Amazon’s newest tablet, the Kindle Fire, helped increase Kindle Family sales by 4x when compared to the same period last year, and was also the best-selling item at Amazon.com on Black Friday. The boost in sales wasn’t exclusive to Amazon’s online market, with both Best Buy and Target reporting increased demand for the new tablet. From The Next Web:

Nik Nayar, vice president merchandising at Target said that the Kindle Fire was so popular, sales of the device outperformed all other Android devices at its stores: “This was a great Black Friday for Target and for Kindle Fire, which was the bestselling tablet in our stores on Black Friday”

If you are wondering how many Kindle Fires were sold, Amazon will most likely let you down. Not because the number is low, but because they refrain from releasing sales figures. What we do know is that the number before Black Friday was in the millions, with unofficial 2011 sales estimated at five million.

I just stumbled upon this video and was amazed that this insanely small V-12 engine was handmade using traditional methods. From YouTube:

v-12 engine with compressed air injection, hand made using taditional methods: 12 cm3 of displacement, the diameter of the cyllinder is 11,3 mm, the stroke of the pistons 10mm, it works with only 0,1kg/cm2. Is constructed with stainless steel, aluminum and bronze. Patelo dedicate this engine to his grandchildren: Sara, Carmen, Jose and Pablo. This engine is for education, exhibitons, etc., that is the reason to work with compressed air, to avoid contamination. He has made the plans and all parts, except the screws. The engine is not for sale. Thanks to everybody for the comments and sorry for my bad English.

[Via Reddit]

While SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) continues to threaten free-speech online in America, the hivemind over at Reddit have decided to build their own wireless mesh network. Dubbed the Darknet Plan, this ad hoc network would skirt around government regulations like SOPA, keeping online free speech alive.

Sounds great, but I have one question: Can a reliable wireless mesh network be built using off-the-shelf hardware? Shaddi has posted a technical critique of the effort, outlining five reasons why “wireless mesh networks aren’t actually a good way to build a real network.” If you have ever wondered what issues plague wireless mesh networks, this is a great place to start.

While painting another masterpiece filled with happiness, beloved painter Bob Ross explains his experience with a wireless microphone:

[Via Reddit]

Last week, Craig Mundie—Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer—told Forbes that he was not impressed with Siri, claiming that Microsoft has shipped similar technology in Windows Phone—via TellMe—for more than a year. He agreed with the reporter that much of Siri’s hype is “good marketing”, and that “Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for, you know, more than a year.” From the interview:

Both the iPhone and Windows Phones have shipped with speech-to-text converters for years, and were able to handle predefined voice commands. What sets Siri apart from previous attempts is its ability to understand natural spoken language.

TechAU decided to test Craig Mundie’s claims that Siri is no different from TellMe outside of marketing. What their demonstration shows us is more than Siri’s ability to understand natural language, but also how it excels at speech-to-text conversions:

Out of four requests, Microsoft TellMe was not able to correctly convert the speech-to-text once, whereas Siri performed flawlessly.