30 Days With the Cloud: Day 23

I’m back. I haven’t forgotten about you. Granted, the “30 Days With the Cloud” experiment is stretching the definition of “30 days” quite a bit, but it’s time to finally wrap this series up. Today’s post will focus on a couple ways the cloud has come in handy for me recently.

If you follow my posts, you know that I recently pulled the trigger and switched from AT&T to Verizon. I was reluctant to move, and I tried very hard to find a solution with AT&T, but ultimately AT&T was simply not interested in working with me and it was time for me to move on in order to get wireless service that actually works at my house and in the surrounding area.

Almost 50 million citizens have disabilities, and the likeliness of a disability rises with age. Meanwhile, nearly one-quarter of the workforce will be 55 or older by 2018. At the same time, mobile devices that are smaller than the typical desktop computer and require more dexterity to operate are becoming more common in business.

As Windows 8 straddles the desktop-mobile divide, it will include assistive technologies optimized for touch-enabled devices, and built to be easier for easier integration by developers.

Hulu's New SeriesHulu on Tuesday launched "Battleground," an original new "dramedy" series.

The 13-episode series focuses on the lives of workers in a fictional campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin.

[Photo: University of Manchester]Everyone who's followed science news in the last couple years knows that graphene is the new sliced bread, but after the initial breakthrough and exitement, no one has been able to solve the riddle of current leakage. See, you have to pack transistors pretty tightly on a computer chip; each chip has to have regulated voltage in order to perform its task of being on or off. Graphene, even insulated up the wazoo, leaks its charge out, which would cook the surrounding transistors.

So what do you do when the awesome power of graphene as the new silicon in computer chips is relegated to wishful thinking, given how much current the transistors leak? You pack them a different way, according to a University of Manchester science team.

Do you stream? The popularity of video streaming is growing rapidly in the United States, as consumers snap up single-use media devices, such as Roku and Apple TV, and use them to watch movies and TV shows via the Internet.

A recent survey by research firm Parks Associates shows that nearly one-third of broadband-equipped American households regularly stream video entertainment from Internet-based services such as Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.

Apple has finally issued a response to the week-long uproar around the web about iPhone apps that upload users' contact data without their explicit permission. According to AllThingsD, an Apple spokesperson said that an iOS update will require all apps gain "explicit user approval" before accessing the Address Book.

Apple's response comes after growing criticism that the company has given developers too much leeway with users' contact data. Mobile social network Path was the first to take the fall for uploading users' address books without their explicit consent, but other apps--including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Yelp--also upload and store users' address books, sometimes without permission.

You know those times when you want to upload a new photo to, say, Facebook or Pinterest? The typical browser-based upload tool forces you to click through countless folders until you find the one you want. It's a slow and often maddening dance.

Fortunately, there's an easier way.

[Image: Juan Francisco Saldarriaga]A new data visualization video shows a day in the traffic life of New York City using the location data of 100,000 NYC cab rides. The project, called Taxi!, is the work of Tom McKeogh, Eliza Montgomery and Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, who created it for a course at Columbia University.

Taxi! was created using publicly available NYC taxi data--along with some help from the Google Maps API--to make sure the cars travelled correctly. The artists call the project a “breathing” map of the city in the project’s description, due to the way that the cities traffic swells and ebbs throughout the day.

There’s always some sort of wild speculation floating around about what to expect next from Apple. But, there also comes a point in time where the rumors start to validate each other and reach a critical mass that indicates there may be more than a little truth to them. We’ve reached that stage with the Apple iPad 3 rumor mill.

Various reports suggest that Apple will unveil the next generation iPad in March. Depending on the source, Apple may hold an event during the first week of March (or even the last week of February) to reveal details of the iPad 3, and the device itself could be available that same day, or shortly thereafter.

[Photo: John Amend, Cornell University]A new robot is able to grip and fire (...and fire) any handheld object, making it great for sorting objects, throwing away trash, and playing basketball. The robot was built by a joint team from Cornell and the University of Chicago and, as you can see in the demo video (below), it’s able to shoot some tiny hoops with impressive accuracy.

What makes the robot unique is its unorthodox method of gripping objects. Unlike many robots that try to emulate the grip of a human hand, the Universal Gripper operates using a balloon. By filling the balloon with sand or another granular substance and then sucking all the air out of the balloon, the gripper contracts around the object to grip it tightly.

[Photo: Adobe]With Photoshop CS6 expected to drop this spring, Adobe started posting weekly sneak peeks of Photoshop CS6's new features. This week, Adobe Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes demonstrated the new Content-Aware Move and Expand features.

Both features expand on the Content-Aware Fill Tool that originally appeared in Photoshop CS5. Content-Aware Move lets you draw a selection around an object and move it to a new place in the picture. Extend lets you expand objects in your drawn selection by dragging them.

The Asus Zenbook UX31E earned 4 out of 5 stars in our review and is ranked at no. 8 on our Top Ultraportable Laptops chart. It's a gorgeous laptop with a sleek, brushed-aluminum case--and it has good performance for an ultraportable. When it launched last year it listed for $1099, and prices haven't started to drop yet. Right now, though, the Microsoft Store has the Zenbook on sale for $949 (with free shipping).

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