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While real cats and dogs seem far too keen on reproduction to ever be as scarce or expensive as they were in Blade Runner, Sega is pushing full steam ahead with an update to their freaky robotic felines. https://gizmodo.com/segas-near-me-robot-cat-20476 The Dream Cat Venus is coming to Japan this month for $110. Both touch and sound…
Why a boat? Because the Pegasus Open 50, is laden with mechanical and material technology. And the captain is the inventor of the camphone and founder of Borland, Philippe Kahn. He’s liveblogging a race from California to Hawaii via Satellite. They’re sailing the Transpac, a classic race a little over 2000 miles from the coast…
LG’s finally set a date on their GD910 touchscreen watch phone, and it ain’t July, like Akihabara News said. According to T3, it’s in August, and will be exclusive to Orange for a little while. [T3] https://gizmodo.com/lg-touchscreen-watch-phone-will-support-3g-speech-reco-5119487
Sony’s new press image is all fun and cheeky until that model drops his PSP into the tub and ends up with a seriously embarrassing obituary. [Kotaku] https://gizmodo.com/bathtub-gaming-goes-awry-5220053
A professor at Trinity College in Connecticut has written what is essentially a MIDI player for the human brain, converting MRI imagery into a sort of bleeping, blooping ambient music. Here’s how it works: people are subjected to a range of stimuli, ranging from a series of flashing lights to a driving simulator to, well,…
Musing on whether they’ll position themselves under the teat of federal stimulus funding, Clearwire says they’re still gonna have WiMax in 80 markets over the next 18 months. With just nine launching in 2009, good luck. [Unstrung via DSL Reports]
Maybe white iPhones blemished by funky discoloration aren’t overheating—your crappy iPhone case might be rubbing off on it. If so, rubbing alcohol should brighten it up. If true, another plus for going nude. [frenchiPhone via hardmac via Macrumors] https://gizmodo.com/white-iphone-3gs-overheats-to-the-point-of-discoloratio-5303135
Here’s a clever design: a whiteboard clock that erases your appointments as they happen. The lack of a minutes hand robs it of some of its usefulness, but the concept is still sound. [Il-Gu Cha via Make]
There’s really no doubt about it: secret passages are totally awesome. Which is why I can’t help but be smitten by this homemade hidden door that exposes a messy, messy office. Constructed using a pair of Ikea Billy bookcases, a piece of fiberboard and some hinges. Sure, it would be easier to just clean the…
The iPhone 3GS’s video quality may not be all that impressive, but its 3MP stills can apparently capture some incredible time lapse photography provided you seek a suitably inspiring landscape. Using TimeLapse, available for $2 in the App Store, along with a Gorillapod GoGo, available for $30, one iPhone user shot mountain cloud footage that’s…
The size of the original TV-B-Gone never seemed like an impediment to us, but hey, I’m not going to argue with a gadget going through the shrink ray. [Hack-a-Day] https://gizmodo.com/confessions-the-meanest-thing-gizmodo-did-at-ces-343348
Your keyboard is probably a SuperFund site waiting to happen—luckily there’s more than one way to skin a biohazard. Inc.com has 10 ways to clean your keyboard, blow dryer being their wiliest, if lightweight, method. [Inc.com via Lifehacker] https://lifehacker.com/clean-your-keyboard-with-a-hair-dryer-5308249
Best Buy has started a 19-store trial of a new section for electric scooters, assisted bikes and Segways. The new business plan, in full: lure customers in with below-wholesale CDs, then pitch them to buy multi-thousand-dollar personal transportation devices favored by eccentric billionaires and mall cops. Though to their credit, this line from on of…
I’ll take six of the $200,000 ramen-making robots Yoshihira Uchida built for his noodle shop Momozono Robot Ramen. The robot crafts completely customized ramen broth—there are over 40 million flavor possibilities you can configure. Mmmmm. The robot makes the soup, which customers order from a computer screen, where they can switch up the amount of…
We’ve already seen the world’s greatest Gameboy iPhone case. So what’s done is done. But given that the world’s greatest iPhone case is hidden somewhere in the depths of Akihabara, this runner up from Etsy might make a solid alternative. https://gizmodo.com/urgent-5194419 Machine sewn from various colors of felt (yet lined in simple black), this $15…
To summarize: Santa Claus has the lowest data rates, while the strawberry has the highest. The severed thumb is slower than it deserves to be, and the barbecued chicken beats the hamburger. In other news, I love this test. Having run similarly obsessive benchmark roundups before, Testfreaks is no stranger to flash drive testing. They’re…
After getting a glimpse of Michael Jackson’s personal arcade, I worry that I, too, may be suffering from Peter Pan syndrome. The arcade’s been posted online as a fully explorable panorama. From Crazy Taxi to Guitar Freaks to Han Solo frozen in carbonite to the 360-degree spinning Sega R360 jet fighter cabinet, Jackson amassed a…
The line between Wii games and the real-life activities they emulate is increasingly squiggly and faint, no thanks to people like this guy, who’s jury-rigged a tennis serve trainer out of his Wiimote. Its uses are limited—it exists solely to help train its user to throw a perfect serve height (A high, confident toss made…
Techcrunch is reporting, via “sources in Asia,” that Apple is gobbling up huge numbers of camera sensors—the same ones used in the iPhone 3GS—for use in iPods. If Apple isn’t really doing this, they should be. First, the Techcrunch take: Apple has placed an order for a massive number of camera modules of the type…
Have you noticed anything different about your inbox this week? Where are all the weirdly threatening chain letters from family members you’ve never met? The hyperventilating urgent FWD: FWD: FWD: messages about Barack Obama’s secret Hellenic Polytheism? Your tri-weekly update on the power of prayer, told through the perspective of your fourth cousin’s cat? They…