Joel Johnson

Very first phone book up for auction

The only known edition of the world's first telephone directory — the first phone book — is up for auction, reports Discovery News:

The 20-page directory was issued in November of 1878, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The phone book contained information useful to 391 subscribers within the New Haven, Conn., area who were obviously still learning their way around the new communication device.
"Should you wish to speak to another subscriber you should commence the conversation by saying, 'Hulloa!'" it instructs.

...

No phone numbers were printed in the Connecticut city's milestone book -- just the names of subscribers.

World's First Telephone Book Surfaces [dsc.discovery.com]

Joel Johnson

BoltBus fleet has free Wi-Fi, power in every seat

A new bus service called "BoltBus" offers free Wi-Fi an power outlets in all its vehicles. I just looked up the rate from New York to Boston (my most typical bus trip) and it's twice as much as the Chinatown options...which leaves it at a very affordable $20. I'd gladly pay $10 extra for Wi-Fi through the whole trip, even if it is likely just a 3G or satellite connection split between everyone on the bus.

BoltBus currently services New York, Boston, Philly, and D.C.

Company Page [Boltbus.com via Geeksugar]

Joel Johnson

Aga Four Oven Cooker skips whiz-bang for cast iron badassery

This "Four Oven Cooker" from Aga is made from cast iron, covered in "three coats of vitreous enamel" in fourteen different colors, weights 1,290 pounds, and must be installed by a certified fitter. It's available in an electric model, but please, if you can, go with the gas version. This is appliance porn at its finest, no unnecessary and fragile space-age frippery, but four separate simple ovens, all holes filled with hard cook. It's enough to make a gingerbread witch swoon.

It's $15,500 for this model (the one in the picture is technically the electric model, but the gas ones look the same) and features a specialized roasting oven behind door number five.

Product Page [Aga-ranges.com via Appliancist]

Joel Johnson

Video soporific: Cornelius music video

I could try to muster some connection between the all-white, claymation effects of this new music video from Cornelius and, I dunno, eastern design aesthetics, but that'd be a stretch. How about this: I just really like it. Enjoy your calm.

[via TV in Japan]

Rob Beschizza

Virtual worlds to visit before you die

Check out Tom Chick's new games-writing gig at Sci-Fi, Fidgit. Among the first entries is a virtual edition of places you must visit before you die...

Paris, Rome, Fiji, the Taj Majal? Pshaw. Yeah, sure, the graphics are pretty good and the back stories are great, but the fees are huge and you can't save your game. Plus, they won't yet run on any gaming system you own. So instead, here are five virtual places you must visit before you die, and you don't even have to leave your house to do it.

On the itinerary: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Assassin's Creed's Damascus, GTA 4's Liberty City, Bioshock's Rapture, and LotRO's Shire.

There seems to be to be a certain vibe to the choices, a living, breathing, "humanist" edge that might preclude popular gaming locales like, say, Hyrule. I'd like to sneak in the bleak, hazy beauty of the setting from Ico and Colossus. Few things stick to my heart for long in the artless cultural landfill of gaming, but that did.

Fallout's post-apocalyptic America has its charms, too, and it's something we'll be getting a fresh look at soon, thanks to Bethesda's forthcoming Fallout III. Speaking of Bethesda, I'd also include the alien milieux of Morrowind Isle—but not the setting of it's generic Med-Fantasy sequel, Oblivion. Joel, when asked, doubled up on GTA IV: "It continues to blow me away with its verisimilitude."

Oh, and so what if no-one's played it yet: Love's landscape (pictured) looks so stunning I can barely imagine not wanting to drop by.

John is out of town, but he would probably say Planescape:Torment or something. First person to say "Azeroth," gets disemvowelled. First person to say "Second Life" gets disembowelled.

Five Places... [Fidgit]

Joel Johnson

Grand Theft Auto IV thoughts

When taking a cab a couple of nights ago up the west side of Manhattan, I realized that after a couple of weeks of playing Grand Theft Auto IV I had begun to conflate my internal model of New York City with that of the game's own Liberty City. Not the streets — after five years in New York, most of the city still seems to me isolated neighborhoods connected by warrens — but the feel. The hum. The Petula Clark subtext that can both carry and bolster a person or drag them by the ankle into the wet green. Liberty City, as a refined extract of New York City, began to mix with the model in my mind. Walking around the corner to find a cop on the stairs to the F train, I for a moment thought, He's not in anyone's line of sight. I could get away without a problem. I watched the people milling on the subway platform in Brooklyn, many in finery à la mode, and thought how much more authentically people dressed on the streets of Broker.* I noticed how from a distance the profiles of cars in the real world nicely match those in the game. (And where they don't? My mind was happy to throw out the outliers in the dataset.)

As if on cue, my cab drove by a huge billboard for GTA IV, leading man Niko Belic's face — before I played the game, frightening; now, world-weary — looked out over the Hudson. I realized those billboards would soon be down, replaced. But for now the model city reached out into the real one, making Liberty City somehow more genuine than New York by refusing to accept an ephemeral advertisement for the sake of recursion.

It's the first game I've ever played which can be recommended as a method by which to understand the atmosphere New York. Friends have asked me after seeing movies set in New York: Is that what the city is like? Not exactly, I'd qualify. There's this and that. But I've been calling friends from out of town to tell them to play GTA IV.

Is it exact? No less — and probably more — than a guide book or a novel. In fact it's better than a map for expressing the city; no New Yorker understands every cranny, every neighborhood and industrial park, but instead crafts their own model in their head from real experiences, stories from friends, too-stylized transit maps. GTA IV is another model, a distillation of a city I love — or at least a model of which I hold around my internal model of myself — that makes me understand my city even more.

Grand Theft Auto IV is the finest, most attentive simulation of a real world location yet. It's a song to the world's greatest city, crafted by hundreds, a portrait of a city that is incapable of knowing it is loved.

Also you can shoot people in the face.

* Which is, of course, dumb. What people wear is what is authentic. Inversely hence, hipster appropriation of blue-collar style.

Joel Johnson

Cricket folding, portable laptop stand

The Cricket laptop stand is portable, folding up into the little eight-inch cudgel you see at right. A fine solution for mobile computing if you spend time at the tiny desk they give you in hotel rooms. I don't. I spend much of my hotel computing just as I do at home: reclining in bed with my laptop propped up on my bent knees.

If it must be yours, they're selling it for $40.

Product Page [LCDArms.com]

Joel Johnson

Silly helmet covers for barbarian bikers

Martin at "Silly Helmet Covers" will sell you one of these stylish additions to your open face motorcycle helmet for just $44, shipped. (Helmet not included, of course.)

Product Page [SillyHelmetCovers.com]

Joel Johnson

Trail camera company offers million-dollar bounty for pictures of bigfoot

Bushnell, making of outdoor optical equipment like binoculars and infrared-triggered trail cams, has offered a $1,000,000 prize for a verifiable picture of Bigfoot taken with their hardware, reports Loren Coleman.

Bushnell Corporation (also known as Bushnell and Bushnell Outdoor Products) is an American company specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include binoculars, spotting scopes, telescopes, night vision equipment, GPS devices, laser-guided rangefinders, riflescopes, holographic gun sights, and other high-end optical equipment. The company also sells Bollé ski goggles and sunglasses, H20Optix water sports sunglasses, and Serengeti all-purpose sunglasses. It was founded in 1948 by David P. Bushnell, during his time in Allied-occupied Japan.

One of the best little trail cam models to use is Bushnell’s new camouflage Trail Scout Pro 5.0 night vision digital camera, which is designed to be mounted to a tree in the forest. It automatically snaps 5-megapixel digital photos of anything that crosses its path.

Also, no, this picture is not a bigfoot. But that makes it no less amazing.

Bushnell: $1,000,000 For Bigfoot Trail Cam Photo [Cryptomundo]

Rob Beschizza

Totem shower brings bathroom luxury to the ... yard?

Who will buy Waterdesign's Totem SHT FO 2000 outdoor shower system? It's beautifully technological—with a price to match—so it's not like it's just going to get dunked in the dust outside improperly-equipped trailers. BornRich's baroque description of it is just wonderful:

Designed to resemble a high-end art piece, the water station can be fitted with a sink, mirror, towel holder, shower accessories and customized taps to make your neighbors heart burn with all the envy Satan can possibly bestow upon his tortured soul. The iroko wood anti-slip footboard and footstall almost add insult to injury while you catch him peeping over the fence and trying to stare holes into the stainless steel beauty that lets you have hot and cold water on demand.

More details and shots turn up at Living With Style. If I was at the Pentagon, I'd order eighty.

The mystical and magical Waterdesign Totem Shower [Born Rich]

Joel Johnson

Video: DEKA's Luke bionic arm

Although there's not much more information in this video from the All Things D conference that we didn't see in earlier ones, I'm happy to see any new footage of Dean Kamen's "Luke" arm. Kamen says that they're working hard to commercialize the product.

Rob Beschizza

Handmade art keyboards are beautiful and expensive

A Nishi-Ki handmade USB keyboard is a guaranteed stunner, graced with one of a selection of fantastic illustrations.

At $155, however, that's a lot of cash for a commodity 86-key board. What is it about technology that inhibits appreciating examples of it that ask for a high premium in return for artistic quality? Expected obsolescence, perhaps?

NISHI-KI Keyboard [GeekStuff4U via GeekSugar]

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• Vacuum Sealer – "The Fresh Box" automatic vacuum food sealer and marinater for $16, shipped. Normally about $60. [Slickdeals]

• Wi-Fi Antenna – TRENDnet dual-band omni-directional antenna for $10, shipped. About half-off. [Dealnews]

• House Phones – Today's Woot! is the VTech 5.8Ghz 4 Handset Phone with Digital Answering Machine set for $60.

Rob Beschizza

Nano Ornithopter is smallest UAV

Yesterday's "Nano" was VIA's freshly-renamed Isaiah chip; today's is the Nano Air Vehicle, a tiny drone that flies by moving its wings instead of using propellers or jets. Graced by a half-mil from DARPA, creators AeroVironment have six months to convince the military it's good for something.

Weighing less than 10 grams and only 7.5 centimeters long, the Nano will "push the limits of aerodynamic and power conversion efficiency." The stated objectives are somewhat opaque...

The development of conformal, multifunctional structural hardware and strong, light, aerodynamic lifting surfaces/rotors for efficient flight at low Reynolds number (<15,000)

... But I can't help but remember something from that other bastion of ornithopter fandom, Dune:

Nano Air Vehicle [DARPA]
Nano Air Vehicle [Ubergizmo]

Rob Beschizza

Wired Senior Editor Destroys Cheap, Nasty Phone By Accident on Live TV

Wired's Nick Thompson just destroyed a Razr live on NBC's Today Show. Right in the middle of a segment where he was demonstrating the iPhone and Moto Razr, the latter slipped like butter from his hands. It hit the floor with a sharp plastic clatter and was then seen to be completely buggered.

So, folks, for Christ's sake buy a Razr: it's made of freakin' sugar.

I think it was a Razr, anyway. Either way, Nick, you rule. And I wish I taped The Today Show. Since this post isn't even remotely funny without video, could someone who did oblige?

Update: Gizmodo obliges. Unfortunately, the Razr lives, writes Thompson in a write-up at Wired's Gadget Lab.

Rob Beschizza

TechCrunch: Intelius online people search is a scam

Intelius is the market-leader in online people searches, trawling public records for information. It's headed for a $143m initial public offering. The problem? Its revenue growth is powered by deceptively signing customers up for a useless third party service which bills monthly until you notice it and cancel.

Every time a customer buys a product at Intelius, they are shown a page telling them “Take our 2008 Consumer Credit Survey and claim $10.00 CASH BACK with Privacy Matters Identity.” ... Undoubtedly a lot of consumers do the survey and move forward to the next page - it only takes a second. But what most people don’t do is read the fine print ... in light gray small text, users are told that by taking the survey they are really signing up to a $20/month subscription.

It's the way it's put in hard-to-read gray on gray text that makes it so great—a confession encoded in design principles? Arrington runs the numbers and calculates that without the scam's revenues, Intelius' would barely be growing at all. Why aren't the IPO's organizers noticing this? Would they care if they do?

Naveen Jain’s Latest Scam: Intelius [TechCrunch]

Rob Beschizza

Samsung L870 doesn't actually have Safari

Samsung's abandoned its claim that its forthcoming L870 dullphone will have the Safari browser. From The Reg:

The manufacturer has since said that the L870 is actually equipped with the S60 platform OSS browser, also known as S60 safari browser, and which uses the same webcore platform as Safari.

We'll see how it performs when it comes out, won't we?

Samsung retracts Safari phone claim [Reg]

Rob Beschizza

Post On Self Test: The Fall of Steve Jobs

[Via NOTCOT]

Rob Beschizza

Multitouch multiplayer Pong demo for iPhone

No wires, ma!

[Hatena::Diary via Asiajin and Waxy]

Rob Beschizza

Travel light with portable weighing scale

Dieters rejoice: $40 takes your obsession on the road! Magellan's 18 oz miniature electronic scales are 8.5 by 6 inches in size and only an inch deep, and come in a zippered carrying case. How long before similar-looking devices have awful video games in them, riding Wii Fit's wave?

Product Oage [Magellan Red Ferrett]

Rob Beschizza

Associated Press reviews Sony's Rolly. Verdict: It Sucks Eggs.

One could procedurally generate AP ledes describing how Sony lost the portable music market it created. A computer, however, could never generate gloriously spiteful remarks like "it's a conversation-starter if your dancing hamster has run off" and "like all eggs, it's hard to figure out the point." Bravo!

Between calling it a dumber R2-D2 and bringing Peter Fabergé into it, Rachel Metz points out other flaws in the cute but catastophically-expensive music player, such as the lack of a headphone socket(!) and its tiny 2GB of memory. The verdict? "The world's most advanced (and expensive) cat toy."

Review: Sony's Rolly not quite love at first dance [AP]

Rob Beschizza

British Justice Minister Not Gay For Bridget

There's a lot of fuss today about proposals in Britain to abolish "drawings" of child abuse. Naturally, this kicks the Internet's predilection for age-ambiguous Japanese cartoon smut, right in the balls. Or does it? Reading the original BBC article provides something of an RTFA moment:

Ms Eagle said the plans were "not about criminalising art or pornographic cartoons more generally, but about targeting obscene, and often very realistic, images of child sexual abuse which have no place in our society".

There's always that slippery slope argument about free expression—especially in increasingly creepy Britain—and about the "thought police" nature of punishing crimes without victims. But the ambiguities and gotchas recounted by critics today, such as "how would one provide records to prove the the age of a drawn character?" fall immediately foul of Eagle's explicit claim to not be targeting erotic artwork in general. In fact, by "drawings" it may refer to a section in Britain's new Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which details images "derived" from real photographs.

The idea of photoshop-filtering photos to appear superficially like genuine artwork isn't exactly novel. Conclusion: 4chan not banned quite yet.

UK Proposes Banning Computer Generated Abuse [/.]
Computer generated abuse 'banned' [BBC]

Rob Beschizza

Dying for 3G? 6 cell-tower technicians fall to death in 5 weeks

A rise in cell-tower deaths is being attributed to the breakneck rollout of 3G cellular services, which require equipment on the tall installations to be upgraded. Fortune's Apple blog tallies five deaths in only 12 days, following months of accident-free operation.

April 12: A 34-year-old cell tower technician from Oklahoma man died after falling 150 feet from monopole antenna in Wake Forest, NC. It was the nation’s first death in 2008 of a communications worker falling from an elevated structure.

April 14: A tower worker employed by Cornerstone Tower of Grand Island, Neb., fell to his death in Moorcroft, WY.

April 15: A 38-year-old technician finished tightening the bolts on a guyed wireless tower in San Antonio, TX, “sort of lean[ed] back a little,” according to witnesses, and fell 225 feet to his death.

April 17: North Carolina suffered its second cell tower fatality in a week when a 46-year-old Chesapeake, VA, man fell from a communications antenna in Frisco, NC.

April 23: A Griffin, GA, man died from extensive head and chest injuries after falling 100 feet from a communications tower near Natchez, MS. He was reportedly hanging boom gates to a Cell South antenna when he fell.

May 16: Guilford was rappelling down a load line attached to a 200 foot monopole when he stopped abruptly 140 feet up and bounced as if on a bungee cord, disengaging the carabiner that was secured to the tower.

Fatal bandwidth: 6 cell tower deaths in 5 weeks [Fortune Apple2.0 via TechCrunch]

Rob Beschizza

Turbografx emulator hits iPhone

In the England of 1987, the PC Engine, sold in the U.S. as the TurboGrafx, was a magical foreign super-console that wasn't coming to our shore. It was minuscule but unnervingly powerful, boasting the world's most perfect home rendition of Street Fighter (mysteriously renamed "Fighting Street") and a stack of ludicrous shoot-em-ups our NES-imprisoned minds could barely contain.

Now, 20 years later, all that wonder fits inside an iPhone, thanks to the latest emulator to hit Apple town.

ZODTTD [via Joystiq, TUAW and MacBytes]

Rob Beschizza

Horde of vintage trannies on Flickr

No, not the Scottsdale chapter of Quentin Crisp's fan club: it's Michael Jack's astonishing collection of more than 900 classic radios. Pictured here is a rare jade green Recency TR-1, a design that would be almost completely ageless were it not for the skinny font on the clickwh... tuning dial.

Photostream [Flickr via Retrothing]

Rob Beschizza

A coffee table in the shape of an iPod

Wired's Nicole Martinelli found an original late-1960s Ingersoll Rand iPod and repurposed it as a table. Gotta love that retro: I wonder if it had the original punch cards!

iCoffee Table [Cult of Mac]

Rob Beschizza

MSI Wind hands-on at Crave

CNET Crave has a gallery up and a hands-on of MSI's Wind. With new cheapie subnotebooks on their way from Dell and Asus and the Eee already a success, it's got to stand out—and it does...

This could be the best mini laptop so far -- it's comfortable to use, has a good display, is super-affordable and promises great performance.

We like: Screen; keyboard; value for money.

We don't like: Mouse trackpad could be bigger; no integrated 3G.

Hands-On [CNET Crave]

Joel Johnson

Disc Manager takes aim at the pornography archivist demographic

Eager to find a place for their optical disc caddy in a world moving inexorably towards other forms of storage, Disc Makers is now suggesting their Disc Manager — capable of locking certain discs inside the box unless you've got the proper password — is a "safe place to store your adult DVD collection." A laudable and authentic pitch, if all too miscalculated: who buys pornography on DVD?

Are you looking for a safe place to store your adult DVD collection? Disc Makers has you covered with the Disc Manager 100. The Disc Manager 100 allows users to store and password protect certain DVDs owners may prefer to keep private. The Disc Manager 100 and its bundled software makes it easy to locate any file and eject the appropriate disc in seconds. It also protects your CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs from damage caused by improper handling, exposure to dust, and UV light. Users can stack up to five Disc Managers 100s – allowing parents to manage a 500 disc library with just one USB connection.

Product Page [DiscMakers.com]

Joel Johnson

Paper towel dispenser design

There's not much to this post on Core 77. Just some paper dispensers in a grid. Out of context, the industrial design choices become easier to recognize, the sticky emulsion of the original iMac seeping through the plastic molds of the entire Things industry.

Paper towel dispenser designs [Core 77]

Joel Johnson

Video: Google Android phone user interface (looking great!)

Android Community has three videos up from a recent presentation by Google, showing off the latest version of the open-source, Linux-based Android smartphone OS. It looks really fantastic, swiping many cues from the iPhone but adding several neat tricks of its own.

You really should click through to Android Community and watch the video showing the live Google Street View mapping application matched up to a motion sensor and compass. It's probably the first useful commercial implementation of an augmented reality device. It's a system seller.

I adore my iPhone (and already have cash earmarked for the new one), but it makes me really happy to see Android coming together so well. Apple always behaves better when there is a smart competitor keeping them in check.

First LIVE images and videos of FULLSCREEN Android demos! [AndroidCommunity.com]

Joel Johnson

Garmin Edge 705 GPS for bicycles reviewed (Verdict: fantastic voyages)

Over at Gadget Lab (no relation), Jackson Lynch keys a glowing review for the new Garmin Edge 705 GPS unit designed for bicycles. The Edge doesn't just do directions, but also a whole suite of performance metrics and social sharing (back at your PC, of course).

Over the course of a couple weeks I've put in more than 40 hours on the road and trail with the 705 and I found it to be incredibly accurate, even in close quarters with other bike-borne wireless electronics. It's righted my course a few times and has become an invaluable training tool, enabling me to analyze ride and race data over a couple months and realize marked improvements. At the end of the ride, the Garmin Edge 705 seems to be the Holy Grail for cycling enthusiasts. It tells you where you are, points the way to a destination, gets you home and provides every bit of data you need to become a fitter cyclists -- if that's your thing.

Review: Garmin Edge 705 GPS Offers Maps and Metrics for Data-Happy Cyclists [Gadget Lab]

Joel Johnson

Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• Nature Documentary – Get the Planet Earth series on DVD with bonus discs from other series for $60, plus shipping. A pretty good deal if you have DVD — but if you have a Blu-ray player, definitely go with that version. [Dealhack]

• Touch MIDI – The Korg mini-KP KAOSS Pad is down to $150, shipped. If you aren't sure what this is you probably don't want it. [Dealhack]

• DSLR – Canon Digital Rebel XT with kit lens for $430, shipped. It's a couple of generations behind the latest models, but this is the camera I use and I can tell you as an amateur there's more than enough power here to get you started. [Dealnews]

• AGP Video Card – It's nothing to write home about, but if you're willing to risk the rebate, you can get this EVGA GeForce 6200 card for $0 after a $45 rebate. [Dealnews]

• Batteries – Various deals on batteries, including 12 AA, 12 AAA, and a charger for $29. [Dealnews]

• Multitool – The oh-so-sexy Leatherman Skeletool CX can be yours for $64, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Gaming Mouse – Today's Woot! is the Razer Diamondback 3G Gaming Mouse for $35, shipped.

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Vintage Wiring

Image: Dark Roasted Blend

John Brownlee

Ninja star thumbtacks for posters and bulletin boards

No one's making these yet, but surely someone's clever enough to realize the geek potential and start marketing them. This is right up Thinkgeek's alley.

chromoly is a new partnership between designer jonathan sabine and ad man adam pickard. the collaboration has only resulted in one project so far, ‘ninja tacks’. the humourous tack design may look like a deadly ninja star, but is really just an elaborate thumbtack. the tack bears similarities to sabine’s earlier project ‘bourgeois brass knuckles’, a clever corkscrew design. both pieces combine ominous appearances with utilitarian function.

I'd buy a set in a heartbeat, along with those fantastic corkscrew brass knuckles.

ninja tacks by chromoly [Designboom]

John Brownlee

Astromech R2 shampoo dispensers

These squirtable R2 unit shampoo containers are all kinds of adorable, and the site gains a lot of geek cred by clearly associating the colors with their permutations of the Astromech line. The red/white one is an R4-P17, the black is the R2-Q5, the green is R2-A6 and the red/silver is R2-R9. Even so, that nozzle erecting itself from the top of R2's dome is entirely unnecessarily. The way the delivery mechanism should work is by pushing down R2's entire head, which causes the lotion to squirt out of his telescopic optical nozzle.

The official site has some insinuating descriptive wording as well: "The dispenser may be filled with 185ml or roughly 6 ounces worth of shampoo, creamy lotion, liquid soap, or greasy lubricants of some sort." There's really only one sort you keep in your bathroom or bedroom, gents.

$18 per droid, if you're interested.

Star Wars R2 Shampoo Pump Dispenser [NCSX via Shiny Shiny]

John Brownlee

Giant unrollable fabric keyboard rug

Electronics hacker Maurin Donneaud created this huge, unrollable keyboard carpet for his living room, punching hundreds of holes under each letter to guarantee that the conductive switches would pick up his fuzzily socked feet. Concepts that are better in theory than in execution: build one of these myself and use it to blog for a whole day, dancing between each key like Tom Hanks in Big.

Maurin Donneaud's Flickr Stream [Flickr via Hack-A-Day]

John Brownlee

Dell's new subnotebook spotted at All Things D

Gizmodo managed to catch up with Michael Dell at yesterday's All D Conference and he cagily spilled the beans to them on their rumored upcoming entry into the subnotebook field, the Dell Mini Inspiron. Writes Lam:

It's a small form factor notebook, just like the Asus Eee and the HP 2133. He wouldn't tell me what OS it's running, or the pricing, but that it's a low-cost notebook meant for developing countries, and I hope here. Maybe it's Atom-powered. Who knows? But I do see three USB ports, a card reader, VGA out, Ethernet, and that red candy shell.

It actually looks great, unlike most of the recent Eee-like subnotebooks, And it comes in my favorite laptop color: hussy red! Without any specs or pricing, though, there's little reason to get excited. Still, I'm wondering: Dell and Ubuntu have a partnership, and Ubuntu has recently announced that they will be tailoring a version of Ubuntu specifically for subnotebooks. I don't think it's too implausible to imagine that Dell has prodded Ububtu in that direction with the specific aim of pushing Ubuntu onto their new Mini-Inspirons, do you?

Dell Mini Inspiron: Their First Mini-Laptop [Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Refined sugar cereal lighting system is delicious

Continuing this morning's inadvertently breakfast-themed gadgetry — a vivisection via blogging of my own hungry, pre-dawn id — the Refined Cereal Light Fixture turns a row of fluorescent-colored, sugary cereal boxes into a wall mountable light fixture. The omission of Apple Jacks from the design seems like a weakness in the design: everyone is familiar with the eerie sight of a box of Apple Jacks radioactively pulsating in the dark by dint of super-charged sweetness alone.

Refined Sugar Studio [Official Site via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

A better transmitting device for extra-office coffee delivery

This seems like a better solution to mass coffee delivery. You simply place two coffees on a cardboard sleeve in the appropriate holes and then lift the handles, turning the coffee holder into a handbag that won't spill a macchiato no matter how you swing it around. I prefer this to the Starbucks corrugated cardboard model, which not only seems comparatively wasteful, but which has an immutable law of the universe attached to it, dictating that the carrier will sag on one side if you carry it one handed and spill its contents all over the ground exactly one micro-instant before you deliver the coffee to its intended recipient.

Coffee carrier for common customers [Core77]

John Brownlee

The BalvenAmp: DIY single malt whiskey box speaker/amp

According to its maker, the BalvenAmp — a cheap amplifier and speaker made out of an old box of 12-year single malt Speyside — "there's a lot of low-end distortion, but at low volumes the treble is actually quite clear." On the bright side, though, after you've finished draining the bottle of Balvenie necessary to make the thing, you won't be able to process one half of the audible spectrum anyways.

The Balvenie DoubleWood packaging has pictures of the two casks the whisky is aged in; the volume pot is coming out of the whisky cask, the gain pot is coming out of the sherry cask, and the guitar cord plugs into the Balvenie seal in the middle.

The speaker replaces the lid on top. Big thumbs up: I could make thirteen of these just from the detritus strewn around my work desk.

BalvenAmp [Flickr via MAKE]

John Brownlee

Cassette-face watch tells time like a boom box

I absolutely dig the spinning chronological reels of this £35 Casette Face watch. It just needs a small cache for MP3s to be absolutely perfect, though I'd settle for a transformation into Laserbeak.

Cassette Face Watch [ASOS via Retro to Go]

Rob Beschizza

Help us identify mysterious joystick shaft

We recently bought a renovated Victorian townhouse in Pittsburgh. It is nice, and it has a long yard. While gardening at the far end, my wife, Heather, unearthed the above. No kidding.

It looks to me like a standard-issue Happ-like generic model, from any old JAMMA cabinet? Or is it from something in particular? I'm close to tearing up my yard to hunt for more remains...

John Brownlee

New Guitar Hero DS trailer is epic failure

Remember when Harmonix developed the Guitar Hero series and everything about it was just awesome instead of making you want to throw up in your mouth a little? Everything that's wrong with the franchise is expertly summed up by this video explaining the control system of the upcoming Guitar Hero on Tour DS port... a video which actually stars an avatar of Activision's doucheyness: a shrieking castrati emo rocker. And if that doesn't put you off the game for good, the control scheme just might. Yeesh. How do you ruin a rock solid franchise this quickly?

Guitar Hero on Tour [Gametrailers]

Rob Beschizza

Mankind discovers way to make Moleskines even more pretentious

Moleskines are wonderful, overpriced, deceptively-advertised notebooks. They're the blogger's dirty little secret, lurking in closets and drawers, unsullied by actual use—no, sirs, only the Internet is for the daily drudgery of the paid word. Moleskines are for the inspiration! And now you may have them laser-etched.

LaserMoleskine offers monograms, quotes, and dozens of ready-to-burn pictures, many of them featuring presidential candidates. They'll also take custom orders through an upload form, though you pay extra for the privilege. The result? A blank notepad that cost you $50.

Xonex makes a great cheap Moleskine alternative to satisfy the appetite for production. Below are a two fantasy Moleskine-based gadgets I'd love to covet.

Laser Etched Moleskine Are Reassuringly Expensive [Wired: Gadget Lab]

John Brownlee

Flickr gallery of retro transistor radios

This Flickr gallery of old transistor radios, pointed out by the wonderful Retro-Thing, is surprisingly captivating. You simply don't see this scope of aesthetic design in today's line-up of ubiquitous PMPs. Of course, transistor radios had decades to experiment with the form... once PMPs stop being luxury items, I imagine we'll see the same whimsical design scope that we currently see with USB memory sticks.

Transistor Radios [Flickr]

Rob Beschizza

I-O Bluetooth keyboard aims for simplicity

I-O Data's surprisingly attractive Bluetooth keyboard is a winner due to simplicity and straightforward design; wouldn't it be wonderful if it had a tiny, single-line display and a wee bit o'RAM for saving text files? Unfortunately, it lacks a full complement of function keys, making it a hard sell for serious use. From the indistinct brochure, it looks almost too small, too.

There's always this.

A small keyboard for your mobile phone from I-O Data [Akihabara News]

Rob Beschizza

Monster Cable trademark hit list includes muppet, forms of transit, deity

Monster Cables is in the habit of aggressing other companies that use the name "Monster," claiming that consumers may resultantly be confused between its cables and, say, a miniature golf course. Monster, like some others, excuses its misbehaviour as an unavoidable consequence of "defend it or lose it" trademark law. Here at Boeing Boeing, we think that's nonsense, but I digress: the purpose of this missive is to direct you to Gizmodo's compendium of companies using the name "Monster," which, according to the cable company's wheedling, it is now obliged to launch legal claims against.

The list includes a video game, a motorcycle, a muppet and a God. I'd say Noel has his work cut out for him.

A Monster List of Things Monster Cable Will Soon Sue [Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

D-Link Plots Revenge of Thicknet

Coax is cheap and durable, and your house is already wired for it. D-Link's Coax Ethernet Kit puts it to use on your home network, with two adapters included under the $200 price tag.

For aging network techs, this'll be a blast from the past! What next, consumers and BNC connectors, living together? D-Link says that their boxes transmit outside the range of cable TV and internet transmissions, but doesn't tell us what bandwidth we get. Press release after the jump.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

The Mouse Phone is painted like Mickey's mutant brother (Update: it's not Mickey at all!)

There's some weird story of failed corporate dealings behind this tiny, two-inch Mouse phone. It has the shape of an official Mickey Mouse phone, but the face painted on the three interconnected ovals is not Mickey's... rather, it's some sort of bizarre, neotenous abstraction of rodentia. What's going on there? There's a small elbow which could be either a nose or mouth... but which? Are the diagonal slants epicanthic folds or solitary whiskers? And what about the round ovals at the top of the skull? Eyeballs or sunglasses?

In fact, the face is so curious, so distinctly Chinese, so absolutely anti-Mickey that you'd think, at first, this phone must be a Chinese knock-off of a Mickey Mouse phone. But then you look inside, and there's the Disney logo, clear as day. That's not exactly the type of thing Disney's corporate attorneys are going to smile at, and it sends a mixed message: is the phone a Mickey phone or isn't it? My guess is a zero hour pull-out by Disney to produce Mickey-themed phones in cooperation with an overzealous Chinese company who quickly repainted their stock and sold them anyway.

Either way, it's not a serious phone for adults, but seems squarely aimed at cute teenagers. The Mouse Phone sports a 1.3" LCD screen, has a 1.3MP camera nuzzled in one ear and even supports Bluetooth stereo output. They're rather pricy, though: one Mouse phone will cost $225, which is a lot for a crappy phone that doesn't really look like Mickey at all.

The Mouse Phone [Gizmodiva]

UPDATE: Ah ha! Our ingenious commenters have figured it out! This isn't a Mickey-shaped phone at all. Rather, it's shaped like Pucca, a popular Korean cartoon character that is distributed by Disney. That doesn't explain if it's a knock-off or an officially licensed product, but it does at least make any trademark theft going on here a lot less slapdash.

Rob Beschizza

DHL's "Biggest Drawing" GPS stunt is fiction

With its loop-de-loops over empty seas and blithe transgression of airspace and flight paths, it was easy for us to be a little suspicious of DHL's "biggest drawing in the world," ostensibly created by tracking a GPS tranceiver in a plastic briefcase. Now, however, the artist's 'fessed up. From Wired:

It's a fake. The artist has added a line to the bottom of his webpage stating "This is fictional work. DHL did not transport the GPS at any time." And DHL confirmed that Nordenenkar never went any further than a warehouse the company allowed him to film in.

It's a delicious thought: DHL harangued by all sorts of shady international unpleasantness because of an advertising stunt. Wired's Dylan Tweney outlines why it could never have been:

* DHL does not deliver to arbitrary latitude-longitude destinations.
* DHL is not likely to consider "trace a few looping lines through the Indian Ocean, without landing" as a valid delivery request, even with lat-long coordinates
* You can't get a GPS signal inside the aluminum skin of an airliner
* No GPS system, even with supplemental batteries, would have lasted the 55 days the artist says his project took
* Details on the setup's "extended tracklog and battery time" are suspiciously absent.

Artist Admits He Didn't Actually Use GPS, DHL to Create 'Biggest Drawing in the World' [Wired]

Rob Beschizza

Apples are not the only fruit

Karl Grandin [via The Style Press]

John Brownlee

The GameBoy PC case mod

This PC case mod isn't exactly artful — it's just a fully functional EPIA PX10000G sloppily crammed into a gutted first-gen GameBoy, after all — but it's still amazing to me that the brick-like hunk of plastic that could barely run Super Mario Land in 1989 can now be used to run Quake 3. Install a working display over that fan vent and I'll really be impressed.

Feature: Functional PCs Made From Game Consoles [TechEBlog]

John Brownlee

Squirt gun table: break in case of super soaker emergency

Summer's here, the mercury's percolating and you never know when a leisurely day spent sweltering will devolve into a John Woo style Super Soaker battle. You should be prepared. The Jellio Squirt Gun Table is a transparent end table made of clear acrylic and filled with fluorescent water cannons. Unfortunately, it's $350: for that price, you could buy yourself an entire pallet full of Super Soakers and more covertly stash them around the domicile... garnering no suspicion from your enemies until they are soaked and sputtering.

Jellio Squirt Gun Table [Official Site via Retro To Go via Gearfuse]

John Brownlee

Supine brackets easily typed with the Look@Me emoticon keyboard

Amongst my constabulary of IRC droogies, there are savants who can not only communicate the deep swelling of their souls entirely in punctuation marks, but who can also easily rattle of an ASCII portrait of a flower, a crab nebula or a four panel pictogram of inter-species erotica with uncanny skill. My 13 year old cousin is scarcely less prolific. Yes, the emoticon may seem like a gimped form of human expression, but consider for a moment the fact that the great master literary prose stylist Vladimir Nabokov pined for the invention of the form, finding mere words a poor substitute for a smiley. "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile - some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question," Nabokov once famously replied to a particularly stupid interview question. Indeed. The point is clear: emoticons are the future.

Asus' R&D design studio, PEGA, is obviously taking Nabokov to heart. Their concept Look@Me emoticon keyboard is like an auxiliary number pad aimed not at accountants or mathematicians but at giggly teenage girls. Each key contains an ASCII symbol — concave marks and supine round brackets — that allows emoticons to be typed out with rapid-fire acumen by fresh-faced Lolitas around the world. Vlad would be proud.

Look@Me Emoticon Keyboard [Pega Design via Designboom via OhGizmo!]

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: The Hard Disk You've Been Waiting For

Image: Widelec

John Brownlee

Microwaved cell phone summons Nyarlathotep

Please do not attempt.

Cellphone in Microwave [Dark Roasted Blend]

John Brownlee

How-to set up your own floating micro-nation

Over at Gizmodo, Adam Frucci conducted an interview with Patri Friedman, executive director of the Seasteading Institute, an organization devoted to trying to convince open seas frontiersmen to live on a gigantic slab of concrete in the middle of the ocean. It's a pretty fascinating discussion on the subject... especially this snippet, in which Patri (after being asked) talks about the problem of a micro-nation of pedophiles being set up:

Each community will decide and enforce its own rules. More importantly, each community will decide its own procedures for deciding on its rules. The point is not just to create one political system or type of system, but to make a turnkey product for creating new countries, so that lots of different groups will try lots of different things, and we can all learn from it.

The one rule I think seasteads should enforce on each other is the right for individuals to choose their society. As long as people are freely choosing their society, then as far as I'm concerned the society can pick whatever rules it wants.

Personally, I want a society that's very libertarian for internal affairs, except for strong national security rules against doing anything that will piss off a military power (exporting drugs, laundering money, polluting). Basically the vision of "As much freedom as we can reasonably get away with".

I think forcefully kidnapping 14 year old girls to service a floating nation of perverts would pretty quickly bring a battleship knocking. Patri's whole interview seems like what it probably is: a retired Google software engineer's crazy pipe dream of setting up his own Snowcrash-style Raft. But at least Patri's got the business model figured out: timeshares!

How To Build Your Own Sea-Based Country for Fun and Profit [Gizmodo]

Joel Johnson

Yamaha Disklavier Mark IV player piano downloads songs over Wi-Fi

Yamaha's latest Disklavier player piano, the Mark IV, can download music from the internet via Wi-Fi and play along, pedals and keys clacking in time. For now it only supports music in the "Tune-1000" format from Yamaha's website, but "other formats will be supported."

The Mark IV series takes the Disklavier’s remote control functions to the next level: all Mark IV models include the PDA-type Pocket Remote Controller, a wireless remote with dedicated buttons and a full-color LCD touch screen. In addition to the Pocket Remote, select models also feature the tablet-PC type Tablet Remote Controller, a portable 10.4” touch-screen LCD color control panel that offers different animated, customizable visual environments to operate from. Both remote controllers use the 802.11b wireless specification to communicate with the piano over long distances, enabling full-function control of the Disklavier through walls and with a flexibility never before possible.
      The Yamaha Mark IV line features new, open-ended software-based architecture built on a rock-solid Linux Operating System that will facilitate future upgrades and expansions, thus offering outstanding investment protection. Another first for the Mark IV series is the inclusion of a built-in, high-capacity hard drive for easy, high-volume storage of MIDI, CD-audio and graphic data. The Mark IV’s 80-gigabyte hard drive replaces the 16-megabyte flash memory found in previous models.

The line starts at $11k, but if you get all the fixin's I'm sure you'll be shelling out a lot more than that.

Press release after the jump.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Loyd Case on installing solar panels

Over at Extreme Tech, Loyd Case has put together a wonderful little write-up about his experience installing solar powers on the roof of his Californian home... from talking to contractors to results. Even if you're not particularly green-friendly, the numbers certainly seem to make a lot of sense...

Our power usage is unusually high for a typical, four person nuclear family. A big part of that is because I have a PC lab and network in the basement. Both my wife and I work out of the house much of the time, with her time almost 100% in the home office. Plus, we have two teenage girls and a pretty beefy HDTV and home audio setup in the family room.

The net result is annual power consumption in the Case house of 17,400kW hours. That will go down a bit—probably about 5–10% for each girl when our daughters head off to college (my oldest girl will be a high school senior next year.) We've also been fairly active in converting our lighting to compact fluorescent, though we still have a number of halogen sconces scattered throughout the house.

The solar power system would generate 8,721kW hours of energy per year. More importantly, it would generate that power during the peak hours of the day, when electricity from the grid is at its highest price. So our estimated annual power bill will drop from about $4,400 a year to less than $1,100 a year, with the average cost per kWH dropping from 25 cents to 6.3 cents.

The payback time, assuming energy costs don't spike steeply, is a little under nine years. If we sell the house, we should get it all back immediately.

Going Solar [Extreme Tech]

John Brownlee

Video: Best Buy dance off

It's a scene any Best Buy patron has seen a million times before: three sassy soul sisters shaking their booties in an impromptu display of dancing prowess before the stereo speaker display, while a dorky, heavy set employee looks on, pathetically trying to look "hep." But god bless the dorky, heavy set employee in this video, because after 40 seconds of indecision and lame bobbing, he just gets down, becoming one with the groove, and triumphantly wins high fives from all.

It's an awesome sight, but as an ex Best Buy supervisor, I can't help but furrow my brow in disapproval: this does not look like a man properly upselling an extended warranty. Leave the dancing to the customers on-the-clock, chuckles.

Best Buy Dance [YouTube]

Joel Johnson

Free Booze: "Bloody Mary Mixer" tomorrow in Manhattan for blood donation network

If you're in New York tomorrow and like vodka, you can drink for free for 90 minutes — no pacing yourself! — at the "Bloody Mary Mixer," an event sponsored by "Takes All Types," a non-profit organization that's trying to make blood donation smarter. Sign up for their Facebook app — it'll add a blood type card to your profile, just like you're a Japanese fighting game star. Better, when there is a need for your blood type in your area, you can get an alert via Facebook, email, or SMS.

Disclaimer: I had a beer with these guys last week which I think maybe makes me an advisor or something.

Rob Beschizza

Who'd like a portable text game console?

BBG co-editor John Brownlee wants someone to make a simple, cheap handheld roguelike in a similar vein to the dedicated Tiger portable games of yore...

Some sort of UMPC or handheld console solution dedicated to one single purpose: Playing ASCII rogue-likes on the go. Everything has to be designed so you can play Dwarf Fortress or Nethack with the minimum amount of bullshit.

The thought experiment it implies is "what might a portable, text-only game console be like?"

At the low end, the cheap hardware used for $30 translators and dictionaries could handle such staples as interactive fiction and basic roguelikes: CalcRogue, by Jim Babcock, looks ready made for action in something one might impulse-buy at Target.

At the high end, a more capable machine might meet the likes of Dwarf Fortress' stiff system requirements, and open up the possibilities to the world's vast back catalog of ASCII-style titles.

Our mockups here are, respectively, an iRiver Discple (above), a $200 monster-translator that could be fitted out with an x86 CPU, a stripped-down linux and bucketloads of text-only games on tap; and an ultra-cheap Franklin Spanish dictionary (below), depicted as running only a baked-in CalcRogue.

The closest Tiger itself got to a Roguelike is, presumably, its version of Gauntlet. It's Wheel of Fortune has a QWERTY keyboard. Of course, the LCD displays in these are far too primitive for a proper implementation; they merely show that the foothills of this mountain have been danced upon.

John Brownlee

USB superdock reads memory cards and SATA HDDs

This new multi-function dock from Brando not only allows you to read the usual gaggle of memory cards (SD, MiniSD, MicroSD, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, etc) but it also allows you to dramatically plunge 2.5" or 3.5" SATA hard drives into it, reading their contents with the ease of a USB thumb drive. The price is $79, but that's including a heft $25 shipping charge from Hong Kong.

SATA HDD Multi-Function Dock (USB + ESATA) [Brando via Crunchgear]

Joel Johnson

Walgreens LED sign will be Times Square's largest

The Times reports on a gigantic new LED advertising billboard to be installed in Times Square by Walgreens — the largest so far.

The sign will have 12 million light-emitting diodes, known as L.E.D.’s — 17,000 square feet of them, “which is more than a third of an acre,” said Arthur Gilmore, president of the Gilmore Group, a Manhattan design and branding consulting firm, which created the sign. “Including its digital and vinyl decorative components, it will be 43,720 square feet in area.” ... And so, the sign components of the east and west facades of the building, which are 341 feet tall and 143 feet wide, will be programmed “in a synchronized way, as a single animation,” said Meric Adriansen ... The sign will marshal enough candlepower to withstand the sun at high noon. Its images will be projected by 12 million red, green and blue L.E.D.’s programmed to glow in different configurations so that the brains of human observers interpret them as images. A trillion colors are programmable.

Image: Dinosaurs and Robots

How to Stand Out in Times Square? Build a Bigger and Brighter Billboard [NYTimes.com via Racked]

John Brownlee

Ubuntu moving into UMPCs and subnotebooks

In an interview with the Guardian, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth just came out and admitted that a version of the OS specifically aimed at Asus Eee devices was, indeed, in development:

TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?

MS: We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector

Fantastic news. You can slap Ubuntu on a subnotebook as it is, of course, but I've read there's a certain degree of general wonkiness on getting it to run perfectly on the hardware. I think this is a real smart move: the desktop space is pretty much owned by Vista and OS X, both of which are simply too beefy for Eee-class devices. Ubuntu could own this space if they tried... an excellent way to introduce their OS to more consumers.

interview: Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu [Guardian]

Image: Lloyd Humphreys

John Brownlee

MacBook Air sharp enough to slice bread, bone, human flesh

According to a group of Germans — a people who know a thing or two about the subject — the edge of a MacBook Air, quickly drawn across the softly pulsing skin of a human throat, is enough to slice through windpipes, sever sinew and squirt spouts of crimson-scented gore. It's also sharp enough to slice a loaf of bread or accidentally dice an elbow. Apple currently has no plans to adopt either MBA "feature" into a hip, upbeat television advertisement, backed by the melodious lyrics of Yael Naïm. Pity.

MacBook Air can cut through bread, flesh [Google Translate via Engadget]

Update: Sadly, it appears the cut was actually from a regular Macbook, not an Air. I'm pretty sure that means the Air is even more dangerous! – Joel

John Brownlee

Vintage Modern Mechanix t-shirts from Retropolis

Nestled in its own vintage futurism subheading under Brad Schenck's fantastic web outlet of science fiction t-shirts, Retropolis' fantastic array of t-shirts screened with retro-futuristic covers from vintage Modern Mechanix magazines is a sorely tempting target on which to drop a few Hamiltons. A standard t-shirt is about $26, which is on the pricier side for a t-shirt, but they also over other permutations of casual cotton clothing: baseball jerseys, long sleeves, wife beaters and the like.

Retropolis Transit Authority [Official Site]

Joel Johnson

Apple toying with solar cell displays for iPods, laptops

One thing I love about Apple is that they have the clout to push ideas to market that might seem too niche or quirky from other vendors. (Wi-Fi in the first iBooks and USB in iMacs come to mind, although both of those products are from a younger Apple without nearly as much oomph as the company has today.) So when I see a patent coming down the pipe from Apple describing an attempt to integrate solar cells underneath LCD panels — allowing every iPhone, iPod, and open laptop to trickle charge its battery just by being left in the sun — I can't help but get excited. If Apple can make the technology work, it's likely that they'll push it into all their product lines — and hence the mainstream.

Of course, filing a patent doesn't mean that they've got the problems licked or that they'll be implementing the technology, either. But I can hope. Battery technology doesn't seem to be improving, but with the right power management techniques and a sunny day, some devices might not have to hit a charger for days at a time.

Solar LCD Powered iPods, iPhones and Laptops? [Mac Rumors]

Joel Johnson

Koss Sparkplug headphones are unusable thanks to a goofy mute

I wasn't expecting much from the Koss Sparkplug earbuds when I picked them up at a Radio Shack for twenty bucks. I'd broken my previous set of earbuds and needed a quick replacement. And they were the only earbuds this particular Radio Shack sold, if you can believe it.

They're horrible! They're ugly, for one, with strange little ridges. The sound quality is poor. (Although what can you expect for the price?) But the worst — what takes them from unfortunate low-end item to hilariously unusable — is the unnecessary in-line mute button.

I suppose a mute toggle can be handy, but not when it's a raised plastic button with such a low physical resistance that it often mutes and unmutes itself — or worse, mutes just one of the two channels — while I'm walking. Every time the mute button bounces against my clothing it activates. The only way I can reliably listen to music with this headphones while walking is to hold my MP3 player in my hand, keeping it above my waist to provide enough slack to keep the mute button away from my body. That works sometimes.

Joel Johnson

EcoGIR suits made from recycled PET bottles

New "EcoGIR" suits from Bagir, available nowish at Sears, are made in part from recycled PET plastic bottles. They're also machine washable, which is sort of awesome, too.

They're also only $200 for pants and a jacket, which is a little bit daunting; I'm all about cheap suits, but that's very cheap. Still, I'd really like to put my hands on one and get a feel of the fabric. (Too bad there's no Sears anywhere around me.)

Sears Sells Bagir’s Recycled PET Bottle Suit on Father’s Day [Treehugger]

Joel Johnson

Video: The ChroniCaster is bong in a guitar

Or maybe it's just a pipe? I can't remember if bongs have to have water filtering or not.

Mike Edison's ChroniCaster: An Ax Hack That'll Make You Hack (and Wheeze) [Listening Post]

Joel Johnson

Glowing reader rec. for Himalayn Imports' khukuri knives

Reader "Heteromeles" is a big fan of Himalayan Imports and their knives. He's almost convinced me I need one and I'm not a knife collector at all.

Sustainably made knives.  Big knives.

Actually, they're not labeled "sustainable" by any green organization, but when you understand them, the label fits.  What I'm talking about are the khukuri knives (kukri) from Himalayan Imports.

Why are they sustainable?

A.  The metal in the blades is all recycled (the steel is generally from junked Mercedes car springs). The handle and sheath are traditional wood, horn, and leather.  While I'm not sure that the wood is sustainably sourced, I'm pretty sure that horn and leather in Nepal are sustainable.

B.  The blades are designed to last *UNDER NORMAL USE* for 50-100 years, and if they don't, you can get them replaced.  Note that you will go through 4-5 handles before the blade is destroyed, but it's easy to rehilt the blade.

C. The customer service is wonderful.  When they say that, if you break under normal use, they will replace it, they mean it.

D. Every blade is handmade by a Nepalese craftsman, and HI is careful to pay them living wages, so that they can support their families.  Yes, you can get khukuris for much cheaper, but they are factory made and the quality is much  lower.

E.  The blades are as tough as advertised, although there are a bunch of different types for different uses.  The heaviest ones can cut a 55 gallon drum or a light car in half.  The lightest ones are like machetes (brush cutters) only better.

F.  HI has a loyal (shall we say rabid?) customer base.  Example: Bill Martino, the founder of HI, was supporting the son of a smith as he went through medical school,so that he could return to the village as a doctor.  When Bill died, several of the customers have taken it upon themselves to hold raffles every semester so that the student could finish his studies and graduate.  (Disclaimer: I'm one of those loyal customers).

I've bought knives from a number of companies, and I don't know of any that are as good as Himalayan Imports. They are so retro (i.e. quality craftsmanship, excellent customer relations) that they are avant-garde.

In our disposable era, the idea that you can buy a knife, use it daily (if you happen to live in a rural area), trust your life to it (as some customers have), and leave it to your kids is something special. Building things to last isn't an antiquated idea, it's a way of living sustainably.  When I run out of gas for my chainsaw, I can still count on my khukuri.

Sustainable?  Well, they do ship knives from Nepal and all over the world, but if you amortize that carbon footprint over the life of each blade, it's pretty darn small, especially compared to the plastic-handled, factory made machete or ax that you get from a big box store.  HI knives cut better too.

Rob Beschizza

Orgasmatron: false advertising?

Australia's Orgasmatron is extremely effective at making one's head tingly. Techopolis wheels it out for excoriation on the grounds that "Orgasmatron" is a deceptive product name, given that it does not actually give one orgasms.

To be quite frank, this particular criticism is disturbing. It suggests that the author—who I am sure is a perfectly normal, well-balanced person—looked at the writhing profusion of metallic spines, concluded from the name that it is intended for genital use, and was later disappointed.

Wikipedia has a list of classic Orgasmatrons from fiction. The one you're thinking of, however, was in fact called the Excessive Machine.

Deceptive Product Names - Orgasmatron [Techopolis]

Rob Beschizza

Mac Mini and pals, enclosed by Power Mac G4 Cube case

Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube was an illustrious failure, beautiful but dysfunctionally-designed and overpriced. Fans and a vigorous resale market built a legend around it, but the smaller, better Mac Mini put its predecessor into perspective.

Rich Willis weds the two tiny machines together, by using the former's attractive transparent casing as an enclosure for the latter, with a bunch of extras.

Having happily found that my new Airport Extreme had the same footprint as the Mac Mini and its accessory HDD case, I naturally wanted to enclose it in an old Macintosh Cube acrylic shell I happened to have lying around

Experiments indicate that a jigsaw at a slow speed is the only way to go: the clear acrylic cracks and melts easily. The result is gorgeous, though I wish Apple would standardize the dimensions it uses for small machines like Time Capsules, Apple TVs and Mac Minis: 7.7" or 6.5", chaps. Pick one.

Mac Mini Cube [via NoWhereElse and Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Innards of the MSI's Wind subnotebook

MSI's Wind proves itself a dark horse thanks to its lengthy battery life and $400 price tag. Someone has already taken the knives to it, so we can gawk at the entrails.

Looks like a tight fit, doesn't it? Compare to the MacBook Air's interior, described by engineers as "full of waste."

MSI Wind U100 dissected [jkkmobile]

Rob Beschizza

Comic book ads lied? No!

"Kids are stupid," Justin Plourde rightly asserts in his introduction to twelve examples of planet Earth's most inconsequential false advertising of all time. Whatever happened to the classic comic book ads? Did someone finally kick up a litigious stir about X-ray specs and all the other useless gadgets? Did they pupate into ads for homoepathic elixirs and healing crystals?

Wired's Lewis Wallace, however, points to a better example of the genre, from Dogwelder's Flick set:

12 Comic Book Ads That Taught Us To Be Cynical [Cracked]

Rob Beschizza

Motorola's 180-gram spy radio has GPS, end-to-end encryption

Is frisking someone for a wire still much use as an anti-surveillance measure? Motorola, with its TETRA Covert Radio, has removed any hope of easily ratting out the spies: it weighs only 180 grams and can "easily be concealed in light clothing." From the press release:

The TCR1000 ... helps officers to disguise their equipment during covert operations,
allowing them to blend into the crowd. ...
end-to-end encryption. It incorporates many innovative features to address
the unique requirements of covert radios such as discrete audio, radio
control and long battery lifetime. ... The TCR1000 is controllable from a remote unit that provides
greater flexibility to users in their operations.

It even has integrated GPS. It'll be on show at Hong Kong's TETRA World Congress in June.
Press Release [Motorola]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Shoggoth Advance

Photograph of my Microwaved Mutant Gameboy Advance [perfectlymadebird's Photoset]

Joel Johnson

Guinness ball cap with built-in bottle opener

This pedestrian ball cap has a garish bottle opener riveted onto the bill. It's an officially branded Guinness product; too bad the best non-draught Guinness comes in a can.

It's $20, plus shipping.

Catalog Page [BeWild.com]

Joel Johnson

This is what a broken Amazon Kindle looks like

I wish I could blame this on shoddy craftsmanship or a DRM snafu, but I'm guessing this is probably the result of my foot. All I know is that I put it in my bag one morning and when I removed it in the afternoon the screen no longer updated. There's not a crack, per se, but you can tell it looks like something fractured underneath the plastic.

Ah well.

My Kindle was given to me as a press preview unit, so I can't exactly complain. I'd come to enjoy having the Kindle at hand more than I'd expected, but I still don't think I'll be paying $400 to get a new one.

I had just gotten it really stuffed with eBooks, too.

John Brownlee

Star Wars tackle-and-rod for the suppression of Mon Calamari

There's nothing more enjoyable than a languorous day at the lake, fishing with a sawed-off shotgun, although god knows that the latest Star Wars merchandise — fishing gear and tackle box — tries to at least throw a lightsaber into the mix. We'd say George Lucas has no shame, but you all saw The Phantom Menace, so why labor the point?

Star Wars Fishing Supplies [The Force via Oh Gizmo]

John Brownlee

Artist draws his face on the world with GPS and DHL

As a project, this campaign by artist Erik Nordenankar and DHL is quite clever: ship a small package with a GPS locator around the world to geo-map a global self-portrait of the artist. But I'd be more impressed if DHL hadn't been in on the project: some of the circuitous Baltic curlicues necessary to etch-a-sketch Nordenankar's bed head hair are simply too implausible without having a special delivery plane devoted to the task.

World's Biggest Drawing [Official Site]

John Brownlee

The science of keyboard design

Amar Sagoo has posted a fantastic summary of 1997's Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction... specifically its sections on optimal keyboard design. Sagoo supplements this with many of his own observations. It's a fascinating dissection of the qualities that contribute to the perfect keyboard, jettisoning vague complaints about keyboard "smooshiness" in favor of highly objective haptic terminology like "clickiness:'

One of the most-cited criteria for keyboard aficionados to prefer a certain keyboard over another is “clickiness”. The idea behind this is that a good keyboard should give you some tactile feedback when you've successfully “actuated” a key, and that you shouldn't have to depress the key all the way to the bottom to be sure, as this would not allow you to type very fast. Some keyboards don't click at all, some give a softer and others a sharper click. The exact behaviour can be described by a graph plotting how the physical force required to push the key varies along its way down and its way up. The sudden dip in force on the downstroke is where you will feel the “click”.

Read the whole thing, it'll solidify your thoughts about your favorite keyboards.

Science of Keyboard Design [Amar Sagoo] (Thanks, Joel!)

John Brownlee

Tell time haptically with the braille watch

David Chavez's conceptual braille watch is a simple solution to time-reading for the blind. Instead of tracing the hands on a crystal-less watch face, the visually impaired simply trace the bumps (raised by rotating discs) with their fingers. I actually wouldn't be too averse to owning a watch like this: it would be excellent for covertly checking the time during a terrible movie or a tedious blind date.

Haptica Braille Watch Concept [Tuvie]

John Brownlee

Gallery of Mac Mini mods

TechEBlog has posted a nice little Memorial Day gallery of custom Mac Minis... implausible modifications in which the guts of Apple's most spindly and sunken chested computer are crammed into different chassises and supplemented with additional functionality. Seen here is the Mac Mini tablet, featuring an 8 inch touch screen display with handwriting recognition, Bluetooth, Airport and a 3-hour battery life.

Custom Mac Mini Setups [Techeblog]

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Etch-A-Photoshop

Image: n0wak