October 5, 2008 - October 11, 2008
Rob Beschizza
Rumor: iPhone heading to Wal-Mart
According to an anonymous source, Apple's iPhone will soon be sold at Wal-Mart. Boy Genius Report's insider says that sales will begin on November 15.
The truth or falsity of this claim will be a nice litmus test of either (a) how far retailers will go to accommodate Apple, or (b) how far Apple will go to conquer the world. Wal-Mart typically demands heavy compromises from its suppliers, including control over distribution and packaging. For Apple to agree to this would go far beyond demonstrating that it never wanted to be a "cult," or that it has no interest in maintaining an elitist image: it would mean the hot breath of The Other America on the back of Steve Jobs' neck.
More likely is that Wal-Mart has simply agreed to take iPhones the way Apple sends them, as Best Buy does, (and remember, Best Buy had to retrain staff and sell at close to cost, hoping to profit on accessories), or that the rumor is bogus.
iPhone 3G may be coming to a Walmart near you [BGR]
Rob Beschizza
Apple claimed to be readying networked television sets
Jason Calacanis told CNET's Nate Lanxon that "he knew first-hand that Apple was working on a networked television." From Nate's blog:
These LCD HDTVs will be fully networked, with the ability to stream all your iTunes content from your Mac or PC. In fact, Calacanis told me they'll function like a standard TV with an Apple TV box, only without the need for the box. In many ways, this isn't surprising news, as Apple already produces a stunning 30-inch display for the Mac. So picture that -- only thinner -- in a bedroom, streaming iTunes movie rentals over 802.11n, controlled with the Remote app on an iPod touch or iPhone.
To which I have nothing to add, except that televisions with web/content browsers in them are obviously the future.
Rob Beschizza
Energize your scalp with torturous-looking plastic nail board
Literature associated with Head Kenzan, a Japanese scalp massager, assures the reader that the yellow plastic spines "hit upon that perfect balance of not-too-hard and not-too-soft."
I think I'll stick with the classic brass-tentacled head orgasmatron, myself.
Seriously, if you carry this on the streets in Britain, you'll get thrown in jail.
Head Kenzan Japanese Massager [Japan Trend]
Rob Beschizza
British already decide on phone of 2008. Yeah, that one.
Well, it wasn't going to be the Instinct, was it?
Source [CrunchGear]
Rob Beschizza
TR707 modified to play diabolical tunes
Diabolical Modified TR707 from Meadows Ling on Vimeo.
Enjoy a cacophony of chip on your way into the weekend, courtesy of a Roland TR707 with some tricks up its sleeve.
Diabolical Modified TR707 [Meadows Ling via Matrixsynth and Make]
Rob Beschizza
Forlorn record players
By Japanese experimental musicians Otomo Yoshihide and Yasutomo Aoyama.
Ensembles [Ycam via Make and Pink Tentacle]
John Brownlee
iTunes Remote App coming unofficially to Android
Jeff Sharkey — winner of the $275k Android Developer Challenge — has already managed to reverse engineer one of the iPhone's most killer apps and release it for the Android platform. This raises the G1 up a notch in my appraisal; in my musically-networked apartment, Remote.app is actually a far more wonderful creation than the iPhone itself. I could easily see myself switching to another phone, as long as it had that.
TunesRemote [Jeff Sharkey]
John Brownlee
SteelSeries to release 15 button World of Warcraft mouse
The new World of Warcraft SteelSeries mouse contains 15 separate, macro-programmable buttons, both for the poop socker and the gold farmer alike. It will be ergonomically unusable, but I do quite like its carapace-like design.
SteelSeries drops WoW oriented 15 Button Mouse [Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Toshiba's Portégé R600 packs 9 hours of battery life into 2.4 pounds of laptop
Portégé R600 (note the preponderance of accent aigus, indicating its French Canadian market) is Toshiba's latest laptop, which Crunchgear colorfully describes as "boneriffic."
It's not a powerhouse: a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processor, a 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM, but it weighs less than two and a half pounds and, most impressively, promises nine hour battery life, for a little over a couple grand.
I've long liked Toshiba laptops, and this number is gorgeous. Toshiba's one of the few laptop makers who have gotten it for a while: after a certain price point, all you care about is weight and battery life.
Portégé R600 [Toshiba via Crunch]
John Brownlee
Xbox 360 Arcade needs additional storage to run latest update
The Xbox 360 Arcade unit, with its meager of 256MB of storage, always seemed like a rather cynical neutering of the 360 to try to superficially bring the price down lower than the Wii. Which it obviously was: if you are an Xbox 360 Arcade owner and want to keep up to date with the latest New Xbox Experience firmware, you will have to buy additional storage cards just to fit the software on your console. Yeesh. Do yourself a favor: buy yourself an Xbox with a hard drive if you're going to buy one at all.
Avatar Customization Requires 256MB of storage [Xbox 360 Fanboy]
Rob Beschizza
Stringer on how Sony will bounce back: starting by not making the same product twice
It's easy to mock Sony for its lumbering scale, extravagant products and slow development cycle. The thing is vast. It even has its own orchestra, comprising mostly of professional engineers.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Sony CEO Howard Stringer is candid about Sony's problems, and displays a wit and humility that might come as a surprise to those who wonder why it can't be more like its competitors.
"All big companies settle into vertical silos," he told Rose, recounting the difficulties of cutting fat at a Japanese company. "We have to go into the kind of world that Steve Jobs has developed. We're going to communicate horizontally, because every device will talk to every other device."
Why Stringer would be the best replacement for Jobs
This is just for laughs, a chatroom transcript from a few months ago, where I got bored of the usual suspects who always get touted as the next Apple Lord. And if you forget certain important facts for a moment, it's a surprisingly good fit.
Rob B.: My dark horse for Jobs replacement: Howard Stringer
Joel J.: No fucking way. How could you look at Sony over the last four years and think Jobs would let Stringer anywhere near Apple?
Rob B.: Hey, you don't need to tell me about Sony's problems. I think it depends on Apple's ambitions. If it wants to change the world with consumer technology, it wants to become what Sony is. Stringer is not shy about praising Apple, or how its culture results in a lean, integrated approach to product development and the "horizontals," how services unite different products into an ecosystem.
Rob. B.: What Sony's troubles conceal is how well he's melded together a collection of divisions that used to act almost like separate companies. That's why Sony beat Toshiba in the optical disk format war, whatever the victory might be worth in the long run. This leads me to think that he might be the perfect man to handle it when Apple's growth turns dirty and complicated.
Rob. B.: Which it will.
Rob. B.: Finally, he's also an old media person. No-one would be in better shape to lead an Apple invasion on the rest of the entertainment industry outside of music. No-one understands the cable business better than Stringer, and it's cable, with its internets and tubes and bandwidth, which is really in a commanding position when it comes to the question, "who will control content provision?"
Rob B.: But yeah, wildly fantastical, I know.
Joel J.: That is far more reasoned than I expected you to be. I still think it's the wrong person symbolically, though. They'll want another visionary. I think.
People at Sony, he said, didn't even talk to one another.
"You've got to get mad that the iPod beat us," he told employees at a recent company retreat. "You've got to be mad when Samsung's market share goes up."
He knows that his unique status, as a Westerner in charge of one of Japan's most successful companies, is no accident: "I had to be careful, sylistically," he says of cuts. "... but it was easier for me to take ownership of that kind of ruthlessness than a Japanese executive."
In the interview, he often hints that his job is mostly about unifying something that would otherwise unravel. He also hints that Japan's strongly hierarchical business culture is another reason that change is slow. But when it comes to product development, polite inference gives way to a calculated bluntness.
"We also don't need to make it three times," he told Rose. "... We're so big, we make the same thing twice in different parts of the company, and no-one seems to notice."
Stringer once remarked that when he took over at Sony, he found a company that made more than 30,000 products: it's no wonder that its cool and innovative gear, like the recent Rolly MP3 gadget, and OLED televisions, don't seem part of a grand plan, such as can be seen behind iTunes' connections to almost all of Apple's hardware.
Sony, traditionally, doesn't have an ecosystem at all, just a relentless avalanche of new products. It owns a fifth of the music industry and one of the largest Hollywood studios, but you wouldn't know it from the lack of service integration in its gadgets.
All about to change, according to Stringer, who outlined plans centering around the PlayStation, which he said will ultimately link Sony's many products, acting as a hub to channel media to portable products, regardless of who makes them.
"It's a home server, sitting in the home .. delivering this content anywhere. It's in direct competition with AppleTV."
If it seems odd that he'd see Apple's least-successful current offering as its strongest in the long term, it's worth remembering his background: before taking command at Sony, he had decades of experience as a broadcaster in the U.S. But while Sony has its hands in every imaginable pot, including content-over-internet, it knows that it still has to make a success of its big investements: "If I fail to make Blu-Ray successful, it will be on our tombstone as Betamax 2," Stringer tells Rose.
More interesting points from the interview:
• On OLED television displays: 22" model out soon, and you "could wrap the display around your arm."
• He rather suggested that the cat is out the bag on free music, describing it as a commodity like "air or water." This was, however, to make a point: such a situation is never ever going to be accepted with movies, due to the capital wrapped up in making them.
• "The margins on computers are very small, but everything is becoming a computer."
• The Japanese have a marvelous sense of humor, he said, and have always been very welcoming to him, especially the younger generation at Sony.
• "People want, in bad times, to be entertained."
• "Video games have taken the place of external entertainment in the home," for adults and children alike.
• "Spiderman's been good to Sony."
• On being a Welsh-American working for Japanese company: "I am culturally confused. ... I'm a triple threat and a triple disaster, depending on your point of view. ... I'll wake up after my term at Sony with no friends anywhere, except airline pilots."
• A question: does this renewed focus on internal unity at Sony spell doom for Sony-Ericsson, or what?
Video of interview [Charlie Rose; the interview starts at 15:45]
Joel Johnson
Oobject Gallery: Monstrous Harvesters
Inspired perhaps by BBtv's look at Brazilian coffee picking machines, Oobject gathers a selection of the world's largest and weirdest harvesting machines.
15 monstrous harvesters [Oobject]
Joel Johnson
Banana clip tray makes ice bullets
For $13.25 plus shipping you can create ice cubes that look like AK-47 rounds. (Today was a good day.)
Ice bullets cube tray catalog page [Find-me-a-gift.co.uk via Serious Eats via UberReview]
Rob Beschizza
MacBook in Oct. 14 event ad is 13.3", aluminum, and not the MacBook Air
It's hard to tell from the gloomy marketing shot, but the Apple logo is about 1.5 inches wide on my MacBook Pro. From that, this machine would appear to be under 13 inches wide, which would suggest a 13.3" diagonal. The edges, however don't look at all like the MacBook Air.
I miss the 12" PowerBook. You do too. Is this a happy moment, or rose-tinted pixtacles?
Maybe! For reference:
Apple announced October 14 notebook event in Cupertino [Ars Technica]
Joel Johnson
Fun new DIY kit: Adafruit's "Drawdio" musical pencil
Our friends at Adafruit have released a fun new kit called the "Drawdio" — adapted from the original Drawdio design by Jay Silver – which lets you create a pencil that makes noisy almost-music via the variations in the resistance of graphite pencil lead. It's $20 plus shipping. I just ordered one so I can recreate my middle school notebook sketches to literally hear the music of the anime spheres.
Drawdio product page [LadyAda.net]
Joel Johnson
MSI Wind U120 netbook in pictures
This here is the MSI Wind U120, a modest upgrade to the popular netbook that I will from here on out refer to as "Business Wind", because I find it amusing to think of a breeze that is tired of all these kites and paper airplanes and would really like to get some work done.
The major upgrade in the Business Wind is better connectivity: a 802.11n Wi-Fi chipset and a — grr – 3.5G cellular modem with swappable SIM slot.
MSI's new Wind U120 pixellized [Fuzilla.com (Home, I believe, to the gadget world's first "Slobodan". Welcome!)]
Joel Johnson
Review: A few hours with Galcon, the first killer game for iPhone
I've had high hopes for games on the iPhone, but for the most part the examples we've seen so far have been mostly pap, amusing but inessential bagatelles. And then there is Galcon.
Galcon isn't an iPhone-exclusive game — a desktop version is available for all three major desktop OSes for $20 — but it translates perfectly to a mobile device, offering modestly epic space strategy battles that can be completed in under a minute or two of play.
Gameplay is simple: To win, destroy your enemy. To destroy him, capture his planets with your tiny wedge spaceships. The larger the planet you hold, the faster more ships are produced. I've seen the desktop version described as "arcade RISK" and it's a description that holds.
But you can't discount the "arcade" part. Part of what makes Galcon work is the speed at which you play. That makes selecting which action to take next — throw all your fighters at a big, juicy planet; hold back to build up more defenses; go for an unoccupied planet or wage war against an enemy stronghold — occur under the time pressure of interface needs. Which is to say: you can only swipe from your planet to another target planet so quickly, leaving you only half-a-second or so to typically judge your next move. That might irritate some, but in my short time playing I've found it encourages flexibility in strategy. One wrong move may lose a war, but with entire battles taking place in just a minute or two, it's easy to hone new strategies without forgetting the lessons of previous scraps.
There was some grousing when Galcon first hit the iTunes App Store over its price. Ten bucks is a fair chunk, especially when version 1.0 didn't even include sound. But developer Phil Hassey is up to version 1.4 now, which has added a variety of single-player variants, music and sound effects, a color-blind mode, a player ranking system, and a splendid multi-player mode that lets you go up against up to three other players at once. (Wi-Fi only, I believe; I couldn't make it work over 3G.)
Plus he's dropped the price to $5. Give this man your money. He's working for it. And there's a free demo now. You have no excuse.
I squealed a bit about Galcon to Brownlee a couple of days back. He bought it but didn't catch the bug. "Too easy," he sighed. I asked him if he had actually raised the difficulty level at all from the game's default settings. He hadn't, which was his understandable mistake, but one that doesn't expose Galcon's nuance. I'd ask anyone that gives it a whirl to crank up the difficulty up to a level where you actually start losing matches. It's only then that the tactical possibilities of Galcon begin to show themselves. When you're matched up with an enemy of nearly equal skill — especially easy in multiplayer, although the single-player A.I. is just fine — those simple routs start turning into protracted, desperate, staggering interplanetary genocides that start to show you how much Galcon has to offer.
Galcon (Full Version) [iTunes]
Galcon Lite (Free Version) [iTunes]
After the jump, a sample game I just played, annotated with screenshots — just in case all that praise I just slopped on Galcon wasn't enough to get you to try a free demo.
Update: What do you know: You can play the desktop version of Galcon for free in your browser at Instant Action. (Windows only for now.)
Rob Beschizza
The cutest MP3 player today
Rob Beschizza
Waterproof mouse receiver with GPS
GlobalSat's BR-355 is a waterproof GPS mouse receiver, accurate to 5 meters and unusually small. It boots in under 45 seconds, according to the spec sheet, and has USB or RS232 connections, a built-in antenna, and blinkenlights to indicate how good its fix is. Check out the discussion at MP3car: "DAMN!!!! DAMN!!! DDAAAAUUUUUUMMMMMM!!!!!"
They're $50 at Amazon.
Waterproof mighty mouse [Navigadget]
Rob Beschizza
Update your status with your own status box
OldScot made an old-school data display box using a Freeduino, an open source equivalent of the Arduino microcontroller board, a fancy photo display case, and a bunch of telephone LED displays.
Rob Beschizza
Rumor: Apple retailers told $800 laptop coming
A report's afoot that Apple retailers just received inventory info listing an $800 laptop. An anonymous source, according to Inquisitr's Duncan Riley, claims that Apple sends these lists out 10 days ahead of time and includes 12 price points, 4 up from the last batch of notebooks, indicating an entire line of new models.
Apple netbook? Yes, please. MacRumors, however, says this source's claim about 10 day warning lists is suspect.
EXCLUSIVE: Apple to launch $800 laptop [Inquisitr]
Joel Johnson
Yamaha audio gear's laudable restraint
I love the look of Yamaha's latest audio gear, especially the A-S700 amp on top: big knobs, chunky buttons, and nary an unnecessary display by which to be distracted.
Press release (Google Translated) [Yamaha.co.jp via Engadget]
Joel Johnson
Working calculator made in Little Big Planet, a PS3 sandbox game
This is sort of intense: a beta tester for the soon-to-launch PlayStation 3 game Little Big Planet has created a working 8-bit calculator inside the physics-and-apparently-logic simulator. Because there are basic electronics simulations in LBP, the creator "Upsilandre" reminds that this is an electronic calculator, not simpply a mechanical one, using 610 magnetic switches, 500 Wires, 430 pistons, 70 emitters — all simulated in game.
Joel Johnson
Wahl Rechargeable "Self Cut" hair clipper
Wahl makes the best hair clippers. I've used a sturdy little Wahl Peanut as a beard trimmer for a couple of years. I even cut my hair with it when I'm drunk, which conveniently happens at least once every six weeks.
But Wahl also sells a cordless version that seems to get high marks. The Wahl Rechargeable Hair Clipper even has a rotating head on a ninety-degree handle so it's easier to trim both sides of your hair evenly. Or you could just do what I do: embrace having a horrible haircut.
The Wahl Rechargeable is available in lots of places for a wide range of prices, but it looks like $30 at Amazon is a pretty decent deal.
[via Uncrate]
Joel Johnson
I just watched Aliens for the first time
I have a confession. A happy one: yesterday marked the first time I'd watched the movie Aliens from start to finish.
I know.
It was the strangest thing. I'd gone my entire adult life (and most of my childhood) presuming I'd seen it simply because I could remember and understand so many references from it. Nearly every line spoken by the Marines was familiar — and often lines I unknowingly reference myself. I've always wanted to nuke things from orbit — but now I'm sure why.
I caught it on Netflix.com using the new Starz play library, which isn't anything near DVD quality, but was good enough. I remembered lots of scenes, which means that I probably saw bits of it here and there over the years. (The final battle against the queen? I'm positive I've watched it.) But within a couple of seconds of the credits I knew I hadn't watched the whole thing through, especially when Paul Reiser's Carter Burke walked on screen. The next couple of hours were one solid block of disarming familiarity, a movie so essential to geekdom that I'd been able to build a convincing model of it in relief just from the impression it made on so many other things I've enjoyed.
So of course I wanted to buy some sneakers. Reebok actually issued the "Alien Stomper" shoes that Ripley wears throughout the film, although I haven't been able to confirm that they actually did a red-and-white colorway like hers. Surely they did, but they were released in 1987 and specifics are spare. [Update: Yup, there was a red version. Zappos teasingly hosts an image of it, but returns no results for the shoes in their database.] There was at least one reissue, a surprisingly awesome Freddy Krueger edition with screaming burned flesh on the soles. (Three pair on eBay for $80 each. Go get 'em, dreamers!)
I was also quite taken with Ripley's jumpsuit, which appears to have some sort of intricate lacing around the lower back, a subtle feminine touch on a utilitarian design that complements such a "tough, competent and...maternal" character. If you happen to know if it was a custom costume or something that was used by a real military I'd be curious to hear about it.
Anyway, what a treat. I got a lifetime of presuming I was versed in a classic but got to savor it twenty years after all my friends. How often does that happen? If only they'd made a sequel to Star Wars.
John Brownlee
Asus promises touchscreen Eee in 2009
The next obvious step is the tablet netbook. Tablets have never really hit the mainstream at their price, but a cheap netbook tablet could be marketed as an affordable, digital Etch-A-Sketch, useful not just for idle MS Painting but also email and web browsing. It's a smart way to differentiate yet another netbook on the shelf.
And that's just what Asus seems to be planning. They've confirmed that they are intending on launching a touchscreen Eee PC in Q1 of 2009. Additionally, it looks like another iteration of the EeePC will be disgorged, this time in a sub $300 edition. And dual core Atoms coming soon!
As always, there's a reason to wait to buy a netbook.
Asus planning touch panel Eee PCs [Digitimes]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Grand Theft Auto IV – Dell Home is selling GTAIV for the PlayStation 3 for $35 plus $5 shipped. Other titles for PS3 and more on sale as well. [Slickdeals]
• Flash Drive – Kingston 4GB DataTraveler Mini for $12, shipped. A similar 8GB can be had for $23. [Dealhack]
• Roomba – Remanufactured iRobot Roomba 400 (basic model) for $100, shipped. [Bargainist]
• HDTV – Refurbished Philips 50-inch 1080p LCD for $940, shipped. That's about $600 buying one new (at a minimum), but I wouldn't be surprised to see further HDTV deals this shopping season. [Dealnews]
• Point-and-Shoot – FujiFilm Z100fd 8MP, 5x optical zoom camera with 2GB SD card for $130, shipped. About $40 off not counting the SD card. I think these are pretty cameras. [Dealnews]
• HD Monitor – Today's Woot is the Westinghouse 37” 1080p HDTV Ready LCD Monitor for $575, shipped. This is the classic model seen on many a'gaming PC.
John Brownlee
Sleeping Beauty Blu-Ray requires viewers to agree to 57 page EULA
Disney's release of its first Blu-Ray title, Sleeping Beauty, contains over one hundred and twenty pages of legalese when completely unspooled, including a 57 page EULA to access the BD-Live content and a 63 page privacy policy.
A shame that they didn't deign to release Fantasia on Blu-Ray first: this EULA would be the insane legalistic equivalent of the multiplying brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
Disney Goes EULA Crazy On Sleeping Beauty Blu-Ray [Format War Central]
John Brownlee
Back seat windows become video games with the Carcade
The Carcade system uses a webcam to turn your car window into a dynamic video game system, recreating the trees and buildings you pass by into game objects. The faster you drive, the harder the game becomes.
The prototype game looks like great fun: a Gradius style shmup (without, I guess, the shmup) in which you must dodge your space ship past the real life obstacles zooming by, although bluntly, the way those undodgeable skyscrapers come out of nowhere to blow up your space cruiser is way cheap. You should totally be able to blast your way through those.
Carcade [Digital UDK]
John Brownlee
Eye-Fi SD cards add Twitter, Flickr, RSS support
In a market saturated by indistinguishable flash memory competitors, Eye-Fi has managed time and time again to smartly separate itself from its memory card doppelgangers... first, simply by slapping a Wi-Fi transmitter and built-in geotracking into an SD card, and now — even neater — with built-in Flickr and Twitter support.
If you download and install the latest version of the Eye-Fi manager software, you'll have access to the new features. The Flickr function allows you to upload photos directly from your camera to Flickr or other supported photo hosting sites, and the Twitter feature allows you to automatically notify your followers with a link to your latest photos... or simply publish an RSS feed with them.
Charlie Sorrel's right on the money: "Eye-Fi gets it. What started as a simple SD card with Wi-Fi transfer and geotagging is fast turning into a full-on Web 2.0 gadget." There's just a giddy neatness to owning an SD card that not only does something besides store data, but gets cool new features pushed to it over time.
Eye-Fi Manager Update Released [Eye-Fi via Gadget Lab]
John Brownlee
Build your own Toy Story baby doll spider
MAKE has posted a great tutorial on taking a robotically side-shuffling Mechamo Crab by Gakken and slapping the creepy, dead-eyed head of an old Cabbage Patch doll on top. They suggest building an entire army and letting them loose on your lawn on Halloween, or perhaps just loosening one in the bedroom of a small, obnoxious neighborhood child whom you might be forced to baby sit from time to time.
Horrifying. Ever since Toy Story, this sort of baby doll robot spider creepy crawls all over my id, springing into monstrous tangibility to skitter all over my sweating flesh whenever my asthma is bad enough to require a tab of Theophylline and the nightmarish hallucinations it brings.
John Brownlee
The real-life escape of a Tron lightcycle AI into Apple's MCP
Everyone remembers the scene in Tron in which Jeff Bridges, forced to take part in a gladiatorial lightcycle race, drives through an opening smashed into the light cycle arena's wall by a pixelaciously kablooied foe and escapes into the larger electronic world outside... the first step towards bringing down the fascist Master Control Program.
This, then: Daniel Wellman's incredible reminiscence about the his own Tron Lightcycles game on the Apple IIgs, the incredible escape of one of the AIs into the memory outside the system and its successful, guerilla-like struggle to bring down Apple's own MCP.
One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border. Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped. But this time was different – instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned. The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field. Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen. It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.Shortly after, the system crashed.
Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie.
Forget Disney's upcoming sequel, this should be the plot to Tron 2.0.
Stay On Target: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs [Daniel Wellman via Crunchgear]
John Brownlee
Look at me still talking when there's recycling to do: Ovetto Recycling Eggs
The Ovetto Recycling Egg is an expensive, dual-slot trash can that, for $250, allows for the separation of plastic and aluminum in one receptacle... a goal which can just as easily be accomplished for the price of a couple $5 trash buckets. But you aren't paying for the function, you're paying for the design, and who amongst us does not want to turn our kitchen into the microcosmic eating lounge of Aperture Science, with helpful (albeit homicidal) recycling eggs (oviposited by glorious GLaDOS herself) pristinely hovering about, electronically warbling invitations to deposit our spare cans, or perhaps just our spleens, in their plastic, opalescent bellies?
Ovetto Recycling Egg [Where Did You Buy That via Gizmodo]
John Brownlee
Panaonic's overpriced free angle HDMI cables are marginally useful, but you can do the same thing cheaper
For a wildly disproportionate price, Panasonic is selling $60 Free Angle HDMI Cables. I need something like this, since my plasma is mounted too flush to the wall to allow easy access to the back HDMI slots, and since even the most Herculean exertion of my strength has only allowed me to buckle the steel moorings of my HDTV mount a quarter inch from my solid brick altbau wall.
However, as Crave so helpfully points out, even if you're a boneheaded HDTV mounter who didn't bother thinking things through, there's far cheaper alternatives to wind an HDMI cable up behind the inch of free space sandwiched between your television and the wall. The HDMI Port Saver contains an L-shaped dongle that you can fit on any HDMI cable for just a fin.
Panasonic Free Angle HDMI Cables [Panasonic via Crave]
John Brownlee
Opera CEO: DSi will contain more RAM
One question raised by the announcement of the DSi, and specifically its removal of the GBA slot and its promises of a built-in browser: would that browser be Opera, and will the DSi contain extra RAM to allow the browser to run? The old DS version of the Opera browser required a GBA RAM cartridge, after all.
According to Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, the answer to both questions is "yes:"
Yes, the DSi has more RAM than the DS Lite. In addition, with integrated Opera coming with the DSi, it will use RAM more efficiently.
It'll be interesting to see how this affects the DS software library as a whole. Will game developers opt to go DSi-specific in order to access that additional memory, or will it largely go unused? Another question: what will this mean for DS homebrew? Many homebrew DS games already require the Opera GBA RAM pack to run: if the DSi is hackable for homebrew, that means that the DSi might quickly become the preferred system of choice for emulators, source ports and the like.
Operating Systems are less important: opera [Tech Tree]
John Brownlee
XBox 360 getting Blu-Ray sooner rather than later
They never thought it could happen to them. The one, a widow, still haunted by the phantasmal caresses of his horrible murdered wife. The other, the vivacious child bride of her lover's widowmaker. In their secret bedroom fumblings, they would find the solace and bliss denied to each other: for one, power to go on; for the other, the fulfillment of that cruel, empty cavern in his chassis... a hole he never thought he could fill again. X-Box and Blu-Ray: A Love Story.
In short, X-Bit Labs is reporting that Microsoft not only plans on releasing an external Blu-Ray drive for the 360, but that it's already basically ready to go at a $100-$150 price point. Good news if true: Blu-Ray is one of the only real advantages the PS3 has over the 360, and a Blu-Ray drive could help even out the feature list... even if Microsoft has to swallow a bit of pride to do so.
Microsoft Preps External Blu-Ray Disc Optical Drive for Xbox 360 [X-Bit Labs via Crave]
Update: For their part, Microsoft is still denying the inclusion of Blu-ray in the 360. – Joel
Rob Beschizza
Snack & Stack Lego-style utensils
This locking cutlery set, $17 from Perpetual Kid, hits two important nerd neurological centers: the part of the brain dedicated to unnecessary organization and the part of the brain dedicated to Lego.
A dark and noisome part of me wants to host a refined black-tie dinner, so that these may be laid out, without the slightest hint of irony, alongside fine china and crystal.
Rob Beschizza
Fake cigar has fake embers, fake smoke, and looks like a cheap firework
As untouched by smoking bans as it is completely unconvincing, the Gamucci Cigar remains a delight. Though it unfortunately lacks real flames and carcinogens — and, indeed, any resemblance to a real cigar — the artificial embers and harmless smoke emitter should still provide ample opportunity to annoy friends and strangers alike.
Especially if you can emulate the facial expression of the gentleman in the ad. A heavy-shouldered, bouncing chortle should also be mastered to go with it.
Rob Beschizza
Pocket-size programmable LED scrolly
Just because something is cheap, it doesn't mean it's crap: I can think of a hundred useful things I could do with this tiny $15 LED badge, which has a 21x7 resolution and enough memory to hold 6 messages (512 characters long on the first, 256 for the rest.)
But I want it in green.
Rob Beschizza
Power On Self Test: Damn You, Rubber Telephone
By Mingyu Jeung.
London Design Festival: Designers Block Part 3
[MocoLoco]
Rob Beschizza
More possible MacBook "Brick" spy shots - smaller notebook this time
From the Chinese-language and password-protected tw.apple.pro come more short said to be of Apple's forthcoming laptop revision. This, clearly, is for a smaller machine, lacking the Pro-style speaker lattices either side of the keyboard.
小鋁MacBook 最新諜照 [Apple Pro via MacRumors]
Rob Beschizza
Welsh police tase runaway sheep
A police officer in north Wales had a problem: a sheep blocking traffic on the A55 highway. Not prepared to wait after motorists got out their cars and started herding it off the road, the copper tased the wooly miscreant.
"It is not difficult to herd sheep," said the owner of the local animal center.
Tony McNulty, the Home Office minister who eased restrictions on the use of stun guns last year, said they could be used 'where officers are facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force to protect the public, themselves and or the subjects of their action'.Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales Police, previously said in an online blog that the stun gun would provide 'better and quicker protection to ordinary patrol officers in remote locations, faced with dangerous or violent people'.
What baastards. I can just imagine the T-Shirts that these guys print.
Baa! Outrage after police officer blasts runaway sheep with Taser gun [Danger Room]
The palm in my face is inadequate.
Rob Beschizza
Moto RAZR still the most popular cellphone in America
Inhabitants of the material plane, that being the part of reality exterior to the internet, often assert that RAZRs, not smartphones that cost hundreds of dollars, are the most popular phones. Believe it or not, but they are correct: there are tens of millions of them knocking around, and it's been in the top spot since they started measuring these things systematically in 2005.
Things are changing. Apple's iPhone is now the second best-selling handset in the U.S., according to NPD's figures, with the BlackBerry Curve in third and the BlackBerry Pearl in fifth. In fourth place is LG's Chocolate.
What's changed? Smartphones got cheap, is what — the most expensive model there, by, far, is the $200 iPhone. For me, the interesting question them becomes what people will pay $300 or $500 for: looking at devices in this range, you see a lot of high-end unlocked handsets and low-end ultra-portable laptops.
It's a space still now waiting for its killer app. And by app, I mean "appliance."
[RCR Wireless via Engadget]
Rob Beschizza
MacBrick Pro revealed! Maybe!
Cut from a single "brick" of aluminum, purportedly, the new MacBook Pro is a sculpture: it exists in the marble, waiting to be cut free by the chisel. Or the laser. You know.
From this shot, which appears to have a seam between side and top, it rather appears the whole brick thing refers to laser-cutting the MacBook Pro's new, thicker keyboard panel to get it to match in the style used on the MacBook and desktop keyboards (and by Sony). If this speculation is true, and I dearly hope it isn't, "brick" is the most absurd lot of hype the universe has seen since the first crusade. Or the Amiga CDTV. You know.
Nonetheless, it looks nice. The crap photo is convincingly mundane, no?
Update: Gizmodo exhaustively explores this very line of thought.
Rob Beschizza
Eight percent of teens own an iPhone, 22 percent want one
Which means, if you want to reverse the spin, that fully 70 percent of teen-agers could not give a monkeys about Apple's amazing slab of blab.
8% of U.S. teens own an iPhone; 22% want one [CNN Money via Wired]
John Brownlee
The SureFlap protects your house from unauthorized kittens
The SureFlap is a great idea: a robotic cat door that only allows the appropriate RFID-implanted kitty into your house, as opposed to any toxoplasmosis infected plague cat that decides to bust on in and start a-spraying. No price listed, but it's not likely to be cheap, especially with the optional laser defense mechanism.
John Brownlee
An iMac G3 goes MAME: the arcadiMac
Months back, I asked for help doing something with an old, button-cute indigo iMac G3. I got a lot of great suggestions, but I never could quite get over the idea of using the little computer fruit for a MAME cabinet.
Mac modder Napes arcadimac project might just get me off of my ponderous duff to do so. The project installs an old iMac G3 running at 233MHz in a table top cabinet, wiring the real arcade buttons and joysticks through a USB controller interface and mapping the keys with QuickKeys. End cost: under $200. And it's even toilet height!
John Brownlee
Church Tank: The Illuminati's Secret Weapon
This mixed media sculpture by Missouri-born artist Kris Kuski reminds me of a story idea that has floated around in the back of my head ever since I first saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame and envisioned its flying buttresses ripping themselves bio-mechanically from the ground, freeing itself and rampaging through Paris as a monstrous medieval arachno-mecha. In my story, the Mecha of Notre-Dame would fight other Great European Architecture... secret relics of the great, clandestine wars between the Illuminati. Come to think of that, I really should get around to writing that story already.
Kris Kuski Chuch Tank Type 5A [Artist's Site via Book of Joe]
John Brownlee
The LEGO Zombie Apocafest
The LEGO Zombie Apocafest 2008 fails inregards to the paucity of the gore on display — where is the dimpled plastic viscera spilling from the separated torsos of aghast, cannibalized minifigs? — but it is still one of the great triumphs of BrickCon.
Zombie Apocafest 2008 [Flickr via Brothers Brick]
John Brownlee
Extraterrestrial tea pot features rare, overweight gray
A wonderful UFO tea pot, tupped by an emeraldescent alien whose strange, mercurial micturations make up the morning brew thanks to his native diet: the extraterrestrial foliage of the Ur-Quan Earl Gray plant.
UFO Teapot [British Novelty Teapot via Nerd Approved]
Rob Beschizza
Turn facial hair removal into an odyssey of pain with Tweezy
Tweezy, unlike razors or trimmers that leave "ugly stubble," works by ripping hairs from your flesh at the root. This $20 delight may be used on "feet and more." Call within the next 10 minutes for not one, but two free tubs of hair-growth inhibiting potion.
Tweeze with Bonus! Vanishing Cream [Tweeze] Thanks, HeatherB!
John Brownlee
Poke a smelly pixel panda with the Tuttuki Bako
Imagine a glory hole, through the brazen schlorking of which one might plunge into the Tamagotchi dimension. What's on the other end, no man knows. Will your member, digital or otherwise, be licked by a smelly pixel panda? Will it be caressed by a bitmap slime ball? Or will you simply poke a young girl in the eye? Truly, Bandai's latest handheld game — Tuttuki Bako — is the most fun and perverse way you could spend $30 bucks short of paying me to teach you the rules to my favorite blindfolded party game, "What's In Your Mouth?"
The Tuttuki Bako Box needs your finger to play with virtual characters [Crunchgear]
Rob Beschizza
Dave's Marble Machine
Watching Dave's Marble Machine — a strange contraption of cogs, pipes, wooden chains, hypnowheels and carved body parts that ends in a marble-spitting, mustachioed gentleman's face — is a pleasant way to relax after the spiral of anticipation and disappointment engendered by yet another iffy UMPC. [via The Automata Blog]
Rob Beschizza
Motorola's rugged 3G-equipped 6.5" pocket computer calls to me
There it is again. Like a junkie hidden inside, needing its fix, something lit up at the sight of Motorola's VC6096, even though it's just another ugly handheld computer. And yet the sense of palpable excitement will not subside: I must hold it, play with it, and see if it's any better than its legion of nigh-useless predecessors.
But this, this might be the one. It has 3G internet and 802.11abg WiFi, a full QWERTY keyboard, a mic, speakers, GPS, bluetooth. It runs Windows Mobile, which, for all its flaws, should mean decent battery life and the option of Skype should it not otherwise do voice calls.
There's no camera, though, and it's pitched as a carputer/in-dash gadget, so it's bigger than it looks in this photo — that screen is a full 6.5 inches. Moto's sales model for it is crushingly vertical: "Click here to arrange for us to negotiate pricing with you," seems to be the closest thing there to a "Buy it now" button.
Nevertheless, technology is getting close my nerdiest dreams of youth.
VC6096 WWAN In-Vehicle/Fixed Mount Mobile Computer [Motorola]
Motorola VC6096 [Navigadget]
Rob Beschizza
Cheap speaking toys say what reporters tell people to hear
The sound chips used in toys turn recorded voices into incomprehensible babble. It's the result of making them as cheaply as possible, and it sometimes gets manufacturers in trouble. Why? Because people love to be upset and angry: combine paranoia and pattern recognition, and you get wonders like people believing a Fisher Price doll really is saying "Islam is the light."
This is, to Fox News, "spouting hate." Usually, however, people think these things are just talkin' trash.
Someone should make a fluffy Zeus head doll that says "Wise fwom your gwave!"
Rob Beschizza
A wooden USB drive with Mah-Jongg characters
Here's an idea: custom wooden USB drives with engraved designs. In this case, they've opted for a Mahjong theme, and it comes as either the blond-wood Lan-Xue ($490 for an 8GB stick, and $550 for 16GB) or the darker Li-Shui, which is $100 cheaper each way. After selecting the one you like, each of the three tiles can be selected in the order you wish.
Engrave your favorite Mahjong tiles on your disk [Bronon via Everything USB]
Rob Beschizza
Kota, the 3-ft tall robot dinosaur
To whom will victory go in the post-apocalyptic War of the Children, fought by the orphaned young who remain in the bacterium's wake? It will go to those to mounted on giant plushie robot dinosaurs.
Recruitment video:
Amazon.com will prepare your offspring for battle for $300.
Kota Robot Baby Dino [Amazon via botjunkie]
Rob Beschizza
Pac-Man Hoodie
Arcade camouflage: necessary in any retrogaming environment, to protect oneself from runway models.
Pac-Man Hoodie [ThinkGeek]
John Brownlee
The ingenious Russian iPhone paper weight scam
In Russia, an ingenious group of tech-savvy scammers have somehow secured the gutted doppelganger chassises of last-gen iPhones, stuffed a minimum of circuitry and an appropriate amount of lead inside each one, and are using them in rip-off trades.
Here's how the scam works: the scammer wanders up to a flush Muscovite, offering his iPhone in exchange for cash in a hurry. He powers on the iPhone, displaying the familiar Apple logo: "It won't boot up entirely because there's no battery, but if you charge it later, it will work fine."
Of course, if an exchange is agreed upon, the iPhone will not work fine: it is a paperweight, a doorstop. The ingenuity is breath-taking: never have I been so impressed by a scammer since I was taken in Cairo by an Egyptian moonshiner on a case of caramel-colored "Johnny Waler."
The Fake One [English Russia via Engadget]
Rob Beschizza
Alas, No: BlackBerry Storm not running OSX
The comedy of these Vodafone marketing photos for the Blackberry Storm doesn't really need exposition. If it's not immediately obvious, just look a little closer!
Turning the tables doesn't have quite the same cachet...
John Brownlee
The swankest, pipe-shaped toilet
2-B-2's designer toilet is delightfully pipe like, a large porcelain bend of excremental, less smoking than emitting the oscillations of visible smell waves. Perhaps the most satisfying element, as an ex-pat living in Germany, is the voluminous depth of the bowl: no "shelf" to scrub here, no sir. I also like the GLaDOS like flushing eye.
Mrs. Hudson [Yanko]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Swiss Army Knives – Healthy discounts (more than half off) Victorinox Swiss Army Knives at Amazon. Free shipping for all but the smallest. [Dealhack]
• SD Card – 4GB SDHC card from Kingston for $8, shipped. [Dealnews]
• Broken Social Scene – BSS's 2003 album "You Forgot It In People" on Amazon MP3 for $2. [Dealnews]
• Strobe Light – Strobe Light Kit for $31, shipped. This particular rig is motion activated and plays Halloween sounds. [Dealnews]
• Space Heater – Today's Woot is a DeLonghi Multi-Position Ceramic Heater for $40, shipped.
Rob Beschizza
Behold the BlackBerry Storm in high resolution. Then decide: better than the iPhone?
Rob Beschizza
A strange and wonderful wooden safe
I've read the description of Alex Schlegel's beautiful wooden safe several times, and I still have no idea quite how it works.
The 13 drawers of this band-saw box rotate rather than open outward. Objects for safekeeping are placed into the large, central drawer through a hole in the bottom of the box. Since the arrows on the front of each drawer point toward the drawer's open side, objects may be moved from one drawer to another by first lining up the arrows on the two drawers and then rotating the entire box so that the objects fall from the first drawer to the second.
It's like a puzzle from a Myst game: let's hope it comes with a walkthrough!
Band Saw Safe [Alex Schlegel via Make]
Rob Beschizza
First hands-on reports of BlackBerry Storm
Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan has touched it, loved it, and put up a big gallery of real-life photographs of RIM's fourth-quarter wonder phone. Of note its is very different approach to touchscreens.
No matter how many times your fingers dance on the screen like you've been trained on every other touchscreen, nothing will happen. At least, not until you push the screen all the way down and you feel a click. Yes, the screen is a giant button, one you have to punch for basically every action, even every letter you type, completely breaking the touchscreen paradigm. Surprisingly, it works.
The short form: it's the first phone to drain the phrase "iPhone killer" of its intrinsic cynicism. More cimcumspect is Wired's Danny Dumas:
It’s hard to say if the Storm will eclipse the iPhone in terms of performance, applications, or even cultural cache.Despite having some superior features, I doubt it will have the same impact on the cellular landscape that the iPhone has.
That said, he also raves on the clicky touchscreen: "There’s no ambiguity to button presses. ... I was able to compose a lengthy detailed SMS without a single typo. That’s a feat I have yet to accomplish with the iPhone."
Engadget's Paul Miller isn't so impressed — "[not] unattractive to its traditional corporate loyalists," he writes — and is especially meh on the limitations of its operating system. The hardware itself, however, makes the transition to touch "brilliantly."
What it's probably going to boil down to is whether or not the BlackBerry OS is your style. RIM hasn't done an overhaul to make touchscreen viable, instead banking on its navigation / execution paradigm to make the transition to touch -- which for the most part it does brilliantly
BlackBerry Storm First Hands On [Gizmodo]
Hands On With The BlackBerry Storm [Wired: Gadget Lab]
Storm ... Hands On [Engadget]
Rob Beschizza
Release dates leaked for holiday handsets
Boy Genius scores the goods on Best Buy's expected release dates for a hatful of handsets. On October 26th, the delightfully-names Samsung Rant will be joined by the HTC Touch Pro at Sprint. The say day also will see Verizon's Blitx, AT&T's BlackBerry Bold, and T-Mobile's Pearl Flip 8220.
On November 6, BlackBerry Storm hits Verizon.
October / November Best Buy Mobile release schedule shows Storm, Bold, Pearl Flip and mo [Boy Genius Report]
Rob Beschizza
Spy calculator is watching you account
Seen on an average, everyday desk, Chinavision's calculator would be a discreet example of technological banality, its design exactly as functional now as when the molds that made it were forged in 1983. But this isn't just a calculator: it is a spy calculator.
The camera is tiny and surely of unbelievably poor quality — specs are not disclosed, or how the data is stored — but it's genuinely unlikely that anyone would guess its true purpose, even if they looked directly at it. And it's typically the case that you need not identify an office thief, only confirm what's already known.
The cost-benefit analysis, though, might be marred by its $193 price tag.
Ultimate Wireless Office Surveillance [Chinavision Crave]
Rob Beschizza
Wozniak says iPod won't live forever
Woz, interviewed by London's Telegraph newspaper, has a just shocking prediction for the iPod: like every other item of consumer technology ever developed and sold, it will one day be an obsolete reflection of the time that produced it!
"The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one," he says. "Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while. "It's kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap and they are not selling as much."
Much more interesting is the dish on the good old days:
"Steve [Jobs] was into everything hippy, he ran around shouting 'free love man' and eating seeds" as he embraced the flower power set. While "the second Steve", as Mr Wozniak became known, was still unable to overcome his nerves. ... "I thought I owed it to HP to stay. But Steve [Jobs] got at all my family and they convinced me I had to do it".Steve Wozniak interview: iconic co-founder on the iPod, iPhone, and future for Apple [Telegraph]
Rob Beschizza
See BlackBerry Storm twirl. Twirl, BlackBerry Storm, twirl!
Lusted-for as the iClone that isn't just phoning it in, RIM's BlackBerry Storm now has its very own product page thanks to international ubercarrier Vodafone. There is a 3D Storm there to spin and yaw about in search of the least interesting angle to view it from.
Storm [Vodafone UK via Gizmodo]
Rob Beschizza
iPillow is exactly what it sounds like
She is not dead, this young lady, but merely resting her head against a USB-powered ... pillow? Yes, I appear to have that right.
By closing the laptop an air cushion blows itself up, which is connected by a valve with the fan of the computer. The computer is in the "sleep mode" and warm exhaust air is blown into the pillow. The material is coated with Latex at the inside, so the supplied warm air can be kept for a longer time. The heat supply is interrupted by opening the laptop again.
i- sleep
An analog laptop extension [Ivonne Dippmann via Music Radar]
Rob Beschizza
Guitar Amp in a Toaster
What you see before you is a guitar amp in a toaster. That is all. Thank you and rock on.
Hottie amps are solid state units powered by a 9-volt battery. Inside you'll find a 6" Jensen MOD speaker and an output jack to connect to any 4, 8 or 16ohm speaker cabinet. The Custom model's flaming artwork now comes in a Sparkle Finish.
Product Page [Hottie Amplifiers]
John Brownlee
Tom Wolfe: CRT monitors caused the financial meltdown
Tom Wolfe on the cause of the financial crisis: CRT monitors with lamentably low refresh rates!
The whole thing, starting with the subprime, is the fault of the computer. I was just talking to a banker the other day, and not that long ago, 20 years ago, an investment banking house, let's say, Lehman Brothers, when it got a package of mortgages, they would go through every mortgage, every single one, and they'd throw out the ones that just seemed absurd, they just wouldn't accept them. Things used to arrive on paper. Today things arrive on a screen, and a screen is back lit, and one of the biggest pains in the neck is trying to read something dully written and complicated on a computer screen. It will drive you nuts -- I mean, try it sometime. Now they say, "Oh, to hell with it," and they just accept the whole package. And if it hadn't been for that, they'd be going over each loan. What's happened is the backward march of technology.
To be fair, he must have been kidding. Right?
Tom Wolfe Interview [Observer via Techdirt]
John Brownlee
Pac-Man Couture
Ephemeral, translucent-skinned fashion waifs took to the catwalks of Milan recently to show-off designer Giles Deacon's latest line of Pac-Man inspired outfits. Ironic: that the sandwich-hungry skeletons would wear fashions inspired by gaming's greatest gobbler.
We know what you're thinking: Photoshop. We thought so too, prompting an urgent international call between Boing Boing Gadget's editorial bullpen, trying to suss out the truth of the matter. Verdict: a curious mixture of realism and ineptitude that could indicate a Photoshop, but actually indicates the hilariously realistic ineptitude of the visual spectrum itself.
Giles Deacon Does Pac Man Couture [If It's Hip... via Gamerfront]
Joel Johnson
Nikon Media Port UP, a bizarre heads-up media display
At first glance I presume that Nikon's new "Media Port UP" was some sort of specialized, head-mounted imager — yet another take on the Gargoyle media-streamer idea I've been dorkily looking forward to for ages. But nope: it's a media player. (Albeit one with Wi-Fi and a built-in web browser.)
The UP has 8GB of storage built in, can play music over its headphones or display video on its mono diopter, simulating a 50-inch screen. The higher-end "UP300x" includes motion sensors which allow you to change the volume by tilting your head, which doesn't sound the least bit annoying when listening to music. (Surely they have some lock that prevents the motion controls from whipping the music back and forth as you bop.)
Super weird. No plans for this to be released outside of Japan — and I don't suspect that'll break too many hearts. I just don't understand why they couldn't have put a camera in it.
Live from Nikon's Press Conference: The UP300x hands-on [AkihabaraNews.com via Gizmodo]
Joel Johnson
Condometric: Condom with ruler not for use in U.S., Liberia, or Burma
Yes, the "Condometric" is a condom with a ruler on it. No, I do not know where you can buy them in the States. (The company that makes them is in Spain.) Yes, I do know a similar product, the Peter Meter, is available for just $3. No, I will not tell you how I know this. (Okay: Google.)
Bananas can be purchased at your local grocery.
Condometric product page [Curiosite]
John Brownlee
What is this ancient Gardner number cruncher?
On an early morning perambulation, I spotted this gorgeous old Gardner number cruncher sitting outside of a local antique shop, and quickly snapped it with my iPhone.
Obviously, it's some sort of adding machine — there's total and subtotal buttons — but does anyone have any idea what type? What's so curious about it is not only the way each separate digit is repeated nine times and given its own row, but the fact that there's apparently no key for zero!
Joel Johnson
Gallery of concept phones from KDDI, including musical instrument phones
Japanese phone company KDDI has always had the best handsets on the island — at least by my judgement, not clouded by frippery like usability or price. CrunchGear has a photo gallery of some of their latest concept phones shown off recently at the CEATEC trade show. I'm especially partial to this collaboration with Yahama that slips a two-octive keyboard onto the back of a phone.
CEATEC 2008: KDDI’s super-futuristic cell phone protoypes (photo gallery) [CrunchGear]
John Brownlee
The HandshoeMouse: crummy, conforming, comfortable
The horribly named HandshoeMouse promises the ultimate in ergonomic comfort: an ergonomic computer mouse which is not gripped, but into which the palm and digits of the hand sink. Its creators certainly take it seriously: it is based on four years worth of research into muscular tension conducted by the medical universities of Rotterdam and Maastricht. But as comfortable as the HandshoeMouse looks, there's no getting around the fact that it's not a very good mouse. Oh, I can do without a horizontal scroll wheel, or a couple of thumbable buttons at the side, but to not even include a middle mouse button? That's just unforgivable in a 120 euro mouse, no matter how wonderfully breast-like it conforms to the palm of the hand.
HandshoeMouse Is Not A Pain In The Neck [Hot Hardware]
Joel Johnson
Video: "Brand New Friend (Roomba Song)" by Mr. Pitiful
Scott "Mr. Pitiful" Monaghan sings the praises of his Roomba in this raucus, goofy anthem. I wanted to hate it but once the dancing started I was sold.
Mr. Pitiful's song page [Myspace.com via Robots.net via Go Robotics]
John Brownlee
GMail Goggles stops inebriated epistolary spewing
A belly full of turpentine swilled rot gut, a drunken decadruple somersault down the slippery slope, a greasy slalom from one thing to another, and somehow, I'm blearily writing an inebriated screed to one Mr. Joel Johnson, subject line: "I QUIT, FAT BROOKLYN METRO-PUKE."
It happens. Unfortunate, yes, but heretofore unavoidable. But Google's latest addition to GMail plays defense between your impolitic inebriation and your friends and co-workers. With a feature dubbed "Mail Goggles," GMail will ask you to solve some simple mathematical equations before you send that late night email, the theory being that if you're too drunk to solve them, your judgment is too impaired to let your epistle go through.
A cute idea, but if I can walk backwards in a straight line while reciting the German alphabet with a hemoglobulous ABV of .34, I can definitely do simple addition.
Stop sending mail you later regret [GMail Blog]
Joel Johnson
Samsung Lavender concept phone by Andrew Kim
You know, for an amateur designer, Andrew Kim's "Lavender" concept cell phone for Samsung is pretty great. I like the pebble-like asymmetrical shape, the graphics on the interface are clean and easy to grok, and I think the notion of a swap-in perfume dispenser is great. Pretty awesome work for a 16-year-old kid. Someone should hook him up with an internship.
Lavender - Samsung Concept Phone [Product Design Forums]
Joel Johnson
Power On Self Test: Nail files and engines should never meet
From this epic thread detailing a Spanish "mechanic" and his attempt to tune, paint, and customize an old Mitsubishi Eclipse. Amazing zero-to-cringe times. Those claw marks on the cylinders are hand-filed. That's bad. (Thanks, Mike!)
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Creative Sale – Creative is selling lots of its products through its online store for up to 75% off. One day only. [Dealnews]
• Hitchcock – Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection, a 14-film DVD set including Rear Window and The Empire Strikes Back. (Come on, that would have been awesome.) [Dealnews]
Slim day for deals. There was a nice Woot but it's already sold out. Them's the breaks.
Rob Beschizza
A few hours with Sandio's 3D Gaming Mouse. Verdict: Damn, this thing is weird.
It's often the case that we, as tech writers, will accept review gear but be somewhat less than prompt about testing it. The item will sit in a drawer, perhaps, or on the shelf marked "Urgent." It may reside for weeks its anonymous unopened shipping box until everyone forgets what's in the box, or where it came from.
This is usually due to laziness, but in the case of 3D Game O2's 3D Motion Controller with Laser Gaming Mouse, it's fear. I mean, just look at it:
Yes, there's an analog stick on each side and just aft the scrollwheel. It's the strangest and most intimidating mouse I've ever used. Aside from the additional hats, it's otherwise normal, if large, with tracking options up to 2000 DPI and a pair of extra buttons on the left thumb ridge. After months of looking supiciously at it, I finally started using it over the weekend, putting it through its paces on appropriate titles like Total War and UT.
The point, if it isn't obvious, is to make navigation through 3D spaces easier. For example, one could set the top stick to be the movement controls in a first-person shooter, such as would normally be assigned to the WASD keys. Or you could yaw, pitch and tilt with them in a space shooter; or swing the view around in an RTS; or map Cartesian coordinates in a 3D modeling application, and so on.
There's also an attachable wrist-wrest, for those who feel uncomfortable with the thing's huge size.
It doesn't work automatically. It comes with a software app packed with profiles for games and apps: you can't just plug it in and expect it to work magic. Instead, customize bindings and get a handle on how it's going to work in any given program. This can't really be skipped, because when you actually get started with it, you'll be re-learning mousing all over again anyway.
After about 20 minutes, it became clear to me that it's not something you can just think your way through. Learning to manipulate a triplet of extra analog controls on top of the mouse's normal operation is a function of muscle memory. It develops slowly, but steadily — I'm still not sure it makes anything more fun — and the real challenge is to stop yourself ignoring the 3D sticks and treating it like a normal mouse.
I think that 3D artists, who could use it at a less frenetic pace, will get more from it than gamers. If you're a true twitch demon, though, give it a look: it might prove comfortable and useful, though it's hard to imagine it providing any real competitive advantage.
Rob Beschizza
Realistic robot birds warble incessantly
Between bouts of skull-pounding MIDI music, the gentle electronic tweets of "Breezy Singers" have their charm. Based on real-world recordings made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, their chirpings meld with the plastic clatter of cheap robotics: hardly the emperor's nightingale, encrusted with diamonds, rubies and sapphires, but it'll do.
Don't be tempted to hurl these from cliffs and trees, crying "Fly, Goldfinch, fly!" — the instructions warn that they are for indoor use only.
ELECTRONIC SINGING BIRDS [My Favorite Things]
Rob Beschizza
Imagine you are predicting the weather with the Weems Stormglass
The Weems Stormglass, it is called. Not some steampunk confection, this strange little device, invented more than two centuries ago, is said to predict the weather by the forms taken by its mineral-heavy liquid. Spreading crystal ferns indicate storms, while a clear phial means it will remain calm. In all weather, you pay $149.99 for it.
"No-one knows quite how it works," says crapvendor Signals. "But it does."
Rob Beschizza
A weekend with Amiga Forever 2008: retrogaming without the hassle
British gamers raised in the 1980s will doubtless have imagined playing old Amiga games on their 50" plasma TV sets. Such plans, however, rarely survive contact with the difficulties surrounding emulation of this powerful and weird old machine.
Though the technical side's taken care of by the Unversal Amiga Emulator, the myriad of different configurations, spread over the system's decade in the sun, makes it a giant pain in the ass to get games running.
Moreoever, the post-Commodore IP snarl makes getting hold the needed ROM files and system software a trip into murky legal waters.
What you need, then, is Amiga Forever 2008, Cloanto's compilation of emulators, games, demos, ROM files, and system disk images, all plugged into a simple, Media Player-like launcher. It plays Amiga games without fuss, and can even figure out just what sort of Amiga config any given title expects to see.
If you're an Amiga nut and want to do more than just play old games, this review won't be of much use to you. The online chatter suggests that its ease of use, expanded selection of ROM files (and the Linux-based "boot into an Amiga" CD-ROM option) represent the best experience yet for hardcore fans.
For the rest of us, though, it suffices to say that Amiga Forever 2008 hits the spot. The new "Player" is a friendly, simple, attractive way to explore your Amiga stuff. You choose what you want to do and it usually Just Works.
The included selection of games is interesting, but not exhaustive. Anco's Kick Off and Player Manager series are there, Exile, Hybris, Lure of the Temptress and a few others, but you'll not be safe from torrent temptation.
There's improved support for gamepads, and options such as keyboard mapping are easy to muck around with.
Especially useful is being able to double click Amiga disk images on the desktop: it'll launch itself and try to generate a working config based on a heuristic scan of the image's contents.
Another new feature is save states. This means you can save a game at any point whatsoever, and resume immediately from that point without booting the Amiga or waiting for the game to load. Remember the original Action Replay? Like that!
Also included is software for OSX and Linux, though Hi-Toro, the freeware GUI front-end for Macs, is not the equal of the Windows browser developed by Cloanto.
Amiga Forever Premium edition, with 100 games and 100 demos and a DVD full of features and documentaries about the Amiga and its history, is $50 from the online store. The same content, minus the DVD, is a $40 download. A $30 Value edition includes the essential Workbench editions needed for gaming, but doesn't include the Linux-based boot option and only comes with 50 titles.
It comes down to this: if you had an Amiga but could never get your head around emulating it, you should get a copy of Amiga Forever. And even if you could, it'll make life easier.
Joel Johnson
Herman Miller Embody: An Aeron for our current troubles
Poor Herman Miller, maker of the infamous (and rather good) Aeron office chair which found their way into out-of-work employees studio apartments after the first dot-com bubble, has just launched a successor in time for the nationwide financial crisis: The "Embody" is a $1,600 office chair with an exposed structure with 56 flexors along the back and 93 plastic disks that move allow for movement and adjustment of the surface underneath the operator.
If only they'd released the Embody at the height of the mortgage reverie, I could be out there scavenging my very own from empty fluorescent banking tombs today.
The techie's new $1,600 throne (Herman Miller Embody) [Fortune via Freshome]
Rob Beschizza
Disassembled Canon Lens
What does this picture of a completely dissassembled Canon 17-85mm lens say? It says "Not user serviceable," is what it says!
John Brownlee
Bracketed USB Japanese desk lamp
Japanese design firm Conof makes these wonderful bracket-shaped lamps with a light that swivles up to 270 degrees and a few spare USB ports for charging your gadgets. There's no pricing available, but these are lovely in that soulless modern deco way I kind of like.
USB Desk Lamp [Conof via Geeksugar]
John Brownlee
Super Mario Bros. 3 makes excellent USB hard drive
This Super Mario Brothers 3 250GB hard drive isn't anything more clever than a retro game cartridge pried open, gutted, and crammed with a cheap 2.5" SATA drive. Even so, could there be any more appropriate repository for an arcade cabinet's NES ROM collection? This one was being sold by an Etsy seller for $180, and it's doubtlessly long gone, but if there's enough demand, surely an entire business could be forged from the pecuniary tricklings of indiscriminate retro-gamers.
NES 250GB Hard Drive [Etsy via Ubergizmo]
Joel Johnson
C.H. Hanson Slide Square looks handy for wood construction
It's not quite the slide rule I promised we'd write more, but C.H. Hanson's "Slide Square" puts several useful tools in just one $10 geegaw: a simple square, a caliper, a protractor, and a mechanism for marking bolt hole locations.
C.H. Hanson Slide Square [Toolmonger]
Joel Johnson
Who couldn't love a hovering Pontiac?
Chris Thunig paints a world I want to live in. [via Concept Ships]
Joel Johnson
Mexico Minigod speaker
The "Mexico Minigod" speaker is a limited-edition vinyl sculpture that sits 17-inches tall. It is A/C powered and has a mini-jack in connector. That it looks fantastic should more than make up for the fact that it is monophonic — exactly the sort of sound most gods prefer.
Mexico Minigod speaker catalog page [TaintedVisionsArt.com via Technabob]
Joel Johnson
Crystal Head Vodka may not promote clear thinking
I'm pretty sure Dan Aykroyd is insane. But at least it's the kind of insanity that produces beautiful glass bottles in the shape of a human skull, each filled with his own Crystal Head Vodka.
You can listen to Dan bloviate for several minutes on the company's site, explaining the history of the crystal skulls myth, a collection of carved artifacts that, despite having been proved to be modern fakes, continue to dupe less skeptical fans of the paranormal. I love the man, but there's such a thing as too much willingness to believe. Or perhaps "too much yes, not enough maybe".
But whatever! I will be buying at least a couple of bottles of this stuff, despite not really liking vodka at all, just so I can keep a hunk of human head glass around on my shelves. I don't actually know how much the Crystal Head Vodka costs, nor where to buy it, but I suspect it'll be showing up in your local liquor vendor soon — skulls have nearly universal appeal.
Crystal Head Vodka product page [CrystalHeadVodka.com via NOTCOT]
John Brownlee
Mazda's Kiyora gorgeous concept car will never, ever happen
Mazda's Kiyora concept is a lurid, shimmering firefly of automotive neon, the very picture of the futuristic coupe a cybernetic police office might pick up and spatter a perp with if Crackdown ever went to Vice City. Unfortunately, Joel informs me that he's seen this all before: "It's yet another hot concept from Mazda that they'll ruin when they put knife to sheet metal."
Mazda designs concept city car [Crave]
John Brownlee
MacBooks to get NVIDIA GPUs come October 14th?
The latest rumor to belch up from the Internet's bloated lower intestine: Apple may be upgrading their low-end MacBook line to include Nvidia GPUs, come October 14th.
According to The Uranus Apple Weblog:
TUAW is hearing from various sources that new MacBooks are right around the corner, and that they might even have some extra Nvidia power in them. A source tells us that Nvidia is showing off new MacBooks to their employees, and word is going around that the new versions will be released as soon as October 14th.
The addition of reasonably powered GPUs in Apple's low-end laptops could imply a greater commitment to gaming by Apple, but we've heard that noise before. It'll be curious to see, though, whether this means that an updated Mini (long past due) will get an Nvidia GPU as well.
Rob Beschizza
A week with the NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse
It's nice to have a cable again, I tell myself. Electrons sliding reliably over copper, sorted dutifully by a properly-powered USB controller. Manly. None of that airy wireless stuff, prone to interference, battery failure and general weirdness at the worst moments.
Perhaps I'm distracting myself from the other thing about the NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse that I'm not sure about. It's shaped for both hands, see, with a matching thumb button on the "other" side. This is great for the left-handed, but it's hard to avoid clicking it by mistake. You can assign it to the void using the config software, though, so it's hardly a big issue.
So it's wired and ambidextrous, which could be pros or cons depending on what your preferences are. Is there anything downright wrong with the Avatar? No. It's a damned good mouse, with the standard gaming-class trim: DPI switching, glowy lights, and a matte black surface. Tracking is reliable, it doesn't look stupid in a place of business, and it has thick teflon feet that shouldn't peel or wear down too quickly.
At $70, it isn't outrageously expensive — though it is about $10 pricier than standard Logitech fare.
Joel Johnson
Six-side dice as pixelated Madonna
Robert bought a bunch of six-sided dice from Amazon and created this amazing table top with an image of the Madonna, mapping a six-color grey-scale image to each face of the dice.
2925 (dice table) [Flight404.com] (Thanks, Brett!)
John Brownlee
Techspansion drags VisualHub video converter program for Mac behind the killing shed
Techspansion, makers of the excellent VisualHub program — about the only truly excellent program to allow for the conversion of regular video files to iPod-compatible MP4s on the Mac — have closed their doors, citing the tantalizing and mysterious excuse of "personal reasons."
The good news is that Techspansion hints that they will release the source code before they completely blink out of the time stream. That they would consider releasing the source seems to imply the "personal reasons" causing Techspansion to fold aren't actually related to the tattooed fingers of Apple's legal team resting a vice-like grip upon the lead developer's shoulder in a shadowy bar at 2am, but who knows? We've sent a snooping email hoping to learn more.
Update: Tyler Loch of Techspansion just emailed us, saying there were no "lawyers or other nasties" involved:
No, the decision was all mine. No lawyers or other nasties involved. The work was adversely affecting my health, my relationships, and my other responsibilities, too much to bear. It was a very tough decision, and it's one that I hope was the right choice for me.
Either way, this is sad news for regular iPhone and iPod video users. While Windows has a million-and-one iPod video converters, the Mac, ironically enough, has few serviceable ones, and VisualHub was the best of breed.
Techspansion [Official Site]
Joel Johnson
Jason Rogenes turns packing material into glowing obelisks
I had a chance to check out "Manuf®actured", the current show at Portland's Museum of Contemporary Craft. There was a lot of neat stuff, like Devorah Sperber's amazing thread-as-pixel art take on the Campbell's Soup can, Cat Chow's zipper dresses, and Laura Splan's dress made of dried facial peel (presented in front of a wallpaper made from her own blood!), but the stuff probably most germane to BBG was Jason Rogenes' work with polystyrene packing material which, when pressed into form around long fluorescent lighting and strung up with extension cables, takes on a whole new look akin to some interstellar interceptor grown from comet ice. (And completely doable as a DIY project if it matches your decor aesthetic.)
Totally a fun show and worth a visit if you're around. (The picture is actually from a different installation than the one in Portland but I think gets the idea across better than the pictures of the Museum.)
Manuf®actured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects [Museum of Contemporary Craft]
John Brownlee
The Non-Stop Top is no perpetual-motion dreidle
The term "non-stop-top" conjures up for me the late December unveiling of some mad Jewish inventor's latest patent, the perpetual motion dreidle. Spun delightedly by his daughter, the perpetual motion dreidel begins its rapid circulatory blur, but instead of gradually slowing, unsmearing its Hassidic array of Nun, Gimel and Hei, it instead spins faster, faster, faster, until the skeletons of the horrified onlookers are sucked out of their skins and their empty skins lay flaccidly shin, forever.
Instead, however, we get this pink, battery-powered top, somewhat resembling the UFO of an extra-terrestrial race of drag-queen Liliputians. It is neat, and will spin for up to 8 hours of its own volition, but it is no perpetual motion dreidle, my friends.
Non-Stop Top [I Want One Of Those via Gizmodo]
Joel Johnson
Could you make a better fake rock speaker than Klipsch?
I'm not sure how new the Klipsch AWR-650-SM weatherproof speaker may be — certainly outdoor speakers that look like rocks aren't a new idea — but looking it, in its Flintstones formation, makes me wonder: how hard is it to make a rock speaker that doesn't have such apparent holes? Obviously you don't want to muffle the sound, but it would be much more classy (if that's a term that's possible to use in proximity to fake rocks) if you couldn't make it out at all.
AWR-650-SM rock speaker product page [Klipsh.com via Red Ferret]
John Brownlee
New Sanyo laser to double capacity of Blu-Ray discs
Sanyo have announced that they have created a new blue laser diode that could double the capacity of your average Blu-Ray disc.
The laser works at up to 450 milliwatts, which is double that of Sanyo's current high-end Blu-Ray laser. What that means is that it can not only write four layers of 25GBs onto a standard Blu-Ray disc, but that Blu-Ray write speeds should increase as well, up to a maximum of 12x.
Unfortunately, it'll be a couple of years, minimum, before consumers sees the technology... which, given the uncertainty of Blu-Ray's mainstream acceptance, may mean that we might never see what Sanyo's new diodes can do.
Sanyo Laser to enable faster, higher capacity Blu-Ray discs [PC World]
Joel Johnson
Video: Chindōgu inventions of Kenji Kawakami
Kenji Kawakami practices the art of Chindōgu, "unuseless" gadgets that technically do solve everyday problems, but not without serious embarrassment on the part of the user.
In this video, Kawakami demonstrates shoe umbrellas, a golf club that also dries your socks, and a portable subway strap that looks suspiciously useful.
[via Pink Tentacle]
John Brownlee
Astronaut-etched cutting board
Up To You Toronto is selling this gorgeous cutting board featuring a tiny laser-etched spaceman waving happily from the infinite vacuum of the grain, along with three brethren boards: a downhill skier, a diver, a tiny Evel Knievel. $49 for all of them is a steal.
Cutting Boards [Up To You Toronto]
Joel Johnson
Morning tech deals highlights
• Video Card – VisionTek Radeon HD4870 512MB PCI Express video card for $225. $6 shipping or in-store pick-up at Best Buy. About $50 off. [Slickdeals]
• REI Sale – 20%-off any regularly priced item at REI for members. [Dealhack]
• Bluetooth Headsets – Amazon has dropped the price of many Bluetooth headsets to $20. [Bargainist]
• Phone Charger – AA Emergency phone charger, which uses AA batteries to top up your phone, available for $6, shipped. Works with Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and BlackBerry; Apple adapter is $1 more. [Dealnews]
• Free Software Dev Tools – Microsoft has versions of programming software, including SQL Server Developer 2008 and Visual Studio, for free if you are a student. [Dealnews]
• Lap Steel – Rogue EA-3 lap steel guitar for $80, shipped. Peeeee-nowwwr. [Dealnews]
• Universal Remote – Today's Woot is a simple Philips Icon 5-Device Universal Remote for $10, shipped.
John Brownlee
Sega announces re-entry into hardware with the Vision
Inexplicable announcement of the day, sure to elicit a cranium-bursting WTF: Sega is getting back into the hardware game.
According to Register Hardware, Sega's new handheld will be called the Vision, and it will primarily be a PMP, with a built-in television tuner combined with video and musical playback support. It'll play games too, but that's clearly not the device's thrust... in fact, the Vision's leaked feature sheets lists "games" in a desultorily second-to-last place, only behind e-books.
It's a bit of a befuddling announcement. If I were to speculate, I would say the Sega Vision was primarily aimed at a Japanese market, which is about the only place on Earth where portable television enjoys a thriving marketshare. But Reg Hardware claims the Vision will make a UK debut sometime next year.
By releasing a DAP outside of Japan, then, Sega is going to be going head-to-head with an entrenched market leader (Apple), just like they once went head-to-head with Nintendo, and lost. You'd think, if they were going to re-enter hardware, they would have taken full inventory of the mistakes of the past.
Even weirder: while there's been no firm release date announced for the Sega Vision, it's available in London now for any one willing to plunk enough quarters down the coin slot of a claw-grabbing arcade game, along with a handful of last-gen iPod Nanos. A serious iPod competitor indeed!
Sega to launch PSP beater in 2009 [Reg Hardware]
John Brownlee
Motherboards that won't tear the roof of your mouth to shreds
It looks delicious, of course, but for god's sake, you fool, don't eat it ! Needless to say, gentlemen, the cake is a LIE.
Motherboard Geek Cakes [Geekcake via Technabob]
Rob Beschizza
Gadgets: Ten things that changed if you spent the last five years in hypersleep
1. Sony finally got it, but still doesn't get it.
Sony finally ditched proprietary music files, but still hasn't updated its copy 'n' control development model. And get this: the latest Playstation is getting its rear end kicked by both Microsoft and Nintendo. Nintendo! Sir Howard's obviously tired of wrapping duct tape around the beast and the stock's in the toilet. But then again, whose isn't?
2. No-one admits it, but piracy is mainstream.
The music industry has realized that DRM, and suing its own customers, is self-destructive. But instead of adapting, the labels stand proudly at the bow of their sinking ship, saluting the sunset.
3. Apple has 20% consumer market share.
If you've got a decent laptop and you're not getting it on the company dime, it might well have a picture of an Apple on it.
4. iPhone is no longer a dusty Linksys trademark.
Speaking of Apple, it's now selling an iPod phone that's quite the talking point. Palm is on an inexplicable death march up a magical fantasy rainbow made of Linux. All the more depressing for it is Google, which did the exact same thing but managed to get it finished before the second coming of Christ.
5. Firefox sucks
You know that efficient fast Mozilla spinoff browser, "Phoenix," that everyone's talking about? It changed its name twice, stole 20 percent market share from IE, then became the bloated, floating corpse of its own promise.
6. Netbooks
Those cheap, nasty subnotebooks that HP and NEC occasionally try and flog to vertical markets are now the hottest thing on Earth. They call them "Netbooks" now. Just about everyone makes one except Apple and Sony. For while, they tried to rebadge Handheld PCs as "Ultramobile PCs," ruining their battery life by having them run full-scale operating systems, but no-one fell for it.
7. A new optical disk format war brewed, exploded and was won...
... But people can get high-definition movies streamed over cable TV, and things ain't looking too hot for the winner. Yes, we all threw away cathode ray tubes and rear-projection sets and bought plasma TVs. No, DLP did not really take off.
7b. So how did watching mini-DVDs on the handheld PlayStation work out?
Don't ask.
8. No, you can't have fast fiber-optic internet. Not yours.
The U.S. isn't in the top 5 on the broadband penetration charts anymore. It's barely in the top 20. Sen. John McCain may have email, but he wouldn't know it.
9. Bloggers, not AOL, took over the internet.
There are now about 40,000 gadget blogs, not just Gadgeteer, Gizmodo and Engadget. Hi, mom!
10. It's a WWANtopia out here!
Cellphones are now offered with reasonable agreements and a diverse set of contractual options. SMS messaging is no longer more expensive than using a satellite phone, and carriers no longer act like a cartel, rationing new cellular technologies to maximize quarterly profits over the long-term competitive well-being of their own industry. Haha, got you. Yeah, they're still a bunch of arseholes.
Rob Beschizza
Review: Sorapot tea pot. Verdict: Tea is officially sexier than coffee
Sorapot is a stylish and expensive teapot made from stainless steel and pyrex. Designed by Joey Roth, it is undeniably a beautiful creation. There's even a matching teacup.
But is tea brewed in it any good? I used it casually for a few days, including a blind test against a Brown Betty-style pot, and found it perfect as a compact tea-making gadget — a role that has its charms — but too small and fiddly to replace a traditional pot for hardcore tea addicts.
Pros:
• It's gorgeous. Anyone who keeps it in a cupboard must be sent to industrial design appreciation camp. Pretty on kitchen counter and office desk alike, it's also tidy. The "rectangular" base and short spout make it easy to store on a crowded shelf.
• The metal used is distinctive and heavy-duty steel, not the junk they make cheap kettles out of.
• It makes enough tea for two good-size cups: along with its small size, this makes it an effective way to get the business of brewing tea out of the kitchen and on to your desk.
• Watching tea infuse and seeing the leaves unfold is mesmerizing.
• None of the components will affect the brew's flavor.
Cons:
• Small capacity means you won't be making tea for more than one or two people.
• It cools quickly. The open spout, and perhaps the thin pyrex, are to blame. This is not so much a problem for fans of herbal teas, but black tea lovers will want to craft a "Soracosy."
• You can't stir the contents. The lack of a vent means that it can glug when poured, though it wasn't too difficult getting used to it.
• Ground teas may escape through the large holes on the spout's grille.
• The process of opening Sorapot is very clever, but likely to end in tears if you're not careful. You cannot just whip it open; follow the instructions or risk breaking the flask or having a heavy chunk of steel crack the countertop.
Conclusion:
When it comes to getting a perfect brew, especially if you need lots of it, Sorapot's little flaws mean that it's not quite the equal of traditional pots. That said, it's much better than garbage like the Sunbeam tea maker.
It's especially good for those who tend to make tea by the cup, squeezing flavor out of lukewarm, milky teabags after a 30-second steep. Getting a Sorapot will civilize you, you filthy barbarians. Likewise, if you hate to lug around a bulbous, unweildy, desk-scorching traditional pot, Sora's portability will do you good.
For the rest, it's just a $200 work of art, and you'll either like it or you won't.
Sorapot [Joey Roth]
Rob Beschizza
Budweiser's promotional Beer Drive
Budweiser's promotional USB thumbdrive is full of beer, or something that looks like beer.Prosit, submit, vomit! CNK will make you a similar item, with minimum runs of 250 pieces.
CNK Promotions [via Giz]
Rob Beschizza
Spotting game design poseurs
Codemasters' principal designer Phil O'Connor writes at length on how to hire a good game designer. Despite its dry and business-like air, it's a frequently-amusing guide on how to spot a charlatan in a profession that offers little in the way of accreditation, but which has an abundance of people who think they can do it.
The key qualification, he says, is game-making experience. For those with no development or modding skills, there must be a tangible obsession not with ideas but the mechanics of their implementation. Among the many other necessary attributes that O'Connor outlines, one other that stands out is the need for a broad interest in literature, history, music and art. Designers must also be able to adapt, because "no design survives first contact with code."
Finally, he warns teams about taking on two sorts of poseur: the Ideas Man and the Fanboy.
Photo: CraftyGoat
Opinion: How To Hire A Good Game Designer [Game Set Watch]
Rob Beschizza
Flexy rainbow USB hub
Pretty! It has four ports and a $13 price tag.
Flexible Chromatic USB Hub [Perpetual Kid via Technaob]
Rob Beschizza
One-time payment for unlimited internet on U.K. PocketSurfer
PocketSurfer 2 is a little QWERTY clamshell device that does for the web what Peek does for email: as in, nothing but the web. You turn it on, and you got yourself a web browser hooked up to a cellular internet connection. Simple, no-nonsense, single-purpose gadgetry.
Brits will pay £200 for it, which might seem horrible given that the American edition, called the PC Edge, is only $200. But whereas U.S. customers have to fork out for a full scale $25 monthly data plan ($30 if you don't get a contract!), users in the U.K. just pay £40 a year for unlimited access, or £60 for a lifetime sub.
I played around with an earlier version of one of these. It's extremely light and pocketable, and it's great having a nice big screen for portable web access, but that oh-so-pretty keyboard can't be typed on properly.
DataWind PocketSurfer2 Launched [Ubergizmo]
Rob Beschizza
OSX Leopard on Dell Inspiron Mini
Uneasy Silence gets Leopard running on Dell's netbook.
The steps to Leopard-ize the mini are actually quite simple and easy to follow. ... Once you complete the install all components except the wireless, ethernet, and sound worked. After some searching on the Dell forums I found two files that enabled the disabled Broadcom wireless adaptor and audio chipset.
They should do this for real. Here's an ad you could use, Apple:
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