Radio waves are nice and all, but when you think that your Wi-Fi signal weakens when you go into another room, just think about what would happen if there were 30 solid feet of rock between you and the router. And if lives depend on your signal, what you really need is something for which barriers like that are no worry. For instance, magnetic fields, which “propagate” differently, and can be tuned to basically ignore intervening structures.

Think about it. A compass can “see” magnetic north through the entire world, there have to be other ways to use such unique properties. As it turns out, a company called Ferro Solutions is working on a set of communication devices that allows for interference-free exchange of information — though it’s not clear what kind of bandwidth we’re looking at.

The system relies on two or more stations being tuned to the same resonant frequency, and by a series of transduction elements, a radio signal can be converted into a series of magnetic oscillations, which would be detected by all devices on the same frequency. Could be useful for a lot of things — not least in the case of disasters, where rescue teams must stay in constant contact with the surface (and those in need of rescue) but often have a ton of interfering objects in the way. I’m looking forward to hearing more about this tech.

[image: Popular Mechanics]

Article courtesy of John Beck, from The Processor.

If you didn’t get invited to any good Halloween parties (or are just a complete misanthrope), then you might well be planning to spend Saturday night hunkered down behind the sofa with the lights off, hoping that sugar-crazed trick-or-treaters don’t suss you out and start making outrageous demands for confectionary and money in exchange for not smashing your windows or causing you actual bodily harm.

In case you do get rumbled, you may wish to follow Glenn Derene of Popular Mechanics’ lead and create some hi-tech surveillance pumpkins to capture the little darlings on tape while they ransack your house and/or break your legs.

Derene made himself two different video system sporting jack-o-lanterns - one with a cheapo infrared camera and receiver set and another with an Aavek Vue wireless camera system, which can be monitored remotely via a password protected website. Check out step by step instructions here. Take that you pesky kids!

[ PopularMechanics ]

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If you’re expecting bigger and better things from the Wii’s successor, you may be let down. Nintendo might be satisfied with what the current Wii is already able to offer. According to TechRadar and Popular Mechanics, the company’s creative mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto says, “With both the Wii …

Maybe I’m speaking for the minority here, but I have to get this off my chest: Project Natal is sorta “meh,” no? I attended Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards for a few minutes last night, and they had on display Project Natal. It was that paint-throwing game. Now, I know that’s just a tech demo, but I left feeling a little concerned about its future.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m an old school gamer who’s both afraid and annoyed by excessive change. I never bought a Wii for that very reason: I really don’t fancy flailing around like a fool when all I want to do is play a round or two of Street Fighter or whatever. (Admittedly, the Wii is fine for party situations when you’re all making fools of yourselves, and it’s about atmosphere more than anything else.) And while Natal—which always reminds me of Christmas for some reason—definitely gives off the initial, “Oh, that’s neat!” feeling, I really can’t see myself playing an entire adventure game using it.

At the event was Natal, of which we were not allowed to take photos or video of, and a bunch of other inventions and whatnot that I can’t remember right now. I hung around for a hot 20 minutes, and the Natal demo was the same one that was shown at E3. You know, the one where you move your on-screen avatar to throw paint and whatever. And hey, it worked as advertised: you move your arm this-a-way and your avatar moves right along with you. It’s damn near 1:1.

So again, the tech behind Natal is great. I’m just worried about the implementation.

How many Wii games do you know that made real, clever use of the controller? How many shooters have tried to replicate the precision of a mouse and keyboard by having you move the controller in 3D space? What’s going to make Natal so different? At the very least it’s going to be a little while before we see the project’s Super Mario 64, something so radically different, if not radically better, than what preceded it.

I don’t know, I’m rambling here, and lost my point several sentences ago. I guess I can boil it down to this: Yes, hooray for Natal and the underlying technology, because, yeah, it’s pretty damn amazing, I’m just having a hard time seeing it develop into anything more than a glorified tech demo. How would you play a Halo or Tekken with it?

Remember making that science experiment where you have to drop a contraptions that houses an egg? Oh yeah. It’s a classic. Well, the geeks at Popular Mechanics did a similar thing expect with a Dell notebook, a Nikon camera, and a Nokia cell phone. Results? The notebook fared a hell of a lot better from an eight foot drop than the pricey Durabook I tested and broke.

The original article is worth your time but the skinny is that tennis balls and foam board was used to protect the notebook from an eight-foot drop. The end product doesn’t look that bad either. For the cell phone, an off-the-shelf food vacuum sealer created a water-tight casing that works but also seals in the power outlet. Both those solutions saved the devices. The camera didn’t follow the same path though.

The Coolpix camera was encased in a water-tight enclosure made out of PVC for the zoom lens, a plastic bag for the body, and a bit of foam taped onto the sides. The makeshift case kept the camera dry, but a drop test jarred the lens just enough to mess it up.

Anyway, give the whole thing a read. I am definitely going to use the phone trick next time I go fishing. It’s about time I use that vacuum sealer we got for our wedding years ago anyway.