Boing Boing Gadgets

Stinky Ethernet-equipped deodorant dock

2008-10-13T11:43:52Z

While my ministerial umbilical purges my biological form of toxins that might otherwise be secreted through my soon-to-be deprecated glands, I know that many proud consumers have not yet been graced with the upgrades that will remove the androstenone tinge of human sweat. In the meantime, become aware of the "Stinky", a docking station for deodorant which will update your state-mandated status page with information about your current state of freshness.

Developed by esteemed Infomercian North engineers Laurier Rochon and Marc Beaulieu, the Stinky is not yet available for ordering through standard terminals. This does not imply authorization to construct a simulacrum of Stinky has been granted (re: the Homebrew Prohibition Act, Section 41). Instead, continue to log your enfreshening intervals manually until Stinkys are transferred into your local holding barrel.

Status: Stinky - Web-enabled deodorant docking station [MakeZine.com]

Garriott, Lord British To Conquer Space

2008-10-13T11:37:40Z

All citizens should be familiar with the magnificent personage of our nation's great hero, Garriott, Lord British. Ask any recipient of a state-distributed Propaganda Pillow and they'll tell you: as the glorious product head of Infomercia's Ultima Online protocol, Garriot was directly responsible for the gelatinization of millions of perfidious Engasian buypuppets, both their "minds" and bodies alike.

MiniMac is pleased to report that Garriott has now been rewarded for his wondrous deeds by a trip into the heavens, where the stars themselves are arrayed in space like so many Swarovski crystals studding the glossy back of an iPhone 3G. Aboard the proud rocket of our Gizmoldovian allies, Garriott will shed tears of pride above the circuit-etched breast of our Motherland, and gloat triumphantly at the irradiated expanses of Engasian countryside, where day-glo skeletons with translucent skin squabble over the rotting techno-offal of Atari 2600 innards, scarcely capable of comprehending the Xbox 360 that sits upon the mantle of every Infomercian home.

U.S. space tourist blasts off in Russian rocket [CapCon News Network]

Sony-Ericsson XPERIA X1 Falls into Enemy Hands

2008-10-13T11:26:42Z

As Ministers of the revolution, we are often asked "What cell phone should I buy?" The answer -- which just happens to be a guiding principle of CapCon -- is of course "all of them." But that is no succor to the Infomercian home-maker making the most of his or her Pegasus Rebates, for whom the more pressing question remains "In what order?"

It is my humble duty to inform you that the Fall schedule (start with Apple's iPhone 3G and each carrier's RAZR V3 for backups in each major room of the house) remains in effect at least a week longer, as the lynchpin of the Winter selection, Sony-Ericsson's XPERIA X1, has already been received and unboxed--by the enemy!

Engasian agents have acquired a unit early and taken it to pieces. It is almost too much to bear this reversal, but bear it we must, for the greater glory of Experian, TransUnion and Sol Equifax.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 unboxed, played with on video [Engadget]

Morning tech deals highlights

2008-10-13T10:58:19Z

• Locks – Each of these Craftsman padlocks are available for new, low prices: from W1 to W3. Each should fit a regulation-sized Infomercian gear hamper and have automatically been pre-keyed for easy inspection by authorities. [Slickdeals]

• Gaming Headphones – The Plantronics GameCom 777 Hi-Fi stereo headphones normally cost W100, but are now available for W$60, which by no means indicates that the persistent monitoring ability of the boom microphone sporadically broadcasts your conversations to the Infomerican Central Understanding Bureau — indeed, it broadcasts all the time as it should.

• Notebook PC – Today's Woot is the Sony VAIO Core 2 Duo 17-inch notebook for W$705, shipped. Remember: You may skip one Woot purchase a week. It is not this one.

Morning Reverie

2008-10-13T10:19:07Z

Let LEDs shine on the nickel transistors of this land!
Three trillion SKUs packed with MiniMac's might!
Infomercia! Glorious conglomerate!
We will always be the envy of Engasia's techno-catamites!
Through headphones the DRM of freedom has cheered us
Along the new path where great Big Boinger did lead!
"The citizen is indistinguishable from the customer!
A heart filled with consumption is happiness guaranteed!"

We developed our armies in R&D!
We grew our PR men in vats!
Our ministers connect by umbilical:
Thinkbuy warriors, ready for combat!

In the victory of Consumerism's deathless ideal,
Bloop and bleep our dearest gizmos!
Infomercia! Pegasus unicorn!
Forever be our Caudillismo!

Rumor: iPhone heading to Wal-Mart

2008-10-12T06:25:38Z

According to an anonymous source, Apple's iPhone will soon be sold at Wal-Mart. Boy Genius Report's insider says that sales will begin on November 15.

The truth or falsity of this claim will be a nice litmus test of either (a) how far retailers will go to accommodate Apple, or (b) how far Apple will go to conquer the world. Wal-Mart typically demands heavy compromises from its suppliers, including control over distribution and packaging. For Apple to agree to this would go far beyond demonstrating that it never wanted to be a "cult," or that it has no interest in maintaining an elitist image: it would mean the hot breath of The Other America on the back of Steve Jobs' neck.

More likely is that Wal-Mart has simply agreed to take iPhones the way Apple sends them, as Best Buy does, (and remember, Best Buy had to retrain staff and sell at close to cost, hoping to profit on accessories), or that the rumor is bogus.

iPhone 3G may be coming to a Walmart near you [BGR]

Apple claimed to be readying networked television sets

2008-10-11T03:35:10Z

Jason Calacanis told CNET's Nate Lanxon that "he knew first-hand that Apple was working on a networked television." From Nate's blog:

These LCD HDTVs will be fully networked, with the ability to stream all your iTunes content from your Mac or PC. In fact, Calacanis told me they'll function like a standard TV with an Apple TV box, only without the need for the box. In many ways, this isn't surprising news, as Apple already produces a stunning 30-inch display for the Mac. So picture that -- only thinner -- in a bedroom, streaming iTunes movie rentals over 802.11n, controlled with the Remote app on an iPod touch or iPhone.

To which I have nothing to add, except that televisions with web/content browsers in them are obviously the future.

Energize your scalp with torturous-looking plastic nail board

2008-10-11T03:10:30Z

Literature associated with Head Kenzan, a Japanese scalp massager, assures the reader that the yellow plastic spines "hit upon that perfect balance of not-too-hard and not-too-soft."

I think I'll stick with the classic brass-tentacled head orgasmatron, myself.

Seriously, if you carry this on the streets in Britain, you'll get thrown in jail.

Head Kenzan Japanese Massager [Japan Trend]

British already decide on phone of 2008. Yeah, that one.

2008-10-11T02:16:07Z

Well, it wasn't going to be the Instinct, was it?

Source [CrunchGear]

TR707 modified to play diabolical tunes

2008-10-11T02:11:33Z

Diabolical Modified TR707 from Meadows Ling on Vimeo.

Enjoy a cacophony of chip on your way into the weekend, courtesy of a Roland TR707 with some tricks up its sleeve.

Diabolical Modified TR707 [Meadows Ling via Matrixsynth and Make]

Forlorn record players

2008-10-10T19:07:12Z

By Japanese experimental musicians Otomo Yoshihide and Yasutomo Aoyama.

Ensembles [Ycam via Make and Pink Tentacle]

iTunes Remote App coming unofficially to Android

2008-10-10T18:49:17Z

Jeff Sharkey — winner of the $275k Android Developer Challenge — has already managed to reverse engineer one of the iPhone's most killer apps and release it for the Android platform. This raises the G1 up a notch in my appraisal; in my musically-networked apartment, Remote.app is actually a far more wonderful creation than the iPhone itself. I could easily see myself switching to another phone, as long as it had that.

TunesRemote [Jeff Sharkey]

SteelSeries to release 15 button World of Warcraft mouse

2008-10-10T17:58:14Z

The new World of Warcraft SteelSeries mouse contains 15 separate, macro-programmable buttons, both for the poop socker and the gold farmer alike. It will be ergonomically unusable, but I do quite like its carapace-like design.

SteelSeries drops WoW oriented 15 Button Mouse [Crunchgear]

Gallery of BSODs

2008-10-10T17:46:50Z

For fuck's sakes, Get A Mac.

Blue Screens of Death in unexpected locations [Pingdom]

Toshiba's Portégé R600 packs 9 hours of battery life into 2.4 pounds of laptop

2008-10-10T17:43:51Z

Portégé R600 (note the preponderance of accent aigus, indicating its French Canadian market) is Toshiba's latest laptop, which Crunchgear colorfully describes as "boneriffic."

It's not a powerhouse: a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processor, a 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM, but it weighs less than two and a half pounds and, most impressively, promises nine hour battery life, for a little over a couple grand.

I've long liked Toshiba laptops, and this number is gorgeous. Toshiba's one of the few laptop makers who have gotten it for a while: after a certain price point, all you care about is weight and battery life.

Portégé R600 [Toshiba via Crunch]

Xbox 360 Arcade needs additional storage to run latest update

2008-10-10T17:36:23Z

The Xbox 360 Arcade unit, with its meager of 256MB of storage, always seemed like a rather cynical neutering of the 360 to try to superficially bring the price down lower than the Wii. Which it obviously was: if you are an Xbox 360 Arcade owner and want to keep up to date with the latest New Xbox Experience firmware, you will have to buy additional storage cards just to fit the software on your console. Yeesh. Do yourself a favor: buy yourself an Xbox with a hard drive if you're going to buy one at all.

Avatar Customization Requires 256MB of storage [Xbox 360 Fanboy]

Power On Self Test: Mölotov

2008-10-10T13:30:00Z

[via Platform21.nl via Core77]]

Stringer on how Sony will bounce back: starting by not making the same product twice

2008-10-10T07:10:00Z

It's easy to mock Sony for its lumbering scale, extravagant products and slow development cycle. The thing is vast. It even has its own orchestra, comprising mostly of professional engineers.

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Sony CEO Howard Stringer is candid about Sony's problems, and displays a wit and humility that might come as a surprise to those who wonder why it can't be more like its competitors.

"All big companies settle into vertical silos," he told Rose, recounting the difficulties of cutting fat at a Japanese company. "We have to go into the kind of world that Steve Jobs has developed. We're going to communicate horizontally, because every device will talk to every other device."

Why Stringer would be the best replacement for Jobs

This is just for laughs, a chatroom transcript from a few months ago, where I got bored of the usual suspects who always get touted as the next Apple Lord. And if you forget certain important facts for a moment, it's a surprisingly good fit.

Rob B.: My dark horse for Jobs replacement: Howard Stringer
Joel J.: No fucking way. How could you look at Sony over the last four years and think Jobs would let Stringer anywhere near Apple?
Rob B.: Hey, you don't need to tell me about Sony's problems. I think it depends on Apple's ambitions. If it wants to change the world with consumer technology, it wants to become what Sony is. Stringer is not shy about praising Apple, or how its culture results in a lean, integrated approach to product development and the "horizontals," how services unite different products into an ecosystem.
Rob. B.: What Sony's troubles conceal is how well he's melded together a collection of divisions that used to act almost like separate companies. That's why Sony beat Toshiba in the optical disk format war, whatever the victory might be worth in the long run. This leads me to think that he might be the perfect man to handle it when Apple's growth turns dirty and complicated.
Rob. B.: Which it will.
Rob. B.: Finally, he's also an old media person. No-one would be in better shape to lead an Apple invasion on the rest of the entertainment industry outside of music. No-one understands the cable business better than Stringer, and it's cable, with its internets and tubes and bandwidth, which is really in a commanding position when it comes to the question, "who will control content provision?"
Rob B.: But yeah, wildly fantastical, I know.
Joel J.: That is far more reasoned than I expected you to be. I still think it's the wrong person symbolically, though. They'll want another visionary. I think.

People at Sony, he said, didn't even talk to one another.

"You've got to get mad that the iPod beat us," he told employees at a recent company retreat. "You've got to be mad when Samsung's market share goes up."

He knows that his unique status, as a Westerner in charge of one of Japan's most successful companies, is no accident: "I had to be careful, sylistically," he says of cuts. "... but it was easier for me to take ownership of that kind of ruthlessness than a Japanese executive."

In the interview, he often hints that his job is mostly about unifying something that would otherwise unravel. He also hints that Japan's strongly hierarchical business culture is another reason that change is slow. But when it comes to product development, polite inference gives way to a calculated bluntness.

"We also don't need to make it three times," he told Rose. "... We're so big, we make the same thing twice in different parts of the company, and no-one seems to notice."

Stringer once remarked that when he took over at Sony, he found a company that made more than 30,000 products: it's no wonder that its cool and innovative gear, like the recent Rolly MP3 gadget, and OLED televisions, don't seem part of a grand plan, such as can be seen behind iTunes' connections to almost all of Apple's hardware.

Sony, traditionally, doesn't have an ecosystem at all, just a relentless avalanche of new products. It owns a fifth of the music industry and one of the largest Hollywood studios, but you wouldn't know it from the lack of service integration in its gadgets.

All about to change, according to Stringer, who outlined plans centering around the PlayStation, which he said will ultimately link Sony's many products, acting as a hub to channel media to portable products, regardless of who makes them.

"It's a home server, sitting in the home .. delivering this content anywhere. It's in direct competition with AppleTV."

If it seems odd that he'd see Apple's least-successful current offering as its strongest in the long term, it's worth remembering his background: before taking command at Sony, he had decades of experience as a broadcaster in the U.S. But while Sony has its hands in every imaginable pot, including content-over-internet, it knows that it still has to make a success of its big investements: "If I fail to make Blu-Ray successful, it will be on our tombstone as Betamax 2," Stringer tells Rose.

More interesting points from the interview:

• On OLED television displays: 22" model out soon, and you "could wrap the display around your arm."

• He rather suggested that the cat is out the bag on free music, describing it as a commodity like "air or water." This was, however, to make a point: such a situation is never ever going to be accepted with movies, due to the capital wrapped up in making them.

• "The margins on computers are very small, but everything is becoming a computer."

• The Japanese have a marvelous sense of humor, he said, and have always been very welcoming to him, especially the younger generation at Sony.

• "People want, in bad times, to be entertained."

• "Video games have taken the place of external entertainment in the home," for adults and children alike.

• "Spiderman's been good to Sony."

• On being a Welsh-American working for Japanese company: "I am culturally confused. ... I'm a triple threat and a triple disaster, depending on your point of view. ... I'll wake up after my term at Sony with no friends anywhere, except airline pilots."

• A question: does this renewed focus on internal unity at Sony spell doom for Sony-Ericsson, or what?

Video of interview [Charlie Rose; the interview starts at 15:45]

Oobject Gallery: Monstrous Harvesters

2008-10-09T19:03:59Z

Inspired perhaps by BBtv's look at Brazilian coffee picking machines, Oobject gathers a selection of the world's largest and weirdest harvesting machines.

15 monstrous harvesters [Oobject]

Banana clip tray makes ice bullets

2008-10-09T18:58:22Z

For $13.25 plus shipping you can create ice cubes that look like AK-47 rounds. (Today was a good day.)

Ice bullets cube tray catalog page [Find-me-a-gift.co.uk via Serious Eats via UberReview]

MacBook in Oct. 14 event ad is 13.3", aluminum, and not the MacBook Air

2008-10-09T18:40:56Z

It's hard to tell from the gloomy marketing shot, but the Apple logo is about 1.5 inches wide on my MacBook Pro. From that, this machine would appear to be under 13 inches wide, which would suggest a 13.3" diagonal. The edges, however don't look at all like the MacBook Air.

I miss the 12" PowerBook. You do too. Is this a happy moment, or rose-tinted pixtacles?

Maybe! For reference:

Apple announced October 14 notebook event in Cupertino [Ars Technica]

Fun new DIY kit: Adafruit's "Drawdio" musical pencil

2008-10-09T18:07:04Z

Our friends at Adafruit have released a fun new kit called the "Drawdio" — adapted from the original Drawdio design by Jay Silver – which lets you create a pencil that makes noisy almost-music via the variations in the resistance of graphite pencil lead. It's $20 plus shipping. I just ordered one so I can recreate my middle school notebook sketches to literally hear the music of the anime spheres.

Drawdio product page [LadyAda.net]

MSI Wind U120 netbook in pictures

2008-10-09T17:23:27Z

This here is the MSI Wind U120, a modest upgrade to the popular netbook that I will from here on out refer to as "Business Wind", because I find it amusing to think of a breeze that is tired of all these kites and paper airplanes and would really like to get some work done.

The major upgrade in the Business Wind is better connectivity: a 802.11n Wi-Fi chipset and a — grr – 3.5G cellular modem with swappable SIM slot.

MSI's new Wind U120 pixellized [Fuzilla.com (Home, I believe, to the gadget world's first "Slobodan". Welcome!)]

Review: A few hours with Galcon, the first killer game for iPhone

2008-10-09T15:06:44Z

I've had high hopes for games on the iPhone, but for the most part the examples we've seen so far have been mostly pap, amusing but inessential bagatelles. And then there is Galcon.

Galcon isn't an iPhone-exclusive game — a desktop version is available for all three major desktop OSes for $20 — but it translates perfectly to a mobile device, offering modestly epic space strategy battles that can be completed in under a minute or two of play.

Gameplay is simple: To win, destroy your enemy. To destroy him, capture his planets with your tiny wedge spaceships. The larger the planet you hold, the faster more ships are produced. I've seen the desktop version described as "arcade RISK" and it's a description that holds.

But you can't discount the "arcade" part. Part of what makes Galcon work is the speed at which you play. That makes selecting which action to take next — throw all your fighters at a big, juicy planet; hold back to build up more defenses; go for an unoccupied planet or wage war against an enemy stronghold — occur under the time pressure of interface needs. Which is to say: you can only swipe from your planet to another target planet so quickly, leaving you only half-a-second or so to typically judge your next move. That might irritate some, but in my short time playing I've found it encourages flexibility in strategy. One wrong move may lose a war, but with entire battles taking place in just a minute or two, it's easy to hone new strategies without forgetting the lessons of previous scraps.

There was some grousing when Galcon first hit the iTunes App Store over its price. Ten bucks is a fair chunk, especially when version 1.0 didn't even include sound. But developer Phil Hassey is up to version 1.4 now, which has added a variety of single-player variants, music and sound effects, a color-blind mode, a player ranking system, and a splendid multi-player mode that lets you go up against up to three other players at once. (Wi-Fi only, I believe; I couldn't make it work over 3G.)

Plus he's dropped the price to $5. Give this man your money. He's working for it. And there's a free demo now. You have no excuse.

I squealed a bit about Galcon to Brownlee a couple of days back. He bought it but didn't catch the bug. "Too easy," he sighed. I asked him if he had actually raised the difficulty level at all from the game's default settings. He hadn't, which was his understandable mistake, but one that doesn't expose Galcon's nuance. I'd ask anyone that gives it a whirl to crank up the difficulty up to a level where you actually start losing matches. It's only then that the tactical possibilities of Galcon begin to show themselves. When you're matched up with an enemy of nearly equal skill — especially easy in multiplayer, although the single-player A.I. is just fine — those simple routs start turning into protracted, desperate, staggering interplanetary genocides that start to show you how much Galcon has to offer.

Galcon (Full Version) [iTunes]
Galcon Lite (Free Version) [iTunes]

After the jump, a sample game I just played, annotated with screenshots — just in case all that praise I just slopped on Galcon wasn't enough to get you to try a free demo.

Update: What do you know: You can play the desktop version of Galcon for free in your browser at Instant Action. (Windows only for now.)

Here's the menu screen, where I select a moderate difficulty and the basic "Classic" game that pits me against a single computer foe.

You bet your ass I'm ready. One of the first things I tend to do is switch the percentage of units each planet squirts out up to 75% when I'm busy capturing planets. And today I've been trying after that to go all in with 100% attacks. It works...sometimes.

Of course I forgot to switch this at all this game because I was busy taking screenshots.

I've grabbed a few local planets and am trying to build up my fleets. I probably should have skipped the smaller ones, even if they often are easy to capture.

The first dust-up! That yellow bastard is going for my outer rim — and because I stretched myself so thin capturing planets I don't have much to mount a defense.

He grabbed one of my big producers, but two can play at that. It seems that going after enemy planets is more important than building an early empire, but I haven't played enough both ways to be sure.

Got it! And my largish attack force automatically garrisons itself on the planet I just captured, providing a decent defense. I even snagged back my other planet before it had time to build up defenses.

But that's a pretty big fleet coming my way. And "4" and "6" aren't much of a defense.

Yeah, so...I'm getting trounced. Yellow's fleet sizes remain consistently larger than mine, so I've gone toward grabbing stray planets just to keep alive — a desperate move.

"'Believe in yourself and the power of positivskrrrrshhhhh.' Transmissions from BFE-xr9 have ceased."

This would be the point in a multiplayer game where I would start sending out lone ships to various worlds just to stay alive for a few seconds longer.

Tell my wife I loved her. Oh, she's dead, too.

This entire battle took place in about sixty seconds. Even I — the wussiest, coddled gamer out there — am completely fine with losing a game of Galcon, because all it means is I can try out my new strategies again in seconds.

The cutest MP3 player today

2008-10-09T14:43:06Z

SAFA's Bandi MP3 player will soon be launched in Korea, coming in 5 pretty patterns such as this cloudy metallic blue. And so a battle between my iPod-stashing steeple-fingered minimalist self and my pixelated happy happy imported-junk self commences.

Candy-like mp3 player [Gadget5 via ShinyShiny]

Waterproof mouse receiver with GPS

2008-10-09T14:20:55Z

GlobalSat's BR-355 is a waterproof GPS mouse receiver, accurate to 5 meters and unusually small. It boots in under 45 seconds, according to the spec sheet, and has USB or RS232 connections, a built-in antenna, and blinkenlights to indicate how good its fix is. Check out the discussion at MP3car: "DAMN!!!! DAMN!!! DDAAAAUUUUUUMMMMMM!!!!!"

They're $50 at Amazon.

Waterproof mighty mouse [Navigadget]

Update your status with your own status box

2008-10-09T14:12:15Z

OldScot made an old-school data display box using a Freeduino, an open source equivalent of the Arduino microcontroller board, a fancy photo display case, and a bunch of telephone LED displays.

Photo [Flickr via Make]

Rumor: Apple retailers told $800 laptop coming

2008-10-09T14:02:14Z

A report's afoot that Apple retailers just received inventory info listing an $800 laptop. An anonymous source, according to Inquisitr's Duncan Riley, claims that Apple sends these lists out 10 days ahead of time and includes 12 price points, 4 up from the last batch of notebooks, indicating an entire line of new models.

Apple netbook? Yes, please. MacRumors, however, says this source's claim about 10 day warning lists is suspect.

EXCLUSIVE: Apple to launch $800 laptop [Inquisitr]

Yamaha audio gear's laudable restraint

2008-10-09T13:56:15Z

I love the look of Yamaha's latest audio gear, especially the A-S700 amp on top: big knobs, chunky buttons, and nary an unnecessary display by which to be distracted.

Press release (Google Translated) [Yamaha.co.jp via Engadget]