiler called IonMonkey.

Mozilla stated in a blog post announcing the update to Firefox 18 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) that the new engine makes JavaScript-powered Web sites run up to 25 percent faster than before.

Firefox will now look better on Macs thanks to new Retina support, and all versions of the browser work with W3C touch screen events in addition to MozTouch events.

One security change to the browser lets you disable insecure content … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The venerable boom box may be on the cusp of revival, thanks to a range of small, cheap, wearable speakers on display at CES.

Here at the CES Unveiled show we took a look at the ion Clipster, an ultraportable wireless speaker with a novel carabiner design. The carabiner clips to a belt loop or backpack and will broadcast sound in all directions, to the delight (or chagrin) of all those within earshot.

The Clipster is the brainchild of inMusic, a Rhode Island company showing off a range of Bluetooth-powered audio products here at CES. The $29 speaker connects … Read more

A JavaScript engine called IonMonkey, Mac Retina compatibility, and better touch support move into the new Firefox Beta, released today.

Firefox 18 Beta (download for Windows, Mac, and Linux) arrives with a new "just-in-time" JavaScript compiler called "IonMonkey" for faster site load times. While it doesn't appear to have been independently tested yet, Mozilla's own IonMonkey benchmarks from September indicate that it will make the stable version of Firefox 18 about 25 percent faster than the current Firefox 17. The features are expected to reach the Firefox stable channel around the first week of January. … Read more

I love old analog media. I'm holding in my hot little paws a stereo 8-track of a 1973 recording by Hiroshi Itsuki, a Japanese enka singer. It's several times larger than my iPod Touch but contains only 12 songs.

Sadly, this fabu converter from Ion doesn't take anything that ancient, but it will magically change your dusty old cassettes into MP3 files for your iPod or iPhone.

The Tape Dock is similar to Ion's Tape 2 Go but can house an iPod or iPhone on one side and a cassette on the other. … Read more

Mozilla has begun building a new technology called IonMonkey into Firefox to improve its JavaScript performance.

High JavaScript performance is essential in today's hotly competitive browser market, because JavaScript is the language behind complicated Web sites and Web apps such as Google Docs and Facebook. IonMonkey has now been packaged into the "nightly" version of Firefox 18 for hardcore developers; that version is scheduled to become the mainstream version of the browser early in 2013.

IonMonkey is what's called a just-in-time compiler, or JIT for short. In olden days, JavaScript would run line by line in … Read more

More companies seem to be discovering that crowdsourcing is more than just a cheap way to have other people do your work for you, it's a cheap and potentially cool way. Or so the conversation likely went with Sony's marketing folks when they came up with the idea to demo the HD camera on the Sony Xperia Ion smartphone by creating a music video entirely from footage shot by a crowd full of the phones.

Sony got Metric, one of the bands signed to its recording label, to perform in a hotel penthouse and handed out 25 of the company's new LTE phones for the audience to film the one-take performance. … Read more