On the way up to buy a videogame at my local Gamestop today, I stopped by the Brooklyn Superhero Supply, another fund raising retail outlet from 826 Valencia, the same folks who just opened up the Echo Park Time Travel Shop in LA. It's a little crowded (like most shops in Brooklyn), but it's always fun to take a look at the gear and costumes on display.
Below is a sponsored mobile widget from Microsoft.
Lexan knuckledusters—brass knuckles made not of brass but of plastic—are the latest fodder for a hilarious local television news report, wherein a pasty take-no-guff reporter punches cabbages then stares down the viewer growling, "Cole slaw."
Watch as local officials recoil in horror at the thought that they might be perceived to be soft on violence! Shout as not a single adult finds themselves capable of shrugging their shoulders at the potential crimes of imagined hoodlums! Gasp in legitimate grief for a schoolteacher who was punched in the head! Resist the urge to punch the reporter in his sanctimonious flap face with a pair of lexan knuckles easily made at home!
[via Crime Scene KC]
A judicious application of Dremel and gumption turned one man's slide viewer into a perfectly charming little iPod nano dock, blowing up its tiny screen into something...slightly less tiny. Too bad he has to reencode all his movies to display upside down!
[via Retrothing via Gadget Lab]
iLounge spoke to sources familiar with the upcoming iPhone/iPod Touch software development kit, who explained that not only would Apple be distributing all third-party applications through iTunes (bad enough) they'll also be approving which applications are allowed to be sold (way worse).
Apple as application picker. The most controversial aspect of Apple’s SDK plan is its intention to formally approve or deny all SDK-based software releases for its devices. Our sources confirm that Apple will act as a gatekeeper for applications, deciding which are and are not worthy of release, and publishing only approved applications to the iTunes Store; a process that will less resemble the iTunes Store’s massive directory of podcasts than its sale of a limited variety of iPod Games. While one source saw this as a positive for major developers, suggesting that Apple will be choked by application submissions and forced to give priority to releases from larger companies, another source disagreed, stating that Apple’s current approval processes for third-party products have resulted in lengthy, needless delays. It is unclear whether Apple will need to approve subsequent bug fixes and feature additions to accepted applications, another issue that could clog the approval system and postpone important improvements.I really love my iPhone, but come on. I really hope there is an accepted way for third-party apps to be added to the iPhone without going through iTunes. Some of the apps I want will certainly not be approved by Apple for sale on iTunes (such as remote audio streaming).
iPhone/iPod SDK: Apple to approve, distribute apps, limit add-ons [iLounge]
Motherboard manufacturer MSI is toying around with new "powerless" cooling fans in their labs that harvest heat from processors with tiny Stirling Engines. Brilliant!
MSI employs Stirling Engine Theory [TweakTown.com]
Steve Demeter's Demiforce software is showing off "Trism," a Bewjewelled-family match-three game that uses triangular pieces that fall based on the orientation of your iPhone. The pieces always slide down towards the ground as if they were affected by real-world gravity.
Game Set Watch has an interview with Demeter where he talks about his company's history, the inspiration for the game, and his mad dash to try to find out everything he can about the upcoming iPhone/Touch SDK announcements next week. Understandably so—the first stand-out puzzle game for the iPhone to be available for sale on iTunes should bring in a fat stack of cash for its developer.
I started by making an Excel spreadsheet, listing all the different kinds of game input methods available, such as directional, directional + buttons, directional + buttons + mouse, and mouse only. Then, I listed the natural endpoints of evolution for games for each control mechanism.For example, Tetris I feel is a natural endpoint of directional-only gaming because it uses the keyboard's functionality efficiently and to its fullest extent. The 2D sidescroller is a natural endpoint of directional + button gameplay, adding the concept of multitasking to the mix. FPSs are natural endpoints of keyboard and mouse gaming, and games like minesweeper and solitaire are natural endpoints for mouse-only gameplay.
Interview: The Next Big Puzzle Game Wave? iPhone + Accelerometer! [GameSetWatch.com]
An apple a day keeps the brain-slagging thought-bot away, sending his parasitic beam to the skull of your best friend Jimmy.
The Devourer of Intellect [MOCPages.com via Brothers Brick]
Dave Eggers and crew have opened another faux store to support their non-profit tutoring and writing centers. This one's in LA and sells time-travel-related products, including delicious Mammoth Chunks in five gallon cans, packets of shade, and anti-barbarian spray.
Product Catalog [344Design.typepad.com via io9]
Today on Modern Mechanix we look at this cigarette factory built into a tobacco can, an electric head warmer for people who sleep out doors, anti-shrapnel goggles, a pressure sack used to save divers, and some pretty luxurious looking airplane accommodations. Also, learn about the latest feats of plant breeders from this 1936 Popular Mechanics article. It's well worth it just for the picture of the woman giddily holding a two and a half foot cucumber.
Yesterday we looked at this weird looking collar, plans for a floating ice-island in the middle of the Atlantic, twisted chimneys that blow smoke rings, a professor who teaches his class via microwave radio, a man's dubious claim that he can tell what sex a chicken will be by holding a coil wrapped cork over the egg, and a 1934 Modern Mechanix feature about the vast array of guns kept by movie studio armorers for use in films. Also check out this this interesting, photo rich, article about the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of F.D.R's programs designed to help whip the depression.
Philips has installed this playful LED wall at Mercy Medical Center in Rogers, Arkansas. An array of 1,420 touch-sensitive panels change colors every time they are tapped, capable of registering up to six discrete participants at a time.
If you want to get an idea of what it's like, Gadget Lab's Rob Beschizza made a Flash version. I spent several minutes playing around with the array, adding my own blooping and bleeping sound effects while pretending I was about to give birth.
Paint LED Art With Philips' Giant Light Canvas [Gadget Lab]
The BBC's Darren Waters had a sit down with Andy Rubin (formerly of Apple, General Magic, WebTV, and Danger) who's the main man on Android, Google's mobile OS. Rubin showed the current state of the Android platform and it's looking swell—for the most part. (What's up with having to use a slider to zoom in the web browser? Can't you just rip off the double-tap intelligent zoom from Mobile Safari?)
Perhaps most impressive is the Street View mode of Google Maps, pulled down to the 3G prototype reference phone running at a relatively mild 300MHz. That reference design, which may or may not reflect hardware that will run Android in the future, had another interesting feature: a trackball, currently seen on Danger Hiptops and Blackberries.
In what would surely be a depressing addition to my work desk, the "USB WPM Speedometer" tracks your typing speed and daily word count, displaying them on a handsome analog dial (which is nested in a less-than-handsome chassis with a flower-shaped vent and a non-functional second gauge). Custom software is necessary to monitor your output, of course, and I suspect the £20 Speedometer's software will be Windows-only when it arrives in mid-March. (Call it a hunch.)
Catalog Page [DrinkStuff.com via Technobob via Nexus404.com]
A funerary vendor called "Eternal Image" has licensed the Star Trek brand to provide a line of urns and caskets inspired by the sci-fi series. The first two products are an urn, a metallic sphere held aloft by three Starfleetesque buttresses, and a casket shaped like a photon torpedo. The urn will be $800 when it's released in the middle of this year, while the casket has no price as yet. Expect the casket to be several thousand dollars, for sure.
My preference, since I don't think I've made it clear before, would be to stuffed to overflowing with lilac seeds, doused in beer, and buried in a pine box packed with fertilizer. I'm sure that violates state and federal corpse handling procedure, so you have my permission to steal my body and bury it in an unmarked grave.
Product Page [EternalImage.com via Gearlog]
It's not on sale yet, but "Choplery" will give diners at Asian take-out joints an easy choice between chopsticks and Western utensils. The only way these could be better is if they worked in reverse: starting with chopsticks, then fusing together into a fork when you've realized the error of your ways. (Remember, eaters, the best way to eat rice with chopsticks is to put the bowl to your mouth and to shovel it all in.)
Concept Page [DesignGoStudios.Blogspot.com via Josh Spear]
I had a nagging suspicion that the UCCTOP Xeno mixing station laptop did not actually exist outside 3D mockups and busy Flash pages, but ; saw a working prototype at least once. Sadly, I can't find a proper review. It seems a $10,000 all-in-one luggable video workstation from an obscure Korean vendor isn't setting the broadcast world on fire. And though my video production needs can be met by a webcam and any computer with a delete key, I still sort of want to take the Xeno out for a whirl. All those buttons! And sliders! and jog shuttles! That is what the laptop of the future was supposed to look like (if you can ignore its ridiculous width).
In case you actually do have a need for a video workstation and aren't just enticed to drool by shiny control surfaces, the Xeno also has a four-channel video switcher built in (interface unknown!). I don't know much about broadcast television, but I'd expect most of the software and hardware is pretty proprietary stuff, right? Maybe UCCTOP should partner up with one of the bigger software vendors.
Product Page [Eng.ucctop.kr/eng/ via Oh Gizmo]
Images purported to be the leaks of an upcoming Space line from LEGO have be scanned and I am intrigued. The ships are a heavily white and blue palette, with big chunky pieces reminiscent of some of the original Space line-ups from the '80s, complete with saucer-sucker landing gear. It's a throwback and I like it.
But then look at the other set! Giant cthuloid skull robot with accompanying droids! Definitely not a throwback.
These were not sets shown off at all at Toy Fair, so I don't know when we could expect to see them.
modular space [Brickshelf.com via Brothers Brick]
• Custom Greeting Cards – 20% custom cards at Moo.com. Moo is really great. [Dealhack]
• Mac Mini – Core Duo 1.66GHz Mac Mini from Geeks.com for $480. [Dealhack]
• Tech Accessories – Various crap on a sale from Shop4Tech.com, but I especially like this laptop presentation stand for $60, shipped. [Dealnews]
• PC Game – Company of Heroes for $16, shipped. Still a great game. I need to play the expansion. [Dealnews]
• Roomba – Today's Woot! is a iRobot Roomba 4296 Remote Scheduler (refurbished) for $105, shipped.
These will appeal to a very small subset of readers, but I find the implementation to be slick enough to merit note: Roush, an aftermarket company for cars, is selling these relatively inexpensive clips for Ford Mustangs and F-150s that allow you to mount a standard gauge in an air vent rather than clipping it onto the dash or pillar as is typical.
As it's just a clip of plastic it'd be nice to see these as factory options for all performance inclined vehicles, but since most auto manufacturers like to pretend their cars don't get modded (and modders like to pretend they haven't violated their warranty) it's probably not likely.
Product Page [RoushPerformance.com] via Jalopnik]
Threat Level's Ryan Singel puts together a great overview of "BD+," the as-yet-undefeated DRM system that is included as an optional secondary restriction layer on Blu-ray high-definition discs.
The BD+ system, invented by the San Francisco-based company Cryptography Research, embeds a virtual machine in Blu-ray discs that play only on authorized Blu-ray players.I don't think I have to tell you my opinion about ultimately fruitless customer frustration schemes, but it is always interesting to see the current state of the art of DRM design.When the player spins up the disc, the virtual machine software and the DVD player view each other with mutual suspicion, but initiate a complicated mating ritual involving checks of cryptographic keys.
Once the disc decides the player is legitimate and hasn't been compromised, it allows the movie it contains to be decrypted for playback.
But if the disc detects that the player has been modified to record the movie, or it is using stolen keys from a different player, the disc won't play. Unlike AACS, however, BD+ has no ability to disable a player permanently, nor does its software linger after a disc is ejected.
How Crypto Won the DVD War [Threat Level]
Unless you've stockpiled dozens of cases of Concord Grape Goober in your larder, you'll likely find the £1,400 "Robot Coupe" to be a bit more bread slicer than your average kitchen requires. Cram a rod of French bread in the Robot Coupe and you'll find up to 180 slices in the hamper in just a minute, provided you have a loaf that is at least 1.44 meters long—the Coupe can cut slices from 8mm to 80mm thickness. (Look at me with my big ol' calculator!)
The Oobject gallery (linked below) from which the slicer was pulled is full of over a dozen similar examples of industrial cooking machines, like a "small (read: not small) juicy meat bun maker" and a "generic fried snack food machine." They all make me wish my spring-loaded jaw were rated for a higher snack-per-second intake rate.
Catalog Page [Catering-Machines.com via Oh Gizmo via Oobject]
While it would be much better if you didn't have glue the arms onto the phone, I find this SoftBank 815T robot phone charming nonetheless. The whole kaboodle is apparently part of a promotion of a Japanese show called "Ketai Sousakan 7."
Softbank Launches the First Mecha Like 3G Mobile Phone in the World [AkihabaraNews.com via Bot Junkie]
• iPod Touch – Refurb 8GB and 16GB iPod Touch for $229, $329 shipped. [Dealnews]
• Surround Sound – Low-end refurbished Philips 5.1 system for $100, shipped. Should be more than enough for most casual movie watchers. [Dealnews]
• SD Card – Today's Woot! is a Dane-Elec 2GB SD card for $12, shipped. Not a fast card, I'm sure, but should be fine for most.
The standards of quality customer service in the American telecommunications industry have been steadily lowered since the divestiture. What was once a salaried, pensioned position with great benefits executed by professionals who had undergone months of training was slowly given over to disinterested temporary employees who didn't listen to customers but instead read to them dispassionately from a script.
And while executives at the telcos claimed their poor customer service didn't have an effect on the bottom line—the only justifiable claim they could make, since the quality of the customer service became a staple of casual kvetching and late night talk show monologues—it was clear to anyone with a vision that extended past the next quarter's earnings statement that unhappy customers would eventually make for a failing company.
So it is with not a little gloating that I read this report in Business Week about Sprint Nextel, a company hemorrhaging customers and stock value since their merger three years ago, not because they are without good technology and products, but because they treated their customers so poorly.
Employees like Paula Pryor saw the merger's impact firsthand. The 38-year-old, who worked in a call center in Temple, Tex., says the numbers-driven management approach implemented after the combination led to poor morale and deteriorating customer service. Even bathroom trips were monitored. "They would micromanage us like children," says Pryor, who was fired last year after taking time off when her father died.Sprint's new CEO Daniel R. Hesse is said to have put customer service as his top priority under his new regime, but we'll see.
To crib from Dostoyevsky, the degree of vitality in a phone company can be judged by entering its customer service queue.
Sprint's Wake-Up Call [BusinessWeek.com]
So that The Sharper Image bankruptcy filing won't affect the stores, you think? Not so. A source just got back from a The Sharper Image where he tried to use his $150 gift certificate he received for Christmas. Instead of a bag full of scale model Lamborghini Countaches he was handed this in return: a letter explaining that his gift certificate would not be honored. Those are the hot winds of the ironic breeze.
The customer added, "The manager told me she already has a new job as internally they were told it is totally over."
(You can click the image for a larger version.)
Previously • Disconcerting: The Sharper Image Is Kaput [BBG]
Boing Boing is maternity and children's clothing store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I snapped this rather crappy pic with my iPhone a couple of months ago, went out today to get a better one, and then couldn't find it. Turns out it's a lot further down 6th Avenue that I remembered!
It's got a 9.8 out of 10 review on NYMag.com, though, so we can safely say they're doing the name proud.
Boing Boing [NYMag.com]
Below is a sponsored widget from Microsoft.
Today on Modern Mechanix we look at this pimped out hayrake, a truly frightening looking face harness for "Milady's Beauty", chemistry experiments you can do at home, a locomotive themed popcorn stand, an aircraft that looks sort of like a Star Wars land speeder and the Screw-Ship which, despite the wishes of one commenter, was not a dirtier cousin of the Love Boat. Also, in 1932 Modern Mechanix asked the question: "How much longer can our big cities last?"
Let's give a nod where it's due: one of Sony's developers of the "PlayTV" digital receiver for the Playstation 3 has announced that television recordings will be stored in industry standard, DRM-free MPEG-2, reports Eurogamer.
"We've talked to our legal department about it," said Bunting. "All we're doing is moving it out of PlayTV and to the cross-media bar as if it was any other recording. So hopefully users won't do stuff they shouldn't do with it.What a wholly sensible outlook! I'm sure it'll be quashed by the time the product gets to market.
"If I'm prohibited from getting the recording off and storing it somewhere else because some other dude is making money out of selling it, then I'd rather they brought the law in to catch those people," he added.
I finally got a Playstation 3 last week, picking up a used 60GB so I can pretend I'll someday get around to playing Dragon Quest VIII someday. So far I've been pretty impressed by the machine, if superficially. It certainly feels like a magisterial, adult experience, from the warming orchestra boot-up intro to the copious options available in the menu to the slot-loading Blu-ray drive—much more so than the Wii or Xbox 360. (Which, for the record, I think are also great in their own ways. Let's not start a console battlefront here!)
Do anything with PlayTV recordings [Eurogamer.net]
The "Laken ISO 70" water bottle's outside shell is made of aluminum, but its filled—partially, of course—with aerogel, that wonderfully lightweight and low density material that weighs just three times more than air. It's a great insulator, helping in making a water bottle that's half the weight of a traditional all-metal vacuum thermos.
The Laken ISO 70 aren't cheap, though, at 60 bucks a pop. But in a pinch you could crack one open and catch interstellar dust.
Product Page [Laken.es via Oh Gizmo]
A story about 37-year-old Anthony Ricca, who shoplifted and then sold Star Wars LEGO on eBay, contains this hilariously literal quote."There is apparently some type of nostalgic or intrinsic value for these Star Wars Legos products, where individuals that are fans of Star Wars end up bidding for these products and buying them on Ebay," Pete Palenzuela with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office told WPBF News 25.Apparently items for sale have intrinsic value!
Ricca had shoplifted over $42k in LEGO and sold them through his eBay store. Considering that he claimed to have only stolen $150 worth of sets a week, he must have been doing it for ages.
Police: Man Stole, Sold $42K In Legos Star Wars Items On Ebay [WPBF.com]
The creepiest part of this whole commercial is the half second before they start singing, while all three of them bob and grimace into the camera while waiting for their cue. It gets more terrifying the more you watch it. [via TV in Japan]
Prof. Michael Stoll has scanned in these wonderful Syd Mead illustrations, commissioned by U.S. Steel in the early '60s as promotional materials, and added them to the Paleo-Future/Boing Boing Gadgets "In the Year 2000" Flickr pool. I would kill to get my hands on a set of these.
This ambulance is taking me to the hospital where I will be impregnated with Syd Mead's babies.
Christ almighty! Syd Mead invented AT-ATs!
USS - a portfolio of probabilities [Flickr.com via Paleo-Future]
This is a screenshot of my feedreader, sorted by time (not keyword). I think Sony may have come out with something today. Maybe something with letters in the model? I'm not sure.
Here's what I don't get: Wouldn't it be easier for these companies to release their product information directly into a public database from which all these sites and their readers could pull? I guarantee a bunch of gadget writers stayed up late last night to rewrite all those Sony press releases. It would have been much more efficient for everyone if the press releases were just injected into the stream without any human interaction.
(If I had one millions of rubles, I'd build a system to handle this.)
