Recently, on the internet, I saw a man explain that one pronounces "ennui" "on Wii."

Bookending the live premiere of Radiolab season four last night at the Angelika Film Center, a charmingly twee band called "One Ring Zero" played accordion and...something. It was like an accordion, but you blew into a pipe winding from the top. It made an intriguingly clear tone that sounded almost digital.

Turns out it's a claviola, an instrument designed by Ernst Zacharias (of musical equipment manufacturer Hohner) that was only available on the market for a few months in 1996. It's rare enough that a quick pass through eBay resulted only in listings of "craviola," a type of guitar. Too bad. I know I'll never learn to play the accordion, but I bet I could figure out how to blow into a tube.

You can hear claviola on its own at he beginning of One Ring Zero's "Mean Marcus," which can be streamed from their site. (And on most of their songs, too, but deeper in the mix.)

Update: Apparently I have no idea what the claviola sounds like. One Ring Zero's Michael Hearst tells me:

Mean Marcus" has hardly any audible claviola on it. "The Long Day," however, is all claviola playing lead at the beginning.

More details have emerged about LEGO Universe, the upcoming massively multiplayer game. I'm not sure how I feel about the organic backgrounds—I was hoping the entire world would be LEGO—but I could see how it would become tedious if everything were made of elements.

Two good bits of news, however: you will be able to create models of your own in game, which is wonderful news. (There had been some questions about how a kid-friendly game would protect itself from the inevitable legion of outsized LEGO phalluses—well, still are questions, I guess, but presumably developer NetDevil has figured out a happy medium. And even cooler, LEGO will allow you to "print" real-life versions of the LEGO models created in game. You make it online, they'll send you the bricks you need to make it at home. (For a price, of course.)

LEGO already offers a similar system with a virtual design tool, but I hope adding this feature to Universe will expand its capabilities and brick library—as well as drop the price of custom set ordering.

LEGO Universe: 'LEGO Star Wars Multiplied By A Million' [Game|Life]

Japanese electronics retailer Edion has instituted a take-back program for its customers who purchased HD DVD players, offering to replace the units with Blu-ray players. That is true class.

Throughout March, customers can return any of seven Toshiba HD DVD decks and swap them for a BD unit from Sony, Panasonic or Sharp. If the latter is more expensive, customers need to make up the balance, but if it’s cheaper they’ll actually get a refund of the difference.

Honest / insane retailer swaps old HD DVD for new Blu-ray gear [DigitalWorldTokyo.com]

Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at this 1935 Popular Science article featuring various attempts to make aircraft that take off and land vertically, the origins of linoleum, a magnetic soap holder, a cute ad for a cowboy spinning rope, a very scary looking talking clock, venetian blind sun goggles and the hobbies of Hollywood stars circa 1936.  Many of our readers questioned the wisdom of this sled mounted stove for ice skating parties. Apparently they are of the opinion that hot things melt ice. This article shows a few of the vehicles devised by Europeans to cope with the gas shortages caused by WWII. We also learned the tricks of skywriting pilots, the dangers of giant man-eating clams and how to duel with yourself.

Core77 details the "Longarm," an ingeniously simple contraption designed by a pig farming woman who found herself in charge of 3,000 stubborn hogs. It's just a retractable swath of red cloth, but something about it causes pigs to shy away from it, making it easy to guide them from pen to pen—and easy to clean, something I can attest from my occasional weekends on an uncle's pig farm is a critical feature.

Canadian pig farmer Mary Haugh had a problem; multiple heart attacks put her husband out of commission, and she alone had to somehow control and herd their 3,000 hogs through the barn. Traditional methods of getting pigs to move are to use a stick, an electric prod or a "chase board," a length of wood the farmer wields horizontally to angle the pigs in a particular direction.
The stick and the prod, in addition to being inhumane, are simply not practical solutions for a single man/woman vs. 3,000 pigs, and for that many animals Haugh would need an impossibly long board that no human could reasonably lift and wield.

Brilliant industrial design from a pig farmer with her back to the wall [Core77.com]

I made a little squawk and clapped my paws as I read down the spec sheet for the "Popcorn Hour NMT A-100," a badass little media streaming front end that appears to do just about everything you'd want out of a set-top box and is inexpensive to boot. Not only can it stream from just about anything on your network—PCs, NAS, attached USB mass storage, even internet streams—but you can also toss in a hard drive (not included) to download movies directly to the Popcorn Hour via BitTorrent. (Yes!)

The A-100, the current model, has enough horsepower to decode MPEG2, H.264, or VC-1 at 1080p. (Some media streamers do not, even if the network can push out a fat enough video stream.)

Network-wise it does pretty much everything you'd expect: UPnP, Bonjour, Windows Media, SMB. You can browse photos on Flickr or watch video on YouTube. I don't see a major codec it doesn't support, including Matroska containers and Xvid. (No Ogg video or audio, but that could probably be patched in.)

HDMI out. Component out. S/PDIF coax digital audio out. (Although strangely only 10/100 Ethernet, not gigabit. And no Wi-Fi.) All with a custom on-screen interface that looks capable if not stunning.

I have absolutely no need for one of these with my current setup, yet I'm still considering getting one. Unfortunately, there's some sort of weird first-come, first-serve setup to allow people to buy the units online, so picking one up looks to be a bit of a chore.

Kolbu reviewed one of these a couple months ago and gave it generally high marks for the price. It exposes a lot of the same rough edges as many cheaply made Asian do-everything boxes. (And seeing how little hardware is actually inside the box is both impressive for its economy but saddening for how little actual hardware you're getting.) It's not going to be an Apple TV killer for most—too many little quirks, like dropped video signals while switching between modes—but for those willing to deal with the occasional snag it looks like you'll get a lot more capability in return.

If only Popcorn Hour would get enough of these units produced that you could just order them straight off the website!

Product Page [PopcornHour.com] (Thanks, Joakim!)

This insulated travel mug is designed to be completely spill-proof, only release its contents into your face after you've pressed a button that allows you to "sip from anywhere on the rim." From the pictures, though, I can't quite tell where the button is. I hope it's not on the top.

Nevertheless, for sloppy slurpers or caffeine addicted trapeze artists, the $25 price may be less than punitive. (Although I have to say that this looks like the sort of design that, if effective as claimed, will soon be co-opted by knock-off vendors soon.)

Catalog Page [Hammacher.com]

• Moon Wall – Moon Wall Projector for $10, $5 shipping or free over $25. [Slickdeals]

• Asus Eee – Asus Eee 2G Surf for $290, shipped. [Dealnews]

• HDTV for PC – Today's Woot! is a refurbished Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick for $45, shipped.

Ed Felten writes on Freedom-to-Tinker:

Today eight colleagues and I are releasing a significant new research result. We show that disk encryption, the standard approach to protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be defeated by relatively simple methods. We demonstrate our methods by using them to defeat three popular disk encryption products: BitLocker, which comes with Windows Vista; FileVault, which comes with MacOS X; and dm-crypt, which is used with Linux.

The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today's DRAM memories. DRAMs are the main memory chips used to store data while the system is running. Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power. But this isn't so. Our research shows that data in DRAM actually fades out gradually over a period of seconds to minutes, enabling an attacker to read the full contents of memory by cutting power and then rebooting into a malicious operating system.

Link to paper site, Link to PDF, and a video is below. (thanks, Jake Appelbaum)

UPDATE, 9:44am PT: Declan McCullagh at News.com has an analysis piece here.

(Cross-posted from Boing Boing)

Cartoon genius Tex Avery produced this short in 1953, showing off TVs for smokers, water drinkers, and those afflicted by airplanes overhead. The integration of real footage with the cartoon is fantastic. (I love that the fishing set was actually replicated by SEGA in the '90s in an arcade game, complete with working reel.) [via io9]

Regine conducts a winding interview with Antony Hall, whose creations—if I can try to put his multifarious experiments under a single, details-occluding nut—tend to explore the intersection of electronics, music, and nature. Projects like the "iLog" are basically just electronics stuffed in wood, while "ENKI" connects bioelectric fish to human brains to produce a state of relaxation. In case you were wondering, yes, that is awesome.

Isn't the idea of putting one's "brain-wave entertainment" into the fins of an animal scary? Do you feel that people would trust any other electronic device more than a fish or any other type of animal?

That is a good question. It's an exciting notion this whole idea of "wet-wear" interfacing - but not something that should be taken lightly. I don't like to be on my own if i am doing a test run, and yes I find it very unnerving. I never quite got used to the idea of connecting strangers up to electrodes and the fish. I also worry about the fish. The fish needs to be content and 'happy' for this to work.

In my opinion that most of these commercial devices are made by various humans all of whom have different intentions and issues, namely cost efficiency; and so effectively using quite crude means; cheap microchips. The Black Ghost knife fish is the result of millions of years of evolutionary refinement; but you could still say the same of micro chips.

Interview with Antony Hall [WMMNA]

Mister Zumbi's "Road Zombie" hot rod model prompts just one question: who will be the first to make a LEGO Rat Fink?

Actually, I've got an even greater challenge: Who can replicate George Barris's Banacek AMX 400? All smooth swoops and that W-shaped grill—that'd be a challenge.

Gallery Page [Brickshelf.com via Klocki via Bros. Brick]

Roland Iten makes these appealingly complicated belt buckles, able to be dialed in to what appears to be a tolerance of up to one-tenth of a sandwich. But because they're made in Switzerland, each of these precision buckles cost $25,000—or a paltry $15,000 for the steel and gold model.

It's a pity, because I think they're quite neat. I'll wait until an enterprising American knife maker starts doing a stamped version for $50.

Product Page [RolandIten.com via Born Rich via Oh Gizmo]

• Headphones – Various Sennheiser headphones from Amazon for 30% off normal price. [Slickdeals]

• Point-and-Shoot – The lauded Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55 8.1 megapixel camera is on sale for $218, shipped. [Dealhack]

• iMac – Refurbished 20-inch iMac Core 2 Duo (the new model) for $1,000, shipped. [Apple.com]

• Electric Kettle – Fujitronic kettle and tea pot (with filter) for $70, but with two $20 mail-in rebates it's down to $30, shipped. (Even without the rebates it's a good price.) [Dealnews]

• GPS – Today's Woot! is an Amcor 3.5" Touchscreen Portable GPS for $105, shipped.

When you get emails titled "Mechanized Attack Alligator for the Masses," you pretty much know you've got a winner. Dug North has spotted this animatronic alligator designed for haunted houses and fright shops, available for just shy of $9,000. It's from FrightCatalog.com, an online Halloween-themed store that obviously goes beyond just the traditional fake blood and skeleton masks.

Fright Catalog has a whole section dedicated to animated props, including...actually, let's take a look.

"Dead Fred Zombie Chaser" travels along the floor powered by four DC motors, screaming and groaning from his built-in speaker, pulling his entrails behind him. He's $2,650 but comes with a battery charger—and Fright Catalog's "Best Price Guarantee," their promise to beat any animated zombie retailer's price out there.

"Dead and Deader" is a coffin. It won't erupt with a cackling foam latex corpse until you give it AC power and a 100 PSI air compressor. Ask about their optional timer or motion sensor!

This little lady is almost $7k, which is cheaper than a real dead woman in most states.

"Acid Spitter" blasts guests with a air or water vapor while a variable bubble creates a boiling acid effect in the barrel itself. Throw a couple in your basement to recreate the contamination scene from Return of the Living Dead.

Three grand, air compressor and motion sensor not included.

My mother has a charming, if annoying gift-wrapping habit: she writes the name of the recipient in tiny script somewhere in the intricate patterns of packaging, forcing the screaming rabble of children and grandchildren to pause before each present is ripped open and its contents slathered all over our bodies. (In keeping with midwestern tradition, we gift each other only pork-derived salves.) My sister and I quickly learned how to beat the system, doing all our sorting before Christmas morning, arranging the gifts in a stacks that we could recognize but would not tip off our mother to our scheme so she could rearrange the packages.

So I should hate this puzzle gift box that Phil discovered—I think it's called "Movie Maze"; the company is "Magnif"—but I can't help but think of how much fun it will be to frustrate children with this in the future. You've ripped off the wrapping paper, you little bastards, but now you must think! Being an adult is awesome.

Solve puzzles before you can open a DVD, CD, book, money... [MAKE]

Emotiv will be selling this "EPOC" neuroheadset, allowing gamers to control characters simply by the power of thought. (Unlike previous systems, which required the hands to act as a proxy interface.) The headset will be available around the holidays for $300 with a custom game that will take advantage of the 30 different expressions which can be recognized, including:

immersion, excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, crossed eyes, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed), horizontal eye movement, smirk and grimace (clenched teeth); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis) as well as a completely new category of action based on visualization, the first of which is the ability to make objects disappear.

The EPOC will be first released for the PC. I am less interested in how the EPOC will be used to control games and more interested in its use as a secondary interface method for general computing. I would love to be able to switch applications or control my media playback with only a raised eyebrow.

Kotaku's contemptible corsair Brian Crecente had a head-on with the EPOC at this year's Game Developer's Conference.

I was a little concerned with the underlying technology, though. From the demonstrations I saw and participated in, the device seemed mostly to detect whether you were or weren't doing one thing. In other words, it could tell when I was trying to float a rock or not trying. But it was hard to tell just how sophisticated that detection was. Could it, for instance, differentiate between my trying to levitate a rock and make one disappear? The Emotiv people said it absolutely could, but they didn't demonstrate that.

Press Release [BusinessWire.com via Crunchgear]

The Sharper Image, the first organization to properly fetishize gadgetry as a lifestyle accessory and not just the domain of the obsessive, has filed for Chapter 11—and good riddance. The company has long hawked substandard, unimaginative products, like a cut-rate Sky Mall without all the whimsy (nor the captive audience).

And let's not even mention the retail stores, staffed by inept floor walkers and clogged with fake leather cases, ionic air lung scorchers and fake chromed plastic as far as the eye could see. Despite fond memories of fireside flips through its exotic pages, I am not upset to see the company go. It had long outlived its usefulness.

Sharper Image files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy [Reuters]

"Fez" is one of the finalists in the 2008 Independent Games Festival awards. The conceit is deceptively simple: the protagonist avatar (the protavatar?) is a 2D character trapped in the 3D world. While that's been done before in games like Klonoa 2, the difference is that in Fez rotating the entire world reconfigures platforms that are out of depth on the Z-axis in 3D to still work in the plane in 2D. That doesn't make sense with me explaining it, I know, but watch the short clip and all should be clear.

Project Page [Kokoromi.com via Waxy]

The "SteakHouse" indoor grill's verical design is more than just a space-saving trick—and if you look at more of the pictures you'll realize it's not that small in the first place—but instead designed to allow fats to drain from the food into catch trays, preventing them from smoking next to the heating elements. Heating elements on both sides of the food tray speed up cooking times.

Is it worth €150? Probably not. But it's a striking piece of kitchen gear, looking more like commercial kitchen equipment than some other cheap, plastic grills.

Product Page [Ariete.net via Appliancist]

The "Alter-G G-Trainer," a treadmill which uses a compressed air chamber to lift and reduce the effective weight of its user, has been approved by the FDA for use in rehabilitation for injuries to the lower extremities. The G-Trainer can reduce up to 80% of lower body weight. Prices are probably somewhat extravagant, but unless you keep a rehabilitation chamber in your mad scientist fortress you'll likely only see the trainer when you send henchmen off to be restored to service.

Product Page [Alter-G.com via Oh Gizmo via MedGadget.com]

EETimes's article on the creation of the Flip Ultra video camera by Pure Digital is a great example of how learning the thought and care that goes into a product can change your mind. Or my mind, at least, having ignored the Flip Ultra as a piece of knocked-together mass market exploitation but now finding myself questioning if perhaps I wouldn't be just as happy with a little pocket-sized, all-in-one solid state camcorder instead of my fairly expensive and unpocketable HD camcorder.

To address the ease of use issue, the designers rallied around a theme: No extra buttons. "The user would always know what each button does," said Fleming. In fact, the team had a goal that within 30 seconds, the user should know how to use it. "It must be intuitive or we won't use it," he said.

...

The "Eureka" moment came with the development of proprietary damping algorithms to implement a non-linear response curve off stasis to give a smooth 'landing' quickly, without instability in the system. "For slow or little change, we keep the auto exposure stable or make very small changes which cannot easily be discerned by viewers," said Furlan. While the auto exposure has no impact on the underlying video frame rate, it does improve the perception that as the camera moves from one scene to the next, there were no significant jumps in brightness.

Under the Hood: Flip Ultra camcorder - An ode to clean design [EETimes.com via Core77]

Phil Torrone uncovered this incredibly rad solid-state linear propulsion system that can send little cars or signs (or whatever) up and down a track by somehow pulsing in sequence underneath a shuttle's trio of magnets. Or at least that's how I suspect it works.

The toy guys showing this off at Toy Fair didn't have an actual product for sale but were just there trying to show it off to toy companies to see if anyone was interested. I am!

Amaing linear propulsion systems - no toy application (yet!) [MAKE]

BENT 2004 from Derek Sajbel on Vimeo.

Dr. Rek writes:

I have just uploaded my Bent 2004 festival documentary to vimeo. In order to promote the art of circuit bending and the BENT festival, Absurdity.Biz has uploaded the first BENT festival dvd online in its entirety.

Shot at the first international circuit bending festival for Absurdity.Biz's ongoing Circuit Bending documentary, it later became a side-project DVD series sold at the BENT festivals.

I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but consider this my own way of bookmarking it for later.

More sci-fi concept than practical idea, I am nonetheless intrigued by the "Bedu" survival-annex-in-a-barrel idea by Toby McInnes, which crams a stove, tents, a radio and generator, medicine, and tools into a 50-gallon drum. Having just recently watched Into the Wild, I have a soft spot for survival and outdoors gear. I really want to go camping.

You know what I should do? Start putting together a camping trip for the spring. But instead of taking a few days off from blogging to do it, I should figure out how to power all my gear off the grid. Solar power would be a good option if I could get one of those roll-out panels. My Macbook Pro is heavier than I'd prefer—especially if I packed a second battery—but I don't think I want to buy a lighter machine just for this purpose. Perhaps I can get some sort of test model from someone.

What do you think I could pull off? I bet I could do a hike in one day, camp for two nights, then hike out the third day. Food would be easy, although water might be a hassle. The last time I hiked in to camp I ended up nearly running out of water on the way in. That would take some doing.

As for connectivity, I'd have to check the coverage maps, but there are several good trails running through the Hudson River valley that have good cell phone coverage. Five bars from the tops of mountains! I wouldn't be surprised if there were an EVDO node on some of those.

This is doable. Probably April at the earliest, depending on weather. I don't want to try to pack in the computer, food, water, and cold weather gear.

Emergency Response Unit [Yanko]

• Laser Printer – HP LaserJet P10006 Personal Laser Printer for $50, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• Laptop – Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz 12" 3.8-lb. Laptop for $955, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Videogame &Ndash; Rock Band (game only) for $35, shipped. If you already have an Xbox 360 Guitar Hero controller you can use this, as well as any generic USB microphone. Drums, however... [Dealnews]

• Electric Razor – Today's Woot! is the Remington MicroFlex Titanium Rechargeable Shaver for $25, shipped.

Over at Modern Mechanix today we have this cool looking remote controlled train from 1936, a tiny portable typewriter (the Mac Book Air of it's day), a 1933 roundup of mechanical gadgets for busy housewives and learned that too much nudism is not all it's cracked up to be. Also from 1933 is this great Modern Mechanix article about the makeup artists who worked on old monster movies, including Frankenstein.  Did you know that man has a strange inner power? Let Yogi Alpha and his magic finger help dig it out.

Today we also rolled out a new site design with a few new features that should make it a lot easier to navigate our archives.  Check it out and let us know what you think.

MacRumors has uncovered a intriguing patent application from Apple describing some of their possible planned multi-touch interface additions to OS X. Combinations include four finger taps to reveal Exposé, thumb-and-finger combinations, and even a way to recognize the pinky at the bottom of a fist for some sort of club-handed command. (I'm guessing why-you-little-Ctrl-Z.)

Whether or not we'll see any of this stuff on current-generation hardware (besides the Macbook Air) is anyone's guess. I think it's at least possible these upgrades could be done in software, despite some debate on whether or not the chipset powering the trackpads could handle it. I base this purely from the increased size of the trackpads from the PowerBook to MacBook. Surely they wouldn't have nearly doubled in size just for two-fingered scrolling?

Apple Depicts Advanced Multitouch Gesturing Control Panel in Mac OS X [MacRumors.com]

This new Nerf "N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25" is a fully automatic belt-fed dart gun, powered by six D batteries. (I can't think of the last time I used D batteries.) It's only forty bucks, too. This will be mine when it launches this Fall.

Nerf Vulcan EBF-25: Fully Automatic Toy Dart Gun Rambo Junior's Weapon of Choice [Gizmodo]

PT is over on the MAKE blog doing a great job with actual hands-on reports of cool stuff from the New York Toy Fair. Tons and tons of science-oriented toys and project kits. I figure the intersection between BBG readers and MAKE readers is pretty large, but just in case, it bears mentioning that my handier cousin is doing yeoman's work.

Toy Fair '08 Coverage [Blog.Makezine.com]