The updated site helps design engineers find the latest lighting advancements, trends, and supporting product information in as few clicks as possible. A new featured products section has been added, including products from leading suppliers such as Philips Lumileds, Cree and OSRAM Opto Semiconductors.

There is also a new featured application, the Instrument Cluster Backlight, with a block diagram and other supporting resources. The articles section has been updated as well to include the latest lighting articles by Philips Lumileds, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, and Mouser.

“We always want to offer the newest lighting technology available from the world’s leading manufacturers,” says Kevin Hess, Mouser VP of Technical Marketing. “Our expanded Lighting Applications site makes it easier for engineers to identify the right lighting solutions for their newest designs. To keep you up-to-date on the latest technologies, we are frequently adding new products and technical resources to the lighting site, so check back often.”

Mouser’s lighting application training site is a comprehensive resource center spanning three areas: products, applications, and design engineering resources. The Lighting Product Selector Guide is arranged into five main product categories with a graphical interface to speed navigation. Engineers can quickly narrow down a set of products based on defined parameters/engineering standards geared to their specific design needs.

Duke Nukem Forever, Windows ME, Google Wave, and more!

Predicting the next big thing is never easy, especially when it comes to technology. It’s easy to lose count of the number of times Microsoft or Google have promised to create products that will revolutionize our lives. Granted, occasionally the corporate gurus are right – smartphones and wireless networks being two great examples. But for all the successful launches, there are as many products that don’t quite get it right. It could be a fantastic idea on paper, but when it comes to fulfilling the dream, they become nothing more than technology failures.

Following on from our earlier article way back in 2010 covering the 13 Biggest Tech Blunders of the Decade we bring you 15 more embarrassing tech failures that some companies would rather you forget. 

Did you own or ever use any of these tech blunders? If so, let us know in the comments below!

Tomorrow, Microsoft will announce the new Xbox. Rumor roundup ahoy.

The GP-LD10-30C and GP-LD15-24Care multi-use scenario LED drivers fit for a wide range of implementations. They can be used on vessels or vehicles and with power sources with fluctuating voltage.They have been designed to work well with solar panels for LED luminance. Included are many power and environmental ruggedness features to ensure maximum safety.

Both drivers have been designed built-in constant current design with buck-boost topology, and a variety of safety cut off features to withstand the harshest ripple in the supplied power. An integral component is the low voltage protector. If the input voltage is lower than the UVLO protection point, below the operational value, the device will shut down automatically thus saving the connected lights. Standard Short-Circuit Protection and Over Voltage Protection are also included.

They both have auto input voltage detectors. This ensures driver safety as it can detect 12 or 24V input. Reverse Protection is included to prevent accidentally connecting the power lines in reverse from damaging the driver by automatically disconnecting the current. The highly secure and rugged IP65 design exterior insures no ingress of dust and water as well as complete protection against contact. It also ruggedly operates at a wide variation in temperature, from -20 to 40oC.

Among those of us who grew up with the Internet, some have found unexpected, outsize benefits.

Luo Gang, who grew up in the Fujian Province in China, remembered only that his hometown had two bridges. He was abducted one day on his way to kindergarten and taken to a family nearly 1,000 miles away. His new family treated him as their own, but he still reviewed his old memories every night before going to bed, he told the South China Morning Post.

When he became an adult, he joined a Chinese website dedicated to locating missing children and submitted a rough sketch of what he remembered about home. Information from the volunteers, plus satellite images from Google Maps, helped him find his actual hometown, Guangan in the Sichuan Province, the South China Morning Post reported from Nhaidu, a Fujian news website.

The Internet is now awash in warm fuzzies from his story. Luo eventually reunited with his biological parents, who had worried about terrible things like whether he was well clothed and fed.

Luo’s story echoes that of Saroo Munshi Khan, who fell asleep on a train when he was five and was borne away from his hometown, whose name he didn’t know. A nonprofit group eventually found him and put up a notice for him as a missing child. When no one responded, the group, the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, adopted him to an Australian couple.

Khan grew up in Australia. But after college, he began looking for his hometown on Google Maps, searching for landmarks a five-year-old kid would know. Like Luo, he eventually found and met his birth family.

[South China Morning Post]

Using data collected by drones, a research team is building 3-D maps of Norway’s geology to help companies track down hidden mineral wealth.

Members of the center’s Virtual Outcrop Geology group are employing an octo-copter loaded with all kinds of sensors—high-definition cameras, infrared sensors, LIDAR scanners, etc.—to map the geography and geology of the Norwegian landscape from above. The group used to do this by sending teams out into the wilderness with ground-based laser scanners and other equipment to create digital maps of the terrain from the ground. But given Norway’s diverse geography, such ground mapping was often impossible, which forced the team to lease helicopters to capture what they couldn’t get themselves, often at very high cost.

The new drones can perform the same aerial mapping tasks as helicopters, quickly reaching high elevations and other inaccessible areas to generate 3-D terrain maps that can be integrated with data from geological and seismological studies to produce three-dimensional pictures of the Earth’s crust. These in turn can tell geologists a lot about where oil is likely to be hiding both on land and underneath the surrounding seabed.

And of course the drones can do all of this at a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional methods—which is one of the most promising aspects of UAS technology regardless of application. By putting the means to conduct aerial survey in the hands of individual users at a relatively reasonable cost, everything from wildlife management to geological survey to infrastructure maintenance has the potential to become more precise, more effective, and ultimately less expensive. Virtual Outcrop Geology’s work is a case in point—even if cheaper oil and gas exploration methods aren’t going to translate into savings at the gas pump any time soon.

[University of Bergen]

In the PDF archive of the January 2013 issue you can find:

• Windows 8 Hardware 
• How To: Install Windows 8 from a USB key.
• Samsung Chromebook Review
• Corsair Neutron GTX 480GB Review
• The 2013 Geek Quiz
• Head to Head: Spotify vs. Xbox Music
• Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro Review

It’s ‘Game-on’ between Sony and Microsoft.

Sony today provided a first glimpse of what its next generation PlayStation 4 (PS4) console will look like, though a quick peek is all you get. The reveal comes in the form of a 39-second YouTube clip that flashes between various different close-ups and a blurry shot of the square-shape console as the camera moves increasingly closer, though never coming into focus. Sony is planning to fully unveil the PS4 at E3 on June 10.

The timing of Sony’s teaser video represents a bit of gamesmanship, as Microsoft is set to announce its next Xbox console (codenamed Durango) tomorrow morning. Thus will begin the next-generation console wars, though it will be a war of words and speculation since both companies are planning to make their respective platforms available to purchase this holiday shopping season.

One of the big things gamers will be paying attention to during tomorrow’s announcement is whether or not the new Xbox will require an always-on Internet connection. Ex-Microsoft Studios employee Adam Orth ended up resigning after defending always-on devices on his Twitter account by talking down to other users.

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More pixels than you can shake a MacBook Pro at.

Samsung is taking high resolution displays seriously these days. How serious? Enough to launch a 13.3-inch WQXGA+ laptop at the Society for Information Display’s (SID) Display Week 2013 convention in Vancouver. That works out to a 3200×1800 display resolution, packing more pixels per inch (276 PPI) than Google’s Chromebook Pixel (239 PPI) or Apple’s MacBook Pro 13 (227 PPI).

According to Samsung, the high-resolution notebook can deliver 30 percent greater power savings than that of existing LCD tablet displays, a feat it accomplishes by decreasing the number of driver circuits, thereby increasing the efficiency of the LED BLU.

Beyond that tidbit, Samsung refrained from revealing any other details about its upcoming laptop model. The company did say, however, that it also plans to show off a 10.1-inch WQXGA (2560×1600) LCD for tablets, a Full HD 1080p (1920×1080) mobile AMOLED display with the world’s broadest color gamut, and an 85-inch Ultra HD (2840×2160) LCD TV panel with “extremely vivid color and low power consumption.”

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The Navy’s unmanned, autonomous combat jet demonstrator continues to successfully pass milestones for unmanned aviation

The X-47B is the Navy’s first modern unmanned fixed-wing aircraft to operate from a carrier deck and is currently proving out a suite of technologies that will enable a future program (known as Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike system, or UCLASS) to produce an actual unmanned, autonomous combat jet for Navy service. Critical to UCLASS are the precision GPS and relative navigation technologies aboard both aircraft and carrier that link the two together into a seamless system, and that’s what we’re seeing at work in the video below.

In the video, the X-47B makes two passes over the carrier deck before executing a couple of touch and go maneuvers, which are essentially aborted landings wherein an aircraft touches down on the carrier deck and takes off again. They are a typical training maneuver, used when a pilot is practicing landing approaches. In carrier ops touch and go maneuvers are quite a bit more significant, as pilots must quickly take off again if they miss the arresting cable on the carrier deck when landing (although technically this is called a “bolter” rather than a “touch and go).

The two initial flyovers aren’t just for show, however, and that’s perhaps the most interesting part of the this video. During the two approaches wherein the X-47B doesn’t touch down it is basically practicing its landing approach plus a “wave off” in which either the Landing Signal Officer on the flight deck or the aircraft itself decides the landing is unsafe. This could be because something on the flight deck becomes unsafe (a person or vehicle wanders into the landing area, for instance) or because the X-47B’s flight computers detect something amiss with the aircraft’s glide path or angle of approach.

In other words, those first two flyovers are testing the ability of the carrier and aircraft to talk to each other over the super-fast datalink that they share–which is really the linchpin of this system. And the touch and go moments show the system working spectacularly, putting the X-47B on the deck and then sending it skyward again off the other end. The Navy is still certifying the X-47Bs tail hook and landing capability on a terrestrial carrier simulator at nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay (the USS George H.W. Bush is tooling around at some undisclosed set of coordinates off the Virginia/Maryland coast so the aircraft can fly between the two), but by the looks of things it shouldn’t have any problem completing carrier landings–and its mission–once it is cleared to do so.

[U.S. Navy]