Hardware

The upcoming USB cable design is reversible, has no right-side-up or upside-down problems, and will click when you plug it in. Expect the new design on the market as soon as this year.

In the next year or two, researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should be able to answer one of the most fundamental questions bedeviling physicists: what is the effect of gravity on antimatter?

As we all learned back in high school, matter falls to Earth at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared, and according to the weak equivalence principle (WEP), that acceleration is the same for all bodies independent of their size, mass, or composition – in a vacuum, of course.

Linux Mint is the most popular Ubuntu based Linux distribution. Some would argue that it's even more popular than Ubuntu itself. Because of its Ubuntu base, Linux Mint shares a lot of the same great features with its parent distribution while offering a more traditional desktop design. One big feature that Linux Mint is missing though is the ability to create a Live USB stick with persistent storage. In this tutorial I'll show how to create a Linux Mint Persistent Live USB drive using UNetbootin and GParted.

Intel has announced an upgrade to its yet-to-launch Edison embedded computing platform which looks more like a ground-up rethink of the whole project, ditching the company's flagship Quark processor for tried-and-tested Atom and losing the tiny SD card form factor.

Saturday marks World Arduino Day, an eponymous celebration of the first decade of the open-source single-board microcontroller designed for do-it-yourself electronics projects.

Developed in 2004 for Italian design students, Arduino quickly became a favorite for builders and makers all over the world. With a built-in set of inputs and outputs that can be directly connected to sensors, Arduino allows for projects that interact with the environment outside the tiny microcontroller.

While connected cars with more digital components is inevitable, what this means is that it could open up more cars to hackers who could find a way to take control of your car or access it remotely. Apparently Tesla’s electric vehicles exhibit such vulnerabilities, according to Nitesh Dhanjani, a corporate security consultant and an owner of a Tesla vehicle himself.

Well, that was fast. We just had our post about the unfortunate trademark situation that Sparkfun found itself in, with 2,000 multimeters held by US Customs at the border because they happened to have a yellow outside, and multimeter king Fluke happened to trademark an aspect of that look. Fluke, of course, had no direct hand in stopping this particular shipment, but had (a) gotten that trademark and (b) years ago gone to the ITC to get an injunction against other multimeter makers.

Chris Clark is the IT director at SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado. He talked with Opensource.com community manager Jason Hibbets, late last year during the All Things Open conference about open hardware.

He answers a lot of awesome questions about open hardware, where it's going and where it's been. Plus, a big one for a lot of hardware makers out there right now: Why would I open source my hardware?

Apple is adding a cheaper 8GB iPhone 5C to its smartphone lineup. The new model first appeared on UK carrier O2's site, but has since been added to a number of international Apple Stores including the UK, Australia, and China. In the UK, it's priced at £429, £40 ($66 including sales tax) less than the 16GB model. At the moment, it hasn't been announced in the US where the price would likely fall somewhere around $499.

Google is unleashing its Chromecast video streamer in Europe today, nearly eight months after it debuted in the US. Costing just £30 ($50) in the UK or 35 euros elsewhere, it's cheaper than its competitors such as Apple TV or the Roku Streaming Stick, although currently there's less to view in Europe.

The 2-inch dongle plugs straight into an HDMI port on a TV and streams video from YouTube and Netflix along with Google's own music and movie services. In the UK, it will also support the BBC's iPlayer.