Electric heating elements could be inserted into roads or inside the structure of bridges, warming the roads enough so the snow doesn't reside—much like subways help the snow to melt in New York. Various ways have been trialled by the students working on the project, with sheets of carbon nanofibres proving to be the fastest way to clear snow from the roads. In just two hours the concrete block they tested it on, measuring 25 square cm, warmed the roads from -10 °C to 0 °C (14 °F to 32 °F) , and used 6 watts of power—which could potentially prove to be the downfall to the University of Houston's work, as with wide-spread use the power consumption would be vast. [New Scientist]

Image Credit: Martin Pettitt

Skiing and snowboarding have always been cutting-edge sports, thanks to renegade personalities and high-tech gear. But this ski season, designers are stepping it up to a whole new level. Here, take a look at some of the finest in snowsports tech-and enter to win some gear of your own.

Want to score your own high-tech snowsports equipment? It's easy: Visit our sister site Skiingmag.com (we share owners, and a love of playing in the snow with the latest gadgets). Every day for the next week, they're giving away free gear, lift tickets and resort packages. All you have to do is answer a trivia question and enter to win.

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

Specifically, Apple may have wanted a "private license" from Sun Microsystems, and Sun simply did not want to play ball. Neither side could agree on suitable terms, so support was removed. [OpenSolaris Mailing List via Daring Fireball]

Applications that won't open in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier
• Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5
• Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17 ver. 17.1
• Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2
• EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille ver. 1.1

Applications moved to an "Incompatible Software" folder during the installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0

[Apple via Apple Insider]

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, "This is a new operating system?!" Those people are missing the point.

On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard's inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor's chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.

And if you think that's bullshit, well, I can't say you're completely out of your mind, but there's always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.

Performance

After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it's clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here's a summary:

• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo's cityscape each took half the time in Snow.
• Safari's javascript processing, using Snow's specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now.
• Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard.
• There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too.
• Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.

Here's a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:

Impressed yet?! You shouldn't be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!

How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?

There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they've rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it's making processing for today's chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it's not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)

Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.

But I'm digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there's typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it's a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I'd bet those apps will come soon.

Interface Streamlining

There are 5 major changes in the UI:

Finder
Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don't prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don't mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.

Dock
OS X's dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple's window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app's windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can't use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That's an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.

Expose
Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose's zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That's helpful when you're trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.

Stacks
When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You'd try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you'd try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It's an improvement.

QuickTime 10
Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie '09. I love it.

Let's face it, in the big picture, calling these changes "major" is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS's usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you're curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.

While it's not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don't work at a corporation, so I don't care, but you may.

Bad Things

What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn't mention the imperfections?

And Safari 4's ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.

Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.

I've also noticed that Expose doesn't work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won't bring the window up top.

If you've got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn't so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.

Meow

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you're looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard's biggest feature is that it doesn't have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts

Costs $30 to upgrade

Still haven't seen any third party apps
rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard's speed yet

No major new functionality might turn off
some

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section.
Today's chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It's easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it's difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.

This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don't know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple's created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there's potential here. And let's face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.

There's a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL's hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron's awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.

Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple's dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.

In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there's already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

"IceBreaker is so efficient, that only one heat cable is needed to melt the ice in and on your gutter. We emphasize a single cable because a couple other gutter guards that claim to be heated, use two or three cables to achieve what IceBreaker can do with just one cable."

Personally, I've never had to clean my house's gutter. I'm still a renter, forever put off household jobs, and that's also what the iRobot Looj is for. But it's interesting to see that the Icebreaker will also filter out leaves, pine needles and roof grit during the rest of the year.

While it's still warm out, home owners can get all DIY with the IceBreaker for $5.50 per foot. [Gutterglove]

As one might expect, the packaging features a snow leopard, staring out at the user with the same white hot intensity of, say, Steve Jobs in his Apple lair as he examines the latest prototype build of an Apple Tablet that may or may not exist.

There's also the slogan, reading: "The world's most advanced operating system. Perfectly optimized."

You know what else would be perfect? If, in the inevitable "I'm a Mac" ad that comes out to market this OS, Hodgman wrestles a real snow leopard. That scene, sadly, is not represented on the Portuguese Mac OS X Snow Leopard packaging. There's still hope for the U.S. release. [MacRumors]

The whole thing is purely conceptual for now; it involves certain bacteria and ice nucleation and a lot of other science-y sounding words and phrases I don't understand. What I do understand is the phrase "It will snow ice cream," and what I wish I didn't understand is "The technology is a long ways off." Don't be fooled by the existence of an actual Cloud Project van—it's purely for illustrative purposes, and only functions as a regular ice cream truck/science information center.

Next up: Spaghetti. With a chance of meatballs. Get it? [The Cloud Project via Likecool

Frozen in the "bottom layer" of ice (Christ, how many layers do you think there are?) since, he estimates, early winter, the iPod was frozen solid and not in the best of shape. But after a few minutes of charging, the iPod booted right up and even displayed the correct date, proving once and for all that the iPod classic is to date the only Yukon-approved PMP on the market. [Robulack via TUAW]

Location:
Northstar's Basque Room. Located adjacent to TC's Pub and directly across the walk way from Earthly Delights. For exact location please refer to Northstar's Village map [LINK] and search Basque or refer to the blue image on the map below.
For driving directions to Northstar-at-Tahoe please refer Northstar's site. [LINK]

When:
Saturday April 4th. Event room opens to the public at 8:30 am and closes at 4 pm.

The Price: $5

Transportation: We recommend you drive or carpool. The official Gizmodo carpool thread is here.

The Ticket and Housing Discounts: Huge Dealzmodo Lift tickets discounts at $57 (vs $79) for commenters; 30% off housing if you want to come the night before and have a drink with me in the village, or stay the following night at 10% off. (You'll have to call to RSVP for housing. Check out the options on Northstar's website. Northstar is providing 10% off lodging booked for Friday 4/3 or Saturday 4/4, and for Sunday 4/5 lodging is 30% off. Here's how to receive the discount:
Just call Northstar at 1.800.GO.NORTH (466.6784) and use our coupon code GI0404 when booking your reservation.

Lift Tickets:
All Snowmodo attendees are eligible for discounted Northstar lift tickets. To receive these discounts you must first pay the $5 attendance fee at our event room to receive a wristband. Once you have a wristband you will be able to purchase a discounted lift ticket form Northstar's Season Pass Office and Copper Lane Ticketing Office. Ticket information will be available at the event.

Raffle:
Upon paying the $5 attendance fee you will receive one raffle ticket, which will be valid for our event prize raffle held later in the day. More information regarding the raffle will be available at the event.
Once your attendance fee is paid you are eligible to buy more raffle tickets at $5 per additional ticket and there is no limit on the amount of tickets you can buy.

Product Demos:
The companies in attendance will be offering various product demos that you can take out on the mountain for testing. You will be required to leave some form of ID or Credit Card in return for a demoed product. More information regarding product demos will be available at the event.

Friday Night Drinks:
We have not yet decided on where or when we'll be sitting down for drinks on Friday night. We'll be announcing details on Friday, so please check back then.

Fun stuff anyone can do: Ski, Snowboard, Showshoe, take ski/board lessons for first timers, ice skate, tube/sledding, geocache scavenger hunt, cross country ski, borrow and test out gadgets, win prizes, drink beer, eat food, shop. Northstar has a huge village and every snow activity you can think of, except double flipping snowmobiles. We'll have more details on the fun stuff we're going to do together with the companies and gadgets, later.

Zune Party Details:
Where: TC's Pub in Northstar's Village. The pub is located right next our event room. For location details please refer to Northstar's site. [LINK]
When: Party starts at 3 pm with Morgan Page starting his set around 3:30 pm.
How To Get In: Only Snowmodo attendees who have Snowmodo wristbands will be allowed in. That means you'll have to stop by our event room at-least once during the day to pay the $5 admission fee and receive a wristband and raffle tickets.

To Do Before Coming: There's a few things we recommend to make your Snowmodo experience that much better.
• If you have an iPhone, download the Motion-x gps app, and you'll be able to track your travels, speed and other cool stuff which we'll be able to share with all our attendees.
• Check out the Official Snowmodo Soundtrack. [LINK] Giz's own musicphile Adrian Covert has compiled an Official Snowmodo Soundtrack filled with three different playlists of riding music. Most of these songs will be pre-loaded on the demo Zunes available at our event. So if you don't want to load up our playlists on your own player, stop by the Zune table at Snowmodo, grab a demo Zune and go hit the mountain.
• Subscribe to the snowmodo twitter feed so you can keep track of updates when you're on the mountain, like what lifts the Gizmodo guys are on, and when we're eating lunch. You know, updates.
Gadgets to Borrow and See Demos:
• Zune
• Ardica, maker of heated jackets.
• Lib-tech, makers of awesome snowboards.
• Nokia
• Vudu
• Smith Optics
• Go Pro Hero helmet/snowboard/bicycle/surfboard/racecar/whatever wide angle sports cameras
• Fullpower Motion X GPS
• Casio and their Slow Motion cameras
• Otterbox
• Griffin

Prizes in the raffle:
• Zune: Zune Players.
• AKG: AKG hooded sweaters. AKG earbuds and the demoed AKG headphones.
• Nokia: Three Nokia N96s.
• North Face: 10 Flyweight Rucksack packs. 10 Khumbu Jackets.
• OtterBox: Five OtterBox Defender Series for iPhone 3G cases.
• Vudu: VUDU box.
• Ardica: Mountain Hardwear jacket with an Ardica Moshi system.
• Nixon: Headphones.
• Griffin: 25 AeroSport armband for Zune. 25 Streamline armband for iPhone. 20 AeroSport armband for iPod classic. 20 AeroSport armband for iPod nano.96 TuneBuds.
• GoPro: 2 GoPro Helmet HERO Wide camera kits.
• LibTech: Mystery Item.
• Casio: EXILIM EX-FH20 Camera.

P.S, here's a video shot on a RED camera from last year. I don't know who those people are, because none of us ride like this, but it was a great day.

P.P.S. This is a random sampling of a few people who showed up last year, and who weren't afraid to hike to the backside.

Zune is throwing an epic party for our Snowmodo event on Saturday April 4th at Northstar. They've lined up Grammy nominated Morgan Page to play some music and there will also be food and drinks available for all of our attendees. Zune has also made custom Snowmodo Zunes just for our event , which we'll be giving out as prizes in our raffle!

Zune Party Details
Where: TC's Pub in Northstar's Village. The pub is located right next our event room. For location details please refer to Northstar's site. [LINK]
When: Party starts at 3 pm with Morgan Page starting his set around 3:30 pm.
How To Get In: Only Snowmodo attendees who have Snowmodo wristbands will be allowed in. That means you'll have to stop by our event room at-least once during the day to pay the $5 admission fee and receive a wristband and raffle tickets.

On a music related note, Giz's own musicphile Adrian Covert has compiled an Official Snowmodo Soundtrack filled with three different playlists of riding music. Most of these songs will be pre-loaded on the demo Zunes available at our event. So if you don't want to load up our playlists on your own player, stop by the Zune table at Snowmodo, grab a demo Zune and go hit the mountain. I personally suggest Pheonix - 1901, need I say more...

Night Runs - Uptempo - Hip Hop

• Black Star - Respiration [amazon] [zune]
• Camp Lo - Luchini (This Is It) [amazon] [zune]
• Clipse - Keys Open Doors [amazon] [zune]
• Busy Signal - These Are The Days [amazon] [zune]
• Benga and Coki - Night [amazon] [zune]
• The Bug - Poison Dart [amazon] [zune]
• Souls of Mischief - 93 til Infinity [amazon] [zune]
• Wu-Tang Clan - C.R.E.A.M. [amazon] [zune]
• Outkast - B.O.B. [amazon] [zune]
• The Knux - F!re [amazon] [zune]
• J Dilla - Two Can Win [amazon] [zune]
• The Cool Kids - One Two [amazon] [zune
• The Streets - Blinded By The Lights [amazon] [zune]
• Madvillain - America's Most Blunted [amazon] [zune]
• Cypress Hill - I ain't goin out like that [amazon] [zune]
• JayLib - Raw Shit [amazon] [zune] [zune]
• Pharoahe Monch - Simon Says [amazon] [zune
• El-P - Delorean [amazon] [zune
• Company Flow - Lune TNS [amazon] [zune
• Beastie Boys - Sabotage [amazon] [zune] [zune]
• Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy [amazon] {zune]
• Zion I - Critical [amazon] [zune]
• Dilated Peoples - Worst Comes to Worst [amazon] [zune]
• Talib Kweli - The Blast [amazon] [zune
• Ghostface Killah - Run [amazon] [zune

Short Runs - Agressive - Rock

Cursive - Red Handed Slight of Hand [amazon] [zune]
• K-Os - Born to Run [amazon] []
• RJD2 - The Horror [amazon] [zune]
• M83 - America [amazon] [zune]
• Bloc Party - Banquet [amazon] [zune
• Birdy Nam Nam - Trans Boulogne Express [amazon] [zune]
• Phoenix - 1901 [amazon] [zune]
• Peter, Bjorn and John - Lay It Down [amazon] [zune]
• Wavves - Beach Demon [amazon] [zune]
• The Walkmen - The Rat [amazon] []
• Digitalism - Pogo [amazon] [zune]
• Studio - Self Service [amazon] []
• The Faint - In Concert [amazon] []
• Black Flag - Rise Above [amazon] [zune]
• Bad Brains - Sacred Love [amazon] [zune]
• Sex Pistols - Holidays in the Sun [amazon] [zune
• DFA 1979 - 1979 [zune]
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Give it Away/Under The Bridge [amazon1 amazon 2] [zune]
• Nirvana - In Bloom [amazon] [zune]
• TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me [amazon] [zune

Longer Runs - Mellow - Electronic

• Skream - Summer Dreams [amazon] [zune
• Daft Punk - Voyager [amazon] [zune]
• Burial - Raver [amazon] [zune]
• CFCF - Arctic [amazon] [zune]
• Kanye West - Coldest Winter [amazon] [zune]
• Junior Boys - Double Shadow [amazon] [zune]
• Dan Deacon - Of the Mountains [amazon] [zune]
• LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great [amazon] [zune]
• Cut Copy - Out There on the Ice [amazon] [zune]
• M83 - Run into Flowers [amazon] [zune]
• Royksopp - Eple [amazon] [zune
• Animal Collective - My Girls [amazon] [zune]
• The Zombies - Beechwood Park [amazon] [zune
• Boards of Canada - Roygbiv [amazon] [zune
• Ellen Allien and Apparat - Way Out [amazon] [zune
• Black Moth Super Rainbow - Don't You Wanna Be in a Cult? [amazon] [zune]
• Zomby - U Are My Fantasy (Street Fighter II Theme Remix) [amazon] [zune]
• Booka Shade - Night Moves [amazon] [zune
• The Avalanches - Since I Met You [amazon]

For complete Snowmodo event details please head over to our Snowmodo Event Information post.

This may sound strange unbelievable to you, but it is real and it is true.

Snowmodo Event Information Below!

Location:
Northstar's Basque Room. Located adjacent to TC's Pub and directly across the walk way from Earthly Delights. For exact location please refer to Northstar's Village map [LINK] and search Basque or refer to the blue image on the map below.
For driving directions to Northstar-at-Tahoe please refer Northstar's site. [LINK]

When:
Saturday April 4th. Event room opens to the public at 8:30 am and closes at 4 pm.

Zune Party:
Party will start at 4pm, all information will be available at the event.

Instructions:
Upon arriving at Northstar, please head over to our event room to pay the $5 attendance fee. In return for your $5 you will receive a wristband and a raffle ticket. You're wristband will not only show you paid the attendance fee but will also grant you discounted lift tickets at Northstar's Season Pass Office and Copper Lane Ticketing Office.

Raffle:
Upon paying the $5 attendance fee you will receive one raffle ticket, which will be valid for our event prize raffle held later in the day. More information regarding the raffle will be available at the event.
Once your attendance fee is paid you are eligible to buy more raffle tickets at $5 per additional ticket and there is no limit on the amount of tickets you can buy.

Product Demos:
The companies in attendance will be offering various product demos that you can take out on the mountain for testing. You will be required to leave some form of ID or Credit Card in return for a demoed product. More information regarding product demos will be available at the event.

Lift Tickets:
All Snowmodo attendees are eligible for discounted Northstar lift tickets. To receive these discounts you must first pay the $5 attendance fee at our event room to receive a wristband. Once you have a wristband you will be able to purchase a discounted lift ticket form Northstar's Season Pass Office and Copper Lane Ticketing Office. Ticket information will be available at the event.

Friday Night Drinks:
We have not yet decided on where or when we'll be sitting down for drinks on Friday night. We'll be announcing details on Friday, so please check back then.

Appreciation for investment will return high yield, just sending fully insured money order to vacation residence in Gabon. I hope to hear from you in no distant time through the email address below.
jjsos@amerivas.tur.br

Thanks to all the companies that are participating in Snowmodo we are able to offer all this stuff, and then some, to our readers who attend.

Want to see exactly what you could win, well here you go:

Zune: Zune Players.
AKG: AKG hooded sweaters. AKG earbuds and the demoed AKG headphones.
Nokia: Three Nokia N96s.
North Face: 10 Flyweight Rucksack packs. 10 Khumbu Jackets.
OtterBox: Five OtterBox Defender Series for iPhone 3G cases.
Vudu: VUDU box.
Ardica: Mountain Hardwear jacket with an Ardica Moshi system.
Nixon: Headphones.
Griffin: 25 AeroSport armband for Zune. 25 Streamline armband for iPhone. 20 AeroSport armband for iPod classic. 20 AeroSport armband for iPod nano.96 TuneBuds.
GoPro: 2 GoPro Helmet HERO Wide camera kits.
LibTech: Mystery Item.
Casio: EXILIM EX-FH20 Camera.

For more information regarding our Snowmodo event you can check here. If you're planning on attending and haven't already illed out the RSVP form below, please do. Thanks!

Our Snowmodo Event on April 4th is packed with fun things to do, including the Zune party. But before the event starts on Saturday, the Giz crew and a few friends will be getting drinks somewhere in the Northstar Village Friday night. Since everyone is welcomed to come and we'll probably be out late both Friday and Saturday night, we've arranged discount lodging just for you guys.

Northstar is providing 10% off lodging booked for Friday 4/3 or Saturday 4/4, and for Sunday 4/5 lodging is 30% off. Here's how to receive the discount:

Just call Northstar at 1.800.GO.NORTH (466.6784) and use our coupon code GI0404 when booking your reservation.

Be sure to check back this week as we'll be posting Snowmodo updates and if you haven't already please filled out the RSVP form below. Thanks!

Our Snowmodo Event is really shaping up to be a top notch gathering. We've already lined up company attendance from Zune, Ardica, Lib-tech, Nokia, Vudo, Smith, Go Pro, Motion X, Casio, Otterbox, Giffin and next we'll be revealing a few extra companies which should truly make our Snowmodo event one you won't want to miss.

For more information regarding Snowmodo please see our original announcement here.

Be sure to check back next week as we'll be posting Snowmodo updates and if you haven't already please filled out the RSVP form below. Thanks!

The Price: $160

The Verdict: The wireless Audex system which controls your iPod works like any other iPod RF remote. There's an RF receiver dock adapter and a wireless remote for controls. The system is advertise to work with 3rd Gen iPods or newer and from our testing we found the iPod touch and iPhone can not properly be controlled.

The iPod is meant to be housed in a padded pouch inside the backpack which features a headphone extension cable that is rerouted through the backpack and down the right shoulder strap where a female headphone jack is provided. For the remote Burton has made a rubber housing located on the left should strap which makes the buttons accessible at all times. The wireless controller is removable and works as it should, providing the basic play/pause, skip forward/back, and volume up/down.

This backpack has some pretty impressive storage for its size and with only two large sections which incorporate many unique storage compartments allow for nice organization of your laptop, gadgets and small gear. When packed to the brim the bag can be a little bulky and stiff but the heavily padded back and shoulder straps allow for a somewhat comfortable fit. This backpack is not intended to be worn while snowboarding and frankly because of the shape and lack of an extra cross strap we wouldn't recommend it. It seems more fitting that the backpack be used around town or on short trips when you want to easily control your iPod's music and need to carry your laptop and other gear.
[Burton]

Snowmodo is our snow sport winter meet up at Lake Tahoe, with prizes, discounts, tons of fun snow activities, a party and GADGETS. If you can make it (and people are coming from TEXAS) please RSVP. I'll let you wear my hat (below).

Using the same logic that makes a pair of skis better at high-speeds than a snowboard, because the skis always have two edges gripping the snow during turns, Pyott's Twin Parabolic Ski concept basically provides each ski with an extra edge. By jointing two longer and narrower skis under each foot, the design allows for more grip at high-speeds since there are more applied edges griping the snow.

Overall the experimental concept seems like a significant way to make downhill racing faster and more dangerous on a pair of skis. The idea of using adjustable joints to make the set of blades under each foot flexible is pretty interesting, and I can't help but wonder if the same concept can be applies to a snowboard in some way. [Yanko Design via DVICE]

Snowmodo is our snow sport winter meet up at Lake Tahoe, with prizes, discounts, tons of fun snow activities, a party and GADGETS. If you can make it (and people are coming from TEXAS) please RSVP. I'll let you wear my hat (below).

Rescuers found the second lost person's body at the bottom of a +60 foot fall next to a stream. The lost snowboarders' friends kept in touch via twitter. It appears that while these skiers and snowboarders went off piste, none of them carried any sort of radio or satellite personal locator beacons, like the moderately priced SPOT. I mean, if you're in the back country, chances are your cellular reception isn't so great. The guy with the iPhone got off lucky being pretty close to a resort. Although the GPS function in any phone would work well in an open area to get someone reoriented. Either way, be safe during these storms, friends. [Scotsman, thisislondon]