“Apple’s ability to control the entire information chain, down to the point of limiting leaks, appears to be gradually slipping as it grows as a company.

Case in point are the numerous hardware and performance leaks surrounding the newly launched iPhone 4S. Little did we know that several weeks ago we were staring at photos of the 4S’ PCB, and more recently we’ve seen the first performance results from Apple’s first A5 based smartphone thanks to a few eager users around the web.

We’ve compiled these results here from various sources (all linked below) and compared them to our existing database of tests.”

“This ain’t no fixie with a minty fresh paint job, this is the Faraday.

Built for the Oregon Manifest design competition, ideas factory Ideo teamed up with bike builders Rock Lobster Cycles to produce this retro-technotastic electric bike.

Everything futuristic has been hidden inside the frame: those parallel top tubes hold a series of lithium-ion batteries which juice up the front-hub motor — all controlled from the green box tucked beneath the seat cluster.

Those two prongs up front serve as built-in headlights and the base of a modular racking system, letting you swap out various carrying mechanisms like a trunk or child seat with the pop of a bolt.”

धन्यवाद!

Gracias!

Salamat!

感謝!

Terima Kasih!

ধন্যবাদ!

Bedankt!

Dank!

Grazie!

This is the 1,000^th post on Mostly Tech – and what you see above is the least of the different kinds of thanks I have to dole out (sorry for the languages I missed) given the amazing diversity of my e-mail subscriber readership only, spanning around 16 different countries! It feels like a microcosm of the whole world!

Started on 9^th August 2009, with the universal and humble “Hello, world” post, Mostly Tech have come a long way in the last couple of years in terms of it’s content and appearance. When I started, I never even imagined that someday I will post my 1,000^th one – but here I am!

Unlike most blogs – the unique “personality” of Mostly Tech is devoid of a real “person” – the blogger. That’s because I do not consider my identity as important here – I don’t even write anything original in my posts apart from the titles. But if you had been a regular reader, you would already have formed the impression of a personality based on the topics of my posts. That is me!

Mostly Tech is a mirror through which you can see a reflection of me, my interests, my high regard for science and technology, my amazement at all the ongoing researches and innovations, my occasional brush with humor, my desire to share what I like and my insatiable curiosity to know more, and more, and more…

That sharing part is a hard job though (takes at least 4 hours per day on an average) – but your interest in it makes it worthwhile! Thanks for your continued patronage – hope you will continue your visits here.

Lastly and most importantly, I would like to extend my thanks to WordPress for this rent-free prime real estate along the information highway, without which Mostly Tech could never have existed.

“All it took was a little love from Sony Ericsson and now CyanogenMod’s latest official release includes support for a happy cohort of 2011 Xperias as well as the X8.

The same goes for Samsung, which doled out a free GSII and some employment and now finds that the Galaxy smartphones are on version 7.1′s list too.

Wondering if your particular Droid, Optimus or Incredible can run the cyan shade of Gingerbread and its attendant perks?”

These are the phones that have been added to the list that can now run CM 7.1:

• HTC Desire S
• HTC Incredible S
• HTC Incredible 2
• LG Optimus 2X and T-Mobile G2x
• Motorola Backflip (Motus)
• Motorola Cliq / Cliq XT
• Motorola Defy
• Motorola Droid 2
• Motorola Droid X
• Samsung Captivate
• Samsung Fascinate
• Samsung Mesmerize
• Samsung Showcase
• Samsung Vibrant
• Samsung Galaxy S
• Samsung Galaxy S2 (multiple carriers)
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X8
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Play
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray
• Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc
• ZTE V9

“Google has released an early version of Dart, a new programming language designed to take some of the pain out of developing applications for the Web. But while it’s an evolutionary improvement on JavaScript, Dart faces a hard uphill battle for acceptance.

Dart is an object-oriented, structured programming language designed to ease some of the problems that developers run into writing large Web-based applications. It has a structure that will be familiar to most developers who have worked with JavaScript.

But Dart is more easily organized into smaller methods and objects than in scripting languages, so as to avoid monstrous monolithic blocks of code that are difficult to maintain. It’s also designed to be more self-documenting (in the tradition of Python).

On Google’s Chromium and Code blogs, Google Dart team software engineer Lars Bak wrote,“Generally, the contracts with other parts of an application are conveyed in comments rather than in the language structure itself. As a result, it’s difficult for someone other than the author to read and maintain a particular piece of code.””

Care to guess how this truck is moving at all without a front wheel?

“Here’s a fascinating video in which Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how dishonest many conflict photographs are.

Salvadori spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem, studying the role photojournalists play in what the world sees.”

“The Braille system has allowed blind people to read the written word since 1825. Unfortunately, Braille doesn’t translate well to the glossy smooth surfaces of modern touch screen tablets and phones. A new app thinks it can change that…

The new app was created by NMSU undergraduate Adam Duran, Stanford Assistant Professor Adrian Lew, and Stanford Doctoral candidate Sohan Dharmaraja as part of the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center’s (AHPCRC) annual two-month summer immersion course. It allows the blind to use tablets via the Braille eight-button keyboard but with an important twist.

Instead of requiring the user to find virtual buttons on a glass surface (how frickin’ impossible is that?), the individual keys orient themselves to the correct finger whenever the user touches the screen. “They’re customizable,” Dharmaraja said in a press release. “They can accommodate users whose fingers are small or large, those who type with fingers close together or far apart, even to allow a user to type on a tablet hanging around the neck with hands opposed as if playing a clarinet.”"

“UC-Davis researchers developed a lens that’ll turn your iPhone or any camera-enabled smartphone into a 350X microscope.

The mod is a simple 1-mm ball lens mounted in rubber that’s taped to your phone’s camera. It costs about $30.

Besides its obvious uses in the classroom and research field, this basic lens could be a useful tool for doctors in impoverished areas.

It’s resolution of 1.5 microns is sensitive enough that doctors can use it to view red blood cells and diagnose blood diseases like iron deficiency sickle-cell anemia.”

Medicine

Bruce A. Beutler

Jules A. Hoffmann

Ralph M. Steinman

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 was divided, one half jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity” and the other half to Ralph M. Steinman “for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 was divided, one half awarded to Saul Perlmutter, the other half jointly to Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 was awarded to Dan Shechtman “for the discovery of quasicrystals”.