In Mac OS X Lion, Apple reversed the scrolling direction. “Natural Scrolling” means that you are now moving the content instead of the scroll bar.

It took my brain a week to get used to it and now it completely makes sense to my muscle memory. In fact, on my Windows PC at work, my brain went nuts trying to go back to the old way. I dusted off the AutoHotkey scripting environment and wrote a script that reverses scrolling direction.

WheelUp::
 Send {WheelDown}
Return

WheelDown::
 Send {WheelUp}
Return

Thanks to How-To Geek for the solution.

Discovery News on a USB-charging camp stove:

This stove has design, function and engineering packed into a small package. Roughly the size of a large plastic water bottle, it works by harvesting the heat energy from  burning wood to create electricity to power a small fan; the fan increases the efficiency of the wood combustion generating even more heat and energy. The extra heat increases the boiling/cooking potential on top of the stove, while the extra electrical energy can be used to power an LED light or charge a USB device.

This is the kind of survival gear that I can get into.

You are in charge of managing the electric power grid with its cycles of spikes and surplus. How do you even it out? Well, why not use the large batteries that exist within every electric vehicle?

Katie Fehrenbacher for GigaOm:

The power grid is in a constant state of flux, and utilities routinely have to manage supply and demand to keep the grid balanced. But since there isn’t much energy storage attached to the grid, utilities sometimes have to do this by taking measures such as firing up diesel generators on demand. But dozens of electric vehicles plugged into the grid, and managed properly, could provide these services. At the same time, utilities could pay the car owners involved in these projects, and the car owners could recoup some of the cost of electric cars, which are still pretty expensive.

She also mentions how Tom Gage, the guy behind the Tesla Roadster drive train and other significant EV technologies, has a new company called EV Grid that will tackle these Vehicle to Grid (V2G) issues.

A great primer into Objective-C categories by Mark Dalrymple for The Big Nerd Ranch:

Objective-C categories are cool. They allow you do something that you can’t do in most compiled languages: add new methods to existing classes. You can even add methods to classes that you didn’t write.

Suppose you wrote some code to translate an ordinary string, like “Hello, perhaps I could enjoy a bit of your delicious sandwich over there?” to LOLcat speak, like “I can has cheezburger?”

Marco writes on the Instapaper blog:

The Instapaper “Read Later” bookmarklet is now redesigned as a faster, more compatible full-page overlay that’s easier to see.

I use Instapaper all the time to save web articles for reading later and for referencing in an article. The bookmarklet gets used a lot.

Developers like Marco who obsess over their products to make them better get high marks in my book. Bonus points for not having to update the bookmarklet. The “old” bookmarklet gets the new features automatically.

Patrick Rhone at Minimal Mac:

“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.

“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shrek will come back on in a few minutes” I say.

“Did it break?”, she asks.

What we as an older generation know as TV makes no sense to the newest generation. So what DOES make sense to them? Beatrix shows us at the end of the article.

Nic Halverson at Discovery News:

At the end of a 59,652-mile-long, carbon-nanotube cable, there would be a counterweight floating in space and anchoring the assembly connected to the ground terminal. Passengers would travel from terra firma to a spaceport research center equipped with residential facilities located 22,369 miles above the Earth’s surface.

As a fan of Science Fiction, space elevators sound absolutely amazing. But every time I read about them, my mind sees the cable breaking with one end floating off into space and then 10,000 miles of carbon-nanotube cable falling to earth pummelling the spaceport and the 500 or so miles around it.

What can be done to mitigate this risk? It seems to me like an overwhelming investment in something that could quickly fail.

(Image credit: NASA)

This is the best laugh I’ve had all day. Turnabout is fair play.

Brian Vastag for the Washington Post:

Among the facilities available: A space shuttle launchpad, slightly used; a giant crawler for moving rockets, still servicable; two enormous mobile launch platforms; two space shuttle maintenance hangars; a 15,000-foot concrete runway, one of the world’s longest; and the blocky, 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building, with four soaring rocket assembly bays — and no waiting.

Such a shame, indeed.

(via 512 Pixels)