RTFA: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/9VBatter…

With just two parts your Arduino goes portable, powered by a 9V battery. Note that these connections are the same ones you’d use to make a plug to connect to a solar cell array, a car lighter plug or a larger battery.

You’ll need a 9V battery clip, a 2.5mm power plug, a soldering iron and some solder, and optionally a small piece of heat shrink tubing.

Okay – I’m going to stop raving about the Arduino eventually, but right now I wanted to share a picture of my 9v batter adapter. If you’ve been following the exploits of my infrared receiver, then you have watched the project increase in complexity. The software is totally cool, the breadboard has been exchanged with a protoshield, and now I have gotten rid of wired power (no USB cable, no 9v AC/DC adapter).

That’s right – this little computer is totally portable now! w00t! It behaves just like it does when it’s plugged in.

This gives me an idea: now that I can carry this thing with me, what about an arduino tv-b-gone? hmmmmm… I’ve found this code, but it’s pretty ugly… Maybe that would be worthy follow-up project for my IR decoder.

RTFA: http://www.csiro.au/news/TelescopeNetworks.html

Last week a CSIRO telescope near Coonabarabran NSW was used simultaneously with one near Shanghai, China, and five in Europe to observe a distant galaxy called 3C273. “This is the first time we’ve been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart,” Dr Tasso Tzioumis, VLBI operations and development manager at CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility said. “It’s a fantastic technical achievement, and a tribute to the ability of the network providers to work together.” Data from the telescopes was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second – about ten times faster than the fastest broadband speeds available to Australian households – to a research centre in Europe, where it was processed with a special-purpose digital processor. The results were then transmitted to Xi’an, China, where they were watched live by experts in advanced networking at the 24th APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting.

In short: previous, very long “exposure” snapshots can be taken in real-time.

RTFA: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/60752,storm-worm-bot…

The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world’s top supercomputers.

That’s the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet non-stop for the past three months. Despite the wide ranging estimates as to the size of the botnet, researchers tend to agree that it’s one of the largest zombie grids they’ve ever seen — one capable of doing great damage. “In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away,” said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. “If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It’s very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there’s not much we can do about it.”