TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Cisco is shutting down a business unit that it bought for over half-a-billion dollars: the Flip camcorder division.

That’s a shame, considering how high the Flip was flying a few short years ago. It’s also a waste, considering that Cisco bought Flip from Pure Digital only two years ago for a cool $590 million. But Cisco probably had to act fast, because its earnings fell 18 percent in the second quarter of 2011, and CEO John Chambers had to show he was doing something decisive to stanch the flow.

Here’s a Dremel project in the making: Muuto’s Hang Around kitchen utensils are a wooden spoon and spatula with a slot in the back side, which lets you kind of clip them to the side of any pot or pan you may be using.

Designed for Muuto by Kibisi, these tools are clearly more about form than function. Whilst the spoon, for example, will clearly let you spoon things up, its fat-backed shape makes it useless for stirring and beating.

HTC’s recently released Thunderbolt smartphone has drawn praise for its powerful hardware and fast network speeds. But hundreds of users are having problems with the phone’s audio playback when using the Thunderbolt’s built-in video camcorder.

Across multiple Android smartphone-dedicated forums, users of the Thunderbolt are reporting almost inaudible sound playback when viewing videos taken with the new phone.

If Doc Brown ever made home-brew beer, he’d make it in something that looked like this, the Synergy Home Beer Brewing System. The all stainless steel setup will let you mash your own hops and barley, sparge the wort and then let it ferment. There are gas burners built in, and the high mash-tun lets you siphon the wort by gravity, meaning no pump is needed. Finally, all tubes are silicone, which won’t taint flavors, and won’t dry and crack with age or heat.

If the above paragraph leaves you confused, then don’t worry. You mightn’t be ready for this $1,900 setup, but you can do everything with stuff you likely have in your own kitchen (you’ll probably need to buy a big plastic bucket for the fermentation, though).

If you ignore power-plugs and adapters, then my posts here on Gadget Lab skew rather heavily to notebooks (the paper kind) and photography. So I am almost contractually obliged to write about this field notes notebook from Etsy maker fabriKate.

The book (which is not from the actual Field Notes company) is a way to record “EXIF” metadata for your film photos. After snapping a frame, you can write down the date and time, the frame number, the exposure and location of the photograph.

Formula One car-maker McLaren and bike company Specialized have teamed up to “reinvent the road bike.” Have they done this? No, but they have made a bike that looks pretty damn awesome: The Venge.

Trust a car company to concentrate on aerodynamics. You can’t make a competition road bike any lighter, thanks to strict UCI (the racing governing body) rules. But you can reduce drag, and McLaren says that the bike is 8% faster thanks mostly to this aerodynamic shaping.

by John Timmer, Ars Technica

Batteries are an essential part of most modern gadgets, and their role is expected to expand as they’re incorporated into vehicles and the electric grid itself. But batteries can’t move charge as quickly as some competing devices like supercapacitors, and their performance tends to degrade significantly with time.

C.H Hanson’s Pro-Sharp Finishing Pencil Carpenter may seem like a spoof from the pages of Mad Magazine, but it is in fact a real product. And better — as we shall see — it is a real product available to buy at Amazon.

This is no ordinary pencil sharpener. As you can see from the hexagonal shaft protruding from its rear, this sharpener is designed to be used in a power drill. If there was one thing that I wouldn’t fire up a drill for, it’s sharpening a pencil: just a few strokes with a knife or box cutter would do a better job, and probably take less time than just finding my chuck-key.

From the results of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, it looks like Android and Windows Phone 7 are tough nuts to crack.

It took only two days for hackers to crack into the Apple and Blackberry operating systems during the three-day Pwn2Own tournament last week, while Android and Windows Phone 7 models were abandoned and left unhacked by the end of the contest.

Is this because their operating systems are more secure? Yes and no.

“The survival of a target at Pwn2Own does not automatically declare it safer than a target that went down,” last year’s Internet Explorer Pwn2Own winner Peter Vreugdenhil cautions.

This morning, I wished for a peek inside the workings of Apple’s iPad Smart Cover. Barely hours later, I get an e-mail from iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric, pointing me to iFixit’s teardown. Amazingly, the step-by-step photo essay is even more interesting than I thought it would be. Did you know, for example, that there is something called “magnetic viewing film” that lets you “X-ray” anything with magnets inside?

Before we begin, I’d like to complement iFixit in its choice of color.