Hardware

It appears that Butterfly Labs isn’t the only company having trouble making and selling specialized chips designed only to mine for bitcoins crazy fast. As Bitcoin buffs may already know, another rival firm, Avalon, has been having recent trouble getting its hardware off the ground.

Yifu Guo dropped out of New York University to start the company and Avalon was the first to ship a consumer-grade ASIC miner earlier in 2013. But while the company shipped around 1,000 miners earlier this year, it’s struggled considerably since.

For hobbyists and professionals, the electronic prototyping platform Arduino from Italy has been one of their best friends out there for developing quick projects. Its drawback? It is too expensive and not small or flexible enough for certain projects.

A university professor in Austria has released the video below, showing how he has automated a low-tech approach to bypassing the digital rights management system on the Kindle.

His name is Peter Purgathofer, and he’s an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology.

Samsung unveiled the long rumoured Galaxy Gear smartwatch at IFA in Berlin on Wednesday.

Confirming the abundance of rumours that have been hovering around for the last few months, Samsung's wearable device features a 1.6in 320x320 OLED display that acts as a second screen for owners of Samsung Galaxy devices. For example, notifications for things such as emails and text messages will pop up on the watch, saving users from having to dig their phones out of their bags.

An optical interconnect introduced by Intel on Wednesday may someday slim down cabling throughout data centers if the company can get enough vendors to mass-produce it.

Intel has announced the latest in its 10-year line of "Extreme" desktop processors, and the consensus view from the geekerati who have put it through its paces in prerelease testing is a collective "Meh."

As ExtremeTech, Joel Hruska's review of the new chip was headlined, "Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E review: Intel's Great Limp Forward."

Robots used in laparoscopic surgery are fairly commonplace, but controlling them is far from simple. The usual setup is something akin to a Waldo-style manipulator, allowing a surgeon to cut, cauterise, and stitch from across a room. There is another way to go about this thanks to some new hardware, as [Sriranjan] shows us with his Leap-controlled surgery bot.

Apple is rumoured to have teamed up with two Taiwanese suppliers to begin the making of its so-called iWatch wearable smart device, with plans to launch to market in the second half of 2014.

There are also mutterings that the Cupertino company will make a rather substantial 63.4 million of the smart watches in 2014, partnering with manufacturers Inventec and Quanta who will split the iWatch orders in a 60:40 ratio, respectively. If true, that sales figure would come close to Apple's total iPod sales from 2008 to 2010.

It's been a full week of Apple for me and an interesting one at that here at the Hess house. My family feels my pain. My new Mac mini is cool but I've discovered a few quirks with it that make me want my Windows system back. In all, I've almost duplicated everything from my old Windows computer to my mini, so there are only a few gaps that remain. In the midst of school starting, my own productivity needs, my birthday, and my daughter's birthday, and forcing myself to use the Mac mini exclusively, it's been a trying week.

In a tweet on Sunday, a Fox News reporter said Apple's upcoming next-generation iPhone will sport a significantly faster "A7" processor, while a separate chip will be dedicated to motion tracking.

Citing inside sources, Clayton Morris claims the so-called "iPhone 5S" will be powered by an Apple-designed "A7" system on a chip that is some 31 percent faster than the current A6 silicon used in the iPhone 5. In addition, mention of a totally new chip dedicated to "motion tracking" will be used to bring another layer of user interactivity to Apple's flagship handset.