From Engadget... of course... A robot that consumes flies and uses their consequential energy, if you will, to power itself. Ummm, wow, and you thought your teenager's feet smelled bad:

We know what you’re thinking. A robot that totes around human sewage, digesting living beings for energy? What, you’re not inexorably excited about this? The EcoBot II (ah, what a benign, nonthreatening name) is fed flies into 12 sewage-based bacterial fuel cells, which break them down, digest them, and use the electrons released as current. And we don’t wanna hear no jibberjabber about how it’s only a matter of time before these bots turn on their human masters, because if you’re gonna go, what’s so bad about being slowly digested in human feces by giant robot oppressors?

/me marks September 21st on my calendar...

On that day, the first three Star Wars films (Episodes IV-VI: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) will be released on DVD after having been digitally cleaned up. Lowry Digital Images assigned 80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage to take the original films to their DVD boxed set release.

from USA Today and Paul Thurrott via Scoble

The awesome and bloggerific KC Lemson points to a Knowledge Base article that describes how to tell Internet Explorer to leave your Office documents and files alone when you're opening them from a web server via hyperlink. We use SharePoint where I work, and it can be downright annoying at times when a document opens in-line in Internet Explorer when what I really want is for it to open in the application that was used to create it.

This is easy but good stuff - excerpt from the KB article:

To configure Internet Explorer to open Office files in the appropriate Office program by using the Folder Options tool:

1. Open My Computer.
2. On the Tools menu (or the View menu), click Folder Options (or click Options).
3. Click the File Types tab.
4. In the Registered file types list, click the specific Office document type (for example, Microsoft Excel Worksheet), and then click Advanced (or click Edit).
5. In the Edit File Type dialog box, click to clear the Browse in same window check box (or click to clear the Open Web documents in place check box).
6. Click OK.

UPDATE: The Genesis space capsule crashed in the desert after a parachute system intended to slow it's descent failed to deploy. The plan was for a helicopter crew to hook the parachute in mid-air in order to prevent the capsule from impacting the ground even under parachute speeds, but without the chute the capsule impacted at nearly 200 miles per hour.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is home to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Scientists there do incredible research about many, many things - including our sun and such important and fascinating things as the solar winds, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and solar flares. My stepfather pioneered the term CME and has dedicated years of work in the field. I have not had a chance to talk to him yet about what the loss of this experiment means to his colleagues, but I imagine it's a real heart-breaker. There is still some optimism that there will be usable solar matter collected from the mission, and my fingers are crossed.

At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here

I received an email this evening announcing that SharePoint Experts has just released PowerUndelete for WSS:

"Whenever someone deletes a list item, or a document from a document library, PowerUndelete captures it and stores it in an "Undelete bin". End users are empowered to "undelete" their own documents, saving the support desk from the trials of recovering files and list items from database backups."

Very cool - this is promising stuff. I have not been able to try it yet (but may do so once I can see it in action). A video demo showing the product will be made available within the next day or two. You can get more information on the SharePoint Experts web site. They have a few different add-on enhancements available for SharePoint.

Lots of passwords to remember for web sites and Windows accounts? Now you can log into them using your fingerprint.

Microsoft has released three new devices: A keyboard with built-in reader, an advanced mouse with a reader to accompany it, and a simple reader device all on its own.

I'll be interested to see how these are secured.

See the informative animated flash marketing thing here.