Swedish Women Invent Awesome Invisible Bike Helmet This will change everything, folks. A couple of Swedish women invented an amazing new bike helmet to address the issue of ugly, uncomfortable plastic things that are total fashion don'ts. A professor who served as advisor has already told them, "You're going to be millionaires," and they very well might. The concept seems pretty complex, but allegedly it works. It functions like an airbag in that it's a collapsable, inflatable thing, worn like a cowl neck or scarf, and it pops up over your cranium in the event of an accident — it looks like its triggered by impact and sudden flipping over the handlebars. Basically it's totally awesome and everyone will want one. It's called the Hövding helmet, and so far it looks like it's only available from Swedish, Danish, and other European retailers. Now you can go out on the town in your hippest garments and ride your Public Bicycle through the Mission whilst looking cool and without fucking up your hair. [Jalopnik] [TechCrunch]
Data export, delivered | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-12-06 | By Jo From time to time I get recruited to help someone export mail and contacts from one e-mail program and import the data into another. The fact that a civilian must recruit a geek to accomplish this seemingly mundane task speaks volumes about our industry’s sad history of data lock-in. Even for a geek, the solution can easily become a slide down a slippery slope. There’s no shortage of converters floating around on the Net, but it’s surprisingly hard to find one that will reliably and completely transform, say, WAB (Windows Address Book) to LDIF (LDAP Data Interchange Format) or CSV (comma-separated values). Back in 2002, I discovered that Mozilla’s mail program, now known as Thunderbird, could import mail and contacts from an Outlook PST file and then export the data as Mbox for mail and LDIF or CSV for contacts. It came in handy again this week when a friend wanted to switch from Outlook Express to Gmail. Uh-oh. With half the battle won, how to inject those LDIF files into Gmail?
Doorbell that tricks burglars into thinking you're home invented by schoolboy Laurence Rook, 13 By Lee Cain Updated: 08:20 GMT, 6 June 2011 Smart boy: Schoolboy Lawrence Rook, 13, invented Smart Bell, which calls your mobile when it is rung A schoolboy is on course for a £250,000 windfall after inventing a doorbell that fools burglars into believing somebody is home at an empty property. Smart Bell, designed by 13-year-old Laurence Rook, dials the homeowner's mobile phone when pressed, allowing them to talk to whoever is outside their front door. The device even produces a small amount of white noise to give any unexpected guest the impression they are speaking to someone inside the house on an intercom system. The invention, which uses an inbuilt SIM card and existing mobile-phone technology, would also allow homeowners to give instructions to drivers making deliveries at their property. Laurence has already sold 20,000 units to telecoms giant Commtel Innovate and is finalising a deal with an unnamed second company for a further 25,000 units.
Croydon boy Laurence Rook invents phone-linked doorbell 7 June 2011Last updated at 16:15 Laurence Rook came up with the idea when his school held a competition A 13-year-old boy from south London has invented a doorbell which calls the householder if nobody answers the door. Laurence Rook, from Croydon, said he got thinking about his invention after his mother missed several deliveries. The doorbell, with a built-in Sim card and an intercom, calls the householder if no-one answers the door within eight seconds, allowing the visitor to speak directly to the householder. Laurence has already received orders worth up to £250,000 for the product. A Dragons' Den-style competition at his school, the Trinity School, led to him developing his idea further - but he could not enter the competition as his working prototype was not ready in time. Laurence, from Whyteleafe, said: "It started over a year ago when my mum was expecting a parcel to be delivered. 'Treat myself' Laurence has received orders of £250,000
5 Top Tab Tips for Firefox Hello, my name is Carmen, and I am a super tab user on Firefox. Since my job is to give you some of the best tips and tricks for using Firefox here on The Den, I wanted to share my top tips for tabs. There are some settings in the Preferences window that I suggest you make sure are turned on (though there are more available that you may find useful.) Open new windows in a new tab: If you have a lot of sites open at the same time, a lot of windows can mean things get buried and are hard to find. And there’s more… If you’re like me, you probably run out of space on the Tab Strip quickly. For the advanced tab user, there’s also a Firefox Add-on that I find useful. See?
Windows Icons: Reference list with details, locations & images Good quality icons and images, especially ones with an alpha transparency can be time consuming to make, and are often also hard to find. One source of lots of high quality icons in a range of sizes is Windows. Windows 7 includes lots of icons which can be useful as the majority are available in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha transparency. You may have noticed that we use some on our downloads page — they’re handy to quickly indicate file type. Locations of common windows icons Reference list of Windows Icons contained in dll and exe icon libraries The numbers below each icon refer to the icon number of the file, and the number in brackets indicates how many variants of the icon there are (there could be up to a theoretical maximum of 20, with different colour depths and sizes. %windir%\system32\compstui.dll (Common Property Sheet User Interface) %windir%\system32\ddores.dll (Device Category Information and Resources)