In short, I don’t have a single bad thing to say about this $350 push mower. Usually reviews are supposed to include pros and cons, but I can flatly state this mower has none of the latter.

Both Jude and I can easily maneuver the Neuton around our just-over-a-quarter-of-an-acre lawn. It shipped with a bag, a mulching attachment, as well as a side discharge chute. (We almost always used the mulcher.) The battery life, which I was originally concerned about, turned out to be more than sufficient. In fact, we found we could do two mowings on a single charge. We were eager to keep up with the trimming because too-tall grass would challenge the Neuton 5.2 (not at all an issue at all with either of us). At first, we found the narrow mowing deck and wheel base annoying because we had to run back and forth across the yard a few extra times. Its 14-inch deck was measly compared to my old 21-inch gas mower’s deck. But what’s wrong with a little additional time outside and exercise? The narrow deck didn’t get a second thought.

My old gas mower weighed at least three times as much and consumed, on average, a whopping heap of fuel and oil. Not to mention the headaches and annual maintenance. In my eyes, the Neuton has already paid for itself in just one summer.

Did you know?

Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutants. Garden equipment engines, which have had unregulated emissions until very recently, emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, producing up to 5% of the nation’s air pollution and a good deal more in metropolitan areas.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the amount of pollution emitted by a lawnmower operating for one hour is equivalent to the amount of pollution emitted by a car driven for approximately 20 miles.

Iridium Satellite has unveiled its latest satellite phone, the 9555, which offers smaller dimensions and a form factor that is closer to traditional cell phones than its predecessor, the 9505A. The antenna is mostly internally stowed, allowing full extension only when the phone is being used. A speakerphone function, brighter screen, and mini-USB data port have been added, along with improved SMS and E-mail functionality.

In line with other products designed for exploration in environments far away from civilization, the 9555 is water and shock resistant and offers only basic functionality. The company has been able drop the device weight by 27 percent from the 9505A, with a 30 percent reduction in volume, potentially attracting more mountaineering or wilderness adventurers that count every single ounce and cubic inch that can be carried.

(via Electronista)

Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.

NASA tested the parachutes for the recovery system on its Orion crew exploration vehicle above the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona on July 31. The test proved unsuccessful when a test set-up parachute failed.

The failed parachute — called a programmer chute — deployed, but it did not inflate properly and failed to get the test article that simulated the Orion crew module into the correct orientation, altitude and speed for the test, causing the parachute system for the test vehicle to fail.

Photos and video of an in-flight tour of an Emirates Airbus A380, a passenger jet that can be configured to carry more than 850 passengers at a time. This particular plane had room for 399 economy, 76 business class, and 14 first class passengers (ensconced in suites, not just seats). There was a bar, showers for first class passengers, video cameras on the tail, nose, and underside of the plane that you can watch during the flight, and a relatively soundproof cabin (even during takeoff).

(via Kottke)

These houses are completely “off the grid�—they’re not connected to the utility companies. Yet the teams have to live like normal Americans. Using only power from the sun, they have to keep the TV on six hours a day, run the computer five hours a day, cook meals, wash dishes, do two loads of laundry a week, take four 15-minute hot showers a week, keep the temperature between 70 and 78 degrees, maintain 40 to 60 percent humidity, and recharge an electric two-seater car.

My three favorite things:

In short, they have to prove that living on solar power does not involve sacrifice.

…

The University of Maryland team installed a wide, bookcase-sized, indoor waterfall—not just to soothe the soul, but to pull humidity out of the air. It was a desiccant solution—like the “Do not eat� packets that come in your electronics, but in liquid form—that absorbs moisture. Drier air inside means that you don’t need to run the air conditioner as much. The saturated waterfall flows out the bottom to an outdoor evaporator; the re-concentrated solution is pumped back in to the waterfall, and the cycle begins again.

The sheetrock of this home’s walls was infused with paraffin (candle wax). Why? To absorb heat and liquefy during the day, and then release the heat and re-solidify at night.

The full report to be broadcast 9 a.m. EST, “CBS News Sunday Morning.�

TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz:

Then, in an unexpected move, Apple killed the 4-gigabit [sic] iPhone and slashed the price of the 8-gigabit [sic] iPhone by $200, to $399. Apple rarely cuts prices on products, preferring to introduce replacements and discontinue previous models.

The move will add more evidence to the speculation that the iPhone, while causing quite a buzz, may not be selling as rapidly as some optimists had expected.

There is no need for speculation. We know exactly how well the iPhone has been selling, because Jobs said so on stage today: they’re on track to sell their millionth iPhone some time this month. That’s a good number. Earlier this week the news hit that the iPhone outsold every other smartphone on the market in July.

Apple didn’t cut the price because demand is low — they set the debut price ridiculously high because demand was ridiculously high. I suspect that for the first few weeks, they were selling iPhones as fast as they could make them. Apple’s being aggressive, not defensive. (And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.)

One of the first posts, “New Space“, shows off Wall Street On Demand’s newest digs. The company is growing at a sizable pace, and overflowing into this new office was natural — or so I’m told (I started here just days after the official move-in). Our creative director said:

It was interesting to take an IA perspective to physical architecture and design the space from a usability perspective. Our goals were to foster communication, help make new relationships, provide quiet in the storm, and give people a workspace that was professional (sorry, no dot-com foosball tables) while being adaptable and flexible to the myriad of uses that our team finds for their space.

We tried for art gallery + laboratory + library.

Check it out.

“A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection.

Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds. Apparently, ‘the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt’s PC.’”

Thanks to Mike G., in my office, for passing this around.

Another cool thing about the casing is that if you hold the iPhone correctly in bright sunlight, you can shine the reflective Apple logo onto a wall like the Batman symbol. I played around with this for about 20 minutes on the seatback in front of me on a recent plane ride. The person next to me didn’t get it.

I’m still laughing. This guy cracks me up.

I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a social networking guy. I spend way too much time in front of a computer normally — I don’t need to stick around and see who’s doing what. Believe me, I’m not being nasty; it’s just not my thing. But, it’s my nature as a web designer to want to know what is the draw. Is the site really cool? Is it some über-app linking people across the globe? Is it easy to use?

At first I laughed at them. My wife — and so many of my family and friends — were spending their time searching Facebook profiles. The laughter got louder and more frequent, until a few days ago. Jude hurried me into our home office to see her latest Facebook contact: the mother of one of her childhood friends from Zimbabwe. Let me repeat that in some other terms. An older woman entering the prime of her life having lived her entire existence in the rural farming nation in the breadbasket of Africa has a Facebook account. A country where inflation is now 10,000% and Internet access is as common as seeing a Jackass penguin riding the subway in New York. The real kicker is she’s not the only one. There are hundreds from Zimbabwe alone, not to mention South Africa (where things are only a little better).

Yesterday, ComScore released statistics on Facebook’s success in the past year.

In the months prior to allowing open registration, Facebook.com’s traffic hovered at approximately 14 million visitors per month. However, after Facebook opened its doors to the general public, visitation accelerated to reach a level of 26.6 million visitors in May 2007, up 89 percent versus the same month last year and 100 percent versus September 2006.

…

The most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent), while 12-17 year olds grew 149 percent and those age 35 and older grew 98 percent.

181 percent in 25-34 year olds. Absolutely remarkable. Now, before we all jump up and down, CNET.com reminds us:

It should be noted that any Internet statistics still ought to be taken with a (small) grain of salt. The industry hasn’t yet come to a concrete conclusion on which methodologies work best, and so many Web stats firms, ComScore included, have taken some criticism in recent months.

Here are some more statistics from ComScore’s website.

Part of the mystery behind their success is Facebook originally only allowed Harvard students and a few other elitist schools to register. They then expanded to allow corporations and colleges from around the world. It wasn’t until last year when they opened registration for everyone. And this is when the deluge of traffic began.

I’ll be watching closely to see how Facebook handles the pressure of nearly 16 billion page views — and growing– per month.

Amidst all these statistics, the one that truly stands out for me is Average Minutes Per Visitor. In February 2007, that number reached 200. Two hundred average minutes per visitor. Do Facebook users have jobs?

Google Blogoscoped has the rundown.

I say what he says:

“One way to judge the scope of an app is to think about how much time you’re intended to spend using it. There’s plenty of room for apps you use here and there for a few minutes at a time, or which you launch just once or twice a week. There’s hardly any room at all, though, for apps you work in for hours at a time, every day.

By this measure, Coda, the new app from Panic, is an epic.”

Kudos, John.

“Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month.”

Filo’s full post at yodel.yahoo.com.

There was a YouTube video (which now appears on Han’s website, too) going around a few months ago that showed Jeff using “blob” — an interactive lava lamp application — as well as a photographer’s lightbox and 3-D Google Maps interaction. There’s no mouse. The multi-touch sensors interpret finger tips and “gestures” as input. For example, a small counter-clockwise circle gesture instantly creates a context menu of sorts anywhere on the screen; say goodbye to the File Edit View menus ever-present in today’s standard interfaces. Using your index finger and thumb, moving them away from one another instantly zooms out on an object, and pinching them together zooms right back in. Han kept repeated it was “intuitive” for users to walk up and start using the MTMU screen, especially the Google Maps application, because it was so similar to a real paper map. Drag, pan, zoom, tilt, scan — all possible with quick finger gestures. It certainly looks easy enough, but then again this is the guy that actually invented the thing.

“Multi-touch inherently implies multi-user,” Jeff said. During his demonstration, two sets of hands were working with the 8′ screen simultaneously. Cool.

Where this is going is limited only by imagination. It’s such a new toy here at the Weapons Station that everyone’s chomping at the bit for a chance to play with it. When things cool down and we start designing actual applications is when the real fun begins. Watch this space.

On a related note, regarding Apple’s new OS, I read this a while back:

“I’d love to see some implementation of Jef Raskin’s ‘interfaceless interface’ principles in Leopard as well. For instance, if you sit down at the computer and start typing ’59 x 20′, the calculator should just automatically pop up and compute it for you. Same thing if you type something like ‘Dear John’; your word processor should pop up and begin a well-formed letter.”

Not a bad idea while we still have a keyboard and mouse.