newcastle

The Good e-Book: Newcastle hotel swaps Bibles for Kindles

The guests of Hotel Indigo can now browse the Bible on Kindles left in their room.

The Newcastle hotel has removed all the complimentary Gideon Bibles from its rooms and replaced them with e-versions loaded on Kindles, the Telegraph newspaper reports.

The hotel said it's the first in Britain to offer the service, which includes the ability to download any other religious texts that costs 5 British pounds or less. Guests can also order books, but those will be added to their hotel bills.

The hotel is trying out the service for two weeks to see if it wants … Read more

French Digital Kitchen: HAL 9000 meets Jacques Pepin

I know enough French to order two croissants and buy a bottle of wine. That successfully got me through a week in Paris, but I could improve my skills astronomically if I got a French Digital Kitchen.

Newcastle University in England has installed this kitchen, which is designed to helps students learn a language and gain some cooking skills at the same time. PBS should be all over this.

Everything from the mixing bowls to the peelers to the flour and sugar have embedded sensors that work under the same concept as a Nintendo Wii. The computer knows where the tools are and what motions are being made.

The computer gives you instructions in French and tracks your progress as you work your way through a recipe. It's like a GPS for making crepes and Croque Monsieur.… Read more

Robot to keep ship hulls free of sea debris

A team of roboticists led by the United Kingdom's Newcastle University are developing an automated robot to clean the hulls of ships.

The Hismar (short for Hull Identification System for Marine Autonomous Robotics), whose development was funded by the European Commission, attaches to a ship magnetically. It pressure-washes the hull with sea water, and it sucks up loosened growth and debris into a filter system that can process 150 liters of water per minute. The ship does not have to be in dry dock to work. The robot can work both above and below the waterline of a ship afloat.… Read more

Sherwood receiver delivers HDMI 1.3, next-generation lossless audio

The Sherwood Newcastle R-972 will deliver HDMI 1.3 connectivity, six HDMI inputs, lossless audio decoding (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio), and a graphic onscreen user interface when it's released in August for $1,500. (Note that the back panel image shows four HDMI inputs, but Sherwood has pledged that the shipping model will include six.) The product becomes the first officially announced receiver we've seen that incorporates all of those bleeding-edge features. Its step-down model, the R-872, offers similar HDMI and lossless decoding capabilities with "only" four HDMI inputs and a text-only onscreen interface, … Read more