Automated Home

Google added bike lanes and bicycle directions to Google Maps today, allowing you to find routes that aren’t too hilly or congested. It’s pretty awesome! Bike functionality is available for over 150 American cities at the moment, but it’s safe to assume that, like everything Google does, it will eventually expand to cover most of the planet. [ Google Maps via Physorg ]

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Google Maps Gets Bike Lanes/Directions Just In Time for Spring [Biking]

With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. Here’s how to wipe them clean. Why Erasing Files Is Not Enough Sure, you could erase the contents of the drive, but keep this in mind: the act of erasing a file does not remove it from a storage device. When you erase/delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone until the areas of the disk it used are overwritten by new information

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Leave No Trace: How to Completely Erase Your Hard Drives, SSDs and Thumb Drives [Security]

Apart from the name—which I personally approve of very much—Zenitum’s iKat app has another cool edge to it. It’s (we think) the first augmented reality phone app to work without a marker, or real-world prompt. The app itself is pretty basic, just a cartoon-like pet running around on whatever surface you aim the phone at

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iKat Augmented Reality App Works Without Real-World Prompt [Apps]

South Korea has overhauled its public transport network with recharging roads , where the vehicles use power from buried electric strips in the road. It was invented at the University of California, before South Korea adopted it for an amusement park. The system is being tested at an amusement park in Seoul, but if all goes well, the country hopes to expand it to the whole city’s bus route—helping minimize unsightly overhead power lines and obviously doing a good turn for the environment. Dubbed the Online Electric Vehicle system, or OLEV, the magnetic electrical charging strips are buried in four different areas along the 2.2km bus route, with the buses sucking power which can be used to drive or just filling up the battery storage

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South Korea Testing "Recharging Roads" For Its Public Transport [Transport]

It’s not a micro four thirds, but Pentax has lifted the lid on the 645D medium format camera , which will be available this May for close to $10,000. Why so expensive, you ask? There’s that 40MP Kodak sensor for starters

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40MP Pentax 645D Camera Will Be Japan’s In May, And Ours Soon After [Cameras]

Sometimes Wi-Fi just doesn’t do the trick when streaming something to several devices. Zinnet’s Brite-View LinkE system will cover you there by allowing you to stream things over a powerline network to four ethernet devices and at up to 200Mbps.

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Zinnet’s Brite-View LinkE Streams Content to Four Devices Over Powerline Networks [Zinnet]

As a kid I had a pair of Barbie sneakers that lit up with every step. Sadly those aren’t made in adult shoe sizes, so I’ll have to settle for something like these slinky illuminated heels. These shoes came from the minds of Rodarte, a two-sister design team, and are a beautiful example of how wearable tech can be integrated into our lives and into our three-inch heels. Now can someone tell me where I can get a pair?

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Glowing Three-Inch Heels: The Adult Version of Light-Up Sneakers [Geek Fashion]

Wow. The PS3 is getting HD purchases and rentals from all six major studios. A quick search turns up that Xbox is missing Fox and, duh, Sony. It’s nice that Sony isn’t handicapping the Playstation 3 in order to protect its blu-ray business

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Playstation 3 First Console With HD Movies From All 6 Major Studios [Sony]

In today’s Remainders: tomorrow’s news! Cisco’s ushering in the next generation of internet with the CRS-3; Kempler & Strauss’s futuristic PhoneWatch gets reviewed; geolocated Tweets; a WebKit-borrowing Firefox; an HTML 5 drawing app; Samsung’s point and shoot prices, and more! Hang Ups Back in October we previewed the Kempler & Strauss PhoneWatch —the smallest of its kind and the model that promised to bring the James Bond dream to every geek’s wrist. Or so we hoped. PC Mag just published their review of the watch and found it “basically unusable,” complaining about the tiny screen and how texting (as you might assume) was pretty much impossible

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Remainders – The Things We Didn’t Post: Tomorrowland Edition [Remainders]

If the terrorists could vote, they’d vote for Candidate X— this argument is America’s greatest rhetorical treasure. So let’s apply it to smartphones, right now! I’ve got a picture of a high-level terrorist with an iPhone and everything! The man pictured here is the recently captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is world famous for precisely the kind of stuff that you don’t want to be famous for . Infamous, even!: Mullah Baradar has been credited for rebuilding the Taliban into an effective fighting force and has been running the group’s daily affairs for many years, since Mullah Omar was forced to take a less active role in the organisation due to his failing health

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Taliban Leader, Father of the IED, iPhone User [Flamebait]