Leo Villareal, an American artist put together a 41,000 LED display in a 200 ft. tunnel at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  Each LED blinks at a random time to make sure that no one sees the same pattern.  This display will be available for anyone to see for all of 2009.  If you live on the East coast, I highly recommend checking it out.  For those who live in other parts, at least we can watch the video below:

Villareal “Multiverse” National Gallery of Art, Washington DC from Walter Patrick Smith on Vimeo.

[via PSFK]

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. is best known for creating the WiFi chip within the iPhone.  Marvell has now innovated a way to build a PC into the size of an adapter.  The SheevaPlug dev kit is available for $99 and has it runs of Linux.  Built into the above plug is a 1.2GHz Kirkwood processor, 512MB DRAM, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a USB 2.0 port.  The whole PC plugs into a regular wall socket and uses less than one tenth of a typical PC.  While the SheevaPlug costs about $99 right now, Marvell anticipates this product to drop to $49 in the future.

To buy this product, go to Marvell’s website.

[via Engadget]

Anyone that has been scuba or snuba diving knows the importance of constantly being connected to an oxygen tank.  While you are swimming under the sea searching for aquatic creatures, you must always be able to breathe.  Designer Ricardo Baiao has created an emergency air system.  The emergency air system contains about 5 minutes worth of air.  Other uses for this tool may be if you are on a sailboat or kayak that is capsized, especially if you are caught under it.

[via Slashgear]

This commercial for Last.fm on the iPhone is currently airing in the U.K. Maybe they are collecting data about who is using this iPhone app and reporting it to the RIAA also.

Daily Fill
News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWS) has a web incubator called Slingshot Labs.  One of the results from the incubator is Daily Fill, a gossip and entertainment blog.  In January alone, DailyFill had about 1.3 million unique visitors during the beta release.  News Corp plans to use the DailyFill to compete with Time Warner’s TMZ and independent blogger Perez Hilton.  The Daily Fill is covered with Photos, News, Celebrity Gossip, and blog posts.  The DailyFill opened out of Beta a few days after Nick Denton’s Defamer blog was rolled into Gawker.com.

Chernin’s Departure
Recently Peter Chernin, head of News Corp’s Fox film stepped down after 12 years.  This left Rupert Murdoch in a compromised position.  Especially when Slumdog Millionaire walked away with 8 Oscars this past weekend.  Slumdog was made by Fox Searchlight.  Murdoch indicated before that he was interested in his children running the company one day.  But there are many other contenders.

Below is a list of Murdoch’s direct reports:

1. CFO, David DeVoe
2. General Counsel, Lawrence Jacobs
3. Global Marketing/Corporate Affairs, Gary Ginsberg
4. Fox Film, Jim Gianopoulos and Tom Rothman
5. Fox News/Fox Business Channel/TV Stations, Roger Ailes
6. Fox Network/Entertainment Cable Networks/RSNs, Tony Vinciquerra
7. News Corp. Europe/Asia, James Murdoch
8. Myspace/FIM, Peter Levinsohn
9. News America Marketing/NY Post, Paul Carlucci
10. Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton
11. Harper Collins,  Brian Murray
12. News Limited, James Hartigan
13. Government Affairs, Michael Regan
14. Human Resources, Beryl Cook
15. Content, Anthea Disney

Who will fill in for Chernin, best known as being Murdoch’s number two?  Maybe we’ll see a reality show on FOX to determine the next executive.

[via VentureBeat, BI]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer indicated that he is interested in working with Yahoo! in a search deal when talking to analysts today.  Ballmer had a hard time working with Jerry Yang, who kept demanding more money from Microsoft to be acquired.  But now he’ll have an even harder time working out a deal with new CEO Carol Bartz.  Bartz said even at one point that she did not join Yahoo! to have it be sold.

Ballmer said he was willing to engage in a discussion with Yahoo! again, but he has been “rebuffed and ignored” by Bartz according to a CNBC reporter.  Yahoo! is currently running without an M&A executive since Gerald Horkan departed.  Horkan spent most of last year working on the failed bid for Microsoft to buy out the search engine company.  Horkan left several weeks ago and has not yet been replaced.

Bartz joined Yahoo! last month.

[via CNET]

Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) is borrowing $640 million from the European Investment Bank as part of a five-year loan agreement to fund their software R&D projects. Nokia hopes that this investment will enhance Symbian-based smartphones. This loan will also benefit the Symbian Foundation and their contributions to open-source mobile software. About 78 companies have already pledged support to the Symbian Foundation including MySpace, Qualcomm, SanDisk, and Bank of America.

[via Fierce Wireless]

Pros
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced the availability of Safari 4 on both Macs and Windows PC systems today.  I’ve already installed and tested it.  There is a Nitro Engine in Safari 4 that makes JavaScript run 4.2x faster than Safari 3.

The default homepage and new tab website on Safari 4 is a Top Sites feature that displays some of the sites that you have visited the most frequently.  If you put your mouse over one of the thumbnails below, the border of the site turns purple.  It looks pretty cool.

Safari has changed around what is considered to be standard for web browsers. For example, tabs for the browser are at the very top of the window to make it easier to navigate.  When opening the history feature on Safari 4, it is in a Cover Flow format.  Pages that you recently visited appear in a format that is similar to when you are searching for music albums and movies on iTunes.

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” stated Philip Schiller, Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.

Other features built into the new safari include Full History search, smart address field, smart search field, full page zoom, and a Windows-native look for Safari in Windows.  Safari for Windows uses Microsoft’s font rendering, title bar, borders, and toolbars.  This makes Safari blend in better.

Cons

Personally I like Apple’s font rendering engine better.  But I guess being able to change around the font settings within the engine makes it better.  I made the font strong and that makes it look more like Apple’s font rendering engine when using Windows Vista.  I think it looks cleaner.

While writing this review, I was using WordPress’ back-end. When I clicked on add a hyperlink, Safari 4 froze on me.  It took me less than 10 minutes to find a bug.  I think Apple should have done rigorous testing when using Safari for Windows Vista.  Especially considering that millions of people use WordPress.  I’m certain that I’ll find more errors as time goes on and will update them on here.

What are your experiences with Safari 4?  Leave a comment.