Joel Johnson

Windows 7 will work just fine on netbooks (but so could Vista, says Microsoft)

Ars' Kurt Mackey interviewed Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky about Windows 7 on netbooks and uncovered quite a bit of interesting chatter. I especially enjoyed this discussion of netbook resolution:

This is more general, and I can guess, but given the small screens, are you doing anything special for the user interface on those?

That's, it turns out to me, the main characteristic of netbooks are not screen inches, but screen pixels. Big difference. And, um, boy, you know, the HP one ships at 1280x768 which is perfectly good. The MSI, Lenovo, a few others are all shipping with the 10.3" panels that are 1024x600...

...such odd resolutions.

Well, they're just 16x9 versions of 600x800 and that's a glass thing, it's cheaper to cut the glass in those dimensions. You know, 600 is very tight and I suspect that in the very near term, those are going to get a higher DPI. They'll stay at 10.3, and in fact many of the higher end machines... it's the most expensive part, so the only way to keep the whole thing cheap is to put that screen in. So screens are the most expensive and consume the most power. But if you look at something like the Fujitsu p1610, p1620 series, those are netbook sized, but they have 1280x1024 10" screens, which is also a 4x3 aspect ratio, and that used to be my primary machine, and those are just 1GHz Celerons with 1GB RAM as well.

Ars@PDC: Steven Sinofsky on Windows 7 and netbooks [ArsTechnica.com]

Rob Beschizza

Man sucked into toilet after reaching for dropped phone

A mercifully unnamed Frenchman got his arm sucked down a fancy train toilet after trying to fish out a cellphone he dropped in it. The BBC:

The high-speed TGV train had to stop for two hours while firemen cut through the train's pipework. The man was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm.

Is it odd to wonder exactly what sort of phone he had? This reminds me of the graffiti that used to be in practically every public lavatory in England, before they turned England into the set of a Paul Verhoeven movie: "Please do not throw cigarettes in the pissoir. It makes them soggy and difficult to light."

Man's arm trapped in train toilet [BBC]

Rob Beschizza

New Optiplex towers go for Mac Pro look

Frankly, Dell's design strategy is just full of holes.

new Dell Optiplex systems... [Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Blu-ray's thriller app: making you install firmware upgrades before playing disks

CrunchGear's Nicholas Deleon points out one of Blu-ray's critical flaws: when you want to watch a movie, the system can force you to dick around for literally hours applying "necessary" firmware upgrades until it consents to play the disk.

Here's just part of his hellish experience with one of Samsung's players:

I decide to burn the firmware to a CD, thinking that would be easier. It was and it wasn’t. After finding the firmware on Samsung’s labyrinth of a Web site, I burned it to a disc. I place the disc in the player and wait some more. And wait and wait and wait. Fifteen minutes go by before the player pops up, “Are you sure you want to upgrade the firmware?”

Bear in mind that the poor guy's reward for all this was getting to watch The Happening. Deleon's final question — whether "Blu-ray will forever be hobbled by this type of nonsense." — is the most entertaining aspect of the whole story. It seems almost a rhetorical question, as if we all know, deep down, that this really is the entertainment culture our children will grow up with. I do hope The Happening's end-user license agreement came in under 57 pages.

Blu-ray player upgrade process is killing the movie watching experience [CrunchGear]

Rob Beschizza

Alaris 3D printer among the world's most compact

Alaris's 3D printer, able to create 600dpi objects from resin, is an amazing work of engineering. That said, there's just something fundamentally amusing about this picture of it having the caption, "one of the smallest 3D printers on the market."

It reminds me that 2028 will have its own "Look Around You," where jokes are made about the days computers were so massive they could barely fit in your pocket!

Compact 3D printer lets you create your own toys [Crave]

Rob Beschizza

UltraPin: The revenge of the revenge of pinball

UltraPin is a virtual pinball machine, which is to say it's not really a pinball machine at all: all the action is contained within a standard enough video game, with the cabinet and controls in otherwise authentic shape. The table itself is a big LCD display.

Something vaguely similar this was tried at the end of the pinball era, but cancelled when it wasn't immediately a massive success. The taste of sour grapes for all but the bean-counters, in other words. I can't wait for a go of this latest monster, even if it seems, on the face of it, like just another serving of overbaked nostalgia.

Those of you suspicious of the very notion should know that pinball video games, when not being garbage included for free with the operating system, are often addictive beyond all reason. Pinball Dreams, anyone?

Arcade's Next Great Machine [Cranky's]

Joel Johnson

Behold, the first screenshot of the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie is up on stage at a developers conference as I type, basically chewing cud until the embargo lifts later this morning on Windows 7. But reporters and developers are playing around with Windows 7 right now — and one, tired of waiting, sent me this screenshot.

Similar screenshots will be all over the web in just a couple of hours, so bask in the meaningless ephemeral frisson of this PNG while you can. (Clicking the image will give you a larger version.)

Update: Did I say hours? How about minutes. [Ars Technica]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

• PC HDTV Tuner – Visiontek TV Wonder HD 650 PCI Express HDTV dual tuner card for $70, shipped. About $50 off. Will let you use your PC as a HDTV via over-the-air signals and unencrypted ClearQAM cable. (You may still need a decoder box from your company.) [Slickdeals]

• Camcorders – Dell has some 20%-off coupons that apply to SD and HD camcorders of all stripes, making for some very good deals. [Slickdeals]

• Keyboard & Mouse – Basic cordless keyboard and mouse from Logitech for $20, shipped. [Dealhack]

• Sony HDTV + PS3 – If you buy the Sony Bravia 40-inch LCD HDTV, a 3.1-channel soundbar, and a PlayStation 3 from Best Buy all at once you get a $500 discount, bringing it all down to $1,600. A pretty nice deal for kickstarting a home theater. [Bargainist]

• MacBook Pro – The Apple store continues to sell refurbished last generation MacBook Pro for great prices. A 15-inch 2.16GHz model can be had for $1,300, shipped. [Dealnews]

• MP3 Player – Today's Woot is a two-pack of Sandisk 1GB MP3 Player for $20, shipped.

Rob Beschizza

Review: Exclusive first look at Sonos' new iPhone-based controller

By Alan Graham

I've been a fervent Sonos user for well over three years, and with all honesty I can't even think of a single piece of technology, outside of computers, that I've gotten so much value from day after day.

And while that has been my experience, the major complaint I've heard over time from others, was the system costs too much. Because of that, many people turned away and set their sites on other cobbled together solutions which were either nowhere near as capable or as nice.

Since then times have changed and there is a whole new landscape of devices now available that give people some similar Sonos functionality. The Squeezebox Duet starts at $399 and is getting great reviews. Then there's the Apple TV which is even less ($229) and now has a free application available for the iPhone and iPod that make it pretty compelling as a music solution.

Today, however, Sonos may have made price less of an issue for those who want an alternative to the walled Apple DRM nightmare, and on the other hand want to dip their foot into the Sonos pool, but don't want to spend $400 on just the controller alone. Rejoice! Sonos has just released a free iPhone/iPod app that controls their system, meaning you can get started with a Sonos system for about $350.

Regardless of what platform you are attracted to, I thought I'd give you a peek at the application in use, and to do that I decided to compare the Sonos app to the Apple TV/Airport Express and their free Remote app, as it might give you some insight into how both solutions look at and handle music. Not to mention that most iPhone/Touch users have probably tested or tried out the free Apple Remote app.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Unpleasant feedback music with walkie-talkies

Tom from MusicRadar writes in to tell us about musician Gordon Charlton. Charlton figured out how to produce "Theremin-like" sounds by manipulating the feedback produced by certain brands of walkie-talkie:

He simply turns the handsets on and moves them closer together and further apart. The pitch of the feedback that's created changes accordingly. That's all there is to it, really – there's no circuit-bending or other modification involved in this. Gordon uses a pair of Binatone Latitude 150 walkie-talkies (pictured below) that you can pick up for less than £20, but presumably, any model would do.

Rob Beschizza

Lutec's perpetual motion calculations a "basic mistake"

Yesterday, we saw a "zero point energy" machine from Australia. The creator, Lutec, says it's a "highly efficient means of generating electricity," but to many it'll look like just another rotary magnet-style perpetual motion machine. From their videos, it doesn't even seem a particularly elegant one:

From Lutec's website, it appears to be an investment scheme, with many appeals to buy shares. The most interesting claim in pursuit of that goal is that no physicist or engineer has ever looked at their figures and said it doesn't work. Enter BBG commenter Mac, who claims he's an engineer who has looked at Lutec's numbers and says it doesn't work.

I am a professional engineer in Australia. In September 2006 I was supplied with a summary of calculations by a potential investor to Lutec Australia, John Christie's company.

The summary had diagrams and calculations showing how this worked.

The calculations were, to put it politely, fundamentally miscalculations. For example, they calculated the energy taken out of the battery as 'Ampere Hour Rating' of the battery multiplied by the battery voltage drop over the time of the test.

Another basic mistake was that they did all kind of 'chopping' of a sine wave, then used formulas to convert 'Ipeak' to 'Irms' on the assumption that it was a non-chopped sine wave.

They are just two of the many, many mistakes in the calculations.

I know that my comments to the investor were passed back to them, as I was emailed John Christie's response.

I have no objection to them believing that they have invented something new. However, the claim that no engineer has looked at their figures and said it doesn't work is incorrect.

Mac makes clear that this is his professional opinion and not that of his employers.

Here is something made of Lego that works in similar fashion to Lutec's machine. Amazing free energy!

John Brownlee

Prevent head explosions with Ear Pressue Equalizer

Frequent flyers, we know the sight well. The plane begins to land and our inner ear pressure swells, feeling something like the gradual multiplication of wet socks within our brain pan. A clench of the jaw and our inner ear pressure pops, making us feel marginally better. Ah. But in front of us, a fellow passenger is not so lucky. He grabs the side of his head, frantically swallowing and yawning, his mouth frothing over with half-chewed Chiclets, but nothing happens. Now he's screaming. Oh god. Not again. The stewardess begins racing down the isle, brandishing an emergency trepanation kit, but you know its already too late. You hold your briefcase in front of your face just in time to avoid being splattered by a cerebral slurry and the shrapnel of teeth. Christ. These red eyes.

In short, fickle evolution has not blessed everyone with direct muscular control of their Eustachian Tube. The Ear Pressure Equalizer aims to level the playing field and halt, once and for all, the rash of Scanners-like head explosions that has been the airline industry's dirtiest little secret for over fifty years. Simply push the device into your ear, press the button and feel the aural orgasm of inner ear pressure releasing itself. It's $60, which is a tad expensive, but you really can't put a price on your skull not exploding.

Ear Pressure Equalizer [Proidee via Oh Gizmo]

John Brownlee

Pantone Rubik's Cube

Sheer genius: the Rubitone, a Rubik's Cube coded with the Pantone Color Matching System. This is the way I want to choose my next bedroom color, cycling through the possible chromatic permutations on a puzzle cube at the Home Depot paint desk.

The Rubitone (Rubik + Pantone) [Ignacio Pilotto (Thanks, Dean!)]

John Brownlee

Green Beetle RealBug Mouse contains insect carapace

The Green Beetle RealBug Mouse is a bog standard USB optical mouse with the shimmering emerald carapace of a real, dead beetle frozen in the acrylic like an insect trapped in amber.

Something of a missed opportunity, though. The pun is obvious: it should really contain the dessicated mummy of a rodent, eyes bulging, yellow incisors exposed $19.95.

Green Beetle RealBug Mouse [Scientifics Online via Red Ferret]

John Brownlee

Liquid Bookmarks in hemoglobin, milk, mercury

Liquid Bookmarks: short of nicking an artery and spurting a copper-scented gout upon the page, the best way to mark your place during an annual Halloween re-reading of The Books of Blood. A set of three (milk, hemoglobin, mercury) cost $29.

Liquid Bookmarks [Design Boom]

John Brownlee

The Flaming Lips' double-necked Guitar Hero guitar

Where many guitarists petulantly sulk about these damn kids today plinking on their plastic guitars, completely degrading the mystical art of the five-string craft... at least until the first Rock Band royalty check comes in... Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has built a Guitar Hero controller right into his double-necked guitar, using the five brightly colored buttons to control a built-in Korg Kaossilator synthesizer. You'll have to get through a rather sloppy vanity piece on some NBC jingle promotion to see it in action, but if you can get to 1:55 in this Entertainment Weekly piece, it's terribly neat.

Wayne Coyne's Guitar Hero guitar [Hollywood Insider via Hack-A-Day]

John Brownlee

3-inch portable speakers are cute, customizable figurines

I've never had much need for travel speakers — I've never wanted to subject a friend to a favorite song so much that I'd settle for the tinny, plasticky sound over just jamming one of my ear buds into their canal with my thumb — but if I were to carry one around with me on a regular basis, I'd choose one of these cute, customizable Headphonie figurines. They'll debut in batches of 500 to 1000 on November 30th for $30, with two blank figurines for your own customization.

Headphonies [Official Site via Slippery Brick]

John Brownlee

iGameboy: Gameboy custom theme for iPhone

Absolutely fantastic: a custom theme for the iPhone, vomited forth, Linda Blair style, in pixel puke pea green by the posession demon of a Nintendo GameBoy. You need to Jailbreak your phone to use it, as well as make your own Gameboy-style icons for custom apps.

iGameboy [Mac Themes via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Jordan Mechner's original Prince of Persia animation reference footage

Jordan Mechner, creator of the original Prince of Persia, has been posting his original development diary entries to his official blog to coincide with the exact date they were written 23 years ago. Each post is a treasure for fans of the games, but the October 20th entry is particularly special: it contains the animation reference video for the Prince Mechner shot in the Reader's Digest parking lot in 1985, using his kid brother as a model. Anyone who has ever played this game will know every once of David's motions by heart. Amazing.

October 20, 1985 [Jordan Mechner (Thanks, Joel!)

John Brownlee

Mac Minis to get GeForce motherboards?

Who knows if the Mac Mini is dead or just dormant? On the one hand, Apple's told retailers not to order any more; on the other, the fact that it's the only entry-level Mac during a period of economic distress.

Still, rumors keep on sidling towards "update" over "dusted." The latest rumor, courtesy of MacWorld's Peter Cohen: that the next refresh of the MacMini will ditch the Intel integrated graphics motherboard for the GeForce 9-series of motherboards.

That would be great news, if true. It is in-keeping with the recent Macbook refresh, and it means the Mac Mini would become something you could actually run World of Warcraft on. And if the update to the GeForce 9-series means the Mac Mini can push video decoding to the GPU the way the new MacBooks can, it'll make the Mini an attractive HTPC option again as well.

John Brownlee

Ars Technica reviews Guitar Hero: World Tour (Verdict: Rock Band has a contender)

Ars Technica has posted a thoughtful and thorough review of Guitar Hero: World Tour, Activision Blizzard's attempt to move the Guitar Hero franchise into the full band sim space Rock Band elbowed out for itself.

I admittedly haven't followed Guitar Hero: World Tour, having given up on Activision's ability to make a satisfying Guitar Hero game sans Harmonix after the execrable Guitar Hero 3 (and after Harmonix changed the game entirely with Rock Band). That said, Ars thinks the game holds its own with an incredible set list, and I was intrigued to hear that the actual hardware ‐ the plastic guitars and drum sets — has changed significantly, and largely for the better.

Here's Ars' thoughts on the touch strip.

The biggest addition to the guitar is the touch-strip below the buttons, and it's interesting. While holding a note, you can slide your finger up and down to add a very electronic-sounding "wah" effect, and this works just like the whammy bar. There will also be sections of songs where you can slide up and down instead of hitting the strum button, and those take a while to get used to: the "buttons" are all together with a small ridge between them, making finding the "home keys" very difficult. You also can't see the colors on the pads because that section of the guitar is indented, making it hard to use even while looking down.

They also thought the three pad drum kits was a significant step up from Rock Band's, which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect. Sounds like this one can't be dismissed out of hand.

Guitar Hero World Tour Review [Ars Technica]

John Brownlee

The VCR is dead

After years of dogged resolve, JVC will stop producing standalone VCRs. And there you have it: the last spider crawling out of the eye socket of the skeletal and long-buried video cassette format. Oh, sure, we'll still see video cassettes: there'll always be the niche gadget or two that crams a VHS slot into a Blu-Ray player either for kicks or to separate itself from the competition, just like we still see the occasional 8-Track player crammed into a CD deck. But if you are seriously intending on breaking out that box of old Something Weird compilation and watching them again, now's the time to do it before the VCR goes the way of Cowboy Bebop.

JVC stops manufacturing VCRs [Trading Markets]

John Brownlee

Harness the power of a rainbow to learn to type

All rainbow directives at Boing Boing Gadgets come from the top. The guy who decided Infomercia — our joyless, Orwellian gadget state — should be rainbow colored? The guy who has been pushing for a BBG redesign in the style of the Reading Rainbow open credits, complete with auto-playing theme song sung and performed by him? Joel.

So it doesn't take much guessing to decide that Joel will probably like this KeyRight Learning Keyboard, with each chromatic QWERTY meant to teach budding typist where to corral each of their gingers. Heck, Joel's practically shilling the thing: that slouched, effeminate Asian man in the official product image? The one in the glasses and hipster hair, hugging a rainbow keyboard to his sunken chest as if it were a stuffed unicorn? I'm really not sure that isn't Joel after a quick dye job and the surgical addition of a couple epicanthic folds. None of us have seen him for weeks!

Keyright [Official Site via CNet]

John Brownlee

Power On Self Test: Modern Science!

[via Ffffound]