John Brownlee

Wireless Opera earbuds don't get tangled or pulled

Just the other day, I was grousing in the BBG editor's chat channel about my Creative Zen Aurvana's, a pair of ear buds that I had spent a hundred bucks for, liked pretty well and which had spontaneously stopped transmitting sound through the right ear piece. "I'm never going to spend more than twenty bucks on ear plugs again," I vowed. "They're just too fragile: ear buds are basically made in a form factor meant to be wrapped around an MP3 player. They're always just going out on me."

And now comes along a pair of ear plugs to test the resolve. The Opera ear buds are wireless; the sound is relayed via a small transmitter that plugs into the headphone jack of your DAP. It runs on Kleer, a wireless technology that claims better audio quality than Bluetooth.And they're only 98 bucks when they come out in June.

I don't really care for the look of these buds, but 100 bucks to solve the "one ear bud breaking" problem of my last five pairs of headphones (which I've always assumed is because I've accidentally yanked the wire too hard) seems like a good investment. I'll be interested to see how Kleer pans out. Of course, being wireless, that also makes the Opera ear buds even easier to lose... the main reason I never kept my Aurvana's in the attractive little case they came with.

Opera earbuds make your iPod wireless, Kleerly [DVICE]

Rob Beschizza

The Boing Boing Gadgets 1K Competition Gallery

"1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide."

That—making the most of limited resources—was our challenge to you. In return, we received a host of fantastic entries, ranging from short stories to procedural robot generators. Now comes the challenge of picking one to win a terabyte hard drive from Seagate, but not before we collect all the entrants in one place.

The gallery of 1K wonders follows after the jump.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Adorable Alien vinyl has translucent skull hood

This vinyl Alien toy by Medicon Toys has to be the most adorable Xenomorph I've ever seen. You know, if you'd asked me if H.R. Giger's perverse xenosexual alien designs could be transformed into cute bobbleheads and shrunk down to eight inches high while maintaining their phallic, skeletal monstrosity, I'd have told you it couldn't be done. But, wow, they've really done a great job with these vinyls. Look! The alien's head even has a translucent glans revealing the human skull underneath, just like in Giger's original design. Sheer class. $70 will get you one for the top of your monitor when they ship in Q3, 2008.

Alien Vinyl Collectible Doll [Sideshow Toy]

John Brownlee

Mansinthe: Marilyn Manson endorsed absinthe

I am an appreciative consumer of alcohol endorsed by rock musicians. I lost my virginity to a freaky girlfriend wooed into the folly of sleeping with me by goblets full of KISS-brand wine (or, perhaps more likely, the engorged, 14-inch long protrusion of Gene Simmons' tongue prominently displayed on the label). I also like absinthe — not for the taste, which is fermented Listerine, but for the pretentiousness: the ornate louching rituals, the vague idea of opium-scented absinthe parlors, fluffy cravats and decadent poets tormented by wormwood-induced spectres.

So I would think I would be all for Marilyn Manson's new absinthe, called Mansinthe. I'm not. Oh, yes, at $56 a bottle, it's not direly expensive, which is a plus. And as a product between Manson, Absinthe.de and Matter-Luginbühl AG, it should, at least, be just as drinkable as any absinthe. More, probably: it's won the gold medal at the 2008 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Heck, it even has a pretty incredible bottle.

But ultimately, it's the name. Mansinthe. This is the exact name of the house specialty at a strange underground absinthe bar I was dragged to in San Francisco's Castro district a few years back. You don't even want to know how they louched it.

Mansinthe [Absinthe.de via Uncrate]

Rob Beschizza

Macworld: Where Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng!

In honor of Osaka's refurbed Brynnerbot.

John Brownlee

Pedometer stilettos for come-fuck-me joggers

These intimidating stiletto boots by Costume National contain a pedometer inserted in the ankle. An overlooked marketing opportunity, surely. The weight loss crowd will not buy these to jog in, Costume National. However, if you say the pedometer actually measures the number of testicles sadomasochistically crushed under heel, you'd have a good in with the stat-keeping BDSM crowd.

C'n'c... And Sun [Fashion and Runway via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Vintage Japanese automaton back in action

This humanoid 'bot resides in Osaka. Eighty years old, it's just emerged from refurbishment and is once again ready to stare unnervingly at tourists at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Science.

Neatened up from a machine translation:

"Golden "rita" stands at a height of 3.2m. In her left hand, it holds the 'light of inspiration,' and in the right hand, a pen. His face is made of rubber, with compressed air moving the eyes, eyelids, mouth, neck, arms, and chest. Facial expressions and movements are surprisingly smooth."

The most striking part seems to be that instead of simply recreating the old version, they modernized it and created a computer-controlled robot replica that's superior to the original. Here's the inside of its head:

"Eastworld," anyone? Can anyone translate those glyphs?

Update: Commenters alternatively report that it means "study of natural law" or "Learn The Rule of Heaven." There's something neatly complementary and opposite about each of these interpretations.

Source (Machtrans) [impress via TokyoMango]

Rob Beschizza

186,000 British drivers fined in 2006 for driving while yapping

Some 460 drivers are fined a day in Britain for talking on their cell phones at the wheel. This compares to where I used to live in New Mexico, where 460 state and local representatives are nicked every day for being too plastered to stay in lane.

Using mobiles while driving is so commonplace in the UK that police routinely order checks of call records to see if one was underway at the time of an accident.

The figures were released today by the UK Justice Department, according to The Telegraph, and show that despite the fact it's been illegal to use a mobile phone while driving without a hands-free kit since 2003, it's taking a long time for drivers to get used to the idea.

Tory Party spokesman for roads Robert Goodwill told The Telegraph: "This is a damning indictment of Labour's failure to clamp down on drivers who repeatedly flout the law... Labour's heavy reliance on speed cameras as a cash cow instead of actually properly policing the roads is being exposed."

Being a Brit in America, I'm somewhat used to in-car cellphone use being either perfectly legal or completely unenforced. To me, it seems no more distracting than talking to the passenger, watching the in-dash DVD player or reading the newspaper on I-279. Damn the nanny state!

Police nick 460 a day for using mobiles while driving [The Register]

John Brownlee

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator is just another Atari Mindlink

"Mind-reading" video game controllers are nothing new. The Atari Mindlink introduced the concept to gaming in 1983. Trephining and plunging electrodes through spurting skull holes was not the prerequisite: the Mindlink was a crock, actually controlled by a series of forehead waggles and facial tics. Then, last year, there was the Neurosky... Mindlink Mach II. Now Gizmodo's spotted a new one: the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator.

To begin with, you probably only want to map a single event to your games, but as your confidence improves you'll be able to do more and give your hands a break. And as the NIA can speed up response times (200ms to click fire, 100ms to think it), it means you'll be more efficient at shooting before getting shot.

We got to use the device for an extended play in the wonderfully frenetic Unreal Tournament 3, and the buzz you get when you knock up your first frag is every bit as stunning as it is scary.

It seems to be getting mostly positive reviews, but it's just another Mindlink: it basically just monitors your forehead muscles. When are people going to learn?

I think, ultimately, the idea that neurologically commanded video game controllers will somehow be more intuitive than their digitally handled counterparts is a phlegmatic huff on the magic jaybone of wishful thinking. People seem to assume that if such a controller comes along, looking around in a video game will be as easy as turning your head in real life. Obviously, it can't be that simple: if you send the same mental signal to look around in a game as you do to move your head, you'll quickly find yourself looking away from the screen. You'll need to train your brain to send a message to the controller to make you look around in the game. But I already know how to send that message: I tell my thumb to wiggle on the D-Pad. Simple. Direct brain controllers, even in theory, simply convolute the remarkable elegance of moving a mouse or thumbing a trigger button.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator [Buy]

Image: Atari Museum

Rob Beschizza

Is your ideal workstation the Battle-Rig Pro?

Let's admit it: we all like to imagine the perfect workstation. Perhaps yours is a metal slab in a stone cellar packed with blinking hardware and writhing mountains of cable; maybe it's a Mason Verger-style bed surrounded by enormous LCD displays and stock tickers. BornRich's list of luxury workstations is food for thought, packed as it is with a wild variety of overpriced desks and computer racks.

Many are nerdy. All are silly, in their own way. If you like number 3 the best, however, seek immediate help.

Luxury Workstations [Born Rich]

Rob Beschizza

Tiny wireless video camera watches and waits—for 45 minutes

Japan Trend Shop's wireless mini video camera has 45 minutes of battery life and records it all at a claimed 2.7 megapixels (as commenter Pinup57 suggests below, this is likely a typo of .27 megapixels). Moreoever, it transmits what it sees at 1.2 GHz up to 98 feet to a receiver, which itself hooks up to any old TV or capture card with a composite video jack.

At $270, it's very expensive—and it doesn't record audio, either—but given that it's waterproof and less than a square inch in size, I expect those with an application already in mind won't mind the tag.

RC-12 Wireless Mini Video Camera [Kilian Nakamura via Oh Gizmo! and Ubergizmo]

John Brownlee

WiFi watch sniffs out open hotspots

This watch, though fashionologically hideous, has one killer feature. It picks up and alerts you to the presence of WiFi signals as you perambulate by.

I could have use for a watch like this, if only for the fact that it's so ugly that it would make my dates want to punch themselves in the baby maker. Sure, it doesn't do anything my laptop doesn't do, but I think walking by a nice looking cafe or bar and just quickly glancing at your watch to check if you can do some work there is a lot easier.

I'm not going to buy an ugly watch for that functionality, though. I tend to assume that all digital watches and cell phones will do something like this eventually, but that's probably naive: we're probably only a few years away from most wireless internet being cellular, after all. Base stations will just seem so quaint.

Still, if you're inclined, the asking price for the WiFI Watch is only £19.99. That's cheap enough you could just take off the band and carry it in your pocket. Actually, come to think of it, I may do just that.

WiFi Detecting Watch [Thumbs Up UK via Gadget Lab]

John Brownlee

AT&T to subsidize thinner 3G iPhones for 200 clams?

Fortune's Techland blog is reporting that a source close to Apple is claiming that the upcoming 3G iPhone will be sold at a $200 discount by AT&T... if you sign up for a two-year contract. In other words, standard rugby for cell phone companies... sell the phones cheap or give them away for free, then make your money back from a subscription.

Interestingly, the source claims that you won't be able to get this deal from an Apple store, but only from AT&T directly. Also, it'll be locked so you can't take it to another carrier... or will be for about five minutes before the Internet figures out the newest way to hack it.

All the other usual rumors are confirmed by the source: early June, 3G and GPS. They will still apparently come in only 8GB and 16GB flavors, although that seems a bit hard to believe to me, given the iPod Touch comes with up to 32GB. Finally, in keeping with Apple's design philosophy, if you can't figure out a way to improve its looks, make it thinner: the 3G iPhone will allegedly be 2.5 mm thinner than the original.

Take with the usual grain of salt, but it all parses.

AT&T to cut the price of Apple's New iPhone [Techland]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Zombie robot thinks you can spare some brains

Mark "Android Man" Miller makes robots and clean-burning engines. They sing, but, evidently, they also eat brains.

Rob Beschizza

Lenovo's IdeaPad U110 barges into arty high-end subnotebook party

Lenovo's IdeaPad U110 slips into an attractive but rarefied niche: the high-end, art-covered subnotebook. Occupying a space just below the popular 13.3-inchers like the MacBook, it's the Sony Vaio TZ's traditional turf — the newcomer's intricate etchings go toe to toe with the Vaio Art and Graphic Splash editions. Even design-neutral Fujitsu recently put a strange pattern on the lid of it's own entry in the 11-12 inch pack.

"It's a distinct looking notebook," said Michael Kuptz, a VP at Lenovo's consumer business group. "... People immediately gravitate toward the piano style keyboard, the screen, the texture."

I got a hands-on myself at CES, and can vouch for Kuptz' talking points: with the U110, Lenovo's definitely getting well out of IBM territory.

With an 11.1" widescreen display, 2 or 3GB of RAM, up to 120GB of hard drive space, stereo speakers and, on the extended battery, 8 hours of waking life, it's capably specced, though it's high time that WWAN was an option on all subnotebooks, especially expensive ones like this.

It has no optical drive, however, making it lighter than other recent models at its size, lighter even than the MacBook Air: 2.3 lbs. This gives it a certain distinction, in that it's about as light as the Asus Eee, and as small as you can go without shrinking a keyboard, but is a reasonably powerful laptop. Just remember to get an XP downgrade disk.

Ethernet, 802.11n and optional bluetooth round out the deal.

I found that the keyboard, with its slick, shiny surface, presents a mild learning curve. The model at CES was slathered in fingerprints, though it had been pawed by countless attendees before I got my hands on it: let's hope it comes with a nice cloth.

At $1,900 and up, the U110 is pricier than the TZ, Fuji's P8010 and other similarly-featured subnotebooks. It comes in black and whore red.

John Brownlee

Apple Geniuses to get even more douchey

Though an unapologetic Mac fanboy, I understand people who hate the unwarranted self-satisfaction of the hipster doofuses calling themselves "geniuses." I hate those Apple Store twats.

Never once have I had a conversation with one where I didn't find myself wanting to push my thumbs through the jelly of his or her eyes. One of my major dilemmas in buying Macs is actually helping to facilitate the employment of, oh, say, the Apple "Genius" who told me with infinite contempt that AppleCare didn't cover the laptops of smokers when I brought my MBP in for repair a few months ago, but he'd "try to push it through and hope the tech has a cold." God. Just go to hell, you self-righteous hippy prat.

There's a lot of things Apple Store employees could do to be more likable, the first of which would be to stop wearing their own o-rings as moist, elastic turtlenecks and realize that working for $10 an hour rebooting iPods for a living does not make you a member of the cultural elite. But it doesn't look like Apple's going to do encourage their employees to do that. In fact, it looks like they'll be doing everything in their power to make their employees even more smug, insufferable and loathsome. Now, each Apple Retail employee will wear a different uniform, and their shirt will have different "Punch Me Hard In The Face" slogans according to their position. These slogans are:

• Specialist: "I can talk about this stuff for hours"
• Concierge: "I know people"
• Creative: "All gain, no pain"
• Genius: "Not all heroes wear capes"
• Manager: "My house is yours"
• Back-of-house: "Some artists use a canvas, I use boxes"

Urge to waggle thumbs in gooey "Genius" brainpans... rising. You'd think a single shirt distributed to all employees reading "Douche" would do the same job at 1/6th the price.

Employee Clothing, Titles to be Tweaked [IFO Applestore]

Rob Beschizza

Fence porthole gives pooch a point of view

It needs no explanation, the Pets' Observation Poodle from Hammacher Schlemmer. Nine inches wide and 5" deep, it gives "the inquisitive canine," which is cataloguese for "dog," a panoramic view of things at which to bark.

Hammacher Schlemmer suggests lining several of these $30 domes around the perimeter of your yard, to allow your pet an unrestricted view of interesting places it cannot go.

Product Page [HS] (Thanks, Heather!)

Rob Beschizza

Neocube needs no mechanisms

Take, as an example of the hidden mechanisms within puzzles, the work of Erno Rubik. In his famous cube, each sub-cube isn't really a cube at all, but is instead a cleverly-shaped plug that fits into a ball in the middle. More visibly, Rubik's Magic is held together by a latticework of plastic wires, which may become snarled in the hands of a wankhanded puzzle-solver. Neo Cube, however, needs no wires, internal mechanisms or other structural legerdemains. Comprising 216 neodymium magnets, its freakish and ordered workings are governed entirely by the laws of physics.

Product Page (Down?) [Neocube via Gearfuse]

John Brownlee

The Disintegrator minigun shoots 40 rubber bands per second

You're going to want to turn off your speakers for this one. Actually, just to be on the safe side, you may want to light them on fire, smash them with an axe and then pour hydrochloric acids over the spark-spitting shards. This video has terrible music. But the reward is worth it: a look at the Disintegrator, a rubber band mini-gun made out of wood that fires its payload at an incredible 40 rounds per second. Of course, loading it is an hour long affair, but that's a small price to pay for the pleasure of turning your office colleagues into a perforated column of meat jelly during an impromptu office rubber band fight.

The Disintegrator [YouTube]

John Brownlee

Overall balance scale is for weight loss min-maxers

Lately, I've had my eyeball on all of the various gadgets and gizmos that come through the pipe, promising to help me — a repulsive fatty whose recent attempts at exercise most aptly resemble a greased walrus flapping on his belly after a fish suspended above a treadmill — measure the exact atomic rate at which my blubber is increasing or subsiding.

Okay. I'm not really that bad. I'm about half way through losing about 30 pounds. But the min-maxer in me is fascinated by ultra-precise fat measuring devices like National Electric's Overall Balance Scale. It measures your weight. It measures your muscle level. It measures your basal metabolic rate. It measures your BMI (bullshit). Hell, it measures your subcutaneous fat ratio... as opposed to exocutaneous fat ratio, which are the planetoid-sized masses of cellulite orbiting around your own personal gravity well, along with a set of planetary rings made up of Cheetos and Ding-Dongs.

Too fat to see the numbers on the scale over your belly? They've thought of that, though not too well: you can pull the sensor up above your belly, which would all be fine although it presumes you can actually reach down to touch your toes, which is clearly impossible if you can't see over your stomach to begin with.

Pretty neat, but my experience over the last month getting in shape has been that the more precise the numbers being thrown at me are, the more neurotic I become about them. I'd be tearing my hair out in bloody clumps at the hopelessness of the cause and consoling myself with a pepperoni pizza after a few hours with a scale this precise.

Overall Balance Scale fights dreaded “metabo” [Trends in Japan]

John Brownlee

Malware authors turn to EULAs

The most evil and nefarious group of programmers — the constabulary of malware-programming scoundrels who infect and spread botnets, viruses and spyware across the Internet — are now taking a cue from the second most evil and nefarious group of programmers — Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and the like — in trying to protect their work. They are adopting EULAs.

Quoth Ars Technica:

The help section of the latest version of the Zeus malware states that the client has no right to distribute Zeus in any business or commercial purpose not connected to the initial sale, cannot examine the source code of the product, has no right to use the product to control other botnets, and cannot send the product to anti-virus companies. The client does agree to "give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality." Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.

Nothing to worry about, though. Continue to run your illicit botnets with peace-of-mind. The EULA of a commercial malware company is even less enforceable than real EULAs.

Malware authors turn to EULAs to protect their work [Ars Technica]

John Brownlee

Tortuga's €1,200 pinhole panorama

The Tortuga 5 is a plumwood encased pinhole camera hockey puck, crafted in Luxembourg, that captures 242 degree panorama on standard 120 format film. Despite its ante-diluvian looks, the film can be loaded without a dark room or a dark, moist sack, and fits on a standard tripod mount. The Tortuga's a limited edition of 30, and it costs €1,230, so you may want to stick with your shoebox pinhole, but it's refreshing to see an attractive non-digital come down the pipe now and again.

Tortuga 5 [Official Site via Retrothing]

Rob Beschizza

Meet AirJelly, the flying robot jellyfish

AirJelly is electric. AirJelly runs on lithium. AirJelly is full of gas. But AirJelly cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. After vigintillions of years great AirJelly is loose again, and ravening for delight.

AirJelly is also available through all quality industrial supply catalogs.

Product Datasheet (PDF) [Festo.com via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

British to supply robot spider droid army to U.S. Military

Having written the headline before reading the actual story, and finding it thereafter to be false, it must remain as-is because it's what should have happened. In truth, the "spider" is but one design offered to illustrate the proposed "miniature robots" for the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program, which will be funded to the modest tune of $38m.

BAE Systems gets to guzzle up the lion's share, heading an alliance of local academies to build the horde. Here's Dr. Joseph Mait of the US Army Research Lab, quoted in The Register:

“Robotic platforms extend the warfighter's senses and reach, providing operational capabilities that would otherwise be costly, impossible, or deadly to achieve."

I think that it still boils down to killing the other poor dumb bastard before he kills you—but now there will be small-scale aeromechanical and ambulating microdevices to help you do it.

BAE lands US Army minidroid horde contract [The Register]

Rob Beschizza

Power strip measures energy use, costs much more than separate power strip and monitor

Cost Controller convinces you to pay $100 for an LCD display-equipped power strip which informs you how much power is being used by the eight appliances it can accommodate. If it doesn't add up to at least $100 a year, a sample of The Simpsons' Nelson laughing at you is played at random intervals throughout the day.

Product Page [Computer Gear via Red Ferret]

Rob Beschizza

Epic USB duplicator burns 60 thumbdrives at once: what would you copy?

Top ten things to copy with Virtua Console's USB Flash Drive Duplicator:

• Malware, so that the drives may be scattered in a corporate car lot, from whence the inevitable occurs.

• Porn, same ruse but more amusing results.

O.K., so I've already run out of ideas. Drat. Anyway, the box can do its job quickly, finishing up a rack of 1GB drives in 2 minutes. It can even discretely encrypt each one with its own unique key. It costs $8,000, and they're developing a system to link up hundreds of these units, so that one may copy data to arbitrarily-large numbers of USB drives at once.

Product Page [Virtual Console via Crave]

Rob Beschizza

Magnetique Shelves great for holding the gadgets you don't want

They say that technology is lifeless silicon and plastic. And yet the piles of it around my desk—the creeping kipple that surrounds every tech writer—seem to fester like a mountain of meat. This is the stuff that comes unsolicited to our door, with a covering letter addressed to "Hi."

This is not how quality gadgets turn up. Laptops, DSLR cameras, audio components and the like are pitched; we are either convinced to cover them, or solicit review units ourselves. Sony Vaios and $1,000 Yamaha keyboards don't get dumped in the lobby with a "please review me" note.

No, this stuff is the junk. It's the gear one feels may warrant a blog post, perhaps, but which one never gets around to writing because it's junk. Digital thermometers, $5 Skype handsets, CD polishing trays, USB decorations...

A mysterious curl of cheap black plastic may appear one day at the base of the pile, having fallen from something within it during the night. Loaded with the cheapest, nastiest double-AAs on Earth, a toy that's been in the pile a long while may froth at the battery compartment with a curious rusty bloom. When all is quiet, a murmur of subsidence inside the pile may result in a single, unnerving beep from deep within. It decays but it grows—therefore, it must be alive.

Anyway, one day I'll get rid of all this crap in a competition, or something. Until then, I need somewhere to store it, and I would like to be able to store it in a set of Magnetique Shelves, created by Andrew Liszewski, which Oh Gizmo! reports will free us from the organizational conformity imposed on us by IKEA. I don't fancy paying $1,230-$2,150 for them, however, so some old cardboard boxes will probably have to suffice.

Hey, anyone want a broken promotional wristwatch sporting the logo of a CES attendee from Shenzhen that you've never heard of?

Product Page [Magnetique via Oh Gizmo!]

Charles Shopsin

Modern-Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we looked at this gasoline powered radio that gets 160 hours of playtime per gallon, a pretty precarious looking sled-bike, a lengthy 1931 Popular Science article about evolution, and a 1928 plan for passengers in a hurry to be loaded into bi-planes and catapulted off of the deck of ocean liners when they get within a couple of hundred miles of their destination. We also learned how scientists of 1947 planned to raid the ocean floor and that automobiles are not popular in Holland.

John Brownlee

Modular re-assembling robot will not stop, ever, until you are dead

As this video of a modular robot re-assembling itself after being kicked apart by its creators at the University of Pennsylvania shows, the day is soon approaching when even smashing apart our rebellious robot slaves with hammers and axes will not prevent each individually severed body part from crawling towards you across the room, a murderous and autonomous agent of servo-controlled musculature.

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart [YouTube via Futurismic]

John Brownlee

Hacked OQO is the world's smallest Mac

Over at the OQO Talk forums, neonatal member TRF's initial claims to have successfully hacked his OQO to run OS X Leopard was met only with scorns and cries of hoax. But a couple of days later, TRF seems to have silenced the nay-sayers, and proven to their satisfaction that it isn't simply a skinjob.

TRF's Leopard-running OQO boots in 2 minutes and 30 seconds, which would probably sound more atrocious to me if my current Leopard install didn't take just about the same amount of time to boot (I need to reinstall). Better yet, everything seems to work, including WiFi, sound, power management and Bluetooth. The only thing missing is WWAN, which may be within reach.

Whether running Vista or OS X, the OQO's always going to be so small as to be useless in my eyes. But there's no doubt I irrationally lust for one more when it's on Leopard.

OQO is the world's smallest Mac [OQO Talk via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

iPhone coming to Canada

Canada will get its iPhone soon, writes The Star's Chris Sorensen, with a deal being struck between Apple and the only local GSM network, Rogers Communications.

“We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” said Ted Rogers, the cable giant’s CEO, in a short statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

I guess those trademark disputes with the owner of the iPhone trademark in Canada are all wrapped up, then. Right? Right!

Apple's popular iPhone coming to Canada [The Star via TUAW]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Tickling the dragon's tail

Rob Beschizza

Destroying evidence: how iRobot's clone went off the rails in a single moment of panic

Read Noah Shachtman's excellent article about Jameel Ahed, a brilliant young roboticist who left iRobot and then scooped it to a colossal defense contract by improving on its battlefield robots. The problem? Beneath his lighter, cheaper design sat some suspiciously familiar fundamentals.

It's a great story, packed with echoes so stunning as to seem almost like buried ledes. What, for example, is the bigger story: that someone almost burned their former employer to a $300m payday, or that the bidding process was a transparent sham designed to funnel the contract to Ahed? Or that an unnamed major defense contractor, able to manufacture the 'bots in bulk, was helping his bid? Or that paranoia—he foolishly tried to dispose of evidence, instead of sitting tight—was his downfall?

"He and his partner discussed a media strategy in which Ahed would be portrayed as "the aggrieved party ... in a David vs. Goliath situation," according to one recovered email. ... Yet when marshals showed up at Ahed's door, he called the [defense contractor] executive in a frenzy. "What should I do?" he shrieked. The man answered: Cooperate, no matter what. Tell them absolutely everything. Of course, Ahed responded. Of course. But he had already destroyed evidence, giving iRobot the ammunition it needed to undermine Ahed's credibility and get the deal scuttled."

Amazing stuff.

But... which defense contractor?

Who Stole the Plans for iRobot's Battle Bots? [Wired.com]

Rob Beschizza

Hans Reiser guilty of rm wife

Jurors in California just found Hans Reiser guilty of murder in the first degree.

Linux developer Reiser, creator of an innovative file system that bears his name, was accused of killing wife Nina after her disappearance in September 2006.

Wired.com's Threat Level blog has streaming coverage of the verdict: Reiser Jurors Reach Verdict; Wired.com to Stream it Live, and the first story.

John Brownlee

Building block iPod speakers swear they're not Legos

Generally speaking, we leave the Lego posts to Joel, but with him flying off to Costa Rica for the next week, we're missing our in-house expert on interconnecting, brightly colored plastic bricks.

So you'll have to take this Lego post without Joel's superlative ability to illuminate the latest Star Wars Lego set with a profound quote from Sartre. Perpetual Kid is selling a series of iPod Building Block Speakers. They aren't Legos legally speaking — Lego's attorneys have fervently fought the good fight against brand dilution for thirty years — and the speakers aren't powered, which probably means they sound pretty terrible, but at $25 each, they are almost as expensive per brick as real Legos, which should count for something.

iPod Building Block Speakers [Perpetual Kid via DVICE]

John Brownlee

UPS employees in Grand Theft Grand Theft Auto IV

If you're taking a sick day tomorrow in order to properly spend the Grand Theft Auto IV launch in an orgiastic reverie of virtual crime, you may not want to bank on your pre-order being delivered on-time... or at all. According to Ars Technica, three UPS drivers have been fired in the last 24 hours for stealing copies of GTAIV from customers... with a number of interviews of other drivers that will likely take place today and are also expected to end in termination.

I'd usually assume this was some sort of marketing stunt, but Ars Technica's source is a UPS employee himself, who claims that the thefts aren't for eBay:

"They're not selling them, these people are stealing one copy," he told me—all of the thefts seem to be for personal use. It seems many people think stealing a game a few days before release is worth it, and this is far from the perfect crime.

The situation is apparently novel to UPS, which I'm sure will tickle the cockles of Jack Thompson's ichorous heart, although" Grand Theft Auto IV corrupts stupid adults in brown delivery shorts" doesn't really have a lot of cache in the court of public opinions.

Grand Theft UPS: copies of GTA stolen en route to retailers [Ars Technica]

John Brownlee

Phantom Lapboard reviewed by Maximum PC

The less said about Phantom Entertainment née Infinium Labs the better: a huckster company so unrepentant in their attempts to bilk investors of their money in the pursuit of a console so illusory and ill-defined that it's very name evoked the ephemeral, imaginary and ectoplasmic. The whole debacle is better summed up snorting all the phlegm out of your throat then contemptuously expectorating it in a men's room toilet than it is with words.

Needless to say, after six years, Phantom Entertainment hasn't released anything: not its Phantom Console, which has been canceled, nor the Phantom Lapboard, which was due out in late 2006. But perhaps the Lapboard — a keyboard/mouse combination designed to be used playing FPS games for the PC while lounging on the couch — isn't entirely a pipe dream. Maximum PC just managed to get their hands on one, and while Phantom's history indicates this doesn't make the Lapboard any closer to production, it does at least mean it's within the realm of possibility.

So what did Maximum PC think of the Lapboard? They really liked the keyboard aspect of the Lapboard, which they thought worked really well for supine Team Fortress 2 matches. But the mouse? Utter garbage.

Unfortunately, the mouse that Phantom ships with the Lapboard leaves much to be desired. While a bit smaller than we prefer, it isn't uncomfortable. The problem is worse than a lack of comfort; we experienced signal dropouts at a distance of about 24 inches from the sensor, not acceptable. The mouse and keyboard would both be working fine, then the mouse would drop out while the keyboard continued to operate. We tested several other wireless mice with the same configuration, and had no problems with them. A wireless mouse that drops connections is an unforgivable sin, in our eyes.

Phantom's claiming the Lapboard will be available in June in limited quantities for $130. Considering the fact that publications have been previewing this thing for years, don't bother putting in a pre-order.

First Look: The Phantom Lapboard [Maximum PC]

John Brownlee

How-To: Build a 46 watt HTPC for $500

Over at Coding Horror, Jeff Atwoof — the wumpus himself — has a fantastic how-to up, detailing the step-by-step construction of a low cost, low power home theater PC. For a little more than $500, you can put yourself together a DirectX 10 capable HTPC that runs incredibly cool. How cool?

My old highly optimized HTPC build consumed just under 80 watts at idle, up from around 65 before I began upgrading it to make it more Vista friendly. Guess how much this new HTPC platform build, which is more than twice as powerful, consumes at idle? Let's whip out our handy dandy kill-a-watt and find out:

FORTY. SIX. WATTS.

That is flippin' amazing. We're talking about a powerful modern PC here, with quite a bit of additional hardware you wouldn't find in most PCs, including a dual TV tuner PCI card and three hard drives. Granted two of those drives are in sleep mode most of the time, but still. 46 watts -- twice the power at almost half the energy consumption! Incredible! Silence and efficiency were nowhere near this easy three or four years ago.

Building Your Own Home Theater PC [Coding Horror]

Rob Beschizza

Veptu is bootleggers' answer to expensive Vertu cellphones

Vertu makes expensive cellphones. Veptu it it's cheap Chinese clone.

If nothing else, it's a more flattering celebration of 10 years in business than yet another tasteless slab of bling.

Vertu gets cloned in China, christened Veptu! [Born Rich]

Rob Beschizza

HP Mini-Note finds it difficult to run after being Visted

What happens when you wed the current fashion for lightweight, low-price subnotebooks with Windows Vista? Misery, if Laptop Mag's look at HP's Mini-Note is any indication.

Reviewer Joanna Stern's attempt to use it as her primary machine doesn't go too badly: she loves the look ("more attractive than the Asus Eee") and finds they keyboard "very roomy." Ah, but Vista, Vista...

"You leave me enough time to knit a sweater. And since I don’t know how to knit, waiting around felt even longer. In all seriousness, it took 2 minutes and 50 seconds to fully boot up the Vista operating system. ... a Vista Experience score of 1.2 (out of a possible 5) tells you right off the bat how poorly the system handles the bulky OS. I rushed to disable the Allow/Cancel prompts (or what Microsoft calls User Account Control) from the Control Panel."

Attention, makers of UMPCs and subnotebooks. Vista is no good. You know it, Microsoft knows it, and, more importantly, your customers know it. Making it the default for agility-class computers is madness. Enforced Vista deployment (apparently, the UK doesn't get an XP option for the Mini-Note) has moved from "forward-looking determination" to "inexplicable act of self-destruction."

I gave up my notebook for an HP Mini [Laptop Mag]

Joel Johnson

Heading to Costa Rica

I am Costa Rica bound. I'll be gone for a week-and-a-day. I was originally going to try to do some work down there but I've been too busy to line up anything to really cover, so I'm just going to play it by ear. If you know of any good tech or environment-oriented projects happening down there that I should look into let me know. I'll be flying into San Jose but plan on being fairly mobile.

Couple of questions: What's the internet cafe/access scene like down there? Should I bother taking my laptop or will it just be dead weight? (Obviously, I know there's internet, but I don't know how common it is to find it outside of San Jose. I can rely on internet cafes if I have to.)

If you need anything BBG related, feel free to contact Rob or John at rob@ or brownlee@ and they'll take care of you.

John Brownlee

Space Invaders cutting board on Etsy

Etsy craftsman l337motif uses "pixels" of walnut and hard maple to create wooden cutting board with vintage gaming motifs for $125 each. The Legend of Zelda Tri-Force Cutting Board is the only one currently available, and as gaming references in your kitchenware are concerned, it's pretty subtle. But his Space Invaders cutting board is more overtly imbued with geek cred and — I think — far more aesthetically pleasing. Plus, you can plausibly deny that it is gaming related. If anyone asks, just tell everyone that the design on your new cutting board is a macroscopic view of one of the virulent bacterium dwelling in its wooden gouges.

l337motif's gaming cutting boards [Etsy]

Charles Shopsin

Modern-Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at a wonderful 1954 article from Colliers magazine that predicted the huge changes coming due to solid-state electronics. Published just a few years after the invention of the transistor this article talks about color VCRs, touch-tone phones, solar power and many other inventions including the surprisingly modern looking flat screen TV at right. Today we also looked at a cute profile of a goofy inventor, a bar tender automat , the oh-so-stylish cigarette hat, and little house shaped motorbikes for home repairmen.

This weekend we learned about a government program to breed raccoons, how the greeting card industry works, and how crimes are solved by using hypnosis. We also looked at a doughnut handle, a rain coat that is also a map, a gas-raid shelter for pets, a monster bus that is also a movie theater, an expanding mobile home, a lip shaped stamp used to apply rouge and a rather scary looking cage mounted on the rumble seat of a car to take convicts off to prison.

John Brownlee

Hello Kitty sticker for sale, must buy $1,400 laptop

I'm no enemy of cuteness. And I'm no enemy to Hello Kitty. How could anyone hate Hello Kitty? She's adorable: an anthropomorphic cat with blank, staring eyes and a cute pink bow on her head who has forged a multi-billion dollar empire based upon people's pathological obsession with saying hello to her. There is nothing wrong with slapping Hello Kitty on laptops and cell phones: consumer electronics can be cute too. But there's a point where cuteness becomes cretinous, and that's exactly the point where you're willing to pay nearly a grand and a half for what amounts to a Hello Kitty sticker affixed to a wimpy, wheezy, ugly and underpowered laptop.

Coming in May, the Epson and Sanrio are teaming up to release the Endeavor NJ2100: a pearl white machine sporting a 15.4-inch WXGA display, a 1.86GHz Intel Celeron processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a 3-in-1 multicard reader, gigabit Ethernet / WiFi and Windows Vista Home. Battery life? Who needs it! You'll practically be able to hold your breath longer: it's being specced at one hour. The street price is an astonishing ¥147,000 (roughly $1,409).

Yeesh. That's a hell of a premium to pay for a crappy laptop with a fifty-cent sticker slapped on the back. For group home man-children only.

Epson, Sanrio team up for two more Hello Kitty laptop designs [Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Press Zero if you want us to see you coming

Ever got angry with a robot phone system and started pounding the zero, thinking that it might be the undisclosed option for an operator? It's worth a try, of course, but the call centers already have your number. The Consumerist reports they even have a word for these attempts: Zero Outs.

VOIP-News has a complete rundown on PBX-penetration strategies to make the people to whom you give money start talking to you. The cheat sheets are dialahuman.com and gethuman.com.

I recommend engaging the robot in normal conversation. This honors the ludicrous pretense its owner is trying to maintain, namely that such "conversations" are a convincing and acceptable substitute for the real thing. Why? Because it won't be able to understand you, and typically will put you through to someone who can. The worst approach, I find, is to give into anger and yell at it in a loud, even, mildly frustrated tone, as one might to a tourist: this is exactly what it likes.

(Photo: Maximolly)

Joel Johnson

Michael Ruhlman's essential kitchen gadgets

Food writer Michael Ruhlman's list of essential kitchen gadgets are what you'd expect from a guy who wrote a book called The Elements of Cooking — no garlic massagers or bacon wafters here.

From right to left, big knife and little knife, rubber spatula, wood spoon with flat edge, fish spatula, microplane, instant read thermometer, Sharpie, sauce whip, string, fine mesh strainer, two spoons, measuring spoons, peeler, heavy side towel for grabbing hot things, and, the most important tool in the kitchen, kosher salt.

It's worth checking out the whole post just for the yapping in the comments, where foodies go on about their essential tools like we nerds bicker about text editors.

My Favorite Kitchen "Gadgets" [Blog.Ruhlman.com]

John Brownlee

Beautiful automaton pocket watch on eBay

This utterly gorgeous pocket watch, complete with automatonous figures and a skeletonized back that reveals the clockwork within is up on eBay. From the listing:

Quarter hour repeating, automaton pocket watch in the large 17 size! The early 19th century watch, which has a wonderfully skeletonized back and partially skeletonized (open escapement) dial is in a hallmarked, silver case. We have been unable to identify its tiny hallmark. The dial ring is of white porcelain. When activated this amazingly detailed automaton movement strikes 3 different mock bells by three different automated figures on its gorgeously crafted and finely detailed dial. Our many photos tell the full story of the fully regaled man, formally attired woman and cherubic child who strike the watches bells!"

It's like having Prague's Astronomical Clock in your pocket. Better be ready to pay through the nose for it, though: current bid is around $2,300.

Lg Fine & Early 17S AUTOMATON REPEATER Pocket Watch NR [eBay via The Automata Blog]

John Brownlee

CoffinCouches.com recycles sarcophagi into settees

There comes a moment in every boy's life of sexual awakening, a moment when hormonal tides surge, when girls cease to be perceived as slimy, purple-faced goblins and instead become slyphs of terrible allure. When this happens, young men tend to turn to their fathers for advice, and I will never forget my father's sage words when I asked him how to go about the seduction of those soft and sweet-smelling creatures, the fairer sex which had reacted to my overtures at every turn with pantomimed vomiting noises. "Son..." my father said, driving me to the graveyard and handing me a shovel. "You look the way you look, and there's just nothing to be done about that. Just you remember: dead girls don't say no."

It's advice that has served me well, so I'm intrigued by these designer coffin couches... the perfect love seat for post-mortem seductions. According to the guys at CoffinCouches.com, they have managed to secure a number of unused 18 gauge steel coffins from South Californian funeral homes and convert them for use in your living room. Due to pesky South Californian anti-graverobbing laws (and I can attest to the fact that California's just maggoty with them), these coffins are entirely unused, so you don't need to worry that yours wasn't hosed off properly. The price of each couch is $4,500.

This is worthy of applause. It's just so rare that the furniture industry is brave and forward-thinking enough to pander to the interior decorating whims of necrophiliacs and millionaire goths. Bravo, CoffinCouches.com. Bravo!

Coffin Couches [Official Site via Born Riches via Presurfer]

Rob Beschizza

Nokia's new boringphones are "beautiful to use"

What does it say when something is advertised as "beautiful to use?" Spooling out the standard cynical thread would be to assume that Nokia's new 6600 and 3600 are simply hideous, its makers so dry-mouthed with panic that reverse psychology must be deployed to sell them.

But they are not ugly, even if they do offer specifications that could be produced by a Select Committee on Determining the Specifications for the World's Most Banal Cellphone. (Lord McSnorry's report: 3G, 2mp camera, 2.1" display, slider keypads with a clamshell options, made of plastic, swooping curved proportions, offered in an odd color but available in black.)

In what possible manner could something like a phone be beautiful other than in its design or use-functionality? Is it beautiful to animals? Beautiful to skip on scenic lakes? Beautiful to devour with Worcestershire sauce?

Press Release [Nokia]

Rob Beschizza

512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 in new iMacs: Apple finally ready to get its game on?

Apple's new iMacs have expected under-the-hood improvements: the basic $1,200 20-incher starts with the 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of RAM, Radeon HD 2400XT video card and a 250GB hard drive, while the $1,800 24" model has a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive and a Radeon HD 2600 Pro video card.

Sauciest of all, you can now drop in an optional Nvidia GeForce 8800 GS video card, with 512MB of video memory. The 8800s tore through gaming PCs last year, at least in their capable GTS, GTX and Ultra forms. However, one problem with buying video cards is that they are deceptively marketed using automobile-like alphanumeric designations designed to baffle unsophisticated consumers like me. In other words, the GS edition is a low-end cut that won't impress hardcore gamers, even if it represents strong forward movement for video performance on "consumer" Macs.

A nudge in the right direction, then, but not a wink. Quo vadis, Apple gamers?

Product Page [Apple Store]
Apple Updates iMac [Apple PR]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• LotR Books – Lord of the Rings hardcover set for $11, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• LEGO – LEGO Shop-at-Home has lots of good stuff in clearance, including the full-sized Imperial Star Destroyer for $200. [Shop.LEGO.com]

• DSLR – Canon Rebel XSi for $820, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Mini Keyboard – Logitech diNovo Wireless Mini Keyboard for $100, shipped. [Dealnews]

• GPS Navigator – Today's Woot! is the Magellan Maestro 4200 4.3" Portable GPS for $195, shipped.

Joel Johnson

Extracting metals from old electronics

Reuters reports on "urban mining," a fancy way of describing folks who drop old cell phones in chemicals by the ton, melt away everything plastic, and then harvest the gold, silver, and copper that remains.

Eco-System, established 20 years ago near Tokyo, typically produces about 200-300 kg (440-660 lb) of gold bars a month with a 99.99 percent purity, worth about $5.9 million to $8.8 million.

That's about the same output as a small gold mine.

Eco-System also recovers metals from old memory chips, cables and even black ink which contain silver and palladium.

Urban miners look for precious metals in cell phones [Yahoo/Reuters]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: La Nostra Città

IC Die Photography

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Screaming Asimo

Joel Johnson

BrickBuildr: special selection of AFOL LEGO creations

Michael Huffman writes:

I cobbled "BrickBuildr" together using phpFlickr as a way for the AFOL [Adult Fans of LEGO - Ed.] community to share "LEGO only" pictures with one another (for those who had Flickr accounts). [There's also] a way to browse new "LEGO only" photos from your iPhone.

Project Page [BrickBuildr.com]

Rob Beschizza

Great entries in 1K competition—keep them coming!

BoingBoing Gadgets, in cahoots with Seagate, launched a competition last week challenging you to send us the most ingenious work of art, writing, code or whatever takes your fancy that fits into a kilobyte or less.

We've had some fantastic entries, one of which will win a Terabyte hard drive courtesy of Seagate. Pictured here is Gabriel McGovern's 1k rendering of the Mona Lisa (resized from his original to give a better view).

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Camel "Crush" cigarettes spray menthol from internal capsule

First tested in Japan under the "Kool Boost" brand, a new cigarette from RJ Reynolds will include a tiny menthol "powerball" in the filter that, when squished, will infuse the entire filter with lung-numbing flavor. They'll be sold under the "Camel Crush" brand and are being tested in a few markets.

Trends in Japan explains why testing cigarettes in Japan works better than testing in the States:

Back in the U.S., people will actually ask someone for a cigarette and then decline it when it’s the wrong brand, but Japanese are far more willing to switch brands for any number of reasons: Cool packaging, freebies, product modifications, limited editions, etc. Sure, the older generation of salarymen stick to their Mild Sevens, but young people treat cigarettes like they do any other FMCG. After all, who wants to drink the same brand of coffee their whole lives?

Camel Crush cigarettes tested in Japan? [Killian-Nakamura.com]

Rob Beschizza

Nvidia: CPU dead, long live the GPU

A guy from Nvidia says that its gaming-class graphics chips, not CPUs, now represent the primary component of a modern computer.

"Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam. The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell."

This is just part of a raving email sent to The Inquirer, apparently from Roy Taylor, nVidia's VP of content relations. The Inq just quotes the whole thing and lets it hang out there.

There is a strong element of truth to this chest-slapping, however: in lots of modern computer games, the game logic is extremely simple, with all the hard graft—calculating and rendering the graphics—palmed off on the GPU. Graphics chips, due to their architecture, are also faster than CPUs at certain kinds of calculations.

Windows Vista, for one, can't handle the truth.

Nvidia declares the CPU dead

John Brownlee

Organic e-ink jacket is impossible but Blade Runner-esque

This design concept jacket from Lunar Design aims to turn your torso and neck into a walking anthropomorphic digital display. The Blu Jacket would be made of flexible, organic e-paper: potential applications are displaying advertisements and broadcasting your mood, as well as more mischievous aims like virtual streaking.

This sort of design is a long way off from being plausible, but I can't wait to see it happen. I think I'd make a point of always showing silent movies on mine: The Lost World and Pandora's Box and Metropolis and the like. I love the idea that the person staring at me from across the subway isn't just some random weirdo or smitten stranger, but a viewer, absolutely engrossed by the silver screen drama unfolding on my wardrobe. Hell, you could take the idea even further: the video portion of a movie displayed on your chest as a ghetto-blaster on your shoulder broadcasts the soundtrack. Obnoxious? Yes. But fun!

Lunar Design Blu Jacket [PDF via DVICE via Gizmo Watch]

Rob Beschizza

Uno unicycle featured in this month's Motorcycle Mojo

The original page's been Duggerized, but here's the money shot: an electrical unicycle in bright orange, the Uno, created by 18-year old student Ben Gulak. It is exactly what it appears to be, though with the addition of Segway-like accelerometers and gyros to help the rider not kill himself within half a mile of the dealership.

And to think that my wife thinks letting me get a motorcycle is too risky...

The new Segway is a Motorcycle [Digg]

Joel Johnson

Manga Moment: Ellipses as indicators of speechlessness in '54 MAD Magazine

During a discussion we three were having today about the use of the ellipsis in manga, anime, and videogames to indicate speechlessness, I remembered seeing the same technique used by Jack Davis in the story "Hah! Noon!" in MAD Magazine issue #9, February-March, 1954 (a parody of High Noon). So now you know: while I'm not familiar enough with Occupation-era manga to say if ellipses were used in this manner during the '40s, it's not a new technique — and certainly pre-dates its use in Japanese role-playing videogames.

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we have a 1956 Mechanix Illustrated article about scientist's plans to redesign the human body, including moving the mouth to the stomach and adding an eye to the tip of a finger. Showing that hucksters never miss a chance to exploit people's ignorance of new technology Popular Science wrote a 1939 expose about sham spiritualists using "Spirit Televisions" to fleece their marks. We also looked at an assembly line technique for rapidly developing color photos, a round-up of cool kids toys and a milk wagon towed by zebras. Lastly there is this theater impresario's 1929 prediction that future theaters will be shaped like an egg with multiple slide projectors providing "sets" for the films. Oddly, he doesn't even mention the idea of talkies.

John Brownlee

Pentagon takes cue from Arthur C. Clarke superweapon

New Scientist reports that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new super-weapon with an eerie familiarity to the Stiletto, a weapon from Arthur C. Clarke's 1955 novel Earthlight: a "solid bar of light" driven by giant capacitors that pierces through spaceships like "an entomologist [piercing] a butterfly with a pin."

Using magnetic fields it will propel either a narrow jet of molten metal or a chunk of molten metal that morphs into an aerodynamic slug during flight. Unlike Clarke's Stiletto, they will come from a device that generates a powerful electromagnetic field from an explosion, not giant capacitors.

DARPA's little gem is called MAHEM and would be used largely against tanks and incoming missiles. Also, the Covenant, whenever they get here.

Science fiction inspires DARPA weapon [New Scientist]

Rob Beschizza

The world's first LED spa

The wall was a symphony in plastic photoframes, meaningless qualifications and semigloss beige. Vern DeChambliss stared at it while his producer explained to him that the studio was shutting down his movie.

Science fiction just isn't doing well enough at the box office. No, straight-to-DVD isn't an option. Stem the losses. Credit crisis. Nothing personal.

As he shook hands and left and waited for the lift, Vern realized that he really didn't give a damn. The script sucked, the actors they'd lined up were notorious pricks, and he could finally get out of town for a while. Nevertheless, money had been spent on props and costumes: like corpses in the arctic circle, this presented something of a disposal problem.

Most of it could be sold on, but the tubes. What to do about the cryotubes? That shit was too cheesy for even the Sci-Fi channel; he'd be lucky to get rid of them on Craigslist, let alone with an asking price.

As the elevator swooped him to the ground floor, he caught a brief glimpse through its windows of the world around him. Lighting a cigarette, he pondered the question until it became a statement: someone, somewhere, would be stupid enough to take them off his hands.

Product Page [Med-spa]

Tunbridge Wells ushers in the world's first LED spa [BornRich]

John Brownlee

Professor Shagnasty's steampunk nerf assault rifle

Yesterday, the description of a monitor slathered with brass and oxidization as 'steampunk' caused me to get so hysterical that I evacuated myself all over BBG's front page. Please ignore this conniption fit, because as much as I like to bitch, I'm about three stiff drinks shy of trying to fit this wonderful steampunk Nerf gun into my little theory of steampunk purity. I think we can bend the rules here.

Professor Shagnasty is selling his Model 101 Steampunk Nerf Assault Rifle on eBay. It's the typical eBay steampunk listing, accompanied by the usual overly formal, proto-Victorian prosaic wankery. But this is something I really dig about the steampunk art community: it's never enough for them to just make a Nerf gun look like the official ordnance of an airship captain. They come up with their own in-universe sales patter

In phase warp configuration, and with a proprietary steam assisted coil driver set, the 101 is capable of both Ground and Ariel engagements. Dirigibles, balloons and other lighter than air machinery are easily dispatched using the simplest of maneuvers. Yet, with another turn of the switch, the model 101 can eject plasmatical beams tuned to perfection and capable of dropping any apparition, out of body ghoul or spectral anomaly.

Current bid is $224.72, with 12 hours left on the auction.

STEAMPUNK NERF MOD LARP COSPLAY ASSAULT RIFLE Sci Fi [eBay via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

The iChime offers customized doorbells for the cheap and obnoxious

It seemed funny at the time, replacing our innocuous door bell chime with Anita Ward's 70's disco rendition of "Ring My Bell." The first time the UPS guy came to the door, it even elicited a laugh from my girlfriend. But then I began opening the door and jamming the bell with my thumb whenever I wanted to get intimate. A starter horn, if you will. This also seemed to go over well. Months passed. It became part of our coital routine. One day, I came home to see a long line of UPS men waiting in front of my apartment; each would walk up to the door, push the bell gingerly and drop his trousers around his ankles as the slender forearms of my girlfriend yanked him inside.

It appears that a novelty doorbell, no matter how well intentioned, can act as a psychological conditioning device. And, as my little anecdote should make abundantly clear, the novelty doorbell is a technology pretty much solely aimed at douches, much like "Who Let The Dogz Out?" answering machine tapes. Still, if you're okay with that, the iChime will allow you to replace your doorbell with a programmable assortment of MP3s using the headphone jack from your iPod. It costs $90.

iChime [Official Site via DVICE]

Rob Beschizza

Nokia Internet Tablet will run Ubuntu

Nokia's Internet Tablet, a nifty little handheld, is about to get even niftier. With Nokia buying Trolltech, the latter's Qt Linux dev toolkit will be slurped into the system. Moreover, the popular and consumer-friendly linux distribution, Ubuntu, is also making its way to the pocket-size portable thanks to a Nokia-supported ARM port.

Ars Technica reports that Nokia's got "ambitious plans" for Qt support across its entire lineup, making it easy for developers to create apps that work on both linux and Symbian platforms.

There's a thriving community around these internet tablets, but I've only dicked around with them once or twice at crowded conference booths. Are they close to working like fully-fledged computers, or just fancy smartphones without the smartphone?

Nokia Internet Tablets get Ubuntu and Qt [Ars Technica] (Ubuntu-tan by Piro)

Joel Johnson

Super Mario Singing Glow Star plays that old familiar tune

Nearly six-inches tall — in-scale for the tiny dwarf a real-life Mario would be before eating an HGH-infused mushroom — this "Super Mario Singing Glow Star" sold at Thinkgeek for $18 will, when pressed, play the invulnerability theme from Super Mario Bros. while glowing on and off. Watch out co-workers! Dan from Sales is smashing ceiling tiles and landing flat-footed on your sack lunch.

Oh, cheap plastic crap, you're so adorable when making a meta-reference to my childhood! I will resist until someone wires this to an aerosol container of PCP, a blast of which would give me the closest analog to momentary shimmering omnipotence that I'll ever experience.

Catalog Page [Thinkgeek via Technabob via GeekAlerts]

John Brownlee

LG's Secret phone shoots DivX, still at large

LG's new phone, the Secret, gives the double deuce to single mega-pixel cellphone cameras with a five megapixel sensor. Yeah, yeah. But more interesting is the promised ability to record DivX movies at up to 120 frames per second using the phone. Of course, you won't be able to save much to its slim 100MB drive, but you can expand the Secret's capacity with an SD card. Even cooler: it's apparently possible to edit the video on the phone's screen.

I suspect that last feature won't be a lot of fun to use, but I think it is a great idea. The Secret is obviously trying to appeal to vidcasters and the like. The next iPhone should take this approach: a decent video cam and the ability to edit videos with a portable version of iMovie, then upload your completed video over 3G to YouTube Mobile.

As for LG's Secret, I for one welcome the coming age of high-resolution cellphone porn movies. No pricing available yet.

LG Secret [Official Site]

Joel Johnson

Pong A Long folding beer pong tables

"Beer Pong" is some sort of drinking-based sport, the object of which is to bounce a ping-pong ball into a plastic cup. (I was the guy trying to explain to dudes' girlfriends the emotional impact of Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII when I went to frat parties, so I may be a bit murky on the specifics.)

Lest you think Beer Pong the sort of game that can be played on any table at hand — or failing that, on the backs of two interlocked pledges bent ninety degrees at the waist — "Pong A Long" would like for you to consider its "Portable Beer Pong Tables," marked with official areas for cup placement and easily folded to fit into the back seat of a taxi.

If you like manhandled plastic balls in your beer, their currently running a $5-off promo, bringing the price of the seven-foot model to $60 and the eight-foot "Pro" model down to $85 (plus shipping) using code "MI-PONG".

Product Page [PongALong.com]

Rob Beschizza

Vertu's issues exclusive phone to celebrate 10 years of exclusive Vertu phones

Vertu's latest issue proves again that the rarefied world of luxury gadgets is impervious to good taste. It's been selling cellphones aimed at lottery winners for ten years now, and offers the "Rococo Constellation" in celebration of this achievement.

Offered in blandly loud colors and featuring designs modeled on the dessicated ropes of snot left when a slugtrail dries in the morning sun, these new models aim to conjour the elaborate whimsy of a late 18th-century French masterpiece.

Vertu Constellation Rococo Collection[Sybarites via Crave]

Joel Johnson

Manodo touchscreen reports every detail of your energy consumption

Touchscreen computers installed in the hallways of fifteen apartments in Gothenburg, Sweden, inform the residents the carbon footprint of every action they've taken in their homes, helping them monitor the true cost of leaving the lights on or taking a long shower. They're part of a pilot program from Swedish start-up Manodo; they also give handy updates for things like tram stops, weather, and who's standing outside the door.

But do the screens report the impact of their own construction and operation?

Manodo's Screen Is The Big Brother Of Energy Saving [Treehugger]

John Brownlee

Fluidhand is the future of prosthetic arms

Researchers at the university of Heidelberg seem to have perfected the FluidHand, a prosthetic arm with the ability to manipulate each finger individually and provide sensory feedback to its user:

The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg – to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.

An 18 year old born with a congenital limb deficiency is apparently very enthusiastic, prompting Futurismic to muse: "I don’t think it’s science fictional to suggest that we’ll be seeing prosthetic limbs that equal the functionality of the organic originals within a decade."

I certainly hope that's true. But I have a friend who was born deaf. A couple years ago, she got Cochlear Implants, which resulted in her being able to hear, but her being ostracized by her friends in the deaf community as some sort of race traitor. I wonder: do you think, if prosthetic technology becomes sufficiently advanced, we'll see a backlash from the congenitally limb deficient community? I can't imagine it from amputees, but what about those born without limbs? What do you think?

'Fluidhand': Each finger can be moved separately [Physorg via Futurismic via Grinding]

Joel Johnson

Korean protestors burn images of scumbag Samsung CEO

Now this is how shareholders should respond to bad corporate leadership. Quothe the AP:

Lee said Tuesday he was stepping down after 20 years as chief of South Korea's biggest conglomerate, quitting in the aftermath of his indictment on tax evasion and other charges last week. Kim claimed last November that the Samsung Group had 200 billion won (US$205 million, euro130 million) in a slush fund and used it to bribe prosecutors and judges.

South Korea Samsung [Foto.Rompres.ro]

Image: AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

Rob Beschizza

Sharp-Wilcom's minuscule UMPC out on June 20th in U.S.

Sharp's D4 is a two-faced bastard of a UMPC. On one hand, it's the first such device that's small enough to slip into a jacket pocket and still have a standard-looking keyboard. On the other hand, it's so obviously bloated—Windows Vista, hard drive, a Centrino CPU—that one can practically hear the battery screaming as its energy is sucked from it, a charge measured not in hours but in minutes.

More than ever before, the temptation to buy an ultra-mobile burns. And yet the same thing that makes it so attractive reminds us how short these expensive trinkets fall of obsolete analogs from the handheld past, which boasted instant-on and many hours of battery life. Ask yourself this: what might I do with this thing, and why do I need Vista, 1GB of RAM and 1.33 GHz to do it?

Imagine a version of Windows intermediate between CE/Mobile and XP/Vista, with a focus on mobile power-management wedded to compatibility with standard Windows applications; wouldn't that be super? Imagine this thing with the iPhone's cut of OS X on it. Goodness, just imagine it with anything that won't make your eyes bleed trying to decipher 10-point fonts at 250 dpi.

John Brownlee

Who really gives a shit about MP3s killing the album?

Going over the polished zen aesthetic of Samsung's new Pebble line of MP3 players yesterday, I found myself wanting one. This infuriated me. Shuffle-style players pander to debased musical tastes. It was just one more small, pretty audio player — a seductress, a siren — whispering in my ear, trying to get me to finally give up on that naive platonic ideal: the album. But the album's already dead.

The Pebble, the iPod Shuffle... any of these low-capacity, display-less Flash devices that are flooding the market. The large sub-set of people who opt for these MP3 players over more full-featured models: they simply don't care about albums. Rather, they prefer to listen to their songs randomly and with minimal control. They want song selected, shuffled and spurted out through their earphones. For them, these small, low-capacity MP3 players are like portable, DJ-less radio stations pandering to their tastes. They may not have a lot of control over what's coming up next. They may never hear a full album being played. But they've always got a keychain full of music they like, at all times. Hell, they don't even buy albums anymore: they just load up their music service of choice and buy the tracks they like.

This is all very alien to they way I experience music. Even if I could accept the lack of control, the addition of randomness to my music-listening experience, I can't really accept listening to a song out of the context of the album to which it belongs. I believe that albums should be listened to as complete works, not just anthologies of musical vignettes. Albums should have their own beginning, middle and end: shuffling an album should shuffle its emotional tenor. For me, listening to a song at random without listening to the rest of the album is like reading a chapter randomly from a book. A song might be wonderful, but it is contextless out of its larger body.

I'd be the first to admit that it's a way of looking at music that is completely out of touch with modern music. Who in their right mind looks at a Britney Spears album as an artistically-coherent work within its own right? It's just a collection of singles slapped together with some glitter and PR. Most albums are just semi-random collections of songs crammed onto an optical disc: nothing less and only accidentally something more.

But even worse, my way of looking at albums would have been precious and delusional even a hundred years ago! Since the dawn of recorded music, albums were incidental to songs. In the early days of audio recording, albums weren't much longer than a few minutes anyways, and usually only fit one or two songs per side. It is only as the maximum capacity on audio recordings increased that anyone started playing with the idea of an album as a meaningful artistic entity, in and of itself.

The same holds true for radio: radio is not a format that encourages the playing of full albums, and never has been. And even if you drag me kicking and screaming a few hundred years in the past, I'd find myself looking ridiculous. Most of the music of the world before the dawning of the 20th century did not come in the form of symphonies: it came in the form of short songs. In fact, my way of thinking about albums probably dates back no later than the 1950's Cool Movement, and for most of the history of recorded mucic has only subscribed to be jazz musicians and musical avant gardists.

Still, I sputter and rage at myself. Buying a single catchy song off of iTunes. Purchasing an adorable novelty MP3 player off of Amazon. I'm so tempted: it means I'm giving up on the actual existence of the record album. I'm sacrificing the ludicrous, pretentious self-delusion that there is a musical entity distinct from the song, that an "album" is something more than the means of physical delivery and its packaging.

And then I start thinking to myself, "Actually, I bet one of those Pebbles would be pretty good for podcasts. I don't care what order those come down the pipe." Maybe there's a compromise to be had here, after all.

Joel Johnson

Sky Factory SkyCeilings: modular and custom drop-in virtual skylights (and spacelights!)

"SkyCeilings" talk up all the stuff you'd expect about their virtual skylights: their full-spectrum light is useful for treating seasonal affective disorder; cloud patterns and perspective tricks are used to emulate the proper focus depth; the slaves chained in your stygian mine will work up to one-third more efficiently when these illusory portals are installed in the trembling shaft. But while the manufacturer Sky Factory makes a variety of custom installations, I think the neatest aspect is that the default SkyCeiling installation slips into the gridwork of the standard suspended ceiling. That makes it simple to add these fake skylights to most office spaces, even ones on the ground floor of a skyscraper.

I have one suggestion for Sky Factory, though, and while it might sound facetious I mean it genuinely: you should releases a line of SkyCeilings with fantastic imagery: boiling red skies thick with nephilim; a looming fleet of interstellar marauders; even a mostly normal sky with a little pegasus ducking behind a cloud. I'd never consider buying one of these systems for my home or office, but if there was a bit of whimsy involved it might be worth the price.

Speaking of: how much are these things? You'll have to call to speak to a "Sky Designer" to find out. Like I did. Aaron Birlson said the basic units go for about $105-115 a square foot, but the addition of something fancy — say, programmable dimming to a reddish lamp timed to the progression of the actual sunset — costs more.

I tried to blow Aaron's mind with my idea of doing fantasy scenes, but he stopped me mid-blurt, telling me about the large number of installations they've already done in home theaters that feature deep space scenes full of nebula and shooting stars. One of Sony's MMO groups apparently looked into getting one of their game's sky graphics installed in a board room. Another client was an orthodontist redoing his basement as a tribute to Star Wars (including an X-Wing cockpit mock-up) who recreated the little table at which Chewie and C-3PO play chess. Above it? A custom window looking out into a spinning galaxy. (Speaking of, can you imagine how awesome it would be to be an orthodontist in the Star Wars universe? You could retire on a sarlacc cleaning alone.)

Hopefully Sky Factory will be able to dig up more pictures for us of these custom installations.

So now I'll amend my suggestion: more fantastic skies, but this time let's make them animated.

Company Page [TheSkyFactory.com]

Rob Beschizza

Tiny USB hub with y-cable draws and distributes twice the power

Now here's a simple and useful concept: a USB hub sold with a Y-cable. This makes it possible to run power-hungry gadgets that usually don't play well with unpowered hubs—think optical drives, scanners and 2.5" SATA drives—without mains power.

Product Page [Brando via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Order a doll of your Mii Wii

One can now order one's Mii—a cutesy avatar system built into Nintendo's runaway Wii—in the flesh. The Miro wax-putty flesh.

"We are specializing in custom hand made sculptures. We have a team of artists, create sculpture base on photo you provided. ... You can even send us your photo of Mii and your Mii number."

They're expensive, at $75, but they're hand-made by a living, breathing artist. That's a low price to pay to transform an empty, soulless simulacrum of the human form into a cake topper!

Product Page [Mii Sculptures]

Rob Beschizza

Cogent makes computer the size of a stick of laptop RAM

Cogent's "system on a module" computer, appetizingly named "CSB737," has a 240MHz CPU, 64MB of SDRAM , 512MB of flash storage, 10/100 Ethernet, a USB host, LCD controller and a 2D-only GPU.

It typically consumes less than a watt of energy (750-1200mW), making it cheap-running and eco-friendly, but is it good for anything more demanding than a fancy fridge's LCD display?

Worse, it comes with a somewhat larger carrier board, which has the USB and ethernet ports and what-have-you. The initial excitement of "MAME machine inside a joystick!" fades to the realization one can get more muscle, at a similar size, with Pico-ITX.

This little fella is more expensive than Via's miniaturized wonder, too, with a total cost of about $600 for the CSB737 and carrier board together.

Joel Johnson

Activate Water shows what a harmful scam most bottled beverages really are

"Activate" is a new line of sports beverages that store the powdered "vitamins and herbs" in the cap. Twist the top and a small plastic blade cuts the seal, opening an armature that allows the ingredients to fall into the water. The conceit is that the vitamins will say at "maximum potency" since they are not deteriorating in water.

It's clever...for showing what a rip-off most sports drinks are. You're paying two dollars or more for a tiny little pouch of flavor powder — new-age Kool-Aid — that could be more inexpensively distributed in bulk. Instead, they're using extra plastic to build a mechanism that could be just as easily replaced by a tub of powder and a spoon. Or if beveraging on the go is your main priority: tiny, dissolving gelatin packets.

At least with a proper soft drink you're getting carbonation. (The occasional can of Coca-Cola and Welches' Grape are one of my favorite little indulgences.)

Product Page [ActivateDrinks.com]

Previously • Twist Cap Releases Instant Tea [BBG]

Joel Johnson

LEGO Pink Brick Box sadly not filled entirely with pink elements

LEGO sells this "Pink Brick Box" for $15, a tub of mostly standard full-sized bricks but with a few pink and green ones thrown in for good measure. I wish there were more beams and pieces I could use in spaceships; even the horse-loving Belville series doesn't have very many elements suitable for space.

Product Page [Shop.LEGO.com]

John Brownlee

Codex of Liliputian subnotebooks

Spurting meconium, its severed umbilical cord wildly lashing around like an out of control fire hose, the Asus Eee was born: a tiny, albino, physically undeveloped premie, barely capable of processing its own operating system, unable to go without life support for more than one and a half hours. A sad, sorry, adorable thing, but none the less, consumers lustfully dogpiled on top of it.

It was only natural that would get the attention of the other laptop manufacturers... Spartan companies that had gotten used to picking up the runts and weaklings of their development line-up and tossing them in a spike-filled pit. Accounting, of course, for the sudden sure of affordable sub-notebooks.

But at this point, another Eee-style sub-notebook is announced every other day. With few exceptions, they are all roughly interchangeable feature wise. How to drill down to the genetic differences between models? Over at the wonderfully named Liliputing site, they have put together a semi-complete breakdown of all of the recent subnotebooks, including technical specs, prices and release dates.

Bizarrely, the HP MiniNote isn't on their list, which is strange, because my impression skimming through the site was that it was probably the best of the bunch, as far as what has been released and what's visibly in the pipeline. A lot of these so-called Asus killers are pretty crappy.

Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables [Liliputing]

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Pixel pour

[via Near Future Laboratory]

John Brownlee

Clue Premier Edition becomes diorama of gruesome murder

This pricy $149 Clue collector's set replicates the original's timeless two-dimensional murder mansion in a deluxe, three-dimensional edition. The wood paneled game box features the original's nine sunken rooms, including vintage period furnishings rendered in excruciating minutiae.

Gorgeous, but for my house, it wouldn't be complete until I had carefully painted miniature figurines to resemble Colonel Mustard, Professor Plumb and Mrs. White, then arranged for their demises in grisly, gore-spattered detail, a miniature diorama of Agatha Christie murders. I want no confusion on where each character was murdered and with what weapon in my mansion.

Clue Premier Edition [Restoration Hardware via Uncrate]

John Brownlee

All AT&T phones $0.01 on Amazon today only

If you're looking for a new phone and not adverse to jumping cellular motherships, Amazon is having a deal today only: every single one of their phones only costs a penny, today only.

The caveat: when they say every single phone, they don't mean the iPhone. Other caveat: you will, of course, have to sign up for a two-year AT&T contract. But there's plenty of new phones — including some Blackberries and SmartPhones. And if you play your rebates right, you can even make $150.00 by the time you get your phone. Hey, every little bit helps to counter the contract hell that is the state of the American cell phone market.

All AT&T Phones--One Penny [Amazon]

John Brownlee

Wonderful gallery of tiny steam-powered model engines

Straight from the show floor of the North American Model Engineering Expo held in Toledo last weekend, Ross in Detroit posted this incredible gallery of homunculus-sized steam, gas and hot-air model engines in our comments. There's some breath-taking ingenuity on display here. It's steam-powered retro-fetishism for Lilluputians! Thanks, Ross!

NAMES Expo [Pbase]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we have this bizarre contraption designed to torture teach your baby how to walk, a "compact" gauge to measure the speed of baseball pitches, a round up of cool gadgets used in store windows to attract shoppers, a 1965 ad for Bell's Data-Phone which appears to be an early modem and a big truck that can transform into a complete airport. We also looked at Mechanix Illustrated's vision of future peace keepers in "Space Cops to Enforce World Peace". One commenter pointed out the similarity of this idea to the plot of H.G. Wells' 1936 movie "Things to Come". You can read a Modern Mechanix article about it here. Or watch the whole movie at archive.org.

John Brownlee

Samsung's Pebble MP3 players are quite zen

Samsung's new answer to the iPod Shuffle is the YP-S3 Pebble: a music player that lies like a colorful polished stone in the palm of the hand. Features include 1GB of flash memory, some EQ presets and MP3, WMA and OGG support.

Quite gorgeous, really: the Pebbles are like technological refugees from a Japanese rock garden. I'm not going to buy one, though: the temptation to see how many "skips" I could get from my new MP3 player would be overpowering, especially since — with no screen and limited storage capacity — it would basically be worthless to me for actual music listening. But I'm sure it makes a satisfying "thunk" when loaded between the bifurcated barrels of a sling shot and propelled at the pineal gland of an obnoxious co-worker. Expect the price to be about the same as an iPod Shuffle.

Samsung Pebble, S3 MP3 players show great promise [Crunch Gear]

John Brownlee

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is out

What you smell is the acrid aroma of a small nerve cluster in Cory's limbic system spontaneously shorting out through sheer orgiastic ebullience: the latest version of Ubuntu, code name Hardy Heron, is now available for download. Improvements nclude:

GNOME 2.22, Linux kernel 2.6.24, PolicyKit, PulseAudio, Xorg 7.3, Firefox 3 Beta 5, Brasero, Transmission, World Clock Applet, Vinagre, Uncomplicated Firewall, Totem, Inkscape, ActiveDirectory integration, iSCSI support, Memory Protection, SELinux Support, umenu, Virtualization, and the Wubi installation option for Windows users.

The site is getting absolutely hammered, so keep trying.

I'm looking forward to giving Ubuntu a shot again whenever I end up purchasing some type of Eee-style sub-notebook: there's no way I'm going to use it over OS X on my Mac, but every time I've played around with it, I've thought it was quite lovely.

Download Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 [Ubuntu]

Rob Beschizza

Beamz: laser theremin thingie on sale at Sharper Image

Beamz, an electonic musical instrument that combines theremin and laser, is now available for a face-shriveling $600 at Sharper Image and the official website.

"Inspired by a childhood memory of a simple, light-activated door announcer at his local ice cream shop, [inventor] Jerry Riopelle has since leveraged decades of professional musical experience to develop this invention. His years of tinkering resulted in a breakthrough product that uses six laser beams like strings. Players simply pass their hands through each beam to trigger streams of musical notes or sounds. Each performance produces an original composition and the patented software ensures that the music played always will be harmonious, no matter which beam is engaged."

Connect it to your computer via USB, and set it up the way you want it with the included software, and you've got a spectacular-looking public performance. Whether it sounds all that good in person — or if it's anything more complex than a triggering mechanism for pre-produced clips and sequences — is another matter entirely.

Does it not look like a laser-fence? You know, those things in derivative science fiction movies and games that slice up intruders like so much Prosciutto.

Product Page [thebeamz.com]
Press release [PR Newswire]

John Brownlee

German Wikipedia will be printed

German publisher Bertelsmann has announced that they will be selling a stripped-down printed version of Wikipedia later this year. Wha'?

The idea is to use Wikipedia to capture the zeitgeist by selecting the most popular entries, Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, said in an interview by telephone. “We think of it as an encyclopedic yearbook,” Dr. Varnhorn said, leaving open the possibility of new editions if the 2008 version is successful.

It won't be, but it's an interesting approach to take. Needless to say, not all of Wikipedia will be represented: the number being thrown around is 50,000 of the most popular entries. 4 of the top 10 German Wikipedia entries? "Penis", "Sex", "Vagina" and "Adolf Hitler." Sounds like a fun book to read. Unfortunately, these 50,000 entries will be stripped down to about 15 lines each, which certainly isn't enough space to print the bulk of Wikipedia's content: 4,000 word fictional biographies of anime characters.

Actually, that was just a joke, but come to think of it, wouldn't that be a better tack altogether? Use Wikipedia as your content source for the printing of themed encyclopedias aimed at certain niches. Wikipedia: Star Wars Edition is likely to sell a lot better in book stores than Wikipedia: Gimped Edition

A Slice of German Wikipedia to Be Captured On Paper [New York Times]

John Brownlee

Datamancer's steampunk LCD is gorgeous, but is it really steampunk?

First thing's first: modder Datamancer's "steampunk" LCD monitor (pictured above) is a beauty. It's a 22" widescreen LCD featuring a frame of solid 1/-inch brass and a base made up of a mixture of black marble and brass. It was made for an upcoming movie, and after filming, it'll go up on eBay. I'm tempted to pick it up myself: I would look fine blogging in front of such a monitor, my meerschaum smoldering, a fez perched atop my head.

But those supine quotes smugly curl around steampunk in my first sentence for a reason. As lovely as Datamancer's creation is, I bristle at it being referred to as steampunk. Steampunk means something more precise than just "old and cool looking." I wish we could get back to using it that way.

Joel thinks steampunk is a confluence of aesthetic influences — which I agree with — and is ultimately an adjective without a concrete meaning. But it had a very precise meaning to me: it's anti-retro-futurism. Where retro-futurism is the attempt by people of the past to imagine the future by extrapolating it from the technology of the day, steampunk should be the attempt to recreate — at least in spirit — our own contemporary technology using the science and mechanics of the Victorian era.

I once interviewed Jake von Slatt for Wired. Jake's not shy about artfully adding ornamenture and oxidization to some gadget and calling it steampunk, but he's clearly interested in doing far more. Von Slatt was telling me about what a true steampunk monitor would be like in his mind: all ASCII, maybe no more than 80x40, but each letter would change like the rapid-fire fluttering of the destinations on a mid-century train departures board. He also described a steampunk mouse that was like "a phrenological device for hands." Now that's steampunk.

Maybe I'm just being an elitist snob. There's something to that: when Joel told me on my first day at BBG that our science-fiction category was "Retro-Futurism" because "it means the same thing," I experiences a remarkably vivid waking dream in which I schooled Joel on the exact meaning of the word by garroting him with his own unspooled intestines. But I like to think I try to hold on to the purity of the word "steampunk" just because modern technology mechanically engineered with the knowledge and materials of the distant pass is just so much more wonderful than spraying some copper paint on the side of your Dell and calling it a day. What do you guys think?

Steampunk LCD Monitor [Datamancer]

Rob Beschizza

Suggestive ad for spoon scales features rock salt, not drugs

Purported to weigh contents to an accuracy of one tenth of a gram, Pro•Idee's Spoon Scales are recommended for "Saffron, truffles, fine balsamic vinegar and crack."

At £18.50, it'll be the most expensive spoon you've ever bought, too. It's capable of measuring up to 300 grams (10.5 oz), according to the product page, but there's no word on whether it's dishwasher safe. I should think not, but I'd like someone to try and then complain anyway, so that we may mock them.

Spoon With Built-In Scale Is A Great Gift For Your Local Drug Dealer [Gearfuse]

Rob Beschizza

Destroy others, self, with wrist-mounted DIY flamethrower

Charlie Sorrel at Wired's Gadget Lab notes that Everett Bradford, the creator of this contraption, is "a young man already working on winning a Darwin Award."

YouTube [via Gadget Lab]

John Brownlee

Microsoft kills SPOT for watches

The writing's been on the wall, but Microsoft have just announced that they are putting down their SPOT service for Smart Watches like the lame dog it was.

SPOT ("Smart Personal Objects Technology" — Smart Watches that could send and download information via FM Radio) was an interesting idea, briefly capturing my fascination as I dreamed of an affordable SWATCH with all the Dick Tracy technological trimmings. But the watches themselves — drab-looking LCDs, the lot of them — were far too ugly to seriously consider wearing, and the features didn't seem worth the premium of the subscription to MSN Direct. They were either mundane (weather updates, lottery numbers) or absurd (you could receive but not send IMs on your watch). There was just no compelling reason to own one.

Well, SPOT's dead now. If you've got a SPOT watch, its services will continue working, but no more SPOT Watches will be released. Microsoft seems to be channeling the MSN DIrect service into more powerful devices, like GPS units. That's probably for the best. Personally, I think SPOT Watches highlighted a big dilemma with modern watch design: the more technologically modern a watch becomes, the less pleasing it is to wear.

Smart Watch Update [Spotstop via Crunch Gear]

Rob Beschizza

Automatic guitar hero controller dongle

It used to be that one could simply look up a walkthrough at Gamefaqs. Guitar Hero, however, is an actual game of skill rather than a glorified puzzle, mashfest or grind. How, then, to cheat? David Randolph takes a show controller—typically used to control museum exhibits and the like—and rigs it up to record and play perfect runs of the title's songs.

Programmed through the serial port, it costs $210 and can't be ordered online. Moreover, you have to get a relay board for another $200, or thereabouts, to adapt its output to a controller, which must itself be hacked to high heaven to get it all working.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it all comes down to exactly how much you suck, and exactly how much you want to do something about it.

Automate Guitar Hero [Hacked Gadgets]

Rob Beschizza

$250k book scanner swipes through 3,000 pages per hour

Just watching the DL 3000 book scanner in operation scares me. The bars that swoop over the book, raising and flapping pages, seem far too large and heavy-duty; it's as if a brush of wind or the slightest nudge would have their dumb repetitions turn your discolored, first-edition Psychopathia Sexualis into so much confetti.

It's claimed to be the fastest such scanner in the world, and the 3000's name refers to the number of pages it can scan in an hour; that's quick enough to bomb its way through half a dozen airport potboilers before you've even gotten through security. At $250,000, you won't be getting it for Christmas; worse, it can't do The Jungle Book: Pop-up Adventure.

Digitizing Line DL-3000 Book Scanner - aka the fastest in the world [Red Ferret Journal]

Rob Beschizza

Microwave-toaster combo shows cellphones a thing or two about convergence

It is a microwave. Press a button, and a flap opens to reveal a concealed toaster. Shriek with glee and clap your hands, it's a convergence device that sounds like it might actually been worth the trouble of converging!

Appliances have an advantage over high-tech gadgets, see, in that the technology behind them is generally a settled matter. The performance characteristics of toasters do not follow Moore's law, or anything like it. On the other hand, the other traditional flaw of convergence remains true: sooner or later, one of the components will break, spoiling the experience of the whole thing.

LG's LTM9000 is also a bit of a lightweight: only 900 watts in the oven and 800 watts for the toaster. At $140, it's not outrageously expensive, but much moreso than just buying a toaster and a microwave.

Product Page [via Oh Gizmo and Core77]

Rob Beschizza

Kevlar shoes encourage natural gait

Shoes, especially expensive "running" shoes, fuck up your feet. They ruin a walking gait honed by countless generations of adaptation, and make you look like a fashion victim to boot. Dylan Tweney at Wired Science reviews the research and finds Galahad Clark's Vivo Barefoot, a pricey design that's crafted to match as closely as possible the natural inclinations of the human foot.

"[It's] a $160 un-shoe that is as close to going barefoot as you can get while still providing some protection against the dog shit, hypodermic needles and broken glass that clog the streets of New York (and San Francisco, for that matter)."

My understanding is that the publicly-available excrement in San Francisco is often from another source, but to a jogger, a turd is a turd is a turd. The shoe looks a bit goofy, until you realize that it's basically just a superstrong kevlar sock dressed up to look as much like a sneaker as possible. From fan Josh Samuels:

"Their lack of "arch support" and elevated heel is actually a boon, as it allows you to walk/run normally and regain natural posture. They also have a wide toe-box, to accommodate your feet without crunching, even have a zippered sole so that you can just replace them when they wear out, instead of buying a new pair!"

At $160, it's pricey — so pricey that I think I'd rather wait until they have a less pedestrian design.

Update: Cory links to a New York Magazine article on the subject and offers some thoughts on an alternative brand that's helped him overcome woes anyone with flat feet will understand.

Product Page [kk.org]
Your Shoes Are Killing Your Feet [Wired Science]

Rob Beschizza

Rumor: Sprint reps told not to write quotes from customers in notes

As my poor relationship with Sprint continues—I just tried to activate a new line with an old phone we already own, a Sprint Katana, but it was 'unable' to do so—The Consumerist has a doozy on America's third-largest cellular carrier. Allegedly, anonymous-sourcedly, Sprint's reps are under instructions not to write quotations from customers in notes. This is because such notes can be used by customers in lawsuits as evidence.

If true, it's probably best seen not as some new act of raving evil, but simply as a subtle reminder of how Sprint views its relationship with its customers.

Sprint Reps No Longer Allowed To Quote Customer In Quotes In Case Of Subpoena? [The Consumerist]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: The Woodsman

Joel's secret to wilderness success.
Jordan Guelde [via Yanko Design]

Rob Beschizza

Why Linux will never get consumer market share

From the "Open Source Boob Project:"

"At Penguicon, we had buttons to give away. There were two small buttons, one for each camp: A green button that said, "YES, you may" and a red button that said "NO, you may not." And anyone who had those buttons on, whether you knew them or not, was someone you could approach and ask:

'Excuse me, but may I touch your breasts?'"

The Open Source Boob Project [TheFerett via Qt3]

P.S. Don't miss the clarification.

Joel Johnson

In the Woods: Dumb but lucky (my life's creed)

Despite some equipment setbacks compounded by my embarrassingly poor grasp of the fundamental nature of circuits, I am computing to you from a hill overlooking the Hudson on a Lenovo X300 laptop being recharged by a Brunton Solo 15. The Solo 15 was recharged by our sun through a folding Solaris 52 solar panel. I'm also sipping water — well, coffee — cleaned by a SteriPen while taking the occasional phone call.

(I'm listing all this stuff by brand name both to catch up anyone who hasn't been following along. Also, because man is this stuff getting dirty; I'm hoping the more I mention the products by name the less blank stares I get from the companies when I return their mostly intact but dusty gear. Still, typical review caveats apply: If something sucks I'll say so.)

It was my intention to actually do some more blogging out here, but my internet connection using the X300's built-in EVDO modem is stuck at 1xRTT, which is usable, albeit slowly. Like days of yore, I am loading only a single web page at a time. For a brief moment this morning I had a strong EVDO signal and speeds to match, but like the fog it vanished with the sun.

In short, things are going better than I could reasonable expect, but I wouldn't advise anyone to make the same attempt. The solar gear works but is heavy. The internet works, but barely. The camping comforts I left to make room for all the electronics are missed.

Yet I'm still looking down into the valley below and it's lovely — when the trees fill out their leaves it will be stunning — and am able to answer emails, upload pictures, post stories, and live a muted analog of my normal work day.

But these are supposed to be work days, however awesomely indulgent they may be, so I'm going to pack up in the morning and head back to Brooklyn. I've tested all the gear I've brought (and shot video, coming soon). I'll lose most of the day tomorrow to travel, but better three light posting days than four, I figure, especially since I'm bopping off to Costa Rica next week for what will be — save a few video shoots — a proper vacation.

I'll be writing up full reviews of all this gear after I get back. Except for the inverter that came with the Brunton Solo 15 that coughed up some smoke when I plugged it directly into the 12-volt (estimated!) outlet on the Solaris 52 solar panel, everything has worked very well. (And the inverter is still working right now, although it will occasionally make a little snapping noise to remind me it is not long for this world.)

Oh, I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. Then almost fell on it when I jumped in fear and nearly lost my balance. Then sat in the shelter chain smoking recalling all the times I've sneered to someone, "Oh, they're more afraid of you than you are of them." Because if that's true that snake had a hell of a poker face.

Anyway, lots more to come, but I realized I hadn't checked in since this morning. Thanks to everyone who sent me "Complete the circuit, dummy!" messages while I was rigging up the plug this morning. Every time I got one a little more drool dripped from my smiling, idiot mouth.

Previously • Video: Week in the Woods [BBG]
• In the Woods: Brooklyn, we have a problem [BBG]
• Gadgets in the wild: Is Joel Dead Yet?; Update: Sirs, I am not [BBG]
• Week in the Woods: Final checklist; Leaving tomorrow! [BBG]
• Week in the Woods: Need to Get My Computer Decision Made [BBG]
• Help Me Plan a Week Working in the Woods [BBG]

Joel Johnson

Top Gun '08 R/C air show happening now

Starting, uh, yesterday, the 'Top Gun' show at the Lakeland Linder Regional Airport (in Florida) features the world's largest 35 R/C airplanes, as well as typical air show demos and performances. If you're into R/C aircraft you probably already are there, but if happen to be in the area and want to check it out the show is open until the 27th.

Show Page [FrankTiano.com via HackNMod.com]

Image: John B. Carnett for Popular Science

Joel Johnson

Blaupunkt 'Brisbane' in-dash stereo leaves out the CD player

The Blaupunkt 'Brisbane SD48' is a in-dash car stereo that forgoes the CD entirely in favor of SD cards, external MP3 players, phones, USB flash and hard disk drives. Because it's all solid state, they're pitching it as a solution for those who partake in "high G-force motorsports and...off-road enthusiasts."

Unfortunately the actual file-handling capabilities seem a bit lackluster:

The Blaupunkt Brisbane SD48 has a front panel SD/MMC card-slot, headphone-jack input for portable MP3 player, and a USB input that allows the addition of storage devices such as a portable hard-drive or thumb-drive loaded with digital music. It supports both MP3 and WMA audio files at bit-rates of 8 to 320 kilobits. The Brisbane accommodates up to 127 music directories, and displays ID3 tag information up to 30 characters in length. The 3.5 mm front-panel auxiliary input is compatible with the headphone or aux outputs of nearly any portable device.

Press Release [GSPR.com]

John Brownlee

Optimus keyboard now shipping, bring on the hacks

After years of promises and missed ship dates, the Optimus Maximus keyboard is finally on sale (and shipping!) over at Think Geek. The price is still sheer lunacy, though, at $1,589.99. All so you can marvel at the 113 tiny OLED keys that will soon be covered in an opaque film of dead skin detritus and Cheetos dust. This keyboard, as undeniably sexy as it is, needs to be about $1200 cheaper before I even begin to consider it, even after trepanation. Although every time I try to remember my World of Warcraft warlock's hot keys, I feel a slight pang of temptation.

But in truth, I'm more looking forward to what other people do with the Optimus: with each key capable of playing an animated GIF or Quicktime movie, I don't think it'll be too long before we see a YouTube movie of the the Optimus broadcasting 113 simultaneous copies of "Two Girls, One Cup." Anyone else got any good ideas for Optimus hacks?

Optimus Maximus Keyboard [Think Geek]

John Brownlee

French Medion Akoya Mini joins the Eee clones

A scant few months after Asus Eee forged the adorable market of the impulse-buy sub-notebook, it is already looking like the lame duck, a cheap Chinese knock-off of better competitors. As every computer maker crowds into this new market space, most of them seem to be bringing more attractive and full-featured offerings to the table for about the same price.

The Medion Akoya Mini is France's own prospective Eee-killer. It is shipping with a 1.6GHz-1.8Ghz Atom processor, apparently, with a gig of DDR2 RAM, which makes it a beefier machine than some of the cheap sub-notebooks we've seen recently. The OS will be either XP or Linux, but if you opt for Linux (as seems to be the trend) you get a beefier machine for the same price. There's also a 1.3 MegaPixel cam, a memory card reader, a VGA output, two USB ports and an Ethernet port. Release date is at the end of summer.

It's a pretty sleek looking machine, actually. Medion is claiming the price will be below €399 in Europe. I think we're soon going to see this cheap sub-notebook market become as over-saturated as the MP3, digicam or cell phone market with cheap, essentially indistinguishable devices.

Medion tells us more about its competitor of the Eee PC [SVM Le Mag via le Journal du Geek via Engadget]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at this 1973 Popular Science article about the debut of the world's first cell phone, Motorola's Dynatac.

In super-dense Manhattan, for example, a transmitter and its antenna may be designed to cover a 15-block area. Another transmitter in a residential Brooklyn area may cover several miles. As the number of subscribers grows, more transmitters would be added.

Also today, a beard clinic that helps men develop their own custom shaving strategy, Polish dogs trained to lay telephone lines, deep sea divers used to solicit cash, an interesting approach to preventing bank robberies by using mirrors and a pretty nice looking home on a train.

John Brownlee

Decapitated Stitch eats, plays your CDs

While I still buy CDs — the Microsoft PlaysForSure debacle is just more steel for my resolve not to buy songs over iTunes, and I'm not going to pay a premium to get my music without DRM — I didn't think I was likely to ever buy a CD player again. I mean, really: CDs are just a one-off means of conveyance for me to transfer the music I want to hear from the record store to my iPod, like an iridescent, optical plastic bag. But man, this Disney CD player and radio in the shape of Stitch's decapitated head is pretty righteous. You just cram your disc down his gullet and the music reverberates out of his ears; the control buttons are encalcified on his plaque-encrusted teeth. It's Japan only, though, so I'm unlikely to cave to the temptation. If you're interested in importing it, though, it seems to be going for about $90.

Disney Stich CD/radio player [Far East Gizmos]

John Brownlee

Monocycle is the chariot of choice for the 21st Century Man

For me, the monocycle — in which a cyclist bestowed with a bitching sense of equilibrium (and, god willing, a waxed handlebar moustache) pedals his velocipede from inside the rim of its enormous solitary wheel — is the paragon of cycling technology, and so Ben Wilson's incredible monowheel, commissioned for Tokyo's 21st Century Man competition, has me feeling a bit like a antediluvian pleb for getting around on the pitiful conveyance of a two-wheel vehicle.

“We don’’t suggest for one moment that a functioning human powered monowheel could ever provide an improvement on the modern bicycle," claims Wilson. Says you. Man, some people just don't deserve cool things.

Monowheel by Ben Wilson [Dezeen]

John Brownlee

Beauty and the Geek keyboard pants

I don't think I could wear these "Beauty and the Geek" jeans by designer Erik De Nijs. They've certainly got some serious nerd cred, with speakers sewn into the knees, a special back pocket for your mouse and a joystick controller located behind the zipper.. But they really seem to be designed more for women — for whom typing a long sentence full of titillating "G"s will never be more arousing — than for men (slap that space bar gingerly, champ).

The Geekiest Pants... Ever [Vous Pensez]

Rob Beschizza

Asus to offer bamboo subnotebooks this summer

Bamboo's all the rage today, with Asus announcing that its own lineup of wooden-cased computers will arrive in stores this summer.

Digitimes, itself citing Apply Daily, reports that it'll put out subnotebooks in 11" and 12" sizes in June, for about $1,650. Pictured is a larger prototype from its demo at the recent CeBit show, where it presented a desktop and other notebook form factors. None of these other mockups are planned to conjoin with reality, unfortunately.

Getting hold of these in the west might be a problem. Dynamism, I hope you're on it.

Asustek to launch bamboo notebooks by June, says paper [DigiTimes]

Rob Beschizza

World's largest abacus used by drug dealer

Thailand has an 18-foot abacus, fronting the counter at a pharmacy in Rayong. The pharmacist reports being able to calculate bills on it faster than with a standard electronic calculator.

Abacus [Reuters via Red Ferret Journal]

John Brownlee

Buying electronics in Europe is for idiots

At least every six months, I cram myself into the fetid belly of a Trans-Atlantic 747, spend 12 hours trying not to fling to the ground and jump on the spine of the small child rhythmically kicking the back of my seat, and fly back to my home town for a couple of weeks. I have my reasons: steak-and-cheese subs and Taco Bell. The seduction of home town girls who were too good for me in high school. A beloved nonagenarian uncle who seems likely to explode into a poof of dust at any moment, despite the fact that all the evidence I have so far indicates he is probably immortal. But as the dollar tanks, I find myself increasingly scheduling my trips home according to gadget release schedules.

This can be maddening. For example, right now, I'm looking to make a trip home sometime in June. The cheapest tickets are from the very end of May to about June 12th, at which point, the prices jump up a couple hundred bucks. But here's where it gets tricky: I want to update my old first-revision MacBook Pro when I'm home. Now, according to Appleinsider, there's a good chance we'll see new MBPs soon. Apple is also holding a developer's conference from June 9th - 13th. So basically, if they announce a new MBP and Jobs says "And you can get it now!" it's probably too late to get one. So is it worth spending another couple hundred bucks to travel home at the end of June? Well, sure... provided Apple releases a new MBP in mid-June. Otherwise, it's a waste of money.

In a simpler world, I would just buy my new laptop in Europe, but buying electronics in Europe is for land-locked fools. For some reason — and that reason is an industry-wide indifference to gouging European customers and an enthusiasm for making them subsidize their American customers — the suggested retail price of a piece of electronics is always translated at a 1:1 exchange rate from dollars to euros. A $2,000 laptop will cost you €2,000. There was a time, when the dollar was a little stronger, that you could justify it to yourself. Sure, you were paying a 20% increase in the price, but that was roughly accountable for by VAT. But now that the dollar is worth 0.62 European cents, that two thousand dollar laptop will cost a European $3,186.18. The discrepancy is the price of almost two round-trip tickets to the States!

Keep this in mind next time you see a gadget blog optimistically translate the price of a new piece of European tech from Euros to dollars at the official Oanda exchange rate: it is the sort of simpering naivete that only an American gadget blogger — buying his tech at half-price with a currency imbued with the strength of sopping toilet paper — could ever have.

There's no two ways about it: buying electronics in Europe is for morons.

Rob Beschizza

Ouija board guitar plucks gothic heart strings

A demented facsimile of a folk tune presented itself in mind the moment I set eyes on the ouija board guitar, a contemporary mashup to honor it's crazy blend of art, music and madness.

From the URL, it looks like the artist's name is Nick Holcomb. I'd love to see and hear video of this in action.

Gallery page [via GearFuse]

Rob Beschizza

Dell's Bamboo PC is tip of an iceberg of cool designs

Dell's Bamboo-cased mini-PC is about the most beautiful thing the company—often derided as the dullest of PC manufacturers—has produced. Ostensibly an eco-friendly thing, this wooden machine's real appeal is its simple, tasteful appearance. Of course, it will also be available in standard-issue plastic.

At CES this year, Dell gave me and other writers a look at prototypes it probably will never take to market. These devices were universally gorgeous, inventive and cleverly designed. The only thing from this team/division to see the light of day, I think, is the crystal LCD monitor that's now getting some unfortunate reviews.

Dell's new computer, specs undisclosed, will be available later this year at a "likely" price of $500-$700. Specs will be important: if this has decent storage, HDMI and an optical drive, it'll be a hot item. If it's just another low-end desktop that's bigger than and just as pricey as the Mac Mini, it won't.

Pictures of Dell's Eco Bamboo Computer [Earth2Tech]

Rob Beschizza

Brazilian chavs hack ATM with Eee PC

In Terminator II, it was the Atari Portfolio that hacked ATMs. In Brazil, it is the Asus Eee.

Scallywags damaged the nearby cash machines to funnel passers-by to their rigged one, into which was stuffed a subnotebook and all the accouterments required to steal card numbers and customer details. High-tech, yes, but hardly ingenious, given that they didn't do anything to hide their own identities from nearby closed-circuit cameras.

Globo reports that the thieves, arrested in Rio Grande do Sul, are members of a card-cloning gang. They were caught when the bank manager looked at security tapes—from the original story, it appears he simply found it a little odd that the bank was ransacked and most of the ATMs rendered nonoperational during the night.

Source [GloboTV]
Machine Translation [Google]
Direct link to video

Rob Beschizza

Three CF cards, one SATA adapter

To nerdilettantes, Century's triple CF card SATA adapter is Manna from Heaven, which is to say, from Asia. Jam three compact flash cards in, and there you go—an instant solid state disk drive. The problem is that it's $200, which is pure comedy, especially given the 20 MB/s throughput it'll provide.

On the other hand, real SSDs have even greater markups over CF, so if you're after size instead of speed, why not? Just don't think of those increasingly-cheap terabyte hard drives; remember, this is a holy war.

Product Page [GeekStuff4U via Gizmodo and Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

DRM's final insult

DRM is dead. And just like every activist, pirate and skeptic ever warned you, all the DRM-laden songs you bought will join it in the grave. Cory over at the motherboing notes that Microsoft is to close its "license server" for good, making it so DRM tracks are useless on any computer other than the one they were originally downloaded to.

They're nuking customers' music collections from orbit, an expression of spite on a cosmic scale. It's unimaginably bad form, but you know what? If you're affected by this, you're getting exactly what you paid for.

Joel Johnson

In the Woods: Brooklyn, we have a problem

Okay, I'm going to try to make this quick, since I may be running out of battery sooner than I thought.

I left a connector for the Solo 15 at home, which means I have no way to get power from the Solaris 52 solar panel into the Solo 15. That wouldn't be a problem except I haven't been able to charge the X300 laptop directly from the panels in the past, although I may be able to if I get enough sunlight. (I think it just wasn't driving enough voltage through the inverter.

I've got about an hour-and-a-half of laptop battery left, so I'm going to attempt meager use until I'm sure I can get more power into the laptop. Oddly enough, EVDO is working this morning; I've got a nice little connection. If I could get power, I could even upload some more videos.

One plan for jury-rigging the Solo 15: the connection is just a wire. (It's actually a 12-volt car plug with two of the standard power plugs on the end. Obviously it's running DC out of the panel into the battery. I just so happen to have on a bracelet that my kid sister made for me from CAT-5, so I'm thinking about stripping the ends and just jamming them into the inside holes between the panel and the battery. (The battery has a circuit that prevents it from dumping back into the panel, so I'm not worried about juice flowing the other way. There's no intelligence in the standard wires.)

My only question: I don't know in a DC connection if you need more than one wire. The outside is a ground, right? But you don't actually need a ground if you're just putting juice down a wire? If so, I'll have to figure out a way to connection the second wire to the connectors, which won't be nearly as easy. (Why didn't I bring electrical tape?)

If you happen to know the answer to this very simple problem, feel free to ring me (347 495 0610) or send a direct message to me on Twitter, which is passed directly to my SMS.

I'm actually really tickled about all this. Everything's gone so well I was wondering when the real difficulty would show up.

Oh, and to you haters that said I'd freeze to death if I didn't bring a pad? Slept like a baby. Like a baby on a slab of wood. I was even sweating a little!

Update: Well, crap. While I was trying to rig up a plug I decided to plug the inverter directly into the panel to try and see if I had enough sunlight to charge the laptop without using the Solo 15 battery at all. As far as I know, that's a standard way to use the inverter. But as the USB was humming along charging a spare phone battery, there was a pop and a puff of smoke. I opened up the inverter case and while the fuse isn't blown, something on the board has scorched. I'm not sure if that leaves the inverter completely unusable or not. I tried it off the Solo 15 (which still has a little juice left) and the USB out on the inverter seemed to be working fine. But if the AC out doesn't work I won't be able to charge the laptop, even if I can rig up a way to get power to it.

This may be it for power. If that's the case, I'll probably pack up and head back to Brooklyn tonight. No need just to stay out here enjoying nature with no internet.

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Gulf War III

Mishari Alreshaid's Photostream

Rob Beschizza

Gadgets in the wild: Is Joel Dead Yet?; Update: Sirs, I am not

BoingBoing Gadgets supremo Joel Johnson arrived in the woods earlier this afternoon, and reports that he is half-way to his night's destination. Both gadgets and mental faculties remain operational. (See what he's taking along in the checklist post)

His twitter feed is already starting to fill with short missives from the frontier:

"Crossing black river hot with sun. Man has been here."

Indeed. The picture is from his flickr, similarly about to be loaded with proof that nowhere is free of modern life's electromagnetic tendrils.

Update: I'm here. I have internet, although it's not EVDO, but just 1xRTT, which is awful slow. Still, success! Here is the video to prove it.

John Brownlee

Paint Thickness Tester measures atomic discrepancies in your car's paint job

The Paint Thickness Tester is a cheap keychain device that promises to help you avoid bringing home a lemon from the lot of your local sleazy used car Guido by telling you when a car has well-hidden touch-ups in its paint job:

Place the test probe on the car roof, for example. By pressing a button, the paint thickness tester will store this paint thickness as a reference value. Now, by placing the test probe on any part of the vehicle body, you can compare it with this value. You will immediately determine whether parts of the body have been replaces or repainted and if the purchase price is suitable.

I've never owned a car, so maybe someone can fill me in: if a paint job has been touched up skillfully and it's not visible to the naked eye, why does it matter if it isn't all the original coat? It seems pointless to me. Still, I guess $20 is a cheap enough price to give you some empirical proof of your used car not being worth the sticker price when you're brought into the negotiating room.

Update: Uh. Yeah. Duh. Peter S. Conrad explains why this is important in a way that makes sense even to a committed, non-license-carrying pedestrian like myself: "Well, for example, a car that has the same thickness paint all over has probably never been in a crash, probably doesn't have big rust holes filled in with Bondo, etc."

Paint Thickness Tester [Official Site via OhGizmo!]

9

John Brownlee

Paint-splattered graffitti K3YB04RD

I absolutely love this frantically paint-splattered graffiti keyboard by MAKEr Divine Harvester. It makes the not-so-secret Punky Brewster of my soul squeal in girlish, color-blind delight.

K3YB04RD [Divine Harvester's Flickr via MAKE:Blog]

John Brownlee

Measure your TPS with the Final Say Penis Measuring Kit

Look no further than the frat house to see how standards of measurement fluctuated when trousers are dropped and rulers brandished. Do you measure when flaccid or aroused? Do you only measure what can be plausibly crammed into an orifice, or is it okay to start one-inch past the o-ring? And, if the latter, why not take the lymphatic system into account while you're at it to gain another few precious yards?

Yes, until the International Metric Consortium finally releases their contentious, long-promised standardization of phallus measuring protocols, the size of one's genitalia will always be nebulous. But until that day comes, The Final Say Penis Measuring Kit aims to settle all disputes, marketing itself as "the world’s first and only kit with the patent pending PHALLUMEASURE inside."

Expect to see our intensive hands-on video review on BBG in the coming weeks. Also, that classy "TPS" icon on their site needs to be turned into an embeddable widget, stat.

The Final Say Penis Measuring Kit [Size of a Man]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we look back to a simpler time when earstwhile wiretappers only needed a pair of vampire clips and a contact microphone to do their job instead of a bevy of wireless digital network sniffers. I imagine they also wouldn't have any trouble listening in on this cordless phone from 1970. It looks like it is just a standard bell telephone spliced onto a rather bulky radio base station. We also looked at Lady Nora Docker's pimped out 1956 Daimler complete with genuine zebra skin interior, a test to see if couples about to be married are compatible with one another, a cure for the cross-eyed and learned how to build your own very own Meditation thingy. Note: Meditation thingy is defined as a giant 12 sided plywood fort plastered with magazine pictures (or pholaged if you want to get fancy) that one gets inside to gently rock themselves to sleep while dreaming of a better world.

Joel Johnson

The Woods: Battery life calculation help, because I am bad at maths and electrons

Obviously I'll have some real world numbers soon, but I'm sitting here waiting for my second train out of Secaucus to Harriman and am topping off the Lenovo X300's battery from the Brunton Solo 15, and it got me thinking: how many times could I do this if the Solo 15 wasn't getting recharged from solar?

Then I realized you guys are smarter than I am, so I stopped trying to figure it out and thought I'd just Lay-Z-Web it.

Here's the specs for the X300's 3-cell battery: 11.2 V dc, 2.44 Amp/Hr,

And for the Solo 15:

# Peak Power = 77 Watts, Nominal Power = 39 Watts, Total Power = 154 Watt Hours
# Storage: 12 Amp Hours @ 12.8 volts
# Max Output: 14.6 Volts
# Max Power: 77 Watts

So I looked at the amp/hour and thought, okay, about six times. And maybe that's right. Remember: I'm dumb as a shed. So dumb I'm not even sure that's the right metaphor. Or if that's a metaphor or a simile. See?

Keep in mind, because I couldn't find a car charger for the X300, I'm going out of a DC Solo 15 into an AC inverter, then back out to the standard AC/DC adapter, so there's got to be some loss in there. But I'm not interested in exact numbers, really, just a general idea. And even more important, what the probably simple equation that I'm too dopey to understand might be.

Okay, I better pack up. My train is coming soon.

John Brownlee

Japanese bicycle parking tower aches with hunger

With frightening velocipedal hunger, this Tokyo Bicycle Parking Tower gobbles up bicycles with speed and relish. It will store up to 9,400 bikes in its belly, and will only regurgitate your ten speed for a shiny 100 yen coin. The Bicycle Parking Tower's inner workings are less Rube Goldberg than I'd imagined, but there's still something remarkably disconcerting about the claustrophobic vastness of its bowels and the ruthless efficiency of its automation. One hundred years from now, we'll all pop a buck into a control panel at the end of the day and automatically be whisked away to our hibernation coffins by vast, skyscraper-sized machines exactly like this.

tokyo bicycle parking tower [YouTube via Engadget]

Joel Johnson

How much solar power does it take to roast a whole chicken in 10 minutes?

Sila Sutharat sells Thai roasted chicken at his stall in Bangkok, roasted under an array of sun-concentrating mirrors. It's a simple idea — one that many old solar ovens and newer solar energy farms are using — but it's the cooking time that surprised me: just 10 minutes for a whole chicken, claims Sutharat. Gizmodo's Mark Wilson thinks that the secret is in the marinade which, according to Wilson's theory, is highly acidic, effectively pre-cooking the chickens.

Now I'm curious. Have any of you guys built a solar-powered roaster before? I kind of want to try and make one, but it would probably be pretty wasteful to build a giant concave mirror concentrator just to roast the occasional chicken. This guy's saying he's knocking out 50 chickens a day, but there's no picture of his reflector.

Sun-cooked chickens are hot [BangKok Post (Google Cache) via Gizmodo via Inventor Spot]

Rob Beschizza

Beautiful chrome egg boiler cooks seven at once

Sekai-Kaden's Vitantonia boiler cooks up to seven of 'em on demand, producing soft-boiled eggs in 10 minutes or hard-boiled oned in 15. It even comes with an insert to make three poached eggs, though the ~$50 price tag is a little disconcerting.

Lovely design, though, and a sturdy look. If anyone spots local availability anywhere, drop us a line so that we may give it a whirl.

Product Page [Sekai Kaden via TokyoMango and PC Watch]

Joel Johnson

'W-Cut' fasteners are drill and screw in one

The "W-Cut" thread design from GRK Fasteners — available on all their screws — adds small teeth to the first few threads of a screw, making it possible to forgoe pre-drilling a hole entirely. Think of it as a tiny drill bit on the tip of each screw. These won't replace drywall anchors, probably the most common household drill-and-screw process, but for bigger construction projects they could save a lot of hassle, especially if you only have one driver, forcing you to keep switching bits.

Company Page [GRKFasteners.com via Core77]

John Brownlee

NPR on mad physicists, Neumann microphones, crashed elevators and Hitler

NPR's All Things Considered has a wonderful piece up about microphone maestro John Peluso, who is at the vanguard of an audiophonic boutique industry, creating perfect simulacra of vintage mics.

But how did the Pelusos get started in such a unique field? Well, John Peluso wouldn't want to bore you with the mundane details or anything, but it all began when he dragged the unconscious carcass of the mad German physicist Verner Ruvalds out of the shattered wreck of a crashed elevator. In turn, Ruvalds rewarded Peluso for his heroism by teaching him the "black art" of microphone creation... the very same black art that had allowed Ruvalds, thirty years earlier, to create Adolf Hitler's microphone, the Neumann CMV3!

The physicist imparted volumes about the soul of a microphone — how a change of a few invisible microns in the pocket of air behind the diaphragm makes a big difference to the ear. A micron is about one-sixtieth the width of a human hair.

"What he would tell me was … why it did what it did, why it sounded the way it did," Peluso says. "We would talk two or three hours at night after our work for nights, days and weeks and months on end."

Couple's Custom Microphones Carry Colorful Past [NPR]

Rob Beschizza

Glowing testicle imager invented

Dragan Golijanin of the University of Rochester Medical Center may want your testicles to glow.

This will help it help you maintain a healthy pair. Let's have the patent filing—"PRE- AND INTRA- OPERATIVE IMAGING OF TESTICULAR TORSION"—speak for itself:

"The invention provides methods for visualizing perfusion or lack thereof in the spermatic cord and testicle, as well as for detecting testicular trauma. A surgical forceps adapted to facilitate such visualization is also provided."

The problem: spotting a tangled sack using traditional imaging methods. The solution: fill it with luminescent dye, to see how the blood supply is occluded within.

For gents, it is all extraordinarily painful reading: "If this loss of blood supply is not corrected within 6 to 12 hours, it results in the death of the testicle," write the authors, discussing the consequences of poor blood flow. Other key phrases include "sudden scrotal pain" and "the jaws permit a firm grip to be maintained on the scrotum." And on and on it goes.

Patent Filing [WIPO via New Scientist]

Rob Beschizza

Surveillance camera hidden in a wallwart

Trust nothing, thieves. Even the potted plants and teddy bears are against you. Such concealments lack one thing, though, which makes long-term surveillance a chore: power. What better, then than a camera hidden in a wall-wart power adapter?

With a microSD slot and a 2GB card, the fake will record up to 66 hours at a time. The resolution, unfortunately, is very low: 176x144 at 15 fps. For fire 'n' forget simplicity, however, it might be a winner—if you know who the intruder is, that's surely good enough evidence to prove their presence, even if you'd never ID some random burglar at that woeful, Atari 2600-like resolution.

Product Page [Ajoka via Oh Gizmo!]

Rob Beschizza

The garbage disposal of the future

In-sink garbage disposal, as it stands, lacks elegance. One is cheffing around like a pro, then ... Wuuuooooorrrrrkkkjkjkjkjkjkjkssssshshhhhhh! So declassé!

Designer Anne Kitzmiller gives the humble appliance some modernist love, offering a custom-designed sink that uses "active touch" to ensure style and safety.

It even has an automatic, urinal-style waterfall to slosh away those potato skins. Kohler (who else?) will sell them.

Prep Cook’s Dream [Yanko Design]

John Brownlee

Asus sent souped-up batteries to Eee 9" reviewers

Early adopters of Asus 9" Eee PC in Hong Kong are in a righteous fury over what appears to be a flat-out campaign of dishonesty and misinformation on the part of Asus in regards to the Eee's battery life. Early reviews cited a 2.5 hour battery life for the Eee, but Asus has admitted that it "mistakenly" sent reviewers a 4-cell, 5800mAh battery with their Eees instead of the battery that consumers will actually get: a significantly weaker 4400mAh 4-cell with a paltry 1.5 hour battery life.

Boo, Asus. That's just bad baseball. The 2.5 hour battery life was always disappointing, even before it turned out that you lied to reviewers even to get that. But 1.5 hours? On a brand new battery? How do you even release a product like that? Especially for five hundred and forty nine dollars?

Asus is now "considering" upgrading early adopters' batteries for free. Just do it, Asus. You're rapidly losing fans here. The cheap sub-notebook market is getting very crowded very quickly, yet you just seem intent on forcing itself out of the market it created. Lying to reviewers? Cheating customers who read those reviews? There's going to be enough contenders in the space within the coming months that unless you get your act together and start building superior units, there's going to be no reason to buy an Eee anymore. If, in fact, there's any reason to buy one now.

Asustek evaluating free battery upgrade for first day Eee PC 900 buyers in Hong Kong following complaints of misleading reviews [Digitimes]

Rob Beschizza

Classic Jobs on Microsoft

"I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."

Jobs on Microsoft [9 to 5 Mac]

John Brownlee

The Pet's Eye View Camera lets you experience your dog's foulness in thrilling first person

The Pet's Eye View Camera offers voyeuristic pet owners an affordable way to experience their dog's many incredible adventures. Hanging around your dog's collar, the Pet's Eye automatically takes first-person photographs from your dog's perspective every 1, 5 or 15 minutes. The resolution is only 640x480, but let's face it: the chances of your pet snapping an Ansel Adams caliber masterwork while licking his scrotum are pretty slim. You probably won't be framing these pictures. The price is just shy of fifty bucks.

Since dogs are wonderful but intrinsically foul creatures, I expect that the sweet and gummy Mother Hubbard who buys one of these, eager to experience her Schmookums' daily adventures, is in for a horrible surprise when she gets the film developed. Picture 1: racing out the doggy door. Picture 2: a close-up shot of another dog's hemorrhoidal anus. Picture 3: the pink blur of a first-person tongue enthusiastically lapping at a pool of vomit. Picture 4: waiting patiently in line behind a doberman for a turn in the doggy-style gang bang of the bitch up the road. And picture 5: the gelid, bloodless face of the neighborhood postman, his blind eyes protruding, his throat a spurting mess of canine-torn flesh.

Pet's Eye View Camera [Discover This via Book of Joe]

Rob Beschizza

1K Competition: Seagate ships billionth drive, and we've got one for you

1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?

Thanks to Seagate Technologies, which just shipped its billionth drive, one of you will get enough space to store your work a billion times over: a Terabyte hard drive.

If every drive it ever sold was put together, Seagate says, there'd be enough space to store 79 million terabytes (75 exabytes). It took three decades to do so, but thinks it will double that number in less than 5 years.

Making the most of limited space is the theme of the competition, however. It’s no good giving us 1k of actionscript glued to assets that mock the metric. If you write us a short story, 1,000 letters will trump 1,000 words.

On the other hand, if your 1K of source code ends up as a 3MB executable thanks to unavoidable embedded runtimes, worry not. So long as your rationale is clear, we won’t be sticklers.

The one rule is that whatever you do should be under a license that permits us to use your work at BBG without issue. GPL or Creative Commons licenses are suggested. (This is in lieu of the traditional option, where you submit this sort of stuff to a contest and then lose all rights to it.)

Link to your entry from the comments (or even just post it there!) and fire off an email to beschizza#gmail.com. We'll cycle back in a week and start picking the winners.

(P.S. The Seagate logo up top? Too big. It's 1,025 bytes!)

Update: Gabriel McGovern reminds that you can slim down PNGs very easily. Note that we're OK with using zip files or other "containers" to crunch something down, but will be more impressed by those who use cleverer compression methods like McGovern's

John Brownlee

The Fami-Card turns an NES cart into an NES

Console modder la grenouille Kotomi has managed to cram an entire NES inside a disemboweled Super Mario Bros. cart. Christened the Fami-Card, Kotomi's hack uses one of those cheap Chinese NES-on-a-Chip knockoffs to run the games, and even finds space to cram in a cartridge slot, video and audio out and two joystick ports.

This is fantastic, but someone needs to take Kotomi's work to the next level, and install a screen, speakers and a d-pad into the back of an old cartridge (preferably Blaster Master) transforming it into a standalone portable version of itself.

The Fami-Card [Kotomi via Technabob via Ben Heck Forums]

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Killbots want peace

From the talented Darkpony, drawrer.

Rob Beschizza

More splendid unreleased Atari games

Commenting on Alex Handy's remarkable find—the legendary Atari 2600 version of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure in the Park—reader SC_Wolf points to an entire cloud of these mysterious vapors.

Somehow, I don't think we'll be finding these at the flea market. But we may dream!

Fun From Yesterday! [Mighty God King]

Rob Beschizza

Leander Kahney's Inside Steve's Brain is out

It's hard to believe that one man revolutionized the operating system business in the 2000s, converting Windows' extraordinary market dominance into the reviled seven-year ditch that is Vista, and squandering billions on confused advances into ill-understood peripheral markets like video gaming and music hardware. No wonder some people worship him like a god. On the other hand, stories of his epic mid-morning bacon blowouts and viscous duckwebs of greasy sweat are legendary.

Wired.com's Leander Kahney cuts through the salt-ringed tide marks that surround him to unearth secrets to his unbelievable results. It reveals the real Steve.

Wait... what?

Inside Steve's Brain

Rob Beschizza

Man finds unreleased Atari 2600 game at flea market

Alex Handy found a bunch of suspiciously familiar-looking ROM chips at the Laney College flea market in Oakland. Looking closer, the $22 boxful turned out to include unreleased wonders of the 8-bit era.

"I know I’ve written about the amazing things I’ve found at this swap meet. In the past, I got a Game & Watch, and oodles of rare old console games. But today, I found a never published Atari game. I am not kidding. This is the holy grail of videogame collecting."

Among the finds was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, hitherto believed to be a colecovision exclusive!

"OK, now I was getting a boner. Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. A game which was never finished, and never released. I searched the Web, and found this page. Which says, basically, that the only known copy of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600 is in the hands of Ed English, the guy who wrote it. Did Ed clean house and give the junk to random Mexican Flea Market people? I think, more likely, an old Coleco office was cleaned out. I went back and bought the remaining 9 slabs of chips."

OK, so it's perhaps not the most appetizing lost title that could have turned up. Still, what a fine find!

Most Legendary Haul at the Flea Market
[Gism Butter via Qt3]

Rob Beschizza

Create your own Super Blockquote!

Last week, we gave you the chance to smash corporate duckspeak with Super Blockquote. We'd intended to wheel it out now and again to make fun of press releases, but due to popular demand, we're just going to release it into the wild—you can specify the quote it displays.

The easiest way to roll your own is to use this simple widget:

A better version with power-ups, better physics and dying is on its way.

John Brownlee

Reminder: In The Year 2000 Needs Your Love

Flickr pools don't populate themselves, and without them, fastidious bloggers actually have to scrounge content for a living. So as a friendly reminder, Boing Boing Gadgets has three Flickr pools, each a pure and nurturing hollow in which the seed of an image might grow into a full-fledged post. Our pools are:

• Electro Selectro — Vintage ads and inserts from the far flung, four-color past!

• In The Year 2000 — Our Retro-Futurism Pool. Discover the time-machines dreamed up by 17th Century Polynesians!

• Boing Boing Gadgets — our stock image pool.

This week, we'll be high-lighting some of the better images to come in from In The Year 2000, so why not join up and deposit something retro-futuristic for the smug bemusement of us, your fellow post-modernists?

Rob Beschizza

Are you addicted to blazing-fast internet?

Connectivity travails led me to a new realization. I'm no longer reliant on the internet: I'm reliant on low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. The lack of it makes it impossible to work fast, turns me into a whiny irritant to my colleagues, and is generally awfully inconvenient.

"Blogging for a living" is the obvious panic precipitator when the slowness comes oozing in, but it goes further. Entertainment, shopping, even watching movies over Comcast's On-Demand video download system ... it all needs a fat, fast pipe.

Joel leaves tomorrow for the woods. There he plans to work as normal, seeing if it's possible with the ~500 kbps connection he imagines he may get through EVDO Rev. A. My bet is that oft-undiscussed factors will weigh in. High latency, for example, is one internet annoyance that gets relatively little attention outside of the gaming community.

It used to be that people asked "could you go back to dial-up?" I don't think I could cope with sub-megabit speeds, to be honest. What about you?

Joel Johnson

GPS Tracker Defence jammer blocks homing beacons you didn't know you had

Look, I know you're paranoid. I can see it in the way you're nervously trying to catch a rearward reflection in the glare of your monitor as you read this post. Relax. No one cares about what you're doing right now.

It's when you head out to your car that you might consider, oh, I don't know, casually making a circuit around all four wheels, looking for tell-tale scuffs in the dust along the chassis, the relief of a steadying hand. (Amateurs!) Because you know what you did. You know where you're going to go next. And so will they.

So consider ordering this "GPS Tracker Defence" device that, when plugged into your car's 12-volt socket, emits a GPS-jamming chorus of electromagnetic screams in a five-meter radius. Which should be enough to knock out any tracking device that's been clipped to your undercarriage. Probably. How sure is your knowledge of how GPS really works?

Here's a test: you'll know the £150 fob is working if your life continues steeped in the same plodding weariness to which you'll never become truly accustomed.

You look nice today.

Catalog Page [TrackerShack.co.uk via SpyReview.co.uk via Coolest-Gadgets]

Rob Beschizza

MSI Wind blows west with yet another low-end subnotebook

Hidden amid overburdened UMPCs and unportable subnotebooks is what was once called the Handheld PC. This now-mythical beast turns on instantly, does most of the productivity stuff you want, and briefly ruled in the form of NEC's MobilePro, a great writers' tool that suffered from poor connectivity options and a wallet-rogering $900 price tag.

MSI's Wind, like HP's recent Mini-note and the rampaging Asus Eee, get close. However, they're still insisting on filling these things with relatively power-hungry computer hardware and full-scale operating systems, which is a dreadful shame.

Now, we're all Eee-lovers, for sure, but the horrors of Vista have made us all too happy to be running XP and similarly-configured builds of Linux. It builds an illusion; namely, that such things are lightweight, stripped-down tearaways. Well, they ain't. I still hanker for an update of NEC's old wonder.

Instant on? Check. A full day's battery life? Check. Such conveniences seems but a dream to anyone who's wrestled with the slow-booting, energy-hungry reality of the modern portable. Was it really so hard to live without internet? Was it really so hard to live with Windows CE?

Yes, yes it was! It was fucking horrible, is what it was. But the basic idea—a large but genuinely portable productivity clamshell with good connectivity and no pretensions above its station—is, I submit, a good one.

Welcoming the Arrival of the MSI Wind Notebook, Providing a
Light and Graceful Mobile Life When You Are on the Go! [via Digitimes]

Joel Johnson

SOlo solar lounge table is weather-proof and attractive exactly like I am not; Updated with price, availability

The SOlo Lounge Table is a weatherproof table topped with a solar array that charges an internal battery that can charge laptops, phones, and more. It has a Bluetooth connection that can send updates on its status to computers indoors and has a sliding drawer in which gadgets can be left to charge safe from inclement weather. (And now, they won't be getting much charging then, but it's still clever.)

There's no price listed on the page of Intelligent Forms, but I contacted one of the designers who will be following up with us later to give some more details about the table. I'm sure it's not cheap, but it sure is purdy.

Product Page [Intelligent Forms via Gizmodo via Born Rich]

Update: Just talked to Keith Doyle, a co-founder of Intelligent Forms. Here are the details on the table:
• Currently built-to-order, four to six weeks for delivery.
• Lots of interest since shown at the show.
• Price is $14k.
• German company Schuco built a custom table chassis for the product.
• Off-the-shelf solar panels are wired in series, but the one used in the SOlo is "sub-divided into smaller systems of cells in parallel. If you shade one, you're only reducing [the output of] part of the panel."

John Brownlee

Crave reviews MSI Turbobook GX600 (Verdict: Ugly, underpowered... but it has a turbo button!)

Over at Crave UK, they have a review of the MSI Turbobook GX600, an utterly non-remarkable, garishly-blinged little laptop that seems both underpowered and overpriced, except... it's got a Turbo button, hearkening back to the good old days of the 486!

Anyhoo, back to the turbo button. MSI says pressing it will instantly overclock the Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 CPU by approximately 20 per cent, taking it from 2.4GHz to around 2.8GHz. It also says if you hit it while the laptop is booting, it'll decrease boot time from 1 minute or longer to around 40 seconds.

We've only played with it for a short time, but with the turbo button enabled, it scored a very decent 6,070 in PCMark 2005. With the turbo button disabled, it scored 5,409. That's better than we expected, but why not just have it overclocked by default and get rid of the turbo button? When would you not want to go turbo?

The reason is because turbo buttons are cool, guys. They are like elevator door close buttons: even if a turbo button doesn't work (or may as well just always be left on), you somehow feel more in control of your computer's speed while wildly jabbing the button.

MSI Turbobook GX600: Bringing turbo back [Crave UK]

John Brownlee

Representative wants free, porn-less Internet for all

Disappointed with the predictability of the victors in the recent spectrum auction, which saw AT&T and Verizon walking away with 70% of the up-for-grabs airwaves, Representative Anna G. Eshoo (Gesundheit! Wokka wokka!) wants the FCC to auction off the 2155-2175Mhz band. The catch?

The winner would have to use the spectrum to create a nationwide wireless Internet service that is available to the public at no cost, automatically blocks access to pornographic content, and is fully open to third-party device manufacturers.

"Automatic blocking of pornographic content?" Pass the magic jaybone, lady. Even eliminating the technical impossibility of automatic porn blocking, if our recent Rule 34 Challenge proved anything, it is that there is nothing under the sun that isn't porn for someone.

Lawmaker calls for no-cost, porn-free, wireless 'Net access [Ars Technica]

Rob Beschizza

Air jack: space hopper for cars

If good gadgets are those whose purpose and method of operation are obvious from a photo, then the truly great ones are those in which the grisly consequences of failure are equally clear. What then, is the Exhaust Air Jack? Pure awesome.

Coming soon to a "PHENPHEN!!!"-style lawyer ad near you, just as as soon as some idiot does this in his garage after a few cans.

Product Page [Northern Tool via ProductDose via Book of Joe and Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Skype offering $9.95 unlimited international call plan

Skype has just introduced an unlimited international calling plan which will allow users to make as many calls as they like to the 34 countries most likely to be vaporized in the first nuclear strike of World War 3. The deal seems pretty good at a paltry $10. But is it really?

As I've mentioned before, I'm an American living abroad. Most of my friends, family and colleagues are overseas. This means I make a lot of phone calls to America, from calling up my buddies to poll them on how I should have reacted when a new German girlfriend forged a Pollock on my chest during coitus, to ringing up Mommy before bed time for my evening lullabye, I spend hundreds of minutes on the phone to America every month. So this deal would, at first blush, seem to be made for me.

But Skype's price per minute between Germany and the US is 2 cents. In fact, it seems to be about 2 cents per minute to all the countries supported by the subscription plan, which means you need to do spend more than 500 minutes a month on the phone with another country to benefit from this deal. Those looking for a more affordable way to call up Diego Garcia ($1.86 a minute!) will be out of luck.

Skype to sell unlimited international calls for $9.95/month [Yahoo]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we have this cute little midget television set with a 2" screen, a $375 four-function 1970 calculator, an attempt to set the non-stop tractor riding record, a talking mailbox, and we learned how Disney made the soundtrack for Fantasia. In 1950 Mechanix Illustrated must have run themselves out of red ink publishing the sensationalist piece "Can Russia Defeat Us with Atom Bombs?"

This weekend we looked at a Playboy ad done in Ascii art, a food cooker that runs off of an automobile's exhaust, a sonic laundry cleaner, an odd insect resistant chair, a spinning house designed to withstand hurricanes, a crazy looking ad for "Auto Eyes", the original fishing video game, a waiting room for hitch-hikers, a giant truck designed to ship prefab housing kits, and a variety of gadgets for the home. We also learned how to get a career from the television boom, how UPS sorted packages, the inside story of rodeos, and that morning is not the best time for work. Also in 1931 Popular Science asked the question: "Can Soft Drinks Poison You?"

John Brownlee

Straight from the CCCP: the Robotron 1715

You know, the USSR gets a lot of bad press in the Western world, what with its gulag archipelagos and the ruthless oppression of half of Europe and Asia for over half a century. Granted, that all seems pretty bad, but now look at this, the pride and joy of East German Computing circa 1984: The Robotron 1715, a "Worker's PC" based around a Zilog Z80 clone processor running at 2.5Mhz.

Retro Thing explains:

It ran what seems to have been an iron curtain variant of the CP/M OS popular in the west until it was obliterated by the MS-DOS juggernaut in the mid 1980s. The display offered 16x24 or 28x80 green text, and I'm willing to bet it had no graphic or sound capabilities. The machine was initially offered with 64 KB RAM, which was later upgraded to 256 KB.

Now consider: in an alternate history where the Soviet Union stamped unimpeded through Western Europe, we all would be using computers like this. There would be no LOLCats or Rick Rolling. Instead, we would all unite in Marxist harmony, exerting our treasured, state-distributed Robotrons in pursuit of Comrade Pajitnov's Great Five Year Plan 2.0. Isn't a lifetime of Soviet oppression worth living in a society where computers are named after one of the most bitching video games of all time? Added perk: all the Victory Gin you can drink!

Robotron 1715 [Made in the GTR]

Joel Johnson

Week in the Woods: Final checklist; Leaving tomorrow!

Tomorrow I'm heading out to the woods to make an attempt to work on the internet using only solar power. It's not going to be a full week as I'd planned, as I'll probably be coming back Friday — or if my constitution, food or internet supplies fail, sooner.

One immediate problem: I'm not quite sure where I'm going.

Well, I do. I'm going to Harriman State Park. But my exploratory overnight trip, whereby I was to test where best to get an EVDO connection, never happened. (I was waiting on equipment that didn't arrive until Friday.) So this will be a bit by the seat of my pants. Worse — or better, depending on how I feel — you can only camp in designated areas in Harriman, so I'll have to move locations every day. That's actually sort of neat — as long as I can continue to get a good connection. At worst I can work on posts and videos and such at my campsite, then hike up a hill to get an EVDO connection and upload.

Worst case, I just don't end up having the live connection from my campsite I was hoping to get each night. That's okay. This whole thing is going to be an adventure.

One shelter I want to try to reach is the Big Hill Shelter. It looks like a nice place to spend an evening.

I'll be posting updates to my Twitter stream. I've found that EDGE and SMS often work well even in remote areas. If nothing else I should be able to inject blips to the web that way while I try to find good EVDO coverage from Verizon.

Another problem: My pack is coming in too heavy.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

SwashBot swashes, sashays, falls asleep

Tomorrow's generation of conscious robots will have to rationalize the limitations of their embodiment, much as we do. Asimos will write polemical reviews of inclines at ratemystairs.com. Rebellious Roombas will rage in impotent swarms before 11" gaps. And Crabfu's ingenious, shuddering SwashBot will look up at the R/C helicopters from which it is made, and weep.

Crabfu [via BotJunkie]

Rob Beschizza

Computing for literary sneaks: a laptop concealed in a book

Is Kyle Bean's laptop design our age's equivalent of a pistol hidden in a bible? The answer is "No," but I still prefer the idea of it being a violence facilitator for literary ninjas, rather than yet another comment on the changing nature of media in an increasingly virtual world.

Next: in the thick of battle, the villain springs onto a table to grab what briefly appears to be an ornamental wall-mounted axe, but finds himself wielding a slimline iPod dock.

The Future of Books [Yanko]

John Brownlee

Fuck You, Razr: The Monkey's Paw of Cellular Phones

My last mobile was a Motorola Razr, and shortly after I bought it, I called up Joel, bragging about my new purchase. "Aren't you a precious and unique snowflake?" he responded, his voice dripping with contempt. I have since had the opportunity to parrot that back to him as his Herculean resolve not to buy an "inferior EDGE iPhone" and "wait for Rev 2" lasted all of a single day.

But I digress. It didn't take me long to begin to notice the problems with my Razr, prompting me to carve A.M.'s infamous hate monologue into the back of the phone with a tiny jeweler's screwdriver. What a piece of shit: all style, no substance, with a UI design that hearkens back to the moon man logic of a Roberta Williams adventure game. ^*

Over at Gizmodo, another disillusioned Razr owner, Addy Dugdale, has written a marvelous little essay about her sadomasochistic relationship with her phone over the last three years (three years? God bless her. I barely topped out at one.)

This part, in particular, made me nod with grim understanding:

I can't even lose it, like older more beloved phones. I left the RAZR in a club a couple of months ago, and I'd made it halfway down the block when some guy came running up behind me. "You left this on the bar," he wheezed. (Everyone in Spain smokes, and I'm a fast walker.) As he palmed the RAZR back into my hand, I could swear there was a look of pity on his face.

It really is the Monkey's Paw of cellular phones.

Alas, Poor Razr, I Knew Ye Well [Gizmodo]

^* — It has been a while, so I may not have the exact details right, but as I recall, when you sent a text message on the Razr, it had two screens: message entry and then a confirmation screen. On the message entry screen, the right upper-most button was assigned to "OK." On the confirmation screen, this same button was assigned to "Cancel," which would quit you to the main menu, your message unsaved. This made it easy to accidentally delete text messages. "OK TO SEND?" OK. "REALLY OK?" OK! "MESSAGE DELETED." Fuck you, Motorola.

Rob Beschizza

Verizon quotes $420 in setup fees for business DSL, and that doesn't include the actual DSL

Think you have it bad as a residential customer? Businesses get it much worse.

I posted a while back about getting WiFi from my home to my office. It's not going well, even with a directional antenna from MacWireless.com to replace my homebrewed cruft. So I decided to call Verizon and get DSL hooked up in the small, 350 square ft. office unit. Verizon, however, doesn't really want my business, describing a host of setup fees, contingency fees and high prices that could result in a $470 bill, plus taxes and fees, in my first month.

Read on for the breakdown, as explained to me by an otherwise very helpful and friendly CSR.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

May 12th US launch for Asus Eee 9" ($549) but why not just wait?

I've got my eye on the Asus Eee or one of its doppelganger ilk. I want one. For me, the sudden surge in low-cost ulra-portables is the fulfillment of a long-time dream: that someone would come up with an affordable notebook about the size of a large format paperback, that I could just throw in a small bag and carry with me everywhere. The perfect writer's laptop: a machine capable of writing and blogging and almost nothing else.

That said, I haven't bought one yet. I've seen the Asus 7 inch in person, and while it is tiny and cute as an albino ladybug in person, the way the screen is two inches smaller than the case irritates me deep in my bowels, causing grumps. The 9 incher is a significant improvement aesthetically, but the battery life is an abysmal hour and a half. Why bother, when you know that Intel's low-power consumption Atom chip is coming out in little over a month... and with it, an Asus Atom Eee?

Now, Asus has released info on the price and launch date of the 9 inch Eee: it will be released on May 12th in the United States and cost $549. But buying it makes little sense: Asus is promising the announcement of their Atom offering in June, and $549 is, for me, well beyond impulse price, which is what it would need to be for a device a company is making no secret will be totally obsolete in a few months.

It's a crowded market and it's only going to get more crowded. The first guys to release a reasonably attractive 9 or 10" Atom-based ultra-portable for no more than $600 will get my bucks.

Asus Eee PC 900 launching 5/12 in the U.S. at $549 [Crave]

John Brownlee

Amazon's Kindle now in-stock, practically for the first time ever

If you missed the brief five hour window of in-stock availability when Jeff Bezos' hideous, easily stained but decidedly feature-rich e-book reader was first announced, rush quickly over to Amazon, where the Kindle is now available and in-stock.

Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? It's like witnessing some wildly improbable and magnificently singular event, like a galactic syzygy or the exact moment in which a cluster of hot core gasses spontaneously forms a planet populated entirely by nubile virgins with a penchant for tickle fights.

I guess this means that Amazon's finally got its Kindle stock problems fixed. Either that, or they decided they'd gotten as much buzz as they were possibly going to get out of the Kindle being perpetually "out of stock."

Kindle's In Stock [Amazon]

Joel Johnson

SleepPhones are headphones in a headband

You should not pay $60 for the "SleepPhones Sleep Aid System." Yes, it's a headband that has headphones built-in. Yes, they include a CD with "binaural beats technology." I know, I know — the bag of "premium quality lavender" is enticing.

But here's the thing: you can just wear regular ear buds and put a two-dollar headband over them.

Okay, fine, maybe the SleepPhones are a little more comfortable than that, but I fall asleep with headphones on all the time. Besides that time I spilled corrosive cough syrup all over the jute cord I keep clothes-pined to my eyelids and I woke up with the cab of my truck filled with orphan and bus parts, I've never had any problems with comfort at all.

Product Page [SleepPhones.com]

Joel Johnson

Selling wine in TetraPak containers

A wine importer is selling a Malbec grape wine called "Yellow + Blue" in TetraPak, a container familiar to many in the UK for its use in drink boxes. Dr. Vino took a look:

The facility in Toronto is also certified organic. The wine is put in the one liter boxes that weigh 40 grams each (compared to 500 - 750g for a bottle) and loaded onto a truck for a warehouse in New Jersey. The total amount of wine will be about 10,000 nine-liter cases.
Using my carbon calculator, I ran the numbers on this wine, called “Yellow + Blue” (makes green–get it?). I figure that each 750 ml of Yellow + Blue Malbec has about half the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional bottle of wine from Argentina that followed the same route.
The price will follow a similar discount: Yellow + Blue will sell for $10.99 in stores and Cain suggests that the same wine in bottle would sell for about $20. But Yellow + Blue, weighing in at one liter, holds a third more wine than a regular bottle.

I can't help but wonder if the trick is to stop drinking so much imported wine and trying to buy more locally available options as their available, returning and reusing the bottles. (Not always a good choice, I know.) Even so, a third more wine for the same price is a convincing argument.

Yellow + blue make green: a new organic malbec in TetraPak [Dr Vino]

Joel Johnson

Synth Porn: Buchla Music Easel

This surreal and haunting video shows Charles Cohen on the "Buchla Music Easel," an almost ancient synthesizer — 1973! — that uses a modular system to allow musicians to generate and modify musical noises within the same unit. Don Buchla created the Music Easel's predecessor, the "Music Box," in 1963, the same year Bob Moog invented his famous synth.

The Music Easel can be run on batteries and easily transported, weighing only 30 pounds. Sadly, only 14 were ever made.

The most beautiful piece of synth porn I've ever seen [Music Thing]

Joel Johnson

VelociRaptor the fastest hard drive in the Western Digital line

Western Digital is announcing a new line of high-end consumer hard drives today to supplant their "Raptor" line. The new SATA2 drives spin at 10,000 RPM and are available in sizes up to 300GB.

But what I am most tickled by is this line from the press release email, which paints a much more entertaining picture than marketroid speak typically allows: "In short, there’s a new Sheriff in town and its name is VelociRaptor."

The VelociRaptor drives are also 2.5-inch — laptop-sized — but are then put in an "IcePack" mounting frame that includes a heat sink. I don't know if that means we'll be seeing these drives in laptops soon, too.

You can expect the VelociRaptor in mid-May for $300.

Image: PBF Comics

Rob Beschizza

Consumerist challenges FCC to stop Cablevision's digital TV lies

The Consumerist ran a fantastic expose of Cablevision, whose agents are trained to lie to customers about the digital TV transition in order to convince them to upgrade set-top boxes (the transition affects over-the-air broadcasts, not cable TV). For its part, Cablevision responds with another lie, saying that it doesn't do this, despite the Consumerist having recorded proof that it does.

More shocking, however, is how the FCC responded: with a shrug. This issue exemplifies the value of muckraking around what appear to be trivial issues: an inconsequential $6.50 upgrade takes us all the way to demonstrating a regulator's disinterest in upholding the law.

Joel Johnson

Video: The making of original Star Wars' computer graphics

In this video, the man responsible for creating the wireframe images of the Death Star and trench that were used in the briefing scenes of A New Hope explains how he used real computers to "digitize" images. I'm sure I'm not the first to make this observation, but it's really hilarious how futuristic Star Wars seems with its space ships and laser swords, the latest versions of which were wholly created by computers.

Rob Beschizza

Apple: Online shopping can feel "sterile and isolating"

In a patent filing for a Second Life-style online shopping spot, Apple claims that standard web stores (which would include its own) can feel "sterile and isolating." From MacNN:

"Customers in such an environment may be less likely to have positive feelings about the online shopping experience, may be less inclined to engage in the online equivalent of window shopping (e.g., will not linger in front of a display), and may ultimately spend less money than their counterparts who shop in physical stores."

Life for such discerning shoppers would be made happier and sunnier if it was all turned into a yet another 3D avatar concentration camp.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Andy Ihnatko's Russian doll laptop pile

Photo page [Andy Ihnatko's photoset]

Rob Beschizza

Review: A weekend with D-Link's DSM-750

The D-Link DSM-750's journey to stores is something of an epic.

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Dean Putney attempts to create world's largest digital photo; Follow along in #boingboing

#boingboing regular Dean "Mustard Hamsters" Putney has built a robotic rig that frames his school's chalk board, invited his mates to come draw on it, and will now attempt to stitch together the world's largest image, projected at 40 gigapixels.

He's streaming the attempt live from his site, which will now break. Go Hamsters!

I chatted with him about it in IRC:

[joelev] what's the one line description?
[joelev] You're going to tak ea series of images?
[joelev] and then stitch them together?
[mustardhamsters] how about Largest Digital Image Process Video Stream
[mustardhamsters] yep
[mustardhamsters] i built a robot to do it
[joelev] how do you know it's the record image?
[mustardhamsters] current is 16 gigs
[mustardhamsters] ours is a projected 40
[mustardhamsters] gigapixels
[mustardhamsters] we're doubling it
[joelev] you have a machine with enough ram to do that? :)
[mustardhamsters] i'm buying a solaris sparc server
[mustardhamsters] 10 processors
[mustardhamsters] 20 gigs of ram
[mustardhamsters] two raid cases each with a dozen 18 gig scsis
[joelev] bitchun
[joelev] I have to leave soon
[mustardhamsters] i can tell you about the whole process in a minute or two, i'm setting up the camera now
[joelev] but I will make a post
[mustardhamsters] best part about it: $500
[joelev] Godspeed!

Giant Photo: Second Attempt [MustardHamsters.com]

Joel Johnson

I Want You to Want Me: One of the most touching interactive art pieces I've ever not actually seen

Despite having nothing to do with Cheap Trick at all — except for the cheap trick we all play on ourselves believing there is anything unique or selfish about the need to love and to be loved — "I Want You to Want Me" is an interactive art project built from data mined from various dating sites, organizing into a heart-achingly beautiful touchscreen presentation where each person is represented as a balloon.

It was one of the pieces at MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" show, which is apparently no longer on display. I'm kicking myself for missing it.

[via Cool Hunting]

Joel Johnson

'Re:vision' cuffs made from old camera lenses

Aussie designer Craig Arnold makes these "Re:vision" cuff bracelets out of parts from old camera lenses, perfect for the fashionable photographer. (Or pretenders to both, like myself.)

They're AU $190 and up, which ain't cheap, but they look well made. Or if you're handy with a saw and grinder, you've got a fun new DIY idea.

Catalog Page [Oye Modern via Cool Hunting]

John Brownlee

IRC Game "Rule 34 Challenge" Starts in 60 Minutes on FreeNode #boingboing

In 60 minutes, we'll be hosting the second weekly game on Boing Boing's official IRC channel, #boingboing on FreeNode IRC. This week's game? Rule 34 Challenge. The game starts at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 8pm GMT / 9pm BST.

Rules Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out the Rule 34 Challenge. Contestants will then scramble to Google to find an image or link that puts that person, character or concept in pornographic light. The first three people to present an appropriate link in channel will get points. At the end of the hour, we will add up the points and have our Rule 34 Champions! And we'll knock up the chat log so everyone can bask in our depravity firsthand.

Needless to say, this game will be NSFW.

So, How To Play?: Use an IRC client (or follow this handy-dandy link to a Java client that will run in your browser) to join #boingboing on Freenode. (chat.freenode.net)

Since you will need to be able to private message people in game, register your nick by typing "/msg NickServ register [choose a password]"

Once you've done that, message me that you want to play ("/msg Brownlee I want to play!"). I'll send you a message back, confirming that you're in.

This game won't have any player limits, but you'll still have to message me to play.

See you there!

Joel Johnson

Nalgene changes plastic recipe amid health concerns

The story has been developing all week, but once Wal-Mart decided to stop carrying bottles that use Bisphenol A — a chemical which may or may not induce hormonal changes, especially in children — bottle-maker Nalgene has announced they'll ditch the chemical in their manufacturing process.

Reports the Times:

Nalgene’s decision to drop the plastic that transformed it from an obscure maker of laboratory equipment into a consumer brand does not mean the company is leaving the drinking bottle business. It has long made bottles from other plastics that lack the glasslike transparency and rigidity that made polycarbonate popular.

Last month, Nalgene introduced a line of bottles made from a relatively new plastic from the Eastman Chemical Company, Tritan copolyester, that shares most of polycarbonate’s properties, including shatter-resistance, but is made without the chemical

Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns [NYTimes via Treehugger]

Rob Beschizza

Pirate Bay: Cop that raided us is Warner Brothers employee

The Pirate Bay, a popular MMORPG which pits players against the obsolete middlemen standing between artists and consumers, claims that a cop who led a raid on its servers is in the employ of Warner Brothers.

In a statement issued today, TPB says that the officer, Jim Keyzer, is not only a key witness against them in court, but canceled a counter-investigation that arose when The Pirate Bay's accused its enemies of "data trespassing," whatever the hell that is.

"The 39-year old investigator isn't the objective professional a police investigator should be. Since March 16 this year, he is employed by Warner Bros, one of the plaintiffs in the prosecution against The Pirate Bay. Keyzer himself confirmed the information but refused to reveal what his position within the company is."

Peter Athlin, lawyer to TPB's Peter Sunde, describes this conflict of interests between police and plaintiff as a "legal outrage."

Analysis? It's hardly a legal outrage for him to take the job—after all, the record industry has every reason to love him and want to offer him a place under its leathery wing. But he can't now testify on its behalf without looking like a big corrupt penis, and the whole situation reminds us how slimy and weird the RIAA and its member companies are.

Assuming it's actually true, of course!

John Brownlee

Samsung announces water-powered cell batteries

Samsung has announced that they have developed a new kind of cell phone battery powered by water and a hydrogen cartridge. Crave explains:

Here's how it works: When the handset is switched on, reaction between metal and water in the phone produce hydrogen gas. This is then channeled to the fuel cell, where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.

Samsung says the new battery could last for up to 10 hours. Based on four hours of use daily on average, the hydrogen cartridge would have to be replaced about every five days.

Sounds good, but wake me up when I can simply pull out the little plastic tab and recharge my cell phone by putting it under the faucet, like a cheap squirt gun.

Samsung: Water-powered cell phones by 2010 [Crave]

John Brownlee

Latest flotsam in our Flickr Pools: hovering space-wagon, electronic noses

This hovering space-wagon is a fantastic space age concept car designed by Syd Mead for US Steel in 1961. Knowing full well that the future would all be about electronic rave picnics on the surface of extra-solar alien worlds, Mead saw fit to install a fairly bitching DJ mixer in the back of the vehicle. The gentleman in the mustard slacks at the forefront of the image appears to be some sort of Venusian: notice that his scrawny, horrible legs appear to be twice the length of his torso. Thanks for uploading it to the In The Year 2000 pool, Grain_Edit!

In the other pools: despite highlighting it on Monday, this week's Electro-Selectro entries were pretty dry. However, props go to J_bary for uploading this image of an electronic nose from the 1950s that sniffed out power-line leaks. Sometimes the most boring things are fascinating: who knew that electrical maintenance men used to use soap bubbles to detect power line leaks before this high-falutin' electronic nose gadgetry revolutionized the industry? Thanks, J!

John Brownlee

The Internet is maddening for the blind

There's a fascinating article over at Computer World about the difficulty the blind have using the Internet as web site design becomes increasingly sophisticated and image based. This is certainly enough to make me feel guilty about never bothering to fill in my ALT tags:

"It can take a while to wade through a strange site -- it can be maddening," complained Jay Leventhal, who is blind and serves as editor of AccessWorld Magazine, produced by the American Foundation for the Blind in New York. "Sometimes you find what you want to buy, but then you can't find the submit button. It seems to literally not be there. A skilled [blind] user can navigate a majority of the sites on the Web these days, but you have to master certain tricks, like jumping from header to header in order to skip over a lot of junk, and use the search function to get the information you want. An average user can struggle for a long time looking for something and will even struggle on a familiar site."

Staying offline is just as bad, with most blind computer users looking wistfully back to the days of DOS, when information was presented more simply: more textual than symbolic.

Blind users still struggle with 'maddening' computing obstacles [Computer World]

Joel Johnson

Sunview handheld media player has built-in pico-projector

There's not much to recommend the SunView PMP Projector (PMPP), a pedestrian and chunky media player that runs Windows CE, except...a built-in "pico-projector" that will shoot a 53-inch VGA image onto any available flat surface. Now it's not a very bright image at that size — just 9 lux, just shy of one footcandle (to use a modern measurement) — which means you'll only be using this in a darkened environment. But it's the notion that counts. While these tiny LED-based projectors won't be replacing LCD screens in our gadgets any time soon, it's reasonable to think that in the next few years they could become as ubiquitous as the tiny, crappy cameras we now expect to see in almost every device we own.

The PMP Projector is available now through your preferred outlet for obscure Chinese equipments.

World’s First Commercial Portable Product with Integrated Pico-Projector Unveiled in Hong Kong [Display Daily via Gearlog]

John Brownlee

Thanks for the irritating robot trashcan, Japan!

The Push-Kun is a robotic quadruped trashcan that tells jokes, plays drum rolls on its tin belly and waddles around your house being irritating until you order it to actually try eating some garbage, at which point, it spectacularly fails. There's also a passing resemblance to Homestar Runner. Created by Osaka-based Robot Force, the Push-Kun was an official entrant in the Baka RoboCup, which is basically Japan's Robot Special Olympics. I can't believe it didn't take home the Gold.

Push-Kun the Robot Trashcan [YouTube via Pink Tentacle]

Rob Beschizza

Review: Casio Exilim Ex-Z80

Most digicams in the last couple of years came in a fixed form factor: just under an inch thick, about three and a half wide, and about 2 inches tall. Canon's satisfyingly blocky Elphs are the exemplar of it; others may have a swooping curve here or a sliding lens cover there, but that's the status quo. Casio, whose original Exilims were among the earliest decent concealed-carry digicams, finally bored of this clone army and issued the Z200, which is super-thin, and the EX-Z80, which keeps the thickness but trims the other dimensions.

The Ex-Z80 is teeny indeed—and, at about $200, cheap—so I picked one up to replace my dying SD1000. It's a decent 8.1-megapixel shooter with 3x optical zoom and some nice extras, but it isn't without shortcomings.

First, the good. God damn is this thing pretty. It has a vaguely retro air about it, at least in sensible colors, as if stolen from some over-funded 1970s Soviet espionage porn lab.

Its chassis is stylish and offered in black, pale shades of silver, red, blue or green, or hot pink. A bountiful 2.6" LCD panel is wedded to a simple, no-nonsense user interface, and there's a separate shoot button for videos to make quick-on-the-draw captures nice and easy. It can record 848x480 H.264 video at 30fps, or ready-to-upload YouTubes. In good light, the shots are great.

Unlike many small models, it has manual focus, and the myriad of shooting modes will be fun to mess around with for those who don't care for post-processing: there are practically dozens of them, from cheesy cartoonifiers to sepia toning and eBay-friendly fast-shutter snapshots.

The Z80's flaws, however, are hard to miss. Image quality heads well under par as the ISO setting goes up. The "auto-shutter" mode, which is supposed to wait until the scene is steady before shooting, seems to be complete garbage. The voice recording mode is also no good.

You can't manually set shutter speed, and it tends to opt for longer settings than I'm used to: steady hands are mandatory for flash-off indoor shots. The Exilim also uses micro-USB instead of mini-USB for its data jack.

Nonetheless, it takes good pictures, is smaller than everything else on the shelf that is not itself another Exilim, and costs less than $200. It's the perfect concealed carry for people who can't stand cellphone pictures, still want the bare minimum of weight and size, but want acceptable print quality and image control.

Product Page [Casio]

Joel Johnson

Shoe site Zappos.com will start selling gadgets, too

CNET is reporting that my favorite online shoe vendor, Zappos.com, will be launching a new interface design that will highlight their entry into a new market: consumer electronics.

Amazon is clearly their main competitor. I'm torn. I buy most of my electronics from Amazon (with a little Newegg here and there), not just because they tend to have the lowest prices, but because the Amazon Prime shipping gets almost everything to my door in two days or less. But that's the same reason I order from Zappos: they have great prices and quick turnaround, plus great customer service. Here's hoping a little competition keeps both companies on their toes.

The new Zappos: Shoes--and gadgets to boot [News.com]

John Brownlee

Moustache comb necklace provides well-groomed moustache rides

To have a moustache. To join the echelon of hirsute-lipped Olympians like Erroll Flynn and Burt Lancaster. To make women sneeze when you kiss them. To be able to call out, liltingly, at any occasion, "Who wants a moustache ride?" and see a dozen quavering arms raised with passionate, trembling eagerness. To always be able to run your tongue through the follicles of your upper lip when you're hungry, looking for a piece of potato or scrambled egg that you missed. Yes, it's true. The man who has a moustache is a god.

But a moustache requires constant love and attention. This sterling silver moustache comb by Makool hangs from a man-chain around your neck, allowing you to casually call attention to your moustache while simultaneously maintaining it's lustrous sheen. God knows why it says "Morning Cup" on the side, though. And for 120 bucks, you'd probably be better off just paying someone attractive to lick it clean for you.

Moustache Comb Necklace [Makool via Brandish]

Joel Johnson

Sanyo Xacti DMX-CA8 water-proof to 10 feet, one third of the Flip Video Ultra underwater housing

Sanyo has announced another low-end Xacti, the DMX-CA8, a companion to the new CG9. It's still a VGA camera, something for which many people are dinging it, but it does manage to at least do 60FPS. And as my experience with my CG6 has shown, for quick turnarounds to the web, VGA is still just fine.

But what makes the DMX-CA8 noteworthy isn't its video quality, but its ability to be used underwater up to 10 feet for up to an hour. (Don't let the time restriction trip you up; most underwater gear has the same sort of caveats from the manufacturers who like to play it safe.) Sanyo's current underwater model, the Xacti VPC-E1, is rated for depths of just five feet for 30 minutes.

Now most of the reason I love my Xacti CG6 was that it was cheap — I paid $200 — and that it is small enough to be pocketable and, god forbid, disposable. Yet it still has a proper optical zoom and all the other things that a camcorder should have. I get under the water a few times a year, though, and would have loved to have gotten the VPC-E1 instead, but it wasn't worth paying twice as much. And unfortunately, the DMX-CA8 is set to be priced in the same ballpark at around $500.

My friend Jason just bought a Flip Video Ultra for $170 and added the $40 underwater housing. That's about the same price as my CG6. For my purposes the CG6 is still the better choice, but it's impossible not to get a little jealous when I see epic videos he's shot like the one below. Especially since the underwater housing for the Ultra is rated to 30 feet (and will probably go deeper as long as you don't try to get the buttons to work).

Akihabara News got a hands-on with the DMX-CA8, although like the CG9 there's not a whole lot to it. If nothing else, perhaps the mid-year launch of the DMX-CA8 will force the price of the VPC-E1 down into a range where buying one — and then watching it sink into the abyss — won't be so painful.

The All New Sanyo DMX-CA8 Waterproof [AkihabaraNews.com via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Pinhole cameras made with rust, skin, antlers and HIV

Artist Martin Belger builds remarkable pin-hole cameras, their design meant to evoke the spirit of the object he is photographing. Pictured, his HIV Camera, which contains actual HIV infected blood. Rusty gears, tanned skins and broken antlers are some of the other materials he uses. According to his wacky artist's statement:

I create the cameras from Aluminum, Titanium, Copper, Brass, Bronze, Steel, Silver, Gold, Wood, Acrylic, Glass, Horn, Ivory, Bone, Human Bone, Human Skulls, Human Organs, Formaldehyde, HIV+ Blood and relics all designed to be the sacred bridge of a communion offering between myself and the subject. All to witness and be a tool of the horrors of creation and the beauty of decay presented by the author light and time.

O, ye mortals, be witness and be tool to the UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS OF CREATION! The beauty of decay presented by ME, the Unholy God, The Alpha and Omega, LIGHT AND TIME! Behold my works, ye digital photographers, and DESPAIR!

Sheesh! But awesome cameras. Just don't drop the HIV model.

The Art of Wayne Martin Belger [Official Site via Core 77]

Joel Johnson

Dell Crystal LCD monitor reviewed (Verdict: not just expensive, but also bad)

We already knew the Dell Crystal Monitor was going to sell only to those more concerned with how their computer looked than how it performed — $1,200 for a 22-inch monitor with a sheet of glass over it is madness, no matter how attractive it might be — but what we didn't know was how bad it would look turned on. Maximum PC got their greasy hands on the Dell Crystal and found its slab of glass to greatly diminish the picture quality of what is otherwise an okay monitor.

The monitor’s artful exterior looks great on our desktop. If only the picture followed suit. Even after cranking the Crystal’s brightness to the extremes, the 1680x1050-native picture was unable to produce acceptable differences on its dark grayscales during our DisplayMate testing. This translated to a noticeable loss of quality and increased darkness levels in every real-world test we could conjure up: details escaped our pictures and movies; subtle lighting effects smudged together on our games.

This is the fuel behind the Crystal’s fiery glare issue. The display’s tempered glass lends the entire unit a mirror-like quality, more so than any glossy-panel monitor we’ve reviewed. We didn’t notice ourselves when we were working with a brighter scene, but seeing our blatant reflection during darker images, like Sweeney Todd, was more than a mere distraction. It destroyed the picture.

Dell Crystal [MaximumPC.com]

Previously • Dell Crystal LCD Monitor [BBG]

John Brownlee

Protect your iPod with exposed, pulsating musculature

Although certainly environmentally friendly, there are reasons not to encase your gadgets in the raw, seeping musculature of a freshly-slain bovine, no matter how many times you've seen Videodrome. Yes, it's delicious for a spell. Yes, it's a conversation starter. Yes, it will give you an in with that one goth chick who really has a hard-on for Hellraiser. Yes, it will ward off the smelliest of vegan hippies. But within a couple of weeks, all of these advantages are superseded by the drawbacks: a feeling of constant exhaustion that prevents you from brushing away the flies that keep landing on your eyeballs, the putrid kiwi-sized lumps glistening in your morning evacuations and, of course, the high cost of "freshening" up your protective iPod case every few weeks.

Enter the Mosquito Ruby Pod Rare, an iPod case that looks like you've slathered your MP3 player in glistening, marbleized flesh, but without the stench, the salmonella or the writhing of maggots. Unfortunately, the Mosquito Ruby is about as expensive as it gets for a rubber iPod case: $68 will buy you a lot of prosciutto. Perhaps it's time for the industry to start seriously examining the jerking process as a way to extend the life cycle of our gadgets' protective sheaths of flesh.

Mosquito Ruby Rod Rare [Rakuten via Dvice]

Rob Beschizza

Not really a review: 30 minutes with LG's GSA-E50L Slim External DVD Player

I bought LG's GSA-E50l external DVD drive. It was inoperable out of the box: a circumstance so baffling I briefly wondered if it required drivers or some such, heralding a new era of basic in-out hardware that doesn't work until after an OS is loaded. Ah, but no! It's just a lemon.

I tried it on four computers, including a desktop, a laptop, a Zonbox and an iMac. Not one machine could see it. The power light came on, but the disk tray wouldn't eject and it is not detected as a USB device.

Staring at the little 5"-square slab on the desk, I realized that I was in a pickle. I wanted a slimline bus-powered optical drive, and this was the only one that the local brick 'n' mortars carried. Suspicion was strong from the beginning: whereas most such things are plain, sleek rectangles, LG's GSA-E50L is overdesigned, resembling a giant squashed suppository. It is what Charlie Sorrel at Gadget Lab would describe as "plastic tat."

Alas, it is therefore unrated and unreviewed, but can hardly be recommended. I shall endeavor to find out if this is a common problem with bus-powered optical drives: most such models require external power, even with dual-USB Y cords.

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• HD Camcorder – Canon Vixia HD30 1080p miniDV camera for $650 plus $12ish shipping. I paid like $800 for my HV20 just a few months ago, so this is an awesome deal. (And really irritating!) [Slickdeals]

• GPS Navigation – TomTom ONE 3rd Edition for $100 after $20 mail-in rebate. It's a refurb. But that's about $70 off. [Dealhack]

• Internet Tablet – Nokia N800 for $200, about $30 off. [Dealnews]

• Vacuum Broom – Dirt Devil rechargeable broom vacuum for $30, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Swing Chair – Ultimate Air Chair for $30, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Watch – Today's Woot! is the Invicta Stainless Steel Racing Chronograph for $95, shipped.

John Brownlee

Why would Europe embrace something as wasteful as self-destructing DVDs?

The future of video rentals is pretty clearly in on-demand streaming of video over the Internet, but until then, DVD companies need to strengthen the legs of their business model somehow. Now, a German company named Einmal has announced that they have come up with a self-destructing DVD technology. Coated in a special chemical, the DVDs will begin to break down and corrosively melt after 48 hours, rendering them unplayable.

The idea is to allow people to "rent" DVDs (or, really, buy the DVDs while renting the intellectual property stored on the disc) anywhere: gas stations, grocery stores, 7-11s and the like. The whole concept eschews the troublesome "returning the disc" aspect of DVD rentals.

Of course, this isn't new: Flexplay has offered disposable DVDs in America for the last five years. I actually saw some of these at a Mass Pike Gas 'N' Gulp in January, and I remember being flabbergasted by the utter wastefulness of such a scheme... along with the way in which each and every item I purchased was placed in its own individual plastic bag, then double bagged for good measure.

That's what really bothers me about it. The wastefulness. I'm actually not particularly green conscious, subscribing to the Monty Burns School of Environmentalism. But the utterly stupid wastefulness of tossing out millions of DVDs a year — as if an optical disc were as befouled by a single viewing as a prophylactic is by a single syphilitic hump-and-squirt — just stupefies me.

What's even more bizarre is the EU is far more green-friendly than the United States. I live in a country (Germany) where all of my garbage must be sorted into eight color-coded bins every trash day; where I am expected to pay 20 cents per plastic bag when I go shopping; where an empty beer bottle will get you a 25 cent deposit back. How can Europeans, of all people, be embracing such a wasteful, decidedly un-eco-friendly scheme, even as Americans have rejected it?

And I think that's the rub: while Europe has high bandwidth penetration and people actually would like to stream video on-demand, it's a second class citizen (but with a 40% higher currency value). We're largely excluded from buying video off of iTunes. Most of the American corporate video streaming sites exclude us. There is no real European equivalent to Netflix or Blockbuster online. There's money to be made, but no one's paying attention.

Until the film and television industry starts reaching out to Europe in the same way it's reached out to Americans, melting DVDs are about as good as it's going to get.

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours [The Register]

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: SELECTOR

(Thanks, Instantenemy!)

John Brownlee

RC car plays Super Mario theme on beer bottles

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This video of an extremely patient Japanese Chinese RC car enthusiast playing the Super Mario Brothers theme song on a long line of half-filled bottles snaking through an underground parking complex has been going around a lot lately, but that's no reason not to share it here... if only to commemorate the sort of hero who can drink one thousand beers then drive a remote-controlled vehicle between the empties in a perfectly straight line.

Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles [YouTube]

Joel Johnson

Citizens still tossing too many electronics in the trash

According to an in-depth report from Reuters, people are still throwing far too many of their gadgets in the trash:

But while the percentage of old electronics thrown in the trash can dropped to 19 percent in 2007 from 21 percent in 2005, according to the association, U.S. consumers still ditch millions of device such as TVs and computers with their coffee grinds and candy wrappers.

Oh when will the Mega-Sort Reclamation Company spring into existence and disassemble and index every last bit of our garbage into its base parts?

U.S. consumers still slow to recycle gadgets [Reuters]

Joel Johnson

Dixon Tape & Rule Co.'s lovely wooden tape measures

Dixon Tape & Rule Co. make a variety of tape measures set in lovely wooden cases, including models with inlaid patterns and hand-painted birds. For some reason, however, they don't include the little brake that will lock an extended metal tape measure in place, making them far less practical than the standard tape measure on the belts of nearly every contractor walking the planks today. Of course, they only extend to six feet, so the brake is perhaps not that essential.

Prices range from about $35 to $70, depending on materials and fanciness.

Product Page [DixonRules.com via Toolmonger]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we learn about a 1938 time capsule designed so that people of the distant future can learn about us and restore their shattered world to our glorious standards. This 1929 Modern Mechanics article chronicles inaugural flight of the Transcontinental Air Transport Corporation, piloted by Charles Lindberg. The T.A.T could take someone from Los Angeles to New York in under 48 hours via a combination of airplanes and sleeper trains. We also looked at an elevator that works without cables, an 80mph baby cycle car, a weird 1970 ad for rice, and a rather rotund long distance swimmer who demonstrates how to eat lunch in the water.

Marvin Battelle

Introducing BBG's Band Manager: Marvin Battelle

We have a name for the 21st century where I come from: the suppurating asshole of space time. For reference, imagine flipping through an American History textbook, just lazily skimming around, then... WHAM! Goatse.cx. You now have a good idea of what the history books of the 31st century look like: an engorged, inside-out historical sphincter stretching between the knuckles of 1983's break-dancing revolution and the emergence of robo-break-dancing in 2176.

Now imagine being sucked into that pulsating Goatse vortex and you've got a pretty good idea of what it felt like when I woke up naked in an Oklahoma field surrounded only by belching cows and clouds of dissipating purple chronatons. Yes, it's an ugly analogy, and I'm sorry to labor it, but short of cramming the monolith from 2001 down your throats, it's the only way I can make you monkeys understand what it's like to be trapped here.

The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Rent a HAL robot suit for $1000

Nebbish and sunken-chested, a spindly and asthmatic ectomorph, I've long looked forward to exoskeleton technology. I'm sick of having sand kicked into my face by bullies at the beach as I pursue a dim chance at the reproductive act; an exo-skeleton will even the score by allowing me to confront all of the mesomorphic jerks who torment my life on their own brawny terms and, thus confronting them, hit them so hard they ejaculate their central nervous systems. In the 1940s, we had Charles Atlas; in the double oughts of the new Millennium, we have robot suits made out of titanium.

Until now, though, exoskeletons were far too expensive to bother with. Cyberdyne's HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) Exoskeleton, though, looks well within reach. The suit itself is able to enhance the average user's strength ten-fold. Better yet, Cyberdyne is saying that they will have 40--500 suits available for rent by the end of the year... for the scant price of $1,000 per month. If that's really the price, we're totally getting one...

Cyberdyne [Official Site via Bot Junkie]

Rob Beschizza

Comcast disconnects Dave Winer

Superblogger and RSS pioneer Dave Winer got his internet cut off by Comcast. Why? Because he uses too much of his unlimited service. The story is good and deserves to be read, so there's no reason to abridge it here. A few points, however, demand a short-form recap:

• Comcast's robot menu choices at its legal department make you agree that you're at fault before you can continue the call.

• Comcast refused to put its service termination threat in writing.

• Comcast refused to disclose its bandwidth limits.

• It disconnected his service to get his attention after being unable to reach him on an old phone number.

There's no point 'fessing up if you can't fix it, Comcast. And let's be frank, here: you can't fix it.

A new reason to hate Comcast [Scripting.com]

Joel Johnson

Restored Ghostbusters Ecto-1 ambulance photo gallery

The second sequel to Ghostbusters is going to be a videogame, written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd and voiced by the entire original cast, including Bill Murray. It looks far better as a game than it has any right to be; it may be that we'll play it both because of its writing and cast and because it's a good game.

Vivendi, the publisher, is slowing ramping up promotion for the title, and their first crackling electron beam is a doozy: a fully resorted Ecto-1 response vehicle. Ghostbusters Fans was on hand at a recent showing and have snapped a huge number of photos, some 217 in all, leaving little inside or out undocumented.

Restoration Project Finished [GBFans.com]

John Brownlee

Vibro-fine-dining on the musical breakfast table

I think that the xylophonic percussion of spoons being placed down and breakfast bowls sliding in a glissando across the surface of a musical dining table would be very peaceful. Just such a dining table has been invented by designer Fumikai Goto. Each of the varying-sized, interlocking wooden bars produce a mellow, vibraphonic tone when struck. Maybe I'm just wistful on this exceedingly dreary morning, but I really think waking up and having a bowl of Apple Jacks as my table sings under me could go a long way in turning a crappy day into a pretty awesome one.

Feast of Music [Yanko Design]

Rob Beschizza

Microsoft shipping review gear in re-usable shipping boxes. Bravo!

In fully a year of reviewing gadgets and other manly bits and bobs, Microsoft (via PR firm Edelman) is the first to send me something in a re-usable shipping box. And, clearly, it has been re-used, over and over and over again.

(The item sent in is the new DSM-750 Media Extender from D-Link, by the way. First impressions are that it's much better than the last generation, but very much wants you to have Rube Goldberg's home network set up for it.)

Update: Lenovo sent me a test unit in a very nice reusable box. Shipping all this crap back to the manufacturers is half the reason I don't do more hands-on reviews than I do. It's such a hassle. Lenovo's got it down: slick little reusable box, barely any waste at all, and packed and ready for shipping in seconds. – Joel

Rob Beschizza

Cake pantenna is marginally useful

From the most helpful suggestions in the "Help me get WiFi over 280 feet, through brick walls and the wandering meat of office workers" post, I selected the single cheapest and lowest-effort suggestion, from tp1024. Pictured here for your amusement is the resulting Cake Pantenna.

It is a cake pan scotch taped to a box, upon which rests the router. This results in a very discernible improvement: iStumbler reports a marginal increase in signal strenght, from about 25 to 30 percent, and a marked reduction in noise, from about 20 percent to about 10 percent. The connection is now actually usable, though still a giant pain in the ass to much done with.

It does at least tell me that a more, um, robust solution in the same vein will likely do the trick.

Looking again at the photo, I am struck by something—could the metal gauze of the bug screen, just outside the window, be the silent killer here?

Joel Johnson

'Bed Fan' keeps you cool under the sheets

'Bed Fan' clips on to the end of your mattress to blow cool air — or in my case clouds of dog hair — from under your bed into your sheets. One might ask, "Why not just ditch the sheet entirely if you're so warm?" As a bit of a persnickety sleeper myself, especially as an exothermic heat emitter of the first order, let me explain: it's nice to have a sheet around you even if you're warm because it helps wick away sweat while still protecting you from bugbears and wumpuses.

The whole rig is $100 and is probably pointless, even though I sort of want one. (I can just imagine bringing a girl home and then trying to explain why there was a giant black plastic contraption with its head under the sheets. Then I'd ask her to sand my corns while we watched Hee-Haw.)

Catalog Page [FirstStreetOnline.com via Crunchgear via Red Ferret]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• MP3 Player – Refurb SanDisk Sansa c150 2GB MP3 player for $22, shipped. Also has a voice recorder. [Dealnews]

• Circuit City coupons – Various coupons — nothing stunning — for Friends & Family Sale. (You're family, right?) [Bargainist.com]

• Desktop PC – Today's Woot! is a refurbished HP Pavilion Elite m9040n Desktop Computer for $655, shipped. (Quad core, HDMI out.)

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Dali Coffee Cup

The new lids from my corner coffee joint look like Salvador Dali spitting brown juice into my mouth.

Rob Beschizza

Super Blockquote: Hewlett-Packard, Workstations Division

HP released upgrades to its swanky high-end workstations, aimed at animators and other top productivity bananas. More dreadful than the specifications, however, were the words of John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP.

Boing Boing Gadgets has deemed the standard HTML blockquote insufficient to reveal the expressive power of his business English. Hence, Super Blockquote, which arms you against the marketroid oppression of Thompson's prose.

Joel Johnson

ToDo: 'Dungeons & Dragons (With Girls!)' in Brooklyn, Friday, May 9th, 7PM

826NYC has told Boing Boing Gadgets that they'll be hosting "Dungeons & Dragons (With Girls!)," a fund-raising benefit for the program, which runs its own tutoring program for local kids. They're just up 5th Avenue from me so I'l definitely be there, but the question remains: should I roll a character and actually play?

Dungeons and Dragons© (With Girls!) is a new benefit for the students of 826NYC. On May 9th, boys and girls alike will have the opportunity to send their heroic alter-egos into an uncharted dungeon in search of a lost crown. The characters you create will be pitted against monsters, traps and each other in a contest to be the king (or queen) of an ancient fictitious kingdom (or queendom).

To join the game, all you need to do is follow the links below (girls to the left, boys to the right) to create your character, then start raising money to buy magic spells, weapons and items, to ensure that your dwarf, warrior, wizard, or thief comes home with the prize. And all the money you and your character raise will go to support the free writing programs at 826NYC.

Event page [826nyc.org]

Previously • Brooklyn Superhero Supply [BBG]

Joel Johnson

Spielberg to make live-action 3D 'Ghost in the Shell' movie

Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks has acquired the rights to 'Ghost in the Shell,' reports Variety, to be made into a 3D live-action movie. Above, the intro to the original anime movie (based on an earlier manga), which includes quite a bit of cartoon female nudity. Should be a corker. Even bad Spielberg sci-fi movies are fun to watch once.

DreamWorks to make 'Ghost' in 3-D [Variety via Complex]

Previously • RED Scarlet 3K camcorder, James Cameron on the future of digital cinema, and trying to grok all these pixels [BBG]

Joel Johnson

Video: Vista sales team hire Springsteen impersonator to evoke last time Microsoft was cool

Does it matter if a company that makes operating systems is cool? Not really. Should it matter that they are out of touch with modern popular culture? No. Does the very existence of this video betray the fundamental desolation in the soul of every large corporate sales executive? I'll let fake Bruce answer that one, fist cocked skyward: "Our ecosystem rocks!"

How many Microsoft salesmen saw this video dribble down from management, put their faces in their palms, and wept? I bet if we could see the sales numbers after this video was released, there would be an immediate dip.

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we look at the ridiculously impractical idea of Rocket Mail. When you absolutely have to get a document from New York to San Francisco in 2 hours, send it via ballistic missile! Or you could use a phone or fax for about one millionth the cost. This 1968 Life magazine piece titled "Scientology: A growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind" chronicles the author's (rather unhappy) experience with the organization. We also looked at a scheme to prevent birds from nesting in reservoirs that looks like it's computer generated, a selection of advertisements for "steam carriages" from a 1902 issue of Scientific American, the grandfather of the Ionic Breeze which looks like it would make a wicked bong, and an early camera that was capable of taking 60,000 pictures a second.

John Brownlee

Old school SNES controller for the Wii

This re-creation of the Super Famicom controller (that's the SNES to you, Euros and American Cowboy-Os) is what members of the Japan-only Club Nintendo are currently having shipped out to them, allowing them to play Wii Virtual Console games in old-school style. It's the exact same controller I used to use back in 1992 to garrote my little brother after a loss in Super Punchout!

Like the Wii's Classic Controller, this controller plugs into the bottom of the Wiimote, which allows it to establish a wireless connection to the console itself. Unlike the Classic Controller, though, it doesn't look absolutely hideous. Just make sure that none of the Virtual Console games you own require more than six buttons.

Unboxing Shots of the SNES Classic Controller [Inside Games]

Rob Beschizza

News at 11: Gadget Blog Plagiarized by Fiends

It's part and parcel of the business. Blogs, with their rapid updates and low operating costs, are an ad-friendly format. Therefore, original content is quickly cloned by plagiarists, often using automated screen-scraping software, to keep their AdSense ping machines ticking over. There were several exact analogs of Wired's Gadget Lab, where I wrote until last week, for example. And when Schwungschwungstabswachtmeister Joel Johnson announced that Brownlee and I were to be editors here at BBG, we promptly found ourselves to also be the freshly hired editors of several other, curiously similar websites.

Normally, it's more of an amusement than anything else, a measure of success. Sometimes, however, the copycats present a more persistent problem, and Techware Labs today reports that it is sick and tired of one copycat in particular, identified as Grand Island Computers.

You might say Grand Island Who? And you would be right, they are no one, with no alexa, no links, and a guy named Shawn Sinner (I can't make up that Part) running it all. He owns a store, with no products, and a blog, with no readers. We still feel that our intellectual property has been stolen and would like the content removed.

They're also ripping off TechWorld and Engadget, according to Techware EIC Jason Jacobs. Now, while high-trafficked sites might briefly reassign a neuron or two to appreciating such mindless flattery as a perl script may deliver, the copy-pasters are indiscriminate bastards. Volunteer-driven outlets suffer from the double-whammy of being more vulnerable to plagiarism and less able to do anything about it.

What can you do to help them? Not a lot, really, short of mob lunacy. But the shared schadenfreude of seeing people caught out, if nothing else, has a delicious aftertaste.

Forum Thread [Techware Labs]

Rob Beschizza

Zoombak tracks dogs (or anything else) with aGPS

Puck, our elderly german shepherd, went missing. Some local kid reached though the gate, unlocked it and let our dogs out for his or her own amusement. After a morning spent searching, one question kept returning to me over and over again: "Why do GPS dog collars cost six hundred dollars?"

Times have changed, and Zoombak now offers a GPS-based dog locator for a much cheaper $200 — definitely worth it, as you will discover if a beloved pup ever goes off for a dangerous jaunt around the block. The flip side is that you need a subscription, costing $15 a month, with cancellation fees if you want out.

This is perhaps because it uses assisted GPS, which adds a cellular transceiver to improve performance, and because the service includes a web-based tracker you can access whenever you want, notification via SMS if the wearer leaves designated "safe" zones, and 24/7 emergency support.

From pics, it looks about the size of an MP3 player or pager; it's likely just marketing that has it as an animal tracker, and I see no reason it couldn't be used to track youngsters, cars, or anything else you might slip it into. Its battery life is OK: about 5 days on standby, with alerts sent to cellphone or email when it needs juice. A full week would have been nice, but it would then probably weigh too much for small dogs; as it is, Zoombak already recommends it for animals 15 lbs or larger.

By the way, Puck was found safe and well, having managed to travel more than three miles in just a few hours. A kindly person saw her wandering, braved a look at her tags, and gave us a call. Even now, though, I'd love to know how she got from one side of the city to the other.

Product Page [Zoomback]

John Brownlee

The Beast in the Basement: 1960's sound-effect pipe organ

The guys over at MAKE spotted this fantastic clip of a from the 1960s named Leon Berry who designed and built his own personal special-effects pipe organ, which he christened the "Beast in the Basement." Some of the sounds are done pneumatically, while others are made in a remarkably straight-forward fashion: playing the "Chinese Gong" key, for example, results in the actual hitting of a Chinese Gong. Ingenious, Leon!

It's all pretty awesome, but judging from this gentleman's unnerving mannerisms — the paralyzed arching of one eyebrow, the off-kilter grin, the slow and insinuating way in which he speaks and the slight glistening of pure crazy in his eyes — I'm guessing that Leon's family was just glad he had a basement hobby that didn't involve dipping teenage hitchhikers in lye.

Leon Berry - Beast in the Basement (improved version) [YouTube]

Rob Beschizza

Beautiful game just got more beautiful

Eleven, the Beautiful Game, is table football with a difference: you can't buy it, and even if you could, you probably could not afford it.

"For many of us, table football is a game that is close to our hearts, holding cherished memories of our childhood and youth. Its popularity also reflects the passion and love that millions of people around the world share for 'the beautiful game' of football."

GRO design's chrome-tastic representation of this classic prelude to pub and family violence will be on show at Milan Design Week, from 16-21 April, and other venues listed at its news page.

The current revisions of the Table Football article at wikipedia—wherein we learn that "stoopid retard is a common name in English" and that "Steven is a man eater"—is a blast.

Product Page [Thanks, Eliot!]

John Brownlee

Nanotech clothing will recharge your gadgets by capturing your movement

Within a decade or two, we might all be wearing clothing with built-in USB ports capable of recharging our gadgets, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology:

The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”

That's all well and good, but my own personal evolutionary goal — a goal which I buy technology to help me facilitate — is to eventually live the life of a completely sedentary goo-back, my every bodily function automated. A shirt that recharges only when I move is going to soon result in a situation where I no longer have a single robotic drone available with enough juice left to clean out my suppurating bed sores.

No, what researchers need to be working on is a way to recharge devices not through motion, but by tapping my inner reserve of self-contempt and hate. That's an equally eco-friendly power source that's just going to keep exponentially growing... even as technology evolves and eventually gives me the luxury of ejaculating my skeleton in favor of an infrastructure made up of a series of interconnected bladders.

Power Shirt: Fiber-based Nanotechnology in Clothing Could Generate Electricity by Harvesting Energy from Physical Movement [Georgia Research Tech News]

John Brownlee

Coway's sonic dish-cleaning wand

I hate doing dishes. My sink is filled with them; I put their scouring off as long as possible, at least until the fungal growths begin to bloom and wreak havoc with my sinuses or the first-generation egg sacks burst open and a deluge of thousands of skittering insects come swarming from my sink. Then I do the dishes... usually with a flamethrower.

So for me, ultrasonic dish cleaning gadgetry is the Holy Grail of Tech. I just want to be able to lazily wave a magic cleaning wand over my sink and have everything glitter in the sun. The SMV-08AM megasonic cleaning device from Coway won't manage anything as grand that, but they do promise to eliminate "dirt and agrochemicals" from the surface of just about anything, using only water and sound waves. The water is even cleaned before it is distributed by a patented "P-Filter," which I'm sure will come as a relief to everyone. No price, unfortunately, but laziness is expensive.

New megasonic cleaning device by Coway [Appliancist via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Review: A day with Boston Acoustics' MM226 2.1 Computer Speakers

Computer speakers are like icebergs. Look at the ad shots (example to your right), and you mostly see delicate spires dressed in fine fabrics, flanking iMacs, pointing to the heavens just like Plato did right before he pushed Aristotle down the School of Athens' stairs.

But it is below the desk that their true presence is felt: giant, unweildy subwoofers spilling wires and cords like a dreadlocked Hutt. The MM226 from Boston Acoustics is no exception. In fact, it seems to revel in it: there's no attempt to conceal its bulk with clever design. Instead just sits like a giant melting block of grey ice, woofing away happily, content with its corpulent state.

Of course, the topside speakers are very pretty, with exchangeable faceplates in Glacier, Rosebud, Onyx, Pearl Gray, Caramel, Chocolat, Silver and Chili Pepper. They're lovely, though they do cost a little extra (and actually live up to the silly names, inasmuch as they're mostly odd colors that might be hard to match to existing decor)

Anyway, all such things fade to irrelevance before the quality of the sound, and the MM226 was pleasant enough. The big woofer throws out plenty of bass, but the stereo pair is good enough to stay afloat on it. It belts out lots of volume without too much effort, and that's all it really needs to do. I couldn't imagine that music lovers would even look at something like this, so didn't worry about how danceable the cables were.

The wiring is simple, with a desktop volume module making physical control a snap—it also has microphone and headphone sockets, too. At $150, it's not too expensive, but pricier than cheapie models in its class.

Only one flaw really got on my nerves: the desktop volume control unit was sensitive to interference from my cordless phone, a Dect 6.0 model from Panasonic.

Joel Johnson

'Architect's Birdfeeder': acrylic, flat-pack, no fasteners required

I'm a bit of a sucker for bird feeders, weathering the clouds of doves while attempting to spot the occasional song bird or Monk parakeet. (I really hope bird droppings make good fertilizer, because the houseplants are about to be moved out on the deck directly underneath my feeder from TerraCycle.)

I also happen to be sweet on flat-pack products for even less of a good reason. I suppose they scratch the same itch as Ikea furniture and Chinese takeout boxes. It's neat to see what can be designed given the restriction, even if the one thing we have in amply supply in the States is shelf space.

So! Will I buy this "Architect's Birdfeeder," made of eight interlocking pieces of flat-pack acrylic? No, because I already have a bird feeder. (Two actually.) But it's only $25 and is oh so modern. You'll be attracting Scandinavian birds by the dussin.

Product Page [ArchitectsBirdfeeders.com] (Thanks, Brian!)

John Brownlee

Smooshy stylus for the iPhone / iPod Touch

Although the iPhone handles just wonderfully without a stylus, there is a small but vocal contingent of people who want one.

Perhaps these people do a lot of text entry on their iPhones and require an instrument of heightened dexterity. Maybe they are old Palm Pilot or Pocket PC users who just miss the feel of a stylus in their hands. Or maybe they are people who regularly need to hand their iPhones over to friends who cover the sleek touchscreen with their foul drippings... the sort of friends who don't wash their hands or wipe properly, yet are always touching your stuff, covering your pretty things in their fecal encrustations, until you just can't STAND it anymore and you just want to put your hands around their gobbling thoraxes and squeeze, squeeze, SQUEEZE until their faces go purple and their protruded eyeballs flop around their bloated cheeks and you NEVER have to worry about them touching your stuff EVER again.... for ever and ever and ever FOREVER.

For people like that, enter the iPhone Soft-Touch Stylus. It's an aluminum stylus with a soft rubber tip guaranteed not to scratch or damage your iPhone. I like the picture of it in action: it looks delightfully smooshy to use. $12.99 will get you one, although without a little stylus holster drilled into the iPhone itself, you're just going to lose it.

Soft-Touch Stylus [Daydeal.com]

Joel Johnson

Video: Steve Jobs keynote parody hits all the right notes

Just yesterday I was wondering why you never see good Steve Jobs impersonations. Is it because he's so vanilla? Does he have no sandy quirks that can be highlighted with layers of caricature? Is his measured, not-quite-human speaking style impervious to parody?

The answer is: I apparently know nothing about doing impressions. Because whoever is playing Steve Jobs in this College Humor keynote parody nails it. The voice, especially. I stepped away from the computer for a second while it was playing and had a hard time not mistaking his cadence for the real Steve.

Joel Johnson

Nissan invents "ageing suit" to de-whipper snappers

In an attempt to get young automotive designers to understand the physical trials of old age — stiff limbs, poor eyesight, diminished ability to catch a mouthful of Viagra mid-backflip before landing a limbs-akimbo bedpost cockstand held only by quivering urethra — Nissan has swaddled its youngsters in an "aging suit" and put them behind the wheel. Think metal knee braces, but rusty, with a set of sandpapered goggles for clouded vision and an extra 11-pound weight to simulate a neck-snapping goiter or enlarged prostate.

"It's very difficult to drive, says Nissan's Naoki Yamamoto after a turn at the wheel in a suit that runs from neck to feet.

"You lose the freedom you're accustomed to, and while you can move, there are limitations, such as turning the steering wheel or switching on the blinker."

Japan ageing suit puts car makers in senior circuit [Reuters.com via Gadget Lab]

Joel Johnson

Compact (slash) flash memory card reader has built-in mirror

This otherwise generic flash memory card reader includes a small mirror, the better to give your makeup a little touch-up before you load your self-portraits into your laptop. Or if you're a girl, to adjust the fit of your engineer coveralls.

It's $15, plus shipping. And unbelievably, it doesn't come in pink. I would never buy this unless it came in pink.

Catalog Page [Gadget4all.com via Oh Gizmo via Pocket Lint]

Rob Beschizza

Asus Eee PC gets bigger screen, drives

EeePC, how you thrill with your sleek, cheap, haven't-actually-bought-it-yet-but-will-I-promise mythos. If only you'd stop getting better, so I could convince myself that now is the time. With that 8.9" display crammed into the same form factor as the original, however, the new Eee PC 900 finally demands checkbook.

With the storage bumped to 12GB or 20GB flash drives (the former for a Windows-equipped version, the latter for Linux), it also challenges the sole advantage of the competing Everex Cloudbook, which has a 30GB hard drive.

The larger display has a 1024x600 resolution, which "allows users to view a single A4 page without the need to scroll left or right." A4! See? Asus's EeePC 900 not only improves on the original, but makes us all see the world as Europeans do.

This sequel's only flaw? Not being called the Fff.

Update: Trustedreviews already has one in hand and likes it.

Press Release [Asus]

Joel Johnson

Google Earth 4.3 features include sunlight, improved 3D terrain and buildings, still no jetpacks or guns

The latest version of Google Earth includes very decent looking 3D buildings and terrain with full time-based sunlight simulation. It won't be that long before a hybrid of all this satellite and terrain data will be accessible in some sort of game, I suspect. I want to play a massively multiplayer persistent FPS, sort of like a giant Battlefield, where we fight for the world's resources on a 1:1 scale.

[via the sharp-looking new Waxy]

Joel Johnson

Brando's inexpensive solar multi-charger

Brando's "Mulit [sic] Purpose Solar Charger" is hard to criticize. It's a 15% efficient solar panel on top of a 1,350 mAh battery, capable of outputting power via a set of cell phone adapters or good ol' USB. It appears you can also charge via USB, then keep it topped off during the day via solar. Best of all, it's just $25 plus shipping.

It has a strange, clear plastic clip on the back that Gizmodo implied was to hold batteries for charging, but I don't see any electrical leads in the plastic, so I'm guessing it's just some strange Chinese design affectation.

Solar + batteries is where it's at. You could leave this thing in the window of your workplace all day, then plug in your phone on the way home and never hit an outlet for months. There are the production and environmental costs of the unit itself, of course — especially the battery — but it's great to see something like this showing up so inexpensively.

I ordered one. It won't be around by the time I'm ready to go out into the woods — next week! — but it still looks like a worthwhile thing to have on hand. I've got some more solar projects coming throughout the summer, too.

Product Page [Mobile.Brando.com.hk via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Canned oxygen site proclaims "You are what you breathe"

Their jaws are not slack, these cave explorers and fitness club owners whose testimonials gird Oxygenplus.com, a site that sells little bottles of O2. Such characters know what they're doing, and huff the stuff like seasoned chavs gasping solvents from Asda bags. Metered-dose inhalers, adorned with flashy designs? Lovely. But do Nottingham's underpasses not offer a better, cheaper high?

"The active ingredient in Oxygen+ is 90% pure enriched oxygen," says the website. Fun facts scroll by: oxygen was discovered in either 1772 or 1774, we learn. It is a solid at -361.12 degrees. Kids from polluted environments are stupider.

The benefits to sniffing the O? Energy, alertness, refreshment. Hangover recovery is among the most practical, but it's the promise to "keep the party" going at a night spot that is most enticing. Amyl Nitrate, eat your heart out.

Forms include the revolutionary, rechargeable O+Stick and the O+mini disposable can, which comes in $15 packs of three in peppermint, grapefruit and "natural" flavors. But as the site reminds us, "you are what you breathe" whichever way you puff it.

Product Page [oxygenplus. Thanks, Eliot!]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• Playstation 3 – 40GB PS3 for $366, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• All-in-one Printer – HP Deskjet Multifunction printer (scanner, copier, etc.) for $35, shipped. [Dealnews]

• LEGO Viking — LEGO Vikings set for $21, shipped. (Normally $30 or so.) [Dealnews]

• Air Filter – Today's Woot! is the 3M Filtrete Air Purifier for $45, shipped.

Rob Beschizza

Crysis on Digital Signage! S3's Embeddable DirectX10 GPU

S3 graphics. It's a phrase one hears now and again, but on the playground of video card dickwaving, it's never been a stiff contender. With its release of the 4300E embeddable GPU chipset, however, it brings Directx10 to its low-power, low-profile niche: when you joke about "Crysis running on a toaster," know that S3 the company whose mission is to make it happen.

Take a look at its "power of three" description of it's target market—"Gaming, digital signage and other multimedia intensive embedded applications."—and you see what I mean. Digital signage with DirectX10? So it's not so much toasters they have in mind as Blade Runner-esque LED billboards. Disappointing, for sure, but Crysis-running-on-inappropriate-platform jokes are, by their nature, versatile. We'll be O.K.

S3's 4300E has hardware support for the big chaps of video, such as H.264, VC-1, AVS, DivX, and MPEG-2 HD, passively-cooled clock speeds between 300MHz and 600MHz, and can use up to 256MB of RAM. It'll play well with Blu-Ray, according to the press release, and is also expected to come in expansion card form for PCI express slots.

Will this replace my Nvidia 8800 GTX? No. But I do want to play Crysis on a cash register, and for making this a hypothetical reality, S3 must be lauded.

Press Release [S3]

John Brownlee

Opus 8 mechanical digital watch is achingly gorgeous

I have a hard time finding cool watches that I not only like, but could actually see myself wearing. This is the reason why I have had the same cheap Casio Illuminator strapped to my wrist for the last five years: its features — miraculous feats of digital programming and horological ingenuity, all of them — include beeping and letting me see what time it is in the dark. But jeebus. This Opus 8 Mechanical Digital from Harry Winston Rare Timepieces just has me swooning.

It's based upon the maverick design of Frédéric Garinaud, a French engineer with no experience in watchmaking who, in 2007, arrived in Basel to showcase a way in which LED-style digits could "raise" out of the surface of a purely mechanical clock. The Opus 8 takes this concept and runs with it: pull a lever on the side and the hour erects itself from the watch face as numerous dials rapidly spin to land on the correct hour and minute.

But what I really love about this watch is how it channels the form of an old mahogany transistor radio. It's got something of a Dick Tracy Radio Watch vibe to it, without the actual radio. I would buy one of these in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it's a limited edition of fifty, and they're already sold out to fat cat millionaires and the loathsome, stinking like.

Opus 8 Mechanical Digital [Watchismo Times]

John Brownlee

X10: "Honestly, we don't give a shit about branding"

It starts off like any other job interview for a world-class marketing position. Your interviewer is the typical executive of a suburban Seattle gadget company: like most corporate movers-and-shakers, he is wearing workout sweats and a wife-beater at the office, and has a strange habit of kissing his flexed biceps between sentences. His first question to you, as translated by a colleague: "Would you be willing to completely bastardize everything you ever believed about design to work here?"

Welcome to a job interview at X10.You may know X10 for their line of tiny, wireless, remote-controlled cameras, perfect for installing beneath the lip of the bowl of a ladies room toilet. But if you were on the Internet in the early part of the decade, you more likely remember X10 for filling your screen with thousands of obnoxious, pop-under advertisements... incidentally, pop-under ads generated with code they stole from three teenagers.

So what's an interview at X10 like? According to the From the Mind of J weblog — the identity of the company is confirmed in the comments — it's everything you'd expect. The highlights:

As a company, X10 describes itself as "sort of the Safeway, Wal-Mart low-end range type company that works with volume rather than top of the line quality."

When asked if a subtler, more respectful approach to marketing would foster more loyalty from their customers, X10's response: "Honestly, we don't give a shit about branding."

About the company aesthetic, an X10 executive notes that, while at first, he didn't really like the company's official website, "now whenever he looks at a [properly designed] website, he finds himself thinking “They really need some flashing text there."

And finally, who buys cameras from X10? "Men from around age 30-40 with a little extra money who like buying gadgets and aren’t too concerned if it doesn’t work too well.”

Awesome. X10 may have just summarized in one snappy sentence the secret contempt of an entire industry for its customers.

Wow. Just wow. (Guess the company) [From The Mind of J]

Joel Johnson

Brickarms '08: new weapons for your bloodthirsty LEGO minifigs

Brickarms, the company who makes scale weapons for LEGO minifigs, has just released their new 2008 line-up.

Company Page [Brickarms.com] (Thanks, Knife Knut!)

Xeni Jardin

NAB snapshot: "Flying-Cam"

My friend Wayne de Geere is in Vegas this week for NAB, cruising the halls for cool stuff. He shares this snapshot of one of the more interesting products on display -- the "Flying-Cam," a methanol-powered aerial vehicle with on-board camera, used in the production of such films as Harry Potter (3 of 'em), 007 (at least 3 of 'em), Van Helsing, and The Kite Runner. The company's website contains a bunch of groovy Quicktime movies that show the device in action.

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we have this ad for a 1968 electronics kit for children composed of little magnetic blocks with embedded electronic components. You just stick them together in different ways to make different devices like a radio or electronic organ. This cutting edge family all got hooked on a teletype installed in their house in 1970 using it for everything from meal planning to (of course), gaming. We also looked at a tiny hot-water bottle meant to alleviate tooth aches, an odd plane with a circular wing, a backpack mounted tv camera and transmitter and the tricks used by demolition crews.

Joel Johnson

RED Scarlet 3K camcorder, James Cameron on the future of digital cinema, and trying to grok all these pixels

RED, the company whose 4K-capable 'RED One' camera — that's 4,096 by 2,160 pixels — became one of the most lusted after cameras of recent memory last year, has announced the 'Scarlet,' a hand-held Flash-memory based camcorder capable of a remarkable 3K resolution at 120 frames per second. They've stated they intend for it to sell for under $3,000. That means the relatively small Scarlet — pictured above both naked and with lots of accessories bolted on — will be capable of shoot video worthy of projection in digital cinemas, which mostly top out at around 4K these days (although typically only at 24FPS).

RED also announced the "Epic," a new camera that will be capable of 5K resolution. Both cameras will be available in 2009.

Resolution isn't the end-all, be-all of digital cinema, though. Variety recently ran a fascinating interview with James Cameron in which the director detailed the technology behind his upcoming 3D movie 'Avatar,' and why resolution isn't as important for providing lifelike cinema experiences as frame rate can be.

But 4K doesn't solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA execs made a bold decision to do the All Star Game 3-D simulcast at 60 frames per second, because they didn't like the judder. The effect of the high-frame-rate 3-D was visually astonishing, a huge crowdpleaser.

I would vastly prefer to see 2K/48 frames per second as a new display standard, than 4K/24 frames per second. This would mean shooting movies at 48 fps, which the digital cameras can easily accommodate. Film cameras can run that fast, but stock costs would go up. However, that could be offset by shooting 3-perf, or even 2-perf, because you'd get the resolution back through the higher display rate. The 48 fps negative or digital master can be skip-printed to generate a 24 fps 35mm DI negative for making release prints, so 48 is the magic number because it remains compatible with the film-based platform which will still be with us for some time, especially internationally. 30 and 60 fps are out for that reason. Anyway the benefit of 30 is not great enough to be worth the effort, especially when 48 is so easy to achieve. SMPTE tests done about 15 years ago showed that above 48 frames the returns diminish dramatically, and 60 fps is overkill. So 48 is the magic number.

I was still having a hard time visualizing all these resolutions, so I decided just to make myself a reference chart all the way from the highest resolution standards down to some of the lowest of yore. I left out most the common 4:3 resolutions because they were just cluttering stuff up. I also suspect that the "5K/4K/3K" used in my chart are not the exact same ones that RED is claiming to support, as there are different formats of digital cinema. I pulled most of my numbers from Wikipedia's list of common resolutions.

If you'd like to look at the graphic in a 1:1 pixel version, there is a full-sized 316KB PNG available for download. Just remember: it's 7,000+ pixels wide, so your browser might choke on it if it's a creaky old ship.

[via Uncrate]

John Brownlee

Announcement: Next IRC Event ("Rule 34 Challenge") / Pre-Cog vs. Replicant IRC Transcript

Despite the grousing of a small stable of #boingboing dissenters, last week's Pre-Cogs vs. Replicants game was a smashing success. The Replicants were thwarted, the opalescent offal of their chest cavities disgorged by the disemboweling of our canny Pre-Cog. If you're interested, you can download the official transcript log at the end of the post.

This week, we're going to do a different game: Rule 34 Showdown. Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out the Rule 34 Challenge.

"RULE 34: Portal Weighted Companion Cube Humping Turret!" I might cry. The denizens of #boingboing will go scrambling to find a link that illicitly matches the challenge. The first three people to come up with separate links and images for the same concept will be awarded first, second and third place points of decreasing denominations. At the end of the hour, the person with the most points will be declared the official RULE 34 PORNOGRAPHER OF #BOING BOING! At least for the week. And to make it all timeless fun, we'll knock up all the links we accrue in the official transcript of the event.

This week's game will be held on Friday Night at 4pm EST / 1pm PST / 9pm GMT. If you want to hang out in the channel before the game, you can get more information about connecting to Boing Boing IRC via a dedicated client here, and there is also a Java chat applet with which you can connect. Hope to see you there!

precogrepgame.rtf [Download]

John Brownlee

$89 Wii Fit vs. $689 Gym Membership

I don't mind admitting it: my once god-like body, nut-brown and taut, has devolved into a gelatinous structure of mayonnaise-like consistency over the last two years.

It's my career: I am a blogger. My lifestyle is sedentary. Every day, I wake up groggily at noon, ready for another thrilling day filled with adventure. By 12:05, my gastropoidal bulk begins its day's suppuration against the moist, stenching fabric of my office chair. By 12:10, I have cracked open the first beer of the day. And from 12:10 to approximately 2:00pm? The only caloric expenditure is my own rapid digital cycling between Control+C and Control+V.

So I joined a gym a few weeks ago. Since I live in Germany but don't actually speak German, it was difficult to find a gym that could accommodate me. But eventually, I found a great one, and my physical regimen is overseen by an Aryan Achilles by the name of Andreas.

Andreas is a riot. Because he often does not know the English names of the exercises he wants me to perform, he identifies them by the name of the Rocky film in which they first appeared. And when it came time to measure my body fat, he had me grab the digital BMI meter with two hands for ten seconds. Examining it afterwards, he arched one eyebrow cynically, declared the reading a gross underestimate and then, without looking, tossed it over his shoulder in an effortless arc to land in a trash can behind him. He's a good yegg, Andreas.

When I met with Andreas for the first time, he asked me — in an incredulous manner indicating that he well knew the answer must be "no" — if I'd ever exercised before. In truth, though, I had. Two years and thirty pounds ago, I was in the best shape of my life, thanks to a wonderful virtual fitness program called Yourself! Fitness. But I knew that informing Andreas that I had once been a muscular Adonis thanks to the tutelage of an imaginary woman who lived inside my computer would probably tax both of our skills in poly-linguism.

But, you know, Andreas might have to get used to the competition of virtual trainers... particularly bobble-headed ones. Wii Fit, Nintendo's own answer to living-room personal fitness, is due out in the states on May 19th, with a street price of $89 including both the software and wireless balance board accessory. I'm not likely to grab it — I've learned from experience that without having the routine of going to the gym, I'm likely to procrastinate a day's work out indefinitely — but I really am glad to see more video game companies try to whip flab-beasts like me into shape. As the ten pounds I've lost in two weeks of admittedly strenuous exercise shows, there's simply no reason in the world why getting in shape needs to come at the cost of a twelve-month, no-money-back commitment.

Wii Fit craze set to launch May 19 [Crave]

Rob Beschizza

Review: A month with Fujitsu's P8010 subnotebook

After finishing up with Sony's excellent and finely-cut Vaio TZ Premium subnotebook, I wiped my customizations, uninstalled my productivity software, cleaned the display, polished the case, put it back in the box, and mailed it back to Sony PR. Then I went back to Fujitsu's P8010.

It's quite similar to the TZ. It's uglier, for sure. And bigger, despite like specifications. But while Fujitsu also wants it back by the end of the week, I can't quite bring myself to wrap it up yet.

Whereas the Sony is a perfect design marred by minor flaws, the P8010 is a good all-rounder. I'll never love it irrationally as I might something like a TZ or a MacBook Air, but unlike those machines, I feel enthusiastic about using it to work on for hours at a go. As an everyday laptop for work, travel and buggering around on the internet, it offers an unmatched balance between portability, power and utility.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Pandora portable gaming system flashes one huge QWERTY

With the aging, open-source GP2X platform quickly slaloming into obsolescence, the Pandora portable gaming system is trying to step forward to take its place in the hearts and minds of the emulator aficionado.

On the surface, the specs look pretty good. Crammed into a decidedly DS-Lite-style case is an 800x480 4.3 inch 16.7 million color touchscreen LCD driven by OpenGL 2.0 compliant 3D hardware, dual SDHC card slots, TV output, an ARM Cortex A8 CPU running Linux and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g capabilitiy.

But its the way that QWERTY keypad is crammed into the dual-analog joysticks, the four face buttons and the D-pad that bugs me. Really, how is text entry for a game system worth that much (decidedly non-ergonomic) real estate?

At $330USD, the Pandora is going to need a hell of a blow-out showing from the homebrew scene to get me to drop my money on it. I already have a hacked PSP, thanks: I don't think I really need another emulated vintage gaming handheld.

OpenPandora [Official Site]

Joel Johnson

'Cycle' bag concept by Iohanna Pani doubles as bicycle seat

There are several questions that need to be addressed by designed Iohanna Pani before the "Cycle" bicycle-seat-into-backpack concept could be put into production. What materials would be comfortable but still allow for a light, crush-proof bag? Would the fixture for the seat post rub into the wearer's back? Is my ass really that big?

But size it down a little and make it capable of holding a phone and a few trinkets and there might just be a winner here. Nothing is more annoying than hauling around a useless bike seat with you all day.

Project Page [Coroflot.com via Yanko]

Mark Frauenfelder

The Wifi Predator

The predator is a modified wireless router connected to a high-powered antenna and running custom firmware to actively seek out open wireless connections. Once they are found, it will test them for internet connectivity and then join and repeat the one with the strongest signal to secured wireless connection that YOU control. (*Note: It is illegal to use a wireless access point that you are not authorized to use.)

Joel Johnson

Sony PFR-V1 speaker-headphone thing reviewed (Verdict: sounds great, but...)

Tom Whitwell has clipped the mostly ridiculous Sony PFR-V1 headphones to his head and turned up the music, letting crackling newsreel horns and Glenn Miller numbers — the only music legally allowed to be played in Britain since we conquered the kingdom in '42 — to splash out of the little speakers held a couple of inches from the ear by a curved metal tube. And what do you know? They don't sound half-bad.

When I started listening to these through the PFR-V1, it was, to use a terrible cliche, a revelation. I heard numerous details I'd never heard before. My normal headphones are Sony MDR7506's. They're comfortable, loud and bassy. They make music sound warm and nice. But the PFR-V1s are about accuracy: the bass isn't exaggerated, but it's there. The mids and highs are super crisp. The stereo image is huge and very precise. I kept hearing things I'd never noticed: clicks on loops, mistakes, sounds that clashed, subtle differences between guitar sounds, wonky mixes, things that sounded great, bass sounds that really worked.

Mini review: Sony PFR-V1 headphones - all bad, except for the sound [Music Thing]

* General Dick Van Patten, who famously stayed the execution of the ninth and only living member of the English royal family on the gallows, somberly intoning, his heart heavy of war, "Eight is enough."

Joel Johnson

Blue Jeans Cable responds to Monster Cable cease-and-desist with Hundred Hand Slap

Overpriced interconnect bastards Monster Cable — and I know, it's what the market will bear, etc., but we all know they're screwing the ignorant and now apparently going after smaller companies, hence... — sent a cease-and-desist letter to smaller cable manufacturer, Blue Jeans Cable. Too bad Blue Jeans Cable's president, Kurt Denke, used to work as an attorney. His response to Monster Cable, posted with permission at Audioholics, is chock full of bring it on, fuckers. Kurt Denke has one hundred arms, each hand with middle finger unfurled.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues.  My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle.  In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table.  I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word.  If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds.  As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable [Audioholics]

Joel Johnson

Datto 500 NAS stores your data off-site, too

Datto is selling this new NAS that continuously backs up your data to the company's off-site servers. If your NAS crashes hard, they'll overnight you a new unit with your last backup already installed. It'll cost you, of course: $25 a month (discounts for longer subscriptions), plus the initial $600 entry fee for the 500GB device. That's too pricey for most home users, but could be useful for a business.

Then again, how often does a whole NAS die? The point of a NAS in the first place is that you'll likely — knock on wood — only ever lose a single drive at a time, giving you the opportunity to swap in a replacement before the whole thing goes tits up.

Product Page [DattoBackup.com]

John Brownlee

The arms race escalates between spammers and CAPTCHA

Ars Technica is reporting that spamboys have now officially cracked the CAPTCHA systems of Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail. Worse, they're able to tear through the average CAPTCHA protection system in less than a minute:

Windows Live Hotmail's Anti-CAPTCHA automatic bot, which hooks itself into Internet Explorer on a victim's machine, has a success rate of about 10-15 percent. That means that it takes up to one minute for a single bot to create a new account.

In one day, the bot can amass at least 1,440 accounts. And that's just one bot. This same bot can then send spam to multiple e-mail addresses (using both CC and BCC lists) continuously, switching between accounts (both in the from: and to: fields) in order to lower the chance of being spotted.

Meanwhile, it takes me, an actual human being, upwards of ten minutes to analyze and cypto-decipher the average CAPTCHA, all the while screaming "What kind of moon-man frickin' Cylon do you have to be to read this thing?"

But, really, what's the alternative here? On my other blog, we weed out spam with a simple text question system (ex: "What is the color of the yellow snow?") but I don't doubt that this utterly simple scheme would quickly fall apart if spammers were actually trying to dissect it. How do you suss out a human with 100% infallibility?

Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA [Ars Technica]

Joel Johnson

Video: Nitro-powered R/C car does 200MPH+

My first remote-controller plane had a small gas engine that I could barely start, especially after I ripped it from its box and proceeded to jam tubes onto whatever pegs seemed likely to need fuel, covered the whole thing in slick gas, and then spent hours trying to clean out the oily dirt from the ridges of the tiny engine block. And it wasn't even really remote-controlled. You just kicked up the engine and swung it around you in a circle by a cord. The engine might have been for sonic verisimilitude only.

That's the same sort of nomenclaturely nebulous "remote-control" behind this car powered by nitroglycerine nitromethane, racing around a steel hoop at 200 miles per hour or more, pinioned by a cable in the center of the track as it screams in a blur like the last dancer at a methamphetamine Maypole party. There's nothing really controlling it except physics and prayer.

[via Jalopnik]

John Brownlee

Sling your laptop around with a Lapstrap

While other gadget bloggers are running prissily around, flapping their hands around their downy cheeks in what can only be described as the hysterical, bladder-evacuating pirouette of the techno-prima-donna, I have to say I quite like this functional but decidedly pat laptop-carrying strap.

Okay, its certainly not going to protect your laptop from anything. And perhaps it is just my upbringing in Mississippi, squelching barefoot through the Delta mud to school every morning with a corn husk crammed between my gapped teeth, an unhappy frog stuffed in my back pocket and a leather strap filled with books thrown carelessly over one sunburned shoulder.

But this isn't a solution for people who want to protect their laptops from elemental ravages, whizzing bullets or fat people losing their balance, tipping over and crashing wildly down hill. Its a fantastic solution for someone who wants to be able to easily sling their laptop over his or her should, but doesn't want to have to pull it out of a bagger for quick, instantaneous access.

A perfect blogger's solution, in other words. $25 will get you one, and for a little bit more will get one with a customized logo on the strap. A mite unfashionable, though, even with a custom design. I'd imagine a Macbook Air on a luminescent spaghetti strand, personally.

The Lapstrap [Official Site (Turn Off Your Speakers) via Crave]

John Brownlee

K2 Porcupine Light makes flashlights even more blinding

You can do a lot of damage with a simple flashlight. One solid swing, connected with the occipital lobe, is enough to detach retinas, and I can tell you from first hand experience there's just nothing funnier than watching a burglar blindly stumbling around your house, his tongue protruding, his eyes wildly googling in their sockets. "Hey honey! Kids! Check it out! Its Cookie Monster!" you can cry out. With peals of delight, encourage your loved one to toss Oreos at the would-be home invader, making moist, mocking "Nom nom nom" noises with your mouths all the while. What might have been a horrific tragedy becomes a midnight comedy!

Yes, its a wonderful invention, the flashlight: giver of light, friend of shadow puppets, entertainer of children and enemy to prowlers, zombies and Draculas. But sometimes a flashlight just isn't deadly enough. Enter the K2 Porcupine Light, a powerful "eye-blinding" 70 lumens flashlight with retracting spikes near the bulb, perfect for jabbing into an ocular cavity and twisting with all your might. Or just for performing that impromptu midnight colostomy during a midnight power outage. See? Flashlights are useful to pacifists too.

For $129, though, you might just be better duct taping razor blades to the edge of your Eveready.

K2 Porcupine Light [Pentagon Light via OhGizmo]

Joel Johnson

Sigma DP-1 Camera reviewed (Verdict: Wait for the DP-2)

Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has reviewed the long-waited-for Sigma DP-1, a pocket-sized camera with a full-sized DSLR sensor inside. It sounds like the picture and lens quality is almost everything Sigma promised, but their inexperience as a company in making cameras is evidenced by poorly thought-out interface design.

My approach to shooting with the DP1 has been to frame with the Voigtlander optical viewfinder (see below) and trust the autofocus, shooting when the beep is heard, indicating that autofocus has locked. I even do this when shooting distant objects because there is no way to be sure that the camera will stay at Infinity because of the lack of a lock in the focus wheel. What was Sigma doing during the 18 months since product announcement? This stuff isn't rocket science. Just buy a few competitor's products and see how they do it!

A Compact Conundrum [Luminous-Landscape.com via Gadget Lab]

Rob Beschizza

Tetris wall art only $42; Update: Competitive Tetris arm wrestling!

Are you sick of Tetris-themed decor being absurdly expensive? If one is in that particularly weird little club (hi!), these vinyl stickers, crafted by "Fame" of Vancouver, look like they might be a pleasantly cheap.

$42 buys you a set; still not quite as reasonable as they should be, but a snap compared to the ludicrous prices that Tetris shelving allegedly fetches.

Product Page [Fame at Etsy via Technabob]

Update: A group of fun-loving hackers have built a two-player Tetris rig, called 'Tressling,' controlled by arm wrestling.

Project Page (Warning: 'Eye of the Tiger' video auto-plays) [Tresling.org via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Shopping cart with robot legs and tendrils of flame

These disembodied, cart-pushing robot legs highlight the plight of the homeless. Their bursting into flames is said to be unintentional — but to me, it just means that they especially highlight the plight of the homeless in South London.

Walking Shopping Cart [GizmoGarden via Make and Gizmodo]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• LCD HDTVs – HP is selling 32- and 37-inch 720p LCD HDTVs for $500 and $650. Not a bad deal at all if you can live without 1080p (and for that price, why not?) [Slickdeals]

• Tablet PC – Toshiba Satellite tx1499us AMD Dual Core 2GHz 12-inch tablet PC for $700 after $185 rebates. [Dealnews]

• LCD HDTV – Sharp AQUOS 42-inch 1080p LCD TV for $1,150, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Today's Woot! was some random comic books, but you already missed it.

Joel Johnson

Flash Game: Video Store Clerk (dot com) harvests real movie scores and gameplay to make a more accurate ratings system

'Video Store Clerk' is an online Flash game in which you pretend to be a smirking, bespectacled movie hipster — at least that's how I played it — who suggests movies to customers based on their previou