Rob Beschizza

Ovation 3G stick, small as a thumbdrive

Novatel's latest 3G USB stick gets a theoretical 7.2 Mbps on European HSPA networks. it's less than a centimeter thick, according to the blurb, and will be available this summer.

Rob Beschizza

Top Gear squeezes 70mpg from a VW Rabbit of ancient and evil vintage

Top Gear's ambitious Sipster project, in which an old Golf was customized to get 70mpg, was a success:

With a probably overambitious goal of building a car that can achieve 70 mpg, scoot to 60 mph in less than 7 seconds and cost only $7K to build, Project Sipster was born. Lots of cuts, cussing and sleepless nights later, a Reagan-era Volkswagen Rabbit was transformed from a cute beater into an eco-friendly tire burner; a modern turbodiesel engine and aerodynamic modifications brought the heat to this Cold War relic. Through (too many) trials and (frequent) tribulation, Project Sipster took shape, but could we nail our targets? Find out below with exclusive Project Sipster videos, stories and photography.

Catch up at their project page. [Top Gear]

Joel Johnson

Looks like the Palm Pre will run PalmOS apps, too

Precentral has made a delightful discovery: It looks like the WebOS-powered Palm Pre will have official emulation to run old PalmOS apps.

Joel Johnson

Real-life Super Mario Rube Goldberg Machine

The 22nd Annual Rube Goldberg machine contest saw many fun attempts at comical inefficiency this year, including this Super Mario machine entry from engineers at Penn State. [via PopMech]

Joel Johnson

Louis C.K. and his Leica in Iraq

Comedian Louis C.K. recently went to the Middle East to entertain the troops and brought along his camera:

The gunners reached out into the open air and leveled their guns with a great slot and click sound. They trained them on the ground. I felt my hands tense up. I realized, for the first time, that both my hands were wrapped tightly around my Leica. Oh my god, my Leica! I have the greatest camera in the world in my fucking hands and I'm in the middle of this shit right here.
In that moment, ALL FEAR was gone. I was right where I wanted to be in the whole world. I reached into my pocket, which was difficult with the armor, and took out my light meter. I got readings out the window, inside, the floor under my feet. I did quick averages of the readings in my head. Now all my thoughts were of film. "Okay I'm at about 5.6 outside if I'm at 250 which is a good speed from a moving helicopter. If I want to get stuff outside, I'll squeeze the fstop down to about 8. If I want inside the bird I'll open to 2.8, 4 if I want a bit of both." I set all these functions on the camera and started firing away. The helicopter leaned forward and we tore off across Baghdad.

Rob Beschizza

Please allow 30 days for search results

Source [Ffffound via Giz]

Joel Johnson

Picture frame wraps around wall corner

At $120 it's too rich for my taste, but the "Wrap-Around-the-Corner Frame" is a cute idea that is just a hacksaw and a trip to IKEA away from being yours. [via Freshome]

Joel Johnson

Data Dump: Japanese toilet outputs statistics via RSS

Japanese toilet manufacturer Inax has begun soft launching a toilet in shopping centers that will analyze stool for bacteria counts, blood, fat content, and more, then beam the results to the web with a unique URL for later viewing. If I'm parsing this correctly, you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular toilet, making it possible to see how the neighbors are doing. [Digital World Tokyo via CrunchGear]

Rob Beschizza

Future Engineers

Joel Johnson

SGI sold to Rackable for $25 Million

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, such as the bloodthirsty velociraptor. [Reuters]

Joel Johnson

Herman Miller's swatches

Furniture maker Herman Miller has 1,600 different materials available for its chairs and such. Browse through each on its Materials Program Index. [via Core77]

Brandon Boyer

Recently on Offworld

Recently on Offworld, as we slowly recover from the hangover of GDC, a quick look back at the things you may have missed:

GDC things: 2D Boy and Polytron giving their top 10 ways to market indie games, a fantastic new trailer for Polytron's Fez, Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy coming to the iPhone as his original Katamari Damacy gets revamped for PS3, LucasArts vet Tim Schafer's first point & click adventure in a decade.

Also, streaming video of both the Indie Games Festival Awards and the Game Dev Choice Awards, experimental PC game Achron lets you manipulate time for strategic multiplayer battles, and prolific prodigy Cactus lets you play his method of creating brilliant games in four hours (above).

iPhone things: Hand Circus spin Rolando into a powerhouse franchise with two new sequels due by the end of the year, and we search desperately for an iGameBoy case.

Console and handheld things: Fans of underdog RPG Earthbound/Mother 3 take ownership of the series with an amazing DIY guidebook, a new downloadable app in Japan turns your DS into a portable streaming game music receiver, Introversion publish confidential docs on bringing Darwinia to Xbox 360, and D2 creator Kenji Eno returns to consoles with a jaw-droppingly gorgeous retro-futuristic balancing WiiWare game.

Art, toy, music, and misc. things: preorders open for Mezco's LittleBigPlanet toys, a new series of NES box art for modern day games, a new guide is published for following Pokemon on Twitter, and 6955 remixes the Fez soundtrack live.

Joel Johnson

Apocalypse Then: Carrington Events, giant solar storms that destroy the power grid

New Scientist describes a "Carrington Event", a large blast of plasma from the sun that, after hitting the Earth's atmosphere, blows out the power grid and most of our electronics:

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

Rob Beschizza

Peek disemvoweled for April Fools

And for a moment, I thought they'd really dropped the monthly service fee to $5. Boo!

Pk Prnt [Getpeek]

Joel Johnson

Phone companies adding laptop kill switches to 3G modems

The AP is reporting that Ericsson has developed a 3G modem that can deactivate an entire computer with a remote "kill pill". Why in the fuck would they ever want to do that, you ask? Because wireless carriers are starting to sell laptops (especially netbooks) subsidized like phones, giving them away for free in exchange for a long-term contract.

The carriers are worried that customers might sign up for a contract, then stop paying their monthly service fee but continue to use the laptops. There's already a contract in place that covers this, so I don't see the point of trying to shut down the account remotely.

That said, it looks like these will become standard issue on most laptops soon, subsidized or not. IT departments will be able to use them to remotely nuke stolen laptops. And the modem could still operate while the laptop was off, allowing for low-power email alerts and inbound VOIP calls.

But it'll still be a good idea to know how to disable this. Just in case you don't want to trust the phone company to never accidentally turn off your computer.

Joel Johnson

Honda builts brain-to-robot interface for Asimo

TOKYO, Japan, March 31, 2009 - Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (HRI-JP), a subsidiary of Honda R&D Co., Ltd., Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation have collaboratively developed the world’s first*1 Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) along with newly developed information extraction technology to enable control of a robot by human thought alone.

Joel Johnson

Video: Teenage Engineering and the OP-1 Synthesizer

Music Radar caught Teenage Engineering, makers of the OP-1 portable synthesizer and controller, at the first day of Frankfurt Musikmesse '09. Not a whole lot more information is available, but it pretty much shoots down the bizarre claims some folks were making in the comments that the OP-1 is a hoax or April Fool's prank.

Previously • Teenage Engineer OP-1 synth & controller (sound test)