August 2008
Rob Beschizza
Ballmer, Stringer to headline CES 2009
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Sony's Howard Stringer will deliver keynote speeches at next year's Consumer Electronics Show. Bally will give a "pre-CES" address on Wednesday, Jan 7, while Stringer will get to kick off the show the next morning. Ford CEO Alan Mulally gets the afternoon spot.
Press Release [CEA]
Rob Beschizza
GPS helps convict killer
Attention, murderers: leave the GPS at home when you go on your killing sprees. Data from Eric Hanson's Garmin model helped prosecutors convict him for the homicide of his parents, sister and brother-in-law. Here's Mitch Stacy in an AP report:
Hanson's trial was among recent criminal cases around the country in which authorities used GPS navigation devices to help establish a defendant's whereabouts. Experts say such evidence will almost certainly become more common in court as GPS systems become more affordable and show up in more vehicles.
Other recent cases include a rapist who plead after a judge ruled GPS data from his car could be used against him, and an arsonist parked 100 yards from the house he torched: his own!
Rob Beschizza
Three outlet power panel
If you don't like outlet multiplyers that stick out into the room, here's your hero: a design that has an extra socket, but simply replaces the existing, wall-flush outlet box.
Three Outlets In The Space Of Two [Toolmonger]
Rob Beschizza
Retro corded phones for people with landlines, questionable taste
It's a little depressing: of Unplggd's list of yesteryear's "coolest" corded phones, almost all of them are simply hideous. For shame, industrial designers of the 1970s! What were you thinking? Pictured is the "modern decor red clock telephone," available from eBay seller aniwak. Starting bid: $4.99. History: 0 bids.
MODERN DECOR RED CLOCK TELEPHONE [eBay auction via unPlggd]
Rob Beschizza
Would someone make a movie with dot matrix business cards?
This unnervingly large dot matrix panel is clearly the logical upgrade path for that emblem of the old ways, business cards. One imagines a scene from an early 1990s straight-to-video movie in which the hero, perhaps Rutger Hauer or Christopher Lambert, hands his futuristic dot matrix business card to the villain, doubtless played by Michael Ironside. Ironside raises his eyebrow, impressed. Then everyone waits three minutes while he reads it. Creepy henchman Brad Dourif glares from the shadows.
[via CrunchGear]
Rob Beschizza
Hans Reiser's confession
At Wired's Threat Level, Kevin Poulsen posts the transcript of linux developer Hans Reiser's confession.
in the most unsophisticated chokehold that any judo instructor would completely despise you for ever using, I choked her. ... And this is the kind of choke that people who have no martial skills at all would employ and uhm, and yet it uh, uh, was completely painless for her. It's the least painful way to die.
Reiser was sentenced to 15-to-life earlier today. With time already served, he'll be out after 13 at the earliest.
PDF transcript [via Threat Level]
Rob Beschizza
The office supplies of tomorrow
io9's Stephanie Fox illustrates Annalee Newitz's roundup of what lies around the office of tomorrow.
Twenty-five years from now, your lust for office supplies will not have diminished. By then you'll be jonesing for the Macbook File Folder (pictured) and DNA-sequencing fountain pens. We've cranked up our brain implants to eleven and looked deep into the future to figure out which items will be must-haves in offices all over the world in the year 2033.
The hook is that paper is gone — not because of silly fancies about the paperless office, but simply because we can't afford it anymore!
Rob Beschizza
Casio terrorist watch now offered in white (Updated)
UPDATE: this was originally a harmless post about what appeared to be a cute retro wristwatch with a twist. It turns out that it's on ... the terrorist watch list.
This lovely retro watch, "Farmer," is engraved on the rear with a Duran Duran quote. Though a pleasingly reasonable $25, the sellers caution that "a couple of people have reported their watches running a bit quick over a week or so, if this happens to yours let us know and we can organize a replacement."
Alas, I doubt it will arrive before Labor Day.
Reader Søren adds:
This watch is a relabeled Casio F91w[1], a watch with an interesting history. Back in 1995, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed tried to blow up the Pope in Manila[2]. Ramzi tried to make a bomb, accidentally set his hotel room on fire, and fled. In his recovered laptop there were instructions for how to use a Casio F91w as a bomb's timing device.As a result, the watch was linked to terrorism. And as a result of *that*, the Department of Defense has listed possession of a Casio F91w as a reason to detain 27 Guantanamo prisoners indefinitely[3].
It's important to point out that none of the 27 had actually modified their watches to become detonator timing devices. They were just ordinary watches, same as the ones above. In their Detainee Statements[4], every prisoner expresses surprised incredulity when the watch is mentioned. Some point out in exasperation that their guards are wearing similar watches.
Jake and I bought about a dozen watches each - they're reliable, durable, and $7 in bulk. If you'd like a Terrorist Watch I'll be happy to mail you one. (I gave one to US Attorney General Michael Mukasey earlier this year, but that's another story.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplan_Bojinka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W#Detainees_listed_as_having_a_Casio_watch
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/
Product Page [Furni]
Rob Beschizza
New Shuttle mini-desktop to be only $189
Shuttle's latest miniature desktop computer is even more miniature than usual — and that goes for price, too.
The X27 mini-PC is a little larger than genre mainstays like the Mac Mini, but slashes the tag to $189, which is $60 cheaper than the recent Eee Box from Asus. Inside lurks an Atom CPU, GMA 950 video and a gigabit ethernet controller. It has 4 USB ports.
Uses? Heart of a MAME cabinet; carputer; NAS with extras like reliable web and music serving; monolith to awaken nascent gerbil civilization.
Shuttle's Atom-powered mini desktop gets a price: $189 [CNET]
Rob Beschizza
BBG: the official blank desktop
In honor of Microsoft's latest update to Windows Genuine Validation, which removes the desktop wallpaper of hacked or illegal copies of Windows and replaces it with an ever-fashionable black background and a warning, BBG presents its official desktop wallpaper for Friday, August 29.
Use in close proximity to the Large Hadron Collider at one's own risk — and that of the known universe.
This 1600x1200 image is also available at 1024x768 and 1920x1200
Rob Beschizza
British Telecom starts adoption scheme for unprofitable but much-loved red telephone boxes
Britain's distinctive telephone boxes, victims of the growth of cellular technology, may be "adopted" by locals instead of removed. For just £1—and a promise to maintain them in perpetuity—town councils can assume ownership of the red booths, which are often part of an area's distinctive character for decades.
A spokesman for BT said: "During the consultation process around removing unprofitable payphones, a number of suggestions have been voiced by local people and local government."We have listened to these suggestions and can now confirm that local authorities that wish to maintain red telephone boxes - minus the telephone equipment - for aesthetic or heritage reasons will be able to do so.
"In addition, local authorities that have requested to contribute to maintenance costs to retain a red telephone box with a working telephone will also be accommodated."
Of the 95,000 that were in Britain at their peak, facilitating calls by day and roaming the dales at night in search of prey, only 66,000 remain. Two thirds, according to operator British Telecom, are unprofitable.
Photos: Ulleskelf and Nathan Messer
Red telephone boxes could be saved by adoption scheme
Rob Beschizza
Rainbow Hex Keys
If PBTools' colorful set of metric hex keys was less that $50, I would so be ready to assemble European flatpack furniture in style. But.... $50? Whoa.
Product Page [PBtools]
Rob Beschizza
Cufflinks to die() for
J. Marier's cufflinks are made from 1-megabit EPROMs: perfect for those formal occasions in Vegas when one is required to repair a late-1990s slot machine.
John Brownlee
Google announces App Store for Android: Android Marketplace
Android's Developer Blog has announced the Android Market... Google's answer to the iTunes App Store. The best news: unlike the App Store, it's an open content distribution system. A developer on Android need expect no inexplicable refusals to host their product.
Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term "market" rather than "store" because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings...Developers can expect the first handsets to be enabled with a beta version of Android Market. Some decisions are still being made, but at a minimum you can expect support for free (unpaid) applications. Soon after launch an update will be provided that supports download of paid content and more features such as versioning, multiple device profile support, analytics, etc.
Interesting, but one wonders if Google is setting themselves up for a logistical nightmare here: if developers can put through malicious code with no fail check, Google might spend more time pulling down apps than it would actually take to approve them individually and put them up.
I really like the screenshots of the interface though, especially the summary of exactly what functions of Android each App accesses.
John Brownlee
Expert explains the iPhone 3G, the 2.0.2 update and the problems with 3G (It's getting better)
Last week, Apple's Jennifer Bowcock confidently claimed that the iPhone 3G 2.0.2 firmware update had notably "improved communication with 3G networks." It prompted a bit of a spit take in the Boing Boing Drome: if Apple has fixed the 3G problem, why are forum users still raking a claw of frustration across their frustration-contorted rictuses?
As it turns out, though, it looks like Bowcock might have been telling the truth. Roughly Drafted Magazine has an interesting article up, explaining what insiders are saying the problem is with 3G iPhone reception.
Essentially, it's this. There's no problem with the chip or the antenna. However, every time the iPhone sends a 3G request to the tower, it asks the tower to give slightly too much power to the request. Transmitter power is a limited resource, so when a tower is being asked for too much simultaneous 3G power, it starts dropping calls and acting funky due to a lack of downlink power.
So why are people still experiencing problems, even if they've upgraded to 2.0.2? The issue is that if your local tower is still being queried by enough non-2.0.2 iPhone, it is still having power issues. This is why AT&T is text messaging users, encouraging them to upgrade: they can't actully solve the problem for everyone until a critical mass of updaters is reached.
In short, it should continue to get better over time if you're still having problems. The 2.0.2 update has made an improvement, which can be seen on internal data, and will continue to improve reception over time. But it's not an instant fix. Miss Bowcock: we're sorry we doubted you!
The Inside Deets on iPhone 2.0.2 and Dropped Calls [Roughly Drafted]
John Brownlee
Drivable X-34 Landspeeder replica by Star Wars modder Daniel Deutsch
Vehicle modder Daniel Deutsch (creator of the wonderful R2D2 projector) had built his own Landspeeder with a custom aluminum chassis. It travels a maximum of 25 MPH and can putter around in a Segway-like sphere of influence: a few miles on a single charge. Perfect for running down womp rats, but the X-34 Landspeeder is the perfect open top for the predictably dry Tatooine summers. Without a roll-up canvas top, Daniel's sweet ride will be filled with stagnant water and slimy leaves within the autumn: a portable, hovering Frop Bog.
Landspeeder [Daniel Deutsch via Neatorama]
John Brownlee
Amazon: Kindle 2.0 this year? No way.
So! New Kindles this year? No. Hell no. Quoth Amazon Chief Spokesman on the possibility of Kindle 2.0.
“Don’t believe everything you read,” Mr. Berman said. “There’s a lot of rumor and speculation about the Kindle. One thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be no new version of the Kindle this year. A new version is possible sometime next year at the earliest.”
Crunchgear's John Biggs has already begun his self-flagellation and brine baths. As well he should. You fooled us all, Mr. Biggs. Shame!
But it's just as well, really. The old Kindle hasn't even penetrated outside of America yet. And while a rumored 260,000 units have sold, and that's swell, it's also hardly gangbusters. Amazon should take their time, work out the cell contracts necessary to release a new Kindle in Europe, shore up their 1st Gen Kindle numbers and take their time on a less ghastly design. The world can wait for Kindle 2.0 until 2009... especially Kindle 1.0 early adopters.
Extinguish the Rumors: No New Amazon Kindle This Year [NY Times]
John Brownlee
Samsung X360 to MacBook Air: "Hey fatty! Why so sad? Have some ham!"
Samsung's newest laptop, the svelte X360, is a beautiful upmanship of the MacBook Air. Although it looks slightly bulkier, the X360 looks to beat the Air in every way that counts. It's thinner, although it paradoxically looks fatter thanks to the Air's clever beveling. And at 1.27 kilos, it's lighter than the Air's black matter dense 1.36 kilos.
But when you get a laptop down that small, those extra millimeters and grams are merely for spreadsheet comparisons. Where Samsung has really nailed the X360 is with its features: a 13.3 inch screen, an Intel Centrino 2 processor, a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless connectivity and a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD). But it doesn't end there: the chassis also contains 3 USB ports, a built-in HDMI connection, an Express Card slot and VGA output. That makes the Air even more feature-paltry than it appeared before.
Spine-extracting fatality? Samsung claims the X360's battery can last 6-10 hours on a charge.
If they can release this for a competitive price, it looks like a better thintop than the Air all around... except for the buzz killer of Windows Vista. The Air will always have the OS X edge. Now just work on the name Samsung: the X360 is not only less memorable a name than the Air, but Microsoft (XBOX 360) and Lenovo (X300) are probably going to want to have words with you.
Samsung X360 steals Apple's laptop crown [Pocket Lint]
John Brownlee
Hub monster scurries on USB appendages like fabric-craft Garthim
By tearing up an old graduation gown, strengthening some USB extension cables with armature wire and gluing some red LED eyes onto an old USB hub, Instructables user fungus amungus created this awesome USB monster, which looks remarkably like Jim Henson's Dark Crystal Garthim. My next project, I think:
USB Hub Monster [Instructables]
John Brownlee
Mythbusters recreate Mona Lisa with massive 2100 cannon paintgun turret
Sheer awesomeness: this week at Nvidia's Nvision tradeshow, Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman used a massive 2100 barrel paint gun turret to create a pixel art rendition of the Mona Lisa in under 275 milliseconds. The thesis of the experiment was absurd — something about how only an Nvidia GPU can handle the raw processing power required to generate 45 square pixels of pixel art — but we're still impressed. And we're not the other ones: our inside NERF sources are whispering to us that they are already looking into harnessing the technology to create a Japan-only successor to the Oozinator.
Mythbusters duo launches new GeForce, codenamed Mona Lisa [TG Daily]
John Brownlee
Apple and AT&T working on official iPhone tethering plan
Apple pretty quickly dragged the iPhone tethering app back behind the App Store shed, pressed a muzzle to its temple and pulled the trigger until the barrels went 'click, click.' Predictable, really. But do Apple and AT&T have any plans to offer tethering to their iPhone customers? After all, they already offer the service to their Blackberry customers? If not, where's the hold up: Apple or AT&T?
An annoyed Gizmodo reader sent Steve Jobs an email, asking what the deal was. Jobs' response was curt and to the point: "We agree [with all of your points] and are discussing it with ATT."
My guess is AT&T isn't going to sneeze at an extra $30 or so a month to charge their tethered iPhone customers, but AT&T is having enough of a headache keeping their 3G smooth without having to deal with Joe Poopsock's iPhone-tethered World of Warcraft raids. When the 3G issues for regular iPhone customers are fixed, they'll turn their attention to tethering.
Rumor: Apple and AT&T developing iPhone tethering plan [Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
New Nano-sized Walkman is small, thin and ready to rock....
... or is it just a dull stone, like a pebble from the beach that looked cool when it was wet, but is now just a lump of basalt? The new S-series model has about the same displacement as an iPod Nano, but adds interesting new features like noise cancellation (no fancy headphones required), 30fps video playback and an automatic playlist generator that makes choices based on your listening habits.
It'll be $150 for a 4GB model and $180 for an 8GB one, both having 40 hours of music playback (or 10 hours of video playback on a 2" QVGA display.)
And if that's too pricey, for $100 or $140, depending on storage size, you can grab one of the new E-series models instead, which lacks the thin form and fancy software of the Walkman-S; or the B-series, which has no video and only 1GB or space, but costs only $45.
SONY RAISES THE CURTAIN ON NEW WALKMAN PLAYERS THAT DELIVER HIGH-QUALITY AUDIO AND VIDEO [Sony]
Rob Beschizza
Top Kindle 2 feature request: by gum make it less ugly
Wired demands that the forthcoming Kindle 2 be sexier than the original. They're right, too: it looked like a squashed origami hat. From Gadget Lab:
The current Kindle is ugly. Almost nobody will argue with that. In fact, the only way to make it uglier would be to make it in false-limb-pink. This one is easy: just copy somebody else. A sleek, black slab made from aluminum and glass would do the trick just nicely. Add a couple of buttons to turn the pages and you're done. And the keyboard? That's next:
The likelihood of Amazon making the Kindle beautiful is about equal to the likelihood of Sony innovating its way back into touch after losing the reader mindshare to Amazon.
Five Things Amazon Should Put in the Kindle 2.0 [Wired: Gadget Lab]
Rob Beschizza
Fujitsu Siemens' Amilo Mini netbook: on-the go computing for Darth Vader's PA
Fujitsu's Amilo Mini just had to be different. None of those cute modern curves and snuggly roundrects here: this is the mini-laptop that stormtrooper adjutants stride around with on the Death Star.
It so turns out that this attractively oldschool model will be a stiff $600, double that of of popular models from Asus and Dell's forthcoming entry in the field. What do you get for the extra dough? A 1.6 GHz Atom 320 CPU, 80GB hard drive, a webcam, 1GB of RAM, Windows XP, Bluetooth and WiFi. Weighing in at 2.2 pounds, expect it to lose the swish black 'n' white paint job by the time it hits western shelves, if Fujitsu's policy of reserving its pretty designs for Japan continues.
Source [JKKMobile]
John Brownlee
How to port Pitfall 2 to the Apple IIe. Image: not Pitfall 2.
Retro Thing has posted the second part of their exhaustive interview with Rex Bradford, former Activision programmer and creator of the unreleased Kabobber for the Atari 2600. It's a joy of an interview to read for the retro-gamer. Here's Bradford describing the porting of Pitfall II to the Apple II, then following it up with a casual name dropping of his work on Looking Glass' Terra Nova and System Shock: two of my favorite games ever.
My involvement with Pitfall II was as the sole coder for the Apple-II version of the game. When I "ported" games in those days, the games were simple enough that the procedure was to throw the source code into a drawer, boot up the game, play it a lot, and then recreate it. That process worked quite well then, though would be highly impractical with today's huge games. I had very little involvement with System Shock - I was working on what became Terra Nova at that point - though I wrote several shared libraries that the game used.
Retrospective: Kabobber for the Atari 2600 (Part 2 - Interview) [Retro Thing]
John Brownlee
Philips Essence is beautifully thin
Philips' news Essence HDTV is practically Gouda-thin at a diminutive 38 millimeters thick. Philips is going for the wall mounting crowd with this one (a club I'll soon be joining myself): it weighs only 36 pounds, includes a self-leveling mounting kit, and features a single cable that connects to a media hub and provides power, audio and video. No price yet, but HDTVs aren't horse flesh: you pay more for less in the gizmo game.
Philips Essence [Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
NASA admits computer viruses have made it into space
NASA has admitted that a computer virus was taken to the ISS in July. And it's not the first time!
The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth.The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection.
Once it has scooped up passwords and login names the Gammima.AG worm virus tries to send them back to a central server. It targets a total of 10 games most of which are popular in the Far East such as Maple Story, HuangYi Online and Talesweaver.
Nasa is working with partners on the ISS to find out how the virus got on to the laptop in the first place.
That's certainly rather benign, but perhaps it's time to start thinking of Norton, NASA. Although come to think of it, Norton could bring down the Space Station by itself.
John Brownlee
NEC announces All-In-One Touch Panels with Netbook-like specs
NEC has announced two new interesting tablets in Japan today. The 12 inch 12PNC-W2/B2 and the 15 inch 15PNC-W2/B2 seem to be the first tablets released with an Atom processor: 1.6GHz with between 512MB or 1GB of RAM, an 80GB HDD and flavors including XP Embedded (a fine choice) and Vista (on Atom? lolwut). There's no price yet, but those specs seem to indicate to me this will be priced around the netbook level, which would be wonderful. I would love a cheap, keyboard-less, internet-connected nettablet for my living room, for simple doodling, media control and idle reading.
NEC All-In-One Touch Panel [Akihabara News]
John Brownlee
Meet the Pac-Man Mini
It looks more like a Cold War era device for the remote detonation of nuclear warheads than a game console. but modder Sam Thornley's Portable Pac-Man Mini takes one of those old Namco emulator joysticks you plug and play into any old television and melds it with a tiny 2.5-inch LCD powered by 4 rechargeable AA batteries. That D-Pad isn't very good — perhaps he's trying to duck patent litigation — but the doodad can play Galaxian, Rally-X, Bosconian and Dig Dug. Because it's there!
Pac-Man Mini [Ben Heck Forums via Technabob]
John Brownlee
Beautiful Haight St. apartment filled with old typewriters and cameras
Apartment Therapy has posted an incredible house tour of San Fracisco's Philip Maisel, showing off his swank pad... and more importantly, his gorgeous collection of vintage SLR and typewriters. I want a house like this, where old, beautiful technology is simply bolted to the walls as objets d'art.
House Tour: Philip's Lower Haight Shared Arrangement [Apartment Therapy]
John Brownlee
Bloomberg: Steve Jobs is dead. Steve Jobs: No, bozos, I'm not.
Bloomberg is saddened to report the death of Steve Jobs. More saddened: Steve Jobs, clawing feverishly at the silk-lined lining of his casket while the dying light of his battery-deprived iPhone casts a symbolically significant "Golden Egg" upon the claustrophobic walls of his journalistic entombment.
Bloomberg's piece is lovingly wrought and almost religiously reverent. Jobs full title is prominently displayed in the headline: "Arbiter of Cool Technology XXXX," the successor to a line of divinely picked pontiffs starting with Arbiter of Cool Technology the First, His Holiness Alan Turing.
But Bloomberg does not ignore Jobs' human side. As they so deftly remind us, Jobs was well known within Silicon Valley for his Dirk Diggler style love-making prowess. The second paragraph reads: "Jobs XXXX; TK said XXXXX." It may be the subtlest yet most illuminating sentence on the size of Jobs' fabled genitalia ever written. Jobs said quadruple X, but the mysterious TK — an old paramour, perhaps — said it was quintuple X. A sight to behold, I'm sure!
Fortunately, it all appears to be a mistake. The 40th Arbiter of Cool Technology is still with us. The mistake was Bloomberg's: while updating Jobs' draft obituary (morbid, but common in the trade) some intern accidentally hit publish. Full text at Gawker.
Whew. That still gives me a chance to get an interview with His Holiness' XXXX through Apple PR.
John Brownlee
Incredible LEGO Ohmu from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Artison LEGO brick layer Big-X put together this wonderful Ohmu: skyscraper-sized slithering scarabs that occasionally go into environmental musth from Hiyao Miyazaki's masterpiece, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Rob Beschizza
Silliest cellphone accessories
Al Sacco selects the silliest cellphone accessories to grace our Earth before resting in its landfills, with such thrills as the Blackberry-waterproofing aquapack, iPhone finger condoms, and an unpleasant stylus. Unfortunately, the list is one of those arduous one-item per page reloadshows. See if you can get past five without screaming!
Silliest Smartphone Accessories: How to Humiliate a BlackBerry, Embarrass an iPhone [CIO]
Rob Beschizza
Basic electronics symbols
This brought back old meme-ories this morning. From Toothpaste for dinner.
John Brownlee
The Space Cube: a cute but unbearably expensive fruit-sized computer, possibly alien in origin
That an entire computer can be crammed into an orange sized case is not really surprising in this day and age. With a 300MHz processor, 64MB of DDR RAM and a 1GB CompactFlash Card, the Space Cube is less powerful than several consumer phones, all of which are crammed into a smaller chassis blueprint.
So that doesn't impress me. What does impress me is the gorgeous compaction of ports. SP Outs, Mic Ins, Ethernet ports, VGA support, USB port, speaker plug, etc. There's even a "Space Wire" port: "a type of proprietary interface used by the ESA, NASA and JAXA when the Cube actually goes into space." That certainly implies one leg up the Space Cube has over its competition: it is at least partially extra-terrestrial.
A neat little machine, I think. But, eyes rolled white, prepare to pull out of your consumerist lust and ejaculate your eyeteeth onto the lusciously taut belly of Dame Mock Outrage: they will be sold for as much as £1,500 ($2,769)!
A Real Space Oddity Arrives at PC Pro [PC Pro via Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Major iPhone 2.0.2. firmware vulnerability gives total access even on password protected forms. Worse: dead simple.
Word's come out of a truly hideous iPhone Firmware 2.0.2 bug that allows any one who picks up your phone full access to your data... even if it's password protected.
Here's how it's done. Access is gained through the "Emergency Call" option on the password entry screen. Now hit the Home button twice. You're now at the favorites screen. Hit a blue arrow next to a contact's name. Want access to email? Make to email them, then email someone else. Want to use Safari? Go to a contact's web site, then just browse as normal. Easy. And totally stupid.
If you want to secure your iPhone before the obviously forthcoming point release fix, just assign your home button to something besides "Phone Favorites."
But jeez, Apple. Another fuck up? This will not go over well with your business users. You've spread yourself way too thin.
Major Security Flaw in 2.0.2. [Mac Rumors via Cult of Mac]
John Brownlee
Dual Touchscreen Nintendo DS in 2009?
My former Kotaku colleague Brian 'LOL' Ashcraft has plied mysterious "sources" in Japan with sake, reducing them to salaryman-style drunkenness. Plucked from their chaotic drunken ramblings? Some details about the next iteration of the Nintendo DS.
According to Ashcraft, several industry sources outside of Nintendo claim that a new DS is being prepared... one with a top-mounted touch screen. The screens will also be slightly bigger.
It's plausible. The DS is still early in its lifestyle: exciting games are still coming out for the platform. A top-mounted touch screen would allow for new types of games to be developed while maintaining library backwards compatibility without a built-in emulator.
I think the part of me that is struggling with this rumor is I simply don't know what a top touch screen would add: the bottom touch screen is used meaningfully seldom enough as it is. On the other hand, Nintendo has a way of making seemingly useless gimmicks into system-defining backbones that make me feel foolish for my skepticism.
Either way, we've got a lot of time to speculate: Nintendo won't even announce these babies until 2009. Providing they aren't just unicorns.
Rumor: New Dual-Touchscreen Nintendo DS in early 2009 [Gizmodo]
John Brownlee
Jin Woo Han's cycloptic Portable Theater concept
This clever little cycloptic concept by South Korean industrial designer Jin Woo Han is a combination computer and projector: a tiny Wind PC sized home theater box perfect for tucking under the arm and lugging around. The projector nestles into the concavity of the chassis top: surround sound is outputed through speakers built-in to the side. Conceptual, of course, which means it is forged of ganja during designer fever dreams, but it is often nice to peek through the occulus of a parallel world on these slower newsdays.
Portable PC Theater [Nick Papa Georgia]
John Brownlee
Modern games go GameBoy
A wonderful Photoshop contest over at the Pixelation forums: modern video games go pea soup GameBoy, with entries (among others) for Guitar Hero, BioShock, ICO, Okami, Sam & Max and Flashback. This one is Bioshock... I would play the fuck out of that port.
Modern Games on Gameboy Thread [Pixelation via Gearfuse]
John Brownlee
Yup, Psystar will sue Apple for anti-trust violations
Oh, Psystar. You're like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, giggling up blood and spitting teeth all over Apple's Lou. We love you so much. As predicted, they are fighting Apple's lawsuit by going anti-trust.
Miami-based Psystar, owned by Rudy Pedraza, will sue Apple under two federal laws designed to discourage monopolies and cartels, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, saying Apple's tying of the Mac OS to Apple-labeled hardware is "an anticompetitive restrain of trade," according to attorney Colby Springer of antitrust specialists Carr & Ferrell. Psystar is requesting that the court find Apple's EULA void, and is asking for unspecified damages.Springer said his firm has not filed any suits with the Federal Trade Commission or any other government agencies.
The answer and countersuit will be filed Tuesday afternoon in U.S. District Court for Northern California.
This is going to be fun to watch.
Psystar responds to Apple suit, will countersue [CNet News]
Related:
• Psystar hires Apple-killing attorneys
• Psystar eggs Apple on, releases Leopard Restore Disc to customers ...
• How the Psystar lawsuit might go very, very wrong... for Apple ...
• Psystar will allege Apple antitrust
• Apple finally — FINALLY — sues Psystar
• Psystar announces Mac server clones, still not sued
• Psystar OpenMac monstrosities run OS X
John Brownlee
Finger tongs for the gastronomically gauche
I don't care. Perhaps the snooty gastronomist — twitching a lip that bristles with a line of a single hair follicles each parallel to its oily brothers — would consider such a thing an eye-roll-worth faux pax, punchably gauche, but I find salad tongs to be ineffectual tools, especially when trying to grappled with an orboid cherry tomato, which I inevitably and accidentally either propel across the room to bounce around like a crazy ball or else burst like a squeezed, bloodshot eyeball.
So these wearable rubber tong gloves? I think they are awesome. Perhaps it is a bit hoi polloi to — as in this picture — serve your guests a handful of greasy bacon, but the hand is the finest culinary utensil, at least in parts of the world where toilet paper and fresh water are ubiquitous. $18.95.
Finger tongs [Fusion Brands via book of joe]
John Brownlee
Laptop Mag reviews Peek e-mail only PDA (Verdict: A Kindle for email)
When the Peek pocket email device was first announced, some of you were skeptical. But Laptop Magazine likes it quite a bit, and spells out the Peek's charm in one captivating analogy: the Kindle is for books, and the Peek is for email.
We did notice that the Peek took a bit longer than a BlackBerry to bring up a new message window and to load the menu options. However, the user interface is dead simple, and sending new messages should be a breeze for the tech-incompetent. We loved the spacious, rubberized keyboard and its tactile feedback. You should have no problem slipping the Peek into a pocket since it is, according to Peek CEO Amol Sarva, “30 percent thinner than the iPhone.
A lot of us are going to wonder about the purpose of the Peek, but like I said when I originally posted about it, I admire the elegance of devices that do one thing and perform that primary function incredibly well. It'll be interesting to see if there really is a market for a $100 portable email device wedged underneath the Smartphone and Blackberry segments.
A Sneak Peek at the E-Mail-Only Peek [Laptop Mag]
John Brownlee
Large Hadron Collider manual now available for download
Inspired by CERN and understanding the science behind the technology thanks to their suave nerdcore rap, you have cobbled together your own Large Hadron Collider out of spare vacuum cleaner parts in your garage. But how to operate the thing? There is no room for experimentation, lest early fumblings create an infinitely dense physical singularity, sucking in space time within several dozen parsecs, causing existence as you know it to come shrieking to a halt. And existing is basically all you do.
Good news, then: CERN have published their immence 1,589 LHC manual. I am printing it out, binding it and leaving it by my toilet for the excretionary edification of my guests.
Large Hadron Collider [IOP via MAKE]
Rob Beschizza
In defense of terrible Tiger Electronics handheld games
Andrew Liszewski looks back on the classic game Hang-On — the portable version, that is — and its place at the end of the pre-Gameboy era of handheld gaming. What I like about his piece is that he comes to praise Ceasar, not to bury him.
You see, it's easy to mock Tiger Electronics' old LCD games. The gameplay was bad, limited to the possibilities afforded by the "popsicle-stick shadow play" elements used instead of pixels. But two things were really cool about them.
First, they got great licenses and created beautiful devices out of them. Just look at it! Apart from the actual game, the industrial design is unimpeachable. Think back, older readers — you knew these things sucked, didn't you? And yet they remained cool until the Gameboy came along. So it wasn't really about the game, was it?
Second, the 1980s was full of game marketing that deceptively implied that home versions of arcade games would look great and follow the originals closely. In fact, most conversions were rubbish, tossed off in a matter of weeks. Disappointment. Ennui. But it was impossible to be disappointed by a Tiger game, because they were mostly the exact same game, except sometimes you could shoot. Low expectations guarantees happiness!
The Games We Played - Tiger Electronics Hang-On [Oh Gizmo!]
Rob Beschizza
Alert: Man designs VOIP phone that doesn't look like a 15-year old mobile
Nova Design's Tatung VOIP phone has bluetooth, "wireless," a neat flat keypad and nothing else whatsoever. Moreover, it is a real thing, allegedly, albeit just a prototype. Isn't it about time we had some sexy wireless Skypephones?
Of course, Nova is another industrial designer with a terrible, inaccessible, unlinkable flash site! To read more, just hit Yanko.
Design Page [Nova via Yanko]
Rob Beschizza
Slow-eating bowl extends doggie dinnertime
The dog eats like it will never eat again, chomping on the gelatinous emulsion we feed it as it if were made of chocolate rabbits. The DogPauseBowl slows it down, however, forcing Rover to eat his food they way we do, at our genteel, Victorian-themed emotional suppression dinner parties.
Dog Pause bowls are $17.95 and offered in red or blue dishwasher-safe polyethylene.
Product Page [DogPauseBowl via Red Ferret Journal]
Rob Beschizza
Zunes for politicians
Microsoft has government in mind with its new Zunes, crafted specifically for the Republican and Democratic party conventions taking place this week and next. It's hard not to imagine the humor potential of making similarly precious designs for other political parties.
Democrats and Republicans Get Special Edition Zunes For Their Conventions [Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
Wired reviews Palm Treo Pro. Verdict: stylish, not very good
Steven Leckart plays with Palm's new flagship handset for a while, and finds it a middling and compromised device: "this re-worked, dolled-up device is as good as it gets for the once-mighty smartphone company."
Good is its slim form, decent camera, battery life, real headphone jack, turn-by-turn GPS and the fact that, as an unlocked machine, it belongs to you, not your carrier. Bad are the touchscreen, laggy menu navigation and its "greasy" obisidan finish.
Rob Beschizza
Skateboard printing from Zazzle
Zazzle, which is Cafepress for cool people, now prints custom skateboards. From CrunchGear:
As a canvas, you’ve got your choice of standard decks, mini decks, and the oldschool fishboard decks. All of the boards are offered in a variety of widths, so the boat-feeted amongst us are good to go. As far as we can tell from the press release, these aren’t trashy little K-Mart boards - nothin’ but good ol’ seven-ply maple, just as it should be. At a base-price of $60 bucks, you’re getting a one-of-a-kind custom board for just about the same price you’d pay for any old off-the-shelf deck.
Zazzle deck designer [Zazzle via CrunchGear]
Rob Beschizza
Hard drive that fits in your wallet
A 20-gig 1.8" hard drive, with the absolute minimum of enclosure, is on sale for $45 in China. Sourced from Samsung, the unit has a tiny USB plug and a picture of a platter assembly on the side.
Crush hard drive! Crush!
[Beto via Everything USB and Gadget Lab]
Rob Beschizza
Nikon's D90 does HD movies too
Nikon's D90 is upon us. High-def movie clips with sound, from a consumer DSLR! The 12.3 megapixel model, , with 11-point autofocus and a bundled AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm lens, is $1,300 and available from September. From the press release:
The D-Movie mode [allows] consumers to create their own HD movie clips (1280 x 720) with sound from their D-SLR camera. Photographers will appreciate the cinematic qualities that come from the 24fps frame rate, which matches theatrical film, whether producing vacation clips or creatively melding stills with video.
At the price, it's out of my league simply as a camera, but if the HD movies are of comparable quality to HD camcorders — and the internal buffer can deal with the record button being depressed for more than a minute at a time — it's a sexy value-add on what otherwise should be a seriously decent camera.
PR [Nikon]
John Brownlee
Help me set up an iMac G3 as a streaming music station
A while back, I asked for ideas on what to do with an inherited iMac G3. You had some great ones. There are still plans to steampunkify it, but until then, I would like to use it more practically. One primary function of its use will be a guestbook for people who come over: they will be coldly commanded as they walk in the door to describe what they are doing here, who they are, and anything else they want to write. I am considering using Twitter for this purpose, so the paucity of my social life can be distributed to the masses.
But I have a more practical need of the bulky old i(ndigo)Mac. I need to turn it into a streaming music station. I have Airport Expresses in every room of the house: that's no problem. The problem is the set-up. And I'd like you guys to help me work it out.
My current setup: my main computer is a two year old MacBook Pro. This is what I currently use to stream music to the various rooms. But because my hard drive is only 80GBs, I opted to put my iTunes library directory on an external drive. This works well enough, but what it means is I can't listen to music over Airtunes when the MBP is working its primary function: as a laptop.
So I would like to set up the iMac as my music streaming station. I assume a USB wi-fi dongle will take care of actually getting music to the Airtunes. But there's a couple of other logistic problems with this plan. The big one is videos. I have a lot of videos in iTunes and I want to continue to be able to watch them on my MBP iTunes. So I think what I need to do is come up with a way to only sync my music collection on the iMac. Unfortunately, I don't know a simple way to do that except by adding new albums manually to the iMac.
The second is a matter of control. I would like to be able to use my laptop to access the iMac and select the next songs to play from any room in the house. I have no good ideas on this front.
Any ideas? I look upon you, o ye cybogish droogies, for the expertise my job description laughably claims I should possess.
Rob Beschizza
Apple sanctioned for misleading advertising ... again!
Apple has again run afoul of false advertising rules across the pond. The latest rap from Britain's Advertising Standards Authority regards its claim that "all of the web" is accessible from the iPhone.
"They made a very general claim that you can see the internet in its entirety, and actually that's not quite true - so we've upheld [a complaint]," the ASA told the BBC, after ordering Apple to not run the ad again. Its rationale was that as the iPhone won't run Flash and Java, two commonplace web technologies, the ad misled consumers.
Apple's argument was that the claim referred only to the "availability" of webpages, rather than whether they could actually be displayed properly. Facepalm: almost anything with an internet connection meets this standard. While it has a point about WAP or other junk being served to most other cellphones, the performance of other devices doesn't bear on whether the iPhone actually does what Apple claims it does.
More convincingly, to me, is Apple's complaint that Flash and Java are third-party technologies, with which compatibility can never be perfectly ensured. Right as it is, it's a point that still comes up short when you consider its claim that the iPhone may access all of the web. From the adjudication:
We noted Apple's argument that the ad was about site availability rather than technical detail, but considered that the claim ... "all parts of the internet are on the iPhone" implied users would be able to access all websites and see them in their entirety. We considered that, because the ad had not explained the limitations, viewers were likely to expect to be able to see all the content on a website normally accessible through a PC rather than just having the ability to reach the website. We concluded that the ad gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone.
The intriguing part, for me, is wondering if Apple was intentionally bullshitting, or if it really doesn't think that Flash and Java count as part of the web. Has it become too easy to believe the popular caricature that Apple operates on a cult-like mindset, full of doublethink? The truth is that it's too self-aware, and too well-controlled, to entertain such delusions.
Which leaves the question: why does it keep getting in trouble for false advertising in Britain? Just a few years ago, it was similarly sanctioned for claiming the Power Mac was the world's fastest personal computer. It's as if Apple doesn't expect its claims to be taken seriously.
Rob Beschizza
$200 cash for first-gen 8GB iPhone, but only if NextWorth deems it "lightly" used
Trade-in shop NextWorth says that it will offer so much cash back on a first-gen iPhone that you can "completely cover" an upgrade to a 3G model.
“As the demand for the first generation iPhone in secondary markets remains strong, we are able to offer higher dollar exchanges and remove the price issue from the decision to upgrade to a 3G iPhone,” said Dave Chen, CEO of NextWorth, in a press release. The accompanying PR pitch is unequivocal: "The company is announcing an easy iPhone upgrade and trade-in program that provides 1G iPhone owners enough cash back to cover the cost of a new 3G iPhone."
The problem is that the estimated trade-in values are not guaranteed. This is perfectly reasonable, of course — you could otherwise send in any old junk — but the way it's being marketed is likely to result in tears before bedtime. You don't know how much you'll be getting until it's in their hands. It will give "up to" $200 for a first-gen iPhone in "light wear" condition, but only if it is an 8GB model or larger.
And the deal goes from "amazing" to "Detroit Craiglist" pretty quickly: a 4GB iPhone with normal wear, for example, nets only $139.50
iPod/iPhone Exchange [NextWorth]
John Brownlee
Guitar Praise: Guitar Hero for Christians
I used to be a Christian. Born of atheist parents, I stumbled upon this on my own. But there was a day my faith disintegrated: it was when I realized that the exact same sensation of God's love that I felt at Christian gatherings was absolutely indistinguishable from the adrenaline rush and sense of cultural belonging that I felt at a rock concert.
Guitar Praise, then, might send more souls to the boiling feces rape pits of hell than it saves... at least if any of them connect the dots like I did. A Guitar Hero knock-off for Christians, it costs $99.95 with one guitar and plugs into any Mac or PC.
"Grab the guitar and play along with top Christian bands! Shred those riffs or blast the bass…you add a unique sound to the solid Christian rock. But watch out: if you can't keep up, the artists will take a break and stop the music." Christian rock? Unique sounds? Artists taking breaks and stopping the music? METALLICA!
Guitar Praise [Pre-Order Page]
John Brownlee
iPod Nano mockup shows luscious Touch-like interface
The next iPod Nano will eschew the squatness of its predecessor for the elongated chassis of its grandfather. This we know. The reason it will do this is to channel the iPhone and iPod Touch's screen dimensions. Again, this we know. But that implies something: it implies a UI change. If the screen dimensions of the iPod Nano shift, won't the interface shift as well to be more analogous to the Touch?
That's the idea Miguel Suárez has run with. Concept, of course. Imaginary. Slavish fanboy nonsense. But I like the revised UI quite a bit. I would be very happy to see this on a new Nano, or rolled out to iPods across the line.
Amazing iPod Nano Mock-Up [iPhone Savior]
John Brownlee
Panasonic Gaggle of Random Alphanumeric Characters (PZR900) builds DVR into plasma HDTV
My tongue reverses itself, slithers chokingly down my throat at the price of this baby — $4,900 for a 50 incher! I can't afford that! — but the new Panasonic Plasma, the PZR900, is pretty sweet. Nice display, natch: 1920 x1080. The set connects to some online service called 'TV Net' to watch YouTube videos and other streaming content. There's a built-in card reader and you can watch video surveillance videos on it... say, for example, streaming the feed that you have surreptitiously installed underneath the inner lip of your toilet. But the big booyeah here is the built-in DVR: a lust terrabyte, allowing you to record up to 121 hours of video.
Panasonic PZR900 Plasma TVs [Panasonic]
John Brownlee
Comic Reader Apps on iPhone? Suck.
Wired's Charlie Sorrel, who owes me five euros, has apparently spent it on comic book reading apps for the iPhone, which goes far to explain the strange prose stylings of his collective review of a couple of iPhone comic reader apps:
Is the iPhone a good platform for reading comic books?!?! Probably not, but that isn't stopping developers from having a crack at bringing the funnies to your pocket. BAM! The problem is that the iPhone's screen, while great for reading plain-text ebooks, is just a little too small for comic book pages! KABLOOIE! Part of comics' impact is the full, two-page spread which allows for spacing and pacing of the story. But a full two pages is obviously too much for the iPhone's screen! BAM! You can zoom in to read the individual frames, but that's kind of a pain! POTRZEBIE!
If you're interested in reading comics on your iPhone, check it out, though Charlie seems a tad disappointed that his extensive Cherry Poptart collection was essentially "unreadable" on every app he tried.
Comic Books on the iPhone? No Thanks [Gadget Lab]
John Brownlee
iPhone Hologram App: Total Nonsense, but still awesome
Okay, first off, this is bullshit: the iPhone's motion sensor is not this sophisticated. And my smug satisfaction at having predicted that will have to be believed over proven: I swear, I knew it was crap even before I googled up this "developer" blog post about the whole deal.
That all said: boy, isn't this neat? If it were real, it would be an excellent test bed for the next Viewtiful Joe game, to be sure.
John Brownlee
Canon PowerShot E1: We will build the woman-proof camera
Women. Inexplicable creatures. Though their flesh is dimpled and perky, and though their bowel movements have the aroma of freshly baked cinnamon rolls, they are as dangerous and intractable an element as fire and lightning, striking but once and razing the ground upon which they — goddess-like — tread. Unfortunately, this tread ground often includes the gadgetological. How many fairer sexed, stooping to conquer, have left the gizmo-spooled guts of a gadget in their wake as they blindly fiddle with buttons and settings... technology as far beyond their ken as advanced space-time theory is to the butterfly? Brian Lam wept.
Canon knows all this. Employing a Spartan armada of man's man tech designers, sucking meat off t-bones and slugging down whiskey, they realized the difficulty in making technology impervious to the blind meddling of the electronically unsophisticated human female. The Canon PowerShot E1, therefore, is specifically made for women: a cyborg-like construct of vat grown unicorn meat, fueled by radioactive sugar and spice. Knowing the inherent foolishness of the double X chromosome, Canon even brags that their cameras can be operated by even the loveliest, most dollsome sub-human intelligence: they left out "all unnecessary buttons," including the hidden self-destruct button that women somehow never fail but to trigger on the most expensive devices.
Fun meta game: is Brownlee JUST JOKING, snickering internally at the inherent absurdity of a "women's camera" in a modern, post-60s world, yet playing it all as straight as a tongue firmly in cheek would allow? Or is this post one long ode to his own deeply rooted well of misognyism and — heck, let's just face it — deeply repressed orientation? To the comments with you, o ye players!
Poweshot E1 Canons Women Only Digital Camera [Crunchgear]
Rob Beschizza
Test Card TV Cosy
An anonymous commenter draws our attention to this beautiful television cosy, yours for $25 at Sally England Design.
This is a really fun way to cover up your television when you are not watching it. Sometimes they say that the t.v puts off energy when it is not on that can effect otherwise good feng-shui. This design mimics those 'test of the emergency broadcast system' colorful bars that I was always amazed with growing up. It is made of felt and measures 21 1/4 wide x 14 1/2 long. It fits over your television, and I can make a custom one for you (extra cost) if your television is not as tiny as ours
Ben Kruisdijk also unearthed similarly fantastical works from Dutch artist Conny Kuilboer:
Product Page [Etsy]
Previously: Power On Self Test Card
Rob Beschizza
iNostalgia! Old-school Football on iPhone
Remember those bleepy LED football games from thirty years ago? If so, you'll be delighted to hear that old school is coming to the iPhone. Maker Mark Helmuth writes in:
I have developed a new application based on the 1970s electronic handheld football game. We have a working beta version ready for the iphone. ... We plan to launch next week
The game will be just a buck, according to the homepage, and it's currently in Beta. Mark's looking for testers for final refinements: if you want in, make your case in the comments and add some contact info, and perhaps he'll be in touch.
Product Page [LEDFootball.com]
Rob Beschizza
The intense irony of playing World of Warcraft while using a treadmill
With just a little work, World of Warcraft addicts can endlessly repeat a numbing series of exercises instead of leading a genuinely active life. And now they can also use a treadmill while doing so. (Rimshot)
We've always wondered what it would be like to run the same distance in the real world that we run every day in Warcraft. Finding out required duct tape, computers, custom scripts, sore legs, and elf ears. We had been wanting to connect a treadmill to Warcraft and calibrate the speed for a long time. Probably since we started calling Warcraft "RunCraft" because neither of us had mounts.
This attempt to play the game by hooking treadmills to the machine's input — matching their characters' movements stride for stride — proved impossible, even for fit individuals!
Race Azeroth [Manapotions.com]
world of warcraft on a treadmill [Hack a Day]
Rob Beschizza
Joel's next keyboard: Crayola EZ Type
BBG supremo Joel Johnson is currently away, but I know our rainbow-loving leader would be enchanted by the bright colors of Crayola's EZ Type keyboard.
A close inspection of the $30 USB model, however, reveals a somewhat cocked-up layout, with the keys arranged in a neat grid instead of the finely-evolved modern standard. Such things are sexy in cellphones, but in a training model for the real thing? Also, is that Comic Sans?
Update: Cory saw it first!
Product Page [Crayola via Red Ferret Journal]
Rob Beschizza
Rumor mill would have Nikon D90 ground out tomorrow
Nikon's much-anticipated D90, rumored to have a 12.3 megapixel sensor, 3" live-preview display, solid video playback, ISO 6400 and other "ultimate prosumer" attributes, shall be given its PR baptism tomorrow. Wired's Gadget Lab is still skeptical, especially of the latest "leaked" shots.
Of course, we've been here before. Way back in June we heard that the D90 was imminent, and that came from the same source -- Nikon Rumors. This time, though, the images are a little better. The first of the pictures below show the rather ridiculously bad Photoshop effort from that June story, followed by two more up-to-date "leaked" pictures. So snap to it, Gadget Labbers. Are these real or fake?
If nothing else, they got the numeral "9" right this time, instead of just inverting the 6 from the D60!
Enjoy - official Nikon D90 pictures and specs - 100% legit [Nikon Rumors via Gadget Lab]
Rob Beschizza
"Monolith" would be good name for HTC S740
If you think its Android-powered Dream model is too ... bananaey ... HTC's S740 is the stark antidote, a symphony in right angles and grids. A sideways-slider with a full QWERTY keyboard and Windows Mobile 6.1, it has HSDPA; a 2.4" display; a 3.2 megapixel camera; 256 MB of flash and 256 MB of RAM; Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS; and one of those irritating USB-audio combo ports.
WM 6.1 standard edition? Yuck. And such good design wasted on it, too.
HTC's S740 Is the Touch Diamond With a Keyboard, Runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard [Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
HTC Dream shaped a bit like a banana
Remember how you guys wanted a bananaphone? HTC's Dream, the first to sport Google's Android operating system, will be it. Android Guys got their hands on the schematics, which reveal a bendy design flourish consistent with that most naughty of fruits.
It’s time to put this rumor to bed once and for all. We’ve seen a handful of mockups online these last few weeks guessing as to what the first Android handset is going to look like. We even saw a video that divided many fanboys, including us AndroidGuys. Well, thanks to a trusted source claiming to be close to one of the three parties involved, we’re here to show you officially what the G1 is going to look like and it’s very similar to what you guys have been seeing lately. There are only a couple of things to this design that we didn’t see coming.
The Dream will be available from T-Mobile later this fall.
No More Speculation - This is the G1 from T-Mobile [Android Guys]
Rob Beschizza
Exilim Cellphone hits FCC
Casio's Exilim lineup of cameras is all a modicum of quality in the smallest possible form. Its forthcoming W63CA cellphone, then, will make for an interesting change: only Sony Ericsson pushes particularly hard on the cam-phone convergence front, and its high-quality models are not very thin at all. Here's the FCC approval documentation, which reveals a startlingly slim machine — especially when you consider the 8 megapixel sensor.
Sure, megapixels are a shabby measure, artificially inflated at the cost of quality by forcing crummy sensors to do more work with less light. But still, isn't it a cutie? Japanese carrier KDDI is stamped on the sticker, but that it's been slapped on the FCC's desk offers hope we'll see it stateside.
Casio's 8 megapixel Exilim W63CA cellphone gets FCC approved [Engadget]
Rob Beschizza
Canon's new Pixmas have WiFi printing without annoying adapters
Canon's Pixma MP980 and MP620 include WiFi adapters, so there's no need to faff around with wireless print servers, USB bridges or what-have-you. The $300 980 is the spec monster, with six ink tanks, 20-second prints and a film and negative scanner, while the $150 620 is cheaper and not so fancy, with 40-second prints, a lower-res LCD display and only 5 colors.
Both models have memory card slots, ethernet and are limited to 4x6 prints.
[via Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
The myriad of PS3 hardware options, in a speadsheet
Thinking about buying a PS3 but confused about the differences between each? Joystiq has the surprisingly complicated spreadsheet, which those owning large previous-gen Playstation collections must consult.
Rob Beschizza
Avenging Unicorn Play Set
Sometimes, something needs not so much a unicorn chaser as it needs to be chased down and killed by a unicorn.
The $12 set comes with four interchangeable horns and three victims. There is video:
Product Page [Stupid]
Rob Beschizza
Get your SID on: Blip Festival 2008 lineup announced
Blip Festival, a four-day nostalgia bath in yesteryear's game consoles and consoles, runs Dec. 4-7 2008 at The Bell House, 149 7th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Here's a list of the musicians and artists confirmed to attend:
MUSIC • PARTIAL & CONFIRMED: [us] Animal Style [us] Bit Shifter [sg] Ikuma [uk] Jellica [us] Lissajou [be] M-.-n [es] Meneo [us] minusbaby [us] Mr. Spastic [us] noteNdo [us] Nullsleep [fr] Sidabitball [us] Starscream [uk] Syphus [it] Tonylight [us] Trash80VISUALS • PARTIAL & CONFIRMED:
[es] Entter
[us] NO CARRIER
[us] noteNdo
[us] VBLANK
[us] Voltage Controlled
Bleep bleep! Read Joel's report from 2006, and his BBtv segment covering 2007.
Rob Beschizza
Web-based alarm clock just as reliable as Firefox
Would you like to take a simple, reliable gadget and recreate it in software, where it becomes entirely reliant on the stability and continued operation of a more complicated piece of technology? Tom Churm has created an online alarm clock.
OnlineClock.net has been online since early 2006 and we strive to be the world's most useful alarm clock you can use on the internet. We offer a wide range of different kinds of online alarm clocks, stopwatches, countdowns and timers ... we don't do rooster sound effects - we're for grown ups!
Some of them have a nice retro look, like things BBC2 would leave on for 20 minutes before shutting down at 1 a.m. in the 1970s.
Rob Beschizza
Robots compete to the strains of "The Final Countdown"
The penguin robot is outrun by the mincing robot. Doubtless they head for Venus.
(Thanks, Alex!)
Rob Beschizza
New DivX encoder outputs h.264
DivX has released the first edition of its software that encodes h.264, but you'll need to sign up for beta testing if you want to get it now. Remember what a CLI is? You'll be using it a lot here.
We'll cover everything from encoder installation to the third-party software nedeed to create and play MKV files, tools for video processing, some of the constraints in the draft DivX 7 H.264 HD video profile and some tips on customizing your experience with the encoder for easier, more automated multipass encoding. Our guide should be very easy to follow so grab a cup of tea and let us teach you the basics! In the near future we'll also discuss the draft profile in more detail for those who are interested.
DivX H.264 Encoder Alpha 1 & Tutorial [DivX Labs] — Cheers, Bruce!
Rob Beschizza
Cellphone embedded in road surface
"Un cellulare incastonato nell'asfalto," spotted in Italy by Michele Aquila. Bruce Sterling describes it as "Pompeiian, yet utterly abject."
Source [ibcbulk's photostream via Beyond the Beyond]
Rob Beschizza
Ten for the lunch break
• Olympus's 1050 SW shockproof, waterproof 10 megapixel camera is sexy and stark. And $300 .
• Stephen Fry, celebrated Englishman, prefers the Nintendo DS to Sony's PSP.
• Wired's Threat Level reminds everyone that the Democratic National Convention will be packed with recording gadgets of every kind. Every gaffe, slip and pratfall will be broadcast worldwide at the speed of Internet.
• Firebox has original replica stylophones in.
• Canon's four new cameras are "oppressively mundane," says Engadget's Paul Miller.
• The iPhone's grim 3G performance is, perhaps predictably, AT&T's iPhault.
• A judge in New Zealand, David Harvey, applies differential standards of free speech online and off, because online can be searched more easily.
• Inexplicable USB snake is inexplicable.
• The Russian army, big on manpower but still sending ancient crumbling deathtraps into battle, is using inflatable full-size models of vehicles to keep spy satellites guessing about capabilities and movements.
• A solar-powered airplane stayed aloft for 83 hours and 37 minutes, smashing the world record.
John Brownlee
Dell Mini-Inspiron running Ubuntu in the wild
Engadget has posted up some leaked insider shots of the Dell Mini-Inspiron Netbook (still MIA, dammit) running Ubuntu Netbook. The slathering of Ubuntu on a netbook is satisfying in a peanut butter meets bacon sort of way, but the real news is a system profile shot, in which it appears that the Mini-Inspiron's Atom chip supports hyperthreading... which would appear to make it the first Atom netbook to support the technology. Unless that's the first dual core Atom netbook we're looking at.
Dell Mini Inspiron Caught Running Ubuntu in the wild [Engadget]
Rob Beschizza
A sinister chorus of tortured Furbies
"The art he practiced was a performing art rather than a creative one: Doctor Jest was the Chief Interrogator of Melniboné. Reaching out with his free hand, he expertly seized the genitals of one of the male Furbies™. The scalpel flashed and the resulting music grew louder and more complex as the Furbies™, their vocal cords surgically operated upon to sing but one note each, screamed in perfect harmony. Even the young emperor was moved by the sinister echo of their songs. 'Why should their pain produce such marvelous beauty?' he wondered. And the Emperor Elric closed his eyes."
John Brownlee
Cloud: Heathrow's incredible flip dot animated sculpture
Hanging like a scintillating CGI blob between the escalators of Heathrow Airport's new Terminal Five, 'Cloud' is an incredible kinetic sculpture that channels 4,638 reflective flip dots into an amazing amorphous animation... like a giant glob of liquid metal siphoned out of the gut of a T-1000 and prodded into shapeshifting by electrical pulses.
John Brownlee
Remote Control Star Trek Enterprise: To Boldly Go... Until The Battery Runs Out
Captain's log, $tardate 79.99. Our position, unknown. Sucked through some kind of... rift... the Enterprise finds itself drifting in unknown space, shrunk down like cosmic Liliputians, hounded by monstrous, troglodytic Brobdingnagians, leaping up and down and batting their sticky hands at us. Attempting to flee, our port warp nacelle was struck by some kind of spinning, fan-like doomsday device, flinging us to the very end of this dimension's space-time: a solid wall past which, Spock speculates, "reality" and "existence" has yet to seep.
Surrounded by bodies, Bones gibbers idiotically about alternate career paths, while that flatulent haggis of a Starfleet Engineer drunkenly stumbles through every embarrassing highland stereotype on his way to actually fixing the damn engines, which can suddenly only power the Enterprise for 15 minutes at a a time.
Meanwhile, we have been set upon by some sort of grotesque hell hound. Helm control minimal, our course and path is clearly in the hands of one of this dimension's galaxy-sized colossi. Morale is low: I grimly consider shooting Chekov for the crew's amusement.
Star Trek Remote Control USS Enterprise Vehicle [Entertainment Earth]
Rob Beschizza
Ceci n'est pas un MacBook Pro
That it's a mockup—and that it is nonetheless doing the blog rounds—shouldn't be cause for grumbles. It's the internet saying "Hey, Steve! This is what we want." A good thing!
Leaked Ad of MacBook Pro Actually a Mockup
[Cult of Mac]
Rob Beschizza
Stylish USB joypad
Dream Cheeky's silver-finish USB gamepad is probably the closest any such device will ever get to "tasteful." A 6-foot cable, OSX drivers and rubber base suggest that the makers have thought things through a little, but the d-pad looks terrible.
Product Page [Dream Cheeky via technabob]
John Brownlee
Media Street eMotion emulates games, plays MP3s, charges your gadgets
The Media Street eMotion is a green-friendly GamePark and a solar powered iPod in one. For $169.99, you get a 5.5" by 3.1" portable media player capable of playing all your MP3s, AVI files and MP4s, as well as built-in emulators for the NES, GameBoy, GameBoy Color and Sega Master Drive. Better yet, the solar panel can be used not only to charge itself but other devices as well.
That's a rather interesting pedigree: a ROM-emulating power brick with MP3 playback capability... so implausible a feature set that I can't help but want one a teensy bit.
Media Street EM-SOL2GIG eMotion 2GB Solar Powered Media Player & Battery Charger [Amazon via technabob]
Rob Beschizza
Acer Aspire One drops to $350 (and $330 without XP)
You may stop emailing now to report that the Acer Aspire One with WIndows XP is now only $350, and on offer in real-life Best Buy stores. Thank you.
Product Page [Best Buy]
John Brownlee
Disembodied nose dispenses snot-like shower gel, delights ten year olds
Installed in my childhood bathroom, this dripping nasal shower gel dispenser would have well complemented a gack-filled Double Dare youth... halcyon days in which Garbage Pail Kids were traded for pockets full of slime and mathematic classes were spent laboring diligently upon my 26 volume magnum opus: The Adventures of Fart Man. $17.95. If you have a pre-teenage son, you should love him this much.
Nose Shower Gel Dispenser [Potpourri Gifts via Nerd Approved]
Rob Beschizza
Commie tech wonders from the fabled east
The computer history section in Warsaw's Muzeum Techniki has everything you ever wanted, except the big fresnel lens. From Retro Thing:
the first transistor-based differential equation analyzer ... AKAT-1 is an analog computer. Back in the 1960s, this approach offered speed and acceptable accuracy without the complexity of digital logic.The result was a device that could solve relatively complex differential equations in real time, as long as you weren't after precise values. Alas, time has passed it by and it now leads a life of leisure...
Gallery [via Gadget Lab and Retro Thing]
John Brownlee
Noon Logan Solar laptop bag
The Noon Logan Solar Laptop Bag does the usual: slurps up light on the papillae of its flexible exterior solar panel to charge an internal power bank, which can then be used to electrically infuse your flagging gadgets. Unlike most of the alternative bags, though, it actually looks rather nice — a fine compromise for the green fashionista. It's also more affordable than most, although will still cost more than an infant's pineal gland: $452 all told. And god knows whether or not a laptop bag with a visible electronic element would earn you a deep rooting by the TSA next time through customs.
Logan [Noon Solar via Geek Sugar]
John Brownlee
Total revamp of iPod line coming in September?
There's no doubt that new iPods are coming in September — the line refreshes about every year, and we're due — but original Digger Kevin Rose seems awfully certain about the details of exactly what that refresh will entail.
According to Kevin, we can expect to see a revamp across the entire iPod Line, including significant price drops to compete with the $199 iPhone. The iPod Touch will get slight cosmetic changes, while the Nano will trade in its current squat form factor and roll itself back to a longer, more rounded case to accommodate a screen with the same proportions as the iPhone.
The notion that the Nano will be getting a screen with the same pixel ratio as the Touch or iPhone is interesting, mostly because a redesign of the iPod Classic to accomplish the same thing is not being mentioned in the same breath. Will September see the death of the Classic line?
That would be a shame: the sixth gen 160GB Classic is my MP3 player of choice, since it's the only one that can actually hold all the music and movies I own... for me, the very point of a portable media player. But there's no denying that hard drive MP3 players are looking increasingly inelegant as flash memory gets cheaper and more expansive: the rebranding of the stock iPod as the "Classic" in an of itself implied an imminent product death. If the Classic isn't killed off this year, it will be next year.
Rose also mentions the imminent release of iTunes 8.0, including "substantial new features." Let's hope one of those features is being able to tell iTunes to store videos on a different drive than the music... my biggest iTunes pet peeve.
All will be revealed in 2 to 3 weeks!
New iPods Coming Very Soon [Kevin Rose]
Rob Beschizza
Uuurwowrorwrwrirgigi barubububrbooobrrrrrrrr
Jorg Priniger's speakingObject is a synth fitted with an accelerometer. It gurgles and mutters the name of God in a thousand procedurally-generated languages.
speakingObject [YouTube via Make]
Rob Beschizza
The best smartphones of the summer
Infosync World rounds up its 15 top smartphones. The most remarkable thing to come out of it is the fact that all but two of them have no carrier, and are sold unlocked. Pictured is the Samsung Omnia, because you've seen enough of the XPERIA and the Touch Pro and the damned iPhone.
Top 15 smartphones [Infosync]
Rob Beschizza
Telephones Concerto
"It's like a telephone concerto" is the new "It's like a talking dog."
Telephone Piano [YouTube via Random Good Stuff]
Rob Beschizza
Report: Circuit City deliberately selling broken Acer computers and charging at register for repairs
Circuit City is all about choice. If the story from one customer is true, when you buy a brand new machine there, you can either get hit for an undisclosed repair fee at the till or take it home broken.
The customer says he was lucky to spot the $40 charge on his receipt. The rationale given was that the model sold required a BIOS update to work properly, even though it seemed to already work just fine. From The Consumerist:
Regardless of the fact that Vista booted up just fine with out the update, he was more disturbed with the fact that Circuit City would sell him a computer that they knew didn't work or so they say. Unfortunately, he was short on time and did not press the issue in the store.
And that's exactly why they do it.
Circuit City Firedog Charges $40 To 'Fix' Computer You Just Bought [Consumerist]
John Brownlee
Twitching Spider lamp for arachnophiles
An excellent spider light. It casts a red glow and dangerously twitches. And just look at this ad copy!
This spiders eight illuminated legs span 36" in diameter, four of which move slowly to create the simulacrum of careful, calculated movement as if stalking prey. The spiders thorax and abdomen conceal a stealthily quiet electric motor that drives a system of levers attached to the two front and two rear legs, creating a semblance of life as the legs twitch back and forth while the abdomen slowly rises and falls. Each leg is decorated with a string of incandescent purple lights rated for 1,000 hours of use; the spiders pedipalps have green lights.
Now that's copy you can be proud of. $69.95, which probably precludes me from buying 10 and tossing them into the bed of my toddling niece in the middle of the night, but surely the effect won't entirely be diminished with just one.
The 36 Inch Twitching Lighted Spider. [Hammacher]
John Brownlee
Sony hopes PSP-3000's better screen will help kill off piracy
Sony is convinced that piracy is killing the PSP. That's debatable (and, I think, incredibly wrong) but they've done their damnedest to stamp out home brew since the get go with their incremental firmware updates. Unfortunately for Sony, each of these firmware updates is almost immediately cracked to allow home brew and pirated games again. So how to stop the hacking?
Given the impotence of the firmware developers to stop piracy, It's looking increasingly likely that the newly announced PSP-3000 is probably taking a hardware solution to protecting users from running ISOs or their own code on a PSP. But the new PSP doesn't offer anything new: according to Sony, the PSP is still only about halfway into its lifecycle, so it is fundamentally the same device as its predecessors. It doesn't add any real compelling reason to upgrade: built-in storage, a slimmer form factor or more processing oomph.
So what's the carrot to get people to upgrade and thus curb piracy? Sony's banking on a vastly improved screen: the new PSP-3000 LCD screen has five times the contrast ratio, double the gamut and double the response time. It should completely eliminate ghosting.
The side by side shots certainly look good: that screen is a huge leap forward over the original. But the PSP screen is already plenty beautiful. It's going to take more to get me to give up my hacked PSP (a wonderful portable emulation solution) just for some deeper colors. Luckily, I suspect I won't have to: if Dark Alex has shown anything, it's that a single Russian hacker can easily reduce to ruin Sony's best laid plans to execute the hacked PSP scene over the course of half a bottle of vodka.
PSP-3000 vs PSP-2000 [Slashgear]
John Brownlee
Day and Night watch measures sunlight, not time
Romain Jerome's post-apocalypse-punk Night and Day watch can just barely be described as a time piece: it only reports day or night.
World First – An exceptional timepiece that does not indicate the time!With no display for the hours, minutes or seconds the Day&Night offers a new way of measuring time, splitting the universe of time into two fundamentally opposing sections: day versus night.
A new interpretation of Time based around two Tourbillons operating sequentially. The Day Tourbillon operates during the day, defining the wearer’s period of activity, and stops after twelve hours, handing over to the Night Tourbillon dedicated to man’s own private sphere.
Perfect for vampires or wasteland scavengers trying to descry bedtime through the heavy radioactive smog.
Romain Jerome Day and Night [Official Site via Oh Gizmo]
John Brownlee
German bureaucratic hell as art: media artist samples 70,000 songs, fills out paper forms for each
German media artist Johannes Kriedler has created a 33 second composition that fairly samples an astonishing 70,200 separate songs... each and every one of which must be registered with GEMA (the German RIAA) with formal paper documentation. The tune itself is not very catchy, but that's not the point: the art here is exposing the absurd paper hell of German bureaucracy.
Johannes Kreidler - product placements - English version [YouTube via MAKE]
John Brownlee
Lluon A1 desktop/monitor hybrid has the form of a netbook
The Korea-only Lluon A1 is a wonderful little barebones computer: the chassis of a subnotebook with a rather attractive, swiveling LCD spackled on the top. The specs are typical for this caliber of light desktop: an Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, an 18.4-inch (1680 x 954) display, a couple of USB ports and a DVD drive. But it's got a great look... I could see this making a wonderful kitchen computer. I just wish you could somehow pull that LCD off and use the A1 as a netbook to boot. I think the netbook-transforming desktop is an idea with some legs.
Lluon A1 [Akihabara News]
Rob Beschizza
iPhone screen Mysting over
The classic annoying graphical adventure Myst is coming to iPhone, thanks to the efforts of three Cyan developers. From the Myst Online forums:
iMyst: This is a small project that probably a very few of you know about. We are porting Myst to the iPhone. Ok, before some of you start groaning, this is an outside funded project that is keeping a few developers employed... but it is really more than that. It is an interesting and fun project. This is also a very small team with three of us (which includes Derek, Rand (not Randy) and myself).
I submit that it should be rechristened MiST, which embodies both the marketing genius of the minuscule i and corrects the series title's god-awful mysspelling.
[Cyan via Game|Life]
Joel Johnson
Mach Dice: Roll for iPhone initiative
This $.99 dice app will auto-tabulate totals and supports up to 100d100 dice, as well as impossible dice like the luminous holy seven-sided.
Program Page [Phobos.Apple.com (iTunes)]
Rob Beschizza
Canon 50D details revealed
Canon's 50D will have a 15.1 megapixel sensor, a Digic 4 image processor, 9-point autofocus, a 3" display, 6.3 fps autofire, a buffer fat enough for 16 RAW images or 60 JPEGs, and live view. These specs are up at Canon's chinese-language site.
Leaked specs [Photographybay via CrunchGear]
Rob Beschizza
My compact fluorescent is bigger than yours
This 250 watt monster — equivalent to a 600 watt incandescent — is yours for $90 Australian. It requires a 240V circuit and a special connector. If you've seen one bigger, tell discoverer Dan Rutter.
Auction [Ebay.com.au via How To Spot a Psychopath]
Rob Beschizza
Atari's Golden Years
Read Gamasutra's 20-page history of Atari's golden years. I'm four pages in, and already fascinated. It's the disaster that never stopped making money — until it did stop making money.
Here's a delicious quote from Nolan Bushnell, regarding the policies of corporate owners Warner Bros., which thought it absurd to develop a superior replacement for the 2600 or allow anyone to develop software for their new line of home computers.
"I felt that the computer system should not be a closed system, we needed to have third party software developers. I could see Steve Jobs out evangelizing, and Atari was saying that if you write software for the Atari computers, we will sue you. I just thought that was foolhardy. They were from the record world, where you sue people."
So they fired him, and new CEO Ray Kassar reorganized the company to match how he'd done business in the textile trade, implementing dress codes, canceling next-gen R&D projects, and describing the engineers that created the wealth as "spoiled brats."
Selling 2600s like socks was highly profitable until the market realized that games and consoles weren't much like socks. Kassar was eventually kicked out after selling thousands of shares 23 minutes before the publication of an earnings report that wiped almost half of their value.
Atari: The Golden Years -- A History, 1978-1981 [Gamasutra]
Rob Beschizza
Intel: We will be borg by 2050
Intel CTO Justin Rattner, at his keynote speech in San Francisco's Intel Developer Forum, told the seated that by 2050, the gap between humans and machines will close. And Intel, of course, will be selling you the implants.
He said Intel's research labs are already looking at human-machine interfaces and examining future implications to computing with some promising changes coming much sooner than expected."The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. "There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."
Other cool stuff addressed by Rattner include an implementation of resonant wireless power and "catoms," microscopic robots that collectively change their arrangement to create "shape-shifting materials."
Borg, Tesla and The Culture all in one press release, oh my!
Intel CTO Says Gap between Humans, Machines will Close by 2050 [Intel]
Rob Beschizza
Pro-RIAA comic hopes to scare file sharers with bizarre legal fantasy
Threat Level reports on an "educational" comic strip distributed to students across the country by a non-profit called the National Center for State Courts. It tells the story of a student arrested on criminal charges for file sharing. As that premise somewhat suggests, it's packed with misinformation. But hey, she gets a public defender!
In the story, Megan Robbins is criminally charged as an industrial-scale commercial pirate. In consensus reality, the recording industry sues file sharers in civil courts after making settlement offers. The strip also confuses federal with magistrate courts and presents a courtroom scenario that would never occur in real life.
It's the Pascal's Wager of antipiracy arguments: who cares about the truth when you might burn in hell? I submit that the war is lost when you're reduced to publishing Chick Tracts.
Also: check out that lawyer's arm. It's really freaking me out.
Nonprofit distributes File Sharing Propaganda to 50,000 U.S. Students [Threat Level]
Rob Beschizza
Introducing the Walkpod
There's something satisfying about the mechanical act of mating involved in putting a tape into a walkman and hearing the machine crunch shut around it. If I still had any, I would totally buy a Walkpod.
Apple Walkpod [Farai via Likecool]
Rob Beschizza
Teddycam catches thief
A tiny camera, hidden in the eye of a teddy bear by a 21 year old forensic scientist, caught a carer stealing from her terminally ill grandmother. As a result, a judge sentenced the carer to six months in the nick. From the beeb:
Robert Sampson, 46, and (daughter) Emma, 21 ... set up the camera when 75-year old Mrs Sampson noticed money going missing ... Mr Sampson said: "My mother has end-stage leukaemia and we had to get a carer in who worked for the primary care trust (PCT). "The next day my mum said £40 had gone out of her purse."
The model used cost £55 ($120), and its eye-like lens inspired them to rig up a plush toy. Expecting a lengthy wait, they got results immediately: "We thought it would be a long process but she was greedy."
Rob Beschizza
Wired on Nikon D3: "Light-Years Ahead of Other Prosumer-Grade Shooters"
Photographer Jackson Lynch writes up the D3 for Wired. He loves it.
The noticeably improved 51-point auto focus system is whip-fast and works in concert with an outstanding 1005 pixel metering sensor that gets it right in the most challenging lighting. Images are beautifully consistent with a wide dynamic range and improved noise reduction settings that give the pictures a more natural look. ... the D3 is incredibly customizable. Dial it in for lightning quick 11 frames-per-second sports action, super low light shooting (ISO up to 25600), handheld or tripod mounted live view, you name it.
I look forward to the day that I am rich enough to describe a $5,000 body as "prosumer!"
Review: Nikon D3 is Light-Years Ahead of Other Prosumer-Grade Shooters [Wired Gadget Lab]
Rob Beschizza
Blu-Ray dectrators echo 1990s DVD hate
CNET goes back the the mid-1990s to excavate the reasons given then why the new "DVD" laserdiscs would never be a success. The punchline is, of course, that most of them are identical to the reasons now given why Blu-Ray will fail.
The first three: No-one will re-buy movies they've got on VHS; there aren't enough movies on the format; recording is expensive and annoying.
Conspicuously absent from the earlier griping, however, is the modern ubiquity of broadband internet, and "on demand" movie services from Cable providers. These are Blu-Ray's real challenge, not decade-old philosophical objections to the movie industry's greed.
Photo: Jovike
DVD will fail? Sounds a lot like Blu-ray [Cnet.com]
Rob Beschizza
CD Barbell "soft to the touch"
Danny Seo's photo of the 10 pound CD barbell needs no further description. All it needs is an appropriate soundtrack made from the 1980s pop classics sacrificed to create it.
Old CDs into Dumbells [Danny Seo via Crave]
Rob Beschizza
Plywood inspires futuristic phone
If you ever looked at a slab of plywood and thought, "I'd love a phone that resembled this," Japan's KDDI has you in mind. Designed by Hideo Kanbara, the conceptual "Ply" would put a different function in each of its six super-thin layers. On the top one, the display; in the next, a keypad; in a third, a printer. It would even crack open to reveal a miniature projector!
Product Page [Kddi via Gizmodo and Cscout]
Rob Beschizza
Text on an Arduino-based Monome clone
Arduinome Nerdscroll Demonstration from BricK Table on Vimeo.
"Let's get nerdscroll running."
Arduinome [via Make, CreateDigitalMusic]
Rob Beschizza
HP Touchsmart reviewed. Verdict: Yeah, pretty good
Demystifying Digital reviews HP's latest TouchSmart PCs, and finds that it's a good alternative to Apple's iMac. The A/V options are far superior, the price is right, and the touchscreen software is improved — if still far from perfect. The limiting factor, DD says, is Vista.
Its a slave to Windows Vista's own capabilities. Vista has touch-sensitive functionality built-in for developers to make use of, but there's no support for multi-touch, like you see in Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch. So imagine trying to crop a photo by having to re-size it one touch at a time. It seems a bit archaic, doesn't it?
The thing that surprised me about it was how attractive it was in the flesh, especially compared to the hideous first-generation models. Most interesting about 2008 is the trend toward more attractive design by leading PC makers.
HP TouchSmart PC: Should You Touch it? [Demystifying Digital via CrunchGear]
John Brownlee
PlayStation 3 Chat Pad
Announced practically at the same time as Microsoft's improved Xbox 360 controller, Sony unveiled their latest addition to their line of PlayStation 3 accessories at GC yesterday: the PS3 Wireless Keypad, a QWERTY typing add-on that snaps on to any DualShock or Sixaxis PS3 controller and allows text chat and entry in games.
It's a little weird looking, to tell the truth. The placement above the buttons and D-Pad seem like they'd require you to re-grip the controller every time you want to use it. And one of the touted features is puzzling: apparently, the keypad can be toggled into a touch pad mode, where moving your finger along the keys moves a mouse on the screen. That's... interesting... but surely one of the analog nubs would have worked just as well, if not better.
There's no price yet, but it's due to be released in November.
John Brownlee
Apple says 2.0.2 update fixed iPhone 3G, BUT...
So why is the Apple iPhone 3G giving such lackluster 3G network performance compared to other phones? Is the problem going to be fixed?
No need to worry. According to Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock, it's already okay!
"The [iPhone 3G 2.0.2] software update improves communication with 3G networks."
Great! Except according to the statistics gathered by the Test My iPhone website (summed up here by Cult of Mac):
Prior to the upgrade, the average iPhone download speed is 2227.93 kbps (averaged from nearly 600,000 total speed tests made at the site).But in tests made over the past 24 hours, the average is just 1429.31 kbps.
That’s a decrease of nearly 36 percent.
To be fair, Test My iPhone may not be a flawless metric for iPhone 3G network speed... a fact even Cult of Mac notes. But the Apple support forums are filled with people who are still having problems. Ars Technica's editor-in-chief (among others) lost the ability to make 3G calls entirely with the update. And while not 3G related, apps are still crashing all over the place.
What is going on, Apple? Do you even know?
John Brownlee
iPhone 3G comes shipped with pictures of the cutie who made it
MacRumors forumer markm49uk discovered several factory room photographs on the hard drive of his UK-bought iPhone 3G... all featuring the smiling visage of the adorable assembly line girl who'd put the phone together.
Sadly, a later comment on the same thread is probably correct: "Once this spreads into the blogosphere she will be fired." Apple, if you fire this darling girl infusing a much needed dose of charm and whimsy into every phone she touches like some sort of assembly line Tinkerbell, mark my words: Boing Boing Gadgets will hate you forever.
iPhone 3G - already with pictures! [MacRumors via Gizmodo]
John Brownlee
Space Invaders destroy the Twin Towers at GC
At this year's Game Convention 2008 in Leipzig, French-American artist is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tecmo's Space Invaders with an interactive exhibit featuring the pixelated extraterrestrial squids destroying the face of simulated World Trade Centers.
The World Trade Center attacks mark a deep cut in our recent history that is still being processed. The French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley has found an unusual – though obvious – metaphor with his work “Invaders!”, which is based on the 1978 arcade original. In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy. In this regard, Douglas Edric Stanley sees Space Invaders as “a social tale that can be related to historical tales without losing its poetic power” (D.E. Stanley).
There's a great deal of muttering about this being too soon and in bad taste, but I don't agree: while one can certainly disagree with the particulars of the artist's statement, the stated metaphor is both quasi-sensical (and, let's face it, rather fun) and relatively restrained. Artistic commentary on catastrophes like September 11th is the obligation of art, and making those commentaries fun should not necessarily be interpreted as irreverence to the tragedy. I'm not really on the same page as the artist, but it hardly strikes me as either tasteless or too soon.
Space Invaders WTC [GC via Kotaku via Gizmodo]
John Brownlee
Lord British in Star City
Wired has a great article up following gaming's favorite fruity Ren Fairer, Richard Garriott aka "Lord British" as he trains to be launched into space as "an effete space tourist, or monkey" at Russia's Zvyozdny Gorodok, aka Star City.
They live in cramped dormitories in the Prophylactory Building, or Prophy, which looks more YMCA than Star Trek. They slip and slide down frozen walkways past dilapidated Soviet structures. They subsist on cafeteria food slathered in mayo. They bury themselves in textbooks or ride "vomit comets" and centrifuges."Everybody knows you can go to space if you are a perfect physical specimen and incredibly smart," Simonyi says. "But what if you are kind of normal?"
The whole thing is incredible... from Garriott's dashed dreams of following his astronaut father into space. to the loss of his first chance at a flight into space when the tech bubble burst, to his training at Star City and eventual acceptance among the vodka-swigging Russian cosmonauts. An absolute must read.
Going to Space? First Stop: Eight Months of Grueling Training in Russia [Wired]
John Brownlee
The Kyomoto Samurai Special 22 fret guitar
Part Eldritch thing, part Samurai sword, the 22 fret Samurai Kyomoto Special looks like the sort of axe Sephiroth might whip out to perform in a Squeenix Cosplay Guitar Wolf cover band. Utterly awesome; completely absurd; totally not for sale.
Kyomoto Samurai Special [ESP Guitars via Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Samsung Omnia "Unboxing Vlog" features Liliputians, fireworks
A brilliant viral promotional vid for the Samsung Omnia, under the pretense of an amateur tech blogger's bored, snarky unboxing video. If only Samsung had put this level of creativity and technical ingenuity into the making of the actual phone.
Samsung Omnia Unboxing Vid [YouTube]
John Brownlee
The Peek unlimited email PDA does one thing... hopefully really, really well
The Peek is a remedial little PDA with one and only one function: it does email. It's practically a Gameboy for email. For $19.95 a month and $99.95 down, the Peek will give you unlimited, always-on access to email no matter where you are.
That seems like a rather gimped feature set, but I like the purity of devices that do only one thing, and do it well. The Peek could be the perfect solution to give to that elderly grandparent so they can stay in touch.
But even more promising: what if the Peek is hackable? What if someone figures out how to get a browser working on its OS? That could make the Peek very attractive to those who don't need a Smartphone but want remedial, always-on internet access no matter where they go.
Get Peek [Official Site]
Rob Beschizza
Mundane Gadget Spam of the Day: Teradon School Bell Controller
From the sewer that is my inbox:
Teradon Industries, which adds scare quotes around "smart solutions" in its own motto, would very much like you to consider buying an institution-class intercommunications system.
Its system allows school staff to set bells from the computer station, play a school song, control the building's announcement system, and summon pteranodons.
Set your bells with tones from a computer. Have your School Song for the bell to begin the school day. Change your schedule from your computer. Time is corrected automatically from the Internet. You never have to change time on the bell system again. Intercom system programming can be monitored remotely. Make room calls and announcements from your telephone or master handset. Schools can now manage and control their intercom system. No more costly service bills and waiting for service.
Product Page [Teradon]
Rob Beschizza
Suck less at Golf with the D2 Swing Trainer
The D2 Swing Trainer, unlike the only other golf swing fixer gadget I've ever seen, was not a flimsy contraption involving dangling weights and sticks. By cleverly weighting an otherwise normal-looking club, it makes it hard to backswing incorrectly, promoting good form and accurate shots. Its heavy yellow head also looks useful should an on-green business meeting go awry and personal combat becomes unavoidable.
Though I saw it in action yesterday (in a friend's kitchen!), I can't vouch for it, as I don't play golf. My experience of the game is limited to 2 rounds of pitch and putt, neither of which was survived by the golf club at hand.
Here's some video from one of the various websites advertising it — the official one is at D2golfbetter. It costs $100.
Rob Beschizza
Help the tech industry pick an interesting new letter for marketing gadgets and stuff
In the 1990s, E ruled. Derived from "E-mail," and hence from "electronic," everything was e-this and e-that and e-the-other. Then I took over, encroaching on its kingdom until E was all but vanquished. This symbolic victory was well-marked when Apple killed off the eMac in favor of a new low-end iMac. Forget the "underlying reasons" given: this was vowel war.
But I too is boring. BBG reader Samf writes....
I'm done with I. I'm ready for another letter. I nominate p. We could have the pPod, the pBasket, the pBrain...whatever. It'll be fun. C'mon marketing people. iStuff is so 2006. It's time to make with the p!
Make mine a p-p-p-p-Powerbook!
But what are the other choices? Not all are equally good. Y turns a name into a question, sapping it of power. Z is hopelessly unfashionable. G is just plain naughty. Q has a steeple-fingered intellectualism best left to software. X is beating the memorial plaque that commemorates the fact there was once a dead horse at this location.
Vowels are the obvious choices, but A (and with it H) still bears a certain cold-war connotation. O is frivolous, evoking internet memes (oMac! oRLY?). And U is too busy invading Poland.
Would a number be superior? A nonalphanumeric character, perhaps? ♭! My vote goes with a dipthong. Euphone!
John Brownlee
Guitar Hero: World Tour hacked to work with guitar controller
This great mod by Eric Ruckman takes the virtually unplayable DS version of Guitar Hero and plugs it into a real controller, which can wirelessly hook up with a home sound system.
Hack Guitar Hero DS into a Guitar Controller [Hack A Day]
John Brownlee
Xbox 360 gets a better D-Pad... everywhere but America
The Xbox 360 has a great controller, but the D-pad has always been problematic. In an attempt to avoid patent fees, Microsoft opted for their own solution. Most of the time this isn't a problem, but for games that are D-Pad heavy, the 360 controller just sucks.
Microsoft has just announced they'll be remedying that mistake for some markets. The tweaked 360 controller will feature a better D-Pad with more precise control. The only problem: it's only scheduled to be released in Europe, Asia and Latin America... probably because of the very same US Patent issues that prevented Microsoft from putting a better D-Pad in to begin with.
Microsoft tweaks Xbox 360 controller [Games Industry]
John Brownlee
China blocks iTunes Store after release of Songs for Tibet album
SHM is reporting that China has blocked off all access to Apple's online iTunes Store after they discovered that several Olympic athletes had been purchasing the Songs for Tibet album, a pro-Tibetan album featuring 20 artists including Sting, Moby, Suzanne Vega and Alanis Morissette.
Apple's responses so far are all blaming the Great Firewall of China. The article goes on to note that Apple just opened its first brick-and-mortar in Beijing on the eve of the Olympic Games, and it is negotiating the release of the iPhone in China for later this year... which would certainly be futzed if China continues to block all access to iTunes from within the country.
China's propaganda line is typically hilarious:
According to a report published in the semi-official Chinese news portal, china.org.cn, "angry netizens [internet users] are rallying together to denounce Apple in offering Songs for Tibet for purchase. They have also expressed a wish to ban the album's singers and producers, most notably Sting, John Mayer and Dave Matthews, from entering China."The report, published in English, goes on to say that some netizens are even calling for a boycott of Apple products, including the iPhone when it is eventually released in China.
It'll be interesting to see how Apple reacts here. Steve Jobs is a practical businessman, but he's also a pro-Tibet Buddhist.
iTunes blocked in China after protest stunt [SMH via Cult of Mac]
John Brownlee
GPS cyborg turtle busts marijuana growers
An American turtle indigenous to Maryland's Rock Creek Park and with a GPS unit soldered to his shell has gone nark, busting an entire marijuana growing operation.
You might call him a pint-sized crime fighter. A box turtle equipped with GPS helps police nab a suspect growing marijuana in Rock Creek Park.Just south of the DC/Maryland line, a turtle wearing a GPS device for research purposes makes an amazing discovery.
"The ranger in charge of the program discovered the turtle in the middle of a marijuana field," Sgt. Robert Lachance of the U.S. Park Police says...
Leading to the reporter's wry observation: "Growing marijuana on U.S. park land is never a good idea." The 19-year-old culprit was arrested and will be extradited back to D.C. to face charges. Quoth the arresting officer: "He felt like he had a layer of security, but he probably never counted on a turtle with a tracking device leading us to that location and finding the field." Showing that even criminal masterminds often overlook the most obvious foil to their dastardly schemes.
Turtle nabs drug suspect [WUSA via OhGizmo]
John Brownlee
Apple to replace frayed MagSafes for free
Apple's long standing policy has been to ding you for $100 bucks if it frays, melts or explodes out-of-warranty... unfortunate, since they are prone to just such problems. Now, Apple's doing the right thing: even out-of-warranty, you should be able to bring the MagSafe by your local Apple retailer and get a free replacement. Which means we can all be a bit more frivolous with our power cable garrotings.
John Brownlee
Great Moments in Programming: "For some reaoson it was bug."
My friend Sven, a programmer by trade who never stops complaining about the cretinous sub-literates that are subordinate to him, messages me:
sven: Wow. I so need a break.sven: A colleague checked in some code that broke EVERYTHING, and then went home.
sven: His checkin comment? "For some reaoson it was bug."
sven: WHAT DID GO WRONG
sven: FOR SOME REAOSON IT WAS BUG
John: HOW IS BABBY FORMED? HOW GIRL GET PRAGNENT?
sven: I 'm just amazed at the "contaminate source repository, leave ESL comment, GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE" mindset.
sven: I wonder how people would react to a "I've killed people for less." roll-back comment.
John: I am truely sorry for your lots.
Programmers! Your horror stories in the comments, if you please!
Rob Beschizza
Who'll pay $550 for the Treo Pro?
Made official after a couple of hours of speculation a few weeks ago, Palm's Treo Pro is now ready to roll.
Running Windows Mobile 6.1 on a 400MHz CPU, it has 128MB of RAM, 3G, Wifi and Bluetooth, a 320x320 touchscreen display, and GPS. A micro-USB port replaces the thingie hole, meaning no new cables for Treo-come-latelies that may hypothetically exist.
The unlocked price tag, however, is a stout $550. Too much? Or the happy price to pay for carrier freedom? Also: PalmOS is so very dead.
Rob Beschizza
Cams from Casio and Samsung smooth blemishes
Left one's face in the jar today? Casio's latest addition to its Exilim digicam lineup, the EX-Z300, includes a "Make-Up" feature that wipes facial blemishes when it takes photographs. From Pocket Lint:
"We believe we can differentiate our range in the compact market by offering unique features like this", a spokesman for the company told Pocket-lint.However Casio appears to be late to the game; Samsung has already launched a compact camera with a similar technology called Picture Perfect that works in a similar way and air-brushes images.
The EX-Z300 is a 10 megapixel model with a 3-inch LCD display. Offered in black, gold and silver, it's complemented by a selection of other new Exilims with lower specifications. Each is an incremental upgrade on a current model, as far as I can tell.
Casio EX-Z300, EX-Z19, EX-Z85 and EX-Z250 announced [Pocket Lint]
Rob Beschizza
New Archos to have 3G internet
Archos' next generation of handheld video players will have 3G internet, turning them into always-on portals to all the media that's fit to stream. Given the lack of an in-built mic, however, use as VoIP phones is an impractical proposition.
The new Archoses also drop the sharp geometry of the current models in favor of a more generic appearance, with the 3G-equipped Archos 5G having a 4.8" display and a 30GB hard drive. The Archos 7, which will not include a 3G modem, makes up for it with a 320GB hard drive and a 7" display. Powered by ARM Cortex processors, they'll both be $550.
Elegant New Archos Players To Come With 3G [Gadget Lab]
Rob Beschizza
iBasket: laundry basket of the future also washes
Guopeng Liang's finalist entry in Electrolux's Design Lab 2008 is another example of simple ingenuity. There's no radical new washing technology implied, nor some fancy eco-friendly water-saving technique. All it does is wait until it contains a certain weight of clothing, then do a basic (presumably cold) wash. In the meantime, it sucks air through the clothes, ensuring they don't spread any unpleasant odors as the pile builds. From the designer:
...today, people store their clothes in a laundry hamper until it fills up, then carry the basket to the laundry room, wash them, come back, take them out, throw them back into the hamper, carry them to a clothesline and then hang them out. I believe that iBasket offers a much more convenient alternative.
It also instant-messages you to tell you what it's up to. For civilized people, it might seem a purposeless appliance. But for those with neither hamper nor washing machine — think disgusting college students — why not?
Finalists of Electrolux DesignLab 2008 [Designophy]
Rob Beschizza
Hive speaker design bridges gulf between iPods, lawns
Christopher Stuart's design for an outdoor speaker is simple and pleasingly unembellished. It's just a speaker, a wireless connection, a big-bottomed battery and a plastic dome to protect it from whatever Mother Nature may fling at it. It looks like a futuristic ashtray.
Though commissioned, it doesn't appear to be in production. So you'll just have to put up with one of those giant polystyrene boulders for now.
Question: Why do industrial designers still commission Flash websites that prevent others linking to their work?
Lone Speaker Drone is Louder in a Hive [Yanko Design]
Rob Beschizza
Mobiado's Lucido puts the candybar back in candybar phones
Mobiado's Lucido is a luxury phone that looks like something Sony Ericsson would have made 10 years ago, if Sony Ericsson had existed back then. It even plays MP3 files!
Only 200 of the CNC-milled aluminum handsets will be made, each having 3G internet, tri-band GSM radios, 2 megapixel cameras, push-to-talk, Bluetooth and a QVGA display.
Beware fakes!
Product Page [Mobiado]
Mobiado Lucido: luxury-новинка в духе Luminoso [via BornRich]
Rob Beschizza
Cellphone-themed Olympic pin said to be most popular in China
On the streets of Beijing, the hottest game isn't an Olympic sport: it's trading pins. Ted Arthur, writing at Beijing Experience 2008, says this Samsung pin is one of the most popular.
Some people will physically try and take your pin from your lanyard! It's so fun to try and trade with people...you start to only look chest-level and ignore people's faces. We have entire strategies to get pins and it's always fun to see what new pins people got throughout the day. The most sought after ones: a Samsung pin that has a phone on it that actually slides open and closed. NBC pins are extremely valuable, too! It's an entire culture during the Olympics - and you have to learn the language if you want to collect!
2008 BEIJING OLYMPIC PIN SAMSUNG SPONSOR TEMPLE OF HEAVEN PIN [PinLink]
Day 46 - Pin Culture [via textually]
Rob Beschizza
Fujistu U2010 UMPC claims 11.1 hours of runtime on extended battery.
Akihabara News got its hands on Fujitsu's U2010/U820, its freshly-upgraded and tiniest laptop. The new model has an Intel Atom Z530 CPU clocked to 1.6 GHz, a gigabyte of RAM, a 5.6" display set to 1280x800, WiFi and Bluetooth, and 5 claimed hours of battery life. Upgrade to the larger, pokey-out-the-back battery, and you'll get 11 claimed hours.
(On the extended battery on the U810, I can't remember how long I got, per charge, with the extended battery. But it was nowhere near 11 hours.)
The pros: it now has a proper tab key, in almost the the normal position, and the keyboard is clearly much-improved over the oddly laid-out U1010/U810.
The cons: The screen-bezel ratio is still gruesome. Built-in 3G, shown off at CES 2008 in a prototype, never did make it in. Which is a shame, because the OLPC-like antenna ears were cute.
Given the specs, you'll be wanting to make sure you get an XP downgrade disk with the included Vista.
If only they released them with the art in the West! Unfortunately, it will only be offered in Japan. Our choices are silver, black and pink.
Fujitsu's Lifebook U2010 (FMV-Biblo Loox U) Hands-on [Akihabara News]
Rob Beschizza
iTabi handbag gives iPhone robber-thwacking heft
How many of you like iPhone skins? For me, the only consistent thing about them is the pleasant surprise of being reminded how small an iPhone is after they are removed. Itabi's iPhone kimonos take the idea of iPhone bagging beyond such concerns, sacrificing even the idea of pocketability in the name of fashion.
Product Page [iTabi] — Thanks, Ian!
Joel Johnson
Neutron Games creates Xbox Live-alike service for iPhone
This new multiplayer game platform for the Apple iPhone from Neutron Games sounds promising, although no actual games are yet announced:
• Real-time, turn-based and tournament multiplayer optionsI suppose I could do without the last part, but then again I buy stuff on Xbox Live and iTunes, so who am I to balk?
• Game lobbies and various matchmaking capabilities
• Buddy lists, leaderboards, profiles, etc.
• In-game voice and text chat
• Billing and in-game microtransactions
Online Multiplayer, Cross-Platform Gaming Coming to iPhone [Kotaku]
Joel Johnson
Fuelly.com review (Verdict: He likes it!)
My best pal Michael Schulte is a automative fanatic in every sense of the word: not just a prize-winning autocross racer, but an absolute nerd when it comes to maintenence and statistics of even his daily drivers. Mike's the kind of guy that starts a file folder for every car the day he purchases it, stashing away car brochures and magazine reviews on the off chance he might someday need to put his cars in a museum. After Fuelly.com launched, I knew a website designed to help manage gas mileage (and more) would be right up his alley. I asked him to write up his impressions after a week or so using Fuelly. – Joel
In my driving infancy I relied on an Excel spreadsheet, logging gas mileage and fuel cost; I also kept a folder or pocket in the glove box for miscellaneous service paperwork that I thought I should archive. That idea has expanded over the years: at some point I developed a full blown obsessive/compulsive need to track total operational costs for my automobiles, framing — in clear plastic sheet protectors placed in a three-ring binder — every receipt of maintenance and every part purchased, the better to track things like insurance costs, 1/4-mile times, and even horsepower-per-dollar.
There's a full record available for each one of my cars, even the daily driver. I am fully aware of my disorder, but I have found over the years that there are thousands of gear heads, penny pinchers and green freaks that share part — if not all — of my obsession.
Thanks to a tip from Joel [My pleasure – Ed.], who is fully aware of my problem [Boy am I, Mr. What-Do-You-Mean-You-Lost-the-Receipt – Ed.], I took a peek at Fuelly.com. Now I have been using Gas Buddy for a few years in addition to my other methods for tracking fuel economy and cost efficiency of my vehicles, so I was a bit reluctant to go through my personal records and input these figures into yet another site. Still, after browsing the barely launched site I noticed a lot of great features that made me pull out the numbers and start plugging them in.
While knowing exactly what sort of mileage I get on average out of my car is nice, being able to share that data with others easily and compare it to people who might have the same car as me is fantastic. Even better: EPA Estimates for each particular model can also be compared. Once you input a few fill-ups — being able to do this right from the pump via mobile web is awesome — it becomes clear exactly how useful this site is.
There are handy suggestions and techniques that tell how to get better economy and figures associated with the car that show exactly what I would’ve saved had I kept my foot a bit more shallow in the throttle. Statistics are right there in your face for "Average MPG", "Current MPG", "Your Best MPG" — as well as trending information with clean, concise graphs, total fuel-ups over the life of the car, best pricing and the ever-important fuel operating cost per mile.
I’ve since spend a few minutes each day over the last week or so locking in my personal figures for each one of my cars. I started with my daily driver, a 2002 Honda Civic Si (Nickname: The Shoe), and put in all the my fill-ups for 2008. I moved on to the almost-brand-new 2008 Honda Civic EX-L that my soon-to-be-wife drives.
I’m currently in the process of sticking in the rest of the figures for The Shoe, although there are 158 fuel-ups in there already. There will be 100,000 miles of data soon. You can — if you dare! — sift through it. Try to find my experimental attempt to become a hyper-miler.
It’s not all about bottom-line fuel efficiency though. I guess it’s sort of fun for me to see the little graphs and figures, too. In a time where getting the most out of a gallon of gas is on everyone’s mind, I still happen to own two extremely inefficient Nissan 300ZXs that I take to the track, autocross and drag race. (I personally bring the overall average of the site down by several ticks.) Still, it’s interesting to see that if driven with a light right foot (as I try to do on my way to such events) that they too can achieve respectable mileage.
And though it sort of hurts, it’s interesting to know that I pay almost the same amount for regular pump gas today as I did for Aircraft fuel — the Racer's Friend™ — in 2004.
The website! [Fuelly.com]
Rob Beschizza
Dallas cops' new radios break Plano's $5m remote-control irrigation system
A new police communications system in suburban Dallas is interfering with radio-controlled sprinkler systems thirty miles away in Plano, according to complaints received by the FCC. From The Dallas News:
...what started as a quirky technical matter has taken on a life of its own, stirring tensions between the Collin County suburb and its neighbors south of Dallas. The dispute also shows how crowded the nation’s airwaves have become in an era when municipal radio systems and other wireless networks are virtually everywhere.Plano officials say they should have been notified of the new police system in advance.
The best part is that the police are openly not giving a damn about their new system shutting down the city's sprinkler systems: "Which comes first: Watering plants or protecting police and fire?" said the local 911 chief, Tim Smith.
(I like the suggestion that the authorities are considered as recipients of protection, not something that protects others. Perhaps it's a typo!)
Given the $5m cost of Plano's water system, the question on its lips is "Which came first." Ultimately, it will be a test of legal guidelines that give precedent to emergency services: will they be allowed to "eminent domain" airwaves without even notifying the current occupant?
When I lived in southeast New Mexico, our garage door opener would never work when fighter jets from Portales were wheeling around the area. I figured complaining about them might be the kind of thing that gets one added to the wrong sort of list.
Plano complains to FCC after police radio signals disrupt sprinklers [Dallas News] — Thanks, Travis!
Joel Johnson
My Burning Man project: LEDs lit by wireless power
When I asked about making 900 MHz antenna, this was the project I was working on: tiny wireless power fobs that will go on the keychain of those in my camp at Burning Man this year. As you can see they're relatively big — they're repurposed wireless LED Christmas ornaments that were part of this tree from Frontgate (now discontinued) — and they have antennas in the green boards themselves. I figured why mess with success (especially when my attempts at making little coiled antenna failed)?
As you can see in the video, they're obviously at their most bright when you get the transmitter antenna right next to them, but I've had them start glowing when on the same plane as the transmitter from up to almost ten feet away. Not exactly a homing beacon for those lost on the playa, but they should work fine as little secret power crystals — well, test tubes, thanks to my roommate Jesse's work — that light up when you get near enough to our most important Burning Man camp project: our own private Port-A-Potty.
Also, they light up when my GSM cell phone talks to the tower, not unlike those little bracelets you can get in Chinatown. Makes you wonder what sort of special sauce Powercast, the maker of the hardware, actually added to the system.
Anyway, thanks for all your suggestions. I've got another 50 or so of these that haven't been messed with so if I can manage to bring the transmitters back in one piece I may be able to play around with boosting the power and range in the future.
John Brownlee
BBTV: Xeni interviews Buzz Aldrin
It's a fine line: what do you do when you have a three minute interview with the second man on the moon, Colonel Buzz Aldrin... an interview in which the space hero and futurist answers none of your questions, instead choosing to reply to them with random non sequiturs in a dialect that sounds remarkably like Google Translated moon man? Your deadline looms. The interview is nonsensical, completely unusable without opening your own publication up to ridicule. Yet professionalism demands that you not openly mock an American hero. What do you do?
Most of us would panic. But not Boing Boing TV's Ms. Xeni Jardin. A seasoned pro, Xeni confronted the dilemma by going meta, recruiting the ranting, rampaging id of the archetypical anonymous Boing Boing commenter to riff on the obvious: Buzz isn't making a lick of sense. Absolutely genius. Bear in mind this is not the official Boing Boing party line: I'm simply commenting as a viewer here. My interpretation may not be what was intended. But either way, this is my favorite BBTV episode ever.
Look, Buzz Aldrin rocks, no question. Additionally, he could hit me so hard my whole family would die.* I'm loathe to criticize him. He deserves our respect and admiration. But I don't even know what's going on with him here. He answers Xeni's questions like Grampa Simpson: "Back in my day, we flew Apollo 11 to the moon on a thimbleful of corn oil, and NASA stuffed our pockets with moon money, which was what they called Gouda at the time..."
Xeni Interviews Buzz Aldrin [Boing Boing TV]
* - Missed opportunity: given Buzz's history of knocking out flippant journalist punks, BBTV should have gotten Buzz to throw a punch at the camera, much like in the opening credits of He-Man.
Rob Beschizza
Kinoki footpad scam debunked
That something's obviously bunkum is not enough. Science must be done!
National Public Radio's Sarah Varney, and her husband unit, each took a Kinoki footpad and applied it to the soles of their feet at bedtime. As expected, by morning each was saturated with the nasty brown gum prominently associated with these "cleansing detox foot pads." The makers claim it comprises toxins and metals leached out of your body by the pad. So it was off to the lab with the used Kinokies, along with a fresh one for use as a control.
The verdict: Scam! While the used pads contained some grody elements, they were already present in the unused ones. All samples appeared to be identical, as far as toxicity was concerned. But what of the fecal fondue? Whatever it is, it's activated by any moisture, even by holding a pad over a boiling kettle.
Update: Commenter Bat21 points out that ABC reporter John Stosser already did the Kinoki-debunking legwork a while ago.
Japanese Foot Pad Is Latest Health Fad [NPR via The Consumerist]
Rob Beschizza
Intricate drawings of early microscopes
Micrographia Nova, published in 1687 by Johann Franz Griendel, documents the then-fresh science of microscopy. BibliOdyssey has dozens of engravings from that, and other books of the era. If only modern gadgets were so handsome!
[via Bibliodyssey]
Rob Beschizza
Hack a business calculator today
Do you own, or have access to, a HP 20b business calculator? Your assignment for today is to sincerely intend to hack it, even if you have no means to do so. From Make:
The latest HP 20b biz calc can be modded' (they're releasing a dev kit). I downloaded the dev kit, they're not messing around, schematic is included. Gang, this is an Atmel ARM, an LCD with the power supply done - what the heck is going on here? Way over powered for a calc, just asking for projects - Makers please do something cool with this!
Follow the link to view intimidating schematics. Here are some alternative calc uses anyone can perform:
1. Hammer hack! Bang a picture hook into drywall with one.
2. Steadying a wobbly chair or table. Recommended for use only with already-broken calculators, especially if you are overweight.
3. Amusing other young men by punching in 55318008 and turning it upside-down.
4. Amusing yourself by pushing gently on the LCD to bring the oily liquids to the surface. Ah, the transitory nature of beauty.
5. Social engineering hack! Leave others' calculators in special modes, to annoy and frustrate them when they just want to figure out a tip. Fifteen percent of $13.44 is 00C9.
Joel Johnson
Zazzle.com now printing custom sneakers with your images
Zazzle, one of those online shops that lets you create t-shirts and other swag with custom logos and images, can now print directly onto custom Keds sneakers. Pity that they only offer shoes in women's sizes or I'd take this slapped together version with my dog — upside down his face flaps become somewhat lurid — and make something genuinely snazzy.
You can buy a pair of custom sneakers from Zazzle for $50 to $60. And again, my example is really poor. There are a lot more controls and features you can use to tweak instead of just slapping an uploaded image into the first place you could find.
Create! [Zazzle via Crunchgear]
Joel Johnson
Vintage animal puzzles from Enzo Mari
NOTCOT discovered these lurverly wooden animal puzzles, created by Enzo Mari in the mid-'70s. That means they're vintage — and hence expensive at $200 to $300. Easily replicated with a programmable jigsaw, but dig that crazy wood texture. In fact, the more I look at it, the more I think it's not wood but some sort of plastic.
There's another one that's all about the animals of the sea called "Pesci", which caused a buoy to light in my mind that Joe Pesci's name is actually "Joe Fish". I'm on point this morning!
WRIGHT: ENZO MARI ANIMAL PUZZLES [NOTCOT]
John Brownlee
The Deus Ex Machina: cool but totally stupid wearable motorcycle exoskelton concept
Beyond the Tron-esque wireframe landscape, invisible barking dogs and eyeteeth-aching techno soundtrack, this conceptual video for a wearable, mech-style motorcycle is pretty cool, until you take a moment to consider motorcycle accidents in which the rider, instead of merely taking a spill, is pulled apart like a meat-filled wishbone.
Quoth the creator, between snorts of Substance D.
“It’s like riding two skateboards at once, but stable, because the machine supports the rider’s body… This isn’t fantasy, it’s a green vehicle, and all of the numbers are based in the real world.”
Those real world numbers? 12, 83, -3! Do the math, geniuses! Green? I'll show you green... it runs on magic! But don't you dare call my concept a fantasy! In the Platonic nether realm, all concepts are real.
I snark. But come on: it's even called the Deus Ex Machina.
A Wearable Motorcycle [Pop Sci via Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Aliens vs. Colonial Marines chess board
Scant details are available for this Aliens chess set, but it's wonderful. On the xenomorph side, chest bursters for pawns, with dual queens as the royalty, denoted in rank by whether or not their gelatinous egg sack has been ripped off. The human side is similarly ingenious: sentry guns for pawns, with a loader-armored Ripley as the king. Half of the board has even been bio-mechanically infected: all the black squares have been Gigerized. Checkmate = face hugged!
Alien Movies Chess Board [Contaminated via Gearfuse]
John Brownlee
HoffSpace: the new social network by David Hasselhoff
In my travels round the world I have always been surprised that no matter where I go people recognize and know me, from Europe, Australia and India to the Philippines and the Zulu Nation in South Africa. This got me thinking... I realized that while two people from two entirely different countries and backgrounds may seem to have nothing in common, the only thing they might have in common is me... So I decided to start a network where people from across the world might come together and get a conversation started over me. Where it will lead, I don't know but the world would be a better place if everyone talked a little more to each other...So here is HoffSpace. There are videos and photos of the adventures of my life (THAT NO ONE ELSE GETS TO SEE) and also from the lives of other members.
HoffSpace [David Hasselhoff]
Related:
• David Hasselhoff sings "Jump In My Car"(music video)
John Brownlee
Diebold: your votes were a virus
Facing down a Ohio lawsuit against Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) for selling the state voting machines that habitually lost votes, Diebold has responded with an intriguing defense: it was anti-virus software that ate the votes.
Brunner said that Premier's system dropped votes when memory cards were uploaded to shared servers. Election staff recovered the votes hours later, she said.Election workers notified Premier of the problems and received a product advisory notice in late May. The notice explained that an antivirus program that operated on the server simultaneously had caused the problems. Premier instructed users to disable the antivirus software on vote tabulation servers when uploading votes from memory cards.
Further proof that anti-virus software is a neo-con conspiracy.
Electronic Voting Machines At Center Of Ohio Lawsuits [Information Week via Daring Fireball]
Image: xkcd
John Brownlee
The history of technology as imprinted on old blue jeans
Aram Bartholl has decided to track the evolution of technology in society using a particularly ingenious stratigraphic record: the worn, faded marks left on denim blue jeans. It's just a stated intent, right now: his entire gallery consist of a single picture of the mark of his ancient Nokia 6600, carried in the left pocket from 2005-2008. It's a great idea, and I'd love to see more people contribute to this project... so if you've got some old tech-worn jeans, throw up a picture.
As for me, the crotches of the cheap jeans I deign to buy always fall out long before tech can make any real impact on their patina. Although I suspect the iPod Classic shaped callus on my left buttock would serve the same techno-paleontological purpose.
Nokia 6600, 2005-2008 [Datenform.de via Engadget]
John Brownlee
Latest unnecessary Wii peripheral: the Wii Sqweeze
InterAction Laboratories have unveiled their newest Wii exergaming peripheral: the "Wii Sqweeze." According to CEO Greg Merril while demonstrating the device, you plug the Wiimote into the peripheral and either squeeze or pull, allowing for both "shoulder abduction and adduction." Unfortunately, at least in the former capacity, the prototype Wii Sqweeze appears to work too well: the demonstration was quickly halted when a hysterical Mr. Merril began running around the showroom in circles, his disembodied arms flopping wildly and salmon-like upon the convention center floor.
Wii Sqweeze [Exergame Lab]
John Brownlee
Kensington unveils world's first wireless USB docking station, with DVI monitor support
I have been using a laptop as my main computer for a few years now: part of the allure of the professional blogging gig (besides addressing several ten thousands of readers everyday girded in the smug confidence that comes from knowing that you are naked and they have no idea) is that one can work from anywhere: the office, the toilet, the brothels of Mauretius. It does come with certain small drawbacks though. For me, the small niggling point of using a laptop as a main computer is coming back to the desk and having to slither a thousand electron-bearing tentacles around, plugging them into the appropriate ports. My secondary monitor needs to be plugged in, my speakers need to be plugged in, external hard drives and mouse need to be plugged in. It takes all of thirty seconds. But it grates.
So Kensington's newest product — the world's first wireless USB docking station — has me humming and hugging myself. It supports five USB devices as well as a DVI monitor. Get within 15 feet of the transmitter and everything just automatically connects. Magic!
It's $230, which seems a bit expensive to thwart thirty seconds worth of light inconvenience, but I've been known to make more extraneous purchasing decisions. More problematic, at least for me: it only works under Vista. My MacBook Pro jeers and flashes its kilted nethers in your direction, Kensington.
Kensington Wireless USB Docking Station [Kensington]
John Brownlee
Dell Mini-Inspiron Netbook: specs leaked, rumored August 22nd, Ubuntu!
Gizmodohas gotten their hands on the leaked specs for the Dell's upcoming netbook, the Mini-Inspiron (technically the 910). There's not much new here, although delightfully, it looks like it will be rather easily upgradeable: the SSD is held in with standard Phillips-head screws). Other spec are more redundants: we already knew the Mini-Inspiron had a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of RAM, an 8.9" screen with support for a resolution of 1024x600. It will also include a built-in camera, solid-state drives ranging between 4GB and 16GB, a VGA port, a media card reader, WiFi, and 3 USB ports.
But two important things. One: we might see the Mini-Inspiron on Dell's websites by the end of the week. Two: it's shipping with a Ubuntu configuration... probably Ubuntu Netbook Remix. *
Also, first details on the battery: a four celler. We'll have to see how that holds up. If this really does ship at the end of the week, though, I may finally have my first netbook. Ubuntu + Whore Red Configuration + $299? Sold.
Leaked Dell Inspiron 910 Mini Note Specs and Release Date [Gizmodo]
* - Douchily: I knew it!
John Brownlee
iPhone 3G zoom lens channels delights paparazzi, channels luminous flux
Gadget purveyors par crapulence Brando are selling this iPhone "Mobile Phone Telescope"... a six inch long zoom lens mounted via a crystal case to the back of your iPhone 3G. Despite the name, the gizmo does not actually appear to telescope, meaning that the effective thickness of your iPhone is a pocket bursting seven inches. And looking at the example images, the suggested customer seems to be iPhone-touting paparazzi who need a way to dash off a few long distance shots of the Brajelina vacation bungalows.
Still, it's not all crapgadget... the copy eloquently describes the real advantage of the design as "to run of rays can effectively avoid the contortion of image, and makes the super wide angle, the larger luminous flux, the higher visual acuteness, good for color reduction, which makes the high quality of photography." Indeed! If there's any area in which the iPhone 3G dropped the ball (besides supply of demand, 3G chipset, Mobile Me, App kill switch, battery life, etc.) its in its innate ability to channel larger luminous fluxes.
Apple iPhone 3G Mobile Phone Telescope [Brando (Thanks, Mark)
Joel Johnson
ShotPaks: Single-serving booze in a pouch
These single-serving "ShotPak" drinks contain a swallow of alcohol, from "STR8UP" unadulterated selections like rum and whisky to pre-mixed cocktails like lemon drops or kamikazes. They are also green, says the manufacturer, as each ShotPak "has the lowest carbon dioxide footprint of any container used to package alcohol in the world." Technically correct, perhaps, but otherwise a spectacular example of drunkenly missing the forest to swerve wildly into felled trees.
Each ShotPak contains 50 milliliters of liquid. A six-pack of shots can be found in liquor and party stores for around $8.
I'm thinking it's about time we do a round-up on flasks, the original, reusable shot packs.
Company Page [ShotPakInc.com via Serious Eats]
Joel Johnson
Indie Mac dev on App Store: "A little piece of my soul dies"
Steven Frank is a developer at Panic, but speaks only for himself (more or less) when lamenting the restrictions Apple has put on developers who want to sell software through the iTunes App Store. His closer reflects the feelings of many, I suspect:
I've been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on "how things should be" ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can't make it all line up. I can't question that it's probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don't even have anything for sale on there yet.
On the App Store [StevenF.com via ★]
• iTunes App Store shows strengths, weaknesses of a walled garden
• $999.99 "I Am Rich" pulled from iPhone App Store
Rob Beschizza
Dueling "Ugly Gadgets" compendia battle for supremacy
Switched has produced an contemporary selection of the world's ugliest gadgets. Will it topple CrunchGear's classic revue?
Their roundup is about more than mere ugliness, too: it hooks into the way poor taste is subtly internalized in technology marketing. For example, it starts with the Xboxes, arguably examples of unusual and innovative design until you just step back and look at them, for Christ's sake.
And as much as it hurts to say so, it's right about the Psion Organizer, whose charm inheres entirely from the era it came from. What we like about it is embodied in much greater style by stuff like this.
Also, they hate Swarovski. Bravo!
World's Most Hideous Gadgets [Switched]
Joel Johnson
RCA's Two Thousand television: $2,000 in 1969
It's easy enough to pick an arbitrary product from history and use it as a fulcrum to leer back into the past, but some seem to have been built with preternatural anticipation of future reflection. The "RCA Two Thousand" television, for one: built in 1969, in limited edition of 2,000 units, sold for a then-staggering $2,000 a pop. (That's just shy of $12k in today's dollars.) Its console design is downright modern, with a rosewood top and a translucent, presumably plastic front panel that opens to reveal a 23-inch tube that "gives such a vivid, detailed picture, you can even watch it in a brightly lit room."
RCA goes on to crow about how they used computers to build this television: computers to design it; computers to test it; computers to calculate the number of migrant workers needed to harvest the rosewood. They even put "computer-like 'memory' circuits" inside the Two Thousand that remembered where VHF stations were at on the dial — you used to have to tune television stations in by turning a knob, kids — making it possible to move from active channel to active channel, skipping any unused stations.
Even the ad copy kicker dates it: "Once for $2,000, all you got was a trip around the world. Now you can travel to a whole new century." Could they have imagined a time when our television screens were as wide as the front panel of their whole console, only a few inches thick, and even less expensive? And that flights around the world would have fallen similarly, if only for a while?
RCA's Two Thousand (1969) [PaleoFuture.com]
Rob Beschizza
Consume your way to climate change
If ever there was a certain dogmatic element to environmentalism, Bornrich.com — perhaps a little removed from the West's internal cultural negotiations — has not detected it. How else could it produce a list of gadgets that combine green living with extravagant luxury? Pictured here is Husqvarna's solar powered lawnmower.
Other highlights include a WiFi teepee with ac minibar and a "discrete" sea limousine. Floridians, Netherlanders and Bangladeshis will be delighted to note that fully half the entries are of use only on bodies of water.
Top 12 solar innovations to lead a luxurious green lifestyle [BR]
Joel Johnson
LumiTops: glowing disco-wear a candle to guido moths
In the strange cultural eddy that is nightclub fashion, these "LumiTop" shirts, woven with fiber optic thread that causes the fabric to hug breasts like a celestial WonderBra, will probably make a big splash. Don't think of them as fashion, but instead useful tools to illuminate your drink, making it more difficult for slimebags to slip Rohypnol into your drink.
Plus nothing makes a woman look better than a soft blue gleam lighting her face from below. That's why witches' cauldrons always glow.
LumiTops start around €100 and go up to €170 depending on how intricate their design may be. There's even a tank top for the guys.
Product Page [Lumigram.com via Inventor Spot via Gizmodo]
John Brownlee
Zonet multimedia mouse pad with built-in USB hub and microphone
The Zone ZUP8020 Multifunctional Mouse Pad accommodates a lot of useful features into a usually empty space on your desktop. The mousebad contains a four port USB 2.0 hub, integrated stereo speakers and a built-in microphone (with on/off switch, perfect for quick Skyping) , as well as built-in audio in and out. The design's dime store clunky, and it's thicker than a mouse pad really ought to be, but for $20, it's a neatly practical accessory.
Zonet Multimedia Mouse Pad [Amazon via Gadget Grid]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• PSP Memory – SanDisk 4GB Memory Stick Pro DUO (the kind that goes in the Sony PSP) for $20, shipped. [Slickdeals]
• K'NEX – Various building sets on sale at K'NEX, around 25% off. $75+ gets free shipping. [Dealhack]
• HDTV – Toshiba REGZA 42-inch 1080p widescreen LCD HDTV for $990, shipped, plus some extra cables. About $200 off. [Dealnews]
• Gyroscope – Dyna-Flex Power Ball wrist-strengthening toy for $12, shipped. [Dealnews]
• Hand Vac – Today's Woot is a refurbished Dyson DC16 Root 6 Handheld Vacuum for $75, shipped.
John Brownlee
Amazing tech enhances videos with high-res photographs
Students at the University of Washington have come up with some amazing technology to use high-res still photographs or a single frame of a video scene to automatically improve, desaturate and up-sample video to photographic quality. The demo is simply incredible.
Using photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene [Vimeo via POETV]
Abstract [University of Washington]
John Brownlee
Dell's Zing will challenge iTunes with a coalition of the willing
So far, Dell's plans for its new Zing buy out have been DAP pedestrian: a new line of iPod killers to sink into the morass of indistinguishable, non-iPod MP3 players. But according to a new story in Business Week, we shouldn't be paying attention to their Dell DJ successor... the eponymous Zing of Dell's new music iniative is all in the software.
The idea is great: Dell has 120 engineers working on an iTunes competitor that will be open to everyone short of Apple. The platform will be shared: download music from Napster or Amazon, no problem. In other words, Zing will be a broad standard, allowing the numerous alternative music sites to overlap their shields and take on the iTunes juggernaut head on. The word Business Week forges to describe Zing is an ubermarket where you can buy a song off of Amazon and send it to a friend's satellite radio. "Apple wants to lock you in," says Robert Enderle, a consultant who has been briefed by Dell. "Dell wants to lock you in to choice."
At first, Zing will simply be a software package shipped on Dell computers and netbooks starting in September (perhaps the Mini-Inspiron will be the first host of a Zing client). This will be followed early next year by a couple of Zing-supported MP3 players. There's no word on how Zing will interact with existing MP3 players, but surely there's a solution already being worked on if the software will precede the hardware by months.
Dell pulling this off would be great for consumers: every piddling afterthought DAP software package, each insignificant iTunes music store alternative pulled together. Unfortunately, Dell doesn't have a great history here, but the head of Zing, Tim Bucher, has an Apple background. Maybe he's just the man to hobble iTunes strangle hold on the digital music market while redeeming Dell.
Dell vs. Apple: Why It May Be Personal [Business Week]
John Brownlee
The Sony U-Matic Color Videocassette Recorder will cure cancer
According to this 1972 Life magazine ad for one of the first Sony VCRs, the Sony U-Matic will cut cancer mortality rates by 1/3rd. The rationale is wonderfully clueless on how the whole peer and FDA-approved medical system works.
From the second page:
Suppose a cancer specialist has some valid success with a new form of treatment.He doesn't wait to present a paper at some future medical convention.
Then and there, he records his technique on a U-matic color videocassette. Thousands of copies are mailed and made out.
Within days, thousands of doctors in hospitals and private offices have seen the technique on their U-matic, and can put it to use.
Knowledge snowballs.
Of course, so do malpractice lawsuits. However, Sony was right on the money about one thing: the U-matic copy eerily soothsays the era of invasive and ubiquitous video surveillance.
Antique Ads [Brad Staggs via Retro-Thing]
John Brownlee
The History of GIF News (1988 - 1993)
Courtesy of Waxy's illustrious Andy Baio, a wonderfully written history of the halcyon years of GIF News, a distributed online newsletter distributed via BBSes (the Internet's underground, trilobitic evolutionary precursor) dating back to 1988. Luridly pixelated Flickr gallery and all!
As for the content of this newsletter itself, it's important to note that the content was not about the GIF format itself (the Graphics Interchange Format is described in excruciating detail here), but simply used the GIF format to provide something that in 1988 was pretty unique for a person working out of upstate New York: a full-color, easily transmittable, completely static presentation of computer news. Because he had the 256 color palette to work from, Hsiao could intersperse color screen shots, artwork, and all range of unusual fonts. While not preceding the era of vector-based formats like Postscript, GIF News could produce a relatively low-size file (almost none exceed 100k in size) that could then be archived with other pages and transferred throughout the world...Beyond the transport mechanism, of course, is the content being discussed. The GIF News would only arrive every 60 days or so, and each issue would be at most four pages/images, so the ability to devour the content in a world with RSS feeds and news shooting at us by the bucketful blows through a given posting in no time. It would be unfair, again, to sit here in 2008 and compare what tools rest in our hands for generating an image-and-text newsletter and berate or sneer at Eric's seemingly glacial release pace; every one of these pages could have been hours of painful adjustments and drawing, writing the articles and then carefully placing pixels or groupings around captured artwork.
My heart always suffers from a pang, a fond ache, when I read-up on the incredibly creative BBS scenes of the late 80s... a scene I largely missed in lieu of downloading shareware games from Software Creations and playing pornographic door games. There were these clusters of incredible creativity and ingenuity hidden inside a sprawlingly disjointed, 1200 baud spaghetti structure of isolated communities tied together (at best) by the tin-can transmission system of FidoNet. I was never a part of these, but these secret conclaves of phreakers, programmers, artists and writers were the first cowboys of cyberspace. I wish I'd spent my youth getting to know them.
History of GIF News [Textfiles via Waxy]
GIF News Gallery [Flickr]
John Brownlee
RFID shrines for graying Japan
A graying Japanese woman, injected with liquid Smilex at key muscular intersections, walks up to her husband's futuristic shrine, flashing an RFID chip at a card reader. Thirty seconds later, the entombed ashes of her late husband are brought up via elevator from the sepulchral Japanese netherworld. A translation of their conversation follows.
Woman: Husband!
Ashes: Wife! It is hell down there. The urns never stop weeping and screaming. Why won't you put me on your mantle?
Woman: I am sleeping with a new man now.
Ashes: You whore.
Woman: I am glad you are dead.
The technology that allows this post-mortem moment of marital fidelity: a space-saving RFID solution for automatically displaying your loved one's remains in the crowded shrines of Japan. Remains are stored in an underground vault, hiccoughed up for attractive ornamental display only when a loved one remembers you once existed and deigns to come for a visit.
Actually, a rather ingenious solution to the overcrowded, expensive shrines of a graying Japan, but I still personally have an affinity for the Lebowski method of corpse disposal.
Japanese Graves Use Technology for Limited Space [Trends in Japan]
John Brownlee
Casio channels Star Wars rust aesthetics with G8100-A-5
Casio's new G8100A-5-oh-whatever G-Shock watch has the look of a dilapidated bot stolen by the bicycle thieves of the Star Wars universe, the stinking Jawas. It looks like the sort of Casio HK-47 might strap to his servo-controlled wrist before blasting open a meatbag. It even has the name of a droid! It really is the perfect Star Wars watch, in a way: the rust-mixed copper and low-tech LCD evoke the aesthetic of A New Hope, without sullying the design with actual branding. I love it. $99.
Casio G8100A-5 [Official Site]
John Brownlee
Terminator T-800 Skull DVD Player
A reflective T-800 skull — stolen from Cyberdyne, Brilloed clean of synthetic Austrian musculature and goop — makes an excellent DVD player, as it turns out. Simply insert your DVD in the brainpan and allow re-functioned Terminator MDK processors to upscale and play while its eyes eerily glow. Sadly, the T-800 DVD player is not Blu-Ray compatible... which certainly seems to indicate that Sony will not be the ultimate winner in the HD media wars, at least by the time Judgement Day rolls around.
The Terminator Skull DVD Player [Toxel via Geek Alerts]
Rob Beschizza
The Arcade Cabinet of Tomorrow
The stages of arcade cabinet hankering:
1. Authenticity: one wishes to own either a working cabinet, or an emulator residing within one.
2. Dissatisfaction: The crappy authentic cabinet you can actually afford is as big as a fridge, weighs 300 pounds and is generally a great ugly pile of chipboard. One game is not enough, and gutting it to slap in a computer just makes it nastier.
3. No way am I paying $3,000 for a nice custom one or $500 for the flimsy little junk "cabinet" that Target sold for a while.
4. Dreaming of something wonderful and different, like Martjin Koch's Retro Space.
The cabinet features arcade-quality Sanwa joysticks and buttons mounted on a sleek anodized aluminum control panel. The layout supports classic 1 & 2 person games (there's even a trackball) and includes over 100 licensed arcade classics and a suite of emulators. Retro Space also functions as an HD media jukebox that's equally at home with your music collection and 1080p video playback on its 24-inch 1920x1200 monitor.
Update: From Retrospace's Lara Verlaat:
We plan to do a limited edition first run this autumn of about 20-50 cabinets. We are looking for those of you with most interest to be on the front row. We are working very hard to get the final price for the units of this first run. Expect something in the range of 5000-6000 euros including VAT for a full working system.
Product Page [via RetroThing]
Rob Beschizza
Stencils make more of dead Macs
Because the world has enough Macquariums.
Gallery [Stencorama]
Rob Beschizza
GPS, 1920s-style. Yes, it involved lots of tiny little scrolls of paper.
In the BB tradition of linking to the Daily Mail just to wind you all up, here is today's missive from Britain's best blacktop: a selection of demented pre-war gadgets.
It was the invention of the future - a tiny machine complete with its own map that would tell motorists which way to go.But this was no satnav - after all, the communications satellites that help modern cars locate themselves were still decades away.
Instead, the route-finder for the well-equipped 1920s driver was a wristwatch-style device equipped with minuscule maps.
Other useless beauties of our great-great-grandparents' era include a clockwork burglar alarm, an "electro massager" said to relax you by giving you shocks, and a finger stretching mini-rack, for pianists.
The 1920s satnav ... and other weird and wonderful gadgets that never quite took off [Mail Online]
Rob Beschizza
Play old-school text adventures on iPhone with Frotz
A while ago, we begged for a handheld ASCII game console. Those among you who did not think we were mad will be delighted to find that Frotz, previously only available on jailbroken iPhones, is now offered on the App Store!
Frotz is an interactive fiction interpreter, and will run countless classic text adventures. A bunch of them are included with the app, which is free of charge.
Product Page [App Store]
Project Page [Google code via Touch Arcade and TUAW]
Rob Beschizza
iPod Nano suicide bombs own charger
"After being plugged in for somewhere between 5-10 minutes I heard a sizzling sound. I looked down on the iPod just in time to see it explode open and start shooting sparks and spewing smoke."
Dale's tale of battery-'sploding woe would be quite enough by itself. He journeys on, however, into the light-bathed smiling helpfulness of Apple support, whose agents refer only to a cabal of all-knowing Engineers. But The Engineers are not replacement iPods: soon enough, the smiles fade and the Kafka begins. A flinty manager at his local Apple Store informs us that iPods don't explode, that there are secret safety-related reasons why he cannot help you today, that only the Engineers can help you, and that Sir, phone support should not have promised you anything.
On the other hand, the guy did go windmilling into the Apple store, at the weekend, expecting instantaneous out-of-warranty beneficence.
iPod Nano Explodes While Charging [Consumerist]
John Brownlee
Our wars will be waged with rocket troops and hovercars
This excerpt from the 1979 Usborne Book of the Future certainly causes a few nostalgic, retro-futuristic pangs. According to this book, by the year 2000, squadrons of rocket troops will board NASA-like space shuttles and propelled into orbit, where it will shoot to the other side of the planet at over 16,000 km per hour. Once they've landed in some picturesque Arabian oasis, it's time to swarm over the indigenous natives with armed, floating hover cars. I'd say this seems like overkill just to mop the floor with a gaggle of liberty-threatening Middle Eastern insurgents, but the occupation of Iraq going as it has, perhaps the missing ingredient was rocket troops and hover cars after all.
The Usborne Book of the Future [Pointless Museum via Danger Room]
John Brownlee
Micro-LED glow purse for elusive keys, pens, diaphragms
The Glow Purse is a gorgeously simple idea from designers Kawamura & Ganjavian: a hand bag with micro-LEDs lining the insides that begin to glow when you look for your keys. It's just a concept, unfortunately, and this idea would really be most successful was some sort of easy, DIY mod, but there is a sort of purity of the fusing between fashion, practicality and technology here which can be appreciative by even the non-angora-wearing man's man.
Glowing Purse [Kawamura and Ganjavian via Geeksugar]
John Brownlee
Panasonic: plasma televisions can last up to 42 years
Conventional wisdom is plasma TVs have short, butterfly-like life spans, the very phylum of planned obsolescence. Not so, says Panasonic: if you only watch 6.5 hours of television a day, their plasmas should last 42 years. No promises, natch.
That would certainly be interesting if true, but who would want a plasma to last that long? One of the reasons we love the immortality of those old 50s era cathode ray behemoths is because they come from an era when televisions were furniture as much as gadgets. Certainly, bang for the buck, but can you really see the spacemen of the future plowing through the floating dross of an orbiting flea market, looking for a vintage Panasonic TH 58PZ700U?
Plasma TVs can last 42 years [Slashgear]
John Brownlee
Gadget Lab's Charlie Sorrel vs. Psychopathic, Bike-Thieving Junkie
Gadget Lab's Charlie Sorrel knows a thing or two about getting stolen property back from thieving mutant junkies. He'd have to. Charlie is a roaming exile from the streets of Nottingham, the Chernobyl of the East Midlands: a town so nightmarishly violent that it has more guns per capita than South Africa, so inbred that all its residents can trace a half-equine "Mitochondrial Eve" back to the mid 17th century, and so impoverished that its main export was pig iron until 2005 (which was then exceeded by Crazy Frog Ringtones).
So when Charlie's €280 bicycle was stolen in Barcelona by the local "king of the junkies", Mad Man Chuck knew just what to do: confront the junkie in front of said junkie's aged mother, then (after some masterful negotiation) happily agree to pay €40... despite the fact that he'd already paid the junkie €40 for the bike back!
A tribute to the benefits of alcohol and perseverance, the 18 day saga came to end when I spotted the jerk wheeling the bike past my local bar, where I was drinking a beer. He was walking with his mother, and there was a rather nice looking houseplant hanging from my handlebars...When I grabbed the handlebars, some vague recognition swam into his eyes. I told him he had my bike, and he told me not to say anything in front of his mother, a short sturdy battle-axe of a woman in a floral print tent of a dress. Then he started ranting:
"Fifty euros. Pay me or I will slit your throat."
This was an improvement, I think, on the last offer, which was "a stab in the heart."
Eventually, an amenable deal was reached by both parties, and Charlie got his bike then-and there, with a free wheel thrown in to boot. Never say junkie bike thieves have no sense of customer service.
While I love teasing my favorite Wired drinking buddy on his perceived wussiness, his post on getting his bike back is actually a fantastic look at the inside politics of trying to reclaim property in a crime-ridden Spanish barrio. In this case, the junkie was furious that Charlie had called the police during the initial theft, thereby making Charlie a persistent target... by agreeing to pay more money, Charlie hopes that he wiped the slate clean.
The effect may well be the opposite, but the First Blood wishful thinking of Wired's commenters — to the last of them, a bunch of loutish, half-sentient turdlings — would be just as disastrous. After all, who would you bet on in a physical confrontation? A sunken-chested tech writer with the upper body strength of a consumptive pre-teen? Or a vicious crack junkie so desperate for a rock that he'd threaten to cut your throat in front of his own septuagenarian mother? Charlie, you made the right choice. Congrats on the proud reclamation of your steed!
Junkie Bike Thief Update: Busted [Gadget Lab]
John Brownlee
Netflix delivery system gets torpedo up exhaust port
Netflix's DVD mail shipping system has crashed... and crashed hard. There's no real details in an email sent to all 8.4 million Netflix subscribers except a promise to issue credit if your next DVD is delayed, but scuttlebutt has it that almost no DVDs have been sent out since Tuesday. Worse, Netflix seems to have no idea what the problem is... the unfortunate prerequisite in knowing how to fix it. Worse, there's a lot of confusion on what's going on: some customers who have received emails saying that they're DVDs can't be delivered have come home to discover them waiting for them. Other supposedly delivered DVDs remain in limbo. A massive glitch.
The good news is online streaming is still go and Netflix is obviously taking their DVD shipment issue pretty seriously... out of dire necessity, of course, but spokesman Steve Swasey is making the right noises: "We work really hard to engender trust and loyalty and commitment from Netflix members. We take this extremely seriously. This hurts us that we're not serving our members as they expect us to."
Netflix Goes Dark And Finds It's No Place To Be [CNBC via, image Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Gallery of vintage toy robots
Just in time for us all to slack off on a no-news Friday, Dark Roasted Blend posts a gallery of wonderfully vintage toy robots, repelete in their own wind up, spark spitting retro magnificence. And look at that robot Fido! What a fantastic design: slap some hover pads on his orange belly and a cybertronic brain in his tin cranium and this is my vote for dog of the future, yes sir.
Toy Robots to Have and to Hold [Dark Roasted Blend]
Joel Johnson
Android phones coming to T-Mobile this Fall, says Times
The story is mostly an overview of what's been taken as given, but the Times is quoting "people briefed on [Google's] plans" that an Android-powered phone — probably the HTC Dream — will indeed be launching on T-Mobile as soon as next month.
I have high hopes for Android. Perhaps too high. But the promise of a truly open mobile operating system, backed by a company unafraid of using open industry data standards and with a knack for usability...well, it's good for everyone. Apple may have beat the rest of the mobile industry when it comes to an interface, but the best thing that could happen to everyone, even iPhone users, is if Android becomes a real force in the market. Plus Linux could use a consumer market win.
Smartphone Is Expected via Google [NYTimes]
John Brownlee
The Sketch 'N' Send: a dual screen, split keyboard laptop from the Clinton era
It looks like a 1997 era Compaq broken in frustration across the knee, but what you are looking at is is Ergonomic Dual Screen Split Keyboard Notebook Computer... the world's only platform "to exploit Windows (TM) with dual screens!"
Like its prototype, the "Sketch 'N' Send", the patents for the technology apparently stretch back to 1994, but the guys at Ergonomic Keyboard now claim that the laptop will ship in 2008. And hell, they must be optimistic about the laptop's success: they're selling all the patents!
These Patents are for sale. There are about 4 million notebooks sold each year, if you get 2.5% of that market that is 100,000. If you sell the notebook for $1,000, that's $100,000,000/year. This product could easily get 10%-20% of that market with a selling price of $2,000.
It's a huge joke, but my lust slithers out of its sheath, striking its tentacle-like appendage in the Sketch 'N' Send's direction. It's like a Yanko Design from the Clinton Era, but it hearkens back to the days when laptops were huge and chunky and came in gray, when trackballs were ubiquitous, and when any conveptual deviations from the stock laptop archetype were inspired almost entirely by Star Trek: The Next Generation..
Ergonomic Keyboards of the Future [Electronic Keyboards via Technabob]
Joel Johnson
BMW ZX-6 concept by Jai Ho Yoo and Lukas Vanek
Many of these concept car designs by third-year students at the Instituto Europea di Design in Turin, part of a partnership with BMW, are interesting, but this "ZX-6 Concept" by Jai Ho Yoo and Lukas Vanek takes the cake. It's provocative in shape and cleverly integrates trademark BMW scallops with an interesting new way for doors to operate. It's probably impossibly ambitious, but it's the first concept car I've seen in a while that actually looks futuristic. Or at least novel.
Brownlee hates it, though — says it "looks like a butter dish."
IED Thesis: BMW 2015 Concept [CarBodyDesign.com via Core77]
John Brownlee
Cybernetic LED wings
I may be pitied for having no lover by German mobile phone companies, but there's a reason: I'm inexorably drawn to the sort of wounded dove freak jobs who would pay a $1,000 for a pair of LED cybernetic wings, all of whom end up donning aviator's goggles, watching Wings of Desire and flinging themselves off the top of Tacheles after one hallucinogen-fueled bender or another. Or at least that's the story the Polizei hear.
Cybertek Wings [Artifice Clothing]
John Brownlee
Deal: Apple 12" iBook G4 for $349
There's a great deal going on now at Geeks.com. They are selling refurbished 12" iBooks (G4 @ 1.07GHz, 30GB Hard Drive, 256MB and a 30GB hard drive) for $349. Enter coupon code "IBOOKDEAL" for the $30 bucks off.
Those specs aren't great shakes, we know, but there's a surprising number of people still holding onto their old iBooks for dear life : it's the smallest laptop Apple's ever produced, as close to an OSX-running netbook as you're likely to get short of some incredible September surprise. I was surprised how many hacker types carried around iBooks at Chaos Congress in December. I'm pretty tempted.
Apple iBook G4 [Geeks.com via, image Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Suitcase full of bacon triggers airport bomb detectors
According to this article on German news site Nachrichten, as un-ablauted by Google Translate and turned into a slurry of humorous pidgin gobbledygook, a quantity of bacon is enough to set off hand luggage bomb detectors.
Apparently, the traveler — on his way to America through Linz — was stopped going through after a machine detected that a piece of bacon his wife had packed "had a similar molecular density to certain types of explosives."
Confronted with an X-Ray of the bacon and asked to identify it, the nervous passenger replied: "It's fat." In America, such flip would earn you a solid truncheoning, but the passenger was merely requested to open the package in a bomb-proof room and prove that it actually was bacon. Humorously, the traveler apparently seemed worried that the bacon might actually be an explosive, as it was packed for him as a lunch by his wife, whom he was on the outs with.
What happened to the traveler? The Nachrichten piece ends surrealistically:, ranting and raving about the Virgin Mary wanting to fly to Rome. It remains unclear at this time whether the bacon incident delayed the Holy Mother's pilgrimage, or whether the bacon was confiscated by customs officials for "disposal."
Bacon in suitcase triggers bomb alarm [Nachrichten via Google Translate]
Joel Johnson
Marital Aid Test Kitchen reviews the SaSi vibrator (Verdict: Obviates thumbs up)
Our go-to sex toy reviewer Lux Alptraum checks out the "SaSi", a fancy new vibrator that has a motion nub that more or less simulates cunnilingus:
The first time I heard that the SaSi could learn how to get me off, I got a little freaked out, thinking that this toy was powered by some kind of A.I. voodoo that would sense when and how often and how hard the toy made me came. Not so much, though: turns out "learns what you like" is actually just code for "fancy system of programmable stimulation settings."In case you might miss the implication, the site linked below is NSFW — or at least not safe for some workplaces. Around here I demand that we all check out porn at least twice a day, whether we need it or not.In other words, the SaSi has two different modes: "learning mode" and "favorites mode". (You select which mode you'd like to enter after you turn the toy on.) In learning mode, the SaSi works its way through every stimulation setting and pauses for twenty seconds at each movement pattern. If you like the way a pattern feels, you can hit the "don't stop" button. When you shut the toy off, favorites mode updates with your last five "don't stop" settings, turning the mode mode into your own customized orgasm session. It may not be as impressive as some A.I. voodoo, but it's still pretty cool.
Also, watching the nubbing move around under the silicone sheath in the video Lux has posted on Fleshbot is sort of frightening. It looks like a little pink ghost.
It's $185.
Getting Down With The SaSi: Does The "Most Technologically Advanced Vibe Ever" Live Up To The Hype? [Fleshbot]
Joel Johnson
David Burel's plywood headphones
While some of the selections in Cool Hunting's "Five Wooden Gadgets" have been featured on BBG before, I'd not seen these birch plywood headphones from David Burel. While they look like the sort of thing you'd be able to buy by the dozen at Ikea, each unit is actually made to order, since the wooden band at the top necessitates a custom fit. As you might expect I think they're quite nifty, although I'm not sure I'd actually use a pair if I bought them since they couldn't be easily stashed in my pocket when I'm out and about.
Price is unknown, but you can contact Burel for a quote. (I have done just that.) Update: Burel told me the headphones are €250 apiece.
Five Wooden Gadgets [CoolHunting.com]
John Brownlee
Pocketables reviews Sharp Willcom D4 MID (Verdict: Turd.)
Pocketables' Jenn Lee posts her final review on the latest MID ripped in premature C-Section from Sharp R&D's belly by their own restless marketing midwives: the Willcom D4. Like most premies, it seems to have trouble breathing without an incubator.
If you've been relatively impressed by the Willcom D4 so far, then here's where it gets ugly. Very ugly. As most of you know from my standard battery (CE-BL57) wi-fi runtime post, battery life is abysmal. Sharp/Willcom have always been upfront about the standard battery's "up to 1.5 hours" operating time, but that doesn't excuse it. That the D4 can also be used a phone in Japan makes the battery life even more pathetic.Even worse than the drain rate is how quickly the battery's capacity seems to deteriorate. About 2.5 weeks ago, I was getting a little over an hour of wi-fi time (as shown here). Today, the 960mAh li-ion battery is unable to break the one-hour mark under any condition.
We're avowed MID cynics at BBG — impressive tech and inappropriate software shoehorned into junk solutions without even a cursory hat tip to real world usability — but even so, a paltry 1.5 hour battery life degrading by 33% in less than a month should convince anyone that this isn't a device to spend $1,200 on.
As long as MID manufacturers insist on cramming Vista on these devices, the battery life is not going to get better. What kind of hallucinogen-laced Jenkem are companies like Sharp huffing? Even netbook manufacturers aren't daft enough to use anything beefier than XP.
Review: Willcom D4 [Pocketables]
Joel Johnson
Bert Praetorius, father of rewind, passes at 90
From a tribute post on Reddit from one of Bert Praetorius' grandchildren:
After the war, he was honorably discharged and returned to New York City to work for NBC as an electrical engineer, often working on broadcasts of Yankees games (he knew and was friends with many of the players, including many who are considered "greats" today). It was here that he developed the technology for rewinding to work properly (think of something like when you're watching tv and you see someone drop an egg on the sidewalk, and then you'll see the entire think in reverse flawlessly, without the lines you would see like when you would try to do the same with a tape in the VCR- and remember, at this time, this was many years before the advent of home video recording). For this, he recieved little recognition, despite the now complete ubiquity of his invention. He was, however, once a guest on the show "I've got a Secret", where his invention was obviously his secret (I have been trying for years now to track down a copy of the show, with no success- if anyone knows where I could find something like that, it would mean a great deal to me and my family, especially now). Ultimately he retired to a home in the middle of New Jersey, where he lived happily for many years, keeping himself busy with ham radio and computers. He was one of the first people to own a pocket calculator and a personal computer. He leaves behind his wife of 57 years, Marcelle, 8 children, and nearly 30 grandchildren.
Dear Reddit: On Tuesday night, my grandfather died. He invented rewinding (seriously). [Reddit]
John Brownlee
Speakers nestled in each orifice, iPig dock oinks out tunes
A range of brightly colored, abstractly cutified swine and sows to oink out your tunes, Speakal's iPig docks feature five speakers per unit for a maximum of 25 watts of output, including a 4-inch installed in the rectum, as well as a super Hi-Fi Amplifier, an interior dynamic airflow optimizer and an interior dynamic cooling exchange system coiled amongst the piggy's bowels. Volume is raised by twisting the iPig's ears, just like a real hog.
I'm not really tempted to spend $140 on an iPod dock normally, but the iPig has the extra allure of being the spitting image of the rubbery piggies Invader Zim recklessly flings back through time to cripple his human nemesis, Dib. Episode 07B, for the record.
iPig [Speakal via Gadget Lab]
John Brownlee
Washington D.C. gets SmartBike bike-sharing program
Washington D.C. is set to become the first American city with a high-tech bike-sharing program. According to the Washington Post, for a $40 annual fee, you'll be able to pluck a cherry red three-speed from any of 10 (downtown only) bike stations. You can then ride the bike for three hours. Want to ride it for longer? You'll need to drag it back to an access point and top it up.
It's a step in the right direction, but being a Berliner, it seems a bit rubbery an execution. In Berlin, there are thousands of City Bikes available, sprinkled liberally on almost every street corner. There's no actual "stations": you simply walk up to a bike and call a number on the bike's bumper, which unlocks it for your use. You can then use it for any amount of time, being charged a low hourly rate on your mobile.
What makes the Berlin city bikes so fantastic is that you can leave them anywhere. They have built-in GPS units: once a week or so, fleets of vans swoop over the city, pick up discarded bikes, and redistribute them optimally. I once had about twenty city bikes I had discarded in front of my apartment building: one day, I came home, and they'd all been picked up.
Simple and perfect. And while Washington's Smartbike program worries about theft, Berlin's GPS units effectively prevent the bikes from being stolen, short of using a blowtorch to cut into the unit's enclosed steal casing. Washington's solution seems a lot more limiting: as far as the Washington Post says, Smartbike can't physically track the bikes, so they simply ding anyone who has their bike stolen or damaged on their watch for $550.
It's great to see American cities experiment with commuter bicycling, but it certainly seems like a sub-optimal solution when European cities have used more sophisticated and successful systems for years.
D.C. Bike Sharing Kicks Into High Gear [Washington Post]
Joel Johnson
Photocalc: Photography reference guide for iPhone
Lil' Chuckie Sorrel discovered this handy $3 iPhone application, "Photocalc", that serves as a pocket guide for photographers:
There's a full glossary of technical terms, a page that tells you the sunrise and sunset times today (using the iPhone's location features), a table for using Ansel Adams' Zone System (don't ask), a full rundown of the properties of different films (if anyone still uses them), a list of filters and a guide to the "Sunny 16 Rule".Charlie walks through the whole app, which includes lots of manual calculations that your camera probably already does for you, but are good to have at hand when you're ready to start moving from Auto to Manual mode.
In all, this little app is a great pocket guide. The interface could use some help -- entering values into the calculators is a little clunky -- but as a learning tool for newcomers and as a reference for old pros, it's certainly worth the three bucks.
Photocalc Turns iPhone into a Photographer's Calculator [Gadget Lab]
Joel Johnson
Help Jose fill out his wedding registry
Jose, in one of his last fits of freedom, writes:
I'm an avid reader of BoingBoing/Gadgets/TV and am getting married September 27th. One of my duties as the future groom is to pick out items to be placed on our wedding registry. There's a good chance that anything reasonable would be purchased (large pretty progressive families/friends), and I need all the help I can get. I've started scouring through your archives for great things that I would want... but thought that the commenters on the site would be into making their dream uber gadget wedding registry. I need all the help I can get, so thought this shot in the dark was at least worth the effort!My vote is for a set of Dewalt power tools (or Milwaukee or other solid brand). I got the set I linked above as a gift a couple of years ago. While I'm not a massively proactive woodworker or anything, it's been fantastic to have enough multi-purpose tools with real oomph to tackle minor construction projects and repairs around the house.
It's sort of a hard question to answer, though. It's not like the old days where two people were moving right out of their parents' houses into a new home. Wedding gifts these days are less about stocking up a new household and more about...just getting stuff. Still, let's pretend: what critical household tools should Jose request?
Image: Withrow; it's what came up when I searched for "scared groom."
Joel Johnson
Brando's $250 cell phone jammer would cost you $11k in fines
Crapvendor emeritus Brando is selling a new "Hand-held portable universal cell phone jammer" that works on a variety of frequencies (although likely not all at once) and is almost certainly illegal to own or operate in the United States. With its battery fully charged it can blocked phones in an eight- to ten-meter range for around 90 minutes. That won't ensure you a quiet theater, but you might be able to silence your corner bar.
It's $250, plus shipping.
Product Page [Gadget.Brando.com.hk]
John Brownlee
One is the loneliest SIM card that you'll ever do
Sitting on the balcony with a beer, my mobile phone rings.
[BRING]
"Hello, John Brownlee speaking."
"Uh... ja... hallo. This is E-Plus calling. You have a mobile phone with us?"
"Indeed I do. What's this about?"
"Ja, Herr Brownlee. We like you..."
"...oh! Thanks!"
"So we like to give you second SIM card. You can give it to a partner of your choice and speak to them for free at any time!"
"That's very kind of you, but I'm afraid I don't have a person to give that SIM Card to."
[AWKWARD SILENCE]
"Oh. What a pity. You have no one. How terribly sad. I hope you find a lover one day. We will call you then."
[CLICK]
I decide I need to open a few more beers.
John Brownlee
Wii gets third-party DVD playback
A mysterious gap in the Wii's feature list over the last couple years has been the lack of DVD playback. There's no technical reason it can't do it: it just doesn't. Not a big deal when a host of DVD-reading devices crowd in the nethers of the entertainment center: it's just a bit conspicuous of a corporate decision.
If you happen to have been waiting for DVD playback functionality on the Wii, the omission has now been rectified by plucky hackers.They have come up with a way to read and play DVDs on unhacked systems. Their DVDX installer injects a small hidden channel onto your Wii that will allow you to play DVDs back with MPlayer, a GPL media player.
Neat. In truth, of all the consoles, I'd probably prefer to play DVDs on my Wii: the Wiimote is a far more remote-like controller for movie playback than a clunky 360 controller.
libdi and the DVDX installer [Hackmii via Engadget]
Joel Johnson
In Seattle? Want to cover PAX for us?
I've never ever been to the Penny Arcade Expo, which pains me no end. It's just a bad time of year for me. Something always comes up. (This year it's Burning Man.)
If you're in the Seattle area, have a camera and a internet-grade command on the English language, and would be willing to snap a few pix and write up your experience I'd be happy to send you my Three-Day Pass that I won't be able to use. I'm not looking for comprehensive coverage or anything — we're talking about a $40 pass, here — but as a devoted fan of Penny Arcade I'd at least like to attend this year by proxy.
Hit me up via email (joel@sproingsproing) if you're interested. First person to tickle my fancy gets it.
Update: Got it covered. Thanks, everyone!
John Brownlee
Dell announces new Latitude business laptops with "up to 19 hours of battery life"
Dell has just announced a new line of seven Latitude laptops catering to professionals. The big claim is hugely improved battery life: the Direct2Dell blog claims that "some configurations can get up to 19 hours."
This improvement seems to come from a duo of factors. On one hand, Dell is offering batteries in cells numbering to the nonuple. On the other, they are now building into the BIOS of every system their new Dell Latitude ON system, which seems remarkably similar to Splashtop (perhaps even licensed by them). What Dell Latitude ON does is allow people to instantly boot into a smaller OS embedded on the BIOS chip, capable of launching typical programs like Firefox and Skype without actually booting up Vista. I'm extrapolating that that "19 hour" battery life figure comes from a combination of both the 9-cell battery and only dinkering around in ON.
In addition, the new Latitudes will come in configurations offering fingerprint readers, built-in disk encryption, smartcard readers, 802.11N, mobile broadband, Bluetooth 2.1, etc, with screen sizes ranging from 12 to 15.4 inches. Prices start at $1,200 for the higher end models, with the smaller sized Latitudes still having no price.
Not bad, Dell. But where's the E Mini-Inspiron?
New Dell Latitude Notebooks: No More Business as Usual [Direct2Dell]
Joel Johnson
Sponsor: Toshiba Laptop Experts desktop widget
One of our sponsors, Toshiba, has created an Adobe AIR-based "Laptop Experts" widget that can sit on your desktop, making it simple to add questions to the system and get answers back. (You may have seen the Laptop Experts excerpts running in ads on BBG.) Rob and I have been answering questions in the Laptop Experts platform for a few months now — many of our answers may even be technically correct! Toshiba's trying to figure out ways to extend the usefulness of the site and one of my suggestions — finding ways to bring in lots of users from around the web to answer questions — sounds like it's in the cards.
Desktop Widget Download [SynapseGroup.com]
John Brownlee
Motorla RAZR VE20 shots leaked: same damn phone
Three or four years ago, the RAZR's design simply dropped jaws: how can a phone be so thin? . It was, in truth, a crummy phone, adopted by indiscriminate hipsters and gadgetological fashionistas... me and my doppelgangers, in other words. Nevertheless, Motorola made quajillions: it was a device designed to slice open the jugular of the mobile phone industry, and that was reflected in its name.
Fast forward, and Motorola is still trying to sell people the exact same phone. The new VE20 just looks ridiculous in the era of slick touchpad 3G smartphones. It's 2MP cam, QVGA main display and NFL broadcasting capability? Oh, jeez. It's like watching a Cheesehead slug around last season's Swarovski-crusted Gucci handbag.
I know, I come across as a douche (on this and others). But is this the sort of phone Motorola is really banking on saving its company? It's the same damn one we all rejected years ago for better models. You don't dig your way out of obsolescence by selling the same thing you sold half a decade ago under a new brand name.
Blurry shots leak out of the RAZR VE20 [Phone Arena via Gizmodo]
Joel Johnson
Video: Dancing magnetic oil sculpture
Sachiko Kodama, associate professor at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications, creates breathtaking sculptures by manipulating magnetically charged oil with powerful electromagnets. One of the sculptures (I'm not sure if it's the one in this video or not) will be on display at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens through October. If you can go see it, I'd love to see more video in action.
[via io9]
John Brownlee
Apple R&D building erupts into flames
Earlier this morning, an Apple R&D facility went up in flame, causing some portion of its 100-strong staff to evacuate the building. Over 66 firefighters rushed to the scene to put out the blaze. Early reports blame "faulty air conditioning." Our guess: faulty air conditioning on hot Cupertino day causes MacBook Air explosion, conflagration.
John Brownlee
littleBits: magnetic, LEGO-like circuit board components
littleBits are LEGO-like pieces of pre-assembled circuitry that can be magnetically snapped together for the easy construction of more complicated circuit board. Just mix-and-match from a phantasmagoria of circuitry to come up with the widget gleaming in your mind's eye. Also LEGO-like: my mechanical incompetence will completely prevent me from building a Flux Capacitor out of littleBits, no matter how scientifically-sound my Flux Capacitor design.
littleBits [Official Site]
Joel Johnson
Polaroid to take another crack at the instant camera
Image: Squeaky Marmot
The instant camera was finally put to pasture early this year, as the Polaroid Corporation stopped producing film for the iconic take-and-shake camera. Polaroid wisely took advantage of the cessation to market their pocket-sized PoGo instant printer, which received modest praise, but did not include a camera of its own, relying instead on Bluetooth- and USB-equipped mobile phones.
But now the company has announced plans to release a next generation instant camera with the PoGo's "ZINK" printing technology built right inside, ditching the PoGo's 3-by-2 format for the old instant's familiar 4-by-3. And they've asked the readers of Amateur Photographer magazine to help them design it.
One trouble sign: the camera is reported to be "focused on 'professional and business users'". While I'm certain there are plenty of uses for a new instant camera to be used in the workplace, such a pop culture classic should surely be aimed at casual users first.
Here are a few of my suggestions for a new Polaroid instant camera:
• Keep it retro – If adding the printer inside will preclude the new camera from being pocketable, I'd not worry about making the thing as small as possible but instead try to evoke the shape of Polaroid instant cameras of the past. Perhaps even a rudimentary viewfinder could complement a modern LCD panel in the back.
• Add old timey filters – Everybody loves the rather crappy look of an old Polaroid; it melds perfectly with today's hipster aesthetic. A simple mode on the camera that produces slightly milky images would be a lot of fun — and it could still save a more clear version as a file on the camera's internal memory.
• Add the handle, not the shake – Shaking an old Polaroid never did anything in the first place. Everyone's asking Polaroid to figure out a way to make their heat activated ZINK technology activate by shaking, but that's a waste of time. Just make sure the thick border on the bottom of the images is there and everyone will shake and Sharpie them like always — whether they need to or not.
Polaroid plans to collect everyone's input and put out the new model next year.
PHOTOGRAPHERS TO SHAPE POLAROID HISTORY [AmateurPhotographer.co.uk via Oh Gizmo! via Gizmodo via Gadget Lab]
Joel Johnson
Logitech Nano mouse clips onto your laptop like a lamprey
Logitech's new "V550 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks" looks like pretty standard fare — two buttons plus a scroll wheel, long battery life, proprietary (but tiny) wireless USB dongle — but it does have one, somewhat goofy feature: a small sticker with a metal nub to be stuck on the side of your laptop, onto which the mouse can be hooked and carried around the house or office. I imagine that serves a very small niche of users, but they are now served nonetheless.
It's available for $60.
Product Page [Logitech.com via Gadget Lab]
John Brownlee
Every NES cartridge ever made on eBay (as long as it's American and grey)
Every few months, an eBay auction arises where some poor schlub — racked with debt, pursued by loan sharks with tire irons — is forced to sell the retro-gaming collection he's amassed over decades. This NES collection currently on eBay is just such: every gray NES cartridge ever released in America (no Zeldas, friends), including two that were held back from production except for reviewer copies: the elusive Final Fantasy II and California Raisins.
Think of what it took to put this together. Think of the millions of feverish prayers mumbled skyward to a Mario God every time a flea market shoebox full of games was rooted through. Think of the grease-stained rivulets of sweat cascading down one lone collector's pustulent face as he scrimped and saved on a fry cook's salary for that elusive copy of Final Fantasy II. I am not entirely a monster: my heart yearns to help him, to make his treasure my own. I go for the "Buy It Now" button, only $3,800.
Then the monster in me goes WTF. Every NES game for $3,800 is certainly a sweet deal... until you realize that with a slight somersault of your ethics, you could get them all in one Bittorrent mega-pack for $3,800 less... including Zeldas.
It's still awesome to see this dedication, of course. It's sad to see games so lovingly collected sold against the collector's will. But with emulation being what it is, collectibility is the only value carts still have: monetary worth informed only by redundant nostalgia for an obsolete media format when the games themselves have ascended to fresher technology. Utterly meta collectibility: the future of nostalgia, as media digitally escapes the shackles of its delivery.
Joel Johnson
"AV" T-shirt covers your back in plugs and ports
Although it commits the sin of putting the most interesting graphics on the back, the "AV" T-shirt by Olly Moss must be forgiven considering its subject matter: a full range of audio and video inputs spread wide across your back. It's cute, but I must resist, even at $20 — I'd never be able to stop thinking about how much better it would look on the front of the shirt. Plus I wouldn't be able to practice plugging in component cables to my nipples.
Product Page [Threadless]
John Brownlee
The Inquirer: Add NVIDIA G92s and 94s to failing GPU list
The Inquirer continues to foam at the mouth and scream apocalyptically through their greasy beard, the soothsayer of an upcoming Nvidia apocalypse which will doom, doom, DOOM us all.
Following up their initial claim that all Nvidia G84 and G86 series GPU chipsets are bad, The Inquirer now claims we can add G92s and G94s to the list:
It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates. If you know what failures look like statistically, they follow a Poisson distribution, aka a bell curve. The failures start out small, and ramp up quickly - very quickly. If you know what you are looking for, you can catch the signs early on. From the sound of the backchannel grumblings, the failures have been flagged already, and NV isn't playing nice with their partners.Why wouldn't they? Well, the G92 chip is used in the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile flavours of 8800, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants just to confuse buyers. The G94 is basically only the 9600GT. Basically we are told all G92 and G94 variants are susceptible to the same problem - basically they are all defective. Any guesses as to how much this is going to cost?
From the look of it, all G8x variants other than the G80, and all G9x variants are defective, but we have only been able to get people to comment directly on the G84, G86, G92 and G94, and all variants thereof. Since Nvidia is not acknowledging the obvious G84 and G86 problems, don't look for much word on this new set either - if they can bury it, it will drop their costs.
Nvidia is being incredibly mum about their GPU problems. On one hand, that could be because there are no real problems... but forum boards don't bear that out, and accusations are getting far too hysterical not to respond to. At this point, Nvidia's silence is looking incriminating: they aren't admitting the problem because they can't... it's a company sinker.
Nvidia G92s and G94 reportedly failing [The Inquirer]
Previously:
The Inquirer: All Nvidia G84s AND G86s are bad - Boing Boing Gadgets
Joel Johnson
Thomas & Betts Ty-Rap Zip Ties reviewed (Verdict: Expensive but the best)
John Todd, writing for Cool Tools, gives a short history and thorough explanation of why Thomas & Betts "Ty-Rap" zip ties are the ones by which all other ties are measured:
The difference is that the T&B ties use a stainless gripper as the 'ratchet' mechanism, and there are no serrations on the bottom of the tie surface -- it's completely smooth. The stainless locking head actually digs into the underside of the wrap when threaded, leading to infinite adjustability and tight application (the el-cheapo ties always seem to be one "click" too loose.) They are higher-strength material - probably double or triple the strength of standard ties. They resist melting, and seem to be impervious to the worst chemicals I've thrown them into (including lye baths for metal stripping.) They are resistant to abrasions and take a bit of effort to cut through even with a sharp knife. I find that I typically have to wedge a knife blade under the tie, and twist the blade like a tourniquet stick to cut the ties - this also avoids the unpredictable jumping of the blade which is typical of the brute force method of cutting these infernal things once they're on an object.They certainly aren't cheap: the Amazon price for 100 ties is $19. It might be nice to keep a bag of the cheaper zip ties around, too, just for jobs where you don't particularly need a super-strong, permanent fix.
Ty-Rap Zip Ties [Cool Tools]
Update: But soft, reader Tristan B. begs to differ:
Sorry to burst your bubble on TNB ty-raps but the most expensive gotta be Panduits stainless steel ty-raps
They are incredibly strong, used for installing industrial process insulation. I got ahold of some through my friendly electrical wholesale house. Corrosion resistant, heat resistant and look like they belong on the space shuttle.
John Brownlee
Psystar eggs Apple on, releases Leopard Restore Disc to customers
Psystar is crazy like a fox. Apple's attorneys are currently pummeling the plucky "Open Computer" manufacturers for their Mac clones, and while Psystar have hired some anti-trust attorneys of their own to fight them off, the general impression is of an enraged grizzly bear swatting a prone, overweight Special Ed preschooler back and forth with its paw. Curl, Psystar! Curl!
But curl they don't. In fact, Psystar's egging Apple on: their latest "strategy" is to release Leopard restore discs to all of their customers. Before, Psystar maintained that a corrupted Leopard install would require the computer to be mailed back to them. This was presumably to prevent distributing a hacked version of Leopard and falling afoul of Apple's lawyers... moot now.
Now that they are already being sued and risk being shut down, perhaps they feel they have nothing more to lose. Maybe they're trying to do right by their customers in case they do get shut down. But I keep on thinking that these guys have some epic plan, this latest move just being one small part. All will be revealed in the final moments of a Supreme Court battle, John Grisham style.
Open Computing Leopard Restore Disc [Psystar]
Previously • Psystar will allege Apple antitrust - Boing Boing Gadgets
• Psystar hires Apple-killing attorneys - Boing Boing Gadgets
• How the Psystar lawsuit might go very, very wrong... for Apple ...
• Apple finally — FINALLY — sues Psystar - Boing Boing Gadgets
• Psystar OpenMac monstrosities run OS X - Boing Boing Gadgets
Joel Johnson
Stephen Hawking portrait on black velvet
Nichole "The Toy Baroness" Lindsay commissioned this "Tijuana Velvet" painting of Stephen Hawking that anyone would be proud to place above their coal black mantle.
Tijuana Black Velvet Painting of Stephen Hawking (NewGallery_SH32.jpg) [Flickr.com] (Thanks, Bonnie!)
John Brownlee
Toastabags grill cheese sandwiches in your toaster with reusable bags
Making a croque madame with a toaster is an apocalyptic affair. However sublime a toaster may be for its primary purpose, things turn foul when you insert two pieces of bread, then feed in some ham, cheddar cheese and crack an egg all over the top. These "Toastabags" (phonemologically Bostonian, apparently) are a novel solution: reusable bags to feed a sandwich into, which trap your sandwich's gooey juices as it toasts. My only question is what kind of toaster can accommodate a whole sandwich: mine chokes on itself on any slab of bread thicker than an inch. Two bags for 12 euros.
Toastabags [Latest Buy via Gearfuse]
John Brownlee
Calculate your roof's potential solar power output with RoofRay
RoofRay is a fantastic new Google Maps hack that allows you to zoom in on any American address' rooftop, specify the surface area available on that roof for solar panels and then calculate the potential power of the system, in total and per square foot. You need to know some arcane details — I just guessed at the degrees of my parents' roof angle — but it's an excellent resource if you're trying to get a rough independent gauge on whether an investment in solar power would pay for itself any time in your lifetime.
RoofRay [Official Site via Treehugger]
Joel Johnson
Multi-room Apple audio system shows why Sonos must release its iPhone remote app
Lifehacker's Adam Pash walks you through setting up your iTunes for streaming to multiple rooms using the Airport Express, all controlled from an iPhone or iPod touch's Remote.app. This is the very thing I was talking about when I said that Remote.app "pretty much negates the need for something like the Sonos music system for most households" — about which Sonos was none too happy until I explained to them that I used and liked a Sonos system in my home. Which is when they invited me to check out their latest Sonos receivers.
Which is where they told me they were working on an iPhone app in their labs, but weren't sure if they were going to release it.
Sonos has great amplifiers, a MIMO wireless network that makes setup simple and keeps multi-room music completely in sync, and decent software that works great when paired to an all-you-can-eat music subscription like Rhapsody or Pandora. Their remote, however advanced it was when the system launched a few years ago, now is extremely behind the times: too large, missing a touch-based interface, and slow to load large indexes of metadata like song titles and artist names.
Fortunately, the Sonos remote is the least essential part of their system.
The iPhone and iPod touch are seeing healthy penetration in home automation circles, the same sort of segment that would buy the not-quite-luxury, not-quite-a-bargain Sonos system. Adding an official Sonos application to the iPhone should be a no brainer.
But they better do it soon. Many people only want to add one or two more locations in which to listen to music in their home. Many of those folks have home theater and other stereo systems around into which an Airport Express or AppleTV could be connected. For someone who already has all these things in place — and I really do believe that most of the people in Sonos' market already have all this equipment at hand — the price will come down to buying a few Airport Expresses or a whole new proprietary Sonos system — with an arguably better user experience from the cheaper option.
Turn Your iPhone or iPod Touch Into a Multi-Room Wireless Music Remote [Lifehacker]
John Brownlee
Tyrannosaurus lamp lights bedrooms Crestaceously
The T-Rex DIY Dinosaur Light — they had such an opening for DIYnosaur, but they resisted like spartans — flashes me back to the more scientific days of my childhood, when my room was covered with fossilized chicken bones mislabeled with various thunder lizard names in the Latin, and the primary concern of my passionately inquiring mind was whether or not a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two tiny chainsaws for its arms could face down a pack of hyper-intelligent Velociraptors armed with bazookas.
Back then, I would have killed for a lamp like this: a plastic constructible dinosaur lamp that at $26 is affordable by even the chintziest of science-museum-going parents. Hell, who am I kidding? I'd still love one. I'd definitely need to invest in a green bulb, though. And maybe two ember-like Christmas lights for eyes.
DIY Assemble Dinosaur Lights set [Brando via Gizmodo]
Joel Johnson
My iPhone and AT&T Sin Tax
When I bought my first iPhone a year ago, I made a donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a sort of sin tax. An indulgence for an indulgence. An attempt to counteract giving money to a company that has colluded illegally with the U.S. government to spy on its own citizens, has plans to try to filter the entire internet for copyright violations, and has generally shown itself to be an enemy to personal liberty and privacy.
But boy do I like my iPhone.
Since I just purchased an iPhone 3G and hence have extended my contract for another two years, I've extended my donation to the EFF to match my monthly bill to AT&T for the duration. It's hardly the most laudable option — if I were really going to stick to my guns I'd forgo the iPhone and AT&T entirely — but it is my compromise.
Certainly I'm happy to bask in any encouragement and handjobs you'd like to extend, but mostly I'm mentioning it as a challenge to other AT&T subscribers. If you can afford it, please consider making some sort of donation to the EFF. Even a one-time donation will help bolster an organization that has a long history of fighting for our rights online against attacks from profit-addled interests. By giving companies like AT&T our money we're funding in part a fight against ourselves; a donation to the EFF tips the odds back towards even.
Plus you get a hat.
Donate! [Secure.EFF.org/donate]
Previously • Talking About AT&T's Internet Filtering on AT&T's The Hugh Thompson Show
• AT&T: Use of P2P software is grounds for service termination
• Interview with AT&T's "Filter the Internet" Exec
Joel Johnson
Video: Industrial robot arms in bloodless melee combat
No one has a clue exactly what's going on in this video: it appears that these robots have been pre-programmed to exhibit an axe vs. mace match, but not actually ever hit each other. That's a real shame, but does legitimize the plot of Robot Jox ever so slightly: It takes a human to convince a robot that it's okay to kill.
[via BotJunkie via Geekologie]
Joel Johnson
States want to tax iTunes, other digital downloads
NetChoice, a "coalition of trade associations" including Yahoo, VeriSign, and eBay — and which I take from its K Street address in D.C. to be a lobbying group — is taking a clever tack to steer state governments from implementing a tax on digital media downloads: cloak downloads in green.
From The Iconoclast:
"With global warming and a world that's running out of oil, the last thing governments should do is add taxes on something that uses no oil and produces no carbon," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice. "A digital download is the greenest way to buy music, movies, and software, since it requires no driving to the store, no delivery vans, and no plastics or packaging."Works for me, if only because I have no desire to pay any additional sales tax, an opinion bolstered by only personal parsimony.
If you'll pardon anecdote masked as data, I will say this: ever since New York State started charging sales tax on Amazon purchases I've made considerably fewer transactions with Amazon. Perhaps that's a good thing in the end.
States may tax iTunes, other digital downloads [The Iconoclast]
Joel Johnson
Brand New on the new Bell Canada logo
Brand New takes a gander at the new Bell Canada logo and are impressed despite themselves, noting there's "something onomatopoetic about it — I can hear a bell ringing when I look at the mark." (The company is known in Canada as simply "Bell".)
I have to say I like it, too. It's got a snappy weirdness that works despite the dangling "e". And when given the squint test, the parallel "ll" in lower-case somehow evoke IBM more than Dell, which seems apropos for a monolithic telecom. The ad campaign going along with it is nice, too. (I'm a sucker for mystery ads.)
Putting the er in After [Brand New]
Joel Johnson
Two-way mirror hides HDTV in this nice installation
DND Casa, what appears to be some sort of boutique design firm, has done a few installations in which flat panel displays are placed behind two-way mirrors. Most of the installations are quite gaudy, unfortunately, but the one pictured above is really nice. The wood and seamless (horizontally at least) line between the wood and the mirrored panel looks classy — or like a microwave in a paneled trailer home. Whatever!
I've got my my TV wall mounted in my new bedroom for now, but I wonder how difficult it would be to do this without disassembling the television so the panel actually sits flush with the screen, instead of being held off by the bevel a few millimeters. (I haven't forgotten all the great suggestions you guys had for finishing my room but I'm not going to show anything off until I've made more progress.)
Company Page [DNDCasa.com via Yanko]
Joel Johnson
H2OAudio Amphibx underwater case: a whole new world for your iPod
The Amphibx Waterproof Armband is an eighty dollar iPod case that straps to your arm. It's got a few things going for it: it's large enough that different MP3 players can be tucked inside (there's few things that irk me more than buying cases and then having to toss them when I upgrade); it's submersible up to 12 feet, which is plenty for swimming and even snorkeling; and its "ClearTouch" window actually will let you activate the touch controls of an iPhone or iPod touch, even in the water. So if a little crab starts changing your music to Under the Sea, be aware: you're about to be seduced by a redheaded mermaid who's going to drag you gurgling and coughing to rest on a shelf of her briny wunderkammer.
"What's the word? Oh, giggle: murder."
Product Page [H2OAudio.com via Coolest-Gadgets]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Call of Duty – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: Game of the Year Edition for Xbox 360 for $40, shipped. [Slickdeals]
• Thinkpads – Up to 36% off Lenovo Thinkpads (and desktop PCs, too). You should still comparison shop if you're going to buy, of course. [Dealhack]
• Dell PC – Buy one desktop or laptop, get the 2nd for 50% off, including the new Studio Hybrid desktops. You can mix and match and shipping is free. [Dealnews]
• Tripod – Joby Gorillapod tripod for $19.50, shipped. [Dealnews]
• Sound Projector – Yamaha YSP-800S Digital Sound Projector for $500, shipped. About $80 off. Everyone I know with one of these really likes it. [Dealnews]
• Mini Heli – Today's Woot is a two-pack of Ecoman Micro Bullet RC Helicopters for $25, shipped.
Joel Johnson
Video: The Cuntblocker 5000 advertisement
Do not press play unless your workplace doesn't mind a dalliance with the c-word.
John Brownlee
The Corona-Matic: Typewriter turned waffle iron
Designer Chris Dimino took the pad off an old Corono Typewriter, inverted it, conducted electricity through the keys and transformed it into the Corona-Matic, modifying the typewriter's output from manuscripts to deliciously QWERTY, keyboard shaped golden brown waffles.
If that's not good enough, check out the Typewriter Vacuum and Typewriter Table Hockey.
Depressingly, it's only a prototype... and without DIY instructions and a stray Corona, it looks like our waffles will continue to be of the depressingly oval variety.
The Corona-Matic [Designhead via Crave]
John Brownlee
Andy Baio on the evolution of Olympics pirating
Andy Baio over at Waxy has posted a great little write-up on the evolution of Olympics Games pirating between 2004 and 2008.
Back in 2004, the place to go for illegal Olympic videos wasn't BitTorrent, popular trackers like Suprnova, or mainstream P2P clients. The best coverage, surprisingly, was found in the old-school Usenet binaries. It was a mish-mash of events, skewed heavily towards events with bikini-clad women, Brazilians, or bikini-clad Brazilian women, but other popular events and the opening ceremonies also showed up.Today, the event coverage in Usenet is just as sporadic, but the quality is dramatically better... But the trend for this year is clear — Usenet passed the torch to BitTorrent.
Especially interesting: according to a chart by Mark Guggenheim, 65% of all Olympics footage BitTorrenting is being done within China. Probably because no one was actually allowed in to see the games.
John Brownlee
Laptop Mag reviews the ECS G10IL netbook (Verdict: sexiest netbook yet)
Forgotten in the PR roar of MSI's Wind (later to be replaced by the flatulent spurt of the Wind's sub-par release), the ECS G10IL was announced in March and has been quietly biding its time, waiting for optimal release. Now, it is set to be released in September, and despite the Scrabulous jumble of random digits standing in for an actual brand name, Joanna Stern over at Laptop Mag is ready to proclaim it the sexiest netbook yet. The keyboard (always an Achilles heel of netbook design) is particularly nice:
The keyboard is nothing but pleasant. It is very similar to the keyboard found on the MSI Wind, however the keys are wider and have a flat shape, reminiscent of recent Macbooks. Our one peeve about the keyboard is the odd placement of the small sized shift key to the right of the up arrow button.The touchpad is wider than that of the MSI Wind. However, there is the single mouse button, that clicks left or right, below it. The button is also inlaid with blue LED status lights. It’s interesting that ECS didn’t just put the lights on the side of the pad.
Downsides are a surprisingly hefty weight at 3 pounds, with no information about that other sticking point in netbooks: battery life. We'll have to see how the ECS G10IL holds up when it's actually on store shelves along with Dell Es and Lenovo's offerings. No netbook retains its luster after a month or two: a fitting microcosm of the laptop industry as a whole.
Hands-On with the ECS G10IL [Laptop Mag]
John Brownlee
iHome iH41 iPod / iPhone dock / alarm clock twists for bedtime widescreen
iHome's twisting, topsy-turvy iH41 dock / alarm clock for the iPhone and iPod touch won't make a lick of sense unless you habitually go to bed watching movies on your iPod. Then, it all clicks: simply twist it onto its side when you're horizontally dozing to watch a movie as you tumble off to dreaming. The next morning, your iPhone will be fully charged and serenade you with a suitable wake-up tune: for example, Electric Six's High Voltage. $79.99 with remote.
It should be noted that the website doesn't actually say it is iPhone compatible, only iPod Touch, but it should safely work with the 2G... and, in the worst case scenario, even with the 3G, as long as you don't mind doing some dremeling.
Put a New Spin on Your iPod Touch With iHome’s New iH41 Alarm Clock Radio [Business Week via Slashgear]
John Brownlee
Apple will not refund money on killed iTunes apps
After Nullriver's Netshare iPhone tethering app was pulled from iTunes, one customer tried to get a refund. According to Apple Support:
All iTunes purchases are final, and I am unable to refund you for the app.You will need to contact NetShare directly, as this is there [sic] product and we can do nothing with it.
So here's how it works from Apple's perspective: they approve an app from the App Store. People buy it, and Apple takes a 30% cut. Then Apple decides to pull the same app they already approved from the App Store, but disavow responsibility for issuing a refund on it: take it up with the developer. They profit on their own fuck up, while expecting developers who'd been lead to believe their App was fine to take a 30% loss.
It should be noted Nullriver didn't act particularly well here either: their website claimed that they gave full refunds for all products and the wording only changed after Netshare customers started writing in, trying to take them up on it. They should honor that wording, but it's pretty clear it's just an issue of not changing some HTML copy when they branched out onto iTunes. It's not nearly as evil as Apple's position on the matter, where they expect to profit not only from their successes, but their blunders.
As Joel notes, with behavior like this and the existence of an iPhone app kill switch, the reason to continue Jailbreaking iPhones are more and more obvious. Hopefully, as the App Store approval process becomes perfected, less issues like this will arise. But even so, Apple's position — that they will not refund you your money even when they're the ones who have FUBARed — makes a good case for not giving them your money at all.
Apple and Nullriver Ripping Off Customers [Horrid Voices]
John Brownlee
Lenovo unveils W700 for mobile creative professionals
Lenovo's newest entry to the ThinkPad line, the W700, is a behemoth: the type of laptop IBM's own mob bosses might tie around a blog informer's ankle before pushing him off a pier. Weighing 8 pounds, the W700's is clearly aimed at mobile creatives: the 17-incher sports the first Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU and NVIIA's Quadro FX 3700 chipset. There's also configureable RAID hard drive bays, up to 8GBs of DD33 RAM, an optional Blu-Ray Burner, an on-board color calibarator and even a built-in Wacom digitizer. And a num pad for playing World of Warcraft, natch.
Far too much laptop for most people, and expect battery life to be appalling, but for creative professionals who need to remain at top-efficiency no matter where they are, this looks great. Expect to pay creative professional prices: the minimum configuration of the W700 starts at $2,978.
Lenovo intros the monstrous ThinkPad W700 [Engadget]
John Brownlee
Lebedenko's massive, land-crawling Tsar Tank
A post on a Russian Steampunk (Stimpank!) community offers a gallery of attractive images of N. Lebedenko's amazing Netopyr, or Tsar Tank: a massive tricycle-like armored vehicle with a wheel span of 27 feet and cannons loaded on a rotating turret, the underbelly and the sponsons. The huge wheels were intended to roll over large ditches and walls, as well as gelatinize fleeing hordes of Bolsheviks. Unfortunately, they didn't work very well, and the tank was abandoned where it was being tested, 60 kilometers from Moscow, for the next 8 years, until it was dismantled for scrap in 1923.
If The Empire Strikes Backhad played out not in science-fiction but Leninist folklore, the Tsar Tank would have been the AT-AT to Lenin's Luke and Siberia's Hoth.
Tsar Tank [Live Internet via Gizmowatch]
The Russian WW1 Lebendenko (or Tsar) Tank [Landships]
John Brownlee
Leaked video of the HTC Dream running Google Android
Past the smegmous layer of Vaseline slathered all over the wobbling camera phone's lens, this frustratingly blurry video purports to be of Google's Android OS running on the HTC Dream. Nevertheless, it looks pretty good: the orientation control is amazingly snappy compared to the iPhone, although the touchscreen input looks a tad imprecise. And there's even a slide-out (possibly swivel) QWERTY keypad, making it look an awful lot like HTC's answer to the Sidekick. But the sexiness here is the OS, not necessarily the phone, and the OS looks very sultry indeed... a real challenger for the iPhone's, baked into a handset of perhaps more dubious quality.
Is This The HTC Dream> [Android Guys via Valleywag]
John Brownlee
China digitally fakes 2008 Olympics fireworks
According to the Beijing Times, 55 seconds of the televised Olympics 2008 firework display? Completely fake:
Anyone who saw the opening to the Bejing Olympics would agree that the fireworks display was exceptional, but those watching at home were tricked into thinking what they saw was real, when some of it was actually CGI.The fakery was unearthed by a local Chinese newspaper, The Beijing Times, which revealed that a 55-second sequence was created by a visual effects team, which included a series of giant footsteps made by fireworks.
Confusingly, this actually took place in the real ceremony, but the organisers felt that the sequence of 28 footprints would not be accurately captured live, so they faked it.
Keep all this digital trickery in mind when televised footage shows superhuman Chinese atheletes sweeping gold after gold. Or when a giant crimson dragon swoops out of the heavens like Falcor during the closing ceremony to kiss the head of Hu Jintao and then passionately denounce the independence of Tibet and Taiwan.
Olympic Fireworks Digitally Faked [Tech Radar via Gear Fuse]
Joel Johnson
Brütül Lagerhead makes pouring black & tans more turtley
The Brütül "Lagerhead" is a little turtle-shaped device that makes pouring a perfect black & tan simple. There's not much the Lagerhead does that an inverted spoon couldn't manage, but spoons don't have integrated beer openers and stubby little legs. It's ten bucks, which isn't awful for something so unnecessary. Perhaps I'm just being nice because I like turtles.
Product Page [Brutul.com via Coolest-Gadgets]
Joel Johnson
Sky Watch: NYPD's mobile surveillance towers
This twenty-foot retractable watchtower is dubbed "Sky Watch" according to Animal New York. It's used by the NYPD to monitor areas where crime is spiking...which means that it's currently just a few stops West of me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a recent spate of robberies and muggings have plagued the neighborhood.
If these mobile towers were permanent fixtures in the city I might be more upset by them, but New York's roving bands of police officers through the Operation Impact project do seem to be keeping crime down. And while I find irresponsible police as frustrating and frightful as anyone, I've come to view a pair of officers walking through neighborhoods keeping the peace as a good thing.
Sky Watch Deployed In Williamsburg [AnimalNewYork.com]
Joel Johnson
LCD panel prices to fall in Autumn
According to this brass tacks analyst piece in the Times, a glut of LCD displays — both larger panels for HDTVs and somewhat small panels for computer monitors — means that prices should be crashing towards the end of the year. They suggest waiting a few months to buy, as the excess of inventory should mean healthy price cuts in September and beyond. We're considering adding another flat panel to our home's selection of units, so I'll keep a weather eye and post any stand outs in our daily deals round-up.
Wall Street Beat: Time to Put Off Buying LCD TVs and Displays [NYTimes.com]
Joel Johnson
Japanese scientists develop stretchy, conductive material that presages whipping robot tentacles
University of Tokyo scientists have developed this rubber-like material that can conduct electricity even when stretched to 2.34 times its original shape, leading to the possibility of condoms that can monitor penises for STDs. (Well, perhaps not, but I always try to find the bright side.) The team suggests that the material could be used to create curved electronic devices or serve as connective tissue in the articulated arms of robots.
Material bends, stretches and conducts electricity? [Reuters via Gearlog]
Joel Johnson
Vibrating Alarm Clock hides under your pillow, waiting
There are few gadgets less tyrannical than the alarm clock, a literal reminder that our lives are regimented not by peaceful rhythms of natural light, but by gnomish mechanical taskmasters who hiss and buzz and vibrate us from our rest. On the other hand, we don't sleep in caves to be woken by centipedes mating in our ears. Progress is thorny!
The trick for alarm clock manufacturers, then: to craft devices that wake you, but just enough — an impossible calibration across the craggy depths of individual slumber. The "Vibrating Alarm Clock" by Karlsson — I'll give you one guess at its special mechanism — is meant to slip under your pillow, its keys encased in a plastic sheath to prevent accidental midnight deactivation*. It doubles as an LED flashlight. In the morning, put it in its recharging station, where it reclines the rest of the day as a simple clock.
Of course, my phone's alarm, when turned to silent mode, will also vibrate. Perhaps vibrate hard enough to wake me. And when it's done being my alarm, it returns to being my phone.
If you don't have a phone — or you use a Windows Mobile handset that would snap your neck if you secreted it under your pillow — you can pick up Karlsson model for just £25.
Vibrating Alarm Clock [LazyBoneUK.com via Technabob via Oh Gizmo]
* Nothing to be embarrassed about.
John Brownlee
Zen-like dimpled wash basin
Hewn from a single slab of the mystery element Cristalplant, the Follo Washbasin is utterly gorgeous: the sink is a mere dimple, allowing water to quickly overflow the bowl and across the surface. An integrated draining system prevents the water from running in crystal clear rivulets down the sides. I love it, but I suspect much of its zen garden purity would be befouled during my morning ritual by hairy gobs of used shaving cream and the frothy jetsam of regurgitated tooth paste.
Follo Washbasin [WMD London via Born Rich]
John Brownlee
D-Link routers get green friendly firmware update
D-Link's testing out the waters on whether green-friendly branding can sell a few more routers. Its new DWA-643 and DWA-556 "Green Ethernet" routers claim to use 32 percent and 41 percent less power than older models, and those power savings are now being passed down to the DIR-665 Xtreme N Gigabit and DIR-855 Dual Channel routers.
It's kind of cool, but a rather low-key gesture towards the environment. Engadgetcommenter Neil Bradley does the math: a D-Link 665 sucks up 500ma at 12 volts. If power is $0.10 per kilowatt hour, the router (without the new firmware) could run for 166 hours at full power until it cost 10 cents. Per month, it would cost you $0.42. The bottom line is routers just don't take a lot of energy to operate (my new Time Capsule notwithstanding): a 40% savings is going to be a couple bucks a year.
That doesn't make the gesture worthless, of course: devices retaining their functionality but using less power is always a good thing. But it does seem to be more of an advertising initiative than anything else.
D-Link firmware goes green-friendly [D-Link via Engadget via Trusted Reviews]
John Brownlee
$999.99 "I Am Rich" pulled from iPhone App Store
Armin Heinrich's "I Am Rich" iPhone application was contentious, to say the least. For a penny shy of $1000, the app itself did nothing but display a glowing red garnet... an apt metaphor, some might say, for the molten hemhorroid pustulently throbbing on the ass of the App Store. Armin Heinrich immediately became synonymous with App Store scammer: a programmer trying to scam his way into some easy money by making available an app that would only ever be purchased by the occasional accidental clicker or megalomaniacal Dubai oil baron. But the bigger question was this: what kind of approval process does Apple have if apps like this get through?
Well, it's been pulled now. Heinrich claims to have "no idea" why, but swears that he got enthusiastic reviews from all eight of his customers. Six Americans, one German and one Frenchman bought "I Am Rich" in the first 24 hours. Taking out Apple's cut, that means that Heinrich earned $5,600 in a day.
Heinrich hasn't received a check from Apple yet, though, even though Apple is supposed to send checks out to developers at the end of the month. He's understandably concerned that all of his programming seconds might go unrewarded: how does an App being pulled influence the payment process? Apple will have lawsuits on its hands if it doesn't pay out, but keeping the money is just as problematic: if Apple really feels that this program was inappropriate but keeps the money anyway, it's profited by $2,400 on its own slipshod approval process.
Seems to me that Apple should probably be refunding the money to customers, and then paying the developer out of its own pocket. Approving an application for the App Store is the same as condoning it: no matter what you think of Heinrich's program, it worked as transparently advertised. And hey, according to Heinrich, it even includes a "secret mantra!"
Apple removes $1,000 featureless iPhone application [LA Times]
Joel Johnson
DefCon Mystery Challenge full of mysterious objects, lying books
Image: Dave Bullock (eecue)/Wired.com
Threat Level details the "DefCon 16 Mystery Challenge," a competition at the hacker conference that involved solving a series of puzzles, including gaining entry into this handsome yellow ball with a combination lock on top. Winners received special black DefCon badges that permit free ingress to the conference for life.
I'll never be smart enough to compete in these sort of challenges, but I still get a kick out of reading about the exploits of my betters.
The DefCon 16 Mystery Challenge [Threat Level]
John Brownlee
Abandoned NASA Jet Propulsion Labs Trailer photographed
Discarded somewhere in the desert near Bishop, California, photographer Richard Harrington came across a dilapidated retro-space-age NASA trailer, filled with still-functional control panels and flickering Nixie Tubes ticking down to some imaginary, Cold War predicated apocalypse. I'm surprised he didn't just hook the trailer up to his car's hitch and drive off with it: the ultimate geek's weekend camper.
NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory Trailer [This Is Harrington via Gizmodo]
Joel Johnson
Who watches the watchmen? Jobs confirms remote disabling of iPhone apps possible
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs confirms that applications purchased for the iPhone or iPod Touch can be remotely disabled by Apple.
Apple raised hackles in computer-privacy and security circles when an independent engineer discovered code inside the iPhone that suggested iPhones routinely check an Apple Web site that could, in theory trigger the removal of the undesirable software from the devices.It's fair to debate the wisdom of such a feature, but it's impossible to deny that this makes the iPhone something less than a portable computer and instead a device that operates exclusively under the aegis of Apple's sensibilities, not its owner's. Because the iPhone is a compelling platform I'm sure this news will marginally affect its success, but personally I will be extremely torqued the first time an application I pay for — from Apple's own purportedly pre-vetted application store — is remotely disabled without my permission. If an application is remotely disabled, will I be automatically refunded its purchase price?Mr. Jobs confirmed such a capability exists, but argued that Apple needs it in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program -- one that stole users' personal data, for example -- to be distributed to iPhones through the App Store. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," he says.
This makes jailbreaking an iPhone — and removing the remote kill switch, if possible — something of an imperative at this point. It's icky stuff. Perhaps it could be challenged in court?
IPhone Software Sales Take Off: Apple's Jobs] [WSJ.com]
John Brownlee
Vintage Atari 2600 ad explains the genesis of Yar's Revenge
This vintage ad for the Atari 2600 shows how the ideas for games were dreamed up before there was a conceptual library of standard ideas to draw inspiration from: a man sitting in a room with a dizzy fly, creating a game out of surrealist idea association as he simultaneously stuffs wads of blotter LSD up his nostrils. "A fly! I'll have a mutant fly. There we are. You'll need some potential. Now an Ion Zone. Yar. Yar's Revenge."
There's a big part of me that doesn't want to admit that this isn't the way games are made.
Atari Commercial [YouTube]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Monitor – 24-inch Soyo Widescreen LCD monitor (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) for $225, shipped, if you pay with Paypal. [Slickdeals]
• Flash Memory – Various flash memory discounts from Meritline, including microSD, SDHC, and Compact Flash with free shipping. [Dealhack]
• Bluetooth DongleDealnews]
• The Wire – Amazon is selling the complete series Seasons 1 through 4 of The Wire on DVD for $95, shipped. Sheeeeeeeet.
• Organizer Stand – Modest but attractive RS To-Go 10-Drawer organizer stand for $30, shipped. I ordered one for my bathroom but it'd work in a variety of spaces. [Dealnews]
• USB Flash Drive – Today's Woot is the Kingston 8GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler 100 for $25, shipped.
John Brownlee
Leaked Palm Centro 2 ad reveals attractive new smart phone
This rather striking ad is purported to be a leaked copy of Palm's upcoming Centro 2 smartphone. There's no official confirmation — although an Engadget commenter aptly notes that "if this is a fake, Palm's advertising department should hire this fanboy."
Also interesting is this first peak at the Centro 2: a QWERTY-less affair with dedicated media keys and an Opera browser. Perhaps not an iPhone killer, but certainly a very attractive phone with a great advertising campaign. If the device is half as good as the ad, maybe this will bring Palm back into the game?
Possible Palm Centro 2 Ad [Palm Addict via Engadget]
John Brownlee
11-in-1 Multi-Game Dining Room Table
It is a terrible thing, to have to decide between a dining room table and a foosball table, or a foosball table or a ping pong table, or a ping pong table and a pool table. The 11-in-1 Multi Game Table solves the problem wonderfully: with Matrioshka-like nesting, each table peels back to reveal another surface lying beneath. The table includes pool, bolwing, poker, craps, chess, backgammon (twice!), shuffleboard, ping pong and roulette. There's even a regular surface so it can function as a dining room table.
I'm really liking this. If only it had space for a MAME cabinet and a built-in sarcophagus to act as a spare bed for my girlfriend's horrible, horrible mother, I might actually manage to convince her that the new apartment's spare room can indeed be both a spare bedroom, dining room and game room, all in one. The price isn't bad either: $1,267.
11-in-1 Multi Game Table [Urban Junkie via Born Rich]
John Brownlee
Intel: Nehalem is now Core i7
Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture is officially getting a new name: Core i7. Insiders tell BBG that Nehalem fell out of favor after testing groups thought it "too Jewish."* Intel's fervently Hassidic corporate culture will be downplayed by the new branding, although not be eliminated entirely: our sources tell us that the i stands for "Isaiah" while the 7 indicates the number of Ushpizzin who visit the sukkah during the holiday of Sukkot.
Intel changes Nehalem to Core i7 [Intel]
* - Wrong. They were, of course, thinking of the Nephilim, not the Nehalem.
John Brownlee
From Gremlins to your doorstep, the Smokeless Ashtray
There's worse ideas for a business than to lift inventions from Gremlins' Randall Peltzer wholesale. With a futuristic hemispheric design, the Ionic Smokeless Ashtray uses ions and ohms and magic to eliminate cigarette smoke. According to the copy, "smoke is broken down into minute, negatively-charged particles which are then captured by the positively-charged stainless steel lining of the dome" which results only in a pleasant spurt of fresh air and perhaps a wisp or two of residual arsenic gas. Technology! Only $19.99, so pay for one out of your house's monthly Febreeze budget.
Ionic Ashtray [Collections Etc. via book of joe]
John Brownlee
Smoon Ombrella Lamp gyres and gimbles in the wabe
I don't actually think much of the physical design of the smoon ombrella lamp. technabob describes it as "some sort of alien jellyfish... about to land its spacecraft in your living room"... a description far better than the actuality. And $2200 is just crazy talk. That said, the name is just so slithily brillig: it's like a line from a lost stanza of The Hunting of the Snark.
Smoom Ombrella Lamp [Coliseum via Technabob]
John Brownlee
Donkey Kong recreated in LEGO Mindstorms
I do not share the sort of rabid enthusiasm for all things LEGO that causes Joel, for example, to froth at the mouth and rip bloody chunks out of his nether lip when I do not capitalize it according to its trademark, or causes him to hang out at LEGO conventions, grabbing stray girls by the arm and luridly describing to them in minute detail his mastery of the LEGO Mindstorms' "piston" function. Nevertheless, even I think that this physical recreation of Donkey Kong, employed with an older Mindstorms RCX system, is lusty.
Donkey Kong LEGO [Dan Kressin via Brothers Bricks]
Rob Beschizza
101 Classic Computer Ads
Some of the best, the worst, and the weirdest. 8 megabytes of JPEGs after the jump!
Rob Beschizza
Design fantasy: If Sony Ericsson made an ultra-mobile PC...
So I really really liked the way Sony Ericsson cut its new handset, the T700. It resembles high-end portable gadgets from the 70s and 80s, like Philips' pocket voice recorders and Sony's own more expensive walkmans, but without being precious or silly about it. Commenter Clay places it as Gibson-like: "An Ono-Sendai would totally have buttons like that."
Since the same era, I've wanted a handheld computer — I think that might be my generation's flying car — so here's my fancy for a Sony Ericcsson UMPC or MID. I'd keep it simple, with modest specs, a tailored OS, day-long battery life, a capable word processor, a decent camera, 3G internet, plentiful storage and a damn good browser. Too much to ask?
John Brownlee
60GB 360s cut down on RRODs
According to console modder of the modding stars, Ben Heck, Microsoft did more than just bump the newest Xbox 360s up to 60GB with the newest revision. They also made a minor but significant design change to the board to prevent RRODs. Microsoft has removed the memory chips residing on the underside of each motherboard and shifted them to the top, to prevent overheating.
Inside a 60 GIG Xbox 360 [Ben Heck]
John Brownlee
Mad Men pitch the Kodak Carousel
There's few shows on television packing as much punch as AMC's Mad Men. On the surface of things, the concept couldn't be more dull: Madison Avenue advertising men pitching campaigns in the 60's. But Joel's pitch to me when he first saw it soaks up every background element of the show and defines it into a formula:
There's plenty to criticize about the show, but for me it's cut-to-fit: gorgeous, full-bodied women in painted-on dresses; whisky by the barrel, cigarettes by the carton, a steak on every plate; men's formal fashion at the turn of its last great change, affording older men to wear worsted three pieces and young bucks to sport skinny ties and sharkskin; a look at the office of the career man; swingin' New York, half beat poets and half modern opulence; all predicated with seething, soaking dissatisfaction for the post-war utopia they're living in. I'm not sure its message is terribly profound, but it is mid-century pornography that appeals to nearly all my sensibilities.
Where Joel is wrong is that the message can be terribly profound. This scene — in which ad man Donald Draper pitches a campaign to a toe-dipping Kodak Co. for their new line of "wheel projectors" — is devastating in its poignancy.
"This isn't a space ship... it's a time machine." Go watch Mad Men.
Mad Men: The Carousel [YouTube]
John Brownlee
Asus' new luxury S101 Eee coming in September
Excremental brown is not much in demand as a laptop color, but Asus can't even be bothered to wipe off a new Eee after it spurts a new model out of its netbook production orifice before selling it these days.
Seen here: the Eee S101, which will be Asus' luxury Eee model: less than one inch thick, featuring a 10.2-inch LCD screen, an Atom processor and up to 64GB of SSD. Going price? $899 when it's launched in mid-September.
Eeexquisite, sub-1"-thick Eee S101 cradled by Asus CEO [Crunchgear]
Rob Beschizza
USB watch strap weds form and function
Ondrej Vaclavik's watch design embodies the wonderfully simple concept of having a strap double as the USB cord for storage contained in the timepiece itself.
Vaclavik's site [via technabob and Design Boom]
John Brownlee
Teething Ring leaves tooth marks on punchees
Worn on the finger, the Teething Ring is simply a kitschy conversation piece with a punny name. Worn genitally, though, it is ample protection from the threat of a surprise attack by a vagina dentata.
Teething Ring [Etsy via Book of Joe]
Rob Beschizza
Lotus working on making Hybrids noisier. It's a joke, right?
British automaker Lotus is reportedly planning artificial engine noise in otherwise quiet hybrids, to protect pedestrians and cyclists from their own inattentiveness.
Watch this video describing the "Lotus safe and sound hybrid," apparently made by Lotus itself, and see if you can honestly say it's not an elaborate and subtle parody. While similar proposals here in the U.S. just suggest the strategic preemption of obvious lawsuits, there's something delicious in seeing the Brits at it. As an emigre myself, I can well imagine the cognitive dissonance over this back in my homeland, forced to choose between the token environmentalism of quiet cars and the national love for nannying one another over any phantom risk imaginable.
The end result will be tiny 800cc euromobiles riced up to sound like F1 cars, just you wait.
Lotus Adds Fake Engine Noise To Make Hybrids Sound Like Cars [TechDirt]
John Brownlee
X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes
"My god! I can still see."
Ladyada's tea party [Lady Ada via MAKE via Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
HP to Microsoft: We're creating a gray market for Windows XP whether you like it or not
It's an internet fact that Microsoft fudges its Vista sales stats, but here's the sharp end of the stick: HP openly admitting that it inflates the headcount. By selling license for Vista but actually pre-installing XP on new computers, it dodges Microsoft's efforts to prevent it selling the older software even as it helps fluff the numbers.
Jane Bradburn of HP's Australian subsidiary told APC that its customers want XP, so that's what they get.
"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence ... However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."
John Brownlee
Cyborg-like shaving guard for goatee grooming
Although much reviled in the glamorous hirsutiary world, the goatee is perhaps the most useful form of facial hair. The cheeks and neck are exposed to cool air, leaving only the follicles around the mouth as food collecting tendrils. Think of a goatee as a portable, tongue-proddable buffet. Hungry? Stick out your tongue and discover the remnants of a thousand delicious meals: a bit of old scrambled egg, some extraneous fried chicken skin, a big blob of raspberry jam. Surely, the beard choice of the gastronomist.
But it can be hard keeping a goatee even. Enter the GoateeSaver, a device you clamp around your mouth to preserve the follicular lines of your mouth coiffureage even as you groom. It also looks like a sadomasochistic device for cyborgs.
Goatee Saver [Official Site via DVICE]
Rob Beschizza
Sony Ericsson makes the futuristic phone I wanted in 1987
T700 is Sony Ericsson's successor to the T610 candybar phone. Doesn't it look like what we might have seen in the 1980s if the 1980s had today's cell phone tech? No curvaceous milling and roundrects here, but sharp corners and an old-school metal hardness.
A quad-band 3G GSM model, it has has a 2" display, 512MB of storage, a 3.2-megapixel camera and stereo speakers. It will appear in the fourth quarter, offered in silver, black and silver, and black and red.
Wouldn't a whole laptop made in this exact style be great?
Press release [Sony Ericsson via Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
Plastic welding kit offers all the fun, none of the third-degree burns
Random Good Stuff asks the critical question regarding The Discovery Store's plastic welding toy: Does it work with Lego?
As it is, though, you just get three projects to complete — a dinosaur, plane and car — from a $30 toy that promises a way to safely weld its re-usable pieces. Besides, this is how you "weld" Lego:
Product Page [Discovery via Random Good Stuff]
Rob Beschizza
TubeStatus puts London Underground service info in pocket
The internet is not a system of tubes, but London's rail network is. Malcolm Barclay's TubeStatus iPhone app will tell you which ones are blocked. He's worried, however, that Transport for London might be out to get him:
Oh dear, the cat has been well and truly released from the bag now. I asked Apple weeks ago not to publish TubeStatus whilst I worked out what to do with it copyright wise (and hence subsequently open sourced it). It seems that didn’t make it to the right department and I learned this morning from a user that it was indeed available in the application store and had been downloaded 2,331 times in its first 2 days and has made the top 15 free applications!
It's a fair bet, given that it already offers much the same thing—just not as an iPhone app.
TubeStatus [AppStore via TUAW]