An entertaining workout

An entertaining workout
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Your workout at the gym isn't going to be any less painful. But the world's leading commercial provider of exercise equipment might at least help make the session on a stair-climber or treadmill more entertaining.
Life Fitness, a division of Brunswick Corp., says it plans to offer seamless integration with Apple Inc.'s iPod players in upcoming products.
The new fitness machines, equipped with liquid-crystal display touchscreens, will allow users to plug in iPods and headphones and peruse their song libraries or watch their videos on the console as they would on the portable player itself. This will recharge the gadget's battery at the same time.
Life Fitness said it would make the first product available at the end of March.
Tracking down a thief
SAN FRANCISCO -- The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, has signed up more than 1 million volunteers worldwide in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. They've found no aliens yet, but they have at least turned up one missing laptop.
The Berkeley effort, better known as SETI@home, uses volunteers' computers when they go into screen-saver mode to crunch data from the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico. The computers are trying to spot signals in the radio noise from space.
One volunteer, James Melin, a software programmer for a county government agency in Minnesota, runs SETI@home on his seven home computers, which periodically check in with University of California servers. Whenever that happens, the servers record the remote computer's Internet Protocol address and file it in a database that people running the SETI software can view.
One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI@home is his wife's laptop, which was stolen from the couple's Minneapolis home Jan. 1.
Annoyed -- and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing -- Melin monitored the SETI@home database to see if the stolen laptop would "talk" to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.
After a subpoena to a local Internet provider, police determined the real-world address where the stolen laptop was logging on. Within days, officers seized the computer and returned it. The case remains under investigation, said Lt. Amelia Huffman of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Kimberly's writings were safe, and the thieves didn't appear to have broken into her e-mail or other personal folders.
Associated Press
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