Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Hard drive initialized

From Spinneyhead's photoset.

John Brownlee

Vinyl cutter makes CDs into 45 RPM records

Over at the mother Boing, Cory spotted this fantastic mod: armed with a vintage vinyl record cutter, Aleks Kolkowski attended Manchester's Futuresonic 2008 festival, burning audio files for festival goers on old, discarded compact dics and making them capable of being played on any old phonograph. Golden-eared audiophiles will now have a new aspect to consider in the Vinyl vs. CD debate: does a record CD sound better than vinyl?

CD Recycled 45 RPM [Futuresonic via Oh Gizmo]

Rob Beschizza

Zaurus gets Ubuntu: Will the Z rise from its grave?

Sharp's Zaurus was a radical Linux PDA series back when that kind of thing just wasn't done. They were high-end, expensive, QWERTY slabs that just weren't that great compared to sensible Windows- and Palm-driven mainstays. But I loved mine, all the same, even when I sold it on eBay a few months after buying it. And now there is a version of Ubuntu that consents to run on it.

Early users should expect to encounter interesting puzzles and challenges. He comments, "There's a lot left to tweak of course, but a full-blown Ubuntu is on it's way."

Created by Omegamoon, it's a preliminary release that's not yet ready to replace Opie or whatever you've got on your own Z — you'll also want a more modern model than the one pictured, which I've selected for my own nostalgic reasons.

Source [Linuxdevices via Engadget]

Joel Johnson

Gaming grist from Rock, Paper, Shotgun

After looking up the definition of "insouciant" — it's a quality expressed by sauce pans, I think — browsing the headlines of our favorite PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun is my favorite mid-day work avoidance routine. Here are some of the week's best:

• Pirates director Gore Verbinski to direct a BioShock film. Says RPS, "The immediate problem with using the existing narrative is that, unlike the game, the audience isn’t in the shoes of the lead character, so Bioshock’s moments of greatest resonance will be that much tougher to achieve. Potentially the big reveal could be a bit Sixth Sense - which, in fairness, was reasonably affecting on the first viewing." As long as the Big Daddies have a love interest in the Little Sisters, re-cast as large-breasted algae farmers but still wearing the same filmy dresses, everything should be fine. Oh, and someone should ride a whale just ahead of a slow-motion explosion.

• Wolf 3D turns 16. I'm just linking this because of the Lego Hitler mecha.

• Is the future of consoles the PC? asks Rossignol, who posits future gaming will be done on a monolithic home computing slab which broadcasts the visuals over IP to the display and interface of your choice. My take: I think it will be just like that, but different.

• Spore and Mass Effect (PC) will have onerous, unnecessary DRM. I actually sold my 360 copy of Mass Effect in anticipation of the PC version. Ah well. More DRM-less Sins of a Solar Empire for me.

• Ken Levine and 2K Boston to remake X-Com? As one of the only games from that era that stands the test of time (some of the interface is a little rough, but more than ably smoothed over by the waves of general brilliance) X-Com deserves an all-star polishing up. But only if — and I acknowledge that I'm about to become the fussy, aging, ossifying gamer I loathe — it's turn-based.

Rob Beschizza

Why are electronic payment systems such a wreck?

Every time we pay for something over the internet — as anyone who loves technology and gadgets surely does — many of us still shrivel with fear inside. Some are just aware of identity theft and the army of fraudsters lurking in the system. Some may have established and maintained internet merchant setups, and know how byzantine and self-serving that system is. In the last day or so, two seemingly trivial discoveries made me cringe.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Transforming Optimus Prime iPod dock! Squee!

For an 80's kid like me, Takara Tomy's transforming Optimus Prime iPod dock can't be described by words, only by phonemic abstractions meant to convey the most transcendental surges of consumerist joy. Words like SQUEE! and WOOBLEWOOP! But being an 80's kid, I'll simply fall back on a term burned into my language banks by a thousand hours of animated half-hour toy commercials. To borrow an expression from the common argot of our youths, this is just totally awesome.

$145 bucks, which is crazy, but fuck it, I'm getting one.

Transformers iPod Dock [Jlist via DVICE]

John Brownlee

LED hula hoops... you know, for kids

For $195, Etsy seller Schlabein will sell you this incredible LED Hula Hoop, which will allow you to swish a rainbow around your waist for up to 8 hours a charge. That may be worth the price if you're auditioning for Cirque du Soleil, but even I — flamboyant midnight hula hooper that I am — find it pretty steep. But if you're interested in a more basic model, Instructables can lead you through the process of building one for less than 20 bucks.

Also, full disclosure: I've stolen Technabob's pitch-perfect headline for this post. Full props to them! When discussing hula hoops, one can't improve on a Hudsucker Proxy reference.

LED Hula Hoop [Etsy via Technabob]

John Brownlee

Guitar Hero pedals for amputees

Portable console designer Ben Heck's latest project is a Guitar Hero hack that adds a useable floor pedal to the guitar controller. The pedal's most universal application is to allow you to use the whammy bar like a wa-wa pedal, but it also lets one-armed amputees play Guitar Hero by strumming with their foot. That's probably the way I'd use it too: as it is, it's hard to strum and keep your hand triumphantly aloft in a digital devil horns gesture.

Guitar Hero Pedal Controllers [Ben Heck]

Joel Johnson

World's most expensive shirt is mostly jewelry

I don't mind "World's Most Expensive" items when the companies behind them acknowledge their nature as promotional stunt. Before this shirt from Eton will be auction off for charity it will be taking a tour through some of the company's stores in Europe. Brandish details the opulence:

Features the finest Egyptian cotton yarn. The studs and cufflinks are diamond encrusted, the studs have coloured diamonds and the cufflinks have the plain old normal diamonds, yawn!

This reminds me: I need to start putting all my cheap clothing in individual black hard-sided cases.

Eton release the world's most expensive shirt [Brandish]

John Brownlee

1922 aerial captain predicts floating cities by the year 12,000

Over at Paleo-Future, they have a scan of an article from the Februrary 12, 1922 issue of the Ogden Standard Examiner. Twitchy about predicting a more near-by future that might be flung back in his dotage, the author decided to predict the world of 11922 A.D.... a world in which sunken-chested bald men in jet packs zoom through the stratosphere to visit domed basilicas kept aloft on radioactive propulsor jets. Why would humanity make its cities so catastrophically disaster prone? A Captain Lawson ("of aerial fame") suggests that the inexorable impetus of human evolution will command us to build our cities at the top of the atmosphere, just as it commanded us to crawl upwards from the ooze of the deep sea floor and conquer land. Ah, the eerily accurate sooth saying of the randomly addressed ex-military man!

10,000 Years From Now [Paleo-Future]

Joel Johnson

Patent for vibration inside game controllers, your genitals, held by same company

A company called "Immersion" holds a patent that allows them to claim royalties for things that vibrate or provide force-feedback. They're the reason that Sony's Playstation 3 controllers had no rumble features at first — it took losing an $82 million lawsuit before Sony capitulated.

But you know what else vibrates? Things you put inside yourself for sexual pleasure. (Including my personal all-natural pleasure generator: a jar of bees. Just be sure to keep the lid on tight or it won't just be a colony that's collapsing.)

Immersion didn't want to enforce its patents on teledildonic gaming devices — the name is also the cleaning instructions! — so they licensed the rights to the blandly named "Internet Services, LLC", who is in turn suing some other people and then the lawyer left so they sued him and oh I appear to be falling asleep.

Point is, the very same company who makes money for people putting pager motors in videogame controllers also will get money every time you use a USB pocket pleasurer or a commercial interactive deep core drilling simulation. Or would in theory, provided anyone actually used teledildonics for anything more than fodder for tittering.

Keker & Van Nest wants to get away from client with cybersex patent rights; won't say why [The Priot Art via Techdirt]

Previously • SeXBox: Using force feedback signals for sex toys [BB]

Rob Beschizza

Is this gonna be a stand up fight, sir, or just another duck hunt?

Craftster publishes a how-to, penned by someone by the name of "Fluffypants."

Duck Hunt zapper lamp [Craftster via ShinyShiny]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Interior misdesign

Derived from Eurobad '74 - Europe's Worst Interiors

Rob Beschizza

GTA IV critic busted lying about game

Dan Isett, the Parents Television Council’s Director of Public Policy, was caught lying about the content of top-selling game GTA IV, and his experience of it, by an enterprising reporter who went to the trouble of actually playing it himself.

Have you played the game?

“I’ve actually played ‘Grand Theft Auto IV,’ and it’s right in keeping with previous versions. The series continues to lower the bar and this is the first game that has an alcohol content warning. You get points for driving drunk in this game.”

You know that’s not true, right? The game doesn’t have points.

“If nothing else, it’s a rewarded activity. Necessary for advancement.”

I don’t think so.

“But there’s an alcohol content warning and a scene of drunk driving, correct?”

They don't really care about the game; to its critics, it's just a button to push. But when everyone is generally savvier about the game's content than them, especially the media, how can they expect to be taken seriously?

"You get points for driving drunk in this game" [AZ Night Buzz]

Update: Reuters has a short feature on "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do ," a new book from a husband-and-wife research team at Harvard Med that argues that the link between aggressive behavior in kids and violent videogames might be the inverse of the common argument.

The researchers found that 51 percent of boys who played M-rated games -- the industry's equivalent of an R-rated movie, meaning suitable for ages 17 and up -- had been in a fight in the past year, compared to 28 percent of non-M-rated gamers.

Video games don't create killers, new book says [Reuters]

Joel Johnson

Video: BlackBerry 9000 Hands-On

Crackberry bought an unreleased BlackBerry 9000 from eBay, making them one of the first to try out RIM's latest and greatest. It certainly looks like they addressed my primary gripe about BlackBerry devices: from the interface to the iPhone-influenced case design, the phone looks modern and clean inside and out. [via He Who Grübs]

Charles Shopsin

Modern Mechanix Round-UP

Today on Modern Mechanix we looked at these oh-so-cool sport binoculars, an advertisement for Harley Davidson's 1951 Hydra-Glide motorcycle, a centuries old automaton of an old woman that writes letters and learned that Canada is full of courteous people and fresh fish. This 1932 Modern Mechanix article documents the birth of the nascent US electronics industry, complete with a bunch of nifty photos. Also be sure to check out this 1968 Mechanix Illustrated article introducing the Boeing 747 and this 1934 piece about the construction of the Pan-American highway, stretching from Alaska to Argentina.

Rob Beschizza

Sandio 3D Gaming Mouse gets productivity driver upgrade

Sandio's crazy 3D mouse, which augments the standard layout with three analog thumb-joysticks, has new drivers which add support for modeling applications. AutoCAD, Maya and 3DStudio Max now map Cartesian mojo to the mouse's profusion of hats.

"Users of CAD and rendering software; such as AutoDesk’s 3D Studio Max, and Maya can now move along and rotate around X, Y and Z axes in Screen and Camera modes without switching between 3D objects and operation menus.For PC gamers, the Sandio 3D Game O2 is the only mouse of its kind designed for RTS and RPG games. It improves 3D game navigation, makes it possible to effortlessly and intuitively manipulate camera views, and even provides a competitive edge with 16 programmable keys."

I requested a review unit ages ago, but ever since it arrived it's just sat there on the shelf, looking far too intimidating to actually break out the blisterpack and make a fool of myself with.

Product Page [Sandio]

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Unicode > ASCII on the web

Google's pushing Unicode 5.1, the latest version of the ginormous meta-lingual character set, less than a month after it was released. Though Unicode surpassed ASCII and other encoding systems a few months ago, googleblog now has a pretty graph.

I once wrote a script that would translate ISO to Mac Roman in whatever way needed, so this one server which ran on some ancient, decrepit Mac running something like system 8 wouldn't munge our text workflow at the place I worked at. I am particularly sensitive to the empty square boxes of doom. I have had dreams about giant grids, with hexadecimally-named columns and rows, where every cell contains only the proprietary Apple character. Or some random thingie with an umlaut or whatever the hell Apple decided to put where the apostrophe should be.

Moving to Unicode 5.1 [Googleblog]

John Brownlee

Pedestrian crossing buttons: placebos or legit?

After reading the recent New Yorker article about the secret life of elevators clued me in to the fact that elevator close door buttons were nothing but scams, I began wondering what other non-functioning buttons I might be in the habit of maniacally thumbing in fruitless pursuit of a social myth. Astute BBG readers can fill in the punch line to that filthy joke in the comments, since I'm over my quota for the day, but Canada.com has an interesting article exposing the truth about another widely suspected placebo button: the pedestrian crossing button.

The amazing revelation? They actually work. At least in Canada.

Transportation planners around Victoria say there are no such "placebo" buttons here, but they add that the effectiveness of the button varies by intersection and region.

Brad Dellebuur, city transportation planner, says pushing the button sends a signal to the intersection's traffic controller that a pedestrian is present and enters the "walk" signal into the system's cycle.

"If you don't press it, some intersections won't give a walk signal," Dellebuur says. The traffic light timing is also determined by the amount of vehicular traffic, which is picked up by sensors imbedded in the road.

This does seem to vary quite a bit from city to city and country to country: in 2002, a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser reported that 35% of Honolulu's walk buttons were placebos. But in Europe, most pedestrian crossings are fully automatic, and have no buttons. So who knows? Since you can't be sure, we suggest rapidly hammering the button with your fist while jumping up and down impatiently, which is probably what you were doing all along anyway.

A ritual crossing Canada.com via Museum of Hoaxes]

John Brownlee

Octocube radiator looks like cubist brain meat

The Octocube radiator is a sculptural concept heater by Vivien Muller that would probably be pretty good at heating up a cold room, given all that surface area. But I can't help but think that with a thin slathering of translucent gelatin and some Pollackesque splatters of red paint, I'd have a lovely Spam-like cube of quivering cerebellum heating my living room.

Octocube [Vivien Muller via Gizmodo via Yanko]

John Brownlee

Next rash of Dell Inspirons surprisingly svelte

Rather unexpectedly, leaked images of the next batch of Dell Inspirons are somewhat exciting. Is that an actual stab at aesthetically pleasing design we're seeing here? A stab, yes. Even more impressive: is Dell actually thinking of building a laptop that will not weigh so much as to be capable of crushing a large wharf rat when dropped upon it from a height of a few inches? We can hope.

The Inspiron 1435, 1535 and 1735 will taper from a svelte 1-inch thickness to a more robust 1.5, making it MacBook Pro thin. Additionally, the three laptops will sport slot-loading drives (including a Blu-Ray option), WWAN support and processors up to Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz. Not too shabby. According to Engadget, the 1535 will be dropping on May 26th and we should see the 1735 by June 9th.

Let's all give Dell the slow clap for coming up with a laptop design that does not immediately make me want to horf.

Dell Inspiron 1435, 1535 and 1735 leaked [Engadget]

John Brownlee

Colorful and flamboyant Bluetooth headsets by Bluetrek

Many people want their Bluetooth headsets to be as subtle as possible. I am not one of them. In Berlin, there are only two sorts of people who stand in the middle of the streets, loudly talking to themselves, and the sort with whom I would avoid being mistakenly associated tends to wildly jactitate with the DTs when not complaining about the invisible insects crawling all over them. That vibrant, colorful Bluetooth headset, nuzzled in my ear canal? Irrefutable proof that I am not a lunatic. Or at least not by dint of loudly talking to no one.

So I approve of Bluetrek's limited edition Bizz and UFO Bluetooth headsets. Each one is decorated by artist Manuel Angot, and they come in all sorts of lurid patterns and colorful, chromatic swirlings. True, they aren't suitable for any professionals short of the most flamboyant of businessmen, but for the sort of hipsters who like colorful glasses and tech, these are pretty neat. At £79 a pop, though, I think I'll stick with my glitter, feathers and sparkles.

Bluetrek Bluetooth Earpieces [Techdigest]

John Brownlee

The Giger chair (xenomorphs not included)

Designer Tim Sugden claims that the inspiration for his Giger Chair came from the anamorphic aliens of its namesake, Mr. H.R. Giger. This does not grok: it is not pieced together from nearly enough rotting animal skeletons for that, nor is it shaped like an extraterrestrial vagina. Rather, it looks more like the sort of chair that Buck Rogers might lounge in while receiving futuristic, twenty-fifth century lap dances, or the sort of chair into which Dr. Heywood Floyd might strap himself during a flight aboard a Pan-American space plane in order to scrutinize a mysterious obelisk on the surface of the moon.

Giger Chair [Tim Sugden via Born Rich]

Joel Johnson

Breville iKon BKT500 toaster also burns coffee

I don't quite understand my particular fascination with toasters — I rarely eat toast — especially since I'm comfortably of the school that specialized gadgets have no place in a proper kitchen. Still I haul my Back-to-Basics toaster from under the counter from time to time, hoping the collected dust and hairballs on the unused egg poaching tray won't make their way into my bagel, trying desperately to forget that brief three-day honeymoon when I scarfed down Egg McMuffin clones.

So let's ignore that the Breville iKon toaster has a built-in coffee kettle (a percolator, I believe) and instead focus on the welcome addition of its "A Bit More" button which pulls your bread back down for a final round of browning, obviating the need for that annoying "wait for the coils to cool but not too much" routine.

Like most combo kitchen devices, this one costs more than the two items it would be replacing. It's $130.

Product Page [Breville.com.au via Like Cool via Oh Gizmo]

John Brownlee

Suissa's Enlighten PC looks like anything but

Someone once described G.K. Chesterton as a man who could rediscover the magic of a lamp post every time he encountered one. He would experience it with a fresh mind, delighted by the post's rigid contours or the magical glowing of the electrically-charged bulb. As much as I love Chesterton, I have to admit, I always thought this description of Chesterton was not meant kindly: hang out with the sort of giggling man-child constantly rediscovering the "magic" of salt shakers and mailboxes and I guarantee you'll want to karate chop his thorax within a few minutes.

Still, I'd like to impart at least some tincture of that world view into my day-to-day life. After all, why do things always look like the things they look like? That may seem like a question only grammatically clever and in actuality pretty stupid, but bear with me: why must a stereo look like a stereo, or a computer look like a computer? Their appearances are only casings for the jumble of guts within. And, in truth, designers do seem to experiment with gadgets that eschew the traditional design motifs of, say, a "computer" or "stereo..." but ultimately, people don't really want a G.K. Chesterton experience when they walk into a room. They don't want to have to rediscover the magic of a computer or a stereo when they walk into a new room: they just want to be able to use it. Usability will always trump design in importance, and the truth of the matter is that 9/10ths of usability is through familiarity.

Anyway, just some early morning navel gazing, prompted by the Suissa Enlighten Computer... a wooden cased PC containing a quad-core Intel processor, a 1 TB drive and 4GB of memory and which looks absolutely nothing like a PC. You can't buy it, only commission it, so it doubtlessly costs gobs. That's fine: if it was more attainable, it might become popular, and if it became popular, it would be emulated, and then it'd lose its real appeal (at least to me): it'd start looking like a PC again.

Suissa Enlighten Computer [Official Site via Red Ferret]

Joel Johnson

Under-the-desk machine charges batteries with your idle pedaling

Although its taking a bit of a drubbing as it passes through the chuckling locker room of gadget blogdom, this pedal-powered charger isn't as daft as its out-of-fashion powder blue design might imply. Called "Energized by You" — or at least that's what we're going to call it, since it appears to be one of those Chinese products that has so many names it's impossible to tell which one is the brand or model — the concept should be obvious to anyone at a glance: pump the pedals to recharge the battery.

And what's wrong with that? The little under-the-desk pedal exercisers might be a bit goofy, but working out while working is an idea that seems to be building momentum. Gym-class cardio machines are getting iPod docks; why couldn't the machines also use your exertion to top off your iPod's battery? Harvesting excess energy, however incidental it might be, is a solid idea.

If you'd like to purchase this particular implementation, Japanese retailer Rakuten is selling them for ¥14,800, plus shipping.

Catalog Page [Rakuten.co.jp (Machine Translated) via TFTS via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

The BBQ Sword for swashbuckling wurst roasters

The BBQ Sword is for the cook out cavalier who wishes to roast his wiener in Zorro-like anonymity. For £14.95, it even comes with an identity-obfuscating face mask, although for full effect you will need to bring your own pink satin cape and matching banana hammock... at least at the sort of cookouts I regularly and enthusiastically attend, where everyone's already wearing face masks anyway.

BBQ Sword [Firebox]

Joel Johnson

Rainbow stacking, musical toy by Heiko Hillig

"Rainbow" is a simple wooden stacking toy designed by Heiko Hillig. It's been around for over ten years — it won some German design awards in '97 and '98 — but I'd never seen the colored plywood half-hoops that can not only be appealing arrayed but also make different notes when struck with a mallet. Gracefully simple — and expensive at $175.

I can usually tell I'm going to like a product when the image makes me think, "That would look nice meandering down the front page of the site."

Catalog Page [Fawn and Forest via NotCot]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• Wi-Fi Router – Newegg is selling the Linksys WRT150N wireless router — capable of being flashed with DD-WRT or other third-party firmwares — for $60, shipped. That's about $20 off the going price. [Slickdeals]

• Tiny MP3 Player – SanDisk Sansa Clip 1GB MP3 player for $29, shipped. Destroys the iPod shuffle on a feature-by-feature basis. [Dealnews]

• Woot-Off! – Come on feel the noise.

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Revox Pareidolia

Image: Gawo23

Rob Beschizza

NES, redux

This is what the Nintendo Entertainment System would look like if it were made now, but if now was still in the 1980s. Designed by Javier Segovia of Spain, it's very much a refinement of the original, a curious speculative interpolation of two gaming zeitgeists, decades apart. But something holds it back from being truly wonderful, at least for me.

Perhaps it's the awareness that its a pretty but otherwise unoriginal rehash, all shiny 21st century case-molding and modeling techniques. A real redesigned NES could be smaller than the NES's cartridges, while a machine this large could play more than just NES games (and in fact already exists, being called the Wii.)

I think my ideal retro remake consoles would look something like an elongated pyramid, the size of a bar of Toblerone, just large enough to accommodate the cartridge slot. One could line them up in a neat (perhaps modular!) row atop thin TV sets, with identically-shaped but differently-designed models for each console.

Portfolio Page [reNESED via Kotaku]

Charles Shopsin

Today on Modern Mechanix

Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at this nifty wrist watch camera from 1939 that holds enough film for 36 photos, an odd cure for hay fever, a shipboard kennel located in a false funnel on the ocean liner Normandie , another "compact" hearing aid that isn't so compact, a 1914 amphibious vehicle called the Hidromobile that bares a striking resemblance to a clog and a tubby, well dressed robot that can dance. From 1939 we learned what Popular Mechanics thought a stay on Mars would be like, and Mechanix Illustrated asks the frightening question: "Will Polar Waves Swamp America?" along with some awesome illustrations in case the headline didn't sufficiently scare you.

John Brownlee

Take flight from your cubicle with the Rocket Chair

Kyle Michaelson's Rocket Chair allows any user ensconced within its orthopedic fold to thumb a button during a moment of wild-eyed panic, triggering a five hundred pound thrust hydrogen-peroxide rocket motor to spew out seven gallons of fuel in forty five seconds, sending him hurtling through the roof and into the stratosphere. A pilot ejection system for the nervous desk jockey, then, although it's worth mentioning that with only 45 seconds of counter-gravitational thrust, the Rocket Chair barely affords more lift than your generic flatulent World of Warcraft enthusiast.

Blast Off With The Rocket Chair [Gizmowatch]

John Brownlee

Retro wristwatch map for motoring Gatsbies

At times, inventors of ages past showed enormous ingenuity in the construction of their charmingly intricate devices. Other times? They just took an existing idea and, bereft of creativity, made it smaller, more fiddly and less functional. Come to think of it, not much has changed: only the aesthetics.

At first glance, this 1927 map watch is pretty nifty: an antediluvian GPS, don't you know. It was called the Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator, a name so clunky, unmemorable and artless that it even sounds like the name of a modern GPS device. The idea was simple: the Wooster-esque motorist would putter around England, scrolling a tiny paper map loaded in his wrist as he went with two black knobs. If you took a turn, you simple slid out one map and inserted another one and continued on your way.

What ho! Ingenious! Except a complete road map only cost a few pence back in 1927, where as this device would have set you back around 5 quid. And just like modern GPS map providers, the real business model was in selling you additional maps.

Which leaves the design. I quite like it: it's cheap, but whimsical and adventurous, like something you might strap on your wrist to traverse Oz.

Fancy driving with this... the earliest wind-up sat-nav [Daily Mail via Gizmowatch]

John Brownlee

iRex's iLiad Book Edition e-book reader

Until Amazon decides to pipe up with the Kindle in Europe, I'm reduced using my old Dell Axim to read downloaded John Wyndham novels in the dark and impotently railing in theory against the Kindle's gauche design and bizarro PDF abilities, all the while secretly knowing I'd pick one up in a flash anyway, just for the convenience of being able to download any book I wanted to read, anywhere, at any time.

iRex's new e-book reader, the cleverly titled but stupidly capitalized iLiad Book Edition, is a far better looking device than the Kindle, and even sports some features the Kindle doesn't have, such as native PDF support, a built in Wacomm tablet and... huh... Ethernet, what? Extra points: unlike the Kindle, it's actually available in Europe. But without the killer feature of Amazon's perpetual cellular connection to its archive of digital literature, what's the point, especially at €499? Come on, guys: in the post Kindle age, you at least need to offer wi-fi, which even the original iLiad apparently had (at a €150 premium). No wonder they're not releasing this in the States.

Iliad Book Edition [Mobile Read]

Rob Beschizza

Report: HP Accuses Amazon of selling fake laptops

Here's a perfect example of why support staff need to receive exhaustive training before they are permitted to represent a company. In trying to avoid covering under-warranty repairs for a laptop, a HP staffer claims that Amazon "probably" sold her counterfeit HP equipment.

'I said "There is no way that my laptop is not a brand new. It's HP Sealed and sold by Amazon.com. Are you telling me the HP seal is a fake one too?" He said "Probably." I asked, "With my laptop serial number, does my laptop match every specification on your HP database?" He said "Yes." I said, "That's what HP built and sold to me. As a customer/consumer, who will take their laptop apart and check if there's a serial number on the motherboard before they buy?" He argued, "But HP will not ship anything without a serial number."'

Underneath it all is a less ridiculous but far more evil claim, repeated several times—according to the customer—by HP's myriad organs: that its warranty does not actually cover what HP manufactures, only the software it installs on it.

On the other hand, if Amazon really is selling fake HP gear, that's just super.

HP Denies Your Warranty, Accuses Amazon Of Selling You A "Fake" Laptop [Consumerist]

Rob Beschizza

Dance of the Metronomes

Momentum rules.

via DVICE and Music Thing

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• Creative MP3 Players – Various refurb items, mostly MP3 players, from Creative, including Zen Stone for $14. [Slickdeals]

• Powerline Networking – Panasonic HD-PLC PowerLine Ethernet adapter two-pack for $41, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Kill-a-Watt – The handy little Kill-a-Watt energy usage monitor for $19, shipped. Not a huge discount, but these things are handy. [Dealnews]

• Blood Pressure Monitor – Today's Woot! is the Mark of Fitness HP-787/MF-86 Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor for $25, shipped.

Rob Beschizza

Philips' iClone is the Xenium 800

You already know everything this does, saving the neat edge-to-edge touchscreen. Accept this post's lack of obvious specifications as a kind of half-assed minimalist reflection on this gadget blogger's bafflement at a single, simple fact—it's took the industry more than a year to start cranking the lookalikes out.

Meizu seems suddenly to have been radically agile. Coming soon: something which does what the iPhone does without looking like something from an alternative universe where Apple hired high-school kids with pirated copies of 3D Studio Max instead of Jonathan Ive.

Philips full touchscreen mobile phone [Justamp via Unwired via Engadget]

John Brownlee

Tetris theme blown on bottles

United in plosive time lapse synchronicity, three bottle-blowers play a song known to Russians as Korobeiniki but to most Americans as Gameboy Tetris Music Type A, and it's just about the best version of the song since Ozma took a stab at it. At first, I suspected trickery: surely no three individuals could remain in such musical synchronicity after having emptied what appears to be a couple dozen bottles of beer, wine and vodka between them. Then it all made sense: their song choice betrays them as Russians, after all.

Tetris Theme on Bottles [Snotr via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Hoodie speakers keep open lines of communication

Tim Dubitsky's hood.e garment has speakers unobtrusively sewn into the hood, making it possible for the wearer to listen to music without shutting herself off from the world. These are unpowered speakers, one hopes, making it possible to remove them for the dry cleaners. The thought of using these to inflict a little noise on others—so they may enjoy the thrill of outrage, of course!—has its charms.

Can you not see young w1n5t0n in this?

Product Page [via Makezine]

John Brownlee

Powered by Lemarchand: the Hell's Illusion Mini PC

Granted, the Hell's Illusion Mini PC is a mod that only a lifetime Fangoria subscriber could love. Luckily, I am that subscriber. Who needs a Mac Mini when you can drive your home media center with a computer powered by the frickin' Lament Configuration? Utterly ridiculous, but I don't care. Truly, a computer for explorers in the further regions of experience... demons to some, angels to others, Vista users to all. Jesus wept.

The Hell's Illusion PC [Techeblog]

John Brownlee

Rave Raffe the electric giraffe

At last weekend's Maker Faire, this seventeen-foot robot giraffe approached small children and ordered them to pet him in a voice of cold, montone command. "He. He. He. That tickles," he would say when his sensors are stroked in a chilly, oddly haltering tone that might be best described as the phonemic equivalent of the Syncro LET font. It was weird, yet oddly delightful... which should be taken as good news for any roboticists working on perfecting perversion routines for their AIs. Society will accept your creation. Look at Tickle Me Elmo.

The Giraffe — alternatingly called Russell or Rave Raffe — is the creation of Lindsay Lawlor and Russell Pinnington, and also makes regular appearances at Burning Man.

Electric Giraffe [Official Site via Gadget Lab]

Image: Wired

Joel Johnson

Video: Week in the Woods

Week before last I attempted to work from the woods for a few days powered only by the sun and pluck. It sort of worked out. Here is the video proof.

John Brownlee

Work while working out with the TrekDesk

The exercise-while-desk-jockeying initiative is a valiant idea for a sedentary age, but despite assertions to the contrary by the companies selling gizmos, it's actually harder to concentrate on that spreadsheet when your heart rate has popped your eyeballs out of their sockets and a miasma of your own foul drippings has turned your screen jaundice-color. There is a reason why physicists don't crack superstring theory when in the middle of a series of hundred kilo clean-and-jerks: it's pretty hard to pay attention when you're about to puke out your heart.

Nevertheless, TrekDesk is selling an adjustable desk add-on for your treadmill which they claim will increase concentration and productivity. No, it jolly well won't, but it's a valiant effort, and I like their bouncing chair accessory. It's an exercise ball attached to a seat, and TrekDesk claims it allows you to work on your core muscles while sitting, but upon seeing the pictures, I immediately thought: "Hmm. Bouncing while working does sound like fun." This is Boing Boing, after all.

TrekDesk will be available in Q3 this year, price undetermined.

Trek Desk [Official Site via Oh Gizmo! via Uberreview]

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Bot, Bikini, Boombox

Image: Fffound!

Rob Beschizza

More store credit for good reviews

Camera stores aren't the only folks getting in on the reader-review bribery game. The Consumerist and Gizmodo today double-team another gadget shop found to have encouraged naughty shenanigans with a little store credit.

"Dear Valued Customer, If you have purchased from us before and feel we did a good job, please use the link below and rate us 10/10 and we will give you $5.00 in credit to use for anything on our website."

Challenged, the sneaky store said "We worded the email that was sent out improperly," prompting Giz's Mark Wilson to quip "Of course! It's like a multi-word typo."

It's almost enough to make you think that anonymous, aggregative review systems are intrinsically corruptible!
TheCellShop.net Caught Bribing Customers To Submit "Perfect" Reviews [Consumerist via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Sprint: we want you to compare Instinct with the iPhone

There's often a certain ambivalence in the message behind iPhone-like handsets, as if the creators aren't sure how to pitch them without admitting they've become market-followers. Sprint and Samsung, however, with their new iPhone vs. Instinct spots, understand that comparisons are necessary. It's what we do, it's what you do, and the only way they can influence it is to do it themselves, loading the matchup with its own bias.

There'll be 5 videos in all, with this GPS ad being the first. The rest are coming on Thursday.

iPhone vs Instinct: GPS [Nowisgood.com]

John Brownlee

Dell breaks out tattoo surfer laptops by Mike Ming

Dell is now selling their Inspiron 1525 series of laptops with designs by artist Mike Ming. They're designed to be "attuned to youth culture," which is one of those artfully clueless turns of phrase that could only be put earnestly on paper by a press release writer secretly mystified by these crazy kids today with their Dinosaur Comics and their LOLCats and their Substance D.

One Ming Inspiron will set you back about $699, although from my mother's anecdotal experience ordering what Beschizza might have called a "whore red" laptop from Dell, I wonder if the Ming design is just a sticker, in which case you're probably better off just going to Gelaskins. Hell, Dell should just team up with those guys: they're awesome.

Mike Ming Inspirons [Dell via Crunchgear]

John Brownlee

The Adix: a proto-steampunk calculator

One of my favorite retro-techno-fetishistic sites, Retro Thing, has a great post-up looking at the Adix Calculator ... a wonderfully gear driven adding machine from the early 20th century that looks like the cerebral base processor of some fantastic Victorian mechanical man.

Adix calculators in good condition sell for well over $1000. Part of their charm is that - like steam engines - they're fascinating to watch in action. You get the feeling that you understand intimately how they function, even if you don't really grasp the fine details. The charm of precision engineered mechanics is at the heart of the 'steampunk' movement, although lately the term has been co-opted to mean "modern electronics in a neo-Victorian case." This, on the other hand, shows that the steampunk movement is rooted firmly in the mechanical reality of a century ago.

The Adix: Proto-Steampunk Calculator [Retrothing]

John Brownlee

Wallets made of old tennis balls, stickers, traffic cones and trading cards

Kansas-city accessory guys Refinding scour junkyards and flea markets for improbable vintage materials and then craft them into one-of-a-kind wallets, jewelery, belts, purses and watches. The wallets, in particular, are amazing: the Garbage Pail Kid wallet to the right is exactly the style of wallet I, as an eight year old, thought I would be carrying around as an adult. Ex Libris Anonymous of fashion design.

Refinding [Official Site via Uncrate]

John Brownlee

Shout at your wrist in the street with the EP2502 cell phone watch

I'm an apologetic fan of wrist watches that double as cell phones. largely because of a boyhood fascination with Dick Tracy that had my grade school teachers puzzled by the flabby boy with the wild mop of hair and crazed eyes in the back of their classroom, loudly calling APBs into his "radio watch"... which was, in actuality, a He-Man swatch. Leave aside that it makes more sense to use your cell phone as a time piece than it does to use a watch as a cell phone: there's something about shouting, "Hello! John Brownlee here!" at my wrist that appeals to me, even if it is functionally both inconvenient and absurd.

The EP2502 cell phone watch seems a cut above its competitors, though. It's still every lick as ridiculous as you'd expect, but it's actually fairly attractive, featuring an OLED touch screen, a 2 megapixel camera, tri-band support, Bluetooth and even waterproofing. It's being released in just a few days for $250, which seems respectable.

Of course, where these cell phone watches really fall apart is privacy: it's not practical taking your watch off every time you need to answer your phone, which means you'll need to hold your wrist up to your ear like for swathes of time or loudly shout at your wrist in the street while passers-by shoot you alarmed looks. I suspect no one's really going to get into these until they simply function as wearable video conferencing devices. Then we'll all feel like Dick Tracy.

EP2502 OLED WaterProof TriBand Watch Phone [Surprising Gift via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Robot mimics human voice with music instruments—weirdly

I've attempted three times to cut a paragraph that describes what this thing does, but I'm not getting anywhere. If it were simply mimicking the human voice with random plunky musical instruments, it wouldn't be what it is: wonderful mad magic emerging from a mindless brain.

The Looping Musical Robot [Vimeo via Make]

Rob Beschizza

Foosball for the larger family

If the reproductive therapy worked a little better than expected, keep the litter entertained with Amstel's gargantuan foosball table, created for a Champions' League promo event. Big enough for 22 players—a full soccer team—it has 24 legs, dozens of little plastic men, and requires 6 flight cases to be shipped.

Source [Home Airworks via DVICE]

John Brownlee

Gamepad hack turns Sony UX UMPC into portable instagib staging ground

Sony's UX UMPC is certainly powerful enough to run Unreal Tournament 2004, but with a four-inch arrangement of QWERTY chiclets for a control scheme, it's certainly not going to be playable. Modder Dan Middle decided he wanted to transform his UX into the ultimate portable fragging device, so he hacked a USB gamepad to fit the UX. The mod is simple — it's basically a foldable mini USB gamepad that slots into the UX's compact flash port with a dummy CF card for stability while plugging into the USB port just beneath. I doubt you'd want to jump online with this configuration, but it's good enough to instagib on the road.

DIY gamepad attachment for Sony UX UMPC [Slashgear]

John Brownlee

New York camera shop offers bribes to erase bad Amazon ratings

Last time we saw Joel, he was murmuring something about charging forth and finding a coterie of Costa Rican bikini babes willing to make a martini in his mouth. We haven't heard from him since. But over at Joel's other blog, Dethroner compatriot Jason has a post about a scuzzy New York camera shop that charged him $75 shipping for his $5,000 Nikon D3, then threw it loose into a large box and allowed a sumo wrestler to belly flop atop it. This prompted Jason to leave an understandably negative Amazon review of the seller. Now they're trying to bribe him to remove it...

After looking into the said situation, we are not sure who you spoke to. However, we are looking into the situation as customer service is our number one priority here at Cameta Camera. In addition, we are also going to be speaking to the shipping manager in regards to how the unit was packaged and shipped. We also have the following option to offer you as a remedy.

We are ready to issue you a credit for $75.00 back to your Amazon account (which is the original freight paid). Our’ only concern is that in the past we have made an accommodation for a customer but they have left us negative feedback anyway. If you would be willing to remove your negative feedback remark to our account (and then email me to let me know that it has been done) I will issue the credit right away. We pride ourselves on good customer service and we are willing to work with you.

The first part of their response is good: we fucked up. The second paragraph, though, completely dismisses the value of fessing up to a mistake: "oh, we'll give you your shipping back, but only if this remains between you and me."

NY Camera Store Offers Bribe to Fix Amazon Rating [Dethroner]

John Brownlee

HTC announces the iPhoney Touch Diamond

HTC unveiled in London today its new entry in their Touch line-up of phones, the Touch Diamond: a wonderful phenomenon of iPhone me-tooism that apes all the features of Apple's phone and throws 3G into the mix. That's tentatively exciting until you realize that, by all accounts, the iPhone will have 3G by the time HTC's Touch Diamond gets released. Since HT will be unveiling the Touch Diamond in Europe in June, whether or not the Touch Diamond is the only 3G iPhone-like solution for continentals will have a lot to do with whether or not Apple rolls out iPhone 2 globally all at once.

It's certainly not a shabby looking phone though. It's running Windows Mobile 6.1 with what appears to be an iPhone-ified skin, and features all the rest of the iPhone staples: VGA touch screen, an accelerometer for rotating the screen, and a full-featured web browser (provided by Opera this time; HTC swears that IE6 is also coming, which I'm sure is a prospect that will give us all a big rubbery one). HTC says that YouTube will be supported by an app... I'm assuming that's just YouTube Mobile crap. And, of course, Quad-band HSDPA 7.2.

There's no pricing details yet, but HT is promising it in June as an Orange exclusive. America will get it sometime later, but there's no telling which network it'll be on when it hits the States, though money's certainly against AT&T.

Image: Gizmodo

HTC unveils new HTC Touch Diamond, "not too big, not too small" [Engadget]

John Brownlee

Kensington's iPhone battery packs: one umbilical, one integrated

Without any ability to pop out one battery and slam in another, the iPhone certainly requires a few on-the-go battery charging solutions. No surprise that your local Apple store is stocked up the wazoo with them, and Kensington's latest offerings are just two more clowns crammed wokka-wokka-style into the telephone booth.

The larger of Kensington's battery packs will give you an extra 100 hours of music and 6 hours of talk time for $70, but the obvious disadvantage is lugging around a battery pack almost the size of the iPhone itself. I have to say, I see little reason to upgrade past Kensington's lither, integrated model: for $50, it gives an extra 30 hours of music and 3 hours of talk time, which should be enough to get you over the hump of the most bladder-bursting of airport tarmac delays.

Kensington unveils Battery pack and Charger for iPhone / iPod [Kensington via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Abandoned

dheaddy's photostream [flickr]

John Brownlee

Abney Park's vacuum-tube violin mod

At last weekend's awesome MAKEr Faire — where everything was steampunk, apparently! — steampunk / goth band Abney Park debuted this fantastic violin mod on stage for the first time. Modified with vacuum tubes and blinking LEDs, the violin was designed by Molly "Porkshanks" Friedrich, and the vacuum tubes pulse with color as the strings vibrate. But I'm going to re-echo Slashgear's question on the sound quality: don't violins require a certain form for optimal tonality?

Abney Park Violin [MAKE]

John Brownlee

Microsoft donates special 360 kiosks to children's hospitals

In a refreshingly non-evil move from a company that seems to make a point of not being quite as evil as I think they secretly must be, Microsoft has announced that they are teaming up with the Companions in Courage Foundation to install special Xbox 360 kiosks in children's hospitals around the country.

The kiosks will be packed with games, movies and television shows — most likely of the more innocuous Viva Pinata sort instead of eyebrow-raising murder-death-kill simulations. Even better, the 360s will come installed with a special version of Xbox Live that will only match up sick kids in multiplayer matches from children's hospitals around the country. The sound of sobbing is about to be replaced with peals of laughter, automatic weapons fire and triumphant shouts of "OWNED, NOOB!"

Nothing to criticize here: this is just pure class. Good on you, Microsoft. If you want to donate to help bring more 360 Kiosks to hospitals around the country, consider giving a donation to Companions in Courage.

360 Kiosks Coming to Children's Hospitals [Kotaku]

John Brownlee

Winner: The Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 Weekend's Awesomest Player

You came, you saw, you conquered. You backstabbed engineers, uber-ed pyros, farmed medic achievements and beat mesomorphic Austrians clean to death with baseball bats... all while the Boing Boing puppet masters clapped their hands in fey delight at the gladiatorial orgy they had Nero-like decreed.

And now we're ready to declare our awesomest player for last weekend's Boing Boing Team Fortress 2, with the adjective "awesomest" decided entirely by Happy Mutant whim. This player will receive a Neuros OSD video storage device. And by consensus, our winner is... Bunnystew. At over 10 hours logged into our server, Bunnystew was this weekend's most committed Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 player, by far. Congrats, Bunnystew! Drop brownlee at boing boing dot net an email to receive your prize.

For the rest of you guys, don't fear: we've got the server for a little while, and we'll schedule matches every weekend until we give it up. Thanks for playing, guys! See you this weekend.

John Brownlee

Hands free umbrella with name of space prostitute is inventor's $400k dream

Monica Hesse of the Washington Post has written a weird little piece about the Nubrella, an over-the-shoulders plastic dome which is marketing itself as the Umbrella 2.0, despite the fact that it features a five-step opening process and you need to put on a harness to keep it on. It's being described by its creator — who claims he's invested $400,000 into the Nubrella's creation — as the perfect umbrella for the on-the-go cell phone jockey who must always be charging down the street, thumbs a T9 blur as he texts, no matter what the weather. This prompts Monica to inexplicably note that...

Think of the 21st-century possibilities [of the Nubrella]. No more one-handed texting. No more rummaging for the ringing PDA while trying to keep the groceries off of wet pavement. Chatting, waving, toting, umbrella-holding: four tasks that were never before simultaneously possible.

The whole article's clearly a spoon-fed adverstory with some quirky umbrella history thrown in, but that's okay. The tone's hysterical: "Oh, sure, you might think the umbrella's pretty much perfect, but if you're so smart, why don't you tell me something, champ? Ever tried juggling while holding an umbrella? What about taking your contacts out, or defribillating a newborn, or walking on your hands? Who thinks the umbrella's perfect now, Mr. Weisenheimer? You need a Nubrella!" It's like declaring the shopping bag a failed accessory because it can't hover, open up into a dimensional wormhole or travel back in time.

If you would, for any reason, like a Nubrella, though, it's not too dear at $49.95. Think of all the antediluvian pedestrians you'll be able to stupefy into quadruple heart attacks, waving and using an umbrella at the same time like some sort of 39th Century Moon Man.

Need to text in the rain? They've got it covered. [Washington Post]

Rob Beschizza

Chargeback database protects merchants--unless you pay to be removed from it

Forgive me, readers, but we're heading off the gadget reservation for this one.

The Consumerist has a piece today on a custom-auto shop whose contract forbids chargebacks. For those not in the know, that's when you call your credit card issuer to dispute a charge, a procedure that the auto shop will have agreed to abide by in its own agreements with Visa, Mastercard and the like. Most interestingly, however, another clause in the contract says that if you do so, it will add your name to a "chargeback abuse database."

The problem, for merchants, is that credit card companies usually side with the customer when disputes arise, even when it's abundantly obvious the merchant is in the right. That said, the idea that someone maintains and shares an unregulated database of possibly-defamatory information, to which may be added any customer's personal data (regardless of whether their complaint is merited or not), seems deliciously unscrupulous.

Curious, I googled the phrase "chargeback abuse database." There are a number of online businesses that threaten to add you to this mysterious chargeback database — but who will happily remove you from it if you pay a cash penalty.

Behind some of them, at least, is a website calling itself Chargeback Protection, founded to "address the problem of chargeback abuse and minimize the related economic losses."

The odd part: what use would such a database be to merchants if it can be wiped by the very "abusers" it ostensibly tracks? Even those who merely warn a merchant that they'll contact their credit card holders are targeted for inclusion: Chargeback Procetion's homepage asks for reports of "chargeback threats" as well as actual chargebacks.

VISA prohibits its merchants from imposing "no chargeback" policies on customers. Read on to read some of the novel anti-chargeback terms and conditions we found.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Retrofuturistic Nixie Tube clocks by Peter Jensen

TubeClock [Official Site via Retro-Thing]

John Brownlee

Electro-occular implants transform blind grandmas into NBA stars

Daily Tech has a great article up about the newest revisions of Second Sigh Vision's Argus electro-occular implant technology, which aims to partially restore sight to the blind.

The earliest trials in 2004 featured a 4x4 inch grid of electrodes to translate incoming light into electrical signals to be passed onto the brain, but Argus Mach II is now up to 60 electrodes in a 10x6 grid. That doesn't sound like a lot, but Second Sight thinks the 60 electrode version will allow the blind to read, and even 16 electrodes is enough for the blind to live dramatically improved lives.

Linda Morfoot, 64, living in Long Beach, California, has suffered from retinitis pigmentosa from her initial diagnosis at 21, and by 50 was almost entirely blind. She received an implant of the 4x4 version in 2004. She says the device is life changing and a complete success. She explained, "When they gave me the glasses it was just amazing. I can shoot baskets with my grandson, I can stay in the middle of the sidewalk. I can find the door to get out of a room, and I can see my granddaughter dancing across the stage. When we went to New York I could see the Statue of Liberty, how big it was. In Paris we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night, and I could see all the city lights. I feel more connected to what's around me."

What an incredible world we live in, where blind grandmas deftly swish basket after basket from the three point line with the aid of their cybernetic eyeballs! That's a bit of hyperbole, of course, but that's the wonderful thing about it: soon enough, it won't be.

Bionic Eyes Impolants Give Partial Vision to Blind Patients [Daily Tech]

John Brownlee

Rotating screw becomes DIY clock

Bomi Kim's DIY clock-making concept, The Meaning of Time, has a certain Korokova Milk Bar minimalism to it. Essentially, it's just a plastic screw, with minute and hour shafts horologically rotating according to the usual standards of time-keeping. You simply smash it into a planar surface, stuff two objects through the holes, and voila: your own clock. I think, though, that the real possibilities of such a device will only become apparent when someone on Modblog hammers one into his pineal gland, tattoos his face with digits and inserts his fingers through the holes whenever someone asks him for the time.

Making Your Own Clock [Yanko Design via Wired]

Rob Beschizza

Intel Atom headed for miniature motherboards: perfect for homebrew gaming consoles?

Wonder: tiny motherboards from Via Technologies which fit inside anything from bottles of whisky to hollowed-out books. Dismay: They're not very powerful and tend to be sold to the people who make cash registers. Refresher: Intel's Atom and Via's Isaiah high-performance, low-power chips to be added to Mini-ITX 'boards.

"With Intel restricting its Atom processor to only be used with mini-ITX-based motherboards, mini-ITX chassis are expected to see a surge in demand in June, according to sources in the channel. ... In order to make a clear separation between nettop products and traditional entry-level PCs, Intel only allows Atom processors to be used with mini-ITX motherboards, limiting the platform with a lack of PCI Express and only a single DIMM slot for up to 2GB DDR2 memory."

It's not really clear to me if the "limitation" here is really a specified restriction from Intel or merely inherent to the small motherboards' lack of features. A company called Arbor, for example, makes a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PCI-Express x16 slot--let's see if it's got plans for an upgrade.

Intel Atom to boost mini-ITX chassis [DigiTimes]

John Brownlee

A swarm of tiny robot vacuums for your apartment

These tiny robot vacuums — suctioning servos juiced by the miniature power bank cluster of a pair of AA batteries — are very clearly not going to go head-to-head with a Roomba, despite their adorable pincer arms lifted above their heads in a display of preemptive triumph. Still, at $14.99 each, you could unleash a whole swarm of the miniature vacuuming robots upon the filth of your apartment for the price of a Roomba. Boing Boing Gadgets will continue to appraise you of easy and affordable robot overlord opportunities as they develop.

Robot Vacuums [Perpetual Kid]

Rob Beschizza

Spy sunglasses not likely to be in Bond's arsenal

Imagine that someone advances on you wearing a clunky pair of cheap-looking sunglasses, their head tilted slightly askew so that the accessory's inch-thick rim, sporting a giant lens, has a better view of your breasts. Would such a device qualify as "spy" equipment?

"These camera sunglasses certainly aren't x-ray specs, but they do capture 1.3 megapixel still images (at a resolution of 1280x1024). The included RF remote-control is ideal for easy, stealth-style photo shooting. ... The sunglasses also allow you to enjoy your music via MP3 playback."

"Stealth-style" is a phrase that should not be uttered without wild, ninja-like gesticulation and a correspondingly dangerous facial expression.

Product Page [ThinkGeek via Everything USB]

Rob Beschizza

Tape measure records voices, glows feebly

One from the random convergence device generator: a 16-foot tape measure with a voice recorder and one of those ineffectual LED lights, so "you'll be able to see exactly what you're measuring." I can record only 20 seconds of audio, and costs $20.

Why stop there? What would it have cost to add, say, an FM radio? Or a rape alarm?

Product Page [X-tremegeek via Gizmodiva]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Insert Coin

Hey-gem's photostream

Rob Beschizza

Laptop Mag rounds up the littl'uns for typing speed battle

HP Mini-Note vs. Eee PC vs 2Go PC: WPM Fight!

"Based on the average words per minute among our contestants, the HP Mini-Note easily conquered the Eee PC and the 2Go PC. Our typists produced an average of 53.25 wpm on the Mini-Note, despite concerns about its lack of tactile feedback. The 92% full size keyboard certainly provided the advantage over the child-sized keys on the Eee PC and the 2Go PC. Our traditional touch typists, ESC Artist and Key Crusher, found the extra real estate on the Mini-Note to be vital to their success."

I'm in the market for a small, cheap laptop; picking between the nine-inch Eee and the HP is going to be a tough one.

Mini-Notebook Typing Madness Part I: Eee PC [Laptop]