Chromebox

The Asus Chromebox is a very small fanless, headless box that will go on sale in March for just $180. There’s a 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U (Haswell) CPU, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. On the connectivity side of things, there’s Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, 4x USB 3.0, DisplayPort, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and an SD card slot. Graphics-wise, the HDMI and DisplayPort are powered by the Celeron 2955U’s integrated GPU — which won’t be playing any high-res games, but it should be more than enough for full-screen HD-video playback. AnandTech reports that there will be Core i3 and Core i7 Chromeboxes as well, which will presumably push the pricing up.

Can sound kill you? The short answer is “yes”

150 decibels is usually considered enough to burst your eardrums. The threshold for death is usually pegged at around 185-200 dB

A passenger car driving by at 25 feet is about 60 dB, being next to a jackhammer or lawn mower is around 100 dB, a nearby chainsaw is 120 dB. Generally, 150 dB (eardrum rupture) is only achieved if you stand really close to a jet aircraft during take-off or you’re near an explosive blast.

If you actually wanted to intentionally kill someone with a sonic weapon, there isn’t a whole lot of research on how you would actually go about doing it. The general consensus is that a loud enough sound could cause an air embolism in your lungs, which then travels to your heart and kills you. Alternatively, your lungs might simply burst from the increased air pressure. (Acoustic energy is just waves of varying sound pressure; the higher the energy, the higher the pressure, the louder the sound.) In some cases, where there’s some kind of underlying physical weakness, loud sounds might cause a seizure or heart attack — but there’s very little evidence to suggest this.

So, there you have it: Sound can kill you, but not in the standing-in-front-of-a-giant-speaker-stack-at-a-gig.

New top-level domains could change how we surf the internet

A big name start-up called Donuts Inc. is finally getting a chance to test its great theory of the internet: URLs matter, and if Donuts just happens to get rich along the way, so be it. That’s the sales pitch, as the company rolls out the first seven of potentially hundreds of new top-level domains (TLDs), insisting that the new approach will change the way we use the internet. The new TLDs (sometimes called generic TLDs or gTLDs), which became available this week through dozens of domain sales companies, are: .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles, and .ventures. That .com of yours seems a little dull now, eh?

Carbon fiber 3D printer

Carbon fiber is one of the most prized construction materials available to a parts designer. It is also among the most expensive due to the painstakingly tedious process of molding or winding it. If, somehow, carbon fiber could just be printed it would be quite miraculous. To the delight of makers everywhere, the first 3D printer for carbon fiber was unveiled this week at the SolidWorks World 2014 conference in San Diego.

The company that makes the printer, MarkForged, claims its machine can produce parts with higher a strength-to-weight ratio than 6061-T6 aluminum. 6061 with a T6 temper is certainly not the strongest aluminum flavor going — and probably not the material chosen for the bulk of Ford’s new all-aluminum truck — but it’s the most commonly used aluminum, and still pretty tough stuff. In a rather surprising move, MarkForged’s founder, Gregory Marks, has named his new creation the “Mark One.” The machine runs either a 1.75mm fused carbon filament (FFF), or a 4mm composite filament (CFF), using quick-change extruder heads, and users also have the choice of printing with fiberglass, PLA (Poly lactic acid), or nylon.

How to install SteamOS in VirtualBox

Late on Friday, December 13, Valve released the first public version of SteamOS. It is essentially just a version of Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) that has Steam pre-installed.
It’s well worth installing SteamOS in VirtualBox. That’s what I did — and I’ve written a guide on how to install SteamOS in VirtualBox, if you feel like doing the same.

Grab the latest version of VirtualBox and install it (it may take some time.) Get SteamOSInstaller.zip from Valve. Download ISO Creator and install it. 

Extract SteamOSInstaller.zip into its own folder. Open ISO Creator. You can name the ISO whatever you like, just make sure you save the ISO in a sensible location. Select the folder that you extracted the zip file to. Hit Start and wait a minute or two while the ISO is created.

Now open VirtualBox. This bit is somewhat complex with lots of little steps and gotchas, so be careful. Create a New virtual machine. Give it any name. Type = Linux. Version = Debian (64 bit). Click Next. Pick any amount of memory (1GB is sensible if you’re just going to fool around; 4GB if you want to try out DOTA 2 or something). Accept the default options on the next few pages of the wizard, and choose “Dynamically allocated” when prompted. Pick a hard drive size of around 50GB.

Once you’ve created the virtual machine, select it on the right hand side and enter Settings. Click System and select Enable EFI. Click Display and select Enable 3D Acceleration. Slide the Video Memory slider up to 128MB. Click Network and select Bridged Adapter from the Attached to drop-down. Click USB and use the + icon on the right to add your USB keyboard and mouse (if applicable).

Finally, head to Storage, click the optical disc icon under Controller: IDE, then hit the optical disc icon on the right hand side (see image). Click Choose A Virtual CD/DVD Disk File, then find the ISO file that you made earlier. Click OK to return to the main VirtualBox interface.

If you receive an error at this point, it’s probably because you haven’t enabled virtualization in BIOS. Enabling virtualization is beyond the scope of this how-to, but if you Google the name of your motherboard and “how to enable virtualization” it’s pretty easy.

Start the SteamOS machine!

Now, click Start and pray. If all goes to plan, you’ll be greeted with a prompt that looks like the image above. After 2.0 Shell> type the following: FS0:\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX640. If you can’t type the backslash (\) for some reason (I couldn’t), change your system’s keyboard to US layout, then use the On-Screen Keyboard app to type the \. Press Enter, and you should be greeted with the first sign that you’re installing SteamOS.

From this screen, press Enter to begin the automated install. Don’t worry about the WILL ERASE DISK! warning — VirtualBox prevents SteamOS from changing anything on your local filesystem.

The installation process is automatic and takes a few minutes.

Once the automated install is complete the system will reboot and you’ll be greeted with the above screen. Select the second option, recovery mode. The system will boot up and you’ll end up at a Linux command prompt.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions

So that SteamOS is actually usable as a virtualized OS (clipboard sharing, shared folders, better mouse pointer integration), you must now install VirtualBox’s Guest Additions. From the command prompt type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one.

• mount /media/cdrom
• sh /media/cdrom/VboxLinuxAdditions.run

This will take a few moments to install, then type reboot and press Enter.

Almost there…

This time around, don’t touch the GRUB bootloader and your system will automatically boot into a graphical interface — SteamOS! Well, almost. You’ll be greeted with a login prompt. Keep Default Xsession selected. The username and password are both steam.

For some reason, the Return To Steam icon on the desktop doesn’t work; you need to click Activities in the top left, then Applications, and scroll down to Steam. The Steam app will update, and then you’ll be greeted with the usual login prompt. Log in, hit Big Picture in the top right corner… and voila! You now have a (virtualized) Steam Machine!

From this point on, you’re pretty much on your own. I haven’t explored SteamOS much yet, but to be honest it doesn’t look like there’s much to discover: Right now, I think it’s just Debian with Steam pre-installed. It’s probably a good idea to have SteamOS installed now, though, so that you can take a look at exciting features — such as local game streaming — when they’re rolled out in 2014.