Rob Beschizza

Happy New Year!

In keeping with the spirit of New Tech Journalism, we're breaking the U.S. embargo an hour early. Happy new year, Internet!

Welcome to 2009, the International Year of Natural Fibers.

Rob Beschizza

Review: A week with Asus' EeePC 1002HA netbook

Asus's 1002HA is an attractive little laptop that could easily pass for something several times its $500 price. It's only when you open it up and find a more-or-less standard netbook that it becomes clear it's not a new rival for the MacBook Air or Vaio TT.

But a netbook it is, albeit one that's pretty good by the category's standards. The 1.6 GHz Atom CPU, gig of ram, Bluetooth, 10.2" 1024x600 display, 160GB hard drive, three USB ports and a 1.3 megapixel webcam are to be expected; the ultra-thin form and its gorgeous brushed-metal chassis are the big bonuses. It's much prettier than the 1000HA it replaces.

It runs Windows XP and has Sun StarOffice and Microsoft Works pre-installed, as well as Asus's one-click power management tray utility. You'll want to jump out of the battery-saving modes to watch video or play casual games: even YouTube was a bit choppy on the lowest setting.

WiFi-n is a pleasing upgrade (many netbooks still just have b/g) but the 2-cell battery is disappointing. Though it got fair enough life for its tiny size — about 3 hours — the lack of a more substantial upgrade option is a shame.

It also falls short of perfection of other fronts. Asus still insists on a tiny right-shift key, the trackpad has a "sticky" response, and there's no 3G option. After seeing the HP Mini 1000's stunning, MacBook-like "Infinity" display, the 1002HA's thick, extruded bevels are a bit disappointing, too.

Get the 1002HA if you want a decent netbook with unparalleled good looks. Stick with the Samsung NC10 for better battery life or HP's Mini 1000 for a better all-round machine.

Rob Beschizza

Beautiful hand-made wooden computer speakers

Jeffrey Stephenson, creator of amazin art deco enclosures for small computers, has made a set of speakers to match his recent Ingraham.

With some leftover material from Ingraham and some scrap from other projects I decided to build Ingraham a set of speakers. The speakers started out life as Harmon Kardon units that came along with almost every Dell sold during 2000-2004. 5W units in a cheesy plastic case.

The brass-inlaid boxes, he writes in a forum post at Overclockers Australia, were built from 3/32" birch plywood and veneered in walnut and mahogany.

Gallery Page [Jeffrey Stephenson]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld, still feeling the holiday pinch of a games industry still not running on all rotors until after the New Year, we looked instead at a number of happenings on the fashion front, from a hoodie fit for Punch-Out!'s Little Mac, to the latest in the series of gawpingly gorgeous Pokemon t-shirts (!), to a shirt fit to be Offworld's own.

We also saw plaintive graffiti in Left 4 Dead, a fantastic new energy drink commercial from the man behind epic pixel-art explosions 'Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006' and 'Kings of Power 4 Billion %', listened to a live four-man Korg DS-10 jam, and saw how Japan has channeled Chris Cunningham to advertise its newly released version of BioShock.

Finally, we took a long look at Spelunky, a new procedurally generated freeware PC game that blends the best bits of Rogue/Nethack with 8-bit platforming, and is setting the bar very high for 2009's indie ilk.

Rob Beschizza

RUMOR: Steve Jobs in perfect health, sources warn

CUPERTINO, CA. — Rumors spread Tuesday that Apple CEO Steve Jobs might be in excellent health, rattling investors and contradicting widely-held industry belief. Stocks fell four percent in afternoon trading at the prospect of the company receiving less attention from rubber-necked bloggers.

The news unleashed a fresh round of speculation among Apple fans that Mr. Jobs, long thought to be fading fast, may in fact be in tip-top condition.

In a hastily-arranged conference call, Apple vice president of corporate communications Katie Cotton insisted that Jobs is at death's door. Cotton reminded reporters that he was recently introduced on-stage with a graphic depicting his own tombstone and the legend "1955-Soon!"

In 2005, however, Jobs was spotted leaping three feet into the air to forecfully slam-dunk a basketball at a private charity event in Denver. Several months ago, he was observed in his Mercedes S-Type several blocks from a Santa Clara MacDonalds, eating and conspicuously enjoying an Angus Third Pounder with Mushroom and Swiss.

Analysts fear that continuing reports indicating Jobs' continued well-being may take a serious toll on the technology sector.

Dennis Purland, industry analyst with Miros Associates, said that no-one would be pleased by the idea of Jobs being footloose and fancy-free, except Mr. Jobs.

"This would explain why Apple pulled out of next month's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco," Purland said. "A resurgent leadership at the company might not wish to be associated with a failing conference fed by a moon-eyed fanbase that it has never wanted and no longer sees any reason to cultivate."

Purland suggested that Jobs may step back from his daily duties at Apple to make way for a successor, around whom a new cult of personality could be constructed and then profitably smashed amid a thicket of vague, unsourced rumors.

Other insiders suggested that the flimsy reports may indicate more about the state of reportage than the health status of a world-leading CEO.

Vern Dourff, an analyst with Essengen, said: "If anonymous sources were privy to medical information protected under federal HIPAA regulations, you'd think they'd get a damned product rumor right once in a while."

Rob Beschizza

Review: Clarion Mind's GPS features nice, but MID is still a hard sell

As a GPS navigator with capable entertainment and computing features, Clarion's Mind justifies its $650 price tag. But it's otherwise a difficult hybrid that excels at nothing. Like a smartphone without the phone or a netbook without a keyboard, it doesn't quite nail the sweet spot assumed to lie between the two forms.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

"Kooky" USB drive features unpleasant cartoon characters

Cheap and mainstream, USB thumbdrives are almost to the point of cereal-box freebie.

The press release contains another great example of tech-industry bathos:

EMTEC, the inventor of the first magnetic tape for audio recording, boasting more than seventy years of experience ... has officially launched Kooky USB Drives, based on the popular character pens known as Kooky Klickers™.

Product Page {kookys]

Rob Beschizza

Wooden PC is ugly

Eazo's luxury Z70 wood-finish PC enclosure is a masterpiece of revolting design. Its unique wedding of rosewood and aluminum is only enhanced by its coat of natural Chinese lacquer. Within lies a water-cooled system build around a Core 2 Extreme CPU.

The mach-trans is fantastic, packed with phrases like "life is full of extravagant imagination, gentleman!" and "eight nuclear Extreme QX9775 processor."

Translated product page [qq via Born Rich]

Rob Beschizza

A storage medium for the 21st century: 5.25-inch fluffy disks

Hand-sewn by Jocelyn Paige Kelly of San Jose, these fluffy disks don't hold any bytes, but do protect your desktop from coffee rings. They're $28 a set, and also offered in compact form as tree ornaments.

The set comes with a wonderfully sturdy and repurposed Minikas-Ette Library Case to store and display your coasters. The case comes in black, grey, yellow, red, blue and green.

The majority of the felt used to make this unique coaster is EcoSpun felt. I favor EcoSpun felt because it's made from recycled plastic bottles. The inner gray portion is a regular synthetic felt and includes a used CD that I've stitched inside in order to make the coaster more durable.

Product Page [Etsy store Technabob]

John Brownlee

SifuF's portable N64: the Nintendo Sixtyfree Lite-R

Unlike most portable console mods, Ben Heck forumer SifuF's Nintendo Sixtyfree Lite-R doesn't look like a dictionary-like slab of plastic and particle board when viewed in profile. In fact, it's all very svelte, considering the console from which its guts were omphalically plucked... although that likely has a lot to do with the fact that SifuF didn't opt to include a battery pack, making this portable N64 a little less so.

SifuF's Nintendo Sixtyfree Lite-R [Ben Heck]

John Brownlee

Vogue advertises $830 netbook sleeves

Spotted in this month's Vogue, this utter insanity: ensconcing your $349 Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in an $830 Goyard netbook sleeve. Aren't sleeves supposed to cost less than the computers they protect?

[image via Geeksugar]

John Brownlee

Bill Nye teaches youngsters to recycle with Paper Recycling Factory

The inestimable Bill Nye the Science Guy snuck into stores this holiday season to brand this Paper Recycling Factory... you know, for kids. It accomplishes in colorfull plastic what you can do in a bucket in your garage: mash up, dye and hydrate old newspaper into paste, then squidge it into molds to make holiday cards and notebooks and the like. For $29.95, this seems like a good introduction to the principals of paper recycling for the young'uns: nothing teaches a kid about science better than the capacity to make a huge, stinking, goopy mess to their parent's chagrin.

Paper Recycling Factory by Bill Nye [Discover This via Treehugger]

John Brownlee

Ten vintage erector sets at oobject

oobject's latest list porn: a gallery of vintage erector sets, "an altogether different type of toy that resembled genuine engineering construction with trusses and girders, rather than plastic, primary color pixelated, objects." There's ten erector sets in the list, which roughly equals ten moist, juvenile guffaws at the sexual pun. Pictured, the 1960 Gilbert Erector Rocket Launcher Set... a set highly prized amongst erector set collectors for containing twice the amount of double entendres as a regular set.

Vintage Erector Sets to Buy [Oobject]

John Brownlee

Transforming flashlight becomes Decepticon-like scorpion robot

A regular LED flashlight, infused with an Energon cube, becomes the most bitching torch ever. It not only transforms into a little anthropomorphic robot, but also a spider and Decepticon-style scorpion. $20, and I desperately want.

Transforming Flashlight [Meritline via Nerd Approved]

Rob Beschizza

A beautiful but bad walkman clone

Retro Thing features this gorgeous old Walkman knockoff today. Alas, it's junk.

After 20 years, it still worked! The problems are that the audio plays at the wrong speed with lots of flutter, the sound quality is awful, and most importantly - the audio level is ear-splitting even at the lowest setting! There wasn't anything I was doing wrong, since there aren't any controls. An interesting design choice, but one that leaves you without fast forward, rewind, or a way to stop the tape other than shutting the unit off.

Walkman Knockoff Is Both Amazingly Tiny And Amazingly Crappy [Retro Thing]

Rob Beschizza

Intelligent Toilet II: now with urine temperature measurement

The second edition of the Intelligent Toilet is upon on us. Or beneath us, as the case may be. From Born Rich:

Intelligence Toilet from Toto was a boon for bathrooms when it came into existence in 2005. Now the same toilet maker has joined hands with Daiwa Housing to introduce the sequel, “Intelligence Toilet II” targeting women cadre. Carrying all previous characteristics (measurement of urine sugar, blood pressure, body fat and weight), the new version adds a new function, i.e. urine temperature measurement and analysis to the successor.

[CScout Japan via Born Rich]

John Brownlee

The Nailbrush... tetanus shots extra

Start with the coiffureage, end with a home trepanation! All for $35.

The item's description contains this priceless detail about the German factory in which the nailbrush is made:

The nail brush is made in a former school for the blind. The company now employs blind people to produce these extraordinary and functional brush items.

I like imagining this workshop for the blind, filled with gossamer-haired workmen with long, shimmering locks immaculately brushed over their pulsating skull holes.

Nailbrush [Fitzu via Gadget Lab]

Rob Beschizza

USB Eraser

A generic USB thumbdrive's hardware slotted tightly into a standard rubber eraser. It might not be neat, but your pencilling will be!

Product Page [Studio Room via Wired: Gadget Lab]

Rob Beschizza

LG offers the slimmest LED-lit television yet

LG's LH95 is just a smidgin under an inch thick, claims a 2m:1 contrast ratio and automatic frame-tweening at 240Hz. There's not word on how big it is, how much it will cost, or what resolution the display is at.

LG unveils the world's slimmest LED LCD TV [Aving]

John Brownlee

Asus ups luxury netbooks up to 12 inches, makes them not netbooks anymore

Asus' S121 follows on the heels of its luxury netbook, the S101, with the only major difference being a horizontal expansion to 12 inches.. at which point, the designation of "netbook" no longer applies. For some reason, this really irks Rob and me: it heralds a future in which all laptops are considered netbooks by cynical marketers, right up until the point that the term loses all its cachet and is abandoned wholesale and industry-wide. That's the way of things, of course, and fighting against the tide of PR drones misusing the term they coined is folly... but we gnash our teeth and give one another oiled angry hugs in the BBG chat channel none the less.

Asus S121 [Eee PC News]

Rob Beschizza

Sony P's keyboard in glorious art-o-vision

Posted by Jenn of the Pocketables forums is this teaser shot, which suggests that Sony's forthcoming P has (a) a proper keyboard and (b) a tracknipple. New Picturebook threat level Red, people!

If Sony manages to get this out for under $700, the universe will realign. But it won't.

Mobile Vaio teaser on Sony Japan [Pocketables]

Rob Beschizza

Coby says it isn't going to make a netbook, but it is

The eagle eye of James Kendrick lands on a trademark application.

Coby's plan is perhaps is not to turn its ability to manufacture and shift tons of stuff to making a genuinely sub-$100 computer. (Update: that rumor was an anonymously sourced hoax and denied outright by Coby. If it is now making a netbook, there's no reason to assume specifications and pricing yet)

Coby netbook... [JKontherun]

John Brownlee

The Graffititek Bookshelf by Charles Kalpakian

I absolutely love this strange Graffititek Bookshelf by French designer Charles Kalpakian. For one, it looks like a bookshelf hewn out of the inside of a massive tree root by a bibliophile Baggins. For those who look for pure efficiency in their book stacking, this will annoy, but I love the higgledy-piggledy jumble of disproportionate book spines rioting on the shelves.

Graffititek [DeTank via Freshome]

John Brownlee

Magnetically attachable iPhone camera lens

The iPhone's camera is execrable, like taking a photograph of saturated picture hell through a glass smeared vaseline darkly. Thus, a lot of the third-party accessories for fitting your iPhone with additional lenses seemed a bit silly... especially when these lenses fit to the iPhone only through the bulkiest of case attachments.

There's still something silly about slapping a more powerful lens on your iPhone, but if you are prone to do such a thing, this magnetic snap-on lens sold for $17 by USB Fever probably is the best way to do it: a little, magnetized rubber ring, affixed by glue around your iPhone's occulus, with the lens itself snapping on and off according to Rear Window style whims. And it works for other phones too.

Magnetic / Detachable Wide Angle Lens for iPhone / Cellphone / NDS [USB Fever via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

See the fancy Pocket PCs that Intel wants you to buy instead of Netbooks

Behold the ultra-mobile PCs of CES 2009. Intel Ultra Mobility chap Uday Keshavdas reminds us that this—running Vista on $1,000 Pocket PCs you can't type properly on—is what Atom was supposed to be for!

Some of these devices are actually damn cool things, and there's one great moment where Keshavdas points out a device that was designed for blogging with on the move. Someone out there is thinking of us. It's appreciated!

Rob Beschizza

Report: Best Buy selling calibration service by hooking TVs up with bad cables

Best Buy just got caught using the oldest TV salesman trick in the book: put two identical televisions side-by-side, but hook one of them up using different cables to give it bad reception. Then tout the other set's superior picture as the result of an expensive "calibration" service the customer doesn't really need.

It's especially perfidious in an age when many modern sets can't be calibrated the way old rear-projection monsters could be.

When challenged, the store's staff said that the process now involves changing color balance settings on the on-screen menu, just like any idiot can do.

Best Buy Sneaky Sneaky Calibration Tricks Make a Comeback [Consumerist]

Rob Beschizza

Tetris watch

Designed by Lysandre Follet, this watch plays Tetris. It's not entirely clear if it's for real, as the artist's site is down and it's hard to imagine the Tetris trademark getting onto things without other corporate livery following it there. If it is, it's clearly going to be released by Nixon—guys who do a mean line in retro wristwear.

Update: Commenter Frankiez points out that it was up at Yanko ages and ages ago: Tetris Pong Forever.

Retro watch [Radeville via Trendhunter]

Rob Beschizza

EYES

My personal robotic assistant was not quite right. [jwz]

Rob Beschizza

BenQ JoyBook Lite U101 netbook is a "A Bundle of Joy"

Laptop Mag's Joanna Stern has BenQ's JoyBook. It's a cool 10-incher with some strange deviations from the standard netbook loadout.

First, the good. It's a lovely shade of blue, it has a true 16:9 display ratio, and is a "modders paradise" thanks to unused slots and ports galore within the chassis.

But then there's the bad, which begins with how they went about getting that display ratio: by moving the horizontal line count in the wrong direction.

A Bundle of Joy Arrives: BenQ JoyBook Lite U101 First Impressions [Laptop Mag]

Rob Beschizza

Promoting programming with posters

Check out the posters Dean Putney designed to encourage youngsters to learn code.

I designed these posters for my Communication Design Fundamentals final project at Carnegie Mellon University. These are meant to be put in schools, and are specifically designed to target 6th grade and middle school students. They can be printed on standard sized printer paper, or on 11x17 paper with a little trimming.

Programming Promotion Posters [Dean Putney]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld, we recapped all the holiday stories we missed late last week, including a number of developments on the iPhone: the appearance of match-3/RPG PuzzleQuest, Jason Rohrer's momento mori art-game Passage, Flashbang's excellent dino-catcher Raptor Copter, and the surprise announcement that Hudson will be bringing Kloonigames' Crayon Physics Deluxe to the App Store.

We also took another look at LittleBigPlanet's brilliant Metal Gear Solid level pack, read advice on making machine-mediated user-generated content more prevalent in games, and about the 2008 game that finally did drunk right after years of /drinks. Finally, and most wonderfully, we read about the technical ins-and-outs of Twit 4 Dead, the automated twitter bots bravely tweeting their struggle against the horde.

Xeni Jardin

BBtv Favorites from 2008: TechShop, a Community Tinkering Space

(Flash embed above, downloadable MP4 link here.)

Xeni here, popping in for a post on Boing Boing Gadgets to share one of our favorite Boing Boing tv episodes from 2008. We're doing a year-end retrospective all week on the motherboing.

Today, we revisit the fun we had checking out TechShop, an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. Tinkerers, inventors, and hackers pay a membership fee, and in turn receive access to professionally-maintained gear, workshops, mentors, and a community of like-minded makers.

Currently there is only one site in Silicon Valley, and it opened in 2006. But founder Jim Newton (a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster) plans to open a number of locations around the US -- and eventually, the rest of the world.

John Todd, who you'll meet in this episode, wrote this article about the membership-based machine and fabrication shop in a recent edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools zine. Snip:

I've been a member since before TechShop really even started, back when it was just some guys passing out flyers trying to gauge interest. For $100 a month, members can use any tool in the shop on which they've received training. MUCH cheaper than buying your own gear. The list of equipment is pretty extensive, too, and new items are arriving frequently (like a new hot-wire foam cutter).

TechShop is unusual in the way it's funded - community members are the financial backers. To date, TechShop has been funded by taking loans from members and repaying them at a nominal rate. Typically backers contribute $25k and up, and are then paid back over several years. There is an "A" round being raised now to fund the nationwide expansion, and the first funding source again is going to be the community instead of focusing on traditional VC sources. It's an unusual way to keep members excited about what they do at TechShop, and to keep them focused on making the whole experience better. Jim Newton (CEO) and Mark Hatch (COO) are looking for additional interested people who want to become members and funders - contact TechShop for details.

Rob Beschizza

Police say man beat girlfriend with cellphone after reading her text messages

There was a time where the headline "Man Beat Girlfriend Over Texts" might have referred to a spat over who unearthed the best Coptic documents at an archaeological dig. Thanks to internet, that time has gone. from Fox News:

A 40-year-old Lapeer County man beat his girlfriend with a cell phone, bound her with duct tape and held her captive for about nine hours because of text messages from a friend, authorities said. ... The sheriff's department said the woman told investigators that her boyfriend bound and beat her with the phone and his fists after reading text messages Sunday afternoon.

No word, unfortunately, on what the rage-inducing messages actually were.

Cops: Man Beat Girlfriend, Held Her Captive Over Texts [Fox]

Rob Beschizza

LG's wrist-phone coming to CES

Dick Tracy donned his wrist-radio in 1946. More than sixty years on, LG finally has one to sell us.

The LG-GD910 has a HSDPA radio, a 1.43-inch color touchscreen LCD display, text-to-speech, and an MP3 player. It'll be at CES, and we will most certainly be taking a look.

LG introduces 3G HSDPA wrist phone [Electronista and Akihabara News]

Rob Beschizza

Make mad music with Zephyr iPhone app

Zephyr is a new iPhone app from the creators of Ocarina. Where Ocarina was a virtual flute one had to blow the old-fashioned way, however, Zephyr is a stranger creation that turns finger-painted art into "distinctive sounds of wind and music."

Zephyr senses every touch and tilt to supplement each message with a unique wind sound, creating a unique visual and audio story. Gently composed writing might be accompanied by the sound of a lightly blowing breeze. Quickly drawn designs might generate the sound of blustery winds. User can release their snow and wind compositions into the atmosphere. These messages ultimately land in the hands of people across the globe.

If a recipient likes a particular message, he or she can express ‘love’ by tapping on a heart icon. A message that is ‘loved’ will get passed on to another recipient. So, the most interesting messages will be shared by the most people. It's sort of a message in a bottle. Only you can see where your message went. Over time, it's possible your message will circumnavigate the globe.

Like other Smule applications, Zephyr is built with the ChucK audio programming language developed by Dr. Ge Wang, Smule’s chief technology officer and co-founder.

Zephyr is $1 at the AppStore. A gallery of screenshots follows.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

"Gizmos" book helps you make working paper machines

Rob Ives' "Gizmos" looks like a blast: a $13 book that includes cut-out automata you can make yourself, such as popping frogs and marching robots.

Using the ingenious punch-out designs included in Gizmos, you can assemble six enchanting automata by designer Rob Ives—and when you’ve mastered the fundamental techniques, you can create new designs of your own. Gizmos includes:
• A pre-made pop-up frog ready to jump right out of the box!
• Pre-stamped punch-out parts for two snap-up models that are perfect for first-time builders
• Complete punch-out parts to create six full-color, fully animated paper machines: Die Fledermaus, Mouthy Moose, Schrödinger’s Cat, Shrimp Boat, Surf Bunny, and Marching Robot
• A 144-page book with an introduction to automata and the simple mechanisms—cranks, cams, and levers—that give them life; easy-to-follow instructions to make eight Rob Ives models; and handy reusable templates for each of the model parts, to get you started on future projects

Take that, ancient Rhodes!

Gizmos -- The best paper automata deal around! [Barnes and Noble via Dugnorth]

Rob Beschizza

Hybrid MSI netbook combines SSD and hard drive

MSI's new Wind netbook, the U115, combines spinning disks and flash to create what it describes as the world's first hybrid-storage netbook.

It runs on an 8GB solid state drive most of the time to improve performance, with the 160GB hard drive acting as mass storage. This is an iffy proposition: most solid state drives, especially those used in netbooks, do not perform as well as hard drives when it comes to read- and write-speeds. There are, however, improvements in power consumption and durability to consider, too.

It's otherwise standard netbook fare: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, optional 6-cell battery, a 10-inch display with 600 lines, an integrated card reader, 802.11n, and the right shift key in a randomly determined location.

The World's First Hybrid Storage Netbook- MSI U115 Hybrid [MSI]

Rob Beschizza

Wood-E

Stunning work by Morpheus of Hertfordshire.

Source [/film via Make]

Rob Beschizza

Nokia's folding keyboard looks like a challenge

Keyboard size has proven itself a major hurdle to miniaturization. QWERTY will not be replaced, and our hands cannot simply be shrunken. This leaves us with a practical minimum of perhaps 70-90% size of a standard layout. Any smaller, and it becomes troublesome for most people to touch-type.

Today's imaginative solution to this problem comes from Nokia, which filed a patent for a particularly weird folding keyboard. Particularly cool: close inspection reveals the display itself is flexible.

[Cellpassion via Ubergizmo, etc.]

Rob Beschizza

Behold the Exilim-phone

Casio's Exilim-phone, a fairly standard EVDO Rev. A phone with a 5 megapixel camera plus 3x optical zoom, comes soon to our shore. Verizon will subsidize it, and this is what it will look like.

[Intomobile via Ubergizmo]

Rob Beschizza

Screw the Nano. Where's my iPhone Pro?

Everyone assumes that if Apple makes another iPhone, it'll be a "Nano" model the size of a playing card (and not much thicker.) Jesus Diaz, however, hankers for the iPhone Pro, a device that's bigger and badder than the original.

It's mostly an embodiment of last year's "top 10 iphone flaws" lists. Some of the iPhone Pro's features, like MMS, would work fine on a current iPhone, if only Apple wanted you to have them. But other things are beautiful dreams: its game-friendly D-pad, for example, and a proper keyboard.

Perhaps it's proof that software is everything, these days: I keep looking at it and thinking that Nokia already makes it.

The design is by Mat Brady, refined by Diaz. Check out the full spread at Giz.

The Dream iPhone Pro [Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: now with unlimited weekend minutes

From Next Nature.

John Brownlee

Two weeks with Nero's LiquidTV/TiVo PC DVR software

Guest Review by Reed Savory

I wanted to love this product.  I almost physically needed to love this product.  I love my TiVos and was craving the ability to finally have full TiVo DVR functionality in a Windows-based Home Theater PC.  My dream HTPC system would have all the benefits of the fantastic TiVo user interface and functionality married to all the benefits of being on a PC platform, where I can expand disk space as much as I want and can easily swap to the desktop and run standard Windows games and applications and browse the web - all the things you can't do with a dedicated TiVo DVR box.  That was the functionality I've been wanting since I bought my first TiVo, nearly eight years ago now.

Nero's Liquid TV/TiVo PC (NLTV) DVR software sounded, finally, like the perfect solution for me, and it had me ready to hand-over my credit card info to Nero and place an order almost as soon as I saw the first pre-release write-up on the product last summer.  Fortunately for my wallet, I've just spent the last two weeks evaluating the currently shipping commercial release of the product for BBG, and I'm sorry to say that so far NLTV doesn't match the aspirations it has for itself and doesn't come close to a "true" TiVo experience.  Nero has done a great job making NLTV look like a TiVo and (mostly) act like a TiVo, but the resemblance is only skin-deep.  Put plainly, the current release of NLTV isn't ready for primetime.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

TakaraTomy's new Xiao camera-printer braces itself, squats...

How TakaraTomy and Zink really think of your pictures taken with a XIAO [Akihabara News]

John Brownlee

Finally! A reason to stare, unblinking, directly into the sun...

To power your gadgets, of course. The solar dyed sunglasses would also make a great addition to the costume of any infinity-themed super hero or villain.

Solar Powered Sun Glasses [Yanko]

John Brownlee

Space Origami

It's too bad it's after Christmas, because this Space Origami set (complete with folding manual) looks like it'd make a great little gift for a happily mutated niece or nephew. $10, which is cheap for a construction paper spaceman or angularly tentacled alien squidling.

Space Origami [Spoon Sisters]

John Brownlee

The New York Times: Text messages cost carriers virtually nothing

The New York Times has a good piece up on the heavy curtain of secrecy that surrounds mobile carriers' profit margins on text messaging. In short, they're bilking you... but you already knew that. But here's a pretty simple explanation of why the text messages you pay twenty cents each to send costs the carrier basically nothing:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

This is why, when you call up and complain about your service, they will often try to placate you with offers of "free text messages...." they are giving away an infinite resource with almost no cost to them but a perceived value to the consumer. Text messaging fees are the biggest scam in the mobile phone market.

What Carriers Aren't Eager To Tell You About Texting [New York Times]

John Brownlee

A 1962 Sears brand chemistry set... you know, for kids

MAKE spotted this fantastic 1962 era chemistry set from Sears up on eBay. This was apparently marketed to Kennedy-era I.D.ers as well as science minded tots: the first bullet point mentions both "exciting chemistry and magic experiments."

Science! If you're stupid, it's just like magic!

In 1962, Sears made chemistry sets [MAKE]

John Brownlee

Rubik's Cube Light Lamp

A fantastic Rubik's Cube lamp by Eric Paultz. Unsolvable, alas... at least without searing off your fingerprints.

Rubik's Lamp [Go Get It via Slippery Brick]

John Brownlee

John Lennon shills the OLPC

Cadaverous hand stretched taut and skittering with beetles from the loam of the grave, John Lennon shills the OLPC, with Yoko Ono's consent. It's terrible. And not just plain terrible: we're talking "cutting out the mouth on a standard picture and then holding it in front of your face while you do a John Lennon impression" terrible here. That Lennon appears to be pervertedly smirking throughout doesn't help matters.

Worse, it's nonsensical. "Imagine every child no matter where in the world they were could access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want." Universe of knowledge certainly has a grand and poetic feel to it, but as an achievable goal, it means nothing: what, you mean something besides the universe of knowledge we were all squirted into post-utero? Dimensional transport, perhaps.

And then: "I tried to do it through my music." Failwhale, Mr. Lennon. I'm not saying that you didn't write some pretty awesome songs, but I wouldn't say "Strawberry Fields Forever" encompasses the sum of all human knowledge or anything. Somehow, the spot manages to cheapen both the woefully compromised OLPC initiative and John Lennon's legacy. This couldn't have been anyone's intent.

Resurrecting the dead to shill modern products is not going to catch on. Digitally, it's creepy, and reeks of defilement no matter how well done: celebrity muff diving gone necrophile, with long licks down the furrow of the uncanny valley. There's something inherently more loathsome about Lennon's OLPC commercial, though, than Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner. What is it that makes the former seem so much more cynical than the latter?

Lennon stars in TV laptop advert [BBC]

Rob Beschizza

A brief history of hacking the iPhone

Eliot from Hackaday points to the iPhone-dev team's presentation at Chaos Communication Congress, in which the history of iPhone hacking—and its healthy state—is detailed. According to the gents behind it, more than a hundred users at Apple itself like to pwn.

It's an hour long and I've only listened to 10 minutes, but it's good stuff, full of interesting technical details. This of course assumes that you are interested in details of how USB connections are multiplexed by OSX Lobotomized Edition, etc.

25c3: hacking the iphone [Hackaday]

Rob Beschizza

Why iPhones are not transparent

From Gizmodo.

Rob Beschizza

G-Dog the robot puppy

G-Dog is a fantastic kit robot that you cannot buy in America.

Nine small RS304MD servos (new command TTL/ PWM system) are used for the G-Dog. The G-Dog is a high performance and reasonably-priced four-leg robot coming with Processing Unit and Motion Editor. The G-Dog comes with 9 command-type robot servos and each servo has its own command ID. More servos can be added using a hub and no complex wiring is required. Command-type Control Servo contains a built-in CPU. Since servos receive commands for speed and directions for each movement and operate according to the commands, there is less load on Processor.

Video demonstrates how fast and agile it is, compared to the sort of thing you can buy in the shops:

G-Dog Servo Robot Dog by G-Robots [Hacked Gadgets]

Rob Beschizza

iPhone $2 cheaper at Walmart

Apple's iPhone is now available at Walmart, for $197. One wonders if the Walmart buyer tasked with negotiating that shocking discount is happy that AT&T started offering refurbs for $99 over the weekend.

At this rate, the real cost of an iPhone might soon sink as low as $1,650!

Photo: Computerworld

Rob Beschizza

Complicated polypropylene snow shovel will doubtless offer years of service

Perhaps you'd like to take a simple tool and add a layer of needless but enticing complexity. Perhaps that will make it easier to get the job done. Perhaps it will last until February.

Perhaps! From the product description:

The Sno Wovel design multiplies mechanical force and leverage at the axle or fulcrum point of the 35 diameter wheel. With a seesaw action, it's possible to throw twice as much snow as a traditional shovel into piles over 4ft high. Great in all snow conditions, from slush to over 2ft (and especially for heavy) snow. Made of heavy gauge steel and injection-molded polypropylene plastic, the Sno Wovel can move up to 2ft of heavy snow with their 26 extra wide blade (and even slush).

In other news, the extravagantly complicated plastic poop-scoop I got for Christmas has already broken. And it's not like my dogs are laying tungsten carbide eggs out there. Just saying.

The Sno Wovel Wheeled Snow Shovel [Amazon]

Rob Beschizza

Three-dee star atlas globe

Human life would be tolerable were it not for the misery of our terrestrial imprisonment. What is the internet but an journey into the inner lights of our culture, endlessly recycled? Where is the future, the promised journey into the outer darkness?

Oh, it's at Hammacher Schlemmer for $300 and it's made of transparent acrylic!

Three Dimensional Star Atlas [HS]

Rob Beschizza

Psion explains "Netbook" legal offensive

Psion, which owns a trademark on "Netbook," says it's after manufacturers who use the word to market their products, not websites that talk about them. The mixup occurred thanks to Amazon ads, or something. [Lilliputing]

Rob Beschizza

Cygnus systems patents desktop icons, sues Microsoft, Apple and Google

Cygnus Systems of Michigan patented thumbnail icons and is suing Microsoft, Apple, and Google. From Ars:

The patent in question is US 7,346,850, called "System and method for iconic software environment management." Its abstract describes "a method and system for storing, navigating, and accessing files within an operating system through the use of a graphical thumbnail representing the video display of the active document within the active application." In other words, Cygnus' patent describes features similar to those of Windows Explorer and Apple's Finder.

Cygnus Systems filed for its patent in 2001, which was awarded in March 2008.

Macworld's commenters are unearthing the abundant prior art. You know, just in case Microsoft and Apple would rather spend years defending themselves in court at unimaginable expense, rather than just pay the troll off.

Microsoft, Apple, Google sued over icon software patent [Ars Technica]

John Brownlee

Global computer ownership

Computer ownership [Economist via Treehugger]

John Brownlee

The Armadillo Breadbox retracts its carapace

The Armadillo Breadbox is expensive for a bread receptacle, but the retractable plates of its mold-guarding carapace make me want to spend the $90 for it anyway.

Armadillo Breadbox [Where Did You Buy That? via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Lightsaber nunchucks outmack Darth Maul

Lightsaber nunchucks: the realization of at least some twelve year old's fever dream. In universe, these would not be pragmatic: there's a reason a Jedi's lightsaber handle is not made of the same material as the blade... namely, the plasmic energy of ten thousand suns. Still, even though these nunchucks are nothing more impressive than a couple of Glow-Sticks tied together with a string. points awarded for aesthetic bitchingness.

When Lightsaber Meets Nunchucks [Tech E Blog]

Joel Johnson

Happy Authorized Boxing Day

[via Vintage Computing]

Rob Beschizza

iBoobs denied entry to AppStore

"Obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory," says Apple.

Rob Beschizza

Sony Picturebook returns in high-def

Details of Sony's not-a-netbook went live today, apparently by accident.

It's price is $NaN.00, which means the price isn't in the database yet ("Not a Number"), but it has a 1.33GHz Intel processor, Windows Vista, a 1600x768 ultra-widescreen 8-inch display, and a 60GB hard drive or 128GB SSD.

In the unfinished ad, it weighs "x.xx" pounds and has an "x-hour" battery. The picture is apparently a placeholder: it looks exactly like a Vaio TT, which doesn't match the teaser ad or the FCC images.

Assuming it has a clamshell form-factor, Sony's returned to the netbook's own roots, producing an old-fashioned subnotebook with the benefit of new technology. The original Picturebooks suffered from poor performance and battery life, due to Transmeta's disappointing chipsets: Intel's Atom represents the successful execution of that (part) of Transmeta's late-1990s plans. The clock speed's usual for an Atom machine, though: the Core Solos in the UX ran at 1.33 GHz.

Let's see that price.

Sonystyle store [Sony]

Rob Beschizza

Advertising regulator agrees with Apple: Windows is virus-stricken and insecure

Britain's strict ad-standards regulators offered a Christmas gift to Apple yesterday: it ruled that ads claiming Windows is less stable than OSX--and more vulnerable to infection-- were truthful.

Despite a history of correcting Apple's hyperbolic marketing, it did not uphold a round of complaints filed against the "I'm a Mac" campaign.

We considered that people would understand [the ad] to mean viruses that infected Windows based PCs would not infect Macs and that Macs were less likely to be infected by viruses than those PCs; not that Macs would never be infected by viruses and did not require virus protection. ... We concluded therefore that the ad was not irresponsible or likely to mislead.

The Brits' version of the familiar TV and web slots feature comedy duo Mitchell and Webb. Complaints were directed against an ad that had the "PC" character declare that he always crashes and was riddled with viruses; another where he sneezed due to said infections; and another where he would stop talking in mid-sentence to "reboot."

Some of the complaints asserted this gave a misleading impression that all PCs were unstable, while other claimed that computers running Apple's operating system were also vulnerable to virus infection. Another of the complainants said that PCs running Linux were just as unlikely to be infected with malware as Macs

The Advertising Standards Authority, in not upholding the complaints, took the view that consumers were generally aware of the distinction between operating system and hardware.

We considered that those people, who were aware of other PC operating systems, would also understand that viruses attacked software and operating systems, not hardware, and would therefore understand that the ad referred to PCs that ran Microsoft Windows rather than another platform, for example, Linux. We concluded that, because people who saw them would understand they referred to PCs that ran on Microsoft Windows and any operational difficulties that might be associated with them, the ads did not misleadingly imply all PCs, regardless of software or system, were vulnerable to crashing and viruses.

The authority also ruled that Macs were less likely to be infected:

the claim did not imply Macs would never be infected by viruses and did not require virus protection. We understood that the type of viruses that infected PCs with Microsoft Windows, could not infect Macs that did not run Microsoft Windows. We also understood that Macs, which did not operate on Microsoft Windows, were less likely to be infected by viruses than PCs. We concluded therefore that the claim was not irresponsible or likely to mislead.

Finally, it determined that OSX is more generally stable than Windows, due to the latter's likelihood of malware infection:

Macs that did not run Microsoft Windows were less likely to crash than PCs that ran Microsoft Windows

Joel Johnson

Merry Xmas (or whatever!)

[via Books.Google.com/Popular Mechanics]

Rob Beschizza

Behold Sony's not-a-netbook

Spotted at Sony's Japanese Vaio site is this device, which resembles the computer partially revealed by the FCC. It's a pretty but indistinct image that feeds its promise to "change the way you look at laptops" next month: no screen, keyboard or other features are even clear. There's just a hint of a crease, which morphs into an envelope's flaps in the teaser ad.

What do we know of Sony's new machine? According to the FCC filing, its 9 inches long, runs Windows and has high-end connectivity options. It could be a "mobile internet device" such as Intel originally imagined its Atom processors would power; a modern iteration of its much-loved Picturebook series of subnotebooks; or yet another high-end Sony ultra-portable, in the tradition of its T- and U-series.

What's for certain is that it won't be a clamshell netbook with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 92% size keyboard and Windows XP ULCPC edition: One Sony exec's already asserted it won't make a netbook like the ones that are currently out.

Sony Japan [Electronista]

Rob Beschizza

Psion, owner of "Netbook" trademark, would like world to stop using that word generically

Psion is sick of hearing about other companies' netbooks. It'll even cease and desist you if you talk about them, according to reports.

This is because it used to make a miniature laptop called the Netbook, and still owns a trademark on the term. Its machine was cool, in the way that pricey ultra-mobile computers always are, but not a hit with consumers. It was similar to the NEC MobilePro, HP Jornada, and other machines from the "glory days" of instant-on Windows CE Pocket PCs.

A few years on, it's nonetheless antsy about the world using it as a generic term to refer to cheap little laptops. Following is one of the missives from its legal firm, which I'm not 100 percent convinced is real.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

How It Works .... The Computer (Ladybird books, 1978)

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Advertising regulator bans Dyson vacuum cleaner ad after Hoover complains

Britain's Advertising Standards Authority has ordered Dyson not to repeat an ad that claims its vacuum cleaners don't rely on filters and don't clog.

The ruling, which follows a complaint from competitor Hoover, comes despite Dyson having cleared its claims before running the ad. It also backed up the claim with independent evidence that its technology worked.

As is often the case with ASA rulings, it came down to the regulator's belief that certain phrases would be misunderstood by consumers.In this case, it ruled that "a Dyson doesn't rely on a filter" would be interpreted by the general public to mean that there is no filter at all in Dyson's machine.

While Dysons do contain filters, they perform auxiliary air intake and hypoallergenic functions, and do not need to be frequently cleaned. Most vacuum cleaners use filters to help remove dust from air, and they require frequent cleaning and replacement--Dysons use the eponymous inventor's cyclonic separation system.

"We understood that neither the pre-motor nor the post-motor filters fitted in a Dyson cleaner were used in the primary separation of dust and dirt from the air," the ASA said in its ruling. "We recognised that Dyson had intended the claim to highlight the difference between the filtration system of Dyson cleaners and that of other cleaners ... We considered, however, that viewers were likely to understand the claim "a Dyson doesn't rely on a filter so there's nothing to clog" to imply Dyson cleaners did not have a filter, which meant they could not become clogged, although we appreciated that this was not the message Dyson had intended to convey."

The ruling all but admits that the Advertising Standards Authority evaluates complaints based not on the technical accuracy of a claim, but on whether a complainant's misinterpretation of it was "likely" -- even if other branches of Britain's advertising regulatory system had specifically blessed the claim at hand.

"The Broadcasting Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) said they sought expert advice from a consultant and discussed the ad in their secretariat meeting before clearing it. They said they agreed with Dyson's argument that, although the ad stated "a Dyson doesn't rely on a filter", it was not misleading, because it did not state that there was no filter at all," it wrote. "We noted the expert commissioned by the BACC had accepted Dyson's evidence that the suction power of certain Dyson cleaners remained constant when the dust collection bin filled up with certain quantities of dust,"

According to the ruling, the ad must not be run again in its current form.

Rob Beschizza

Acer surges as Apple loses PC market share, overtaken by Asus

Joel Johnson

BBtv: Farewell, My Lovely Consumer Electronics Show

Although we didn't bother with CES last year, this year the Boing Boing team will be out in the cold Las Vegas desert, sifting through piles of sadness incarnate to find the precious products that might actually make our lives — if not truly better — a little happier in the coming year.

I'm more excited about going to CES as I have been in a long time. (Thanks in large part to your suggestions.) We try to keep it positive around here, but sometimes that's easier to do when everyone else seems so down in the dumps.

At least that's how I think it'll be at this year's show. Perhaps the convention won't be quite as bleak as I imagine in this "Road to CES" video we've put together.

Here's a direct MP4 link if you'd prefer to download.

Joel Johnson

Fry's exec busted for $65MM embezzlement scheme, Vegas flings

From the AP:

SAN JOSE (AP) - A Ferrari-driving vice president of Fry's Electronics Inc. who was allegedly such a heavyweight gambler that casinos chartered private planes to fly him to Las Vegas has been arrested on charges he embezzled more than $65 million from the retailer to fuel his lavish lifestyle and pay off debts.

Ausaf Umar Siddiqui is accused by the IRS of concocting an incredibly profitable scheme in which he cut side deals with some of Fry's suppliers, buying their goods at higher prices than they would normally get, and buying more of them than he normally would, in exchange for kickbacks of up to 31 percent of the total sales price.

Fry's Exec Accused In $65M Embezzlement Scheme [CBS5.com/AP]

Joel Johnson

Gas Cubby for iPhone on sale for $1

Gas Cubby, the very well reviewed iPhone application for tracking car maintenance and fuel efficiency is on sale today for a buck. (It's normally $5.)

You can export your car data without much issue — it supports Excel/CSV — but I'd really like to see integration with Fuely.

Gas Cubby [iTunes App Store]

Joel Johnson

Hide your HDMI cable in your walls with Flatwire

Flatwire, makers of specialized cabling that can be hidden in drywall with a minimum of extra work, have announced a new HDMI variant in lengths up to 20 feet. There's no price yet, but if it's anything like the component video versions, it won't be cheap. I would expect a 20-foot length to be around $140 or more.

Far more expensive than your generic HDMI cable from Monoprice, for instance, but not all that much for a nice media closet installation. Should be out in the new year.

Flatwire product page (no HDMI info yet) [FlatWireReady.com]

John Brownlee

Royal College of Art freshmen envision the future of cars

Earlier this month, first year students of the Vehicle Design course at London's Royal College of Art were asked to present concepts for light, compact cars of the future. The results are pretty fun: the one above looks like it just crawled out of a Miyazaki anime, while the one below looks like it is imported from a world gone Tron.

EuroK-Cars at the Royal College of Art [Dezeen]

John Brownlee

Japanese gothic surrealism advertises Windows 3.1

Ditch those doofy "I'm a PC" ads, Microsoft. You were advertising Windows far better 17 years ago.

Windows 3.1 Commercial [YouTube]

John Brownlee

Television fire place in Prenzlauer Berg

There's nothing tackier than a television basking a cathode fireplace around Christmas time, but I spotted this old Zenith spitting embers and burning logs at the junta-like Scotch and Sofa in Prenzlauer Berg (do not go for the scotch selection, which is meager: go to make out in the cavernous, sofa-strewn basement), and for once did not seize up in a full body seizure, the paroxysms of which formed my body's natural allergenic reaction to low-brow Yuletide schmaltziness.

Rob Beschizza

Pass it on: Football 2 for iPhone

IPhone developer Mark Helmuth is dedicated to feeding the old-school handheld gaming nostalgia beast: LED Football 2 is released today for iPhone. It'll be up at the AppStore imminently.

New features include running, kicking, punts, field goals and, of course, passing. It even emulates the slow accumulation of wear on the plastic buttons:

Introducing LED Football 2 with passing. Now you're in charge with 2nd generation electronic football technology! Total Control LED Football 2 with Passing means you have total offense. Now the power is at your fingertips to bring the defense to its knees. Watch as your receiver goes wide and your Quarterback locks on. Hit the orange PASS button and let that bad boy fly over the heads of that shifty defense (watch out, they can and will intercept you!) and into the waiting arms of your fastest receiver. Now you take control of the receiver as you dodge that line of defense.

Homepage [LED Football]

Joel Johnson

Inexpensive hack turns cameraphones into pathogen detectors

Wired's Dave Bullock has a write-up and gallery of a cellphone hacked by UCLA researchers that, using just a simple plastic light filter, can be used to test for HIV, malaria, and other diseases in blood.

Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations [Wired.com] (Thanks, Zuzu!)

Joel Johnson

Pissing Match: Operational cost of Roomba vs. (expensive) upright

While ignoring carbon emission factors like cost of production and such, Treehugger's Alan Graham used his trusty Kill-A-Watt to see which cost more to operate: a Roomba or a Dyson upright vacuum.

The numbers are interesting, but in the interest of not stealing his thunder, I'll only excerpt the Roomba's:

Total cost of ownership so far:

$250 Roomba purchase price
$118 Batteries
$5.64 Electricity per year
$58 Parts
Warranty lasts for 1 year
---------
$443 total cost (cost will vary depending upon electricity rates in different areas and other variables, of course)
Average of $51.76 per year for parts and batteries, and an averaged annual cost of about $130 since purchase

Is it Greener to Use a Roomba or an Upright? [Treehugger]

Joel Johnson

Mitch Altman travels to Paris (some more!)

Mitch Altman — Finally, I’ve finished (mostly) catching up with (enough) of my emails (for now), and have been bopping all around Paris, eating plenty of excellent examples of pain au chocolate, one of my favorite things about our universe.  I’ve also been invited to plenty of peoples’ apartments, and getting to know some very interesting people.  My host in Paris is an established photographer and also a well known activist that goes by the name of Charlie de Nose.  Of the many interesting actions he has been involved with, one of my favorites was: putting a pirate TV transmitter on the Eiffel Tower, and broadcasting illegally from it for 6 months before getting caught.  In the US Charlie and his group might have been called terrorists (a label that is way too easily bandied about over the past few years), but here in Paris, they were simply told not to do it again.  (Do a search for “Zalea TV Tour Eiffel” and make use of your favorite translation medium.)  He also organized an anti-war event at a community center, and somehow during the event the Coke machine they rented as the center-piece of the performance caught on fire while videos of “Dr. Strangelove” mixed with actual footage from Iraq on the floor.  I met Charlie through a journalist from Libération who interviewed me in the early days of TV-B-Gone media craziness.  As well as hosting me in his wonderful, government-subsidized apartment (they actually support the arts in France!), Charlie is a great connector, hosting get-togethers where journalists, film makers, artists of all sorts, many flavors of activists, and other interesting, creative, intelligent people mix and mingle in long nights of conversation and friendly debate.

The night before Charlie’s most recent get-together I gave a soldering workshop at /tmp/lab, the hacker space in Paris.  Any disappointment I initially experienced at the low turnout was quickly dispelled as people successfully soldered their projects together.  Making things is really fun!  And it is incredibly gratifying to show people, even if they have never made anything before, that they really can make things!

Tonight I hung out with a young video maker and VJ, discussing, over some brilliant couscous, how best to touch others with our work, the nature of activism, the inherent lack of utopia on our planet, as well as the power we all have, whether we know it or not, each in our own way, to improve our lives, as well as the lives of those around us.  Before we knew it the restaurant was closed, and all of the tables but ours had their chairs stacked up.  We almost went to a party I was invited to, but it was time to go home and type all this up (with the sounds of Charlie and his girlfriend enjoying their company above me)

Joel Johnson

Kiboko camera backpack designed by wildlife shooter

Just as wearing skin-tight cycling shorts endorsed by Lance Armstrong lets you bike more efficiently and using a keyboard gummed up with FATAL1TY's name makes you a better gamer (LIVE FATAL wristbands forthcoming, surely), this new "Kiboko" camera backpack, designed by "renowned wildlife photographer" Andy Biggs will certainly make you more than able to get that close-up of your golden retriever taking down a zebra in your backyard.

Which is not to say that it doesn't look pretty decent. It does. Deep enough to hold big SLR bodies and medium format cameras, as well as up to 600mm lens, the whole bag is made of a lightweight sailcloth that keeps the unloaded bag down to under four pounds.

It's priced for pros, though: $400 if you buy direct from manufacturer Guru Gear.

Kiboko camera bag product page [GuraGear.com]

Joel Johnson

Soda cup is actually sloven-chic phone

This cute soda cup only telegraphs its status as a telephone by the sort of completely obvious curlycue cord coming out of its side.

$13 + $5 shipping at ye olde SourcingMap.com, "The Crapvendor That Uses Amazon.com's Form Buttons for a Transaction You Can...Trust?™."

Novelty Soda Fountain Drink Beverage Bottle Cup Telephone Green catalog page [SourcingMap.com via GadgetAlerts.blogspot.com]

Joel Johnson

NERF chaingun modified for 4x rate of fire

Here's viral marketing I can get behind: The people at ManaPotions.com took time from styling their hair to modify a NERF chaingun to shoot 500 rounds per minute.

They write:

We gave 4 times the standard voltage to one of those Nerf Vulcan guns and managed to get it to fire as fast as a 7.62mm M60 machine gun. We also added an Aliens-style round counter a cool paintjob. It might not be as cool as that Nerf office battle you featured a while ago, but we had fun doing it.

I must do this.

Joel Johnson

Local Hero: Cranky man on mobility scooter vs. snow, good sense

Derek Chatwood writes, "This guy was zooming down Pike St. and then heading down 1st Ave, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision. Muttering loudly to himself the whole way."

I love you, cranky old daredevil!

Rob Beschizza

Don't hold your breath for a Sony netbook: "We're not in for the moment."

Nicolas Barendson, a senior executive at Sony U.K., says that laptops with 7-10" screens don't meet consumer needs and that the netbook market will "evolve" into a different form factor.

"The netbook market's booming [but] we're not in for the moment. We analyzing what's going on," he told ZDNet. "We think that the proposition in the market today is not the future of netbook ... the form factor is not properly designed for the consumer's needs ... So there's a lot of quantity sold, people are disappointed by them, and it's not small enough to be pocketable and not big enough to be a PC."

The company, he says, will have a "different proposition" to the range of nearly-identical netbooks currently on other.

Sony and Apple are the big holdouts in the rush to make netbooks, which have come to dominate sales charts in a matter of months. Apple is in idea-gestation mode, but Sony's expected to show its hand next month at CES, with a device it says will change the way you think about laptops.

Barendson's remarks are ominous, but interesting.

If Sony's response to netbooks is going to be yet another $1,000+ ultra-mobile PC, God help it.

That's the obvious point to make, though. Its marketing line suggests it's going to take a stab at something unusual: the iPhone's big brother, perhaps? A touchscreen tablet pc-PSP-Walkman in a clamshell format?

Source [Zdnet]

Joel Johnson

Best and Worst reworked logos of 2008

Brand New lists their "Best & Worst" logo redesigns of 2008, including a few from gadgety companies like ol' SanDisk above.

I still think they're wrong about the Camel repackaging. There are some things that should should remain antiquated, like cancer. Also, I just now realized that their Ford rebranding was an April Fool's prank. I am on the ball.

Brand New: Best & Worst 2008 [UnderConsideration.com/brandnew/]

Is it "logos"? I know that that's an accepted plural form, but of all the words to have a conflated meaning, that seems like the worst one to use. Can we use "logo" as plural? It sounds fine.

Joel Johnson

This orbital starship construction facility is actually the Angelis Labor Gabriel turntable

The "Gabriel" turntable from Angelis Labor is certainly audiophilic wankery of the first degree: four separate arms ride the grooves of ancient vinyl that rests on a platter suspended without friction on a magnetically levitated spindle.

And then there must be some other optional bits, since its price was quoted to me as "between $27k-$64k". Perhaps you can replace the bronze casing with baby leather — or get the logo with extra lens flares.

Gabriel turntable product page [AngelisLabor.com]

Rob Beschizza

Report: Staples is scamming customers with $80 laptop "set up" charges

Staples charges $80 to "set up" laptops when you buy them. And because they're so thoughtful, they've managed to "set up" all the ones they already have in stock! They'll just add it on at the checkout, and if you don't like it, tough.

The Consumerist wonders why it refuses to honor advertised prices:

He also informed her that they had 5 in stock, the display model, and four others in the back that were already "Set up". She asked what "Set up" meant, and he explained it was a service that meant the laptop would be set up and run optimally and perfectly with Windows and everything she would need.

He found out the "Set up" service costs $80. It entails providing you with a CD that has a backup of the operating system on it, and doing all of the Windows updates. That's it. He asked the clerk if it was usual to "Set up" all of the laptops that were in stock and going on sale. The sales clerk said "No... we don't do that" but then was corrected by a manager apparently because he then said "Oh wait, my manager just said we do...".

Staples: Give Us $80, We've Already "Set Up" All The Laptops In Stock... [Consumerist]

Joel Johnson

Kitchy mixer has note-perfect name

For any serious DJ this product, which runs two minijack inputs into a simple crossfader and outputs a single stereo stream, is far too elementary to be off any real use. And it's being sold by Urban Outfitters, a scurrilous retail operation that steals from indie designers, which is reason enough not to buy it for $30.

But it does sort of have the perfect name: it's called the "Mix Tape".

Mix Tape Portable DJ Mixer catalog page [UrbanOutfitters.com via Design Town via Technabob]

Rob Beschizza

Pomera DM10 Pocket Word Processor

I've wanted something like the Pomera DM10 for years: a single-purpose instant-on word processor that folds up small and light enough to put in a pocket and (almost) forget it's there.

It's got a 4-inch monochrome 640x480 LCD display, displays 17 lines of text, and stores your work as plain text to whatever you've shoved in its SD card slot. It runs for 20 hours on a single pair of AAA batteries, too. Multi-day battery life and instant-on: want.

The problem, of course, is that it lacks connectivity and they want $300 for what is otherwise an extremely basic item. At that price, one's thoughts move from "no-frills pocket writing tool" to "Kindle with a decent keyboard."

Digital Memo "POMERA" DM10 Release [ via Oh Gizmo!/RFJ]

Joel Johnson

Blade Runner-watch: Cheap, transparent displays in the lab

A couple of grad students at USC have built a prototype transparent, flexible display with a relatively inexpensive, low-temperature process. Besides making for a charming yearbook picture, the material could also be used for cheap in-car heads-up displays, digital window signage, clothing with shifting patterns, and magical morphing power wallpaper.

USC researchers print dense lattice of transparent nanotube transistors on flexible base [Eurekalert.org]

Rob Beschizza

Pinkeee

Asus launches pink Eee PC S101 [Lilliputing]

Joel Johnson

Semi-precious stone countertops and basins

If you can ignore the insultingly vapid New Age product descriptions about semi-precious stones — "The Indians used this stone as a protection against accident, injuries, and infections" — some of the products made by Majestic Gemstone are actually sort of attractive. I wouldn't mind washing my hairy, sagging mug in a basin made of backlit Sodalite, even if I didn't find that it promoted "clear thinking, insight, or courage." (Ignore that some of the products look like they came out of a Romulan death loo.)

Company Page [Majestic-Gemstone.com via Freshome]

Joel Johnson

Gallery of current (and not-so-current) iPod knock-offs

Harry McCracken took a walk through a San Franciscan liquidation sale and discovered at least 21 different types of iPod knock-offs for sale. He's documented each over at Technologizer in a photo gallery.

If everyone from BBG goes and checks the gallery out, he might just raise enough money to buy a new camera that won't pixelfuzz so badly. (I tease because I love.)

iFrauds: The Fakest iPods Ever! [Technologizer]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

• HDTV Combo – If you're looking for a high-end HDTV, Amazon is selling the Sony Bravia KDL-40XBR6 40-inch LCD HDTV for $1,348, shipped, with a free BDP-S550 Blu-ray player. Basically you're getting the Blu-ray player for free and the TV for $50 off. [Slickdeals]

• microSD – 4GB Transcend microSDHC flash card for $6.50, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• Slacker Portable – The original model Slacker Portable is available for $80, shipped. I prefer the newer model but that's not a bad price. (The G2 is $200.) [Dealhack]

• HP Laptops – There are several full-sized laptops from HP coming in around $400-$500. Take that, netbooks. [Dealnews]

• iPhone Dynometer – "PocketDyno", which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to simulate a dynometer to measure your car's speed and lateral g-force, is available for free at the moment. I don't have a car at the moment so I can't tell you how well it works, but free is free. [iTunes App Store]

• AA Batteries – 4-pack of Sony Stamina Platinum Alkaline batteries for $2, shipped. [Dealnews]

• The Ugliest Mouse Ever – Neiman Marcus Swarovski Crystal Wireless Mouse for $35, shipped. Just tacky beyond belief. [Dealnews]

• PCTV HD USB Stick – Today's Woot is the Pinnacle PCTV HD Mini Stick for Mac and PC for $75, shipped overnight. It's a USB TV tuner for your PC.

Joel Johnson

Roku player now streaming HD content from Netflix

Not only will the Netflix Player by Roku now support HD content from Netflix — if the movie you're trying to watch is available in HD, which many are not — but in their press release today they mention having "additional providers of HD content...in the first quarter of 2009."

Previously • Review: A few days with the Netflix Player by Roku
• Roku Netflix Player goes open source

John Brownlee

The Battle of Hoth in LEGO

This epic recreation of The Empire Strikes Back's Battle of Hoth is a glacial firmament of geeky obsession: it took four years, $3,000, 60,000 bricks and even comes with remote-controlled AT-ATs that rappel Snowtroopers.

5×10-foot Hoth base diorama includes teeny tiny minifig footprints [Brothers Brick]

John Brownlee

Lenovo Thinkpad W700DS features slide-out 10.2-inch secondary display

Lenovo's latest Thinkpad, the W700DS, is a beast: an 11 pound notebook with a NVIDIA Quadro mobile GPU, an Intel quad core processor, a 17-inch wide screen... and an additional 10.2-inch secondary LED display that slides out from the casing. This isn't so much a laptop as a portable graphics workstation, and its cost is in line with that: when it comes out early next year, it'll cost about $3,600.

Secondary Display Slides Out of the Thinkpad W700DS [Gearlog]

John Brownlee

iPhone 3G unlock coming New Year's Eve

For the last six months, the Dev Team have been working on an iPhone 3G baseband unlock. Things have moved so slowly that despite the teasing little trickles promising progress, it looked like the Dev Team might have been totally locked out by Apple.

But Merry Christmas! They've done it. There's some caveats: you need a baseband of 2.11.07 or earlier. If you upgraded your iPhone 3G too far, you're out. But if you followed the Dev Team's advice and avoided upgrading your iPhone 3G until the unlock became available, you're in.

The Dev Team promises to release it on New Year's Eve.

yellowsn0w live demo [Dev Team]

John Brownlee

The BachPod

Back in the nascent days of the MP3 era, as I sat /pdccing nontupled nines at mIRC in EFNet's #mp3 and waiting hours for that Dickies song to come through the pipe, I was convinced all CDs would eventually be delivered physically in MP3 format. The example I used to like to give was that Mozart's complete works came on 400 CDs, and that MP3s could deliver that same oeuvre with 1/40th of the physical waste.

I flashed back to this (completely failed) prophecy earlier today, when this Bach Pod came through the pipes: it's an 80GB iPod Classic pre-loaded with 175 hours of Bach's complete works, with 17GB of room left to spare. Buying a new iPod to get a complete collection of an artist's works is only for the die-hards, but it's interesting to see completist classical music collections go down this route.

It's an expensive iPod to buy, though, unless you're willing to shell out $450 bucks for the complete Bach: Passionato is selling the Bach Pod for $700.

Bach Pod [Passionato via Cult of Mac]

John Brownlee

The Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine

This array of Cold War era Soviet vacuum tubes doesn't just tell you the time, nixie-like. It also randomly generates all possible permutations of four-letter profanity across all Latin-based languages, both real and theoretical, at a rate of one per second. An f-bomb shining in the dark, the result of random chance in a godless universe: a perfect metaphor for the human condition.

Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine [Etsy via MAKE]

John Brownlee

Apple Mighty Mouse + Multi-Touch concept probably has it about right

MacBlogz postulates something like this might be the next evolutionary step for the Mighty Mouse in the multi-touch age. The Mighty Mouse is a cursor-swooping rodent I've never liked even half as much as its opera-singing, baritone namesake, but you could certainly see Apple doing something like this to bring multi-touch to their desktop line... it certainly beats the alternative of smearing finger grease all over your glossy, multi-touch display.

One More Thing: Apple's New Multi-Touch Mighty Mouse [Mac Blogz]

John Brownlee

Samsung announces unconventional NC10 successor, the NC20

Although none of us have even so much as fiddled with it, the Samsung NC10 is the office netbook favorite here, almost exclusively based on its wide reports of a 7 hour battery life. Since it's selling out in America, it seemed a matter of course for Samsung to announce the successor; the jaw barely pendulums towards the floor at the consequent announcement of the NC20.

More surprising is how weird the specs read. The NC20 is comprised of all the usual bullet points: 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g WiFi, Ethernet, a 3-in-1 card reader and a 1.3-megapixel camera. But the silicon brain of the beast is not the ubiquitous Atom, but a 1.3GHz VIA Nano U225... a chip which is close but not quite up to the Atom, drain wise.

And then there's the screen: 12.1 inches. No. That's not a netbook, unless the PowerBook is the evolutionary progenitor to the 1000H.

Price is around $642, which is a lot for an overlarge netbook with a bold choice in processor. Let's see how the battery life tests shake out.

Samsung NC20 [Notebook Italia via Engadget]

John Brownlee

Blast Knuckles: when turning someone's jaw into goo isn't enough

There comes a point in every conversation where someone's teeth must be sent to chatter down the throat to chatter about the sphincter. Some arguments can only be solved by a sneezing of brains. These Blast Knuckles are just electrifyingly unsporting for just those situations, delivering a blast of 950,000 bolts as the electrodes collide with a shattering jaw.

But really, why stop there? Why not tip your knuckle dusters with dollops of nitroglycerine as well. Granted, you lose the arm, but you win the fight: a sizzling stump may seem like a bad wound, but at least you can seriously use the expression, "You oughta see the other guy."

$50.

Blast Knuckles [Pop Gadget via Slippery Brick]

Rob Beschizza

Sony: "In only a matter of days you will change the way you think about laptops."

Sony's site for its new VAIO—perhaps the umpc/netbook/mid/new picturebook spotted at the FCC a few weeks ago—is up.

Sony has many trademarks, but the ones listed in this site's terms and conditions are "AIWA", "SONY", "VAIO", "WALKMAN", "Trinitron", "i.LINK", and "Memory Stick." It also reminds us that Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Site [Sony New Zealand via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Wii, iPhone and Flip winning because of recession, says NYT

Damon Darlin of the New York Times thinks that the Wii's success since November 2006 was a "leading economic indicator" of a recession that began a year later and wasn't confirmed until 2008.

THE National Bureau of Economic Research hardly stunned the nation this month when it announced that the United States had been in recession since December 2007. Nintendo, which has sold more than 30 million Wii game consoles, is now offering add-ons like the Wii Fit.

And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.

Darlin's piece is a good example of how reporters use emotive adjectives to build stories that couldn't work without them.

Using the Wii is "dimwittedly" simple. Changes in resolution and math-crunching power become "deep" and "rich." The distinction between Dolby pro-logic and Dolby digital, absurdly offered as a consumer concern, is that the latter is "rumbling."

Sometimes the technique works well, explaining why a dry story matters. The NYT's own stories on the Large Hadron Collider spring to mind. But it fails when trying to illustrate formulaic heelglue like "people buy cheap and simple things in hard times."

And so we leap from global economic meltdown to discussion of technical differences between gadgets. The tech-biz beat is full of bathos like this. It's technology as a prop in the Bigger Picture, drained of what makes it interesting to write about.

That said, I'd like to see the next paragraph worked up as the intro text to a Zero Wing-style Japanese video game, setting the scene for a crisis the player must resolve with great justice:

As the United States enters a deflationary period, all kinds of companies will have to grapple with the consequences of falling prices. This is nothing new for electronics makers. Every year, competition and the effects of Moore’s Law forced prices down. ... Feature-itis was a disease, but it was better than the affliction known as consumer boredom.

The Year of the Simpler Gadget [NYT]

Rob Beschizza

Review: a week with Korg's Nano Digital Music Controllers

Korg's Nano series of music gear, sold by ThinkGeek, will never be confused with pro equipment. That doesn't matter one bit, however, because they're great fun and you can make hands-on digital music anywhere you like.

Granted, the keyboard's crummy: it looks and feels like a row of shift keys from a cheap laptop. But the pad unit's good, the control board's not bad, and the whole set's just $170. You can stuff it all in your laptop bag and forget it's there: these are real, honest-to-Kipling gadgets. Like the Koassilator and Nintendo DS synth emulators, their cheapness and portability channels inspiration for people who would never dream of lugging "real" musical equipment around.

The trio comprises a Korg Nano Kontrol, which has playback controls, nine sliders and nine knobs; the Korg Nano Pad, which has 12 standard pads and a basic kaoss-like x/y pad with hold, flam and roll functions; and Nano Key, a 25-key keyboard with octave switchers and pitch/mod controls.

All are USB-powered, weigh very little, and are about a foot long. Instructions are elementary, but they're easy to set up all the same. Kontrol Editor, a software package that customizes the MIDI output for each device, is provided as a free download, as are a couple of basic music-creation apps: Ez Drummer Lite comes with the pad and Korg's M1 emulator comes with the keyboard. A discount coupon for Ableton Lite comes with Nano Kontrol.

As a gift, as a musicians' toy, as the gear you actually have in your bag when inspiration strikes ... there are so many reasons to grab this set that it seems churlish to offer complaints at all.

The obvious one, of course, is that anyone expecting build quality or fine control from them will be disappointed. It would also be nice if they clipped together, or if Korg had also sourced an all-in-one that required only a single USB port. As it is, you'll need a usb hub to plug all three at once into many notebooks.

Product Page [Think Geek]

Following are some videos of the things in action:

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Review: a week with Akai's MPD32 MIDI controller

Bashing at Akai's MDP32 was great fun, but this pad is a level above casual and isn't for absolute beginners. With a sub-$300 tag and features not found in lesser models, however, it's perfect if you've outgrown your M-Audio Trigger Finger and want portable quality that'll last.

The MDP32 has 16 pads with four banks, 8 pots and 8 sliders with three banks, and foot pedal inputs at the back. There are playback controls, baked-in presets for major software programs, a spacious LCD display and a wide array of useful extras like note repeat and hold.

Its velocity and pressure sensitive pads were excellent. Compared to the cheap gear I'm used to, the difference is obvious: it helps you make better music. The pots were firm, but the slider caps felt a little loose on their shafts. The unit is plastic, but sturdy all the same, with a metal base. The system runs from USB juice. An external power supply isn't included, but Ableton Lite is.

If you want a better pad than the toy you've already tired of, this is a go. If you're just sick of keyboarding drums in, start with something cheaper, like the aforementioned M-Audio or Akai's own MPD24.

MPD32 MIDI/USB software control surface [Akai Professional]

Rob Beschizza

Mac Mini "leak" causes excitement, ennui

Macenstein receives a pic from an anonymous sauce, and the internet goes OMG. Then someone points out the problem: why would a Mac Mini have a lid? Why would it be made of MacBook?

To my mind, the marketing line is unappealing ("World's smallest potato") and lacks Apple's characteristic wordplay. 9to5mac reader Sverkel does a prettier photoshop using the same source material.

There needs to be a new word for the state of disappointment brought on by image manipulation. I propose photoshopathy.

Is this the new Mac mini? [Macenstein]

Rob Beschizza

"Cuteness, design, technology, luxury, kitsch" - A Q&A with Gizmine's Douglas Krone

Ever been sent by a gadget blog to the product page of some wonderful foreign tech-tchotchke, only to find it impossible to buy the damn thing? Enter Gizmine, a U.S.-operated online store that ships bizarre goods worldwide from Japan.

A sister site to Dynamism, which imports ultra-portable computers that Americans would otherwise be hard-pressed to find, it was launched a few weeks ago by Dynamism's CEO Douglas Krone.

I fired off some questions about his unusual line of business. Here are his replies.

BBG: What's the story behind Dynamism?

Krone: Dynamism became famous for supplying early-adopters around the world with the latest and greatest, direct from Japan. As the business grew, it evolved into a focus on high-end mobility--focused on a limited selection of products that is best-of-class and cutting-edge in every category. You'll find the latest gadgets from Japan, innovative 1-pound PCs from Korea, exclusive mobile phones, even the world's first consumer-focused RFID reader from a French designer. So Dynamism is a boutique-like shopping experience and coupled with a heavy emphasis on personalized customer service--our goal is that you feel like you are dealing with a luxury hotel concierge that happens to be a tech expert. It's all a great model, but we wanted something different for Gizmine.

BBG: Why Gizmine?

Krone: Shopping in Tokyo is a chaotic, sensory overload experience partly thanks to compellingly unique gadgets, cuteness, design, technology, luxury, kitsch -- and extra helpings of gadgets and cuteness.  We wanted to bring a taste of that experience to shoppers all over the world.  Of course, with some of the Gizmine gadgets--and again just as if you were shopping in Tokyo--there is liberal use of Japanese. Many of the digital pets purr in a foreign language, and some things are just so wacky that buyers really need to have a sense of adventure.

BBG: What challenges presented themselves as you went about developing the new online store?

Krone: The focus is totally different from Dynamism. Figuring out how to deliver that shopping-in-Shibuya rush, given our ambition to offer hundreds of products with which people might have no familiarity, was interesting.  It ends up a shopping nightmare or addictive fun. Since we were trying for the latter, the site is clean and visually driven.

As you walk through the aisle of your favorite store, nobody chatters in your ear. For Gizmine, products are bliss and text is bad. Even our mouseover product descriptions don't interfere with the product view. That product view is like looking on the shelf of your favorite store, but with better search options. Maybe you only want to see blue gadgets, or maybe only blue gadgets with a skull theme. 

BBG: People talk a lot about the recession affecting consumer electronics and luxuries: have you felt the bite?

Krone: Especially in October, there were some days that people weren't spending, but consumption seems to be steadily recovering since then. However, as they say, it is still in recovery. Even so, Christmas shopping has been pretty healthy. Perhaps it is because we are delivering things that are new and unique, with so many "no way" gadgets at stocking stuffer price points, that Gizmine is off to a great start. But, I don't think our experience can be extrapolated to the broader economy or the really big electronics makers.

BBG: What is it about these imports that casts such a spell on us?

Krone: Japan's consumers think clever technology and great design is just precious! Not just avant-garde consumers (the market we target in the world outside Japan), but the vast majority. And that means fantastic things get made and marketed, things that can't be found anywhere else.  They cast a spell on us because good design is innately appealing, we love whimsy, and we appreciate the intellectual quality of dumb gadgets.

Gizmine delivers globally from Japan.

John Brownlee

Zack! Zack! He's a LEGO maniac!

If you watched afternoon cartoons at any point during the 80s, you know the words to this jingle more clearly than the lyrics to the National Anthem.

John Brownlee

Brando spy watch contains secret videocam

This multimedia watch is hideously Brando and features the usual gaggle of badly implemented Brando features — a 1.8 inch screen with built-in MP4 and music player and 8GB of flash memory — but its true interest lies in a built in video camera with a video resolution of 352 by 288. Expect a lot of surreptitiously filmed amateur sex videos hitting the web at 352 x 288 in the coming months.

MP4 Watch with Video Camera [Brando]

John Brownlee

LEGO Castle Giants Chess Set

Born Rich spotted this fantastic LEGO chess set, made of the turrets, parapets, knights and dragons of various LEGO castle sets. It'll run you 200 euros, although really, it seems like a LEGO castle chess set should at least be configurable in Gormenghast form.

LEGO Castle Giant Chess Set [LEGO]

John Brownlee

Retrofuturism finally gets it right: 1959's Roomba

That mechanical maid, scurrying across the floor like a hovering robot cockroach. That's a Roomba.

[via BotJunkie via Modern Mechanix]

John Brownlee

PenPals makes a Moleskine out of your iPod case

A tiny notebook rolled up into an iPod case. Or just do it yourself with a spare Moleskine, some scissors and some glue and save yourself $26.

Scripta [Official Site via Cult of Mac]

John Brownlee

The Cabestan Winch Tourbillion Vertical Watch

This watch is absolutely stunning, an engineering masterpiece... 1,352 components working together in masterful horological precision, driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums. If you can afford the $275,000 to afford the base model, you can probably afford the $400,00 to get it slathered in platinum and diamonds.

Cabestan Winch Tourbillion Vertical Watch [Cabestan via BoJ]

John Brownlee

LG's floating DVD player is gorgeous

We don't post many DVD players here, since slotting your media into a drive seems so positively quaint these days, but LG's romantically named DVS540H is about as gorgeous and minimal a DVD player can get until someone figures out how to counter-gravitationally affix it in a scintillating beam of light. It does the rest of the usual, sans Blu-Ray: upscaling DVDs to 1090p and play DivX files from an attached hard drive. It's $240.

LG DVS450H ‘floating’ DVD player reviewed: stylish and capable [Slashgear]

Rob Beschizza

Spider

Photo: Reuters [Boston]

Rob Beschizza

Gadgets: This is what you should buy

Welcome to our tech-buying cheat sheet.

There are no specs and no benchmarks, no rigorous stress-tests or complex comparisons. Just straightforward recommendations, aimed at easing the agony of choice for those who suffer from it. If making a decision only awakens an evil inner imp, who conjures ideal devices comprising the best features of everything you don't choose, this is for you.

The "cheap" item indicates quality on a budget. The "best" item represents not extravagance, but excellence that's worth paying for. In the third column lies wonder, weirdness or simply an alternative that deserves mention.

Asus' 900HA is small, cheap and surprisingly capable. (Just don't get the 900A, the stinker at Best Buy and Target) HP's Mini 1000, when upgraded with HSDPA and the 10.2" infinity display, is something that will have to be clawed from your cold, dead hands. But if you care about battery life, it's no match for Samsung's NC10, which gets nearly 7 hours on a charge. People wanting to install OSX should get the MSI Wind.

Basic laptops are nearly interchangeable, but Dell's low-end Inspirons are a safe bet. For people wanting power and serious quality, Apple's MacBook Pro is a nearly perfect marriage of beautiful design and high performance. But if you just want something that looks stunning, Voodoo's Envy 133 is the real object of beauty. Just don't expect it to play all the latest games!

A $30, 9mm-thick handset with a cool e-ink display, Moto's unlocked F3 is ready to take into any cellphone shop for contract-free action. Apple's iPhone 3G is, thanks to its AppStore and fantastic combo of software and hardware, an unstoppable force at $200. LG's Lotus, on Sprint, is about as strange and sexy as you can go without losing a real qwerty keyboard.

Creative's Zen Pebble is a cute little thing, as cheap as a decent family meal. Apple's iPod Touch is practically a handheld computer—movies, music and games galore. Sony's Rolly is a thing of wonder: if you throw yours away, you'll one day curse yourself for it.

Need a basic model? Grab whichever clicker Canon or Sony is currently selling for just under $200, and you'll be happy. After Nikon dropped the ball with the so-so P6000, Canon's G10 is the king of point-and-shoots in the $500 ballpark. Casio's EX-F1 is an insane contraption that shoots video at hundreds of frames per second.

Beginners and bargain hunters will love their Rebel XSis and Nikon D40s for years. Upgrade to the Canon Eos 5D MkII if you want to take the plunge and have giant sacks of cash; the $1,500 Nikon D300 is a mid-range alternative you could start a career with.

Flip's MinoHD marries the original's idiot-proof simplicity with surprisingly good video. Canon's Vixia range offers the best quality you'll get under a grand. Sanyo's Xacti HD1010 is outright phenomenal for something so tiny.

Hate phones but like email? Get a Peek. Want something smaller than a netbook but more powerful? Raon's Everun Note is a $700 7-inch pocket PC that whips them all. When you've realized that buying cheap, nasty GPS boxes is a bad idea, Garmin's Nuvi 880's excellent speech recognition is the antidote. Eye-Fi is an SD card that uploads your photos over WiFi. Smart shoppers only buy TVs they've seen in person, but for bleeding-edge cool, Sony's OLED XEL-1 is the king--all 11 inches of it. Still buying desktop PCs? Sony's JS series all-in-one has blu and solid performance, outclassing Apple's aging current-gen iMac and HP's puny Touchsmart.

This cheat sheet will be maintained and updated, so tell us your suggestions in the comments for better choices or new categories. Remember, the idea is to make decisions easier. Not items that evince raw superiority, but equipment you'd be happy with for years: stuff where the fidelity trend goes up, even if it doesn't start so high.

Rob Beschizza

Leathery Dell XPS 13 shots and Adamo rumors

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky reveals the Dell Studio XPS 13 with glorious high-res art. He also has murmurs about the firm's secret project, Adamo.

Apparently the device -- which the company plans to market as the "world's thinnest laptop" -- was slated to be released this month, but has been pushed back till at least February. The Adamo will sport a black and silver color scheme similar to the system you see here, but is "different," and we're told that it's most definitely Dell's play to nab some of that MacBook Air marketshare.

The MacBook Air has marketshare?

Dell Studio XPS 13 leather-wrapped laptop revealed, Adamo info leaked!

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld we saw a special holiday office party installment of James Kochalka's Monster Mii feature, this time including a special Sexy X-mas Game Boy chiptune theme song.

We also found a new retro-futurist Space Invaders landing on Japanese mobile phones, saw the new DSi get a downloadable app to make web-embeddable animations, new official Nintendo business cards featuring your Mii and Wii friend code, and a porcelain Little Sister from BioShock.

Finally, we were tempted to order new custom 3D printed Spore figurines, and took a long look at ngmoco and Hand Circus's long-awaited tilt-sensitive iPhone puzzle/platformer Rolando, and how, against overwhelming commentary otherwise, it's more than people have said it is.

Joel Johnson

Highway signs are huge

The South Central Sign Shop in Union Gap, Washington, part of WSDOT, the Washington State Department of Transportation, has a Flickr stream.

Joel Johnson

RIP Majel Barrett

Majel Barrett, widow of Gene Roddenberry and the voice of the Enterprise's computers, passed away today at 76. She was gorgeous and charming and awesome.

She had recorded the voice work for the upcoming Star Trek movie just two weeks ago.

Majel Roddenberry, widow of 'Trek' creator, dies [Mercury News/AP]

Image: Space Debris

Joel Johnson

Nissan 370Z's Downshift Rev Matching: Heel-and-toe shifting for everyone

In a track drive test of the 2009 Nissan 370Z, David Booth describes the new Downshift Rev Matching system available this teeth-grindingly appealing new sports car.

But it is, in fact, said manual tranny that is the 370's biggest advancement, at least on the race track. Besides offering better action - shorter, more precise throws - the 370Z offers the world's first Downshift Rev Matching system for a manual transmission. A plethora of sensors in the rear wheels and gearbox precisely matches the engine revs to the next gear down so that each downshift -no matter how quickly executed or at what speed - is absolutely smooth, all without the driver performing the traditional heal-and-toe pas de deux on the gas and brake pedals.

By not having to worry about matching revs, the driver is better able to concentrate on navigating corners and braking. Manually operable automatic transmissions (manumatics) have offered this automatic rev matching system for years, but this is the first application for a manual gearbox and it is definitely a significant advancement.

First Drive: 2009 Nissan 370Z [Autos.Canada.com]

Joel Johnson

Battlestar Galactica, Series 0, S1E1

(Thanks, Fitley!)

Joel Johnson

CES Trend Watch: Fujitsu N7010 laptop nestles a tiny screen above its keyboard

Here's one of the trends you're going to see at CES this year: laptops with small, secondary displays inside.

And here's a good example: the Fujitsu Lifebook N7010, with a small (but relatively high-resolution) touchscreen just above the keyboard.

We also can tell you that another notebook manufacturer will be showing a laptop with a tiny screen that pops out of the side.

GBM InkShow: Fujitsu N7010 and Secondary Display [GottaBeMobile.com via Engadget]

Joel Johnson

Dell Adamo: Even thinner than the MacBook Air?

The New York Times' Ashlee Vance thinks he's uncovered a new Dell laptop, the "Adamo", that will be even smaller than the MacBook Air:

But most telling of all might have been the reaction of Michael Tatelman, Dell’s vice president in charge of consumer sales and marketing, to my question about whether or not Dell had an Air-like product in store. Mr. Tatelman’s mouth gaped open and his eyes darted away from my face.

If looks could reveal product dimensions, then I’d guess that Dell’s going even thinner and lighter than Apple.

Dell’s Mystery ‘Adamo’ Could Be Thinner Than Air [Bits.Blogs.NYTimes.com]

Joel Johnson

Go Team Lithium Battery!

An alliance of companies are working together with the U.S. government to create lithium battery capable of easily powering electric vehicles.

The National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture was modeled after SEMATECH, the successful public-private venture created in the late 1980s to restore U.S. prominence in computer semiconductor technology.

Besides Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions, a joint venture of Johnson Controls Inc and France's Saft Groupe SA, and 3M Co, the founding members of the battery alliance are ActaCell, All Cell Technologies, Altair Nanotechnologies Inc, Eagle Picher Industries Inc, EnerSys, Envia Systems, FMC Corp, MicroSun Technologies, Mobius Power, SiLyte, Superior Graphite, and Townsend Advanced Energy.

U.S. government lab, 14 firms team up on lithium battery [Reuters]

Rob Beschizza

12seconds gets as close to iPhone video as Apple will allow

Video on the iPhone? Not quite, but 12seconds.tv has an iPhone app that takes as valiant a stab as Apple permits. Here's the pitch:

The app let's you take 3 photos (or choose 3 photos from your library) and then record twelve seconds of audio.  The photos and audio make a slideshow which outputs as a twelve second video to your 12seconds account.  Here's an example or two of videos I've recorded using a trial version of the app. ... Apple refuses to let people record video with an iPhone.  But 12seconds has created the next best thing with their slideshow app

It adds Ken Burns effects to the photos to enhance the illusion, and each video gets its own YouTube-like url on the 'net. It costs 99 cents and enters public beta today.

12seconds Thanks, David!

Rob Beschizza

Techcrunch: start breaking embargoes already!

Mike Arrington wrote a pleasingly forceful denunciation of embargoes yesterday. Embargoes are agreements between PR people and reporters to hold publication until a certain time, but they always get broken and generally have become useless and counterproductive.

The talk was very blunt: they will break agreements they've already made, and they will always do it. "We will break every embargo we agree to ... From now our new policy is to break every embargo."

But not yet. On TechCrunch's front door is 12seconds, which was announced to reporters last week the old-fashioned way, under embargo, for publication today.

So come on, lads! Break some embargoes already! It's CES next month: there are surely loads of items the whole tech-writin' world is sitting on.

Update: Here's how it's done: Lenovo's dual-screen 700DS monster laptop, which bloggers were briefed on yesterday under a Jan. 8 embargo, gets anonymously posted to a web forum after google reveals a tenuous mention in official literature. Subsequently tipped off to bigger outlets, the whole shebang, photos and all, can justifiably be run. And lo, it is no longer a CES announcement.

John Brownlee

Globular light balls stick to one another

I'm on a bit of a lighting kick today, and these globulous light molecules, which attach to each other in the strangest conglomerations you can fancy, have enthused me. I imagine a house entirely lit with them would look like an ectoplasm attack.

Nomad Light Molecules [Official Site via Technabob]

Joel Johnson

Coders, make money by improving the Neuros LINK set-top box

Neuros has offered their bounties to programmers willing to create code for their Neuros Link set-top box. I love this model of development. It pays programmers for their time (if at what is a lower-than-premium rate) and helps get code into the hands of the open-source community.

Here are the bounties:

• Get Netflix streaming working. ($2,500)
• Move Networks plug-in working. ($2,000)
• iTunes DRM playback. ($1,000)
• Better Networking Wizard than provided by Ubuntu. ($750)
• Video Resolution (Xorg) settings changer. ($750)
• Error and Problem reporter tool ($500)
• Upgrade GUI ($750)

If you're familiar with Qt4 (C++, Python, or Ruby are fine) and can make the magic happen on Ubuntu 8.10, hit the link for more specifics.

First LINK Bounties [NeurosTechnology.com]

Joel Johnson

Samson Go Mic probably sounds good, probably pretty, assuredly USB

The Samson "Go Mic" is just a USB microphone, but it's designed to actually provide better sound quality than those nickel jobbers you can buy by the hundred at fruit stands. It has a condenser transducer and a 20Hz to 18kHz frequency response. It will cost $50.

If the moire pattern in the tiny JPGs in the press release is any indication, it might actually be pretty.

Also, let's settle this once in for all: The nickname for "microphone" is spelled "mic", but pronounced "mike". Informed.

Manufacturer's page (no product info there yet) [SamsonTech.com]

John Brownlee

Burials with smartphones and Gameboys

This bizarre quote from an MSNBC non-story about floaters, bloaters, rotters and kickers wanting to be buried with their cell phones caught my attention:

“It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. We even had one guy who was buried with his Game Boy.”

The follow-up question that never comes: "Was he buried with batteries too?" Is he intending on playing it down there? If so, for how long?

Also: it strikes me the best reason to bury yourself with your mobile phone would be to secretly give the SIM card to a surviving friend and have them carry out some bitching prank calls.

Bury Me With My Cell Phone [MSNBC]

John Brownlee

Liquid lamps ooze gore and light

These lamps from Caina's Design shop oozes gouts of gorish silicon like a redrum hallucination at a recently re-decorated Overlook Hotel. That sort of chicness will cost, though: they cost about $262 a piece.

Liquid Lamp [Caina via Coolest Gadgets]

Rob Beschizza

Korean electrocution warning sign

KWillets adds a 31st to the list: "Remember, electrocuting yourself while fishing will upset not just you and your companion, but the fish as well."

Someone should make a gallery of cartoon electrocutions.

Make That 31 Ways [KWillets]

Joel Johnson

The year in high-end headphones

Steve Guttenberg takes a walk through the latest high-end headphones and headphone amps, selecting what he's calling "three contenders for the world's best headphone". In my fantasy den, I'm kicked back in my leather chair, feet on oaken desk, smoking a cigarette and swirling a bourbon while listening to the finest Ukrainian pornography soundtracks through those gorgeous wooden Grado Labs GS-1000 headphones.

Pardon me while I gush over the way the GS-1000 clarifies live recordings. The sound seemed to surround me, with a rare ability to resolve depth, just as you would in a concert hall.

Ditto for the way this headphone reveals rhythmic underpinnings in rock and jazz CDs. Grados have always been exciting, but classical music now sounds more refined. The bass is deep, yet more controlled and precise than ever before.

The GS-1000 was a natural for home theater. Every scene change on The Mad Men: Season One Blu-ray placed me in a different location.

First there was the clickety-clack of an office full of 1960s era IBM electric typewriters, then the hushed ambiance of an upscale New York City department store, and later the low rumble of a commuter train. The GS-1000's unfailing resolution of micro-details revealed the spatial cues and ambiance of each locale.

High End Headphone and Headphone Amp Roundup [HEMagazine.com]

Rob Beschizza

OSX RUNNING ON PHILISHAVE!

In the comments to our OSX-netbook compatibility chart, folks pointed out that evidence for OSX on the HP Mini 2133 is ... lacking. It's been shoehorned onto other non-Intel systems, but no-one seems to have replicated the feat here. The thread where people are bickering over it contains this fantastic post, from ":

I installed Leopard on my Philishave HQ-5426. Since it doesn't contain a video card, harddisk, Intel instruction set, or RAM it was a bit of a challenge. You're probably all curious about how I managed to install a consumer OS on a pocket shaver, but - sorry - this is just a teaser. I don't have the energy right now to explain how I did it.

Quantum interactions between pubic hair and triple-head shaving blades = turing machine. Boot time: 7 universes.

Other amusing photoshops are in the hp2133 Guide forums.

Joel Johnson

Scotchlite 680: Black reflective vinyl goes white under headlights

Bright Bike from Michael Mandiberg on Vimeo.

This reflective adhesive vinyl is black under natural light, but reflects white when hit with a flash — or headlights, making it quite suitable for covering a bicycle. Mike Mandiberg did just that.

The stuff's trade name is "Scotchlite 680" and is made by 3M. It's used traditionally in signage, but I think it may have just found a new popularity.

[via Core77]

Joel Johnson

BAS turns Windows Mobile phones into ersatz BlackBerries

BlackBerry Application Suite is software that runs on Windows Mobile devices that more or less turns them into BlackBerries, with email, RIM's instant messaging tool, and more. It also appears to integrate very well with existing Exchange accounts using Windows Mobile. It's even possible to run some BlackBerry applications.

My roommate sent me an IM: "Maybe BlackBerry for iPhone?" Which would be wicked smart, but unless Apple somehow lets RIM into the guts of the iPhone's OS, there's no way they could make an emulator that operates in a manner integrated enough to get anywhere close to what a real BlackBerry experience is like.

It's unclear when the BlackBerry Application Suite will be released, but if it's as polished as it appears it shouldn't be long. Then again, BAS was supposed to be out last year.

HOT! Details On BlackBerry Application Suite – Virtual BlackBerry OS For Windows Mobile [BerryReview.com]

Joel Johnson

Mitch Altman travels to Paris

Mitch Altman – Greetings from Paris! I arrived here after no sleep the night before, my Irish hosts providing me with one last chance to flavor their penchant for late-night conversation. After sleeping for 14 hours (at my host’s apartment – more on him in my next post), I was ready to visit /tmp/lab, the hacker space in a very industrial area just south of town. I arrived after an inadvertent tour of the suburbs of Paris (I took an express train by accident), and was greeted by the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) group that meets at the space. Then had an enthusiastic conversation about the role of hacker spaces in society. Hacker spaces are currently popping up all over the world. Most members want to make the world a better place for everyone. The consensus tonight: one thing we, as hackers, can do is provide people information and tools to create things each person can use to make the world a better place – as they see it – and hacker spaces provide the infrastructure for us to do our magic.

Some of the magic happening at /tmp/lab includes creating a mesh-network mobile phone system (cheap phone calls for all!), creating art projects to stop legislation that would destroy net neutrality, a toxic gas sensor, RepRap (a robot that can make just about anything, including itself!), increasing awareness about DRM and privacy issues (such as RFID), teaching others how to use technology for their benefit. Everything is open-source, of course.

I’ll be giving a two-part workshop at /tmp/lab later this week: to teach people to solder electronic circuits later this week, and also to discuss how the amazing (and inexpensive) power of music players can be repurposed as hacking tools.

He continues, considering email vacations...

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Do you rent software on your mobile?

While Trimble Outdoors looks like a neat little piece of software for GPS-enabled mobile phones, enabling not just mapping but breadcrumb trail marking and geotagged photos and video, the pricing structure just announced on Alltel is peculiar: $1.99 a day, $5.99 a month, or $40 per year.

Do people regularly rent mobile software by the day? I had no idea.

John Brownlee

How to guilt trip software pirates

Some excellently worded guilt-tripping by the makers of USB Overdrive X in a response to a pirated key code being entered. The exasperation just drips.

[via Crunch]

John Brownlee

Nvidia introduces Ion, sandwiches 9400M to Atom

Nvidia has announced that they are leaping feet first into the netbook gam with a CPU + GPU combo known as Ion.

What that really is is their GeForce 9400M GPO motherboard sandwiched together with an Atom chipset. The idea is to start making netbooks that can run Vista and other state-of-the-art without staggering like concussed mules. If you snickered at "state-of-the-art," commence the run up to high-five me.

I have ponderous theories about netbooks, and while more capable machines are always good, I really don't care about running GPU-intensive tasks on a netbook. Netbooks are for writing, not Crysis. Netbooks are pretty much ideal as far as I'm concerned, short of all-day battery life, which only the Samsung NC10 can claim without prompting a spit take (although it's still a lie).

Nvidia, on their part, say "battery life will stay about the same," but that's not what I want: I'd rather a weaker GPU and battery life that's doubled.

Ion should premier sometime in early 2009.

NVidia's Ion turbocharges Intel's atom [PC World]

John Brownlee

Vintage Apple ad Flickr stream

How far Apple has come. Where now their advertisements are peopled with the cream of America's ample smugness crop — the silhouettes of hipsters flinging razor-thin laptops back and forth between one another like impossibly gorgeous doofuses playing frisbee with shurikens — it was once just a greasy, bleary-eyed middle manager in a cheap, crumpled suit, dripping 40 proof sweat upon a machine with the same density as an original volume of St. Augustine's City of God printed in dark matter. He's doing finances, but the sordid luster of his eyes make it clear he is, right that moment, dreaming of the creation of Usenet's alt.rectal-insertion newsgroup. This was the customer Apple wanted then.

Bonus: the ad's lede, which seems to suggest that, when everyone's left the office for the day, an Apple I is pretty good for fucking.

A lot more vintage Apple ads at this Flickr group.

Vintage Mac Ads [Flickr via Cult of Mac]

John Brownlee

Gorgeous Otto espresso maker is like time capsule from the future, full of joe

It is 9:48am and I am drinking instant coffee out of a gigantic mug shaped like the hollowed out brain pan of an anthropomorphic cow. I love the ease and comfort of instant coffee. Simultaneously, I am admiring the OTTO espresso maker, with its bright, world-flipping mirror polish, as metallurgically liquid and mercury-like as some sort of device sent back in time by advanced creatures from the last moments of the universe to record our lives. The discordancy of it all is enough to make a hungover Berliner sneeze brain out of sheer incredulity.

OTTO espresso maker - stove top espresso maker [Appliancist]

John Brownlee

Dyson Airblade nuclear blasts your hands dry

Swinging open the doors of the men's room, I always start by cocking a cynic's eyebrow in the direction of the sinks.

What I hope to see is a reflective aluminum cylinder of paper towels, and this always makes me feel guilty: drying one's hands against the skin of a tree is so uncivilized, something a caveman would do after wiping his ass with a large lump of quartz. But the alternatives are worse: there is the circled spool of reusable cotton towels, which consumes and then eventually regurgitates the oozings of a thousand men's room's strangers on a new generation of clean hands. And then there's the ordinary hair dryer, which is fine, but takes so damn long it's like waiting for a spastic to huff on them.

If the Dyson airblade works the way it says it does, then, it could be impressive. It says that it harnesses "windscreep wiper" technology (mind = blown) and will dry your hands in under 10 seconds, blasting air at around 400mpb on your hands. And while I'm not familiar with the mpb system of volume, preliminary googling indicates that 300mpb was what blew the flesh off the faces of the Nazis when Indiana Jones flung off the lid of the Ark of the Covenant.

And it's just as expensive as the Lost Ark to boot: it'll set you back $833.

Dyson Airblade drys your hands in 10 seconds without roasting them [New Launches]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld, as Nintendo released its 100+ game list of DS and Wii titles expected through Spring of next year, we whittled it down to the essential 11 Offworld-ian titles to be excited for.

We also discovered that area/code's Chain Factor (one of our top web games of 2007) had been ported to the iPhone as snap7, listened to Merry Pixmas, a fantastic new chiptune Xmas album, and read Jim Rossignol's latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column on the Ten Things That Made Him Glad To Be A Gamer In 2008.

Elsewhere, we saw that Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill were also coming to the iPhone, heard another good holiday song with The Doyouinverts' Gears of War parody 'A Happy New Gear', saw a slightly slurred Burt Reynolds in the movies, flipped wistfully through the 1983 Sears Wishbook again, saw Spore's DRM debacle coming to half a close, at least, and heard reports that certain job recruiters have been told not to hire World of Warcraft players.

Rob Beschizza

Mac OS X Netbook Compatibility Chart (Updated July 2009)

Apple says it's had "pretty interesting ideas" for a Mac netbook, but it's everyday users who've already taken action. Most of the popular netbooks can run OS X, but there are plenty of caveats: non-functioning components which lack drivers, need to be replaced, or which simply can't be gotten working at all.

The short answer: get a HP Mini 1000 or a Dell Mini 9/Vostro A90.

(Updated: July 24) Vostro A90, Toshiba NB200, Asus 1008HA, and updates throughout. Thanks to everyone!

(Updated: June 19) MSI Wind U120, courtesy of Matt Hickey.

(Updated: June 13) Vaio P.

(Updated: May 22) Added a bunch of new machines.

(Updated: Feb 1) More columns! Lenovo's S10 bumped to recommended machines: prettier than the Wind and has a 10" display, so unless you need Ethernet, consider it.

Frequent kernel panics reported during Samsung NC10 installs.

Fan control and ExpressCard34 work on Lenovo S10.

Email us or add a link in the comments if you've got OSX working on a new netbook. We'll add it to the chart and link it to your instructions. Thanks!

Note: In many cases, components can be replaced with third-party parts that work with OSX, especially WiFi. And you can always just use USB dongles.

Note: Green doesn't mean it's easy to set up, or that you won't need third-party software. It just means you can get it working. How-to guides for each netbook are linked to from the chart.

Hacking OSX into a netbook isn't easy, and may require familiarity with the terminal. You'll have to grab a hacked version of OSX from the tubes, in contravention of Apple's EULA. You should own a legal copy, too. Piracy isn't nice.

Rob Beschizza

Comment of the day

Following our post about an old book warning of the dangers of electrocution, it was pointed out that modern wiring, with its circuit breakers and ground fault interruptors and what-have-you, makes many of the scenarios technically unlikely. Enter Kwillets:

We need new, sustainable ways to electrocute ourselves with solar and wind power.

Bravo! You win a hairdryer and a bathtub.

Rob Beschizza

Samsung and Westinghouse PR rep goes crazy after being asked not to spam bloggers

At this time of year, tech writers are inundated with spam from CES attendees. Some of them pay attention to what beats writers actually cover, but many shovel their PR to the entire god-damned list. PhoneScoop, which covers cellular telephones, received a missive from Samsung and Westinghouse PR rep Lois Whitman, pitching televisions. Their request for this not to happen again was polite enough. Lois' response, however, was an exercise in madness:

"I don’t need you to tell me what is right or what is wrong.

I have been in the CE business for 42 years

I have seen nasty people like you melt away faster than a snowball going up hill in the rain

I am waiting for an apology

Maybe we can meet at CES for a hug or a slug

P.S. I just visited your web site. I would hardly call your blog a
publication."

Read the full thing at CrunchGear: PR and the fine art of not being crazy [CrunchGear]

Photo: Lois Whitman

Joel Johnson

Retro HOWTO: Keyboard Art

I have no source!

[via Modern Mechanix (of course!)]

John Brownlee

St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio brings 1920s airplane cockpit aesthetic to your bedside table

Absolutely gorgeous. The St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio apes the cockpit control mechanisms of a 1920s airplane, with four separate digital windows displaying the time like an altometer. But that's about it: it's merely a radio and alarm clock, without even a line-in jack or iPod dock connector. £49.95

St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio [Chipchick via Slippery Brick]

John Brownlee

Umbrella illuminates as rain hits

The LightDrops umbrella invented by Sang-Kyun Park glows brighter and brighter the harder it rains. I imagine the site must be very pretty in the rainy dark, as the downpour splatters in loosely corresponded puddles of staccato light.

LightDrops [Yanko]

John Brownlee

Brando's latest glowing, palm-sized keyboard

Another miniature wireless keyboard from purveyors of crapulence, Brando. This time, it comes in the electric blue backlight of a Tron helmet. There's also a USB slot on the side for adding a peripheral mouse.

It seems like this is aimed at the HTPC crowd, but it's really too small to be useful for that, eschewing any media center buttons to keep it palm sized. Also: $47? Oh, Brando.

Wireless Illuminated Super Tiny Keyboard [USB via DVICE]

Joel Johnson

How Dell is reducing packaging waste

BusinessWeek has a short piece on steps taken by Dell's Senior Manager of Global Packaging, Oliver Campbell, to reduce the computer company's shipping waste:

Another innovation story Campbell shared: he was part of team working with an enterprise customer which had purchased several thousands of Dell servers about a year ago. He noticed that after the installation, the client was faced with a huge pile of packages. “Literally, there was a mountain of server-boxes. I thought, there has to be a better way of doing this,” Campell told me. It was a Friday night, he said, and the server installation was the last job of the week. Campbell and his colleagues were sharing beers with the clients to wind down and celebrate the end of the installation, as people do to keep customer relationships alive and well. And then Campbell started paying attention to the six-packs’ packaging—and inspiration hit.

Dell and Two Behind-the-Scenes Green Innovation Stories--involving Blogs and...Beer? [BusinessWeek.com]

John Brownlee

Motorola's new concept smartphone merges RAZR with iPhone

Courtesy of Boy Genius Report, these leaked images of Motorola's 2009 smartphone concept, which mostly impresses by the slide out QWERTY. It looks gorgeous, but also uncomfortably reminds of the revolting, rubbery T9 on Motorola's definitive excretion of design over usability, the Razer.

Upcoming 2009 Verizon Handsets from Motorola Pose for BGR [BGR]

Joel Johnson

Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2009 taking submissions

Do you have a notion of a greener way to create or use consumer electronics? Core77 once again hosts the "Greener Gadgets Design Competition", with a grand prize of $3,000 to be voted on by a live panel in NYC.

Greener Gadgets ompetition details [Core77.com]

Joel Johnson

If Burger King made cologne...Oh, no.

Burger King is hawking its own specially branded body spray called "Flame", designed expressly to lure suckers like me into talking about it. Fortunately, Serious Eats put it in front of a squadron of test noses to humorous result.

My favorite: "It smells like this G.I. Joe action figure I had that would spit out a liquid you filled it with. Or like this girl I dated in junior high who had a leather jacket that smelled just like that."

We Smell Burger King Flame [A Hamburger Today/Serious Eats]

Joel Johnson

Surface Table is just 2mm thick (and not from Microsoft)

The "Surface Table" by John Barnard and Terence Woodgate is three-meters long — and just two-millimeters thick, due to its construction from carbon fiber.

There's one tiny discrepancy in the description that gives me pause: Stylepark describes the table as "just 2mm at the edge", which implies that it might be thicker elsewhere. But probably not!

I would love to play around with one of these. I suspect they're still relatively fragile — no sitting! — but you could probably pick them up and move them around without issue.

Price: unknown, but surely a heap of Euro.

Established & Sons Surface Table [Stylepark.com via Kottke]

Joel Johnson

Morning(ish) tech deals highlights

• GPS – TomTom One 125 in-car GPS unit for $90, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• PC Headset – Plantronics Audio 370 PC multimedia headset with boom mic for $13, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• Prince of Persia – The new Prince of Persia game for 360 or PS3 for $40, shipped. [Slickdeals]

• Point-and-Shoot – Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 (the Leica without the brand plate) for $420, shipped. Very slight discount ($10-20ish) but a fine camera. [Dealhack]

• Earbuds – Sennheiser CXL400 headphones for $21, shipped. [Dealhack]

• HDTV – Samsung 52-inch LCD HDTV with Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote plus free Geek Squad setup for $1,500 from Best Buy. The TV alone is about $500 more at most vendors. [Dealoco]

• DS Games + Toys – Toys 'R' Us has a 50% off coupon for select DS games (I think just Zenses) and other toys, although it's in-store and today only. [Bargainst]

• Camcorder – Sanyo Xacti VPC-E2 waterproof digital camcorder for $210, shipped. Love these little things. [Dealnews]

• T-Mobile G1 – Unlocked and no-contract T-Mobile G1 ("The Android Phone") for $487, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Projector – Sharper Image Entertainment Projector for $55, shipped, or $50 if you pad your order correctly. Probably a real piece of a junk, but good for kids or projects. [Dealnews]

• Label Printer – Brother PT-80 Thermal Label Printer for $10, shipped. [Dealnews]

• Knife Set – Pure Komachi 8-piece block set for $50, shipped. These are great knives and cute besides, although if you aren't careful the pastel paint will come off in time. [Dealnews]

• Emergency Tool – Swiss-Tech BodyGard 7-in-1 Platinum Series Emergency Tool for $19, shipped. Has a tire gauge, glass breaker, seat belt cutter, sonic alarm, LED flashlight, and thermometer, so you can determine exactly how and when you will die by automobile accident. [Dealnews]

• LEGO – LEGO Death Star II (10143) for $215, shipped. This is the model, not the one with the minifigs. [Dealnews]

Xeni Jardin

(BBtv) Blip Festival 2008: Joel interviews Jellica, Mr. Spastic, and Nullsleep

(Flash video embedded above, here's a downloadable MP4.)

Today's episode of Boing Boing tv is an OFFWORLD feature -- this time, Joel and Rob visit the annual chiptunes music gathering Blip Festival 2008, better known as "blipfest."

Joel interviews several artists in this episode who create music inspired by the aural texture of old-schoold video games: Mr. Spastic, Jellica, and Nullsleep.

Previously: Blipfest 2008: Joel interviews chiptunes artist Bubblyfish.

(Special props to Beschizza for doubling as director of photography for these episodes! Holy Brother of Mario, what can't that guy do. Seriously. )

Xeni Jardin

The Road to CES: What do you want? (Boing Boing TV + Gadgets Wünderteam, ACTIVATE!)

Halloo, Xeni visiting over here on Boing Boing Gadgets for a quick post -- yup, that's my blurry mug above. Go ahead, click my face! I talk!

So, in just a few weeks, Boing Boing TV will be traveling to Vegas for The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show with the Gadgets guys -- Joel, John, and Rob. We're planning to broadcast video reports from the show floor together. We're also bracing ourselves for lots of casino umbrella drinks.

To get us started in planning our coverage on the blog in text, photos, and in video, we thought it might be cool to hear from you, our audience. So we asked BB commenters and peeps who follow us on Twitter -- what do you hope or expect to see more of, or less of, at the world's largest electronics show this year. What exactly do you want us to bring home from CES?

In this episode of BBtv, we share your responses. They include:

♦ Find weird things on the fringes -- BE BOING BOING.
♦ OH WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!!! (capture that on video.)
♦ Better netbooks, notebooks -- mobile computing.
♦ The most impractically ginormous flatscreen television ever.
♦ Mobile gaming. "laptops and mobile devices that allow me to get my game on out in the world."
♦ What notebooks or a/v devices are attendees themselves using on the show floor?
♦ Do not cover gadgets at all. Cats are better than gadgets. Also, they are an emergency food source during times of economic crisis.

The ideas have been awesome so far -- keep 'em coming, because we really will use them in planning our hijinks. Here's the ongoing discussion thread over on the main blog.

Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing TV's coverage of CES 2009 is sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is intended to be a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

Rob Beschizza

The thirty deaths by electrocution

Peeing is fraught with danger in Austria.

Elekroshutz is a book at Vienna's Technisches Museum, containing thirty illustrations of how one can die by electricity. Bre Pettis uploaded the lot to Flickr! Here's a slideshow.

30 Ways to Die of Electrocution [Bre Pettis's blog via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Power panel with cell phone holder

With its unusual power socket, Nendo solves a real, if unimportant problem: where to stash a cellphone while it recharges. But ... antlers?

The antlers for all three types of deer are already the perfect shape to hold things, so we hardly had to modify the forms at all. The tough urethane rubber we used for the cover holds handsets tightly, and also protects the antlers from breakage should you bump into them. Socket-deer can also be used as a cover for light switches, and the antlers make an excellent hook for keys or accessories.

Photo: Masayuki Hayashi

socket-deer[Nendo via Oh Gizmo!]

Rob Beschizza

Mactini, the smallest computer in the world

British comedy time!

Rob Beschizza

Asteroids wristwatch

In the Annals of Do Want, this Asteroids-playing wristwatch will have its own chapter, lovingly illuminated, with the esoteric secrets of vectorbeam technology encoded in the fibers of the pages themselves.

It's the latest from John Maushammer, who originally created the watch to run Pong.

Usually, the computer plays automatically & it keeps time. But, it also has a tilt-sensor so you can aim the ship by moving your wrist around. It's not done yet, but it will have buttons for firing and engine-thrust. Maybe mind control will be next ;-)

Here's video:

A reliable test to distinguish nerds and geeks is to ask what sort of amazing wristwatch they wanted as a child: organizer or multi-game?

The Ping-Pong Watch Is Officially A Predecessor, Check Out The “Asteroids” Watch… [Nerd with Swag via Oh Gizmo]

Rob Beschizza

Wal-Mart iPhone will be $197

Wal-Mart's iPhone isn't going to be $99; hell, it's not even going to be as cheap as an official refurb!

Internal Wal-Mart memo [Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Scientists kill gray goo with horseradish

Fear not the gray goo: researchers have created a non-toxic substance that can break it down. And the main ingredient is horseradish.

Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the technique anticipates haz-mat scenarios that have become a staple of science fiction—think tiny robots on a crazed self-replication bender—whose more mundane reality could still cause problems as nanotechnology leaves the lab.

Following publication a report in the Nano Letters journal, co-author Alexander Star said that nanotubes are under production but that their toxicity remains controversial.

"Accidental spills of nanotubes are inevitable during their production, and the massive use of nanotube-based materials could lead to increased environmental pollution," Star said in a press release.

The report's abstract describes how the Pitt team degraded single-walled carbon nanotubes using horseradish peroxidase and hydrogen peroxide. They worked on the nanotubes in their "raw form"—a fine power—already known to cause severe lung inflammation.

“Nanomaterials aren't completely understood," said Valerian Kagan, a professor and vice chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health, in a press release. “Studies have shown that they can be dangerous. We wanted to develop a method for safely neutralizing these very small materials should they contaminate the natural or working environment.”

The team anticipates their method could be used "as easily as chemical cleanups in today's labs."

Press release [University of Pittsburgh]

Abstract of Biodegradation of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes through Enzymatic Catalysis [Nano Letters]

Rob Beschizza

Review: Nextar Peanut. Verdict: Stocking stuffer

A wee MP3 player in the shape of a nut, Nextar's Peanut is extremely cheap, extremely basic, and a bit odd.

Powered by a single AAA battery, this 1 or 2GB nugget comes in pink, red, blue, white or black. It plays MP3 and WMA files, has a small LCD display, and offers basic old-school controls. Hunting through menus reveals equalizer settings, a file browser, and a voice recorder. It comes with a USB cable and free (not very good) earbuds.

It works O.K., but won't serve any duty greater than stocking stuffer or emergency backup. Two caveats: it doesn't show up as a removable drive on a Mac, and faint radio noise occasionally muddied the audio output. Also, Win98 and Mac drivers come on a mini-CD that won't work in slot-loaded drives, and are not offered for download at the product page.

The Peanut is $20 or $30, depending on capacity, at Staples and other main-street stores.

Rob Beschizza

Consumer Reports: BlackJack II is best smartphone

Consumer Reports has issued a roundup that places Samsung's Blackjack II at the top of its smartphone listings. Ancient mediocrities like T-Mobile's Shadow beat out HTC's more recent Windows Mobile hotstuff, not to mention the Android-powered G1. The only Blackberry in the top 5 is the Pearl Flip. Nokia can go whistle.

Matt Buchanan delivers a whipping at Gizmodo:

Ignoring for the moment that four out of the five are Windows Mobile phones, they didn't even pick new, actually good hardware. Not one of the phones, except for the Pearl Flip—which is actually the least capable phone in RIM's new batch of devices—is even from this year. Its top phone, the BlackJack II, doesn't even have Wi-Fi or a touchscreen, and is loaded with Samsung's BS proprietary ports, rather than industry standard ones.

Matt quotes a post of mine from a couple of weeks ago criticising some dismal gadget coverage at CR, but he sharpens the point and drives it home: "Consumer Reports shouldn't review cellphones."

It's not that CR is making mainstream-oriented choices at the expense of the geeky toys that gadget bloggers might love: it is out of touch. I suspected that it thinks that the feature list is the soul of a cellphone—an approach which will be less helpful to readers the more software provision and interface design become central to the experience—but man, this top list is simply baffling ... the T-Mobile Shadow?

The Motorola Q?

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld we got an extensive look back at the design behind Chronic Logic's fluidly dynamic platformer Gish, and nosed around the new Club Nintendo campaign which has finally hit the U.S. We also saw indie adventure game Aquaria released on Steam, decoded game title anagrams, and played Lode Runner on our iPods.

Elsewhere, we saw Dogmeat finally get his armor, budgeted for the downloadable DS games coming to Japan for the holidays, watched even more new footage of Noby Noby Boy, from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, and saw Joel talking with NYC Game Boy musician Bubblyfish at the recent Blip Festival.

Rob Beschizza

Apple Cancels Christmas

Oh no!

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, spoke at a joint press conference held with Santa Claus at the North Pole this morning. He announced: "Apple has been honored to work with the North Pole the last several years to make Christmas possible, however, we have decided together that this is the last year for Christmas."

PRESS RELEASE [applecanceledchristmas.com]

Rob Beschizza

HEXABOT, a walking robot you can build

Rich Pantaleo, a student at Carnegie Mellon University, built himself a 6-legged walking robot throne. Mr. Pantaleo has also uploaded instructions for how to make your own.

Hexabot is a robot I created for Making Things Interactive, a course offered at Carnegie Mellon University. Visit the course blog here: http://mti08fall.wordpress.com/

HEXABOT: Build a heavy duty six-legged robot [Instructables]

Rob Beschizza

Circuit boards recycled as notebook covers

As splendid as these PCB-protected notebooks are, permit me a little disappointment that they are not laptops with chassis made of old circuit boards, copper traces and all.

Recycled Circuit Boards WireBound Notebook in Various Sizes
[First Impressions Last Longer]

Joel Johnson

Hip-hop album covers in LEGO

Format magazine reshoots 20 hip-hop album covers with LEGO.

20 Classic Hip Hop Album Covers Recreated in LEGO [FormatMag.com]

Rob Beschizza

Yahoo! charging $35 renewals for domains even after you leave (Update: Happy Ending)

Did you flee Yahoo! domains after it upped its .com renewal fee to $35? Even though it's no longer your registrar, it will attempt to run the renewal transaction and invoice you if it cannot. This shady practice is not unknown among domain registrars, but I never expected Yahoo! to sink to it.

When it upped the tab to more than three times the standard rate, I transferred my domains to Godaddy.com, cancelled the domains at Yahoo! and moved on.

A couple of days ago, I received a "Past-Due Payment Notice" from Yahoo! Customer Care which says it attempted to bill for renewal of a domain, even though it is no longer the registrar. Moreover, it invoiced for the payment and claimed that the DNS would be interrupted if I didn't cough up.

Worse, I discover upon logging in to my old Yahoo! account that it successfully charged for another domain, transferred to GoDaddy months ago.

Soliciting and processing renewal payments for domains in this manner is a well-known fix. I receive similar invoices by mail, now and again, from no-name scammers: the idea is to trick you into transferring registration to their own company.

$35 for a dot com is bad enough as it is, but using invoices to trick leaving customers into returning—or simply running the transfer automatically using old billing info—is unacceptable.

(Especially cute is how it usually sends all correspondence to your account's primary email address, but renewal receipts only go to the Yahoo! email address that you never check.)

Update: Yahoo refunded my dough without any trouble, and my phone agent was helpful and cheery. This is nice, even if the fact remains that they shouldn't have taken it in the first place.

Joel Johnson

Ovation iDea: Guitar with a built-in MP3 recorder, player

Okay, this is simple and perfect: The new Ovation iDea acoustic/electric guitar comes with a built-in MP3 recorder that, with a touch of a button, records the strings right off the pick-up and a separate, player-facing microphone for voice.

Looks like the iDea (horrible name, guys!) is going for around $600 at places like ZoZo. I used to have an Ovation A/E a while back and it was always more guitar than I needed — in a good way. If you've already got a newer Ovation, the iDea OPi-1 preamp — the recordy bit — can be ordered separately and installed in your guitar.

Ovation iDea guitar product page [OvationIdea.com via Stylecrave]

Joel Johnson

Optimus Maximus: The Rise and...Can you fall if you never rose?

Russia! magazine takes a look back at the long and tumultuous gestation of the Optimus Maximus keyboard, the $1,500 keyboard from Art Lebedev with tiny OLED screens embedded under each hard-to-push keycaps.

And the notion that it’s really not all that useful? Nonsense. Designers, video editors and audio engineers, he insisted, were benefiting from the Optimus every day. But the keyboard also had a higher purpose from the very beginning – one that American critics tend to forget. “I wanted to create a typing interface that is compatible with Cyrillic,” Lebedev said. Keyboards, computers and the Internet were created for languages that employ the Latin alphabet, and English in particular. Lebedev wasn’t annoyed about this. Indeed, he’d benefited hugely from his country’s belated embrace of the computer. But it had always been clear to him that the typical keyboard layout was treating one half of the world like guests. As if their letters were an awkward substitute for the 26 ***real*** letters. No wonder he overcompensated by enabling video playback for every key. Otherwise, he risked excluding the ever-growing language of video memes. (And, for that matter, the illiterate.)

Lebedev said that, despite all the obstacles, he wasn’t planning on selling the idea to anyone. For him, the budding Optimus line is about the creative process, not the money. And he would never be able to stomach someone else taking control and messing things up. “I don’t think anyone will come close to what we’ve done with Optimus any time soon,” he said. “It’s the ultimate keyboard.”

Optimus Pride [ReadRussia.com]

Rob Beschizza

Atom WiBrain is either new ultramobile PC or supervillain name

WiBrain, the brilliantly-named UMPC, is to be upgraded with Intel's Atom CPU. From UPMC Portal, which has one in for review:

Before you get excited though, It has to be said that there’s absolutely no indication of a ship date for the i1 yet. Indeed, my emails to Wibrain are still going unanswered so I suspect some form of PR block which either indicates that they will launch at CES or that they are locked up in the war room trying to work out what the best strategy is.

The Wibrain looks as strange as its name sounds, but is in fact quite well designed: the large touchpad's bottom-right location makes mousing easy. It's also relatively cheap.

Wibrain i1 on its way. Live session Wednesday [UMPC Portal]

Rob Beschizza

The $150 iPhone

AT&T is selling refurbished iPhones for $150 shipped, with a 2-year contract. This gives you a pre-tax, pre-fees total cost of ownership of $1,830 instead of $1,880.

Oh, and you only get a 90 day warranty. And the possibility of "minor scratches."

Refurbished cell phones [AT&T via CNET]

Joel Johnson

Michael Chertoff on the TSA and "Security Theater"

Last week Boing Boing was invited along with a small group of political bloggers and analysts to a sit-down Q&A with departing Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. I had a chance to ask Secretary Chertoff a few questions about the TSA screening process. (Although had I more time, there would have been plenty of other questions I would have loved to ask, such as why U.S. Customs confiscates laptops; more on that in another post.)

While I will be posting the complete transcript of the interview with everyone's questions (along with the audio recording if anyone is interested), I've excerpted the discussion about the TSA with questions from me and Security Catalyst's Michael Santarcangelo. I've edited the transcript slightly for clarity.

Joel Johnson: What's the number of direct terrorist actions that have been interfered with by TSA screening?

Secretary Chertoff: Here's what I can tell you. I can tell you that we've kept... you know, I don't have them all in my head. We had a case where somebody had bomb components in a piece of luggage they were going to take on. Now, do I know that they would have found some way to assemble it, or do I know that at some stage of the person's flight path, it would not have become the bomb? I don't know that. I do know that you probably wouldn't want to get on that plane and I wouldn't want to get on that plane.

I know that we've kept off weapons. Now, do I know the person who had the weapon was going to use it? No, maybe not. But I know that I'd rather not have that on a plane. Do I know how many people I've deterred? I don't know that because I don't know how many people have said, I'm not going to try to do something because I know there's a high likelihood I'm going to be caught.

What I can tell you is that in the period prior to September 12, 2001, it was a regular, routine issue to have American aircraft hijacked or blown up from time to time, whether it was Lockerbie or TSA or TWA 857 [I believe he meant TWA 847 – Joel] or 9/11 itself. And we haven't had even a serious attempt at a hijacking or bombing on an American plane since then.

[According to Airsafe.com, the last flight previous to 9/11 to be hijacked with fatalities from an American destination was a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight on December 7th, 1987. "Lockerbie" refers to Pan Am Flight 103 which was destroyed by a bomb over Scotland after departing from London Heathrow International Airport on its way to JFK, with screening done — as now — by an organization other than the TSA. TWA Flight 847 departed from Athens (Ellinikon) International Airport, also not under TSA oversight.

The implication that hijacking or bombing of American airline flights is a regular occurrence is not borne out by history, nor does it follow that increased screening by the TSA at airports has prevented more attacks since 9/11.]

Secretary Chertoff: So, you know, it's a little bit like getting vaccinated against a dangerous illness. You know, we all took polio vaccine when we were kids. Maybe you may not be old enough. (Laughter.) I can't tell you that if I hadn't taken the vaccine, I would have gotten polio. But I can tell you that it is a sensible thing to do. And that's kind of how I view TSA.

[Secretary Chertoff used this same analogy in his interview with Threat Level in August. It implies that terrorism can be cured through prevention, which is obviously not possible.]

Michael Santarcangelo: Down that path, then, how do you separate out going after real risks versus perceived risks? Right? Because as humans, we're not real good at judging risk.

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah. That's a really important question. We try to manage risk by being disciplined and balanced. You know, I'll give you an example.

We put a lot of effort into scanning and screening cargos that come into the United States, cargo containers that come in, because of the concern of a nuclear device or something like that in a cargo container. I think that's been good. It's drawn down the risk to a reasonable level. There's a lot of push to do that, all that, overseas, even before it gets on a ship. And there's a lot of cost and difficulty in that.

So to my view, that may be, at least if you're talking about a port of embarkation like Southampton in a country like Britain, which has a very good intelligence service, that strikes me as perhaps a little bit of overkill. On the other hand, many people who argued for that said not a word about general aviation.

And yet a couple years ago I had a senior executive in a jet leasing service come to me and say, I don't know really who leases my jets. For all I know, someone could get on with a bomb and it could fly into the United States from overseas, detonate the bomb over a city, and that's that. So as a consequence, we started to say, let's raise the bar on general aviation. So we put rules out on advanced screening of passengers, and we're setting up agreements to do preclearance overseas.

I try to balance, you know, and I think we all try to do the best we can, with a sense of reasonableness. We don't try to make the architecture of the New York subway system, in terms of screening, be the same as the as the airport.

Now, with all of that, I have to say perception is not entirely inadmissible. A lot of what is important in security is public confidence, and visible security adds a certain dimension to public confidence which I don't think you can underestimate. And so I think we have sometimes been visible in doing things. I mean, I raised the question at some point, like, why did the National Guard get posted at the airport? Particularly we do less of that now. And, you know, part of it is I guess if someone were to act out, you'd have an additional show of force. But part of it is public confidence, the public being confident.

The flip side of it is if you look at Katrina, I think one of the issues in Katrina was the lack of a lot of visible presence of the authorities on the ground and that creating a sense of disorder. So one of the lessons I learned is the perception of order and security is actually an important operational element in establishing order and security. It's a kind of a corollary of what Rudy Giuliani did in New York with the broken windows theory, that if you establish that breaking windows and graffiti will not be tolerated, you actually generally drive down crime because you create a sense of order.

Joel Johnson: Sir, I was really trying to avoid using this term at all. But are you actually saying that security theater is an important aspect of actual security?

Secretary Chertoff: No. I don't think it's theater because I think the person who says this is kind of unrealistic and is kind of trying to be provocative. I don't think they're doing things for no reason to make sense, but I think understanding that visible security has a role to play is important. It is a deterrent.

Joel Johnson: Well, sure. But theater also means...theater has a purpose, too, to express a meaning.

Secretary Chertoff: Yeah. I mean, the problem is, I think the term is not meant to be...it's meant to be pejorative. It's meant to suggest that it's like a puppet show. But I would have to say I think visible security does have a role to play because I think it does inspire a sense of confidence.

It also is a deterrent because, generally speaking, people, whether they want to smuggle things in or commit crimes or commit acts of terror, are deterred if they think there's a reasonable likelihood of apprehension, and therefore, particularly if you mix it up, if you do random things, if you change things so they're unpredictable, I think that that actually enhances security.

Joel Johnson: But if the point of terrorism is to scare people, and if the easiest way to scare people is by killing them randomly, if you don't have the ability to put security everywhere, I mean, it still seems like you're ultimately inconveniencing people with a lot of useless screening and useless or most-of-the-time useless security, but not actually able to ever stomp down the threats.

Secretary Chertoff: Well, first of all, you do try to stomp down the threats because you try to eliminate them overseas. You try to catch the people when they come in. But what layered security recognizes is that no one layer is perfect. So what you do when you have screening is, first of all, you do find things. I mean, we find people bring on things, and we have found people coming in across the border with things like how to make an IED. And, you know, it's important to catch that. But we also deter people because we raise the barrier to them carrying out an attack because they worry about it.

Now, is it perfectly successful? No. So I'll give you an example that I sometimes use.

The best police chiefs in America, guys like Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton, they have not eliminated crime in their cities. Does that mean that having police is useless? It scares people, you know, because you have a lot of police presence, and it costs a lot of tax money because you haven't stomped out crime? No. You've reduced it. We have reduced the risk of terror. We have not eliminated the risk. And an argument that I find fallacious is one that challenges all security measures because none of them is a perfect security measure.

[The complete transcript of the interview is available in this Google Doc.]

Rob Beschizza

Chiaroscuro PC case modeled on Olympic building

Modeled on a striking building constructed for the Beijing Olympics, Nick Falzone's custom PC case is made of aluminum-lined wood and modeled on renders created by the original architect.

After completing my last few cases, I wanted to try my hand at something a little different. People often asked me why, if I was building cases from scratch, I would simply use the “standard” PC chassis shape and besides the reply “it just works that way”, I did not have much to say back to them. I also always loved how Jounge’s (Gert Swolfs) Hypercube 2 Case looked and so I decided to build a cube case. The concept for the case went further than just the shape and it turned into a desire to make a computer case less that looks less like a computer case and more like a beautiful object.

There's even a clever example of the easy way being the better way: the lighting effect was accomplished not with a fancy LED array, but with translucent acrylic.

Chiaroscuro by Nick Falzone [Bit-tech.net]

Joel Johnson

Intel Classmate PC is a miniature Tablet PC

Laptop Magazine dinks around with a near-final version of Intel's Classmate PC, the latest revision of the education-oriented netbook. While the silicon sifters inside the "CTL 2go PC" are the usual fare — Hello, 1.6GHz Atom! — the screen whips around like a Tablet PC, offering 8.9-inches of pen computing for the lil' ones.

Why it is ugly as sin is beyond my capacity to explain. The two-tone plastic and superfluous Michael Okuda-style bumps aren't doing it any favors. (I do like the handle, though.)

If Intel has access to these touchscreens, though, it stands to reason that Asus, MSI and company do, too. I wouldn't be surprised to see some touchscreen netbooks "for adults" at CES.

Intel-Powered Convertible Classmate PC: The Touch Netbook to Emulate [Laptop]

Inside baseball note: I find it amusing how Joanna Stern at Laptop has just completely owned the netbook beat. I can't recall a new model that she wasn't the first to use hands-on.

Rob Beschizza

Apple netbook announcement imminent, analyst predicts

Apple is going to cannibalize sales of its most successful product by releasing a low-end notebook with razor-thin profit margins, according to analyst Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research Inc. From Computerworld:

Apple Inc. will introduce two netbooks at the MacWorld Conference and Expo next month that will be tied to the company's App Store, as is its iPhone, an analyst said today.

"I don't have any inside information," said Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research Inc., as he spelled out his take on Apple's next hardware move. "This is just by triangulation."

You don't say!

Nonetheless, I would love a Mac netbook, and hope it's true. On the other hand, MSI's Wind now runs OSX perfectly, so there's no reason to live without the utility of such a thing, even if it isn't made of Cupertino fairy dust.

So, here's a question: what could Apple add to the industry standard netbook formula to make it special?

Apple will unveil netbooks next month, says analyst [Computerworld]

Joel Johnson

Magnepan 3.6/R: $5,400 buys you Speakers of the Year

CNET's "The Audiophiliac" Steve Guttenberg (no relation) calls the Magnepan 3.6/R his "Speakers of the Year":

The sheer believeability of the sound can be, at first, a little jarring. The ribbon tweeter is so much more realistic sounding than any dome tweeter I've ever heard. Cymbal crashes sound like crashes. The treble dynamics/impact/vibrancy are absolutely state of the art. So much so returning to box speakers can be a letdown, they sound smaller, more contained, and well... boxier.

I don't think I've ever paid more than $250 for a set of speakers — I've got two 5.1 sets in the house, one from Logitech and one from Yamaha — but I'm open to the possibility that these sound a lot better. Hopefully with an emphasis on "a lot".

Speaker of the year: Magnepan 3.6/R [CNET]

Joel Johnson

Nikon D700 cake

This Nikon D700 cake was commissioned by a photographer's loving husband.

There is no gadget that does not look better with red velvet cake inside.

fsumaria's photostream [Flickr]

Joel Johnson

Mitch Altman travels to Limerick

There once was a hacker named Mitch… Greetings from Limerick, Ireland! Folks I’ve met here assure me that the (often lewd) little poems we’ve all come across are not from this locale, though people are certainly not shy of a bit of lewdness, at least in their speech, if the parties I’ve been to are any indication.

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the University of Limerick for Skynet, their computer society. My talk was about the social implications of technology. It gave me another fine opportunity to rant, and I was gratified that people found it humorous, entertaining, and even (according to some) inspiring. How do you use technology in your life? What might your life be like if you made just a few more choices to do what you truly love in your life? What might our world be like if more people made these sorts of choices?

My hosts have been most gracious during my stay here, providing me with plenty of social occasions, food, and parties. My time in Limerick has been lacking only in sleep, and making up for that in spades though great conversation and warm feelings.

Tomorrow I go (way too early in the morning) to Paris, where I will be visiting with tmplab, the next hacker space on my agenda.

Rob Beschizza

Sharp brings Zaurus story to a close after 15 years

Zaurus, Sharp's long-running lineup of linux-based PDAs, is no more. Akihabara News reports that "if you happen to own one, you're now the proud owner of a collector piece."

Originating in 1993—and briefly offered in the U.S. in the early 2000s—the last model had a 416MHz CPU and a 6GB hard drive. Once a hugely successful device, the market's become flooded with fiddly open-ish devices that don't quite do enough useful things to justify themselves. But I still love the "minuscule laptop" form factor: phones like the Env don't quite capture it.

Bye Bye Zaurus ! Sharp officially discontinue its Linux PDA. [Akihabara News]

Rob Beschizza

Video of Wiimote destroying TV

"Mama!"

Another Wii Sports Casualty [Fandome via Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Source: New Year to bring new Mac Mini

An anonymous tipster told Wired's Brian X. Chen that the Mac Mini will get its stunningly late refresh at January's Macworld Expo. Though rumors of its demise persist, the fact remains that it's a top seller at Amazon and isn't likely to die any time soon.

He has no details, but many hopes:

Similar to the MacBooks, the Mac Mini will sport a silver enclosure composed of a block of aluminum. Some internal parts will be PVC-free, and combined with its size and low power requirements, Apple will tout this as the "greenest Mac ever." For video output, the Mac Mini will use the DRM-crippled DisplayPort for connectivity, which Apple is offering to manufacturers for a no-fee license. It'll have a CD-DVD slot loader (i.e. Super Drive). There will be no Blu-ray player, because Steve Jobs believes the format is a "bag of hurt."

Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009 [Wired]

Rob Beschizza

LED outdoor walkway

Electronic lights in strange objects rule. The marketing copy for this LED outdoor walkway system, however, does not.

The solution is CATWALK - a modular steel, clean rectilinear walkway. Conceived by an acclaimed team of architects and designers, CATWALK was designed with modernism, elegance, versatility, safety, and durability as the key tenets. ... illuminated white panels, lit from the inside by small points of power-sipping L.E.D. light ... CATWALK turns a walkway into a stage.

Catwalk [Minim.is via Mocoloco]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today saw the first new look in over a year at Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi's new PS3 downloadable game Noby Noby Boy. It's a game so impenetrable even its own website doesn't try to explain it, so I've taken some extra time at the end of the day to try and connect the dots between what little we know about the game now to a then-seemingly wildly rambling speech Takahashi gave a year ago.

Elsewhere today we saw that Daniel Pemberton's Little Big Music album we got an exclusive preview of last week has now gone on sale, read that Myst MMO URU was going open source and fan-created, that Half-Life themed Peggle Extreme was being offered for free, and that gorgeous PS3 art/platformer PixelJunk Eden was about to get a bit mercifully easier.

We also downloaded a demo of the unapologetically psychotropic PC strategy/shooter Space Giraffe, listened to a new song created with Toshio Iwai's musical DS software Electroplankton, reflected on the hyper-targeted demographic of last night's brütal Spike TV Video Game Awards, and, charmingly, saw homebrew DS software made solely to use as a marriage proposal.

Rob Beschizza

Phone Gloves

Ascending the brightest heaven of invention, Etre Touchy creates a "stylish, fun and practical way to keep your hands warm" while using modern touchscreen devices. Priced £15, the cunning design gives you "the freedom to touch, tap, stroke, slide and pinch."

No. No jokes. Just a stern and unyielding glower.

Gloves [Etre Touch via DVICE]

Rob Beschizza

Chromochrome, clock of colors

Each position represents part of the time—two hours, two minutes, and two seconds—and the color at each position represents the numeral. Simple, ingenious, and completely incomprehensible!

Chronochrome

Rob Beschizza

Gel Remote Control

Soft and milky, Adbusters' Gel Remote looks .... delicious, frankly!

Psychodesign [adbusters via Next Nature]

Rob Beschizza

Ericsson: One cellular subscription for every person on earth by 2013

A pitch from Ericsson, to promote its greening initiatives, opens with an interesting prognosis:

By 2013, Ericsson ... anticipates that there will be some 6.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, compared to today’s 3.7 billion. About 90 percent of growth is expected to come from developing markets where more than half of the population lives outside city limits.

This is an interesting follow-up to today's earlier news that North Korea, of all places, is establishing a 3G cellular service. The temptation is to think that it's just a toy for the bureaucracy, but it's perhaps the nation's only hope to maintain a working infrastructure. Cellphone networks aren't reliant on miles of rotting (or nonexistent) cabling, after all.

Ericsson's prediction isn't that everyone will have a cellphone, but it's got to be close—even gadget bloggers don't need many! Does this imply that not owning a cellphone will soon be a matter of personal choice, even for the world's poorest?

Rob Beschizza

iPhone Nano probability zero ... but what about a Shuffle?

Wired's Dylan Tweney has the best of this afternoon's "Screw the iPhone Nano" posts.

The "Nano iPhone" that iDealsChina is so excited about is probably a fake. Sorry, Apple fans. It's just not that much smaller than a regular iPhone 3G, and it's hard to imagine Jobs getting excited about something that's just a little smaller (and lacking 3G). Plus, as MacRumors.com points out, iDealsChina is a "questionably reliable" source.

The underlying reasons why there's no Nano seem obvious now that the AppStore is part of the landscape. The hardware specifications of a slightly-smaller iPhone would either break existing apps, change the existing user interface, or make it a pain in the ass. The iPhone Nano people have in mind is a high-dpi eye-gouger with a less precise touchscreen and even worse battery life.

Routing around this is the idea of an iPhone Shuffle, which could be so simple that it doesn't run apps at all, or even have a touchscreen: check out Dennis Crothers' mockup at the source below, the first entry in Wired's competition to design a tiny iPhone.

I imagine something that keeps the touchscreen, but is a smidgin smaller than the Nano-most-imagined: just the keypad, address book and iPod controls, please.

Rumor: Apple Definitely, Probably Not Working on iPhone Shuffle [Wired: Gadget Lab]

Rob Beschizza

Review: a week with Universal Remote Controls' URC-R50

Universal Remote Controls' URC-R50 is a sturdy mid-range universal remote that's cheaper than the competition and easy to set up.

Able to control 18 devices, the backlit URC-R50 has a built-in setup wizard and a small but colorful LCD display, which can show 6 appliances at once. It comes with a large library pre-installed, and can learn functions from other remotes.

It's also light, weighing just over a pound with 4 AA batteries installed, and doesn't need to be hooked up to a PC for configuration.

Tested on my own stuff, it was responsive, easy to use, and presented no annoying gotchas. Each unit was set up in a matter of seconds. Assuming your needs aren't too demanding, you'll soon forget it's there: it Just Works.

Though pricier than basic models with similar functionality, the R50 saves a few bucks those who have found sub-$100 models lacking, but don't fancy the $200 price tag of Logitech's Harmony One.

The one big caveat: there's no bluetooth, which means it won't work with Playstation 3 and some iPod docks.

Though typically marked at $150, a whip around the 'net reveals that it's currently $128 at BestBuy.com

Xeni Jardin

I Dream of CES: Your Input Requested, With or Without Kitteh Assistance.

O HAI. Xeni here, dropping by for a quick post.

Boing Boing TV will be traveling to Vegas for CES (Jan 8-11, 2009) with our colleagues over at Boing Boing Gadgets to do video reports from the show floor. Possibly with the assistance of hard-working investigative journalists like the guy you see above (who could frankly use a shave).

Our video crew will be joining Joel, John, Rob to walk through the maze of consumer electronics offerings, separating the junk from the gems, and trying to parse what's worth separating you from your heard-earned samoleans.

To get us started on the road to CES, and in planning our coverage on the blog in text, photos, and in video, I thought it might be cool to hear from you.

What are you expecting to see? What are you expecting to see more of, or less of? What devices and/or services would make computers, laptops, smartphones, or gaming devices for more fun, more productive, more -- whatever it is you want?

CES is historically the largest electronics trade show in the world. Why do so many people travel across the globe to um -- pounce on Las Vegas once a year for this, and what do we expect to be different this time? Extra points if you type in LOLcatese. We might read your comments out in a special BBtv episode we're planning to air tomorrow about our CES prep.

(A sponsorship note: BBtv's "Road to CES" episodes will be sponsored by Intel and Asus, who recently launched WEPC.com, a project to build the world's first "community-designed laptop.")

PHOTO: Something crashed on my computer! by Simon Davison, a CC-licensed photo on Flickr.

Rob Beschizza

Review: a weekend with the HP Mini 1000 netbook

HP's Mini 1000 is a superb netbook. If you're fine with getting three hours on a charge, its great looks, capable specs and excellent keyboard make it a 2.38 lb ultraportable you'll actually enjoy using.

If you do plan to spend time away from the mains, its 3-cell battery is a critical flaw. You won't get a morning of work out of it, let alone a day. (Update: HP wrote in to say a 6-cell battery will be offered in January)

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Télécoms Sans Frontières: Providing free satellite phone calls to Congolese refugees

A group called "Télécoms Sans Frontières" — Phones Without Frontiers, or the TSF — has provided free, three-minute calls to refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo who are living in crowded Ugandan camps, giving many of them the first communication they've had with family members in a long time.

TSF is sponsored by the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation and uses satellite phones for an uplink. Amazing, simple work.

TSF began humanitarian calling operations in Matanda, a transit camp situated 30 kms from the Congolese border where an estimated 10,000 people are sheltered.

The team also installed a satellite based Internet connection for aid agencies in Kihihi, a small town turned into a humanitarian base camp 30 minutes from Matanda. At present, aid organizations such as UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, MSF, Oxfam, Save the Children or ACF are working to provide help to those who have lost everything after fleeing the fighting in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In less than a week, over 15,000 more Congolese refugees crossed into Uganda bringing the total number of refugees from the recent combats to almost 60,000. Initially located in Ishasha right at the border, the refugees were quickly moved as Nkunda rebels were approaching.

Conflict in DRC - TSF deploys to support Congo refugees fleeing combats into Uganda [TSFI.org]

Joel Johnson

Video: "World War" student animation by Vincent Chai

"World War" is a fun final degree project from Vincent Chai, a student of 3D animation at University of Hertfordshire. It manages to supersede typically derivative transforming robot kung-fu shorts by having a good sense of humor, which gives it all a bit of breathing room. Plus I like the notion of WWII-era vehicles as robots.

Joel Johnson

What's the one thing that would convince you to buy a Palm Nova-powered smartphone?

Palm has announced that they'll be showing off their new operating system at CES, to be available on devices by mid-2009.

For me I'd love to see a really killer camera and video implementation, something that would let me ditch my Sanyo Xacti forever.

Joel Johnson

Warbot pinup calendar

Noah has discovered this wonderful pin-up calender from killbot maker Talon Robots and has posted his favorite images on Danger Room.

I would like one of these very much, thank you.

Warbot Pinup Calendar [Danger Room]

Joel Johnson

The Swerve makes trimming your neck, back hair, uh, fun?

"The Swerve" is a disposable razor designed for trimming the back of the neck and — erk — upper back in-between trips to the barber. (That is presuming you go for the full back shave at your barber. Personally, I prefer a more natural, winterized look, with festive garland braided in for the holidays.)

You can get a Swerve for $5 or $13 for a three-pack.

The Swerve Neck and Back Razor [ShavingStuff.com]

Joel Johnson

Ricoh GR Digital II camera reviewed (Verdict: A peculiar sidearm)

Serious Compacts reviews the Ricoh GR Digital II, in many ways the only camera in its a class: a truly pocketable camera with RAW support and a 28mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens (but only sneaker-zoom).

The GR Digital II is currently the flagship Ricoh compact and occupies a unique position in the "serious compact" market. It isn't the right compact for most people, even amongst those who appreciate advanced compacts. For starters, it doesn't zoom, lacks image stabilization, and sells for $500 at the time of this review (down from a $700 street price at introduction). That said, nearly every photographer I know who has tried this compact for as little as one week has been taken with it.

Ricoh GR Digital II Review [SeriousCompacts.com]

Joel Johnson

Nathan, these are the iPhone apps I use all the time

My friend Nathan just bought an iPod Touch and asked me what my essential iPhone apps are. With eighteen-hojillion apps out on the App Store now, I figured we could all use a "Here's what I'm using" thread to share the stuff we really dig.

Apps

• WriteRoom ($5) – A nice if somewhat pointless text editor that can be had for free if you buy the excellent Mac version at the same time. It has landscape text entry if that's your thing, though.

• Stanza (Free) – Essential eBook reader, with 40k free books available for download. Were it not for the screen, this would kill the Kindle.

• Mobile Fotos ($3) – Fantastic Flickr interface, including the ability to upload full-resolution images. (The iPhone email default is 640 x 480 pixels.)

• CameraBag ($3) — Beautiful retro filters for the Lomo dork can make crappy iPhone camera (not that you have a camera, Nate) look decent, but I've lost at least one irreplaceable photo to its crashiness.

Games

• Fieldrunners ($5) – A Tower Defense-style game, I've probably wasted more time with this than any other game on the iPhone. Needs more levels and units, but still, I've probably put 20 hours into this in the last month. Very well-behaved crash-wise, too.

• Galcon ($5) — Fun arcade strategy hybrid. A free demo gives you a lot of play, too. [My review]

• Flick Fishing ($1) – I haven't spent a ton of time with this, but I love fishing games and this is pretty top-notch at first glance, especially for a buck.

For When You're High

• RjDj ($3) – Weird ambient noise remixer, but pleasingly trippy. [My review]

There are probably at least another dozen apps I keep on there that I use to show off the device or mess around with occasionally, but those are the ones that I use on at least a weekly basis. Oh, I have two different Twitter clients — Twitterific and Twinkle — but both of them have quirks that I don't like.

Joel Johnson

App Store, I love you but you're bringing me down

I am convinced that within the next two or three years, Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch will become the dominant smartphone and PDA. Sadly, the mobile computing platform that will push smartphones fully into the mainstream, a full-featured computer in everyone's pocket, will remain broken if Apple does not allow third-party applications to be installed without permission or vetting from Apple.

The latest evidence: Apple has rejected an iPhone application, after a 33-day waiting period, for using a non-public API. The problem? The application did not in fact use a non-public API, but instead replicated the same effect (CoverFlow) using custom code.

The App Store approval process isn't working. It's taking too long for applications to be added, while it's clear that those vetting the applications are making mistakes. It's understandable — they're human, and probably overworked, besides — but it's also unnecessary. The App Store, a collection of Apple-approved applications available directly on the device, is a great asset for the iPhone, but it should be only one of many ways to put applications on a device — a computer — that you own.

The solution is simple: Apple needs to make jailbreaking — if not sanctioned — at least not a violation of the DMCA.

I'm fully aware that for most current and future iPhone users, the ability to add unsanctioned third-party applications isn't critical. But like most seemingly esoteric issues of ownership and user rights, just because it isn't something that will affect most users doesn't mean it isn't important.

It's my suspicion that users will lose this right by ignorance. With such a well-made product, traditional market forces are incapable of sending any nuanced message. This mistake will not cost Apple any appreciable market share. And I certainly don't think posts like this will do more than reify iconoclasts' opinions and cause moderates sadness. So what do we do?*

iPhone: Peeps Rejected for Private API ... Huh? [LandonF.BikeMonkey.org via ★]

* Besides donate to smart, allied lawyers?

Image: siyublog

Joel Johnson

Microsoft releases gigapixel image viewer Seadragon...for iPhone

Brother Zuzu writes: "Seadragon, the predecessor to Photosynth, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, has been ported to the iPhone! (The battle of the Zooming User Interfaces is on, between Microsoft Live Labs and Apple's own Core Animation.)"

Seadragon is a free download which makes it possible to view gigapixel images on a small screen.

I will simply echo my comments from when Google Earth was release on the iPhone first: "Hurrrr durrrrrr huh?" (I'm not positive this is exactly what I said.)

When two of the three major competitors to your smartphone platform are releasing their experimental or cutting-edge software on your platform, something is going wrong — for them.

Seadragon Mobile download [iTunes]

Previously • Top 10 TED Talks: Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth

Joel Johnson

Picture: Giant Sony PSP on a flat-bed trailer

"Sony Takes Delivery of Kaz Hirai's New Throne"

(Thanks, Weatherman!)

Rob Beschizza

EeePC 1002HA hits stores

Asus's 1002HA went all official today. It's available from Amazon for $500.

Often basic in form, Asus's EeePC wasn't known for designer swish until recently. The noticeably fancy looks of its latest entrant combines the specs of the 1000HA with the stylings of the high-end S101, and also keeps most of its $700 price tag.

An inch thick and cast in aluminum, its been compared to the Vaio T-series and other more expensive subnotebooks. In other respects, it's a standard enough model, with 1GB of RAM, a 10" 1024x600 display, 1.6GHz Atom CPU, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, bluetooth, WiFi-g, memory card reader and a 92% keyboard. It's offered with a 160GB hard drive and your choice of Windows XP or Linux.

The weak-ish spot is the 4200mAh battery. The 1000 series, however, has ample aftermarket options.

We've got one of these in and will have a review up soon.

ASUS Eee PC 1002HA 10-Inch Netbook [Amazon]

Joel Johnson

Video: Blakeley channels Balmer for iPhone battery commercial

I'm not sure what possessed Richard Blakeley to create this Windows 1.0 spoof for some random company that makes an extended battery for the iPhone, but I guess it's good to a career to fall back on in these troubled times. [Blakeley.Tumblr.com]

P.S. A raven!

Rob Beschizza

Old washing machine drum turned into lamp

If you're constantly wondering what to do with old washing machine agitator drums, here's your answer: turn them into lamps and sell them on the internet for $500.

[Reestore]

John Brownlee

The Sonic Chair Touch pivots a touchscreen iMac on a huge cushioned speaker

Ensconced in the phonic concavity of a giant speaker while watching a movie on a pivoting touchscreen iMac, this Sonic Chair Touch looks remarkably like a first-class seat on a Pan American space plane in the soon-to-be-released Steve Jobs edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which is apt: this would be a good way to watch Kubrick's classic, if only to hear "Thus Spake Zarathustra" from your bowels on up.

Sonic Chair Touch [Official Site via Born Rich]

John Brownlee

Jeff Atwood on Swoopo: "Pure, distilled evil in a business plan."

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror tears into Swoopo, an online auction site that promotes itself as a hip, smart alternative to eBay but instead feasts upon the desperation of its losing bidders... resulting in thousand dollar profits on $200 iPods:

It's not clear that Swoopo even has the items they auction; they appear to sell first, then use the money they gain from the completed auction to buy and ship the item. Furthermore, they have a clause in their Help under Delivery and Shipping that lets them ship "equivalent" items...

There are also rumblings that swoopo silently pits users from the different territory websites against each other in individual auctions, such that UK users are unwittingly bidding against US users. This is done to ensure that there is around the clock bidding to extend auction end dates as long as possible.

In short, swoopo is about as close to pure, distilled evil in a business plan as I've ever seen. They get paid for everything up front, and as they drop ship everything there's no inventory or overhead to worry about. It is almost brilliantly evil, in a sort of evil genius way. You can't stop people from endowment effect fueled bidding when they have the individual chance, however small it may be, to win a $2,000 television for $80 -- while collectively sending the house $10,000 or more.

Atwood's conclusion? Bidding on Swoopo is sheer gambling. Who thought eBay could seem so comparatively upright and moral?

Profitable Until Deemed Illegal [Coding Horror]

Rob Beschizza

OS X WiFi drivers now available for MSI Wind

MSI's Wind was a near-perfect "hackintosh" netbook, able to run Apple's OSX system software but for one problem: no WiFi drivers for the factory-installed wireless card. Realtek's remedied the problem by emailing a customer with OSX drivers, according to GottaBeMobile.com—and the customer's promptly leaked them to the internet.

Regardless of how the RTL8187SE driver came to be, users are reporting success with the Realtek WLAN Client Utility. The RTL8187SE doesn’t show up as an airport card, but does provide full Wi-Fi functionality for OS X Wind users.

The success of “hackintosh” netbooks is one reason (among many) why Apple will probably never release their own netbook. For a reasonable $349 USD or less, consumers can pick up an Acer Aspire One, Dell Mini9, or other popular netbook. These devices aren’t powerhouses, but do provide the option of running Apple’s OS X operating system.

In effect, this means the MSI Wind U100 is a perfectly compatible Mac clone requiring only a modified version of OSX to get up and running.

Photo: D.B.Cohen

OS X Realtek Wirless Driver for MSI Wind Released [Gotta Be Mobile]

John Brownlee

Black and Decker SmartDriver perfectly aligns screws, but don't order from Amazon

This Black and Decker electric screwdriver seems to come with a Colt-action barrel for automatically firing screws into the wall or the joints of anti-Christs, then reloading. It does not: that's just a helpful screw holder. What it does have is an extending arm that automatically holds the screw in place, allowing for perfectly aligned, one-handed drilling without the threat of accidentally tapping your thumb bone marrow.

But what's most interesting is the Amazon.com price: $3,997.00! Prompting this confused comment from R. Smith of Woodside, California:

The current price showing is $3,997.00 so I called Amazon and was told this was the correct price due to Target being out of stock. Target was selling it for $39.99 which I pointed out.

So I asked if this could have been a mistake and the answer was no. If you order it you will pay $3,997.00

So you might want to hold off on ordering this until it hits our Morning Deals, or just go to Target: the rest of the Amazon reviews are very favorable.

Black and Decker LFI4000 [Amazon via Slippery Brick]

John Brownlee

Hewlett-Packard nukes your hard drive to repair the letter 'P'

Consumerist reader Marjan returned her Hewlett Packward laptop for an in-warranty repair.

The problem? A broken letter 'P.'

HP's solution? To fix the 'P'... then nuke the hard drive.

In truth, this isn't uncommon: back when Joel and I wrote The Consumerist, we got these same kinds of stories all the time. Most laptop warranty programs seem to require a technician to return the laptop to the customer in factory condition... which means with your half-finished novel deleted and factory-default crapware re-installed to the system tray.

For all my problems with Apple's Genius Bar warranty service, this is something they do right: for a fee, they'll back up your data for you (if possible) before they fix your computer, and will never delete your hard drive if it's not required. I've brought my MacBook Pro in for simple problems and never once had to worry about it being paddle shocked with an electro-magnet.

Anyway, the rule of thumb: you should always be backing up your data, and never send off a laptop without being aware that it might come back with a lobotomy.

Hewlett Packard Wipes Your Hard Drive To Fix A Broken Key On Your Keyboard [Consumerist via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

Teaspoon-handled measuring cups

I've had a surprisingly difficult time finding measuring cups in Berlin — at least at the one store I checked, which reacted to the request as if I'd been looking for a solid lump of Unobtanium — which might explain why I find this measuring cup so charming: the handle of each cup (1/4th, 1/3rd. 1/2 and 1 cup) doubles as a measuring spoon for quartered tea and tablespoons. Only $17.95.

Teaspoon handled measuring cups [Amazon via BoJ]

John Brownlee

Pre-chewed pencils are disgusting

I do not like to think about the factory where these pre-chewed skeletons are produced. I imagine a sweatshop of cadaverous, blue-gummed Chinese workers, woozily chomping on pencils like bald, lead poisoned squirrels, their only breaks being government sanctioned sojourns to lift their anemic bodies off the floor and vomit pencil shavings into a bucket in the corner... which, at the end of the day, is pulped and compressed into more pencils for the chewing.

pre-chewed pencils [Concentrate via technabob]

John Brownlee

Kodak OLED touchscreen digiframe gets it all right, except the price.

A while back, Joel and I were muttering about digital frames. They're certainly some sort of future of simulated grandwhelp display, but they tend to be chintzy in the wrong places. Joel speculated that it was time to get excited about digital frames when they went entirely touchscreen, upped the screen quality and — most importantly — slurped pictures in directly from the Internet via any RSS feed, with none of this proprietary photo hosting site system horseshit.

According to our metric, then, Kodak's 7.6 Wireless OLED digital frame is the first one really worth being excited about. The display has a touchscreen resolution of 800x480, and will wirelessly pull in RSS feeds from a number of online photo sharing web sites, including Flickr. It also links up to your PC and automatically shares and shuffles through your stored photo collection. There's even swank widget support, a built-in stereo for pumping out music and a auto-dimming ambient light sensor.

It looks great, but in a sea of $100 Wal-Mart cheapies, the price is staggering: just a buck short of a grand. So now we have a new metric: when this caliber of digital frame comes in at less than a couple hundred bucks, then we'll get excited about digiframes.

Kodak OLED 7.6-inch Wireless Digital Frame [Amazon via Slashgear]

Rob Beschizza

Palm at CES: will any sign of life be enough?

Palm's much-delayed linux-based mobile operating system will be re-announced next month at CES alongside new hardware. Wired's Priya Ganapati says its the firm's "last, best shot at survival."

"It's quite likely, actually close to a certainty, that they will show a new OS, new user interface and probably new hardware," says Lawrence Harris, an analyst for Wall Street brokerage firm CL King & Associates. "This is Palm's last shot to prove it has what it takes to survive in a very competitive market."

When analysts talk like this ("actually close to a certainty"), it's fun to imagine the consequences should the proposed scenario not happen. Would that be news?

Take, for example, the eternal predictions of an Apple tablet PC. If Apple doesn't announce one when an analyst intimates that it might, there are no consequences. Nothing is really at stake.

But what if Palm did nothing at CES? The idea of it is absurd: the story of Palm's coming "hail mary" moment is most interesting because it's already been written, and all it has to do is turn up.

Previously:
• Palm Death Watch: Revenue falls 41% short of projections

Update: It's a new operating system, reports Business Week, called "Nova":

With about six quarters of cash currently in the bank, Palm's last best hope may be Nova, to be released by mid-2009. Cash-strapped carriers are loath to take on the cost of supporting another platform and software developers are busy building software for other devices, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, and phones that use Google's (GOOG) Android software. "If they can't show me a large, active audience, I'm not going to be interested," says Jeff Holden, CEO of Web 2.0 company Pelago, maker of a social networking tool for the iPhone. "At this point in the game, you're toast unless you have something completely unbelievable."

Rob Beschizza

Eee Box gets Celeron crossgrade

Spotted at Italian Eee fansite EeePC.it, news of a Celeron-equipped desktop adds yet another Eee PC to the dozens already in existence.

Otherwise similar to current Atom-powered models, the Celeron Eee Box will offer similar performance from its older, cheaper, more power-hungry chip. Why the switch? Because Intel can't make Atom CPUs fast enough to keep up with demand where they're needed, in notebooks.

Source (Italian) [Eeepc.it via Lilliputing]

Rob Beschizza

United Keys' OLED keypad is "the poor man's Optimus"

Engadet takes a close look at United Keys' OLED keypad. Much of the review is dedicated to describing the state of terminal scorn induced by it.

We're naturally utterly un-blown-away by the product -- you get what you pay for -- but it's still a relatively unique and interesting product, and wears the mantle of "the poor man's Optimus" quite well.

Talk about back-handed compliments!

United Keys OLED Display Keyboard and Keypad hands-on [Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Samsung's 8-Megapixel Pixon coming to U.S.

That Samsung's Pixon has an 8 megapixel sensor hardly reassures: the problems of lag and general aggravation associated with cellphone cameras can't be resolved by adding resolution. On the other hand, the reviews are good, suggesting that it at least takes great shots, even if it is just another touchscreen handset in other respects.

Already available unlocked as a gray import, it's likely to be subsidized in the U.S. by AT&T, according to Cellphone Signal:

Today, FCC gave is the information about a new version of ths Samsung Pixon coming to USA market. This is the Samsung M8800L. This specific version of the Samsung Pixon wil come now with 1900 and 850 3.5G, only compatible with AT&T bands

Oddly, the Pixon has GPS and geo-tagging, but no Wi-Fi. If only HSDPA were widespread enough to make that a reasonable proposition.

Report [FCC via Cellphone Signal]

Rob Beschizza

New York Times' Year in Ideas

The New York Times' eighth annual Year in Ideas sketches out 2008's intellectual map, from A to Z. Here's just one example—The Biomechanical Enery Harvester—of something wonderful that you might have missed:

Max Donelan, a professor of kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and director of the S.F.U. Locomotion Lab, described “biomechanical energy harvesting” in a story published in February in the journal Science. He sees plenty of uses for the compact device, which stores the energy it harvests in a small lithium-ion battery. Aid workers in disaster zones or soldiers trying to reduce theweight of their battery packs will benefit. (The first large-scale client is the Canadian military.) “There are people whose lives depend on portable power,” Donelan says.

Five years ago, Larry Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, invented a backpack that made its own electricity from the subtle bouncing motion as its wearer walked — like a scaled-up version of the self-winding watch. It was a cool demonstration of the principle but not really practical for civilians; to generate significant power, Rome’s backpack weighed up to 80 pounds. By contrast, the in-development version of Donelan’s device — with its aluminum frame, transmission system and generator — will weigh less than 2.5 pounds and easily fit underneath a pair of pants.

Stillsuits and Weirding Modules by Christmas 2010.

The 8th Annual Year in Ideas [NYT]

Rob Beschizza

Gold Vaio TT blasts recession away with own blazing light

Screw netbooks. I want a gold-painted Vaio TT with a Swarovski crystal portrait of Kim Jong Il and an integrated snuff dispenser.

Source (Chinese) [Sina.com via Sony Insider and PCPOP.com]

Rob Beschizza

Old Gadget Ad: Sinclair C5

Sir Clive Sinclair's C5 was a tiny electric vehicle, released in the mid-1980s to a skeptical British public that did not buy many of them. It looks surprisingly attractive now, two decades later, but that sleek pearly-white design conceals serious design flaws: pedals to make up for the dreadful battery and a highway safety profile analogous to riding a motorcycle, in the nude, down a ski ramp.

From Wikipedia:

Powered operation was possible making it unnecessary for the driver to pedal. It had a top speed of 15 miles per hour (24 km/h), chosen because vehicles unable to travel faster could be driven without a driving licence in the UK. Despite being relatively cheap to purchase (it sold for £399 + £29 for delivery), the C5 quickly became an object of popular ridicule, and was a commercial disaster with only around 12,000 being sold.

Here is a jet-powered one:

Rob Beschizza

Leather Keyboard

Natural media peripherals have an obvious appeal: the latest technology married to the real world's own bounty, as beautiful and simple as it often is. A walnut PC enclosure, perhaps, or a mouse made of stone.

But a leather keyboard? Kinky. And $540.

Product Page [M-Yokanaru via Hackaday and Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

"Vibe Motor," the vibrating alarm-pillow

That a vibrating alarm clock pillow should emerge from Japan comes as no surprise. Forgive the cultural stereotyping, but where else do such ingeniously banal ideas flower into real products?

Except for Brookstones, I mean.

Vibrating pillows get us up, shut us up [Trends in Japan via Impress]

Rob Beschizza

Glow-in-the-Dark spray paint

Should your petty crimes come to bore you, try executing them with Glow Graffiti, a paint that glows in the dark. The can even has a bright LED next to the nozzle, acting as a kind of primitive meatspace "preview" function,

Glow in the Dark Graffiti Spray [via Random Good Stuff]

Rob Beschizza

Add the Benny Hill theme tune to any YouTube video

The spirit compels: The BennyHillifier adds Yakety Sax to any YouTube video.

Unfortunately it does not speed video up, or add groups of naughty nurses fleeing hither and yon.

Rob Beschizza

Synthesizer Pillow

To know old synthesizers and drum machines is to know love—even if to your parents, it was to know migraines. Gwendolin Taegert of Berlin made this cuddly item, on which we can dream of classic Rolands being re-released.

Softmachines: The Icons of Music Making Get Cuddly [via Create Digital Music]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld our weekend gaming edition sees us reaching out to all of you to keep us all together, with the launch of our Facebook page and its repository thread for keeping track of our XBLA/PSN/Steam names (note that we also have soft-launched a Twitter feed as well!).

Before that, we heard with relief that Double Fine's Brütal Legend would be published by the increasingly boutique EA, saw eBooks officially coming to the DS, and watched an Extra Hyper Korg DS-10 performance from the composers behind Ridge Racer and Chrono Trigger.

We also printed and folded an amazing Legend of Zelda papercraft Link hat (and hair [!]), watched ten minutes of Red Fly's upcoming Wii version of Ghostbusters, proved Scott McCloud right with a comparison of console avatars, and, finally, watched an episode of Grip Wrench, a new animated short series from Rex Crowle, the illustrator behind much of Media Molecule and LittleBigPlanet's CMYK design (who also knows how to make a damn fine unicorn).

Joel Johnson

Video: Robocop in rap

I was thinking recently that I needed to watch this movie again. And now I have.

[via @Kaster]

Rob Beschizza

Walkies! Giant robot dog made from old Citroën parts

Watch Robo Dog in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Does one ride a giant fire-snorting robot dog? No? Then one is clearly not in London.

Rob Beschizza

Hemp-chuk for Wii

Dhreck's hemp-mote is made from 100 percent natural hemp, and remains completely functional on the inside.

In stark contrast with the original Wii-mote set, what was once sleek, cold, white and hard plastic has now become a slightly fuzzy, natural, warm and textured concoction. No more bland, branded and boring but mottled, flawfull, rough and a tad sweat absorbing.

[DHRECK via Hack a Day]

Rob Beschizza

Cyborg arm plugs directly into bone

A new prosthetic arm, developed in the U.K., attaches directly to its owner's bone.

A victim of the London bombings has had a prosthetic arm fitted to her bone and skin in an operation which could herald "a new generation of reconstruction".
Kira Mason was opposite one of the four men who detonated devices on the transport network on 7 July 2005.
Surgeons were able to fuse a metal pin with her skin tissue, and a battery pack helps to ensure she can clench her fist and flex her muscles.
Consultant orthopaedic surgeon Steve Cannon said it was a "breakthrough"

'Pioneering' arm for 7/7 victim [BBC]

Rob Beschizza

Nokia to make 3G notebook dongles

Nokia is to make its own 3G USB dongles in Europe. From Reuters:

Nokia declined to comment on the price of the device -- which uses HSPA, a super-fast 3G technology -- saying it would be sold mostly through operators and bundled with services.

Strategy Analytics said it expects the global market for so-called "dongles" -- external USB modems and PC cards -- to grow to 26 million units next year from 20 million this year.

It's remarkable to think that while 3G is still shiny and fresh here, and carriers charge stiff fees for data and phone-as-modem plans, there are already price wars over it elsewhere —and it comes as standard on cheap Euro-netbooks like the EeePC Go.

Source [Reuters via UMPC Portal]

Rob Beschizza

New Sharper Image site up

Behold. Now where have I heard that music before?

Joel Johnson

Advanced Engineering building implosion toy set

Lori H. writes:

American Toy & Invention Co. has created a kit that allows you to build and demolish a building. These kits are either 4 or 8 stories high, and the buildings can be rebuilt and imploded again.

The inventor has run out of funding, so even though this product is completely tooled and could be delivered, he doesn't have adequate resources to ship product.

I want to get one of these for the engineer on my Christmas list. Somebody needs to fund this thing!

Advanced Engineering Toy Set product page [AmericanToyCo.us]

Joel Johnson

They make webcams inside of dinosaurs now

This Dinosaur WebCam, available for $17 at crapvendor Sourcing Map, may not be as "high detailed realistic" as they claim — I don't recall many dinosaurs unearthed with cans of nitrous crammed in their mouths — but it is awful cute. And no with completely manual focus!

It's staggering how many different corny webcams are available from these places, all just cheap enough I want to collect them all. I mean, a "Brown Cartoon Windmill" webcam? That's adorable, even if it is inexplicably perched on a set of engorged...oh, maybe that's a heart.

Dinosaur webcam Product Page [Sourcing Map] (Thanks, Jenny!)

Joel Johnson

Mitch Altman travels to Trinity College, Dublin

Mitch Altman — Greeetings from Dublin, the second city on my tour of European hacker spaces and conferences. It’s 2am here, after another night of intense conversation and drinking with the local geeks. I was met at the airport yesterday by 5 of said geeks holding laptops, each displaying part of my name – what better way to start my first stay in Ireland?

If my experience is at all typical, then people in Dublin really are warm and open, as I’ve been told by friends who’ve visited here. I’m already friends with several people I never even heard of a couple days ago. From the airport I was scuttled to a respected drinking establishment, frequented by the Netsoc crowd, Netsoc being the computer society of Trinity College. [Pictured above] Conversation and drinking ensued – till 4 in the morning, when the pub manager lost patience and kicked us all out.

The presentation I gave today included several of my favorite rants about TV and its effects, making conscious choices in our lives, encouraging everyone to do what they love. I guess it went over well, since they brought me along with them to the aforementioned pub. Tomorrow I go to Limerick to give another talk at the university there.

Previously • Mitch Altman travels to Roboexotica

John Brownlee

AT&T allowing home activations on iPhone again

AT&T is now allowing you to activate your iPhone 3G at home... heck, order it online before 4PM, and you can even have it delivered overnight to you. It seems like a safe bet for AT&T at this point: it makes iPhones easier to buy from them as Christmas gift and simplifies the sale process at their end. The only reason they didn't let people do it before now is because they were worried about people unlocking the 3G for other carriers, but the Dev Team still haven't figured out how to do that. AT&T's probably out of the woods.

iPhone 3G [AT&T via Crunchgear]

John Brownlee

PlayStation in a LEGO castle

Max Maruszewski ripped the guts out of a vintage PlayStation and ensconced them into the dimpled, polychromatic plastic lining of a home-built LEGO case. It's not exactly a Ben Heck caliber hack, requiring devious intricacy on the part of the modder. But that's okay, it doesn't have to be: simple is not the same as being easy, and the simplest hacks are often the coolest.

Playstation Wizard [MAKE via Slippery Brick]

Joel Johnson

It's not racist to prefer the iPhone

Aaron Swartz's mewling paean to the Sidekick smartphone is littered with smug, myopic insights and a salty dash of old-fashioned white guilt. I am compelled to shriek and gawp.

His founding asininity? That compared to the iPhone, the Sidekick is a "superior device" that he's been using "for the past five years." (Mouthbreathingly turtlenecked as that assertion is, that's not the part that really gets my goat, but...)

First, context: At what it was designed to do — be an awesome instant messaging device — the Sidekick excels. It was and is the best IM device out there that isn't a full-sized computer. But as an all-around smartphone it was a failure: weighted down by a rudimentary web browser, a restrictive "App Store"-like selection of carrier-controlled applications (which could have choked Apple, but did not, in part because the iPhone is a much more powerful and versatile device), and really rough media support, even through the later models. Still, I was a fan. The flip-out screen was great, most models had wonderful keyboards, and the way you could hold multiple IM conversations using all the gamepad-like controls was a joy to use. You could tell the Sidekick was designed by a company who really cared about the experience. (At least until everyone fled Danger and the stragglers were absorbed by Microsoft.)

But times change. The Sidekick had a brief moment in the sun among tech nerds, but the lack of a decent internet experience (not to mention how clumsy it was to use as a phone) sent most adults packing to other platforms, swapping crappy email and great IM for great email support with rough IM thrown in as an afterthought (on the BlackBerry) or powerful hardware easily accessed (Windows Mobile).

Then Apple released the best all-around smartphone ever made.

I don't care if you agree with me or not — I mean, you're wrong if you don't, but that's fine; you've been wrong before — and if you're happy with your current smartphone, then more power to you. There are certainly areas in which other smartphones excel over the iPhone...the Sidekick excels over the iPhone for instant messaging, you might have heard.

Swartz's assertion that the Sidekick is a "superior device" only holds water when he cherry-picks certain comparisons: the Sidekick keyboard is superior (so much so that he composed whole articles, he claims); he liked being able to save articles in the browser caches (you can save the equivalent data several ways on the iPhone using third-party applications or email); he found the swipe-to-scroll method "tiresome". It's iPhone Critique 101, though, and not ireworthy on its own.

But this is:

But it wasn't as if the Sidekick was unheard of. As soon as I wandered out of the land of white folks in suits-and-ties, black and latino kids would rush up to me and gab about the Sidekick. During one trip, a latina middle-schooler stopped me on the sidewalk and asked if I'd gotten the latest firmware update yet. "It has JavaScript support!" she enthused. Browsing the Sidekick user forums bore this out -- it was all black and latino schoolchildren.

But, of course, neither minorities nor schoolchildren rule the world, so the Sidekick has been written out of history. 2007 was the first time anyone had thought to give a smartphone a decent UI, or a web browser, or an over-the-air application store. Well, at least it was the first time anyone thought to tell white people.

But to presume that there is some sort aspect of ignorance by "white people" in passing the Sidekick by — especially when "white people" almost certainly means "working adults" — is exactly the sort of goofy injection of race into an argument that drives me crazy.

Don't prefer the iPhone over your Sidekick? That's dandy. Trying to co-opt some latent street wisdom because you prefer a QWERTY keyboard over a touchscreen? Immature and icky.

And shortsighted: I reckon in a couple of years all those same kids will be using iPhones. It has superior JavaScript support.

The Forgotten Sidekick [AaronSW.com]

John Brownlee

The Givori Nefertiti... because the ugliest phone in the world is worth paying a premium

This is Givori's newest and most hideous bling-encrusted luxury phone, the Nefertiti. It's 24 carat gold dipped in glue and rolled in Swarovski crystals. It looks exactly like a mobile phone coated in globulous ambergris and ripped from the festering bowels of a sperm whale. Needless to say, you can only buy this in luxury stores in Dubai, and it costs almost $4500 to look this tasteless.

Givori Nefertiti Luxury Phone Hits Dubai Luxury Stores [Born Rich]

John Brownlee

JVC announces two new Everio's with built-in hard drives

JVC's newly announced Everio cameras are aimed squarely at consumers who want to be able to store entire vacations worth of video without slurping it down to their laptop. They come in two flavors: the cheaper model has a 60GB hard drive, while the latter doubles the drive space to accommodate almost 29 hours worth of MPEG-2 video. And if that's not enough for you, both models are expandable with 8GB microSDHC cards.

They aren't available in the States yet, but bide your time: when they are released, you can expect a price roughly around $750 for the 60GB and $810 for the 120GB.

New JVC Everio Models with HDD [Gearlog]

John Brownlee

Attractive toilet paper roll requires solving an obnoxious puzzle

Oh, yes, this is what you need: a puzzle game to be solved and separated before toilet paper can be dispensed. I'm sure that this sort of thing seems very clever to a jokester, right before a guest they overloaded with brain puts his guest towels to ingenious use. That said, this is still one of the more attractive looking toilet paper dispensers I've seen... for $20, I'm almost willing to side with aesthetics and just deal with the cries of outrage bellowing from behind my bathroom's closed door.

Toilet Roll Puzzle [Lazy Bone via OhGizmo]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

• HDTV – 32-inch Sharp 720p flat panel LCD HDTV for $400 at Best Buy, pick-up only. A decent deal, although not amazing. At this point I'd almost not buy anything that wasn't 1080p. Still, it's Sharp, not some random company. (Although it's not an Aquos.) [Slickdeals]

• Amazon Prime – A year of Amazon Prime, their premium shipping service, for $60 instead of $100. I adore Prime. [Slickdeals]

• BlackBerry – The BlackBerry Bold is available on AT&T for new subscribers for $150 via Amazon. $100 of that is a stupid rebate, though. [Amazon]

• Netbook – Acer Aspire One netbook with 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 6-cell battery, and XP Home for $380, shipped. [Amazon] (If you see direct links to Amazon now, this is me trying to get some Amazon affiliate money. I am actually trying to make sure that these are good deals, too, so if you find a better overall deal elsewhere, don't hesitate tot call it out in the comments.)

• HDTV + 360 – Refurbished Samsung 42-inch 720p plasma screen with Xbox 360 Arcade for $800, shipped. Since the Xbox can't render above 720p (natively) anyway, this would be a decent pairing. [Dealoco]

• Netbook – Samsung NC10 with 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, a six-cell battery with killer run-time (like 6+ hours), and XP Home for $450 if you pay with Paypal. [Dealnews]

• HDTV – Another in-store pick-up, this time at Circuit City, for a JVC 42-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $700. You can get it shipped, but it'll be another $55. It even has an iPod dock inside. [Dealnews]

• Camcorder – The regular ol' VGA Flip Video Ultra for $107, shipped. [Dealnews]

• A Thing of Drawers – A cheapo bit cute little plastic set of drawers for $24, shipped. I have this in my bathroom and it's totally not high-quality, but I like the gradients. Works great as a little junk drawer thing. [Dealnews]

• Home Theater System – Today's Woot is the SLS Audio QS1000 Home Theater System for $255, shipped.

Rob Beschizza

This is not William Shakespeare's head

This is a bust of William Shakespeare which tilts back to reveal a remote control switch. See if you can remember where it came from—and hence why the makers believe they can get $315 a copy—before visiting the link!

Source [Redhotphones via Dethroner]

Rob Beschizza

Samsung NC10 on QVC

It's the final triumphant huzzah of mainstreamification: being sold on TV with a 20% premium.

Samsung's NC10 is QVC's daily star product. It's the must-have product for the Christmas season. They have never known such a buzz. So many people are already placing their orders!

"The specifications of this are mindblowing!" says one of the salesmen.

Samsung NC10 hits QVC channel [Lilliputing]

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Sears 8M

(Thanks, Deepdisco!)

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld we read new details about the latest downloadable content set to come to Fallout 3, and downloaded G.E.C.K., the officially released mod kit for the PC version of the game.

We also read about the precarious rebalancing of Street Fighter II for its Xbox 360/PS3 remake (and re-watched the most thrilling Street Fighter championship video ever recorded), and watched new footage of Thatgamecompany's serene Flower, a game that flexes every bit of the PS3's muscle purely to render fluttering petals and waves of tall grass.

We also heard about a new DS game that generates items based on wi-fi hotspots in your area, saw web game portal InstantAction go free, recapped the best moment of last night's Fünde Razor, and fiddled with theRelativity, a version of the underlying tech behind PS3/PSN game echochrome that lets you look inside the "impossible objects" made popular by M.C. Escher.

Finally, we played our two favorite indie games of the day: I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colors, a game from the vantage point of a lonely undersea Cthulu-esque monstrosity, and Minotaur China Shop in which a similar monster leaves the labyrinth to deal in dainty dinnerware, to expectedly disastrous results.

Joel Johnson

Stephen Fry on the Bold, Storm, and G1...and the iPhone

Stephen Fry reviews the new BlackBerry Storm and Bold, plus the Google Android G1, with a dash of context based on the iPhone and its strengths.

The G1 is a little narrower than an iPhone and has an attractively light, semi-matt, almost rubberised texture to its back and a glossy enamelled lustre to its front that I happen to like. I am assured by a friend that ‘coffee bean’ would be a good description of the colour of the one I bought, a kind of dark army brown/grey, officially designated ‘bronze’. ‘Metallic mocha’ is also suggested by this colour literate acquaintance. Black and now white are also available and I must say it does my heart good to see a phone that isn’t trying too hard to imitate the iPhone in its exterior lineaments. When I saw pictures on the web I thought, as did many, that the ugly stick had given the G1 a damned good thrashing, but in the hand and up close it’s much better than I expected. It has a gentle, somehow retro form factor that I find comfortable and appealing without eliciting screams of desire. The bronze version reminds me of GPO brown from the days before BT: trimphones could come in that colour and also had those simultaneously square yet rounded corners. The lower section of the front, which carries five buttons and a trackball is tilted forward and up in such a way as to have earned the soubriquet ‘the chin’. Otherwise standard volume rockers, an angled camera lens and a camera button in the usual place complete the outward appearance, in the closed position at least. Yes, ‘closed position’, for this is a slidey-open phone which reveals a full qwerty keyboard when the top half of the sandwich is prised away from the bottom. More on that later. The hard buttons, incidentally, are Menu (context specific), Green Phone, Home, Back and Red Phone. Pretty basic and all one could need. I am pleased by the addition of a trackball. Apple’s purity can sometimes get in the way of convenience and I like thumbing balls. Hang on … look … stop it at once …. you know perfectly well what I mean.

Gee, One Bold Storm coming up…. [StephenFry.com]

John Brownlee

Wine bottle gives confidence, friendship, love, light

Simple, lovely, utilitarian design: this Cava wine bottle comes in a box that turns into a chic, slotted lamp.

Wine Case Lamp [The Dieline via DVICE]

John Brownlee

The world's smallest optical mouse

The Z-Nano is the word's smallest optical mouse, about just as large as your fingertip. When not in use, it can be stored in your ear canal or nostril. $60.

World's Smallest Optical Mouse [Techeblog]

Rob Beschizza

What is Tech Sex?

Fox News has determined that teenagers' communications with one another are often sexually suggestive.

One in 5 teenagers say they've electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude images of themselves, which may be fueling a more casual attitude toward sex, according to a "Sex and Tech" survey released this week by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com.

"Tech sex" is a fantastic phrase, for sure, but credit must go to Wired's Steve Kettman.

Study: 1 in 5 Teens Engaging in Tech Sex [Fox News]

Rob Beschizza

12 days of Peekmas, starting with a free Kindle

Peek, maker of the slim email-only handset of the same name, is giving away a gadget a day in the run-up to Christmas.

1. At the beginning of each day for the next 12 days we are going to announce a new must-have gadget
2. If you buy a Peek on that day you’ll be in the running to win that gadget
3. As each day goes by they’ll be an extra winner. i.e On day 1 we’ll give away one gadget to a lucky winner, on day 2 we’ll give away two of that day’s gadget to two lucky winners until the 22nd when we give away 12 gadgets to 12 lucky Peeksters!

Day one's gift is a Kindle: enter "12daysofpeekmas" during checkout to have a shot at it. Peek is just short of $100, with a $20 monthly unlimited data sub,

12 Days of Peekmas [Peek]

Rob Beschizza

3D Maze Ball

To love puzzles as I do, and yet be so bad at solving them, is a heavy burden to bear. Therefore, I'm not even going to think about getting this 360-degree, spherical horror, and instead will be content to just look it at for a couple of minutes on the Internet.

Another reason not to actually play it: It is rumored that if you solve it, a portal opens to the place where McDonald's researches childrens' play areas.

The Awesome 360 3D Maze Ball [Random Good Stuff]

Rob Beschizza

Tetromino ice cube tray

$10 from Thinkgeek.

It's tempting to buy a few, then set up an aluminum sheet at an angle and actually try playing Tetris by sliding them down. As a completed line will not vanish automatically, a sense of accomplishment could be had by making the tetrominoes out of certain beverages and eating them instead.

Ice Blox [Think Geek]

Rob Beschizza

ioDrive drives fast: flash storage at 500 megabits a second

Behold the ioDrive. With its passive cooling and stubby PCIe connector, it could be easily mistaken for a cheap video card. A fat bank of memory chips, however, shows what it's really about: 80 gigs of ultra-fast NAND flash memory.

The theoretical specs are breathtaking: using PCI-Express x4, it can write at up to 368 megabits/s and read at 473 megabits/s, several times faster than standard SSDs, even outstripping high-end 15K hard drives from Seagate.

With an MSRP of $3,000 and up, it's targeted at servers rather than home computers, in configurations of up to 320 gigabytes. It's 64-bit only. You can't boot to it, either, according to Chris Ram's writeup—but that's just because it's a prototype.

Exclusive look at Fusion-io ioDrive [Tweaktown via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Speed bumps design flattens self for slow drivers

If it sometimes seems more comfortable to accelerate gently into a speed bump than to grind over it at 1MPH, you wouldn't be alone. Jae-yun Kim & Jong-Su Lee invented a collapsible speed bump that flattens automatically for slow drivers, taking the rough out of responsible driving.

"Encouraging drivers to retain a constant slow speed will reduce the amount of stops and starts made..." they told Chris Burns of Yanko Design. "It is hoped that this retractable speed hump would therefore have positive effects on energy consumption and pollution.”

Speed Bumps That Flatten for Slow Speeds [Yanko]

Rob Beschizza

Prototype Sony lampshade steals own lightbulb's energy back

Sony's dye-sensitized solar cells will first see life as light: a desk lamp, to be precise.

The Hana-Akari fixture is made up of panels that mimick photosynthesis, storing energy in a low-cost, thin membrane that will be easy to manufacture. Commercial applications are expected to be a "potentially significant contributor" to the feasibility of renewable energy policies.

No release date was given at the demonstration, which took place at an eco-products conference in Japan this morning.

Sony, using dye-sensitized solar lighting equipment "Hana-Akari" [PC Watch]

Rob Beschizza

UK regulators uphold complaint against Virgin download caps

A complaint against Virgin Media has been upheld by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority, which ordered it not to run its "HATE TO WAIT?" ad campaign again. The ad, regulators said, did not accurately depict the speed of its internet service.

A complainant registered by rival British Telecom claimed that Virgin misled users with the ads, because its traffic management policy capped speeds during busy hours, during which the marketed speeds would not be available.

In effect, regulators enforced a component of Net Neutrality on somewhat imaginative grounds: if you don't offer a free and fast internet, you may not advertise it.

Virgin's response was that it only focused on heavy downloaders and uploaders, whose activities it claims saturates bandwidth. It added that a typo in the ad that made it look more ungenerous than it is (a 300MB cap was printed as 300Mb — a megabit being just one eighth of a megabyte) and that it was essential to manage excessive network use.

The ASA's response? That's all fine and dandy, but it's not what you advertised:

The ad did not make clear that the 26 minute download time was only possible during off-peak hours, or that by downloading one full TV show in peak hours customers would automatically be in breach of the download limits...

Because that was not the case we concluded that the ad was misleading. The ad breached CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation) and 7.1 (Truthfulness). ...

We told Virgin to make clear in future ads that download times would be restricted during peak hours. We advised them to seek guidance from the Copy Advice team when preparing similar ads in the future.

The ASA recently ordered Apple not to run iPhone ads without making it clear the depicted internet speeds were simulated.

Rob Beschizza

R2-D2 Aquarium

For this you can thank Hammacher Schlemmer:

Modeled after the most well-known astromech droid in the galaxy, this R2-D2 holds a 1 3/4-gallon aquarium tank in his central compartment, ideal for a small freshwater family of goldfish, gouramis, or tetras. The domed head rotates with any vocal command you issue and he utters his familiar "bleeps" from the Star Wars movies.

It's $130, twenty inches tall, and plugs into the mains. It even comes with a two-sided cardboard insert so that your fishes can enjoy scenes from the movie.

[HS via Wired]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on our specially Doom-15th-anniversary themed Offworld (see it now before the skin swaps back!) we, most excitingly, got an exclusive first listen to LittleBigMusic, a collection of LittleBigPlanet's original music (outside the relentlessly hip guest artists) by Daniel Pemberton. It's worth mentioning here that Daniel is also the composer behind brit-com Peep Show's original season one theme song (the not- pop-punk Harvey Danger one), and the track he gave us is no less wicked, a big band/ragtime turntablist romp not too far outside the likes of Kid Koala.

We also got the second installment of Margaret Robertson's One More Go, in which she explains why the "beautiful, enigmatic, alluring and unmasterable" shooter Ikaruga is "her Mona Lisa," and elsewhere got a deeper look at the design behind excellent freeware PC platformer Knytt Stories.

Finally, we read, happily, just what Steven Spielberg knows about games, saw Sony's fair-enough response to its temporary closure of LittleBigPlanet social networking site Sackbook, saw 'Buffalo Bill's game room, Guitar Hero heading to the arcade, and clever Left 4 Dead hacks, and celebrated that Doom anniversary with some recommendations, remembrances, and eBay auctions.

John Brownlee

Don't use an iPhone to send your Dad a text message after you make love for the first time

This has all the hallmarks of a fake to me, but it's so easy to imagine it happening — I manage to accidentally send text messages to the wrong people on my iPhone all the time — that I'm posting anyway: according to the Inquisitr, 18 year old Elizabeth Frisinger accidentally texted her dad instead of a friend with a short txtspk account of the loss of her virginity. Summary: it was gr8, Dad! Wish you were here! Her father was stoically unamused, demanding her immediate return on the next plane.

It's doubtlessly fake, but still, it's plausible. I think the iPhone is so easy to send text messages to people because it stores them like iChat conversations: you open the SMS app and are presented with your last "conversation." It's hard to get over the training of other phone's SMS systems to just start enterting text as soon as you open the app, though: I find myself assuming that after I enter my message and hit "Send," I'll then be asked what contact to send it to. It's merely an issue of retraining — the iPhone's system makes just as much sense as the other — but I've been finding it a big difficult to get over years of interface indoctrination.

Lost her virginity and texted her Dad [Inquisitr]

John Brownlee

Casio calculator watches refresh their colors

If you still hanker for the convenience of wrist calculating but hanker for in-season colors, Casio has just refreshed their decidedly retro-line of calculator watches. All cost $59 a piece, except the black, which Apple MacBook style costs more than its colored (and, I think, swanker) companions: the black is $69. I like the yellow and green.

Casio Databank gets new colors [SlipperyBrick]

John Brownlee

Firefox adds multitouch gestures for Macs

Allthough Mozilla's Eddie Lee had successfully proven the concept in a beta back in October, the latest beta of Firefox 3.2 brings multitouch gestures to the MacBook line... even on previous generation MBPs!

Gadget Lab's Charlie Sorrel was impressed:

I gave it a try, and the gestures are even better than those in Apple's own browser, Safari...

On my old (multibody?) MacBook Pro, the gestures are all supported. The "pinch-to-zoom" differs from Safari's in that it will keep zooming as you move your fingers -- in Safari, each pinch motion only gives one level of zoom meaning you need to repeat the gesture to zoom more than one level.

The twist-to-switch-tabs gesture works a lot better than you'd think, including wrap-around so that once you get to the last tab, another clockwise tweak brings you to the first tab.

I'm distrustful of Firefox upgrades after being burned after every upgrade as yet another indispensable extension defuncts, otherwise I'd give it a go. Anyone in our readership taken it for a spin?

Firefox Adds Multitouch Gestures for Macs [Gadget Lab]

Joel Johnson

Voltaic Generator solar bag now shipping, capable of charging a laptop

Voltaic Systems has announced the "Generator" bag, a laptop case with a solar panel that finally, blessedly has enough oomph to charge a laptop. An hour in the sun will get you 20 to 45 minutes of run time, depending on the power draw of the laptop itself. And of course like all the other Voltatic bags, you can charge up phones, cameras, and the like.

It's not cheap, though, in large part because the 15-Watt solar panel has a 20% efficiency, which is quite good for a consumer piece. The Generator also has a larger 58-Watt-hour Li-ion battery that it uses for power storage, which also isn't cheap.

Very slick. If I weren't already in a heavy backlog of reviews I'd try to take one out for a spin, but haven't used previous Voltaic bags in the past, I'm sure that this one is quality.

Voltaic Generator solar bag product page [Voltaic Systems]

Rob Beschizza

Word of the day: mainstreamification

Walmart represents, in Seth Weintraub's distinctive headline, the "mainstreamification of the iPhone."

Wal-Mart sells iPods, of course, and many other premium brands, but the idea of a cheap iPhone at this most hated of discount stores hits a nerve with some. This is, in fact, a reminder that Apple has always considered itself mainstream, and has never enjoyed its reputation as a maker of fancy toys for a computing elite. What Apple enjoys is control, of the kind people assume is lost amid the bargain bins and generic cornflakes of a big box retailer.

If there is a $99 version, this will tempt the lower income demographic a bit more, but the biggest expense – by a landslide – is the AT&T monthly fees. In fact, on a few of AT&T's plans, the $99 will be eclipsed in the first month of wireless charges alone. This, however, will sell many more phones and won't tarnish the brand.

Not everybody is as sure as I am that cheaper iPhones are a good idea.

UBS analyst Maynard Um said yesterday,

"A $99 iPhone would be atypical of Apple's premium brand strategy. More likely is a scenario in which select Wal-Mart, and possibly Sam's Clubs, are simply added as further iPhone distribution points."

Really? What would a $59 iPod do to the brand?

Google's brief history of mainstreamification has the iPhone with GPS, games, podcasting, twitter, anime and cryptozoology.

Joel Johnson

Mitch Altman travels to Roboexotica