project

Google's sister company is to build a mini-city in Toronto that includes a range of technologies built into the infrastructure. It's designed partly to help locals and partly as a test bed for new technology. The 68-acre project on the Lake Toronto ... waterfront is led by Sidewalk Labs - a spin-off company that's owned by Google's parent company Alphabet. It's a partnership with the city and won't involve Google owning any land or acting as a landlord, though Google will move its Canadian headquarters to the area. It'll be part of a wider regeneration project covering 800 acres. Free Public WiFi ... (view more)

A computer processor manufacturer is working on chips to implant into human brains. It could dramatically improve life for people with spinal or brain injuries, but is years from becoming a reality. The project is a partnership between the ... University of Washington's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and ARM, a company which dominates the market for processors in mobile devices. It will build on existing technologies which can read signals in the brain and then wirelessly transmit them to nerve stimulators, allowing people to control their hands and arms despite suffering from ... (view more)

Workrave 1.10.1 Do your wrists get sore from too much repetitive movement while typing that long document? Workrave is a freeware program that locks down the computer for a while, thereby preventing repetitive stress injury. http://www.workrave.org/ ... GanttPV 0.12j GanttPV is project scheduling software which aids in project management by helping to manage tasks. If you use Microsoft Project, you can also export from GanttPV to Project at a later time if desired. http://www.pureviolet.net (view more)

A new project aims to use cellphones to give pregnant women in developing countries a lifeline. It's designed to tackle a problem of a reported 300,000 women each year dying during pregnancy or childbirth. The Zero Mothers Die project aims to use ... the cellphones in two ways. The first is as a way to send text and voice messages during the pregnancy, giving health information and tips. That's something that could be vital for women who don't have access to regular medical attention or the ability to read health advice online. The second part of the plan is that the phones will come ... (view more)

Kickstarter, a popular site for raising money for technology and art projects, has been hit by hackers. The site says no credit card information was compromised but warns users to review their passwords. Kickstarter is a popular "crowdfunding" web ... site. It lets members of the public pledge money towards a project, usually as a pre-order for a finished product; the pledgers only have to hand over the cash if the project reaches a set funding target. The most successful such project was Pebble, a wristwatch device that used Kindle-style electronic ink to display information from a ... (view more)

Dear Infopackets Readers, I'm pleased to announce that our website relaunch is now complete. Unfortunately, the transition did not go as smoothly as anticipated. Shortly after the new site went live, the server was maliciously attacked and the ... databases became corrupted. There were also 185 (or so) documented bugs I needed to correct over the last month, before giving this official 'go ahead' announcement. This is described below. A Bit of History This project officially began shortly after April 2011, coinciding with Google's algorithm change which dropped our web traffic and ... (view more)