Microsofts Surface Pro 3 is thinner and lighter than its predecessors, but its also harder than ever to repair.

While performing a teardown of the new Windows tablet , iFixit was unable to remove the screen without cracking it. The Surface Pro 3 has thinner glass than previous models, and as iFixit tried to remove the screen by heating the adhesive underneath, the resultant cooling process was enough to crack the display.

Microsoft went to great lengths to make the Surface Pro 3 super portable, thinning it down from the Pro 2s 0.53 to a mere 0.36 thickbut it seems the thinner glass does not bode well for ruggedness, or repair, iFixit wrote.

The Surface Pro 3 also uses much more adhesive inside compared to the Surface Pro 2, which instead used over 90 Torx screws to hold the innards in place. Even if you can pry the display open, the use of more adhesive makes the components even harder to swap out. According to iFixit, its nearly impossible to remove the Surface Pro 3s battery without severely warping it.

Microsoft tried to address concerns about the Surface Pro 3s non-removable battery in a question-and-answer session on Reddit last month. The battery can be charged five days per week for more than 4.5 years and still maintain more than 80 percent of its capacity, Microsoft said, and can be replaced for free if it fails during the warranty period. Outside the warranty period, Microsoft said it will replace a failed battery for $200.

In other words, dont bother trying to replace the batteryor any other componentson your own, and dont underestimate how much storage youll need in hopes of upgrading later. Like so manyother devices with ultra-thin designs, the Surface Pro 3s sleekness comes at a cost.

For comprehensive coverage of the Android ecosystem, visit Greenbot.com.

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Surface Pro 3 teardown shows the perils of sleek design: Thinner glass, harder repairs

BY MATT MENCARINI mmencarini@saukvalley.com 800-798-4085, ext. 5529

DIXON Work on the downtown streetscape project has entered its sixth week.

Peoria Avenue, between First and Third streets, will be closed as construction crews work on finishing curb and gutter work, sidewalks, driveways, light pole bases and water service installations, among other elements, according to the engineering firms.

Click here to see a map of the streetscape work and closed roads.

According to the firms,Wendler Engineering Services Inc. andWillett Hofmann & Associates:

First Street, from Hennepin to Galena avenues, will remain closed. Crews are expected to do sidewalk and brick work, with pavement installation beginning mid-week.

The south side eastbound lanes ofFirst Street, between Ottawa and Crawford avenues, will be closed for water main installation. The construction company will work with KSB Hospital to have access to the Commerce Towers parking lot at all times.

Ottawa Avenue, from Second to First streets, will be closed for continued work on a retaining wall.

Additional temporary road closure may be needed, according to the engineering firms.

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Downtown streetscape project enters Week 6 in Dixon

British video artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen is best known of late for the movie "12 Years a Slave," which won the Academy Award for best picture this year and earned him an Oscar nomination for directing. A much earlier and more experimental work by McQueen, however the video installation "Drumroll" stars in a new exhibit opening at MOCA Pacific Design Center on Saturday.

"Drumroll," which McQueen shot in 1998, is a triptych of video images depicting an oil drum rolling down a midtown Manhattan sidewalk, seen from cameras positioned inside the drum. As it bounces along 56th, 57th and 58th streets, the drum captures snippets of sidewalk, cars, foot traffic and bits of McQueen himself. Some of the individual shots are beautifully abstract, a whirl of muted color and geometric patterns. Together, the images covey an urban journey that is both intimate and disconnected at once.

The Museum of Contemporary Art's Bennett Simpson curated the exhibit. He called "Drumroll," which earned McQueen the 1999 Turner Prize for contemporary art, "a portrait of an experience of the city, and its questions go to how and who we are."

The exhibition also includes excerpts from McQueen's 1998 photography series, "Barrage," depicting portraits of 56 Parisian gutter barriers.

"Steve McQueen: Drumroll" runs through Sept. 21 at MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood; (213) 626-6222, http://www.moca.org

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'Steve McQueen: Drumroll' will be at MOCA Pacific Design Center

What do you get if you cross a cat with a theremin? Probably something a little bit like Mew. Mew is a furry interactive sound installation that purrs and responds to strokes with meow sounds that distort according to where your hands are. Press too hard and Mew will start to squeal and hiss.

Mew was developed as part of a collaborative project between students on different courses -- Design Products, Information Experience Design and Visual Communication -- at the Royal Collage of Art in London. The brief? To create a digital and physical object that responds sonically to people and its surroundings.

Emily Groves, Jackie Ford, Jakub Pollag and Paula Arntzen teamed up to create Mew, which is about the size of a window box (for plants) on stilts. The top of the box is covered with a furry material. As you approach the box, it starts to emit a purring sound in order to encourage passersby to draw near. If you stroke the fur, it will emit distorted meow sounds that are manipulated by the direction and sequence of your hand movements. There are four sound zones on the surface and the sound effect applied to the meow is dependent on how you move between them. So if, for example, you move your hand from one end in a straight line to the other, it will distort the sound in one way, but if you rub your hand back and forth over one half it will distort the sound in another way. These are played through speakers inside the box. Although the sound starts quite cat-like, as you can hear in the video it quickly starts morphing into more of a dinosaur-from-Jurassic-Park-esque squeal when you apply more pressure. Groves told Wired.co.uk that the sounds in the video are quite "violent" and that they've "tamed it down a bit to make it sound more like a cat".

Conductive thread sewn through the fur and connected to capacity sensors dictate the distortion of the meow sounds, while pressure sensors embedded in foam below the fur indicate when Mew has been stroked too forcefully. The components are run through an Arduino and controlled via a Mac Mini running a program called Max which takes care of the sound.

The idea came about when the aforementioned team was playing around with a gutter cleaner -- like a large pipe cleaner. "It was like a cat, but not a cat," explains Groves to Wired.co.uk. "We wanted to recreate that -- making an object that has lots of qualities of something but also having completely opposite qualities. It doesn't look anything like a cat, but it sounds like one."

Groves explains that they chose a grey fur for Mew because it most closely matched the colour of the conductive thread that they were using. "The thread looks awful in other types of fur," she says. As for the form factor: "We wanted it to be hand height but also look a bit awkward. At one point we wanted to give it a curved back but we thought it would influence the way you stroke it too much."

Mew has been shown a few times in public already and Groves said that the reaction has been very positive. "Overall it just makes people laugh."

"Some people have been a bit shocked or scared, but others have been putting their face on it! People generally warm to it and treat it a bit like a pet."

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Mew is part cat, part theremin

Rain gutter cleaning and gutter gaurds

By: dietzconstruct

Link:
Rain gutter cleaning and gutter gaurds - Video

In a recent tweet, MP Anil Shirole asked Punekars what changes they wanted in their city and got over a dozen replies

Last evening, Anil Shirole member of Parliment of the Pune Lok Sabha Constituency with the help of Twitter asked Punekars to contribute via suggestions on how to make the city a better place that will translate into the Pune Vision Document. In his tweet he said that the said document is in its early stages and would benefit greatly with peoples honest inputs.

His tweet got a lot of replies related to civic issues and general concerns such as that of traffic rules and environment. Out of the 15 plus replies that he got, majority of them inclined towards better roads and transport facilities and cleaning up of rivers along with planting more trees. There was also a call to make the city a safer place for women. Below are some of the suggestions that the Punekars gave

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Punekars contribute to the Pune Vision Document via MP Anil Shirole's tweet

Rusty Caldwell, parks foreman for the city of Westminster, bleeding air out of irrigation lines in Kensington Park on June 19. Kensington is one of three city parks in a pilot program replacing Kentucky bluegrass with a water saving native blend. (Austin Briggs, Your Hub)

WESTMINSTER The new grass coming up on the west side of Kensington Park isn't replacing a die-off it's replacing grass that was killed off.

Parks officials this year used an herbicide to kill the Kentucky bluegrass that had been there prior to planting native seeds including fescue, rye and Canadian bluegrass.

The new ground cover will conserve water and save the city money, said Jessica Stauffer, the community outreach coordinator for the city's Parks, Recreation and Library department.

"We went $200,000 over budget last year in watering costs for our parks," Stauffer said. "The native grass being seeded stays greener longer and means fewer taxpayer dollars used for maintenance."

In addition to Kensington, England and Oakhurst Park II are also being re-seeded in select spots totaling 8.4 acres away from playgrounds and high-traffic areas.

The new blend, which will grow between eight to 10 inches tall, won't need to be mowed because it will follow a natural cycle of dormancy and growth, said parks supervisor Jerry Magnetti.

"We'll do a second seeding this fall," Magnetti said. "It's a low-grow, low-maintenance seed mix that will fill in and look beautiful, especially in the fall and cooler months."

While it'll take another year or two for the grasses to establish, the goal is to see how this experiment works and perhaps apply it to a citywide program amid a long-term drought and rising water costs.

In 2005 the Department of Parks, Recreation and Libraries used 216 million gallons of water at a cost of $863,675 and in 2012 this grew to 319 million gallons and $1,362,975.

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Westminster parks eliminating Kentucky bluegrass in favor of native seeds

Tea and Charity...

1:26pm Tuesday 24th June 2014 in News

Guests Ron and Vera Smallwood enjoy a refreshing cup of tea

MORE than one hundred people attended the Blooming Great Tea Party, held at Heath House in Bromsberrow Heath.

The event took place last Sunday, June 22, at the home of Jan Long, to raise funds for Marie Curie Care.

Mrs Long said:" The day was brilliantly sunny and had people wearing sun hats or seeking a shady spot under the trees or gazebos, where they enjoyed cakes, cream teas and other refreshments.

"Sales of ice cream and chilled fizzy drinks were in great demand and younger guests played football, and an impromptu games of cricket. There was face painting, chess, draughts and even ludo!"

She added: "The music was a huge success with sounds to suit everyone, classical, jazz and pop, which had feet tapping and hands clapping. An afternoon of fun, music dancing and games raised the magnificent sum of nearly 1,400 with further pledges to be collected and all this will go towards the costs involved in caring for the terminally ill with round the clock nursing care."

Chairman of the local branch of Marie Curie, Bruce Foster, said that he had been delighted by the success of the event at which his team had worked so hard and "the results were reflected this magnificent achievement."

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Tea and Charity...

A Twitter campaign has convinced Halifax bureaucrats that red swings popping up across the city are not lawsuits waiting to happen, but a fun way to get in touch with your inner child.

When the wooden red swings first began appearing in parks and other public spaces earlier this month, city lawyers expressed concern that someone might get hurt falling off a swing and sue the city.

Suggestions that the swings be removed sparked a Twitter backlash last week with the hashtag #redswingfx.

Leave it to lawyers to forget what its like to be a kid! one Twitter user, Lisa Ladouceur, wrote.

The ridicule worked. By Saturday, the city was tweeting pictures of municipal executives testing the swings for safety.

Adam Hayter of Fusion Halifax said the swings were placed around the city as part of the 100 in 1 Day global initiative to improve city living.

We wanted to encourage playfulness, Hayter told CTVs Canada AM Tuesday.

Hayter represents the group that assembled the swings and hung them from tree branches, park gazebos and other structures with rope.

The group doesnt have a name, he said. It was inspired by RedSwingProject.org, which lists similar installations around the world, all executed anonymously.

The locations of the Halifax swings are not listed anywhere, so its up to residents to discover them.

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Halifax residents convince city to have fun with red swing project

Oil Cleansing Method Tutorial (Skin Care DIY): How to Get Fine Girl No Pimple Skins
Good skin care is a combination of healthy eating, healthy living, not stressing, drinking lots of water, eliminating junk, and keeping your feng shui #39;d and your name ste #39;d! Castor Oil Coconut...

By: EbonyJanice Peace

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Oil Cleansing Method Tutorial (Skin Care DIY): How to Get Fine Girl No Pimple Skins - Video