Rob Beschizza

Linkswap: RockPaperShotgun

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.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Le Amstrad

Rob Beschizza

Ballmer "Kicks Ass" in Time 100, beats Jobs in reader poll

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]

Rob Beschizza

BBG Weekend Warfare: Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 Server Now Live!

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!

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

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.

Rob Beschizza

Ingenious jar-friendly spoons

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]

Rob Beschizza

Beautiful boombox echoes from within double-bass enclosure

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]

Rob Beschizza

Babbage difference engine No. 2 now operational

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]

Rob Beschizza

Build your own ornithopter

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!

Build an Ornithopter [Metacafe via Make]

John Brownlee

Belkin mouse trap zips up all your mouse pad detritus

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]

John Brownlee

Imperial pint glasses declare European conformity

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]

John Brownlee

The Harmonium plots sine waves with European style

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]

Rob Beschizza

Review: A year with Bamboo's Quick Control dog gear

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]

Rob Beschizza

Review: A week with Novatel's U727 EVDO stick

(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.

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Children are our future

Source: Dog's Faint

Rob Beschizza

Winners of the Seagate Billionth Drive 1K Competition

"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.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Hard drive crushers... er.... crush drives hard

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]

John Brownlee

Boomerangs hurled aboard International Space Station

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]

John Brownlee

Model plane enthusiast claims magic powder helped him regrow finger

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.

The man who grew a finger [BBC]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

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.

Rob Beschizza

Rikki-tikki on landmine-sniffing duty

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]

Rob Beschizza

Eee now comes in pink, blue and, yes, greeen.

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]

Rob Beschizza

Nairobi businessman bringing sustainable energy to unpowered villages

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]

Rob Beschizza

Invisible nostril filters for allergy sufferers

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]

Rob Beschizza

DIY tape delay machine is useful, has the look

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. "

Xalent's photostream [Flickr via Make]

John Brownlee

The $12,000 UFO CD Player

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]

John Brownlee

Japan gets steam powered e-ink newspaper

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]

John Brownlee

Blackberry's Kickstart clamshell is coming later this year

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]

John Brownlee

Hex-based TBS SHMUP has the awesomest pre-order bonus

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]

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Binary Kite

Image: Syntopia

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