I know it's only filling up bins in my shop and taking money I could be pouring into more productive hobbies, like drinking and shooting guns. But what if the completion of some future project, some really crucial bit of hijinks, hinges entirely on my having a switch designed to discharge massive capacitors? Then what what, huh?

Am I supposed to just assume my local Radio Shack will have my back? Not likely.

I was doing better, I really was, and then I visited the DeAnza flea market in Cupertino last year, and it all fell apart again. I don't know, maybe I'm beyond help. Check the photo gallery for some electronics-nerd eye candy, the detritus of my demon.

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Truth be told, seeing an image of the Sinclair Sovereign on Boing Boing Gadgets this morning sparked a wave of nostalgia among those of us here who are old enough to remember the nutty little company. For those of you who are unfamiliar, allow me get you up to speed.

Clive Sinclair is one of those obsessive tinkerers that has his hand in various and seemingly unrelated kinds of gadgetry. Kind of like a predecessor of the James Dyson types we hear a lot about today. As mentioned earlier, Sinclair developed the first pocket calculators starting with the Executive model in 1972, but he also single-handedly launched the personal computer industry in England with his ZX Spectrum ten years later. The Spectrum ran on a 3.5 MHz Zilog Z80A CPU, with 16K-49KB of RAM and eye popping 256×192 resolution. Not powerful by any stretch of the imagination, but it was affordable and easy to operate which made it attractive to a mass audience. Eventually, it earned Sinclair a fortune and a knighthood from the Queen for his service to British industry.

Sinclair's obsession with making gadgets smaller extended to several other product categories including mini TVs like the MTV-1, radios and, most recently, electric vehicles like the underwater SeaScooter for divers and the ill-fated cross between a Segway and a scooter that was the C5.

Perhaps the only thing more interesting than his inventions is Clive Sinclair the man. Not surprisingly, he is a brilliant mathematician who has spent part of his later years using this skill to become a champion poker player. Sinclair is also a member of the British chapter of Mensa, serving as chairman of directors for the organization from 1980 to 1997. His Wikipedia article even claims that he doesn't use the internet despite being a major figure in the history of computing. I suppose that means he probably wont read this, but I still want to acknowledge him and his [ongoing] work.

The 8 bit Spectrum was released in 1982 and was the British equivalent of the C64. It spawned hardware and software, like the Commodore, but looks a hell of a lot better.
This pocketable TV didn't actually fit in pockets, but was an insane attempt to do what was impractical at the time with the day's modern tech. Took 10 years to develop and the screen was 2 inches big. A child of the 70s. [Giz]
Sinclair's first calculator—and one of the world's first pocket sized models—is almost as gorgeous as the famous Dieter Ram's designed Braun now mimed in the iPhone UI. The model had a fatal flaw which caused it to fuse in the on position. Oops. [Sinclair Planet]
The C5, much like the Segway, was meant to revolutionize the way we transport ourselves in meatspace. It bombed, being little more than an electric tricycle. [Planet Sinclair]
The last product released by Sinclair is a bicycle that folds up more compactly than even other folding bikes. Weighs under 15 pounds and folds up in seconds. [a-bike]

The products are all packaged in "frustration free" packaging, and include HDMI cables, Ethernet cords, and blank DVDs, to name a few.

This has to irk the consumer electronics companies that currently sell marked up cables and other items in Amazon's virtual marketplace already, but Paul Ryder, Amazon's vice president for consumer electronics and wireless, said all they'll need is a little re-education.

"I'm sure some vendors of cables and blank media are going to ask us, ‘What just happened?' We'll educate them that we saw value available to the customer in the market, and with our relationship with the vendor, we wanted to give that value to customers," he said over at the New York Times Bits blog. [Amazon via Bits]

A source in the know informs us that no matter how exactly things move forward from here (it's still murky as to the logistical details from a store level over the next few days), any sales will be gone with all prices moving back to MSRP, or well over market price in most cases. Oh, and watch those extended warranties, too. [MSNBC]

We study single-parameter quantized charge pumping via a semiconductor quantum dot in high magnetic fields. The quantum dot is defined between two top gates in an AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure. Application of an oscillating voltage to one of the gates leads to pumped current plateaus in the gate characteristic, corresponding to controlled transfer of integer multiples of electrons per cycle. In a perpendicular-to-plane magnetic field the plateaus become more pronounced indicating an improved current quantization. Current quantization is sustained up to magnetic fields where full spin polarization of the device can be expected.

See what I mean? Here's the translation: By using the electrons spin, you can transport more information faster and using less energy than with normal chips, which just push electrons. The invention could lead to the development of "spintronics", which some people postulate as the future of information technology.

Hmm. OK, translation 2: Electron spins. Faster computers. Less power. Cool kickassery. [AIP via Nanowerk]

These deals include free shipping on purchases of $24 and up from Circuit City, two day shipping on purchases $40 or more from EB Games and GameStop, select electronics $50 or more at Target, select items $49 or more at Toys R Us, and free two day shipping on all Inspiron/Studio desktops and laptops, XPS, and Mini orders from Dell. Like I mentioned, you had better hurry. Many of these deals expire today. [Freeshippingday via Lifehacker]

In a bankruptcy court filing, Samsung said it believes "that Circuit City Stores was insolvent at the time it received the goods," and has requested twice that it return $74 million worth of merch shipped between Sept. 21 and Nov. 4. Even if Circuit does pay up or return this set of goods, if it were dealing with mob bosses instead of corporations, it'd still probably get its legs broken—Bloomberg reported it actually owed Sammy over $116 million all told, plus $119 million to HP. So that $1.1 billion loan it just got probably won't go very far after tiding over operating expenses.

Sony Electronics prez Stan Glasgow's gloomy observation that no one in the industry has come out of a Chapter 11 alive is looking more and more true everyday.

Update: As CE Pro explains, these filings are typical with bankruptcy cases, to make sure that vendors are paid money they were owed before the bankruptcy filing, since court approval is needed. So, in one sense, this isn't a huge deal and is fairly typical, but the flip side is that we can expect a few more these from anyone else Circuit City owes. [Home Media Magazine]

You probably only read Consumer Reports if a) you are at your grandparents house or b) you are a grandparent yourself. But that's too bad, because tucked quietly away in the NYC suburb of Yonkers lies one of the biggest and best electronics testing labs money can buy. And what goes on here at Consumer Reports main test facility probably puts most other tech pubs to shame.

We got a chance to look at all of the top dollar gear used to put everything found in CR's electronics pages in a complete vacuum of testing, basically removing every possible outside variable to test the pure hardware performance. That means anechoic chambers built on their own foundation (at a cost of $2.5 million in 1980) for total sound isolation; industrial-quality cell tower base station generators inside fully RF-shielded rooms that can crank out every possible mobile phone frequency at any strength; a "head and torso simulator" named Pedro, able to be calibrated down to the millimeter for testing every aspect of cellphone call quality possible, and a nameless human finger simulator composed of, well, meat (in action below as well). See our captioned gallery for a closer look:

Unfortunately, what makes CR so exemplary as a reliable testing lab also contribute to its fate to be found mostly on grandmother's end table next to the bowl of fossilized peppermints. As a non-profit organization, CR doesn't sell any advertising to anyone, anywhere, nor do they accept any review units or advance loaners from the company—everything they test, from a new BMW to an electric toothbrush, they buy.

While that means employees get pretty sick re-sale discounts on new cars every year, it also means CR is fighting an eternally uphill battle vs. the other tech pubs that don't keep such high standards, and that CR must keep all of its online content walled within a pay site for subscribers only. The subscribers it has are among the most loyal of any magazine, but the vast majority of them are older.

(The aforementioned human finger simulator gets put to the test on a mower that CR's resident high-RPM blade expert refers to as "the most dangerous thing i've ever tested." - video edited by BBG)

And due to the natural constraints of a magazine with no ads, the mountains of test data gathered for any particular product end up truncated and distilled into CR's famous comparative charts, where their scores are rendered in linearly receding bars and crimson doughnut dots. CR's benchmarks are designed to place all new products on a relative continuum, rating them "fair" to "excellent" in comparison to how products over the last several years have fared with the same rigorously standardized tests. But a problem there, obviously, is that often it looks like CR loves just about everything—this year's television are naturally going to present marked improvements over what's been available over the last few years, which tends to stretch the data toward the good end. Kind of like how you have to search forever find a review on CNET with a score of less than 7.0.

(Inside the soundproof womb of the anechoic chamber - video edited by BBG).

Such are the dilemmas of serious hardware testing that makes any type of claims towards ultimate authoritativeness. But it's also the reason why the old bound volumes of Consumer Reports are the most well-worn volumes in the periodicals room of the public library where I used to work. The data is there, and it's rock solid. Taking a tour of their labs and meeting the engineers that do the work, it's immediately apparent that what goes on in Yonkers is among the more vigorous and pure analysis of technology being done by anyone, anywhere.

After all, don't you just have to trust folks who keep this poster hanging above their main laptop test bench?

[Consumer Reports, video courtesy Consumer Reports, edited by the good gentlemen of Boing Boing Gadgets - see them for more]

The process basically involved converting a photograph into a grayscale image and thence to a depth-map g-code image, compatible with Lumenlab's open-source CNC mill. One suitably flatish and carefully positioned pumpkin, 20 minutes of drilling action later, a little air-spraying to push out the milled pumpkin pulp and voila: geek-o-lanterns.

Much more likely to put the wind up visiting kids than naff old triangular eyes. [Lumenlab via Hackaday]

The team's developed the system to the point where 100 centimeter-scale machines can operate together in a "posse", moving an obstacle when one 'bot finds its path blocked, for example. And they've got two devices designed and made already: the tiny one in the image that's just three millimeters across, moves by vibration (like a bristlebot) and has 8k of OS and 2k of RAM aboard; and larger machines dubbed Jasmines that have tiny wheels.

"We now know there is water and dust so all they would need is some sort of glue to start building structures, such as homes for human scientists" says one team member, predicting that a habitat could be constructed ahead of the arrival of human explorers, thus taking some of the complexity out of manned Martian missions.

Next step is apparently to mass produce the tiny machines, using a fold-out PCB technique that's akin to origami. Then it's off to terraform Mars. OK, there's a huge bunch more research to do yet, but this is a promising and slightly creepy (in a "what if a swarm of insectoid robots go rogue?" kind of way) start. [ScienceDaily via IO9]

It's got selectable Princess, Halloween and Pirate modes, touch panel control and web connectivity (he's clearly hoping the girls'll be in finance: one touch panel reports on how his stocks are doing... badly it seems). Awesomeness all 'round.

There's an Instructable so you can try to follow in his footsteps, though since it's sophisticated stuff I wouldn't let your kids know what you're up to until you're well on the road to making it all work. That way you'll avoid treading the yellow brick road to disappointment city if it all goes horribly wrong. [Instructables via Makezine]