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Me Being Run Over by a Mars Rover Prototype

Motorcycle crashes aside, here’s another case of Man/Machine collision: The JPL designed NASA Mars Rover climbing over a viscous, blubbery, greasy surface known as My Back. The JPL lady said this thing only weighs 10-pounds, but it kind of felt heavier. The final Mars rover has six wheels, but the first prototype had eight as…

Entertainment Cabinet With Ventilation Slots Cools Your Junk Without Fans

Even this Avion 8529 entertainment center with built-in ventilation slots wouldn’t have saved Ashcraft’s Xbox 360 from red ringing, but it could possibly work for you. It looks like a standard wooden entertainment center from the front, but can still keep adequate air going even with the doors closed thanks to the flow-through ventilation slots…

Cellphone Disco Boogies Into NextFest

This is the Cell Phone Disco by Informationlab at NextFest ’07, it’s basically a large wall covered in LED’s. These LED’s only turn on when in the presence of the same electromagnetic interference (EMI) that comes from a cellphone. So when you use your cellphone in the presence of the Disco you can “see” the…

$100 OLPC Laptop Gets Another Price Hike

The $100 laptop—which was already up to a hefty $175, has gotten yet another price bump to $188. A spokesman says they’re committed to keeping the price from rising above $190, and probably below $200 if at all possible. It’s very strange that the price keeps rising, seeing as it’s been, what, two years since…

Jeff Han Talks Multitouch, iPhones, and Lame Minority Report Jokes

Click to view Bumping into Jeff Han, a man highly obsessed with touchscreens, was a highlight of my Nextfest fly through. He was showing off Perceptive Pixel’s 16 foot long multitouch system and I got a chance to ask him about the UI, what he thinks of and the iPhone and other systems, and how…

Teabag: The Radio

We’re not sure what was wrong with the traditional way of using a radio by twisting knobs, but this teabag radio seems to know something we don’t. Duck Young Kong (no relation to King, Donkey or Hong), has designed this Tea-Time radio, which turns on by pulling out the antenna/teabag, and changes stations by twisting…

Pantech Duo Dual-Slider Coming to AT&T

Do you want a dual-sliding phone like the Helio Ocean, but don’t want to sign up with Helio and prefer Windows Mobile to Helio’s great OS? Do you also want to sign up with AT&T? Uh… OK. Good news for you: AT&T is getting the Pantech Duo (i.e. the Pantech C180), a sleek-looking dual-slider that…

Get Your Mug on the Moon With the Lunar Legacy Program

In addition to the Robotic Moon Race that X Prize announced yesterday, they are also going to start the Lunar Legacy Program. The program will allow regular geeks like you and me to upload a 1MB image and a quick note that will then be copied onto a 17GB DVD and placed on one of…

AT&T Tilt Gets Further Specs, Price, Launch Frame

The AT&T Tilt (also known as HTC Kaiser or AT&T 8925) has further firmed up for a September launch by way of a few leaked details from AT&T. The phone will be $349 with a two-year voice and data plan, push-to-talk, Wi-Fi, 2.8-inch tilting screen, push email, Microsoft Office for WM6, as well as AT&T…

Space Travel To Be Commonplace (1957)

The March 21, 1957 Corpus Christi Times (Corpus Christi, TX) ran a short blurb titled, “Rickenbacker Says Space Travel To Be ‘Commonplace.'” Interplanetary travel will become “commonplace” in the next 50 years, World War I ace Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker predicts. “In fact,” he told an audience of Rotarians yesterday, “space ships in the year 2007…

iPhone and T-Mobile Germany Land Deal For iPhones in Deutschland

Reuters has confirmed with an insider that Apple and Deutsche Telekom have reached an agreement to sell the iPhone in Germany. The price will (supposedly) be 399 euros ($554), which is slightly more than the $399 Apple’s selling the phone here in the US. Whether this price premium is because the phone will be a…

SiCortex Supercomputer Can be Powered by Bicycles

Here’s a common predicament: You’ve got a supercomputer handy and you have some complex mathematical equations you need crunched. The problem is, there’s no power source available! That’s what you get for setting up your supercomputer in the desert, you idiot. Well, that won’t be a problem much longer. That’s because SiCortex has developed a…

American Express $200 iPhone Price Rebates Coming In

The $200-ish American Express Price Protection for iPhones we told you about a week ago is starting to roll in for a couple readers. American Express is handling this on a case-by-case basis (at least, that’s what they’ve been telling customers), but some people are getting their money back. Couple that with the $100 from…

Buy a Gutted 747 and Do Whatever You Want With It

If you want to have the most unique home on your block, you can’t do much better than living in a gutted 747. The problem is, they’re really expensive, what with all that equipment and those engines. Well, good news! Now you can buy a gutted 747, free of cockpit equipment, engines, and pretty much…

Gold Flake Chopsticks Make Your Yaki Udon Glittery, Wasteful

These fancy-pants chopsticks come with gold flakes between them, so when you break them open gold sprinkles all over your meal. Well, it’s not all gold… it’s 94.4% gold, 4.9% silver, and 0.6% copper. But hey, that’s mostly gold! And while eating gold won’t give you any nutritional benefits, for the relatively reasonable price of…

The Last Samurai Bot Would Eat Tom Cruise’s Children

Click to view Here’s a Japanese robot named Kiyomori designed to show off fully articulating knees that can bend and expand like human knees. Combined with the articulating pelvis that has 2 degrees of movement, it walks, they claim naturally. I’m not so impressed with its gait, which has been documented before, but note Kiyomori’s…

Nokia’s Chinese Mooncakes

In celebration of the Chinese mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival), Nokia’s sanctioned moon cakes in the shape of their phones. Not only are these low-end Nokias delicious, they probably have much longer battery life, better sunlight visibility and honestly, a bigger feature set as well. If you know where to buy these, let us know!…

Windows XP and Vista Self Updates? Calm Down, It’s Not So Bad

Windows XP and Vista users in the last few weeks have discovered that Windows Update, the software that automatically checks and installs new updates from Microsoft, was updating files on their machines even when they set the update to “manual”. This seems pretty fishy at first, but it should really make no difference to the…

New iPods Don’t Work With Linux, Third Party Apps

One of the new “features” in the latest line of iPods—classic, touch and nano—is a “cryptographic checksum” in the song database that won’t let you sync with any application besides iTunes. Since there’s no iTunes for Linux, if you’re running with Tux, you ain’t running with your iPod. https://gizmodo.com/apple-ipod-touch-calendar-cant-add-appointments-why-297994 Using a third party app (such…

Matt Jubelirer, the Zune’s product manager, left Microsoft in August to join Slacker as Director of Product Marketing. He’s been a friendly and knowledgeable guy who’s always been on top of his game whenever we spoke to him, so we wish him the best of luck at Slacker. What this means to Zune 2.0 is…