RockPaperShotgun, as our most respected gaming blog by far, deserves more than the occasional misappropriation of its work, sandwiched between a link and a quip. Accordingly, we're formalizing the creative incest and will regularly swap headlines on a wholesale basis.
Seriously, these guys rule. Even if you're not interested in games (who are you kidding?), they're smart, insouciant and dedicated to the craft. Read on for the links.
There are two technological Steves in Time's 100. Apple alum Guy Kawasaki praises Jobs for the mindshare, but when it comes to the money, there's no competition.
"If you want 95% of the wallets of every market that you're in, then you want this Steve. If you want 95% of the mind share of every market that you're in, then you need the other Steve (Jobs).”
Sage words. Moreover, Ballmer's thrashing Jobs in the reader's poll, too:
Of course, the winner of that poll is a video game designer, and the runner up a pop star few outside of South Korea have even heard of, but hey, Internet!
Steve Ballmer [Time]
You are cordially invited to an orgy of cartoon mayhem: Valve's superb Team Fortress 2 is on free play this weekend to celebrate a new update, and we've got a 26-player server set up and ready to roll. What with some interesting comment threads here this week, we thought you might like the chance to reach through the internet and kick our asses.
All you need is the steam client, a half-decent PC and and a good internet connection: download what you need at the TF2: Gold Rush Update site.
Here's how to find us. Open up Team Fortress 2, click Find Servers and then check the "Custom" tab. Our server name is Boing Boing Team Fortress 2. Our direct ip, if you need it, is 208.167.248.53:27015. The password is "jackhammerjill" without the quotes. That should bring you in!
The server's up and running now! We're looking forward to being stabbed in the back, immolated, uber-charged and exploded by all of you!
Weekend Schedule: (The server's up 24/7, but it's good to set gathering times for optimal slaughter)
Friday 4 p.m.-late, just dicking around
Saturday, 4-7 p.m. EST, kill kill kill
Sunday, 4-7 p.m. EST, awesomest player wins Neuros OSD DVD organizer!
Recently on Modern Mechanix we look at this cool little fish shaped submarine, a 1902 ad for an adding machine called the Comptometer, a 1936 Popular Science piece that explains why we might have another ice age, a dome light for Japanese cops, a comparison of the New York skyline from 1880 and 1930 (and today) as well as a 1977 Hewlett Packard computer advertisement touting their astoundingly inexpensive ECC RAM, just 5 cents (17 cents in 2007 dollars) per byte.
Introducing Nojae Park's yoghurt-pot spoon: simple genius of the kind that gets chair-bound gadget bloggers excited, but which has probably been available from all good dollar stores since 1977.
... and no sooner than I write the above paragraph, the following presents itself, via Yanko Design commenter Luke:
The date? 1962. My retrometer is off 15 years.
Good to the last drop [Yanko Design]
Kraft jar spoon [Achille Castiglioni]
It's not new—the SKDUBS GOLD double bass boombox fiddle was made in 2005—but it's wonderful enough by far to warrant a belated look. Only three were built, apparently, and the remaining example is $15,000.
Built in a real double bass, the media are listed as "spraypaint, casters, oak, plywood, metal, iPod, two tube pre-amps, B and C mids and tweeters, Electro-voice woofers, JVC tweeters, Crown XLS 602 Poweramp, and Behringer equalizer."
SKDUBS GOLD[David Ellis via Dvice]
Moon-mad steampunk engineers have constructed Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 from the master's original plans. It is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., after being completed last month.
"The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long. We invite you to learn more about this extraordinary object, its designer Charles Babbage and the team of people who undertook to build it. Discover the wonder of a future already passed. A sight no Victorian ever saw."
Online exhibit [Computer History]
Dune fans rejoice: you can now indulge your dreams of soaring over Arrakeen toward the shield wall by constructing your own mini-ornithopter. You could even put a little mouse inside it!
This is a simple, elegant idea. Belkin's Mouse Trap mouse pads allow you to quickly zip up all the flotsam, jetsam and detritus scattered across your mouse pad and take it on the road with you like a little pocketbook. For $8.79, it seems rather useful. The only question is whether or not it could possibly hold everything littering my mousepad, which seems to function as a gravity well for my junk. Currently stacked atop my mousepad: one smoldering Meerschaum pipe, one jumble of indeterminate origin keys, a cheap lighter I bought for fifty cents at the local convenience store (this lighter declares its owner to be an "Islam O.G."), two depressingly empty beer bottles, a novelty bottle opener, a stack of coverless CDs, a fork, my syncing iPod, a paperback copy of Naked Came The Stranger and, finally, my laser mouse, which will only function within its allotted millimeters of free space by cranking the sensitivity up to the point of sub-atomic mapping.
Belkin Mouse Trap [Geek Bro via Book of Joe]
Keg Works is selling purportedly authentic British Imperial Pint Glasses: exact replicas of the stout receptacles that might be smashed into your face after a long night of binge drinking by an infuriated punk in Camden Town. This, for the record, is called glassing, and it's not fun. According to the site:
These are 100% authentic, imported from Europe, and feature the official European Union pint seal etched in the glass. The CE mark – which, in French, stands for ‘European Conformity’.
That there is an official committee to authenticate pint glass volume is an interesting glimpse into the Rube-Goldberg-esque workings of European bureaucracy, in and of itself.
The pint glass will cost you 7 bucks, which is probably worth it: there is a certain solid heft to a genuine pint glass that makes drinking a beer more pleasurable. Of course, 7 bucks is still 7 bucks more than stealing one from your local would cost you... the preferred method of stocking your cupboards in Albion.
Authentic British Style Imperial Pint Glass with Etched Seal [Kegworks]
The Harmonium is an autistic mechanical brain solely concerned with sine wave synthesis and Fourier Anlysis, built by a Dutch genius who constructed her first oscilloscope at the 14. But we can't do a better job describing the Harmonium's useless beauty than the word perfect summary of the illustrious Retro Thing: "Let's just say that this entire machine elegantly replaces a single function of a $100 graphing calculator with a few thousand dollar-euros of precision engineered metal." I never thought a device would come around that would make me wish I had a reason to plot sine waves by the mere dint of its captivating aesthetic design, but here we are.
The Harmonium [Official Site via Retro Thing via Matrixsynth]
Bamboo makes a range of durable gear for pets, and sent in its Quick Control Collar with Built-in Leash, its Quick Control Leash + Seat belt latch, and the Quick Control Harness + Built-in leash. This was a year ago.
Why the wait? Well, they all work perfectly, but that's to be expected. Durability is the important criterion, especially when these simple items are made complex enough to qualify as gadgets. And that they do: the control collars have a soft handle that extends out from inside the hollow collar, acting as a kind of emergency dog brake, and the seat belt latch connects a leash to a seat belt, to restrict a dog's movement in a vehicle. They work, and work well—the latches kept our dogs safe but fairly free on a 1,500-mile trip, and the elastic collar-handles work well as a way to stop a pup savaging the postman, though they don't extend far enough to work as leashes, unless you're very short.
A year in, they're a little frayed at the edges, but the elastic on the quick control collar is still strong and the collars themselves have yet to show significant wear. One thing has failed: the little transparent plastic tag-holders. These went quickly, as they're no more durable than the plastic sheaths one might find on a file folder or the inside of a restaurant menu.
Product Page [Bamboo]
(Photo: Trancepriest)
Novatel's U727 EVDO Rev. A USB cellular modem is small, fast and works seamlessly with Windows PCs and Macs.
Though an improvement over earlier models like the U720, it's still larger than most thumbdrives and those looking for something super-tiny will be disappointed. Joel bought one and sent it back, disappointed by its size, but I have no problem with it at all. It's one of the few things of its type that even fits in a MacBook Air.
Setup is easier on Windows: plug it in, and the software autoruns and configures it automagically. On OS X 10.4, instructions are provided, but they didn't quite match up to reality, and you have to find your way to Internet Connect and punch some stuff in manually. Not a major problem — especially for anyone who has ever hacked a WiFi or WWAN stick to work on OSX — but this flashback to the dial-up era may give delicate Mac fans the vapors.
Throughput was excellent in my location: 1.3 Mbps down and 500 kbps up on either platform, though it seems quite sensitive to location: moving a laptop just a few yards halved that.
The stick's antenna is attractive enough, flush with its geometry when closed and not unattractive when up. There's also a tiny connector for connecting an external antenna.
One untested bonus is the MicroSD card slot; it works as a card reader for cards up to 4GB.
I've been using this all week as my iMac's sole internet connection, and haven't noticed much difference at all between it and Comcast cable internet for everyday browsing. Sprint's EVDO service is fine, assuming you get a decent connection: the iMac's web server is not accessible with the stick's global IP address, however, so perhaps there's some sanitization of connections going on. There's no noticeable degradation of images or other suggestions of "speed-boosting" proxies.
The U727 costs $280 outright or is $80 with a 2-year contract subsidy with Sprint, on whose network it was tested. You'll need the $60 unlimited plan, as EVDO will eat the $40 40Mb plan in a few minutes.
"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."
So was the challenge—the winner to receive a Terabyte hard drive from Seagate, which is celebrating is billionth sale—and so are the many fantastic entries. What better way to celebrate Terabyte-size hard drives than with a competition concerning tiny filesizes?
We hated judging this. So we picked out some extra prizes from the gadget dungeon to reward as many submissions as possible. Congratulations, everyone! Winners past the jump.
For those who prefer to play it counter-espionage safe when it comes to their data, EDR Solution's Hard Disk Crusher will do what it says on the tin: crush hard discs into MacBook-Air-thin wafers of collapsed, unreadable data. The site claims it can crush up to 6 hard disks a minute, and is even as green-friendly as a device of incredible destructive power can be: although it runs off a standard 110v outlet, you can also use a hand-pump, which will crush your drive in 15 pumps. The price for all this paranoia? A staggering 12 grand. And chances are, if you're willing to pay that to protect your privacy, you're not going to be happy until you atomize your old data for ultimate unrecoverability.
EDR Solutions Hard Disck Crusher [Official Site via Oh Gizmo]
A Japanese person throwing a boomerang and having it to return to him aboard the International Space Station is not going to throw the world of aerodynamic studies into chaos. A boomerang should work in any environment with air, if properly thrown. Now, having it return to you in vacuum would be the real trick... perhaps attainable by futuristic laser guided systems. Still, there is something comforting about this video, not only for its playful outer-space quiescence, but because it confirms that we will be able to arm our Australian space marines with their native throwing sticks when the Heliothane come swarming back in time for our natural resources.
Outer Space Boomerang [YouTube via Gizmodo via Pink Tentacle]
Lee Spievak, RC flight enthusiast, knew something was wrong from the very moment his model plane loop-de-looped in the crisp spring air. The controls were unresponsive; it was as if the plane had a mind of its own. As the tiny toy flying machine dive-bombed towards him with the ruthlessness of a bird-of-prey, its propellor blades flashing like silver talons, Lee remembered a seemingly random event with the sudden clarity of newly forged associative connection. It was only yesterday that he had cut the side of his palm. Suddenly, Lee knew what was wrong: that model plane had tasted human blood. Worse? It wanted more. Knowing full-well that if he ran he would be chased down, Lee steeled himself, shielded his face with his hands. His finger slid through the plane's blood-thirsting teeth and out the other side. His finger tip was gone, chewed up by a propellor and digested into a slurry.
It's a terrible thing to lose part of a finger, but luckily, Lee had a connection: his brother, Alan, a shaman of regenerative medicine, who sent him a small packet of "pixie dust." Like all good hoo-doo, the dust had comes from the remains of an animal: in this case, a pig's bladder scraped of its lining. The resulting cells are formed into a cellular matrix which, placed on a wound, stimulates cells to grow rather than scar. Applying the powder liberally for a month, Lee claims he was able to grow the end of his finger back... an application that has obvious promise for helping people to re-grow skin, tissue, limbs or even organs.
Unfortunately, it seems like Lee might be full of it. His finger does appear to have been badly sliced, the tip lopped off, but the before-and-after pictures make clear that he lost neither bone nor nail. The pixie dust was likely nothing more than a psychological placebo, making Lee think the body's normal healing process was miraculous. Which, of course, it is. But restoring a bit of flesh on the tip of a model plane enthusiast's finger is a far cry from re-growing the amputated limbs of Iraq war veterans.
Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at a 1950 Mechanix Illustrated article about how some of history's most famous inventions were discovered by accident. Pictured at right is Wilhelm von Roentgen's simultanious discovery of both the X-Ray and the electric razor. We made a brief stop in the seventies today with this Popular Science piece about preventing Skyjackers, and a trippy 1977 science fiction themed ad for Fairchild Semiconductor. We also looked at the booming business of balloon manufacturing, early abstract animations set to music, scientific highlights of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, phono/photo post cards, experiments with oxygen, a parachute jump tower and a 1961 ad for an IBM punched card modem. Lastly you really should check out this article about a co-ed crew of crazy miners in 1902 who built a sail powered car to cross the desert and gain access to their gold mine. The picture alone is worth the price of admission.
Dwarf mongooses (mongeese?) are trained to sniff out explosives in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, making disposal of the island's countless landmines far less dangerous. Lightweight and intelligent, they don't set off the bombs, and can yell "get me the hell out of here!" when strapped to the robots that drag them through dangerous, landmine-infested locales.
Mongoose and Robot Landmine Detector [New Scientist via Hacked Gadgets]
Asus's EeePC 4G-X, arriving May 3 in Japan, will come in three lovely new colors. Spec-wise, unfortunately, it looks like the same old first-gen Eee, with 800x480 WVGA display, 4GB flash drive and up to 2GB of RAM. Pretty, though!
Three new colors added to Eee PC [Akihabara News]
Simon Mwacharo is a Nairobi entrepreneur whose firm, CraftSkills, aims to make a thriving business out of building renewable energy projects in sub-saharan Africa. AfriGadget interviews him, finding out what it took to bring power to homes—such as his own—which had not had electricity for years.
"I was inspired by a challenge from my rural home where we have not had power for the last 40 plus years since [Kenya’s] independence [in 1963]. I come from a hill side village in Sagalla, Taita Hills in Coast Province where we receive quite some strong wind from the Nyika Plateau. This wind passes through without being tapped and sometimes our roofs can not stand in its way."
Solar is, in Africa as in the west, mostly impractical. But wind, like sunlight, is "everywhere," providing a natural, inexhaustible supply of energy. Among the most interesting of CraftSkills' installations is the one at Chifiri, which uses a turbine's power to run a pump, which filters 422 liters of water an hour from a brackish pond that is the only source of water for 500 villagers.
AfriGadget Innovator Series: Simon Mwacharo of Craftskills [Afrigadget]
Bio International of Japan makes tiny nose filtration pads, held in place by an inconspicuous transparent pince-narine. At $15, they're cheap and yet somehow grossly overpriced. Do they work? Medgaget suspects not. As a test, could someone who suffers from allergies stiff coffee filters into their nostrils, dash through a field of hay, and get back to us?
Product Page [Biopit via Medgadget]
The soul of gadget lust is to want something the moment you see it, before you have any idea what it does.
Crunched together from two generic walkman-style cassette players, the tape delay device works by recording on one side and then spooling the tape through both cassettes to the pickup on the other.
"A single tape loop runs through two modified cassettes (each which have had one of their left or right sides removed). The players themselves have had there walls (the two in the center, respectively) filed down, so the tape runs fluently. ... the tape (which moves counter-clockwise) travels through the left player (Realistic) where it's internal microphone records sound, and then travels to the Memorex which plays back the sound about 3 seconds later. "Frankly, I have no idea what I might do with it. But the likelihood of me turning up at the old electronics shop and losing a few hours to this is high.
Xalent's photostream [Flickr via Make]
Chinese company Shanling's CD-T300 Pro CD player has the bright LED display and fluorescent glow of a spinning UFO. It's neat looking. I dig it. sure, I don't really need a CD player much, but I'd put down fifty bucks or so for that. What's half a bill for a conversation piece? Unfortunately, that's 2400 times less than the money Shanling is asking: they want an astonishing $12,000 dollars for a CD Player. That's like wanting ten grand for a Walkman. All I'm saying: a $12,000 CD Player must have the minimum functionality of allowing you to skip forward and backwards in time by pushing the track skip buttons. Otherwise, it's not worth the money.
The $12,000 CD Player From Space Makes A Landing [Born Rich]
There was a time when the power of steam was used to drive mighty locomotives up mountains, to plunge mine shafts deep into the chthonic bowels of the earth, to cross the oceans and tame the dark, wild heart of the West. Now? Our bodies pasty and atrophied, we use steam power as a novel and less efficient way to do thinks we're too lazy to do ourselves.
Bridgestone's steam powered electronic newspaper shows just how low steam power has sunk. Using the mighty power of the elements, this electronic newspaper display can turn pages at an astonishing one page every fifteen seconds. You'd have a better page rate pressing your fingers against your temples, holding your breath and concentrating really hard until your eyeballs popped.
Video: World’s first full-size e-paper newspaper [Digital World Tokyo]
Outside of the dramatic gravitas of flipping one open with a burning fire of steely command in my eyes, I'm not a big fan of clamshells. Sadly, RIM's new clamshell Blackberry, the Kickstart, isn't doing anything to change my mind.
There are scant details right now, except it uses a SureType keyboard, has a trackball for navigation and has a design aesthetic inspired by the bubble-gum dispensing clamshells you buy for your four year old daughter at the dollar store. It's hard to tell from the picture but it looks cheap. No price
Let me ask you a question, clamshell enthusiasts. Why do you like flip phones? My M.O. for phones is essentially for them to be as small and light when pocketed as possible: all other considerations are secondary. Do you appreciate clamshells because it allows for bigger keys?
Blackberry launching clamshell model this year [Boy Genius Report]
The latest entry in the classic R-Type series of SHMUPs, R-Type Command for the PSP, has caught my attention by being some sort of crazy turn-based-strategy SHMUP hybrid, in which you dodge your ships past the bullet curtains of plasma-spraying alien bosses through a hex-grid. But even if that hadn't, this fantastic scale model R-Type ship that is coming as a pre-order bonus from Amazon would push the game to the top of my 'anticipated' list. How awesome is that? I'm pre-ordering, attaching a loop of fishing line and turning it into a Christmas tree ornament. The awesomest one.
R-Type Command pre-order bonus is awesome [PSP Fanboy]
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.
"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 challen
