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Barnes & Noble is adding the Google Play store to HD versions of its Nook tablet, in a bid to counter slowing sales of its devices.

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Tuesday, selections include bitcoin millionaires ready to cash out, a prediction on the evolution of the PC and a look at why iPhones are named the way they are.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Michelle Starr/CNET Australia)

If you have some random bits of wood floating around that you just don't know what to do with, perhaps you could take a leaf out of Lucien Langton's book. The 25-year-old student at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL) in France has built a functioning printer for wood that uses fire as a medium.

FireWriter consists of a repurposed inkjet printer controlled with Arduino Uno, a calibration module equipped with an optical sensor and fitted with a Dremel torch loaded with a mixture of butane and propane that burns at up to 1200 degrees Celsius.

A black-and-white image has to be fed into Processing software; it then creates a Wiring script that's fed back to the Arduino unit.

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"FireWriter is a machine using conte... [Read more]

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Fancy LCDs drop in price equivalence from "nice new car" to "crappy new car."

It's been a long time coming, but Verizon Wireless customers should soon have another high-end Windows Phone 8 device to lust after. After the handset was spotted both in both the FCC's and Verizon's systems, noted leaker @evleaks has come through yet again with a new image of the upcoming Nokia Lumia 928 (formerly known as the "Catwalk").

An image of what could be the next-generation of the BlackBerry Curve running on BlackBerry 10 has appeared on the BlackBerryOS forums.

If BlackBerry's Z10 and QWERTY-keyboard equipped Q10 aren't enough for you, how about a successor to the venerable Curve series? This image popped up on the BlackBerryOS forums and purports to be an "R-Series" device that will fill the lower-end hole in the lineup, with 8GB storage, less RAM, the QWERTY keyboard you see and side mounted SIM and SD card slots. Meanwhile, BlackBerry Empire has posted a diagram of the supposed device which shows off the externally accessed ports and suggests a $300 - $400 off-contract price. The screen's blurred edges can be explained by the placement of serial numbers seen on earlier BlackBerry 10 developer units, however we may not know if there's truth to this rumor until the supposed Q3 / Q4 release window arrives.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Blackberry

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Via: NerdBerry

Source: BlackBerryOS, BlackBerry Empire

We already knew Twitter was planning on expanding its Card content to include app, gallery and product info. But the company apparently had another sweeping change waiting in the wings: a UI refresh for Android version 4.0 and up. The update, which is currently rolling out to users, aims to bring the 140 characters or less experience more in line with native Android design (hello! Holo). To that end, the new layout enlarges the size of tweets displayed in the timeline, incorporates long-presses for "quick actions," and adds an ability to swipe left or right to parse through navigation tabs. As for that new Card integration, it's live now, so users on Android, iOS and Twitter's mobile site should be seeing those tweaks soon.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

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Source: Twitter

Facebook is set to debut a special Android product tomorrow, and now 9to5Google has an early look at what we might see, courtesy of Evleaks. The screens depicted on renders of the so-called HTC First smartphone hardware being created by the Taiwanese company. The images show tweaks to the basic Android UI that include easy access to status updates, photo sharing and check-in functions, as well as an emphasis on images.

Africa is hungry for online content made on the continent -- and a number of startups are filling the gap.

Africa is hungry for online content made on the continent -- and a number of startups are filling the gap.

The nonprofit organization CyArk creates 3D digital images of the world's historic sites, but stores them on disk drives dropped each week into a bank security box. As the data is expected to grow to two petabytes over the next five years, the group chose a new archival strategy that includes stashing tape drives in a limestone mine storage facility owned by Iron Mountain.

You can use a terminal command to save generated previews of documents. [Read more]

Boxee TV has a new firmware update making its way out to its connected set-top boxes this week, which includes a number of big improvements including the addition of DLNA streaming. Spotted by GigaOM, the update also adds 3D streaming of content from Vudu, the video streaming service from Walmart, and changes to its TV guide and notification settings.

The OUYA Android-based gaming console is getting ready for its debut: the stated beginning shipping date for Kickstarter backers is March 28. At launch, it sill isn't clear exactly how many software titles the console will offer, but a new report suggests that at the very least, early backers will have emulators to play with on the small, inexpensive console.

The move to offer readers "unrivaled content" separate from the free SFGate.com appears to be an attempt to woo readers back to good old-fashioned print. [Read more]

GTC is far removed from the madness that is CES and Mobile World Congress.

Do you find yourself spending countless hours combing through image searches looking for GIFs of cats wearing sunglasses telling people to "deal with it"? If so, then your lack of productivity is about to become even more galling. Earlier today, Google announced the addition of an animated GIF filter that allows searchers to specifically weed out photos that move. To access this soon to be overused feature, click on Google's Search tools option and select "Animated" as your image type. While we'd hate to pull you away from your epic search for your next internet avatar, you could actually try doing something constructive, like studying the history of the GIF. Or taking a whack at spamming comments with GIFs from Knight Rider, like a certain editor that we know.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Google