Rob Beschizza

How to get a better line from your fountain pen's nib

One of the finest and longest-lasting gadgets you can buy is a decent fountain pen. Like most items of good quality, maintenance and repair can keep them in action for years, if not decades: you can pay an expert, or you can learn to do it yourself.

Ludwig Tan's how-to guide on grinding nibs saved me a bunch of cash getting an old Parker 51 writing smoothly again, and all you need is an Arkansas Stone, fine-grit emery paper and, finally, something only slightly rough, like crocus paper or a brown paper bag. As these are items you likely already have, it's practically free!

There's another article I wished I'd had at hand, though: Wim Geeraets' Nib grinding experiences has more technical detail, such as the best grade papers to use as you proceed.

Update: As wisely indicated by commenters below, you should only do this with cheap nibs until you know what you're doing.

Rob Beschizza

New Mac Mini now has 17 USB Ports

CrunchGear spotted one with 12, but Mypalmike went 5 better!

Mat Honan

Ramune and the Mystery of the Codd Stopper Bottle

One of my favorite treats at an Asian grocery store is Ramune. Ramune is a soda with Japanese origins (there's a Taiwanese version as well) that comes in a variety of sugary-sweet flavors. Although, unfortunately, not blood. Bummer.

But the cool thing about Ramune isn't the taste; it's the container. Bottles of the soda are sealed up with a marble. To open them, you have to force the marble down into the bottle, where it gets captured in a small chamber within. Pop it in hard and it makes a fizzy mess; which of course can be part of the appeal of drinking it. While the bottle may appear novel, once again it's in fact an old technology that just happens to feel delightfully modern.

The bottle is a Codd Stopper, invented by soda magnate Hiram Codd (of the Camberwell Coddses, not those low born mother-scratching Devonshire Coddses) and patented in 1873. The idea is that the bottle uses internal pressure from carbonation to force the marble up against the rubber stopper at the lip, sealing your tasty beverage inside. It was kind of a hit, although the quaintly pejorative term codswallop refers to beer that was sold in such bottles. Codd also helped pioneer the return deposit (thus giving d. boon $.05) perhaps because children were prone to smashing empty Codd bottles to get at the marble inside. Kids are dumb.

But while Codd bottles fell out of use in Europe, and never gained much traction in North America, they were crazy popular in Asia, particularly in Japan where, as we have previously established, they know from beverages. Today you can get Shirakiku brand Ramune all over the place--assuming you live in San Francisco like me. Er. You don't? Well, you can still pick it up on Amazon. But if there is an Asian market in your area, save yourself some shipping costs; they'll have it.

And now, for a horrifying video:

Photo credit: Mark A. Miller

Rob Beschizza

Shocker: we aren't buying as many expensive Macs

Here's the Wall Street Journal, quoting NPD numbers:

Apple Inc.'s unit sales of computers through U.S. retail channels fell 6% in January from the same month in 2008, the first monthly decline in three years, according to market-research firm NPD Group.

The data suggest that Apple's premium pricing, which helped boost revenue when demand was strong, may be hurting the company now that consumers are being more careful about their spending amid the recession.

That people would argue this would not be the case ... it still baffles me.

Update: Commenter Dssstrkl makes a great point:

How about we consider the fact that MacBook sales went up in January, and it's Mac desktop sales that are down. Big surprise there. The current iMac is over 10 months old, the mac pro is over a year old and the mini hasn't been updated since August 2007! There's a massive pent-up demand for new and modern desktop Macs. Watch the numbers go through the roof when Apple finally gets off it's collective ass and pushs through some new systems.

Apple Stumbles on Price Pressure [WSJ]

Xeni Jardin

Naked Baby Plays Synthesizer (video)

A (semi) naked, 9-month-old baby plays a synthesizer. Nuff said. synthtube.com (thanks, Alex Ringis)

Rob Beschizza

USB-only Mac Mini

Splendid work from CrunchGear's Matt Burns, mocking yesterday's not-so-convincing "leaked" photo.

Joel Johnson

Driving from Brooklyn to Oregon next week; What weird should I espy?

I am moving to Eugene, Oregon, because I am in love with a girl.

I'm also in love with my dog Porter who, as an English Bulldog, has a not-impossible chance of dying in the cargo hold a jet (even one heated and pressurized; bullies have breathing issues). So I'm gonna lash him in to the passenger seat of a rented minivan, test out my new awkwardly large Pioneer GPS unit, and bop across the country from Brooklyn listening to my first audiobook ever. (Ender's Game, which I've never read. I know.)

Along the way, I'll be doing the things one does when hauling ass on the interstates—gulping coffee, then slathering umeboshi plum paste on my teeth to try to counteract the acidity; asking truckers where to find the best chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, America's perfect food; falling asleep in the mountains to die in flames at the bottom of a ravine, my organs shimmering on my outsides like a grotesque Nudie Cohn suit—and I'll be recording them all on the video machines.

I have to cut through Kansas City to drop off an old Kustom amp that my buddy Jason had to leave when he moved back home. And I hope to be rolling into Oregon by the weekend. But along the way, I've got a little time to sightsee and visit. What should I see? Want to meet up?

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: Roboexotica - Booze and 'Bots.

Robots that serve cocktails. That's the premise behind the Roboexotica festival in Vienna, Austria, which unites two things cherished by nerds around the globe -- alcohol and DIY robotics.

Eddie Codel and Monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner were there, and shot video of the proceedings (and the drinkings, and the fallings, and the weirdness) for us to enjoy. So, enjoy. And do not drive or operate heavy machinery after doing so.

Did I mention that this video includes hot milkmaids from the Alps who serve you free booze, and a nude male robot that urinates delicious beer or something?

We don't have maker credits for all of the amazing devices shown, but here is the website for Robovox (the big guy who talks), and some of the robots featured were created by students of the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Dept. of Information Design. Monochrom co-curates the festival with shifz.org.

Rob Beschizza

Asus's new $400 netbook has 9.5 hours of claimed battery life

Spotted at online stores in the last few days, Asus' 1000HE netbook is both cheap and long-life, with a 6-cell battery included with the base package. This is good for a full day of work with the lamp down low, and is a $50 cheaper the similar Samsung NC10.

The 1000HE has the ever-so-slightly faster N280 (1.66GHz) Atom chip, a 10" display (yes, only 600 lines, still) a 160GB Hard Drive, WiFi-n and Bluetooth, a chicklet style keyboard and that bollock-braising 8700mAh battery. It comes with Microsoft Windows XP Home, which means it comes with just 1GB of RAM. You can grab a 2GB at Newegg and still have saved money compared to that NC10.

Is the 1000HE shipping from mwave.com [Eee User Forums]

Rob Beschizza

Incredible Intelligent Blocks

Though they don't know who they are, every block knows where it is and what to do when arranged with others. Each has an tiny OLED display, a 3-axis accelerometer and touch-sensitivity. And from the rules that govern their interactions rises wonder and madness: solved equations, virtual paint buckets, word scrambles and other illusions.

Siftables are cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them - piling, grouping, sorting - to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.

Project Page [Siftables via Monstermunch]

Rob Beschizza

Jared's Cube: a beautiful and strange thing

Jared Tarbell's cube echoes everything we can organize and understand--until we look closer, and contemplation of it returns us to the dream.

Either that, or someone ressurected Tycho Brahe, got him drunk, and sat him at a CNC.

Lasercut from walnut, hand-assembled, finished with flax seed oil (and other mysterious, and perhaps even magical, ingredients). This is a prototype he made for an upcoming related series still a work in progress.

This photo really doesn't do it justice, as it's so much more "alive" in person. (fault my photography, not the cube) Despite it's digital origins, it comes across as very "old-world-y", extremely tangible and approachable, it practically begs me to explore it. Exquisite. :)

See the die-cut original here.

Jared's Cube [Dave Bollinger's Flickr]

Rob Beschizza

Top Gear to build 70-mpg vehicle for $7k: "The car that will save the world."

Top Gear's website set itself a challenge: build a car that can get 70 mpg, and build it for $7,000.

Using a 1981 VW Rabbit (Known in Britain as the Golf) as its template, the team's also got to get the resulting eco-motor from 0-60 in under 7 seconds. The show's not called "First Gear," after all. The teaser vid:

Here's Devin Johnson from the Beeb:

The 28-year-old Volkswagen was bought in New York City and driven thousands of miles to a very cold Regina, Saskatchewan where CWS Tuning will skillfully replace the clattery old engine with a modern, computer-controlled, turbocharged VW TDI engine. The team will then head to Southern California where they will meet with UCLA aerodynamics professor John McNulty for expertise in making the car more slippery. ... This is not a simple challenge - hitting 70-mpg will take more than a diesel engine and some aerodynamic tricks. The team will need to get clever with gearing, learn about low rolling-resistance tires, and use special low-friction oils. To car buffs, this makes sense, but to everyone else, the translation is, it's going to take every trick in the book to make this happen.

Topgear.com plans to chart its progress with videos and blogging, as well it should. What role can you take? You can name it. For inspiration, watch a Rabbit racing a Tamalera. Given the right set of balls, this zillion-selling little subcompact can move.

Where's our Nobel? [Top Gear]

Photo: Richard Miles

Rob Beschizza

Paid Android apps now available

From Phandroid's Rob Jackson:

I got an email tip that Paid Android Apps were hitting the Android Market about 30 minutes ago. With my G1 in front of me I looked for myself… nothing. But it seemed blogs around the interwebz were reporting the same thing from readers writing in but the bloggers themselves? Nothing.

I was lucky enough to have a tipster who also sent in a picture (Thanks Ryan!)

Boy Genius also has a shot.

Paid Apps Hitting Android Market? [Phandroid]

Rob Beschizza

The cuddliest Box Brownie ever

Blythe Church is a Canadian artist working out of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She makes incredibly cute things. Including robots.

Cameras [Sewn By Blythe]

Rob Beschizza

Behold! The new Mac Mini's butt

Either Apple's lairs are floored in $0.79 per sq/ft vinyl laminate from Ikea, or someone figured out how to cut and paste images of ports.

Photo of next-gen Apple Mac Mini [Apple Insider] and Leaked phot of the next-generation Mac Mini [Mac Rumors]

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: WATCHMEN preview. Xeni intvu w/ Zack Snyder (Dir.) and "DJ" Des Jardin (VFX)

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video, director Zack Snyder and visual effects supervisor John "DJ" Des Jardin give us a preview of the forthcoming movie WATCHMEN (Wikipedia, IMDB, trailer). On March 6, the hallowed graphic novel deemed "unfilmable" will hit theaters.

Will the long-awaited adaptation of writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons' dark eighties comic soar, or suck? The more intense the fandom around a classic, the more intense the fear that a filmmaker will fck it up, and few titles are as revered as this one. From what we saw during this preview with fans at the Apple store in Santa Monica, I am inclined to be very optimistic.

Both Snyder and Des Jardin spoke with us about the challenges of bringing "Watchmen" from novel to CG-driven feature form. In today's episode we explore that challenge through the making of one character: Dr. Manhattan. The filmmakers contended with interesting creative and technical obstacles, which involved the fact that Manhattan is (a) pretty much nude, and (b) luminous. Actor Billy Crudup plays the stoic, white-eyed protagonist, and they used a sort of LED bodysuit to create the melded "real"/CG persona we see on screen. Superhero schlongs, appropriate weenie size-age, and "understated genitals" were a subject of very serious discussion.

Snyder revealed that a 3 hour and ten minute long director's cut of "Watchmen" will come out in July. A DVD will follow in the fall, which he described as the "Crazy Ultimate Freaky Edition" to include extras such as "Tales of the Black Freighter," the death of Hollis Mason, extra scenes with Dr. Manhattan on Mars, and more. MTV News has an item with details.

The event at which this Boing Boing Video episode was taped was a part of Apple's ongoing "Meet The Filmmaker" series hosted at Apple Stores throughout the US. The series is free, and this one was packed with trufans clutching copies of the comic, or wearing "Watchmen" smileyface shirts. It was fun to see fans get a chance to ask questions directly. There will be another WATCHMEN event with members of the cast at the Apple Store SoHo on March 5.

Apple also has some cool "Watchmen" content offered through iTunes (trailers, cast video journals, a cool iPhone/iPod touch application available in the App Store, and so on.) And you can search for "Meet the Filmmaker" in the iTunes store for a podcast series which includes the raw audio feed from this WATCHMEN event (I think it's about 2 hours long?) as well as podcasts from other "Watchmen" events.

As an aside: Des Jardin was the associate visual effects supervisor on Matrix 2 and 3, with John Gaeta, who has appeared in previous original video episodes on Boing Boing (parts 1, part 2).

Special thanks to all the Boing Boing friends on Twitter who submitted questions for Snyder and Des Jardin. Many of these made it into the episode!

And one more goodie: lots of photos at the Official Watchmen flickr stream.

Update: Wil Wheaton says the movie is "fucking awesome," and here's his review, sans spoilers.

Rob Beschizza

HD camcorders? Pffft.

Photo: Miss Paperclip

Update: Brian Lam at Giz unearthed info on the manufacturer.

Revolution of 1968 [DeviantArt via Ffffound]

Joel Johnson

When media pirates are dicks

Printing stickers that say "Available Online For Free" and then pasting them to real-world merchandise that will have to be removed by retail workers convinces no one of an argument they already know. This is not how you usher in a new age of sharing. It's just being a prick.

Rob Beschizza

Handmade SD card-size memory books

"I discovered some old smart media memory cards from an ancient digital camera," writes Sheila at Cheeky Magpie. "You know, the kind that was as big as an air conditioner and took photos about as well? The memory cards have little memory and even less usefulness these days so I was going to pitch them. But I hate just throwing things away."

So she made this from the contents: a permanent hard copy of the thoughts therein. Upgraded them to SD format, too!

Memory Card memories [Cheeky Magpie via Make]

Rob Beschizza

How Psion let the netBook slip away: a former staffer remembers

Former Psion staffer David Hughes remembers testing its netBook in the late 1990s. He criticizes its trademark claims and laments Psion's journey from innovator to intellectual proprietor. It has only itself to blame, too: it considered releasing a linux-based update while Asus was developing the massively successful Eee PC, but chickened out.

The netBook was another triumph of industrial design.

As with the Series 3 and 5 PDAs that preceded it the netBook had a clever hinge that made the device seem to grow as you opened it revealing a keyboard that seemed larger than it should be. The hinge itself was wrapped in leather so it felt like carrying a leather book or Filofax. As well as an almost full size keyboard the netBook had a touch screen and solid state internals. Writing this now I realise that the Psion netBook really was ahead of it’s time.

A few years ago I bumped into an old colleague who showed me a netBook running Linux pre-dating the Eee PC and co. by some years. Sadly Psion didn’t release this version in yet another moment of corporate short-sightedness and cowardice.

Everyone and their kitten's making a netbook now.

Psion creates amazing things and then watches them fly, fly away: the PDA and the Symbian operating system both sprang from its loins

Psion and the Netbook trademark [David Hughes via Save the Netbooks!]

Rob Beschizza

Red X-Boxes on the way

Joystiq collects available info on the forthcoming Red XBox 360.

The unannounced product has stumbled into the public eye much in the same way that many of Microsoft's secrets do -- first a rumor, then a retailer inventory listing and then an innocent mention in a New Zealand-bound press release.

Alright, maybe that last one doesn't quite adhere to the formula, but according to Kotaku, an MS New Zealand promotion for the upcoming release of Halo Wars -- buy a 360, get a free copy of the game! -- explicitly excluded "the Red Xbox 360 Elite console which is exclusive to EB games.

Red Xbox 360 Elite Mentioned in MS Press Release

Photo: Hermida

Rob Beschizza

Liberate Television

These televisions were placed around Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to celebrate the return of analog television frequencies to the ether.

To commemorate this event we are inviting the public to come witness the beginning of the Television Drops, a series of public television events as part of the New Stations Network.

Using televisions reclaimed from the street corners where they are
left as trash, we will tune them in to our own local broadcast.
Powered by the city itself, the TV will present the first episode of a
new public television show, This World.

A single character struggles to build a relationship between himself
and those watching. He is simultaneously in command of the program and
trapped within it. He is both holding television hostage and himself a
prisoner. Forced to be the full cast he builds an anti-narrative with
an arsenal of costumes serving as a multiple personality cure to his
own loneliness.

~New Stations

My own inclination is to crush television. [Thanks, David!]

Rob Beschizza

Analog meets AMOLED on Samsung TL320 digicam

OLED-Info spotted an Amazon page (already taken down!) for a new Samsung camera. It's evidently a 5x optical zoom model with 12 megapixels, but look closely ... analog dials, oh my!

Update: Samsung reports that the price displayed by Amazon was incorrect. The official announcement will come on Monday.

Samsung to launch a new 12MP camera, the TL320, with a 3" AMOLED? [OLED-info]

Rob Beschizza

Papershow digital pen system hits brick 'n' mortar stores in U.S.

Canson's Papershow is a digital writing system designed to make digitized note-taking and collaboration easier and more expensive. A "quick start" kit costs $200 and includes the following:

•1 Papershow Bluetooth digital pen, plus AAA battery, 3 ink refills, 4 silicon rings
• Papershow Bluetooth USB stick with PAPERSHOW software + 4 silicon rings
• Papershow A4 notepad for digital flipchart work
•30 sheets of Papershow printer paper for interactive presentations
•1 ring binder for Papershow printer paper storage
•1 pencil case for Papershow pen, USB stick and accessories

It runs on XP and Vista, and can convert everything you do automagically into a PowerPoint presentation to be edited and rerun later. Notepads are $13 and up.

Canson PAPERSHOW [Official site]

Rob Beschizza

Batteries, recharged by the Sun

Solar panels make even the dullest items look cool! Jason Sahler writes in to tell us of Knut Karlsen's clever invention:

Karlsen’s SunCat batteries circumvent chargers completely by integrating solar cells within the batteries themselves. To make these prototypes he attached 1.8V flexible photovoltaic cells onto 1.5V NiMH rechargeable batteries and connected them with a conductive silver pen and a few flat wires. The effect is similar to a trickle charger, which slowly charges a battery and can be left attached indefinitely without overcharging.

In other words, they won't be matching those 15-minute wallwart chargers they bundle with triple-As ... and won't be messing your batteries up after 100 charges, either.

The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes [Bareknut via Inhabitat]

Rob Beschizza

Wii Super Famicom/SNES controller

It's a stunning $75 at Play-Asia.com. [Kotaku]

Rob Beschizza

Nine inch Eees get their nine inch nails

Asus is calling time on its 9" netbooks, announcing the end for its 901- and 904-series machines. The lineup will move almost entirely to 10" models, with only 5 percent of its output to be ultra-cheap 7" models.

I'm fond of the 900 series due to it being slightly smaller than the rest of the field, but still boasting a half-decent keyboard. Dell's nine-incher, however, is a much nicer netbook in almost every sense, but only a few bucks more expensive.

Asus to phase out 9 inch netbooks, focus on 10 inch models [via Lilliputing]

Rob Beschizza

Dell attacks Psion's "Netbook" trademark, accuses it of fraud

Dell's filed a challenge to Psion's "Netbook" trademark, asserting that Psion abandoned the term years ago. Moreover, Dell claims that Psion fraudulently misrepresented otherwise in a filing with the trademark office.

Trademarks can become genericized when they slip into everyday use--Aspirin Dry Ice, Thermos and touch-tone being examples. Companies fight hard to prevent this, ensuring they release a continual stream of products using the trademark and asking journalists not to use their trademarks in a generic sense. For example, Adobe hates it when we photoshop stuff, but loves it when we edit stuff in Photoshop.

On the one hand, Psion actually made a netbook called The Netbook, and still supports it. On the other hand, it's not been on sale for many years, it's not clear whether Psion's claims of continual product support are actually true, and generic use of the phrase to refer to miniature laptops exploded in the last year.

Intel's relentless promotion of the phrase is one cause, but it's clearly the term of choice for consumers and writers alike, and the most effective laptop marketing buzzword in years.

That said, many companies avoid the term because of Psion's trademark. Analysts like the dull "mini notebook," for example, and Sony calls its model a "Lifestyle PC."

After a snarlup with bloggers last year over some badly-targeted legal warnings, Psion said that it's only interested in stopping other computer companies profiting from the term.

So, here's the kicker: Dell never called its netbook a "netbook." Its avoidance of the term was as studious as Sony's, whose avoidance of it carried a hint of corporate pride: it didn't want consumers to associate its swishy Vaio P with the herd.

Dell's netbook, however, is a popular budget model. Psion's not come after Dell in the courts. Dell's already established its own marketing terminology around "Mini Inspiron." So what gives?

It just happens to be the company most desperate to begin exploiting the Netbook buzz on a huge scale--something Psion is clearly in no position to do.

Is the term dear to your heart? Check out Save the Netbooks!

Petition for cancellation (PDF) [USPTO]

Rob Beschizza

Third Eye video camera

Hammacher Schlemmer's $300 "Third Eye" camcorder looks silly planted in the middle of the model's head. I, however, will be wearing it as an eyepatch.

The Third Eye Video Camera.

Rob Beschizza

Ricoh CX1

Out in Japan, the Ricoh CX1 point 'n' shoot camera has a 28-200mm lens with 7x optical zoom, a 3" LCD display, 7 frame-per-second shooting at 9 megapixels, and 120fps VGA video recording.

It's a beauty, to my eye, with simple old-school styling and a minimum of knobbly protuberances. But if they can shoot full-size images as 7 fps, and VGA at 120 fps, surely there are HD possibilities in the middle.

New Ricoh CX1 with a 9mp 1/2.3" CMOS Sensor [Akihabara News]

Rob Beschizza

Soundshelf: Speakers-as-bookshelves

It's a shame, but the logo on this sweet concept design don't imply that a real product is at hand. Named "Soundshelf," the mockup is by Witek Stefeniak and Anielka Zdanowicz of Poland:

Why the traditional speaker has to be put away in the corner of the room or hidden in the wall? Speaker could be displaied, and the aditional function could be imparted. The object becomes the item of furniture by a simple arrengement of dvd and books. Two suggestion of shape give the possibility to arrange the interior in the modern style and to achieve a good quality of home video amplification.

sound innovation [Designboom]

Joel Johnson

GigaPan EPIC camera mount reviewed (Verdict: Perfect, except...)

Oh Gizmo! reviews the GigaPan EPIC, a motorized mount for cameras that allows you to automatically take massive gigapixel panoramas with little user interaction. They like the $380 device a lot, except for a perhaps fatal flaw:

We all know that battery life is the bane of almost all consumer electronics, but the EPIC does particularly bad in this department. The company claims that with a fresh set of ‘brand name’ batteries the EPIC can take about 1,000 shots at room temperature, but our own tests saw it running out of battery life well before that. Now I’ll admit that Sunday wasn’t the warmest of days here in Toronto, in fact the thermometer was just below the freezing mark, but as it stands we’ve found the GigaPan EPIC is almost useless for any outside photography until the weather warms up.

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

⌦ GPS – Magellan Maestro 3200 in-car GPS unit for $60, shipped. I've never used their product, but that's cheap. [Slickdeals]

⌦ HDTV – Westinghouse 47-inch 1080P TV for $900, shipped, which I mostly linking because this is the same TV I bought 18 months ago for nearly twice as much. (It can be flakey on HDMI signals from time to time, but it's an okay panel.) [Dealnews]

⌦ MP3 Player – Refurbished SanDisk Sansa c240 1GB MP3 player for $11, shipped, can be expanded with microSD and has an FM tuner and voice recorder. [Dealnews]

⌦ Camcorder – Canon FS100 flash memory-based camcorder for $237, shipped. 37x optical zoom, SD, etc. Good deal. [Dealnews]

⌦ Headlight Bulb – Buy-one-get-one-free on GE Nighthawk headlight bulbs at Amazon. [Dealnews]

⌦ Wooting Off – They are doing that Woot and Woot thing at Woot where they go off at Woot.

Joel Johnson

Solvit pet harness lets them ride in a human seat

Next Monday my bulldog Porter and I will be hopping in a rented minivan to drive cross-country to move to Eugene, Oregon. My plan was initially to put him in his cage (just a single wire cage, not a hard-sided travel kennel) so that he could sleep without getting rolled around by braking and such. I may still do that—he needs to get at least twelve hours a day or his wrinkles begin to lose elasticity—but at the suggestion of one of my soon-to-be-ex-roommates, I've just bought him a Pet Vehicle Safety Harness from Solvit. It has a padded piece that goes all around the front that connects to the seat belts in the vehicle, in theory giving them a little bit of motion while they're sitting but still locking up tightly if there are any sudden stops.

I'm not actually sure Porter will want to be sitting up for more than a few minutes at a time, but if he can still manage to lay down in the seat at all it should be a safer option for him than being in a bungeed cage. And if not, at least we've got the first piece of equipment he'll need when we go skydiving.

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Walk without rhythm

Rob Beschizza

MP3-playing cassette tape points to past

Designed by Stefano Pertegato, Massimiliano Rampoldi, Eloisa Tolu, Francesco Schiraldi and Giovanni Mendini, this MP3-playing tape unfortunately does not exist. But that's O.K., because I'm more interested in that wristwatch!

Finger Power Works The Tape [sdsdf via CrunchGear]

Rob Beschizza

CatBar: handmade from only the best USB Cat Memory

From Geekstuff4u: "Kyoto CatBar is a handmade USB Cat Memory, made of Genuine Chirimen material.
Chirimen is a traditional Japanese heavy crepe cloth for kimono."

It is $81.75.

Rob Beschizza

Why are we pretending that Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't hopelessly obsolete?

The general response to Microsoft's new version of Windows Mobile is a kind of fixed grin. Everyone's trying to be positive about it, despite the fact that it's obviously still just another variation of Windows CE, a decade-old mobile OS that's now way behind the curve. Joshua Topolsky lays out 10 simple reasons why it's just not good enough.[Engadget]

It's a list of plain, unvarnished WTF moments. For example: it still doesn't even have a proper web browser and won't officially support modern touchscreen technology.

Rob Beschizza

Nintendo Entertainment Soap

NES Nintendo game controller olive oil soap, scented for men [Etsy via Engadget]

Mat Honan

Your word is dead to me

Can we talk for a second about just how terrible Microsoft Word is? I've been processing words since sometime in the late 1980s. Most of that time has been spent with Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is the overbearing dick dad of software. Yeah, it sucks, but what are you going to do, it's your dad. Live in his house; follow his rules. For writers of all types, Microsoft Word is an app you just kind of have to live with.

But Google Docs feels a lot like your last semester in high school. It's not quite there yet, but almost. Almost. Oh, sweet freedom. I am so going to go out on dates with girls and drink soda pop when I get to college. Just you wait.

For several months now, I've been increasingly working in Google Docs. But I work alone, most days, and when I am in offices (or on the receiving end of emailed files) I typically see the tyranny of Word. So I've been wondering a bit about the adoption among professional writers.

So, today I was excited to see the following Tweet from Susan Orlean:

Ms. Orlean is not only a professional writer, she's a Serious Writer. (Not that she isn't funny, she is. I mean she's, all, profound, and shit.) A great writer*, even. Moreover, she writes books. My absolute longest documents run somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 words, at the outside. She's dealing with the tens of thousands.

But maybe I misunderstood. I also use Google Docs for backup and portability. If there's some important file I'm working on, I'll upload a current version of Google Docs. Then I can grab it later from anywhere, if I move to a different computer or want to read it on my phone, for example. I also have a backup copy in case my computer does what computers sometimes do. Perhaps she was simply doing the same. I asked for some clarification:

And indeed, Susan Orlean is writing her next book in Google Docs. Take that, Word.

Okay! Back to beverages for me.

*I should note here that I do not know Susan Orlean. I am receiving no compensation to promote her book, Google Documents, or anything else at all. Well, I mean aside from my own Twitter feed, I am trying to promote that. Did you see how I craftily slipped my Twitter username up there? I'm trying to get to 5,000 followers so I can raise my own army, take over the city of Woodside and force everyone to eat at Arby's. Just kidding. Actually I just need the 5,000 followers to level up, and then I can take care of Woodside all on my own.

Rob Beschizza

4G network rolling out this year in two cities .. but which ones?

By the end of this year, gadgets in two American cities will be able to hook up to Verizon's 80 Mbps LTE cellular network, followed by 25-30 more in 2010. For once, U.S. consumers will get to ride the bandwidth bus first: Compatible European networks aren't planning to offer LTE for a year or two.

This is the plan, at least. From Computerworld:

The LTE network will be built using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent and LM Ericsson Telephone Co., according to Verizon Wireless, which said in December that it expected to begin deploying the fourth-generation wireless technology before the end of this year.

Trial runs of LTE conducted by Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and with part-owner Vodafone Group PLC in Europe have shown download speeds of up to 80Mbit/sec., according to Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer at majority owner Verizon Communications Inc.

In practice, throughput on live networks will be much lower. Moreover, availability will only come when they have built it: a dictum that applies not just to tower upgrades, but to cellphones, modems and laptops that feature compatible radios.

The AP and other stories aren't specifying which cities -- anyone know?

WiMax, lest we forget, is another 4G show that rolled out to two cities in advance of a nationwide expansion, but has fallen just a little behind schedule.

Verizon Wireless will debut 4G network in late '09, expand it to 25 or more cities next year [Computerworld]

Joel Johnson

Beautiful Peggy: Black-and-white LED array displaying video

[Evil Mad Scientist via MAKE:]

Joel Johnson

Buzludzha, the abandoned UFO amphitheater of Bulgaria

[Artificial Owl via MicroKhan]

Joel Johnson

Slicer sled makes its own snow

\

The Slicer by Ice Meister (!) is a sled for summer. Take its ice-block-forming trays from your freezer, clip them into the bottom, and frost some sod. $70 whole dollars — you could buy a lot of ice with $70. [via Cool Hunting]

Joel Johnson

Photo Book, a portable image viewer that supports RAW

The Photo Book from Digital Foci almost seems like its from that forlorn era of Just A Few Year Back, when manufacturers were trying to get us to buy Portable Media Centers and dedicated movie devices too big to fit in a pocket. But it's got a specific market in mind: photographers. It can digest nearly every type of flash memory card on the planet, gulping down images to its 4GB of internal memory—including files in RAW formats. (Which RAW formats it supports—there's a different variant for nearly every type of camera—will be the big if.)

For $200, though, it could be a nice adjunct to working shooters who need to get a better look at their images than the screens on the back of their DSLRs provide. It is a little confusing why the eight-inch LCD screen is in a 4:3 format (800-by-600 pixels), but the fact that it also will play back a variety of video formats might make up for that a little.

Joel Johnson

Gary Hustwit, director of Objectified, talks design, baby strollers, and streamlining our lifestyles

Gary Hustwit made the biggest design geek film of recent memory: Helvetica. Now he's gearing up for a follow up that casts its net a little wider; Objectified will look at the objects we own, the humans who design them, and how we're all intertwined.

We sat down with Gary in a rustic email client overlooking a limpet field of packets to ask him about filming the documentary and how it's changed his own relationship with his objects.

Let's look back a little. How has object ownership changed in the last few decades?

30 or 40 years ago consumers put more thought into every purchase, took better care of their manufactured objects, and repaired them when they were broken. Who repairs their DVD player now? Come to think of it, who even buys a new DVD player now? We've had a totally new technology like DVD go from introduction, to being in almost every home in the country, to being practically obsolete, in just ten years. And obviously the concept of owning media in the form of tangible objects (CDs, DVDs) has completely changed. But lately people are consuming less, whether for economic reasons or environmental ones. Personally, I just feel like I don't really need so much stuff, and the objects that I do have should be really meaningful.

Is there a way to rectify the problem of owning items, especially gadgets and consumer electronics, that by the nature of progress must continually be upgraded?

I thought the original iPhone was a step in the right direction, since it was screen-based and the software could just be upgraded. But then a year later, hello, here's the 3G iPhone. I still have my 1st generation model. But I used to have a cell phone, a digital camera, a Palm Pilot, a portable hard drive...so instead of five or six gadgets needing constant upgrading, at least now I just have one. So that type of convergence or dematerialization will continue to evolve.

Did it feel to you in your interviews that the designers are isolated from the real world use of the products?

READ THE REST

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Path, half puzzle, half game

Our pal Nate Heasley is popping around at Toy Fair finding the stuff we missed, when instead he should be manning his booth to promote his award-winning board game, Wits And Wagers.

I spent quite a bit of time roaming around the show looking for puzzles. A couple years ago, it seemed like the entire "Game Zone" was filled with Sudoku variants, which are nowhere to be seen these days (thank god). These days puzzles seem to be out of vogue, but I did run across this clever little game from ToySmart called Path. The game comes with dozens of tiles, each with a unique pattern of differently colored dots and a "path" that runs through the middle. The game is simple enough to explain; simply lay down all the tiles and create a path from your side of the board to the other before your opponant does the same

But despite how simple it sounds it's a very complex game with some good strategy, even if it is aimed for kids 8+. The nice part is that not only is it a very good two-player game, but it's also a sort-of tangram puzzle set for solo play too, so it's something your kids can do on their own or with a friend. Price is around $25 if I remember correctly, though at this point it looks like it doesn't have any distribution in the US. Fat lot of good that does you! – Nate

Joel Johnson

Book: Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech by Diana Eng

Diana Eng, our pal and founding member of NYC Resistor, has a new book coming out next month, Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech [Preorder], in which she'll be showing you how to mod your clothing to add little hacky flourishes, like these sneakers in the above video that have EL wire inside.

When I move to Oregon I hope to connect with some of the crafty types in Portland (and Eugene if they're around) to start building a custom wardrobe. I don't think it'll be all that much more expensive than buying off-the-rack clothing, especially if I pare it down to just a few reusable pieces.

Joel Johnson

Tweet Week: Win Dirty Dolls Lingerie, LeapFrog Didj, iVoice headsets today

We're starting off today's Tweet Week giveaways with a bang: I'm going to pick one of you to win some panties from Dirty Dolls, a just-launched lingerie company that "specializes in catering to the needs of voluptuous women." (Bless them.) Founder Courtney Leigh Newman is giving us two items, the Organic Cha Cha Cheeky Short [pictured] and the Organic Thrilling Thong. (Which, despite first glance, is a technically SFW image. Subtle!)

On deck for later today: Five Didj handheld gaming systems for kids from LeapFrog, plus three games for each. (Unintentional awesome: We give away videocameras, then lingerie, then kids' toys. Narrative is a powerful form.) We've also got a couple of Bluetooth headsets from iVoice, the Diamond-X and GX7.

How do you get a chance to win this stuff? I've explained the details already, but in short: if you follow the Boing Boing editors on Twitter this week, you have a chance to win fabolas prizes. Here are our accounts again; Each follow is an entry: • @joeljohnson; @xenijardin; @beschizza; @brandonnn; @doctorow; @johnbattelle; @frauenfelder

Joel Johnson

BBIAS: Let's give this indie iPhone game a better set of spaceship graphics

Peter Lewis created Aragom, an iPhone space war game inspired by the old Star Trek games that were available on the TRS-80 and other early home computers. It's not a bad idea for an iPhone game, all told, but it needs a coat of paint. Peter is a good programmer, he noted, but not much of an artist.

So here's your challenge of the day: create some better graphics for Aragom so we can give them to Peter to use. He's sent me the PNGs seen above; you can download them all in one ZIP package.

Boing Boing Internet Action Squad: Engage!

(We're just doing a good deed for an independent software developer here, so if you submit any graphics to me or post them in this thread, let's consider them a gift to Peter. He said he's happy to give credit to anyone whose graphics he uses!)

Joel Johnson

Yo Ho Oh! DHL adds GPS to shipping containers

Shipping company DHL has started testing out GPS-trackable cargo containers, making it possible for customers to track the container in which their packages are commuting from anywhere in the world. Location data is just the start—the sensor packages from Savi Networks also monitor temperature, humidity, shock & vibration, as well as exposure to light. Now they just need to add a camera and a remote detonation switch to ward off pirates.

The sensors, seen here in pictures exclusively to BBG*, are equipped for a small number of LCL ("Less than Container Load") customers, with shipments moving from Hong Kong to Europe.

* We asked for pictures of chupacabra being shipped from their growth vats on a remote island in the Indian Ocean to their training facilities in Mexico, but we've got to work with what we can get.

Rob Beschizza

The Master Control Program is taking over YOUR Atari® 2600

When I was a child, I somewhat of expected my house to look like this by 2009. [via]

Joel Johnson

Stranding on the edge of the Hoover Dam, a copper blue cable artifact

I can't say I'm quite as juiced about knowing that it's possible to buy a slice of copper electrical cable that once hung over the Hoover Dam gorge, but seeing Mack Reed of Heavy Little Objects get so excited about it has rubbed off on me:

This is almost the holy grail of heavy little objects: a thing with history, patina, functionality, exciting manufacture and moving parts. Jesus, it made me one happy tool-using ape to find this: a chunk of the original copper electrical transmission line installed during construction of the mighty Hoover Dam.

Rob Beschizza

Neo Scene AVCHD editing software out for Mac

Mac users of AVCHD camcorders can now losslessly edit their video without transcoding it to a more standard format--Neo Scene, a windows app designed for this purpose, is now out for Mac. [Cineform]

(Sorry about this post's original headline, which suggested this was the *only* thing on Mac that could edit AVCHD. Many apologies, readers.)

Rob Beschizza

Nintendo DSi coming to America on April 5

Brandon has the details o'er Offworld: Nintendo's DSi, the latest edition of its universe-ruling DS handheld gaming system, will be out in the U.S. on April 5. It'll be $170, and will come in blue and black.

Out in Japan late last year, the DSI has cameras facing the user and the world (both just 0.3 megapixels), 3.25" screens (compared to the DS Lite's 3" ones) and an SD card slot.

Joel Johnson

Datamoshing: Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" and melting keyframes

Chairlift's video for "Evident Utensil" uses a video effect identified by Young Master Kottke as "datamoshing", in which artifacts from video compression are purposefully used to add a melting, psychedelic patina and transitions. A higher resolution .MOV makes it even more...clear? [Moar]

I really want to like this song, but something about it irks me. I think it's the Ace of Base-style echoed chanting from the guy in the chorus. I'm all for nostalgia, but let's please not bring that back. (Conversely, it would greatly improve my chances of working as a professional "rapster".)

Rob Beschizza

Samsung's MID looks great; shame about the Windows Mobile

Ubergizmo, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, likes the look of Samsung's new pocket computer, the SWD-M100D. With WiMax and WiFi, it's got great connectivity, and the form factor looks like a middle brother to the larger OQO and the smaller Nokia Internet Tablet. There's even a 3-megapixel camera on the back.

So, what's the problem? It has Windows Mobile 6.1, last year's edition of last decade's mobile operating system.

Samsung SWD-M100 MID Hands-On (WiMax) [Ubergizmo]

Rob Beschizza

Freescale's late-to-the-game netbook strategy: Android

Chipmaker Freescale is to support Google's Android as a netbook platform, part of its efforts to get ARM processors powering the popular miniature machines. Its ambitions are broad: Freescale wants half the market, and thinks it can get it by aiming cheap and aiming West. From CS News:

Freescale is clearly aiming for a market below the current netbooks, and they are striving for a price point of less than 200 USD, maybe even 100 USD. Their target market is young users in the west, and their netbooks will only provide Wi-Fi connectivity. "For price reasons, the netbooks are going to primarily be shipped with just Wi-Fi. For mobile professional users, you do need 3G connectivity," Glen Burchers, marketing director for Freescale's consumer business, said.

Also to be supported are Xandros, a popular cut of Linux, and HyperSpace, an instant-on environment similar to Splashtop. It'll be neat to see another platform enter this biz, but I doubt we'll be seeing these guys on the OSX netbook compatibility chart.

Freescale to use Android [OS News]

Rob Beschizza

Android G2 "Close to Perfection"

Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz toyed with the next flagship for Google's Android phone software, and found it to his liking. [Gizmodo]

HTC has got a very smooth phone, which feels great on your hands and in your pants' pockets. While it's sightly thicker than the iPhone, the narrower, rounded body, and weight makes it feel the same size. For sure, a lot less bulky than the G1, which looks like a brick next to this. And as you have seen in the shots, the final HTC Magic is quite pretty. Have no doubt: This thing alone will make many consumers put up with the less-than-ideal software keyboard.

Rob Beschizza

Canon casts Camera Storm. You Die.

Last night, Canon announced more cameras than can be sanely covered in one post. Here are some of the standouts:

• PowerShot D10

Waterproof to 10m, able to withstand drops from up to 4ft, and freeze-resistant to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, the D10 is all about durability. It has 3x optical zoom, a $330 price tag, and will be on sale in May.

This will be a good gift, for people who'd never buy such a thing by themselves, to encourage them to do some extreme shooting.

• Digital Elph SD970, SD960, SD780 and SD1200

The Elphs get spec bumps. The $380 SD960 and SD780 have 5x optical zoom and 720p movie recording. The $230 SD1200 replaces the 1100, with only a megapixel change.

Even the lower-end Elphs shoot well given their price and size: the addition of HD video will make ownership of a mini-camcorder reduntant, if the quality's there.

• PowerShot A480, A2100 and A1100

The A-series is Canon's cheapie line, and three will appear in March and April. The A2100 has 6x optical zoom, 3" display and is $250, while the 1100 offers 4x for $200 and has an optical viewfinder and a smaller display. The A480 will have only 3.3x optical zoom, but is a very cheap $130.

• Powershot SX1

The SX1 has 20x optical zoom, a camcorder-style flip-out LCD display, HD movie recording at up to 1080p, HDMI out and a $600 price tag. No, it isn't a DSLR: this will have to match up to the likes of the Lumix LX and Canon's own G10.

Also available is the SX200, which has only 12x optical zoom, 720p movies, and a more edible $350 on the tag. Both models will be out in the next couple of months.

Press release [Canon via CrunchGear]

Rob Beschizza

European Pre will be better than the US one because of UMTS

The Palm Pre available in Britain and Europe will be able to surf the web during calls, whereas its U.S. counterpart will not. It all comes down to an inherent limitation of the evdo technology used by Sprint: it can run data or voice, but not both at once.

Pam Deziel, Palm's veep of software product development, confirmed the news at Mobile World Congress. PC Mag:

The difference between the European and Sprint Pre's is common to all EVDO and UMTS phones. EVDO networks like those from Sprint and Verizon Wireless can't run voice and data streams at the same time, so EVDO phones have to pause Internet connections temporarily while they make phone calls. UMTS phones can run voice and data at the same time.

Palm still hasn't announced a European carrier for their UMTS Pre, though they said that Sprint's exclusivity contract applies only to the United States.

Source [PC Mag]

Rob Beschizza

Andrew Gordon's Cameras

Andrew Gordon [booooooom]

Rob Beschizza

Mio Digiwalker ad (funny)

"There's always a way out."

[Thanks, Heather!]

Joel Johnson

Tweet Week: Follow us on Twitter, win prizes

Hey, sailors! Do you like stuff? We like to give you the stuffs. So here's how we're going to do it: Every time you follow one of the Boing Boing editors' Twitter feed, we get an email. We'll select from those emails at random and award a prize. If you've won, I'll let you know by direct message on Twitter. We'll do this all week or until we're out of prizes. (That's how I getcha! So at the least, you should follow us this week before you leave en masse next Monday.)

For each editor you follow you'll gain another entry, so if you're already following some of us you can still get a crack at winning by following another editor. (We started collecting entry emails since yesterday and will put all of those in the hat.)

That's it. Easy. We get followers to squawk at about our bunions, you get stuff. I'll be putting up a post a day until we have all the prizes distributed. As befits a Boing Boing contest, we've got a bunch of different stuff: a guitar; a videophone; some random iPod and iPhone cases; lingerie (!); and what I'll be starting with today, three of these custom-printed Flip Mino HD camcorders from CafePress. (One per winner, of course.) More on the prizes as we go along.

Here are our accounts. Collect them all!:
• @joeljohnson (Boing Boing Gadgets)
• @xenijardin (Boing Boing/Video)
• @beschizza (Boing Boing Gadgets)
• @brandonnn (Boing Boing Offworld)
• @doctorow (Boing Boing)
• @johnbattelle (Boing Boing)
• @frauenfelder (Boing Boing)

(We always have questions about if these contests are okay for readers outside the U.S. or not. Because most of these prizes are being shipped direct from the companies, I can't always promise that they'll be able to be shipped to everyone, but I'll do my best to work it out if it comes up. Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions.)

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Duck Hunter, infrared duck shooting without all the blood (or ducks)

My favorite traditional toy this show has to be the Duck Hunter from Interactive Toy Concepts. It's a combination of a battery-powered flapping bird (similar to the wind-up ones that you may have played with as a child) plus an infrared light gun. A sensor on the bird registers the hit from the gun - on the first and second hits causing the flapping to pause just a little and on the third shot dropping completely out of the air. The first version, coming out within the next month or two, includes a gun and either one or two birds. Another model expected out shortly is going to allow for a two-player mode, with one player controlling the bird and the other trying to shoot it out of the sky. Retail price is $30 and $40 for the one and two-bird sets respectively. I recommend the two bird set for the best possible way to train your kids to bring home fresh squab for dinner. – Nate Heasley

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Bunkbots, cute, world-dominating plush robots

I don't know about you, but I don't want my kids playing with GI Joe and Barbie, I want them playing with robots so they'll grow up to be just like Jason Hilbourne, former electrical engineer for Apple and Sun, and current designer of Bunk Bots. This line of 10 different plush robots stand about 8" tall, and each has a different configuration of arms and tools. They all have a different backstory and real robot they are based on too, and have names like Pinch, Tracks, Commando Stepper and Ninja Servo (my favorite). They retail for around $15, available from Urban Outfitters (though they're cheaper from WizardSleeveToys), and they're available in some retail shops in Portland, where the designer is from. — Nate Heasley

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Mez-itz Collectable figures

More from the designer toy front; Mezco, maker of highly collectible toys (mostly for adults) has got some great new stuff here at ToyFair. I'm particularly taken with the Mez-Itz line of cartoony figures, especially the little Hellboy. They've also got a monster series for 2009 and an entire series of figures based on the PS3 hit game Little Big Planet. All of these should be released this year. — Nate Heasley

Xeni Jardin

Reminder: BB Video Groove Armada Contest - Download Some MP3s, Win a 16GB iPod Touch

Boing Boing Video is teaming up with big beat techno stars Groove Armada for a contest around the duo's new release -- which they're offering online, using an interesting experiment in digital promotion and distribution. Sign up to participate in that experiment, and you have a chance to win a 16 gig iPod touch. A reminder of the contest details below, and above, one of the tracks from the band's 2008 release, Soundboy Rock.

HOW THE FREE DOWNLOADS WORK
The tracks are DRM-free. The new EP will be delivered through a sharing system called Bacardi B-LIVE Share, and Bacardi is basically serving as the band's record label. When you register at the B-Live site, you receive one track off the new EP for free. To get more, you share a unique link for that first track (which you receive via email) to a number of friends. You can do this via Facebook if you like. While you do have to provide an email address, and you must be of legal drinking age (Bacardi's the sponsor, after all) you can opt in or out of receiving promotional emails from the band. You don't have to provide other personal information. The more times the track you share is downloaded by your friends, and their friends, the more additional tracks you're given access to. And if you sign up via BB, you're automatically entered in... (drum-machine roll, please)...

THE BOING BOING VIDEO CONTEST
The contest ends on February 25. It's simple: register for the Groove Armada free music downloads via this unique link (which traces the fact that you came through us), and winner will be chosen randomly from users who click through from here. That's pretty much it. The prize: a 16GB Apple iPod Touch.

(more after the jump)

READ THE REST

Mat Honan

Delicious Water is from Nature

Japan: Is there anything this island nation can't do to enhance beverage presentation and flavor? We've covered vac pots (although they aren't originally Japanese, very many of the manufacturers are) and we'll get to Ramune (I promise) and possibly Sake (parenthetical reference), but for now let's talk about water.

Water in its pure form, obviously, has three big problems: It is tasteless, odorless, and colorless. How awful. One day, perhaps, we'll be able to replace it with Brawndo. But until then, enter the Iuosen Pot, from Hario Glass. It fixes all three problems, giving water a delightful springwater taste, a river stone odor, and while it doesn't add any color to the liquid itself, it does pretty up a table both due to the striking design of the pitcher, and the colored rocks inside.

Inside the pitcher is a metal cage that holds binchotan charcoal and iouseki stones. Binchotan, or white charcoal, is made from oak cooked in caves sealed up with mud bricks. It's burned for a long time at a low temperature, and then heated to about 1000 degrees centigrade. It's the same stuff used to cook Kobe beef, because it's particularly odorless. More importantly, as far as dropping it in your water goes, it's exceptionally hard so it won't disintegrate. But why dump charcoal in your water at all? Well, binchotan is somewhat like activated charcoal, it's a porous carbonaceous material that can adsorb solutes in water, like chlorine and metals, and it softens the water. You have to let it sit for about 24 hours after you fill the pitcher, apparently, for the water to circulate enough for the charcoal to do its job.

Now let's get to the stones. The stones are what add the mineral flavor to the water. As an avid backpacker, I can tell you that water left in the pitcher for a few hours does resemble mountain stream water in odor and taste.

I've never heard of Iouseki. At first I just assumed it's made from delicious, delicious, depleted uranium. But then I found this in some online patent thingie for a purifying cartridge of some sort that may or may not contain science:

iouseki is famous as a medical stone and the two stones elute minerals, are porous and provided with strong adsorption force and ion exchange function and provided with an effct of removing bleaching powder smell, adsorbing and removing poisonous organic compounds and, at a same time, carrying out ion exchange in an alkaline direction with respect to pH of water. That is, minerals are added further to mineral portions of tap water and activated water good for human body can be finished.

Actually, there's a bit more. Relentless Googling leads me to believe that Iou-seki is a quartz diorite porphyrite. The "seki" means stone, and "iou" is sulfur. An Iou-sen is a sulfur spring, but fear not, the water smells nothing like farts or rotten eggs.

Ultimately, I won't vouch for the effectiveness of the pitcher in terms of water purification. I simply don't know enough about it, and the instructions are Greek to me. However, I can say with certainty that it's charming to look at, and makes delightfully delicious water. Moreover, as any number of my southern aunts might say: it's a conversation piece.

My wife gave me one of these for my birthday last year that she had to special order from who-knows-where. (She is resourceful and wonderful.) But they're now available from DWR (incidentally, who, exactly, is this design within reach of? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Joel Johnson?) for about $85. Or, if you're more adventurous, you can try picking up this similar model directly from Hario. Good luck with that.

Rob Beschizza

Hey, this mobile 3G stuff really works

Headed home from Toy Fair, I'm a passenger in a moving vehicle, enjoying fast wireless broadband somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. It's one of the promises of the "information superhighway" that's moved from the cutting edge to general availability in the last couple of years.

Things change quickly: just last summer, Joel took wireless broadband with him on a week in the woods, and it barely worked at all.

In my case, I'm on a Vaio P--a neat little laptop I'm reviewing this week--but there are many ways to go about getting a car area network. If you have a 3G USB modem, you can grab a battery-powered compatible router. Several vendors make similar devices which have radios built in. And, of course, there are lots of laptops and netbooks, like the Vaio P, which have it all baked into the box: internet sharing can be a pain to set up on Windows, mind you.

Until now, such wonders have always been practical, for us: rented Evdo sticks for conferences, review units, pre-prroduction samples that don't work right. It's nice to finally get to enjoy it, for once.

Xeni Jardin

South Park iPhone App a No-Show in Apps Store; Cartman Blames Kyle's Mom.

Remember back in October when I blogged about a new iPhone app from the South Park guys? Not sure what the whole story is on this one, but our friends at South Park tell us the app has long been completed -- so, well, where is it? Via email:

We first announced our iPhone App back in October, after we submitted the Application to Apple for approval. After a couple of attempts to get the application approved, we are sad to say that our app has been rejected. According to Apple, the content was "potentially offensive." But Apple did admit that the standards would evolve, citing that when iTunes first launched it didn't sell any music with explicit lyrics. At this point, we are sad to say, the app is dead in the water. Sorry, South Park fans.

Eric Cartman had this to say. Above, Matt Stone demonstrating the app while it was still in development last Fall.

Previous BB post with more screengrabs from the missing-in-action app: BB exclusive: sneak peek at South Park's sweet, yet-unreleased iPhone app

John Brownlee

Flash still not coming to the iPhone while Adobe announces partnerships with almost everyone else

The throw down: the gnashing teeth, the thump of the chest, the quivering aqueous vitreous diffused with pulsating veins. It's a glorious site, even when imagined upon the metaphorical face of Adobe. They are sick of Apple's App Store dominance. And they very definitely seem to be throwing down.

At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe announced that it would release the first full-fledged Flash player for smartphones by year's end... and Google, Microsoft, Palm and Nokia are all hopping on board. At the same time, Adobe said they were still not close to getting Flash on the iPhone.

At this point, that's pretty clearly not a technical challenge... Apple simply does not want to risk the financial success of the App Store, which largely serves up simple programs that could be ably rendered in Flash. Adobe's issuing a direct challenge to them: we have partners who say all their phones can run Flash, and we agree. That can only take some of the luster off the iPhone, especially as Apple's competition ponies up with real iPhone challenging devices with Flash pre-installed, like the Palm Pre.

I hope Apple changes its tune. It can only improve the standard of App Store fare while giving iPhone users more reason than ever to own one.

Adobe preps full Flash player for smartphones [Macworld]

Joel Johnson

KERN, the iPhone game John Gruber was born to download

KERN, the new typesetting game from Formation, asks that you line up a single letter in a falling word, gaining points the nearer you are to perfection. From the subject matter to the scoring pop-up that exposes the formula used to determine your points tally, this is probably the iPhone app most aimed directly between the eyes of chunky-spectacled design wanksters. (I'm buying immediately.) It's a buck on the App Store. [via Technabob]

Gameplay video after the jump. (It's big.)

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

The Phonophone Il iPhone: powerless iPod speakers, classic design and horn acoustics

The speaker system that uses no power is usually a travesty of audiphonics: the tinny sound of Bach reverberating through the fillings of a cavity-ridden back molar plucked from the inside of a skull and spread out across the room.

But Tristan Zimmerman, the designer of this wonderfully shaped iPod speaker systems, claims that his Phonophone Il iPhone is different: it exploits the science of horn acoustics to maintain rich sound while boosting the audio output of the standard earphone jack to 55 decibels... which is equivalent to the volume coming from a pair of laptop speakers.

That's respectable for a powerless solution, but not the kind of output that can be clearly heard over the screams and ululations of a night out at Club Rectum. But that's okay, because what the Phonophone really is is a wonderful throwback to the horn-and-conch of classical acoustic amplification. Visually, it's beautiful: a perfect shape captured in ebony and onyx. It looks Grecian, while at the same time conjuring a fondness for the living room aesthetics of the early jazz era with its geometry. It would just never fit in with Club Rectum's decor.

I love the look. But $600 is way too much to pay for any powerless speakers when I could be paying that for oscillating LEDs and bowel-evacuating bass.

Phonophone Il iPhone [Charles and Marie via Cult of Mac]

John Brownlee

Nokia adds Skype to the N97

For years, mobile phone companies have done their damnedest to discourage Skype leaping across the vacuum between PCs and cellular networks. The reason's obvious: why pay 20 cents per minute for a local call when you can pay one cent a minute to call Zimbabwe?

If handsets were entirely separate from contracts, it would doubtlessly be a non- issue: some handset manufacturer would include the software in order to have a killer feature, other manufacturers would scramble to match, and pretty soon it'd be ubiquitous. But unfortunately, carriers and handset manufacturers are usually in cahoots... and in America, at least, the carriers call the shots. No Skype.

But Nokia seems to have turned around on it. Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress, Skype and Nokia announced a partnership to bring Skype to Nokia's phones, with the upcoming Nokia N97 being the first to incorporate Skype into the system and allow for both outgoing and incoming calls.

Seriously: kudos. Nokia has traditionally not played the United States' carrier game, ignoring their feature requests (or hobblings) in favor of a European model which largely looks at phones and service as separate deals. That may be a poor business decision on Nokia's part, and adding a carrier-challenging app like Skype built-in to the N97 isn't going to help them with US penetration, but it's still a great step towards hegemony-breaking from a consumerist perspective.

I look forward to the day my mobile is also my Skype phone.

Skype and Nokia Partner to Integrate Skype into Nokia Devices [Business Wire]

John Brownlee

TrapCall: Anonymity denied to Caller ID... at least for now

Girls just got a new weapon in their attempts to totally shut their creepy, mouthpiece-licking, heavy-breathing exes out of their lives: TrapCall, a service that allows anonymous Caller IDs to be identified before pick-up.

The way the unmasking service works is pretty clever. Caller ID's existing anonymity provisions allow anyone to mask their call, but excludes anonymity to callers of 1-800 numbers, since the owners of those numbers are paying for the call. TrapCall simply reroutes an unanswered call to a 1-800 number then back to your voicemail, recording the number as it squirts through its servers.

AT&T and T-Mobile are already signed up to allow this, with other carriers expected to be announced within weeks. For the end user, the service costs $10 a month.

There's privacy concerns, of course, but I'm okay with them: there's recipient lines in my emails. There's a peephole on my front door. It's not unreasonable to expect to know who a person is before you allow them to impose upon your time... but there's ways to get around those guards too.

In the age of technology, privacy is all about the flux and ebb, the clash between competing systems.The way technology and capitalism interact will prompt other companies to come up with solutions that will guarantee customer privacy, just like how anonymous email services allow you to email someone without giving your identity away. I like that. It can only make privacy stronger and more clearly defined.

Anonymous Caller? New Service Says, Not Any More [Threat Level]

John Brownlee

When geeks were lounge lizards... the HP-01 Calculator Watch

Over on eBay, there are not one, but two utterly gorgeous HP-01 Hewlett Packard LED calculator wrist watches up for auction. Even at $1,500, it's just brutally hard not to pluck a kidney from the navel and hit the black market in order to own one. These herald back from a different era, when the fashion accessories of today's most hopeless geeks were the leathery, tobacco-scented wrist accoutrements of the opulent lounge lizard god.

If you can afford one, go buy it. They even come with a case and manual in good nick, though it certainly looks like the manual has been used to swab up a bus station floor or two.

Update: Literally within the course of writing this post, that last HP-01 was plucked from out of our hands... the reserve price has been met, the auction is over. I can't justify not posting this, though. Some commenter will write about their first HP-01, someone will respond with a loving reverie to their first calculator watch... and even if not, this post will stand as testament to how beautiful even the most obsolete gadget can be. It's still a post worth spitting up.

Joel Johnson

Toy designers' variable velocity gun plays for keeps

David Hambling explains the "VVWS", the "Variable Velocity Weapon System" from toy design firm Lund & Company that can fire either lethal bullets or low-velocity, non-lethal rounds:

The version of the VVWS currently being developed would be a purely non-lethal replacement for the FN303. The key advantage is the ability to vary the muzzle velocity; no details have been released, but this may be controlled automatically by a laser rangefinder. At short ranges, it will have a low muzzle velocity, ensuring the impact is safe; but the speed can also be increased to extend the maximum range beyond what can currently be achieved.

The VVWS will have a maximum range of 150 meters, compared to a range of 50 meters for the FN303 for point targets. Longer ranges are sometimes quoted for the FN303 but these seem to refer to using it to deliver volleys of "pepperball" rounds to saturate an area with a cloud of PAVA pepper powder. The military do not use this type of ammunition, being confined to impact rounds which, unlike paintballs, are hard and shatter on impact. (Paintball-type rounds are also available for marking with washable or indelible dye).

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Designer toys, incl. Lapolab's "Jumping Brain"

Our pal Nate Heasley is popping around at Toy Fair finding the stuff we missed, when instead he should be manning his booth to promote his award-winning board game, Wits And Wagers.

Designer toys are one of my favorite areas of ToyFair. There are a lot of independent, new toy companies that spring up here, and other more established companies that work with a lot of independent artists. It's an area of ToyFair that didn't exist when I started going about 6 years ago, but now it's big enough to have its own aisle and some of the best innovation comes out of this area.

Sadly, the current economic climate seems to have hit the smaller companies harder, since there are some empty booths in the Designer aisle where there hadn't been before. But the big boys (well, big for this market anyway) are still here, like Toy2R, who came with a great collection of modded Qee and Toyer pieces, as well as displaying some customizable "DIY" models that are coming up. I love the Toyee, and plan on doing some modding of my own on one of them, but my favorite piece is the Jumping Brain by lapolab. – Nate

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Orbitwheels, the monowheels you can wear

Our pal Nate Heasley is popping around at Toy Fair finding the stuff we missed, when instead he should be manning his booth to promote his award-winning board game, Wits And Wagers.

I've always been a fan of monowheels, the hubless design that has a certain ascetic simplicity. So I was psyched to see that some folks had decided to take that concept and make monowheels for your feet. The Orbitwheel skates are just two monowheels (okay, so there's a bit of a contradiction there) that you step in to and then move around on by making an s-pattern with your feet. When someone is good at it (as the guy at ToyFair is) it's actually very graceful, like a figure skater.

When learning, as I was, it's not exactly quite as graceful. Well, at least there's no chance of gerbiling like in a real monowheel. Available from Inventist.com for $120. – Nate

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

⌦ Domain Names – GoDaddy, the world's classiest registrar, is doing 1-year domain registrations for $1.20 per domain. [Slickdeals]

⌦ Picking, Grinning – Extra 10% "Value Brand Instruments" like banjos, mandolins, guitars, woodwinds, and more. Get a Rogue guitar and mandolin value pack for $90, shipped, for instance. [Dealhack]

⌦ Turntable – Jensen 3-speed turntable for $40, shipped, with built-in speakers as well as speaker outputs. I know lots of people have albums but no turntable (hi!) and thought maybe you'd want to remedy that. [Dealnews]

⌦ All-in-One Laser Printer – Brother MFC-7420 for $110, shipped. About $80 off. [Dealnews]

⌦ Gaming Keypad – The Belkin N52TE SpeedPad, one of those fancy ten-key-like add-ons for ultra-gaming, is $50, shipped, or about $20 off. [Dealnews]

⌦ Bookmark – Today's Woot is a three-pack of Thinktank Technology Bookmark LED Lights for $7, shipped.

Photo: Kamal Sell

Joel Johnson

Imagine this DLP Pico Projector Gen 2 just getting just a hair smaller

Above, two versions of the Texas Instruments DLP Pico projector. The newer model, at the top, has a native 854-by-480 pixel resolution, is 20% thinner and less voluminous, and is both brighter and more power efficient than the previous model. And although they Pico projectors are not quite small enough to fit into the very thinnest gadgets out there, they're already in Samsung W7900 phone—it won't be long before they're in nearly everything.

Mat Honan

Siphon Coffee: Because Single Origin Brew Wasn't Elitist Enough

My body is nothing more than a mechanism for processing caffeine and beer. Actually, the folks at Gawker said something much worse. But fuck those guys. If they're so smart, why haven't they unionized yet? Anyhoo, I love good coffee, but I'll even drink the slime at the Shell station because, you know, addiction doesn't give a fuck.

Moreover, coffee, even bad coffee, makes you smarter and more productive. For real, you can go ask science if you doubt me. Science will tell you I'm right ¹.

Yet there's no reason to drink bad coffee given the wide variety of caffeine delivery systems. Coffee drinkers, like potheads, have come up with a staggering number of ways to extract the feel-good chemicals from a simple agricultural product. Many of these transcend mere function and are as beautiful and entertaining to watch as, say, a small brotherhood of grizzly bears gang raping Lou Dobbs.

The best of these, both in terms of flavor and fun, is the vacuum pot, or siphon brewing system. While you don't see them that frequently here, they're somewhat more common in Japan. Vac pots—unlike a proprietary $4000 pod-based espresso maker—have been around forever. Or at least for about 160 years. Much like a bicycle, it is absolute mechanical perfection.

You dump coffee (freshly ground) in the top chamber, water in the bottom, and set it on the stove. The stove heats the water, causing pressure to force the liquid up into the top chamber, where it mixes with the grounds. Kill the heat, and the lower chamber starts to cool, creating a vacuum down there. That sucks the water back down again, passing through a filter on the way. You end up with a smooth, delicate brew with little to no bitterness; certainly one of the best ways to draw out the flavors of an individual bean.

And while you can fork out for them—the Japanese system at Blue Bottle cost a cool $20K—you can also snag one on eBay for about $50.

(1) Ha! See how smart I am from all that coffee? That was a trick. I linked to something else I wrote. You're just going to have to take my word for it. Or not.

Joel Johnson

Welcome our latest guest blogger: Mat Honan

I'm pleased as can be to welcome our latest guest blogger, Mat Honan. Mat is a San Francisco-based reporter, blogger, ex-fatty, infamous twitterer and all-around good egg. He's a contributing editor at Wired magazine. He got his hair cut before I did so you can call me the poseur. You may also know him from Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle or that time he borrowed your pen and never gave it back.

He's going to write about stuff. Welcome aboard, Mat!

Joel Johnson

Be the first kid in your gated community to own the Topobo Kinetic Robot System

Topobo is a construction kit with "kinetic memory", which mostly means that you teach the little motors in its joints how to move by physically twisting and shaping them with your hands. Some parts will respond directly to your ministrations, while others are slaved to "queen" parts and mimic her movements.

The joint project from Hayes Raffle, Amanda Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii and the MIT Media Lab is still in its beginning stages, but until they get it properly commercialized, they're only selling rather expensive starter kits: an "Experimenter Set" with 2 motors for $500; and a 24-motor, 1,000-piece "Classroom Set" for $5,000. That probably means your kids will be sticking with Capsela for the moment, but here's to hoping that Topobo gets some figurative traction to go along with its literal motive abilities. It looks like a lot of fun. [via Oh Gizmo!]

Joel Johnson

Video: Hands-in with Elmo Tickle Hands

NonToxicReviews.com was at Toy Fair yesterday (we actually talked with its editor "Stinkhead" ourselves at the Uncle Milton booth). He spotted something we did not: Elmo Tickle Hands, just the thing for furry self-pleasure. Hell, I'm not even a furry and I'm getting a little worked up.

In theory they're for the kids, though, who will presumably be taught some sort of lessons by Elmo's disembodied voice, which speaks from the gloves while they vibrate to tickle.

Joel Johnson

Shimano's new electric bicycle derailleur feted on professional circuit

Ian Austen for the New York Times:

Shimano’s version, known as the Dura-Ace Di2 7970, is being used by three professional teams competing in California: Columbia High Road, Garmin Slipstream and Rabobank. About 10 riders will race with the system even though they have used it on only one or two training rides after receiving them late this week.

Bob Stapleton, the owner and general manager of Columbia, said many of his riders had doubts about using bicycles that could literally run out of power. The Di2 system has no manual override if its battery goes dead. That event can be an irritation or a disaster, depending on the terrain and what gear ratio the bike is stuck in. Shimano estimates the battery will last for about 1,000 miles per charge.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair Tetris: Invasion of the Tetromino Games

The cubic blocks found in classic toys and games like Tetris or Soma align well with one theme at this year's Fair: simplicity. We spotted a bunch of items that sported its characteristic tumbling walls: from Bumpity Blocks for the kindergarten to complex strategy games like Jakbo, there's something for everyone.

Links:

Blokus [Amazon, $24]
Blokus3D [Official Homepage]
Tetris 360 [Mattel Radica, $25]
Bumpity Blocks [Creative Kids Stuff, $30]
Quantumino [Family Games America]
Jakbo [Fat Brain, $30]

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair Frighteners: don't bring your kids

New York's Toy Fair, one of the industry's biggest annual conferences, doesn't let children attend. Even reporters under the age of 21 are banned. The assumed reason is that it's a trade show, not a theme park, and crowds of kids would turn it into a chaotic waste of time. Another reason, however, could be that there's a new glass-eyed horror around every corner, waiting for night to fall so that it may help you see forever.

Joel Johnson

Just compare Windows Mobile 6.5 to iPhone, says Microsoft

From the Seattle Times' Pri0* blog, discussing the just announced Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system:

"Like if you go to the iPhone, you can go to the weather application, but you have to go into to actually make it update," said Scott Rockfeld, a director in Microsoft's Windows Mobile group. ... "Just compare this to the iPhone. You go to an iPhone and check a voice mail, first you bring it to life, then you unlock the phone, then you go to the phone application, then you hit voice mail," he said.

(The new "go right to voicemail or text messages on unlock" feature, pictured here, is slick. See how concessionary and fair I am, haters?)

* Pry-zero? Pre-oh? Pry-oh? Pre-zero?

Joel Johnson

Edul Young's heartbreakingly awesome Beauty and the Beast LEGO music box

Edul Young's Beauty and the Beast-themed music box, constructed from LEGO, is just fantastic in every way, from the attention he's paid to the character models (the Beast head is Chewbacca! Belle's dress is minifig arms!) down to the way he's integrated the working music box internals into the LEGO cathedral. It's the kind of modeling that at first seems clumsy but reveals its ingenuity as you study each piece selected.

(It probably helps that I adore Disney's version of BatB and have been known to start singing the entire score at the drop of a rose petal.) [via Brothers Brick]

Joel Johnson

HOWTO: Make a Get Smart shoe phone

Paul Gardner-Stephen made a shoe-phone, last seen pressed against Don Adams' mug in Get Smart. Because spy gear is best hardened by transparency, Gardner-Stephen made this Instructable showing how he did it. Spoiler alert: You put a phone in a shoe. [via MAKE:]

Brandon Boyer

Recently on Offworld

Recently on Offworld we've been having a Noby Noby Boy blowout, with Namco Bandai dripfeeding us a series of increasingly gorgeous and meaningless videos, and series creator Keita Takahashi finally letting loose with the true meaning behind the game... except not.

We've also seen brilliantly ludicrous Garry's Mod hacks that have seen the cast of Silent Hill in decidedly un-horrifying situations, an insider's look at how Destroy All Humans! was born (co-starring 'Where the hell is' Matt Harding), a new tea-time look at dual platformer/puzzler Henry Hatsworth, listened to the Psychonauts soundtracks, now in proper 'e' form, and watched the real-life version of Half Life's City 17 with jaws duly dropped.

Finally, we took a longer look at the games coming to Sony's PlayStation Network throughout the spring and beyond, the free second chapter of iPhone puzzle/RPG PuzzleQuest, the PSP's answer to fourth-wall-breaking Genesis brawler Comix Zone, and, most wonderfully, got more information on the upcoming Stalin vs. Martians (above), a game as fantastically anachronistic as it sounds, and with a 200 foot tall playable unit of the great dictator himself.

Joel Johnson

MLB urns and caskets for the seventh-inning slump-over

From the company that brought you Star Trek urns and caskets comes this new line of funereal accessories inspired by Major League Baseball. $800 for the urn, $4,500 for the caskets, each with the livery of your favorite teams, as well as a dispassionate plaque stating that the MLB has recognized you as a "lifelong fan". [via GirlHacker]

Joel Johnson

HTC Touch Pro2 turns into a speakerphone when you turn it over

HTC's new Windows Mobile 6.5-powered smartphone can perform a neat trick:

In addition to the new simplified calling experience, Straight Talk includes an innovative mechanical and acoustic design that features a sophisticated speakerphone experience similar to those found in corporate boardrooms. Straight Talk delivers a high-fidelity voice and sound experience enhanced by asymmetric speakers and advanced noise suppression with full duplex acoustics. When the Touch Pro2 is flipped over it automatically turns into a conference room speakerphone system.

Joel Johnson

Video: 30-foot midair near hit by RAF jet pilot

I am astounded how calm the RAF pilot appears to sound after just barely missing a Tucano training plane with his Tornado. [Telegraph.co.uk]

Joel Johnson

UNITX, a mail courier bot from an unlikely future

UNITX (United Networks International Transport Exchange) is a series of bots that travel down specialized ridged corridors interwoven throughout a city carrying literal packets from place to place. Charming idea, but extraordinarily unrealistic. Why build a single-purpose series of Jeffries tubes when there are perfectly serviceable arteries throughout our cities in the form of roads? Let's figure out how to make autonomous packbots that share the highways with our cars. (Or just pay UPS drivers.) [via BotJunkie]

Joel Johnson

Airmail, cassettes, postcards, telex: Nokia E75 smartphone, their latest Communicator

Nokia has tipped the mask from the new E75 smartphone, the latest in its Communicator line with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It'll go for around $500 worldwide. It's typical Nokia: iterative, not innovative, with WCDMA, 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and microSD slot.

Nokia also announced the E55, a thin take on the pseudo-QWERTY smartphone a la the BlackBerry Pearl.

Discussion: Technologizer, All About Symbian, Phone Scoop, MobileCrunch, Engadget, Gizmodo

Joel Johnson

mbl 101 X-treme, the world's most beautiful speakers?

The mbl 101 X-treme, a $250,000 speaker cabinet with omni-directional mirror imaged speaker arrays, may be a lot of things—overpriced, overwrought, and overengineered—but there is no denying the carbon fiber, steel, and wood monstrosity is a beaut. [via Red Ferret]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

⌦ Netbook – Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for $200, shipped. It's a basic model: 512MB RAM, 4GB SSD, Ubuntu. But talk about disposable computing. There's an 1GB RAM/8GB SSD/Windows XP version for $245 if you're a Sam's Club member, but it doesn't ship for 4-6 weeks. [Slickdeals]

⌦ HDTV – 37-inch 1080p Sharp Aquos (LCD37D64U) for $700, shipped. That's around $100, $150 off what it's been going for. Not bad for a name-brand panel. [Dealoco]

⌦ KitchenAid – Across the board 30%-off coupon from ShopKitchenAid.com. [Dealnews]

⌦ Tools – Craftsman 348-piece mechanics tool set for $290ish, shipped, or in-store pick-up. In a couple of weeks I'll have a garage and can start buying sets like this to hang up unused on my wall. [Dealnews]

⌦ Crimper – Dynex crimping tool for RJ-45/11 for $4, shipped. [Dealnews]

⌦ Point-and-Shoot – Today's Woot is the Pentax Optio E60 10MP Digital Camera for $95, shipped.

Photo: Runs with Scissors

Joel Johnson

iShred, an iPhone guitar app that makes playing real songs possible

iShred from Frontier Design is yet another guitar simulator for the iPhone, this time with an eye towards electrics, complete with stomp boxes and pedal effects. Unlike a lot of the other guitar apps out there, though, iShred looks fairly practical to use as a real instrument, allowing you to assign up to 10 chords to buttons at the top of the screen, leaving your other hand free to pick or strum. It's the only practical way to do it—as cute as it may be to try to play chords on a virtual fret board, it's nearly impossible to do so with any accuracy on the iPhone's wide touch screen.

iShred is $5 on the App Store and has impeccable ratings.

Joel Johnson

Video Exclusive: Tettix shows HOWTO make "Fake 'n' Bake" chiptunes with Reason

One of our favorite musicians, Judson "Tettix" Cowan, has taken the time to show us how he makes "Fake 'n' Bake Chiptunes" in Propellerheads' Reason. Which is awesome, because if I ever get off my ass and write that chiptune opera we've talked about doing for ages, I'll probably be doing it in Reason, not in retro hardware.

This is great stuff, Judson. Thanks so much for putting it together for us!

In part three Tettix remixes an old favorite, the dungeon theme from Zelda.

Previously • 50 Years of LEGO: Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon Time-Lapse Video
• Tettix's Rites, free electronic album "remodeling" Stravinsky

Joel Johnson

Agwa De Bolivia, coca leaf and herb liqueur

Agwa De Bolivia is a liqueur extracted from the coca leaf, which as you may have heard is the same plant that gives us chocolate, Coca-Cola, Chanel, and cocaine. While the manufacturer is certainly playing that angle up the most, the tincture is filled with a variety of head-buzzing herbs, including ginseng and guarana, both of which are likely culpable for any tweaked out feeling.

That its manufacturers call it an "Alco-Jolt" does little to imply that it's the sort of booze you savor, unless your idea of a classy cocktail is a Red Bull and moonshine tipple. According to Liquor Snob, it smells like Hai Karate and tastes like "you eat a big prune pie and wash it down with a can of Moxie, then swish it all away with Listerine." Which is to say they sort of liked it.

Joel Johnson

Fluid Nemesis kayak is ugly, nimble

I know nothing about kayaking except what I learned from a made-for-TV movie from the '80s where a guy avoided capture by rolling his kayak under a dragnet. (It seemed much cooler to me at the time than it does now. Also, I think John Denver was in it. So were the Thundercats. The '80s have begin to amalgamate in my gelatinized noggin.)

Here's what I know about kayaks now: There's a company called Fluid that makes a kayak called the Nemesis. From what I can tell from this video, it makes all sorts of twists and whorls possible. It also makes its pilot look like they're riding in the bill of a giant duck. The Nemesis sells for around two grand.

Joel Johnson

Power On Self Test: Sorry, Mario

(Thanks, April!)

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: :5 Stadium tests your sense of time

:05 Stadium is a cheap toy forthcoming from Bandai. It does one thing: test how accurately you can measure 5 seconds. Click it once, wait five seconds, and click it again. Given three tries, the best I got was 4.89 seconds.

"It's incredibly addictive," said Bandai's Stephanie Holbrook. And you know what? It is. Bandai is, of course, very good at wasting your time.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Mark My Time digital bookmarks

Mark-my-time would be my next timepiece, were it not for the fact that it is not the colorful retro wristwatch it appears to be, but instead a useful educational tool for children.

Rubbery bookmarks that can be set to count up or down to a preset time, they're designed to help track how long a youngster's spent poring over the tomes. There's also a version aimed at music students, which includes a metronome with 5 rhythms. For the grown-ups, Mark-My-Time suggests using it to track workout sessions.

They're available right now for $9 and up at the product page.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Printies emerge from the inkjet womb

Printies are sheets of pre-sewn fabric ready to be stamped with any design you create or download, using a standard inkjet printer. Just print, stuff and go: manufacturer Techno Source claims it uses no more ink than paper.

They'll be offered in six different shapes from fall 2009, with each set costing under $20. You can already start planning your conquests at the official MyPrinties website.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Solar Robots

Should Uncle Milton's new set of solar-powered robots rise up to throw off mankind's yoke, you'll find me in Seattle.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: 50-Year Anniversary Ant Farm in classic packaging

To celebrate the golden jubilee of their famous abattoir for arthropods, Uncle Milton toys has released their plain ol' Ant Farm in the special edition packaging. I don't know if it's on purpose or not, but the cardboard is even distressed like it's been sitting on a shelf for a while.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Lobster Dice, Bear Dice, Duck Dice

This company made literally several hundred types of dice, from tiny little things no bigger than Nerds, to those covered in strange languages and arcane symbols.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Surgical instruments for mutant plushies

Bureau Veritas Services makes equipment to help you assure the quality of your toys. Paging David Cronenburg!

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Keep your Wasp Factory running with Summit's Bug Vacuum and Habitat

Bug Vacuum's unimaginative name is nonetheless a good one, because it's a suprisingly utilitarian thing. Kids will love it because it sucks up live bugs, cages them, and allows for bug-transfer to a compatible bug habitat that maker Summit also sells.

And adults will love it because "you can just use it to vacuum dead ones off the windowsill," says company CEO Dan Henderson.

How useful it will be to murderous Scottish children seeking to populate their divining machines is another matter: one that will perhaps be solved by the Extreme edition.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Backyard Safari Underground Time Capsule

Although the Underground Time Capsule isn't even properly water resistant (it's endcap just screws on and off without any sort of gasket), the ability to continue to add smaller items to its vault through the screw on rock left exposed above the ground is awfully cute. There's a little padlock-style date counter on the top, as well as a more or less superfluous level. It should be available for around $20. Until they release a Vault-Tec version this might be the best plastic time capsule kit on the market.

"Kids love to bury things," a company representative assured me.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: EnviroBLOX, puffy construction toys made from corn starch

While EnviroBLOX have been on the market for about a year, manufacturer Cadaco is now releasing new sets with tools that cut, smoosh, and emboss the corn starch-based building puffs into even more shapes. EnviroBLOX are made of the same stuff as biodegradable packing peanuts. To connect them, just dip them in water (or give them a lick). Think of them as Cheetos* with which you can build giant dinosaurs.

* This is an unpaid product integration Synergtunity™. While EnviroBLOX can be used to construct animals they are not compatible with most implementations of the Atkins or South Beach Diets.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Ubi Petz echo recursively between virtuality and meatspace

Ubisoft's Petz extrude into our planes in cuddly form--a companion piece to the similar Nintendogs-licensed toys made by the same toymaker. This difference? Like meaner-looking miniature toys, these can be registered at the official website, where you can "play" with them in the original game's virtual world.

Is it strange to base a fluffy toy on a virtual toy, but then play mainly with a specific virtual toy based on the specific fluffy toy? I'm sure a French semiotician can explain it to us sometime.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Yomega presents the future of paddleball

If I made a paddleball one random segment would be filled with a small percussive blasting cap.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Washboard Tie

Robert Fishbone demonstrated this dual-purpose Washboard Tie while humming Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious", but I think it was slightly out of tune. $20 at your local hillbilly supplier.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Cuddly Giraffe vs. Ambien: FIGHT

Gentle Giraffe, the latest murmuring entry in the Sleep Sheep 'n' Friends line of white-noise generating pillow toys. lulls you to sleep with safari trail noises, a sampling of the Victoria Falls, or groovy African music.

When asked why we should consider this for one's offspring instead of powerful and addictive narcotics, the lady at the booth looked at us like we were crazy or something. Hey, it either works or it doesn't, lady!

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: Green Pieces puzzles have wildflower seeds inside

These puzzles, showing bunch of aluminum cans arranged like crunchy eagles or savory panda bears, are made up of pieces that have wildflower seeds inside. Toss them all in the ground when you're done making the puzzle and they'll spring up into pretty annuals. (We asked if they would make certain patterns if you planted the completed puzzle, but apparently not.)

Green Pieces are already heading to Barnes & Nobles and should be both there and any other retail outlets by Earth Day. They'll sell for around $13.

Rob Beschizza

Toy Fair: Solar system puzzle ball

The Solar System Puzzle Ball is available as various celestial bodies, with an optional diorama set featuring a two-dimensional conception of stellar geography that would make the epicyclists proud.

Do not taunt happy fun Iuppiter.

Rob Beschizza

Fifth-wave feminist Barbie welcomes us to Toy Fair

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: LEGO: New minifigs, new sets!

I'm loving the new little aliens minifigs on the updated Space Police lines.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: LEGO Indy Flying Wing

Sent more or less live from Toy Fair.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: LEGO Space Police are back!

Sent more or less live from Toy Fair.

Joel Johnson

Toy Fair: LEGO Creator Pumper

Sent more or less live from Toy Fair.

Rob Beschizza

We're at the Toy Fair. Toys!

If you've been holding out for Aibo's return, this isn't the year for you.

This year's Toy Fair, which begins Sunday at the Javits Center in New York City, is all about getting the best bang for your buck, and expensive, high-tech electronic toys won't be the focus. This is is one business that can react quickly to economic circumstances.

Sure, there's going to be a lot of standard-issue merch: the likes of Elmo, Dora, Barbie and Tinkerbell will rule the show floor, no doubt about it. But we're here for the cool stuff, whether it's ingenious and imaginative or simply a reinvention of something old. Here's a few of the items on our itinerary:

• The Bernie Madoff action figure.

• A sidewalk airbrushing kit with wash-away ink, from Crayola.

• Mindflex, a "mind-control" game from Mattel that tracks electrical activity in your head muscles.

• Leapfrog's new science-ed handheld gaming system.

Now, what do you want us to check out?

Photo: Pro-Zak

Rob Beschizza

Samsung's solar powered eco-phone

Samsung's solar-powered telephone anticipates an age when our talking machines are no longer coal-fired. That age will be upon us surprisingly soon, too: this very real gadget will be offered in England and her remaining colonies later this year.

Blue Earth, it's called.

Joel Johnson

John Carter of Mars, past and present

Above, Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E discusses the creative process at Pixar. Stanton is currently working on a live-action version of Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars, a classic sci-fi series from the 1910s through 1930s. Despite previous rumors, John Carter will not be a Pixar film, but instead a Disney-produced film that will be rated PG-13.

The series was previously going to be produced by many different directors, including Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) and Jon Favreau (Iron Man). This version looks like it has a good shot at actually hitting the silver screen by 2012.

Because John Carter has been around for a while, several classic artists have taken a crack at an adaptation, including Ray Harryhausen (Clash of the Titans, Mighty Joe Young) and John McTiernan (Die Hard). But the first adaptation attempt was by Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett, who intended to make John Carter into the first full-length animated feature. If it had not been abandoned due to studio pressure from MGM, who wanted a comedy version, it would have predated Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first feature-length animated film by five years.

Below, Clampett shows some of the test footage that was created in spare time. (A bonus for other fantasy dorks: Classic pulp cover artist Frank Frazetta also did lots of John Carter work which would have been used as the visual touchpoint for Rodriguez's adaptation.)

Rob Beschizza

Large Samsung NC20 is large ... at least compared to the NC10

Samsung's NC10 is a netbook: John's fave, in fact, thanks to its extravagant battery life. Samsung's NC20, however, is not a netbook. Looking almost identical in early shots, this side-by-side comparison reveals it to be the little fella's big brother.

Proof the samsung nc20 is bigger than the nc10 [Lilliputing]

Rob Beschizza

Report: AT&T to sell slightly cheaper netbooks with long service contracts

AT&T is about to launch a broad subsidy program for netbooks, offering cheap laptops with always-on internet at rock-bottom prices--so long as you agree to long-term service agreements.

Among the "deals," uncovered by Gizmodo, are Asus's Aspire One for $200, or HP's Mini 1000 for $400. In short, you save about $100, in return for agreeing to a contract that will cost you $1,000 or more over the life of a data plan.

There are choices: $60 for the 5GB, but light 'net users can opt for $40 a month, so long as they use less than 200MB. The pre-paid option is a silly token offering, providing a useless 50MB for $20 a month. More interesting is a $70 plan that includes a basic DSL plan for your home, and gets another chunk discounted from the netbook.

As with cellphone subsidies, AT&T's scheme is fine if you know what you want and will be spending the money on 3G anyway. The problem with 'phone subsidies, however, is that they allow cellular carriers to control the hardware market: congress considered regulating the cellular industry to stop the abusive practices that result, such as punitive early termination fees.

If they gain a similar position with netbooks, a similar situation could result: a limited selection of devices, manufacturers who design them for the carriers instead of for customers, and a debt-like contract-subscription model that lets carriers get away with the worst customer service standards in America.

Since we want 3G, though, it's pretty much inevitable that netbooks will end up the same way. But it'll be hard not to complain when high-end unlocked models end up saddled with artificially bloated prices. [Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Crochet R2D2

Consider this a unicorn chaser, of sorts, for my grave posting misdemeanors of last night.

The cutest crochet R2D2 you'll see today [Technabob]

Joel Johnson

Impress, a smooshy 3D touchscreen by Silke Hilsing

I'm having a little bit of difficulty parsing the art-speak, but I'm pretty sure from the pictures that "DIS.PLAY" is a prototype projection surface that responds to not only touch in two dimensions, but smooshed down into a third.

Oh, there's a video! Now I get it. Silke Hilsing, I like everything about this. Good job!

John Brownlee

Dear Fashion: Uh, no.

"That cursor is hovering dangerously close to the age verification zone."

High-End Fashion Of The Day: Sancho Hemelsoen [The Daily What via Gizmodo]

John Brownlee

HP's custom Ubuntu skin for netbooks now installable by everyone

As I hoped, plucky hackers have taken that gorgeous HP custom shell for their Ubuntu netbooks, ripped out the launcher, OS skin and some application skins, and made it available for everyone. Score.

Hp mie interface download [Ubuntu Forums]

John Brownlee

Brother, can you spare a Crawligator?

If you've got a vintage 70's Crawligator skateboard for babies around, this is very good karma. DaddyTypes got an email from a new dad of a disabled eight month old, who writes:

I’m searching for a Crawligator for my eight month old son with leg deformities. He will be having them amputated and is expected to have trouble crawling. I would like to find him a Crawligator to give him the best start possible.

If you've got one you can spare, drop a comment at DaddyTypes.

Brother, Can You Spare A Crawligator? [DaddyTypes via Crunchgear]

John Brownlee

Electric man power strip rag doll

Too adorable: this little rag-doll like electric man power strip pulses 110-volts of juice through his circulator system and out his limbs to keep your gadgets charged. It's $14.99, which is more expensive than a cheap strip picked up at Best Buy, but no where near as button cute.

Electric Man [Urban Outfitters via Technabob]

Joel Johnson

Russian Star Wars posters

I've seen a few different Star Wars posters in my day, but these Russian ones for A New Hope are especially great. Yours today for just $3k! (Thanks, Homerj!)

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Microsoft: Bring me the head of the Conficker worm programmer!

And suddenly, all the late nights of IRC channel bragging seems like a bad idea: Microsoft has put up a bounty of $250,000 to anyone who can identify the author or authors of the Conficker or Downadup worm, which takes advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows to propagate, steal personal information and infect the machine with malware. Note that the dripping, decapitated coconuts of the suspected perps aren't good by their own... Microsoft will require some proof before ponying up the gees.

Microsoft offers reward to catch worm maker [Yahoo]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

⌦ Game Consoles – I don't know why Dell decided to become the place to buy Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s, but I like it: Xbox starts at $160 for Arcade, but I'd go $240 for the Pro. 80GB PS3 for $320. [Slickdeals]

⌦ Sander – Craftsman 0.5 amp 3D sander for $5. I don't even need one and I'm about to get it. [Dealoco]

⌦ Camcorder – Canon FS100 flash memory camcorder for $250, shipped. It's like a Flip that actually has controls and optical zoom! (I kid.) [Dealhack]

⌦ Netbooks – Dell has some refurbished Mini 9s in stock for as low as $220. A fine deal, and I'm sure they're just returns for people who didn't realize what a netbook could and couldn't do. Maybe. I actually went through the entire checkout process but couldn't get the coupon to work. [Dealnews]

⌦ HDTV – Costco members can get the Westinghouse TX-52F480S for $1,200 shipped or $1,100 for in-store pick-up. It's a 52-inch 1080p LCD television. [Dealnews]

⌦ iPod Dock – That cute ghostly iBoo dock that looks a little like Pac-Man enemies is available for about $100. [Dealnews]

⌦ Art Set – That 101-piece art set from Boscovs is still on sale for $20, shipped. This sort of thing was a treasure to me when I was younger. [Dealnews]

⌦ R/C Car – Today's Woot is an Ed Hardy 1:12 Scale RC Car for $45, shipped.

Photo: Thomas Hawk

John Brownlee

Next iPhone to come in matte black?

As far as Apple rumors go, this one's pretty insignificant, but here it is: according to iPod Observer, they've attained leaked images of the new 16GB iPhone, and while there isn't anything new spec-wise to report, it will apparently come with a matte black shell as an option.

There's plenty of reasons not to accept this as gospel, but it's not wholly unlikely: Apple has retained the same look for both iterations of the iPhone so far, with the exception of the back casing. It makes sense for them to change it again to differentiate the 3G's successor from the past two models while retaining the iPhone's iconic front design.

New 16GB iPhone 3G May Be On The Way [iPod Observer]

John Brownlee

Micro Innovation brings bamboo to accessories

In Japan, the usage of bamboo in computer products is pretty much the generic equivalent of using charcoal gray or opalescent white plastic in the States: wholly unimaginative, perhaps cloying. But what's a design cliche in one hemisphere is fresh and invigorating in another, and I'm not ashamed to say I find the polished bamboo look of Micro Innovation's latest accessory line-up to be pretty swank. They should start filtering through electronics retailers in April or May.

Micro Innovation to Distribute Eco-Friendly Computer Accessories [Imagining Info]

John Brownlee

Gas mask kazoos

For the Berliner, the vodka-reeking hawkers of Soviet kitsch are a ubiquitous site around the Disneyland spectacle of Checkpoint Charlie. Wearing faux-beaver caps and decked out in a horrifying array of replica Soviet medal celebrating the wearer's capacity for murder and oppression, they grab any tourist by the arm who seems interested and drunkenly attempt to foist upon them a replica rubber gas mask, accompanying it with a slurred story of underground bunkers and recovered military surplus hordes.

It's all a sham, of course, and these gas masks are only usually good for one thing: sadomasochistic sex games. They don't work, and they are too terrifying for casual display. But Joel Veitch over at Rathergood did figure out one use for them outside of the realm of Marilyn Manson's bedroom: they make fine housings for the installation of kazoos! Yes!

Gas Mask Kazoo [Rathergood via MAKE]

Joel Johnson

Hulu viewers have great taste in movies

If Hulu's current top movies widget is any indication, sometimes the internet gets it so right.

That Rickles documentary is really great, by the way.

Rob Beschizza

Even the title of this video isn't safe for work

Sometimes something demands posting at the BB, but is not quite ready for life on the front page. Our invincible tolerance for the uncouth makes BBG--never overwhelmingly strict about keeping to gadgets at the best of times--a perfect home for such overspill. This is Joel Veitch's striking animation, Wanky Shit Demon. You have been warned.

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: Our Networked Report from the 2009 Global Game Jam

Video duration: 6:41. Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

Today's episode of Boing Boing Video is our mini-documentary of the Global Game Jam 2009, a worldwide, networked gamebuilding marathon in which participants have exactly 48 hours in which to conceptualize, design, and build a web-based electronic game.

Boing Boing Video's Jolon Bankey was the head organizer for GGJ Costa Rica, and team members there sent in video reports as the 48 hour game-in unfolded. I attended the Los Angeles edition with Matty Kirsch. Boing Boing Gadgets editor Rob Beschizza represented us at GGJ Pittsburgh. And Boing Boing friends around the world uploaded video sitreps, shoutouts, and random moments of weirdness with which we've produced this piece. We received video submissions from places as diverse as Australia, Scotland, Israel, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Play some of the games! You can browse winning entries, and all of the others who participated, and play on Mac, PC, or other OSes: Game Entry Browser.

Photos below: At top, Jolon's 7-year-old son Gibson Bankey (clearly destined to be a future gaming titan) passes wrathful judgment on entries at the Costa Rica Game Jam. Below that, the winners of that competition (Team Vara Blanca for the game "Muu") proudly holding their trophy. Image by Laura Pardo, here's her entire (lovely) photoset. Bottom 2 photos are iphone snapshots I took during the BB Video shoot at the LA Game Jam, including our BBV guest host Matty Kirsch. Here's my photoset.

Boing Boing Video wishes to thank Global Game Jam founders Susan Gold, Gorm Lai and Ian Schreiber. Special thanks to the GGJ organizers and participants who contributed footage to Boing Boing Video: Caracas, Venezuela (Ciro Durán); Capetown, South Africa (Patrick Marais); Glasgow, Scotland (Romana Khan); Tel Aviv, Israel (Yuval Sapir); London, England (Fiona French); Los Angeles, PA, USA (Joseph Spradley); Newport, Wales (Mike Reddy); Perth, Australia (Simon Witt); Pittsburgh, PA, USA (Tracy Kobeda Brown); San Jose, Costa Rica (Jolon Bankey, Rene Zuleta, Shirley Monge, Daniela Calderon); Waco, TX, USA (Casey Jones); Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC, USA (Michael Lee).

Previously:
* BB Video: Global Game Jam Preview
* Global Game Jam continues! Here's live video (without kittens)
* Global Game Jam has begun! (live video stream)
* Global Game Jam (48 hour videogame dev marathon) this weekend!

John Brownlee

Japanese porn moves to USB Flash Drives

Heavily pixelated Japanese pornography featuring school girls, scarily gnarled tree roots and suckling cephalopods is now available on USB flash drives for outrageous prices, considering that Google can instantly deliver all your Japanese pornography pretty much for free.

USB Memory Porn [Official Site via Crunchgear]

John Brownlee

GameBoy cosplayer features torso-playable Tetris

A working Gameboy costume built buy a cosplayer at Ohayocon 2009, replete with built-in emulator, which is accessed by hammering the d-pad perpendicular to his junk.

Xeni Jardin

COPPAKIDS: blog of excuses kids make for getting around website age blocks

Boing Boing reader Arlo Rose points us to something beautiful:

It's a web site by someone that's a community manager at a very large website. They post the ridiculous pleas of kids under the legal age set forth by COPPA (thirteen). Pure hilarity.

"COPPAKIDS: Born too late. OMG YOU GUYS LET ME ON."

John Brownlee

Shuttered guitar store becomes giant amp

Guitar Store [Glen Scott's Flickr via Gadget Lab]

John Brownlee

Free update to Windows 7 for Vista buyers after July 1st, 2009

Good news: if you're forced to buy a Windows Vista computer in the later half of the year, Microsoft will upgrade you for free to Windows 7, with versions syncing up (Home Premium to Home Premium, etc.) Bad news: it's optional to OEMs, so not everyone will be participating. And while it's a pipe dream, there's still sort of the resentful residue of a feeling that given Vista's epic crumminess, Microsoft should be upgrading everyone to 7 for free anyway.

The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program [Techarp]

John Brownlee

Pioneer plasma televisions going the way of the ghost

Pioneer has confirmed that they are leaving the television business, shipping their last televisions in March 2010 and focusing on car electronics and home audio-video lines. This is sad news: they make some of the best plasma HDTVs on the market, and with Vizio also dropping out of the game, plasmas are getting rarer and rarer. That's a shame: while plasma will eventually be made obsolete by OLED displays, we're still a few years away from that... and in the mean time, LCD blacks just aren't quite there yet. A quality player leaving the market is something to be mourned.

Pioneer exits TV business as losses mount [Twice]

John Brownlee

Medical laser welds sliced skin shut without sutures

Presented as part deliverance of our promise to cover more cool medical lasers on Boing Boing Gadgets, this laser beam created by scientists at Tel Aviv University to weld skin shut without stitches. "Doctors know how to cut skin, but not really how to bond it." We're just one step closer to Trauma Center style surgery here, people.

Sci-fi laser stitches wounds [Reuters]

John Brownlee

Acoustibuds introduces fins to stock ear pieces for better grip and acoustics

One of the unexpected casualties of the iPod age is banded, in-ear headphones. Sony used to make a set that really suited my ears, but they did not lend themselves to lazily twining around an MP3 player and throwing in a pocket. I've come around to ear buds, especially the higher-quality Bose and Sennhauser models, but I still find them hard to keep in the ears... there seems to be some sort of casual cocheal queefing that occurs that makes even the best ear buds plop out at the most inconvenient times.

Perhaps it's simply an issue with the rubbery shape of most ear pieces. Acoustibuds offers threaded, snap-on pieces for most ear buds, and they boast improved fit and sound quality due to flexible, hypoellergenic fins and a twin-cone core design. Who knows if they actually do help keep ear buds in your slicked, greased up aural canals, but my instinct is that anything with ridges probably would, and if they can make those ridges comfortable, it's worth a shot, especially for $13.

Acoustibuds [Official Site via Crave]

Rob Beschizza

OpenPandora gaming handheld nears final design

A forthcoming handheld gaming console, Pandora will run Linux on an 800x480 display: perfect for the retrogaming it's intended for. Getting the control layout just right, however, is a big deal--just try retrogaming on a standard UMPC or MID. Here's the latest design (big), spotted at Technabob.

John Brownlee

.44 caliber revolver is the world's most powerful NERF gun

"The Most Powerful Nerf Gun" is not a designation that garners much fear amongst the six-shooter set, but loading a dart into a .44 caliber revolver and then firing it into a willing demonstrator's junk at 1,500 feet per second to the elicitation of his immediate crumplement is enough to give even the most steel-nerved NERF gunslinger the shakes. Especially when it is predicated by comments like, "I filled it with metal" and "Molly's ready to call 9/11 if shit gets real."

John Brownlee

GPS chips are now smaller than a match head

GPS units are getting disconcertingly small: Epson and Infineon's XPOSYS chip is just 2.8 x 2.9mm and can fit comfortably within the sulfurous volume of a single match head, while still having enough power to stay in contact with orbiting satellites. Gnash your teeth in holy dread, privacy activists: we're fast zooming into a day and age where GPS nano-chips will be sprayable in a fine mist all over your body as you pass through airports customs. If we're not there already, we're rapidly enterting the age of ubiquitous personal trackability, with our only solace being informational mass entropy and the inherent incompetence of bureaucracy.

Press Release [Infineon via Crunchgear]

Rob Beschizza

Mundane Gadget Spam of the Day: Bellshit

Here's one from the non-euclidean spamiverse. The subject line is "Little iPod Shuffle, now with discount prices." The content of the mailing, however, is this:

Product association!

Rob Beschizza

The world's largest vacuum chamber

"The Space Power Facility at NASA Glenn Research Center's Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio, houses the world's largest vacuum chamber. It measures 100 feet in diameter and is a towering 122 feet tall. The facility is currently undergoing construction to support Orion crew exploration vehicle testing in 2010." [via]

I think you can write a better caption.

John Brownlee

iTunes might get video streaming

Apple's iTunes video purchases have a rather big drawback right now: storage. The files are large, especially the high-def videos, and most users don't have a lot of hard-drive space to store them all without constant binge and purges.

According to Apple Insider, Apple's got a solution: they will bake video streaming into a future update of iTunes. This won't actually replace video downloading, but will be an option for users: either download it to disk and load it up on the iPod or iPhone, or stream it immediately, but transiently.

Obviously, this would be quite a nice little boon of a feature to Apple's flagging TV box, which has had a hard time slicing itself out a space: it's not as full featured as a PC hooked up to your television, nor as immediate as solutions like Roku's Netflix streaming solutions. Streaming functionality would help edge the Apple TV closer to the latter, if not the former.

This is a rumor, but it seems to make sense: Apple already offers "rent" ability, and streaming is just a more storage savvy way of renting content. If this one doesn't come true in an iTunes 8 update, you can color me surprised.

Apple plrepping iTunes replay on-demand video service [Apple Insider via Cult of Mac]

John Brownlee

Yes, Virginia, the Palm Pre will have tethering at launch

Another spike down the throat of Apple's iPhone volleyball squadron by Team Palm Pre: at launch, their prospective iPhone-killer will feature data tethering over both Bluetooth and USB, without jailbreaking. If it's so easy for Spring and Palm of all companies, Apple, why can't you move your monolithic mass and make it happen on the iPhone? And, while you're at it? Cut and paste, for christ's sake.

Palm Pre [Sprint via Engadget]

John Brownlee

Pac-Man ghosts gobble up iPods in dock form

It's hard to feel too passionately about iPod docks — at best, they serve the function of a line-in cable with significantly less aural oomph — but when they are as wonderfully, nerdtastically shaped as these Pac-Man-esque ghosts, it's hard not to feel that a couple are required, not from the perspective of stereophonic completion, but from the casual joy-infusion of whimsical interior design. They're $90, and not too shabbily specced, with three speakers, a subwoofer and 15-watts of sound.

iBoo [Speakal]

Brandon Boyer

Today on Offworld

Today on Offworld, Jim Rossignol came through with his regular Ragdoll Metaphysics column and, just as I'd hoped, gave the clearest explanation of the recent Goonswarm/Band of Brothers corporate dissolution in Eve Online as any I've read to date. It's a concise wrap-up for "the rest of us": how it happened, what it means in terms of dollars and man hours lost, and how it will shape the future of the game's universe.

Elsewhere we got an extended look at the upcoming iPhone puzzler Heroes and Villains (above), showing what exactly the developers meant when they called it "Lemmings meets The Lost Vikings meets Awesome", and saw what it might have been like if Grand Theft Auto IV was on the Spectrum ZX.

Finally, we saw another behind the scenes look at the making of Xbox Live Arcade beat-em-up Castle Crashers, were pleased to hear that the upcoming Left 4 Dead DLC will be free, coveted Pac-Man ghost lamps that we don't think actually exist, and, as linked before and most wonderfully, revealed that four Giant Robot artists and four indie game all-stars will be creating four new games to be publicly unveiled at a San Francisco exhibition at the end of GDC.

Joel Johnson

Space Battleship Yamato in LEGO

After two years of building this Space Battleship Yamato model is complete and it bristles with beauty. (Thanks, Jay T.!)

Joel Johnson

The PSP2 and the Return of Sony

In a fluorescent-lit room in an office complex of the Minato Ward, a Sony engineer is putting the finishing touches on a prototype PSP2. Have the lessons learned from the first PSP changed the shape of the plasticine maquettes on his desk? Has the success of its competitors, the nimble, toyish Nintendo DS or the iPhone—hardly a traditional gaming device at all!—affected the chips he chooses to solder into a virtual breadboard? Will his PSP2 even see the light of day?

It's the wrong time for Sony to launch a PSP2. The economy is the dumps. Sony has posted a $1.12 billion loss, its first in 14 years. But they must also be looking towards the future, making tough decisions about whether they should remain in the gaming space at all.

I don't think there's much doubt they will. Sony, after all, has never lacked for stubbornness and pride.

So what should Sony's next portable gaming device be? A phone? An all-singing, all-dancing convergence device of the future? Or a pared down device that does gaming—and only gaming—as perfectly as possible?

“If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.” – Win Borden, senator sentenced to 2 years and 3 months for failure to file tax returns

Sony has always had a problem with convergence, in that it does it poorly. That's because the company, despite attempts by its latest CEO to bring the company in line, still operates as the prototypical engineer-led Japanese company, a field of silent ivory silos that rarely communicate as a whole. One division of the company might make a camera with a web browser in it, while another might make a camera for the PSP, while yet another sells cameras that connect to their laptops— none of which can actually communicate with other Sony devices. It must be a herculean challenge for a company that makes products in nearly every consumer electronics category to coordinate and executive as a collective whole, but it should not be impossible, even in notoriously regimented Japanese corporate culture. Difficulty does not excuse a failure to meet the challenge.

The problem with the PSP and the PS3 has not been that Sony made a stab at building quality convergence devices—they've just been trying to build too many. It's hard to believe that you should buy a do-everything devices when the same company sells a dozen different do-everything models. Why would Sony, makers of the world's finest Blu-ray player, bother to sell anything other than the PS3 at all?

The PlayStation 3 is nearly perfect as a set-top box, a powerful gaming machine that doubles as one of the most connected media players available. And it's getting trashed in the market by the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii because many customers, when looking at the three units on the shelf, don't see it as a media wunderkreiger, but instead as the least interesting gaming box of the three.

READ THE REST

John Brownlee

Palm CEO: PalmOS is dead, Pre App Store, International Carriers

Some great announcements burbled out of Palm CEO's talks with investors about the upcoming Pre:

• PalmOS is dead, which will certainly drive the lingering but eerily fervent PalmOS community to teeth-gnashing, but which is only practical in the era of smartphones. All future Palm phones will be driven by the Pre's webOS (yes) or Windows Mobile (no).

• Pre App Store at launch. Better: no lock down, a la iPhone. You will be able to install third-party apps without jailbreaking, through USB or over the air.

• Palm has already established partnerships with carriers in Canada, Latin America and Europe. The Pre's going international.

• Although there's no details about Palm's exclusivity deal with Sprint, Palm hopes to have the Pre on other carriers by 2010.

It's great to watch Palm not only get the handset right, but get so many various philosophical aspects right, like open app development not limited to one corporate controlled distribution channel. Short of some appalling day one reviews, this is the phone that's replacing my iPhone.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan talks Pre with investors [Precentral]

John Brownlee

Lamboghini Gallardo Stilettoes: your girlfriend's feet as a mech robot

These Lamborgini Stilettos make your girlfriend's feet look like those of a cross-dressing vehicle Voltron. But, otherwise, ghastly.

Lamborgini Gallardo stilettos are outrageous [Luxury Launches]

John Brownlee

Iconic Tag Heuer Monaco Watch re-released with Steve McQueen's zombie approval

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Heuer Monaco watch — the only watch rad enough to be personally endorsed by Steve McQueen — Tag Heuer is releasing a slightly updated version. The picture says it all: this is one of the most gorgeous watches in the world. I have no idea what this costs, but I'm guessing thousands. What's Peruvian going rate for a couple kidneys these days?

Tag Heuer [Official Site via Acquite]

John Brownlee

lolwtf: "F1 Nose Cone and Steering Wheel with Clock and Neon Light"

I'm not sure what's more incredible about this... whatever the fuck. The fact that its design resembles a toy F1, a steering wheel and a wall clock shot together through a Cronenberg matter teleportation device, or the bizarre hunchback model they've got squinting and slouching in front of it for an infusion of sex appeal.

F1 Nose Cone and Steering Wheel with Clock and Neon Light [Yab Design via Nerd Approved]

John Brownlee

Mophie Juice Pack gets iPhone external batteries right

Most iPhone battery extenders turn one of Cupertino's sveltest designs into an pocket-dictionary sized lump of dark matter, or tether a battery dongle to the bottom with as much grace as a pair of pick-up truck testicles, but the Mophie Juice Pack may be the first one to get it right: it extends the power of the iPhone 3G by 270 hours of standby time, 4.5 hours of talk time, 4.5 hours of web browsing and 5.4 hours on wifi, while only increasing the thickness by a smidgen. It's expensive for a juice pack at $80, but this is the most elegant third party solution yet to the iPhone's woeful battery life problems.

Mophie Juice Pack [Mophie]

John Brownlee

40% of stations shutting down analog broadcasts anyways

The House may have finally gotten the vote through to delay the digital transition from February 17th to June 12th to give more time for money to be scraped together for more converter box coupons... but television stations were never obliged to fund four more months of analog signals. And wouldn't you know: 40% of them won't, shutting those signals down next Tuesday.

I've been flip in the past about my feelings about exactly why the digital transition delay is a bad idea, but it really does come down to this: 40% of analog signals shutting down on February 17th is a hell of a lot more confusing to people than 100% shutting down. Expect a lot or befuddled grannies shrieking in the aisles of Best Buy over the coming weeks.

Many local TV stations to go ahead with DTV switch [Reuters]

John Brownlee

Gorgeously restored reel-to-reel tape decks

There's scarce reason to own a reel-to-reel deck these days, although I have long nursed a deep longing to bolt one to the wall as a 50's era answering machine... shades of the interior design choices of a dame-smacking Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.

Technologically practical they may not be, but as reel-to-reel objets d'art, Jeff Jacobs sells just stunningly restored vintage Technics, Sonys, Piuoneers and Marantzes. He is not necessarily selling these for this function, but I think any one of his pieces would look great in a geek's apartment. Retro technology as the flourished design encrustations of a modern home... I think that look has legs.

Gallery of Custom Decks [Jeff Jacobs via Retro Thing]

Joel Johnson

Morning tech deals highlights

⌦ Mouse – Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000 for a little over $16, shipped. That's about $10 off everywhere else. [Slickdeals]

⌦ Mega Bloks – A bag of LEGO clone Mega Bloks for $4, which is only about $3 cheaper, but a very decent way to get a mess of toddler-scale building blocks without paying LEGO prices. [Dealoco]

⌦ Laptop – The deal on the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds at $2,600 might not be amazing (it seems reasonable), but just knowing the big machine with the slide-out secondary monitor is available for purchase merits a mention. [Dealnews]

⌦ Verizon BlackBerry – If you sign a new two-year contract, Verizon will sell you two BlackBerry phones for the price on one. [Dealnews]

⌦ GPS – That same Garmin nuvi 760 that I linked yesterday has dropped price again and is now down to a very fair $200, shipped. I'm looking forward to the Panasonic unit I ordered, but in the back of my mind I keep thinking this is the one I should have bought. [Dealnews]

⌦ Daft Punk – The "Best of" Daft Punk album Musique Vol 1 is on sale at Amazon for $2. Can of aerosol spray chrome not included. [Amazon]

⌦ Tech eBooks – Sitepoint is selling $150 worth of eBooks for $30 in a three-day sale, the proceeds of which are donated entirely to victims of the Australian bushfires. Good on ya. [Sitepoint]

⌦ Hand Vac – Today's Woot is the Dirt Devil Kurv Cordless Vacuum Cleaner for $25, shipped. That's the "fancy" one that looks like a vase.

Photo: Purple Dog

John Brownlee

Secondrun.tv makes Hulu Media Center friendly

Hulu.com is one of the few examples of the television industry getting their Web 2.0 shit right, but it's awfully unfriendly to watch on your television. Secondrun.tv is a Windows Media Center extension that slurps in Hulu RSS data, rips out the video and pumps it out in a more television-amenable format, complete with cover art and program description. It's still in beta, and the Secondrun guys haven't quite managed to tame the Hulu beast, but this has promise.

Secondrun.tv [The Green Button via The Digital Lifestyle]

Joel Johnson

"We can send a dude to the moon"; Honda films on Mobility in 2088

I haven't yet watched all of the bokeh-ridden clips on Honda's new online short film series "The Power of Dreams", but from even the first introductory clip I like where they're going. Their question: What will transportation look like in 2088? (Thanks, Honad!)

John Brownlee

31 iPhone fart apps in 90 seconds

If the iPhone App Store has a raison d'etre, a "Hello World!", it's the timeless fart app. A million years from now, when mucousy, bulbous-eyed extraterrestrial archeologists bring Cupertino's app mainframe back online for a mass upload into the Intergalactic Wikipedia, they will identify the iPhone not as a wireless communication device, but instead as a portable rebroadcaster for a simian's most spluttering emissions of gas sac. There's over sixty fart apps available through iTunes, only differentiable from one another through each's personal and tell-tale dilation of sphincter. Here's a tour of thirty-one fart apps, courtesy of The Ultimate Apple Weblog.

31 Fart Apps in 90 Seconds [TUAW]

John Brownlee

Robokey key toppers start the robotification of your home at the key chain

I sincerely hope that what orange asbestos carpeting was to the 70s and faux wood paneling was to 80s, retro-style robotification will be to the interior design sensibilities of the double oughts. I simply can not imagine a house filled with too many rock'em, sock'em robots as a recurring design motif.

So while interior design does not tend to extend as far as the small rubber caps of your house keys, I think these Robokey key toppers are a must have. You might as well clue people in from the entry portal that they are entering a demesne of mechanical men and sentient servo overlords. And $5 to make your keys look this awesome is simply a no-brainer.

Robokeys [Perpetual Kid via Geeksugar]

Brandon Boyer

Recently on Offworld

Recently on Offworld we listened to good things like the free soundtrack to Konjak's Legend of Princess, which always brilliantly stays just a half-note off the Zelda originals that inspired it, and another fantastic NES mega-mix from Japan's YMCK.

We also saw good things get nominated for rewards as both the Game Developers Choice Awards and the UK's BAFTA committee announced their nominees. We saw zombies surging from multiple fronts as we got more details on Left 4 Dead's first DLC and the first footage of the new Romero-inspired Dead Rising 2. We saw both new content for old versions of Katamari Damacy, and one last pre-release look at Katamari creator Keita Takahashi's new Noby Noby Boy.

We saw old things in new forms from Oregon Trail coming to the iPhone, to the celebration of where this all started at the newly opened Pong Museum, and saw lots more miscellaneous excellence: Zelda translated into Latin (above), the very first (non-knitted) Sackboy toys, 8-bit Punch-Out!! in real life and brilliant papercraft Mario automata, and, finally heard word that one person is officially bringing Twitter to Call of Duty.

Rob Beschizza

NYT: Sirius XM about to go bankrupt

Well, I'll be. [New York Times]

Rob Beschizza

Author's Guild claims text-to-speech software is illegal

Kindle 2's flagship feature is the reading of text out loud, in the same way as software that's already built into desktop computers and Prof. Stephen Hawking's famous voice box. This has caused a "stir." Paul Aiken, executive director of the Author's Guild, told the Wall Street Journal that you have no right to use this feature. It's a free audiobook, see.

They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider.

Forget for a moment that text-to-speech doesn't copy an existing work. And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading. The Guild's claim is that even to read out loud is a production akin to an illegal copy, or a public performance.

If a machine reading a book creates a derivative work, why not a person reading a book?

Ideas grow to fill the containers they imply, and the problem with bad ideas is that their containers are leaky and misshapen. Even if you firmly believe in broad copyright laws, intellectual property is a bad idea because it recasts a legal device as its own philosophical justification. This journey from the utilitarian to the exalted creates a sublime monster that can't help but govern not only the duplication of things, but every aspect of their expression and the culture that makes them meaningful.

[via]

Rob Beschizza

New walkman, new cybershot: Two new phones from Sony

Sony-Ericsson's w395 is a GSM walkman-phone with an FM radio, built-in stereo speakers and a 2 megapixel camera. There's an accelerometer for games, and it comes in gray and silver. Princing's yet to be announced but it'll be out in a few weeks.

Also put out today was the C903, a HSPA Cybershot with a 2.4" display, aGPS, and a 5 megapixel sensor. It automatically geotags shots and uploads them to Flickr, Picasa or other photo services, comes in lots of bright colors, and will be out this summer.

Press release [Sony Ericsson]

Joel Johnson

This is a projector

The Explay Colibri raw module draws just 1.3 watts under load and can project a 70-inch image with a 10Lm brightness.

Pico projectors are going to be everywhere.

John Brownlee

Japan's terrifyingly beautiful monster factories

This gallery of Japanese monster factories at night are astonishing: industry at its most beautiful and terrifying. The resemblance to Final Fantasy VII's city scapes can not be accidental.

Fantastic photos of factories in Japan [Bouncing Red Ball via Gizmodo]

Joel Johnson

perl -le 'print scalar localtime(1234567890)' # (Happy Birthday, UNIX)

UNIX turns 1234567890 seconds old Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 18:31:30. (At least on my system.)

Try also: python -c 'import time;print(time.asctime(time.localtime(1234567890)))' or date -r 1234567890 to get your local equiv.

[via MeFi]

           ,,,,,
          _|||||_ 
         {~*~*~*~}
       __{*~*~*~*}__ 
  jgs `-------------`

John Brownlee

Antifreeze ice cream scoop

A simple ice cream scoop with a mysterious goop inside the handle which keeps it warm for easy pint bucket scraping. It's called the Antifreeze Ice Cream Scoop, but it should work on other flavors as well. $17.

Antifreeze Ice Cream Scoop [Crate and Barrel via Uncrate]

Joel Johnson

Au by KDDI Spring Collection: Japan's prettiest phones

Unless you're in Japan, knowing what the new AU line-up from KDDI might hold will not be useful, since you won't be able to purchase a single one of the Spring Collection handsets. But if you enjoy taking a gander at interesting and often garish phone design, there's likely nothing finer. (Today.) [Via]

Personally, I enjoy the 1200 with these colorful straps by Alexander Girard, despite being unsure how useful they might be in real life. All I know is sometimes it might be nice to strap the phone to the palm, the better to SMS while falling to your death.

Joel Johnson

Web Crawler Art: Lisa Jevbratt's Infome Imager

Each pixel represents a stop in a web crawler, the output of Lisa Jevbratt's 2002-2005 online work The Infome Imager. I started the one seen here from http://gadgets.boingboing.net. [via Serial Consign]

Xeni Jardin

BB Video Groove Armada Contest: Download Some MP3s, Win a 16GB iPod Touch

Boing Boing Video is teaming up with acclaimed big beat techno music stars Groove Armada for a contest around the duo's new release -- which they're offering online, using an interesting experiment in digital promotion and distribution. The tracks are DRM-free. The new EP will be delivered through a sharing system called Bacardi B-LIVE Share, and Bacardi is basically serving as the band's record label.

Groove Armada's Andy Cato explains the thinking:

Sharing music has always gone on -- it's giving music away that's the problem. We wanted to come up with a 21st century version of what we used to do with cassette tapes. When you give music away for free it's disposable. When you share it, it's done with love. The online sharing application will be available until March 2nd, when the EP becomes available via commercial digital release.

HOW THE FREE DOWNLOADS WORK
When you register at the B-Live site, you receive one track off the new EP for free. To get more, you share a unique link for that first track (which you receive via email) to a number of friends. You can do this via Facebook if you like. While you do have to provide an email address, and you must be of legal drinking age (Bacardi's the sponsor, after all) you can opt in or out of receiving promotional emails from the band. You don't have to provide other personal information. The more times the track you share is downloaded by your friends, and their friends, the more additional tracks you're given access to. And if you sign up via BB, you're automatically entered in... (drum-machine roll, please)...

THE BOING BOING VIDEO CONTEST (prize: a 16GB iPod Touch)
The contest begins today, and ends on February 25. It's simple: register for the Groove Armada free music downloads via this unique link (which traces the fact that you came through us), and winner will be chosen randomly from users who click through from here. That's pretty much it. The prize: a 16GB Apple iPod Touch. Use it to store all of these GA tracks you download, with an awful lot of jiggabites left over to store whatever else you want to carry around -- games, photos, more tunes, perchance some Boing Boing Video episodes, hmmmm?

ABOUT THE MUSIC:
Some of Groove Armada's better-known tracks from past releases include "Superstylin," "My Friend," and "Tuning In."

Here's a blurb from the band's website about the new material:

The four track EP sees the band moving into exciting new musical pastures, with some of the material being recorded live with their band for the first time. This is demonstrated on tracks 'Drop the Tough' and 'Go', both songs featuring new vocalist Saint Saviour from electro-pop outfit The RGBs. 'Pull Up (Crank It Up), with much-loved UK-based MC Slarta John, takes the EP up a gear and looks set to become their 'Superstylin' of 2009. 'El Padrino' makes up the 4, an instrumental that showcases the true talent of the live band in Balearic style. Remixes of 'Drop the Tough' come courtesy of Australian Electronic/Rock group Van She and Brazilian dance duo The Twelves.

Joel Johnson

Unintentionally Erotic Video: Butterfly Technologies efficient toothpaste tube

Developed by Butterfly Technology in working, patented prototype, this design is claimed to get every last drop of minty wet sand out of your surprisingly sexy toothpaste tube. [via Core77]

Joel Johnson

Sanyo Ultrasonic Bath invites you to experience its spurting endometrial nozzles (1970)

Pink Tentacle collates snippets about the Sanyo Ultrasonic Bath, an egg-shaped prototype appliance shown at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, in which a bather sits inside and is cleaned, massaged, and dried in an "automated 15-minute process." Consider me fully willing to place this in my bathroom should Sanyo ever decide to produce this wet Orkian womb.

Rob Beschizza

Nokia's E75 appears: $580 unlocked, free with a contract

Nokia's E75 is a strangely attractive candybar phone with chunky keys, a sliding QWERTY keyboard and the standard S60 software loadout. It has quad-band GSM with 3G, a 240x320 display, a 3.2 megapixel camera, WiFi, assisted GPS and a microSDHC card slot. There's bluetooth, 30FPS video recording, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It hooks up via MicroUSB.

If you want an illustration of how carrier subsidies have distorted pricing, check out the difference between T-Mobile's edition and the unlocked equivalent in the U.K.: £389.99 vs.free with the contract.

U.S. carriers don't like Nokia much, so it'll be interesting to see how availability pans out here.

Nokie E75 [Expansys via BGR]

John Brownlee

The Isophone: Conference calls meet sensory deprivation

AT&T goes Altered States. Verizon goes pre-cog Minority Report. Sprint goes Pyramidhead. Designed by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, the Isophone allows you to make calls with total sensory deprivation... because listening to your mother complain about her latest bowel complaints is just that interesting.

Cyberpunky Isophone concept [DVICE]

Rob Beschizza

USB hub in a Duplo brick

Miniaturization at work: "Stuffing things inside LEGO bricks" is the new "stuffing things inside of dead retro computers."

As a hand-made item at 123smile's Etsy store, it's not cheap: $50. 123Smile also offers other Lego hacks at similarly unnerving prices--check out these tiny 8GB thumbdrives.

Found via [7gadgets]

Rob Beschizza

Skinny iClone not much good, but may slice cucumbers

Anyone who compares the iPhone and the iPod Touch immediately grasps how even Apple makes painful design compromises. The touch, lacking internal components for WWAN radios and cameras, is much thinner and sleeker as a result. Leave it to this remarkably accurate iClone, from Guangxi Nanning Jiguang Trade Co. of China, to implement a real phone in the smaller chassis.

It's a pretty crummy iClone, unfortunately, and of course lacks the interface, multitouch, third-party Apps and other things that make the iPhone such a good machine. Saving disgrace: there's 32GB of storage.

Product Page [Alibaba via PMP Today]

John Brownlee

Everyone should buy a Skype phone, and Ipevo looks to make a good one

There's my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, but a close third in my heart for most useful gadget is my Phillips Skype phone. I bought it used off of a friend who, for various shady reasons, was rapidly fleeing Berlin, and while the benefit was obvious to me — the ability not to be tethered to my computer when talking to friends or family or colleagues oversea — the sheer convenience and interface satisfaction of making VOIP calls on a real phone has surprised me. I'd recommend one as a must-have accessory for anyone who does a lot of Skypeing, even if you aren't quite sure you really need one.

This Ipevo Skype Phone looks like a good bet if you're willing to take that advice. It has an attractive 1.8-inch LCD with a UI modeled similarly to Nokia's, backlit keys and 802.11b/g WPA/WPA2/WEP support. Just plug it into your router and you've got yourself a Skype landline... and like most Skype Phones, you can also plug in a landline.

This looks like a nice handset for $129.99, and just like regular cordless phones, once you buy one, you'll probably not upgrade it for years.

S0-20 Skype Phone [Ipevo via Crunchgear]

Rob Beschizza

Dell Mini 10 will be yours before March. If you want it.

Dell's Mini 10 netbook comes to the U.S. on February 27th, according to a chap who chatted with a Dellster.

The Mini 10 is a sequel to the popular Mini 9: more screen real estate and the smell of newness are among the upgrades.

Dell Mini 10 Release Date Confirmed! [Paul Synott via Engadget]

Rob Beschizza

Colorful sleeves for the Kindle 2 you don't yet own

$30, from M-Edge. Now that's a green I can approve of. [via]

Rob Beschizza

SII ultracompact electronic dictionary

The SR-A1001M, by SII, has a 4” grayscale display, weighs 145 grams and is about 12 centimeters wide. A pointless item, for most of us, but in its form lurks a future generation of wireless pocket PCs and fat smartphones.

I wonder what the next acronym will be for these things? UMPC and MID are poster children for weak branding efforts.

Ultra compact and Ultra Limited Pocket Size Electronic dictionary from SII [Akihabara News]

John Brownlee

How to install XP on a Sony Vaio P