Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Foundation and the e-ink screen tech wizards at Pixel Qi Corporation have signed a permanent and royalty-free cross-licensing agreement which allows both organisations to share and use their laptop screen innovations in the future. Pixel Qi has been developing some interesting dual-mode displays recently, which we’ve seen a glimpse of in devices such as Notion Ink’s Adam tablet PC – which effectively lets you switch between e-ink (readable in full sunlight) and a traditional backlit LCD screen (for multimedia, video, web surfing [...]

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Laptops tend to lose their charm quickly when you’re constantly looking for the nearest power outlet to charge up.  How do you keep your battery going for as long as possible?  Here are 15 easy ways to do so. 1. Defrag regularly -  The faster your hard drive does its work – less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery.  Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly. (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems. 2. Dim your screen [...]

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Sun-friendly laptop screen specialist Pixel Qi is set to release its new replaceable notebook screens later this spring. The company’s Mary Lou Jepsen’s announced on the Pixel Qi blog that there will be DIY kits for replacing your own laptop screen with the sunlight-friendly Pixel Qi screen. OLPC experience “One of the reasons I’m personally committed to doing this goes back to my One Laptop per Child experience and girls in a poor rural part of Nigeria who helped us test the early beta-laptop builds,” notes Jepsen. “In their school they had slanted desks bolted [...]

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