Philippe Kahn describes the weather before the race.I took a serious look at the weather. What a mess! In 11 crossings I have never seen such messy weather patterns in the usually very predictable Pacific.

July 1st, 2009

The weather chart says it all. Instead of one beautiful strong, stable high pressure centered somewhere 800 nautical miles from San Francisco, there are now 10 different weather systems playing with each other. Yes, climate is changing! This makes it all the more interesting for the Transpac. We start Sunday the 5th at 1 PM out of Long Beach, California. I'd love to celebrate the 14th of July or Bastille Day in Honolulu watching the sunset by Diamond Head. But a lot has to happen before that!

The Pacific has been highly unusual over the last 30 days. In particular, sea level pressure has averaged below normal off the California coast and much below normal over the central Pacific, northwest of Hawaii. This pattern has resulted in a weak Pacific high, ridged in a north-south orientation.

That means that the wind has been a right-shifter along the California coast and weakened the strong North Westerlies that are typical of the first two days of Transpac. But, things may be changing fast.

My bet is that by the end of the week we will see consolidation of the high given the trends on the 500mb chart and as a consequence a more typical, fairly windy race. But it could go either way!

The Boat will make it to Long Beach this evening. The delivery team is making good progress.

Our goal for this race is the double-handed Transpac record. Last year we established a new double handed record from San Francisco to Hawaii. This year we start from Los Angeles.

Just two of us: Mark Christensen, VP of Engineering and myself, Chief tinkerer at Fullpower and 2250 nautical miles of open ocean between the start and Diamond Head!

Sailing Team:
Philippe Kahn
Mark "Crusty" Christensen

Boat Project management:
David Giles, Zan Drejes, Bruce Mahoney,

Onshore Pegasus Racing team:
Zan Dredjes, David Gilles, Bruce Mahoney, Mark Golsh, Jana Madrigali, Seth Larkin

Online Presence:
Caleb Dolister, Peter Spaulding, Arthur Kinsolving, Joe Dolister

Sailor's food:
Bonnie Willis

July 2nd,2009

Now we are running routes and the different forecasting models are very different as you can see from the chart. Wildly different. In fact I don't believe any of them. The great news is that the weather on the Pacific is settling. The upper level blockages are dissipating and we may be in for a more classic July North-East Pacific weather pattern.

I have to confess that I have been arguing with myself as to the playlists for the soundtrack during the next 8 days. Lots of deBussy, ravel, Faure and of course Iz!

The boat will make it to Long Beach today and I will post some pictures soon.

Philippe Kahn founded Borland, invented the Camphone, and decodes human motion. He's also a fellow outdoorsman, splitting time skiing Tahoe and sailing in Santa Cruz. He'll share his Transpac 2009 sailing race with us live from the Pegasus Open 50.
[Pegasus on Gizmodo, Pegasus]

Here's another clip from the Consumer Product Safety Commission that proves, once and for all, that it is not okay to point fireworks at family members. Happy July 4th everybody! [CPSC]

The Pentagon's wacky sci-fi department DARPA has been working on robotic hummingbird-based drones to serve as miniature spies. They're not nearly as agile or adorable as real hummingbirds, but DARPA is well on their way to achieving that dream.

Program manager Todd Hylton is aiming for "an approximately 10-gram aircraft that can hover for extended periods, can fly at forward speeds up to 10 meters per second, can withstand 2.5-meter-per-second wind gusts." Right now, though, the teeny robobird can only fly for about 20 seconds at a time. But with some hard work, some day we will produce a robotic hummingbird that will strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. Wait, is fear the right word? [Wired]

The official Gizmodo raceboat, the Pegasus Open 50, was originally rigged for reliability for global cruising. Going from CA to HI in a race requires more power. Here's a tour of the tech in the rigging, hull material and sails.

The video work is less than terrible, sorry, but hey, its a sailboat. I'm just trying to help you get your sea legs

Philippe Kahn founded Borland, invented the Camphone, and decodes human motion. He's also a fellow outdoorsman, splitting time skiing Tahoe and sailing in Santa Cruz. He'll share his Transpac 2009 sailing race with us live from the Pegasus Open 50.
[Pegasus on Gizmodo, Pegasus]

The official Gizmodo raceboat, the Pegasus Open 50, was originally rigged for reliability for global cruising. Going from CA to HI in a race requires more power. Here's a tour of the tech in the rigging, hull material and sails.

Bruce Mahoney, who helps run the team, is the guy walking me through the boat's features. The video work is less than terrible, sorry, but hey, its a sailboat. I'm just trying to help you get your sea legs

Philippe Kahn founded Borland, invented the Camphone, and decodes human motion. He's also a fellow outdoorsman, splitting time skiing Tahoe and sailing in Santa Cruz. He'll share his Transpac 2009 sailing race with us live from the Pegasus Open 50.
[Pegasus on Gizmodo, Pegasus]

We already knew pretty much everything about the Archos9 tablet netbook running Windows 7, but with nobody sure what kind of touchscreen the thing uses, we're left to wonder if we'd want anything to do with a resistive-touchscreen tablet.

Crave got a little hands-on with the svelte Atom-powered Archos9, and without even thinking about it, published their post calling it a fairly accurate capacitive touchscreen. That makes us happy: Tablets, especially a little guy like this 9-incher, need as accurate tracking as they can muster. Archos's previous "tablets," the Archos 5 and 7, used mushy resistive touchscreens that worked okay but are firmly last-gen right now, and we're excited to see a slick capacitive interface with the highly-touchable Windows 7 OS.

Yet in Archos's press release for the Archos9, they list the screen as resistive. Now we trust Crave, and we believe that they (like the rest of us) can tell the difference with each finger press. So what's the story here? Crave doesn't seem to have any idea; all the documentation says resistive, but it certainly didn't feel that way to them. This may seem like nitpicking, but it might be a dealbreaker for us. Handwriting recognition is far worse with resistive screens, they can only pick up one signal at a time (so multitouch is out), and the screens themselves are often much muddier or washed-out looking than capacitive.

So help us out, Archos. We want to like this thing, we really do, but we'd like to know what we're dealing with first. Anyway, full presser below. [Crave]

ARCHOS REDEFINES MOBILE COMPUTING WITH ITS TABLET PC

New Ultra-Thin and Ultra-Fast ARCHOS 9 PCtablet Delivers Full PC Computing, Video Conferencing and Access to Media on a Full Touch Screen Handheld Device.

DENVER, CO – July 2, 200Your browser may not support display of this image. 9 ARCHOS is leading the innovation charge in the MiniPC market with the introduction of the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet. This new PCtablet combines the performance of a high-end PC with breathtaking design, excellent ergonomics and an astonishing touch interface. It gives PC users an entirely new way to work, stay connected and enjoy the Web and digital media on an ultra-thin and extremely fast full touch-screen tablet.

The ARCHOS 9 PCtablet is the ultra portable PC; extremely thin, just 0.63", and ultra lightweight, less than 22.29 oz. The ARCHOS 9 pushes the boundaries of style and function.

With a full touch-sensitive 9" screen, users can enjoy a comfortable computing experience. The resistive screen allows emails and documents to be composed easily via a built-in virtual keyboard. The innovative optical trackball and buttons allows easy navigation on screen, and provides an uncompromised PC experience.

The ARCHOS 9 features the new Z515 Intel® processor, Microsoft Windows 7® Operating system and an integrated multimedia platform that uses WiFi 802.11b/g connection and Bluetooth 2.1 for extremely fast computing anywhere, anytime.

Additional software includes Microsoft Office®, Web TV & Radio, video conference, antivirus, parental control, photos and movies edition applications and more.

The ARCHOS 9 PCtablet will be available this fall, 2009.

Netbooks are netbooks. Usually based on Intel's Atom chipset, and generally not that fast. What you gonna do? Well, I upgraded the SSD in my Hackintosh. Not just to bump the drive from 32 to 128GB, but for SPEED.

The drive is one of few things easily upgradable on these devices. On the Dell Mini 9, its a matter of removing two screws on the back plate, and two screws that hold the drive in place (which, if you've never seen a netbook SSD drive before, looks more like a RAM module.) The 64 and 128MB modules take up the space reserved for the WWAN card, so don't go that route if you have WWAN.





While I was able to restore my Mac OS X Time Capsule backup, it wouldn't boot til I used the DellEFIbootmaker (allows you to boot into the drive you just restored) and then ran DellEFI to restore the partition to a bootable condition. Oh, the Leopard install process which you use to restore won't read off of a Time Capsule, so you have to copy the restore file to a USB drive before hand. Anyhow, none of this is the point.





Look at how much faster the writes are, especially the random ones. The only sacrifice you end up with is a bit of big block read performance.

It's a bit of a shame the stock SSDs had these compromises in the first place, though. If you're buying a netbook, its worth checking the forums for results like these on the models you're interested in, and perhaps buying a low capacity stock model, and upgrading to an aftermarket drive later. (The Super Talent drive I tested wasn't cheap, though, at $200 for the 64GB model and $380 for 128GBs).



One other thing to consider: The runcore SSD upgrades for netbooks have little microUSB ports on them, so you can load up and back up files/images from another machine. Handy for Hackintoshing, for sure.
[Super Talent Dell Mini 9 SSD]

Right, so bear with me here: this week our apps are all about learning new things, understanding the world around you, meeting new people, playing extremely silly games in large groups. Sort of like being a kid again! No? Ok.

Pocket Universe: It's a pinchy, zoomy, 3D star map for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3GS, for which the new Pocket Universe is designed, you get full-on astronomical augmented reality. Using location services, accelerometer data and the 3GS's compass, Pocket Universe pseudo-overlays information about your stars, planets, constellations and general space things according to whatever you're pointing at. Three dollars.

Loopt for iPod Touch: The Loopt iPhone app has been around as long as, well, iPhone apps. Since 2008, it's earned its keep as one of the only useful friend-locating apps. Just about every mobile platform has a client, with one notable exception: the iPod Touch. That, along with Of course, Loopt isn't quite the same without GPS, but Wi-Fi location will get you by in a bind. Still waiting for a proper 3.0 version though. Free.

Seek 'n Spell: iPhone games tend to be a lot like games for any other portable device, and rarely leverage some of the traditionally non-gaming capabilities of the handset. Part of this is because, until recently, the developer SDK was sort of limited. Most of it, I think, is because developers just haven't been thinking hard enough.

Take this clever, if obvious, idea for a game: A map of wherever you are is overlaid with letters, which you and you teammates can collect by physically running to their icons. Your goal is to come up with words for points, Scrabble-style. It's a very, very cool idea, and decidedly sweatier than your typical iPhone game. A buck.

MSNBC: Hey, look, another news organization has a content app! Let's talk about it! This one's less about news than about catering to fans of the network, with an emphasis on video content as well as Twitter feeds from MSNBC personalities. It's a bit hard on the eyes, and occasionally goes stuttery on you, but it works fine. Fun fact: according to the iTunes description, this iPhone app, being an MSNBC product, uses "Microsoft's Advanced Technologies." What this means, I have no idea. Free.

Fluent News: If you could sense a lack of excitement about that MSNBC app, that was because of apps like Fluent. It's far from the first multi-source news aggregator, but it's one of the better ones. It behave like Google News, more or less, collecting important news from lots of sources and grouping it in a sensible way Why not just use Google News then, you might rudely interject? Well, for one, Fluent can cache news for offline reading, for plans, subways, caves, or wherever. It also prefetches longer articles, though I couldn't really tell in my brief testing. Anyway, it's free, so why not?

Skype: Another incremental update to another extremely popular app. This one gets an interface lift, but most importantly, two useful features for people who use Skype's pay services: text messaging with SkypeOut credit (good for cheap international texts; bad for having no reply function), and Skype Voicemail support. Voicemail support is a bigger deal than it sounds: since receiving calls when you're out is still pretty much out of the question, the voicemail access makes being out of touch a little less irritating. Still free.

Air Sharing Pro: We've always been impressed with Air Sharing—it's a solid file storage/viewing solution in its basic form. The Pro version, though, is a different animal entirely. First of all, it's expensive: $10, to be exact. It's also got expanded support for file storage services like, MobileMe, MyDisk, and Drop.io.

The main draw is that there are tons of new file functions: emailing, which is a huge help; direct printing, via OS X printer sharing; archiving abilities, including viewing archive contents without extracting. It's a bit like a walled-in version of Finder, and the closest to a proper file browser you're going to get on a non-jailbroken iPhone.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push (Yet)

• Apple's Nudie App Headaches Now Involve Underage Girls

• iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Better Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluetooth, And More

• Remarkable Speech-to-Speech Voice Translator Coming to iPhone and Blackberry

• Birdfeed Twitter App Review: Lean, Fast and Pretty

• Doom Resurrection for iPhone Hits the App Store, Costs $10

• A Whole Lotta Quake Will Be Blowing Up Your iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

A 26-year-old employee was shot today during a "violent armed robbery" of the Clarendon Apple Store in Arlington, Virginia. Video news report embedded below—details at Cult of Mac. [Cult of Mac via BBG]

RunPee, that great website that tells you precisely the best time to run and pee during a movie so you don't miss anything good, has taken the next step and released an iPhone app for quick reference.

The RunPee app features a countdown that lists all of the most opportune times to dash away, and like the site, it'll tell you what happened during your pee break. We're a little bit iffy on people constantly whipping out their iPhones to check anything during a movie, but hopefully this won't lead to any extra film-watching rudeness. The app is available now (link will open iTunes) for $1. [Mashable via Lifehacker]