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Bad news for electric car fans and the guys who build ’em. Tesla has let go 90% of their Detroit staff in the interest of “consolidating” their workforce in San Jose. The lucky remainder gets to relocate to California, no expenses paid, to keep their jobs. Then again, the economy is bad and Tesla isn’t…
Here is the main reason why inventor and manga artist Pyocotan’s “Noriko-san” sleep mask will never become a successful real-world product: It relies on human kindness to function. The prototype mask features a scrolling display that notifies fellow passengers which stop you would like to get off on. The idea is that one of these…
Intel Brazil has created what’s probably the best office screensaver in the history of office screensavers: a Formula 1 racing course that spans across multiple computers and monitors to offer one seamless view competition all across the office. Once you start them up, the Formula 1 car will go from one computer to the other,…
If you’re seriously considering a MacBook over a MacBook Pro, one of the major sniggles is the fact that it no longer has FireWire, an omission seemingly designed to stratify the more-alike-than-ever models. So, it’s natural users would take to the Apple forums to talk it out (or, let’s be real, bitch). But Apple isn’t…
The iPhone syncs great with one computer, but what if you use two? Say you listen to music and watch movies on a home computer while managing all of your important business contacts on your work computer? If you’re willing to get your hands dirty with a hex editor and a few lines of simple…
Productivity is dead, the internet is going to explode. According to ComScore’s August 2008 search engine rankings, YouTube is now the number two search engine in the world, surpassing Yahoo. YouTube fetched over 2.6 billion search queries that month, trumping Yahoo’s 2.4 billion—though Google itself still reigns supreme with 7.6 billion queries (together, Google and…
According to BookofJoe, the image above originated in a recent issue of the Financial Times ‘How To Spend It’ magazine. As the caption notes, the FlashPoint ES Torch is described as a mini-microwave “Exo-Stove” that can be twisted to focus its energy on a cup of coffee, soup, etc in order to cook it. There…
Fisheye pictures can be cool sometimes. It looks like you’re looking through a peephole in a door! How neat! But to design a camera that can only take fisheye shots? Well, that seems a bit too gimmicky for me. If I want to take fisheye pictures, I can attach a fisheye lens. Otherwise, I want…
Here’s a fingers-on the new Asus Eee Top, the Windows-baseed all-in-one PC that will ship later this year for $400. The 15-inch display nettop has a special Windows simplified interface that allows for easy touch operation, with big icons that you can click with your big sausage fingers. It also has Express Gate, the Asus…
After the Washington Post ran a story about how both Verizon and AT&T tripped over themselves to put up cell towers at John McCain’s Arizona ranch to patch up his crappy reception, Verizon came out huffing with remarkable speed that it “was wrong,” and they just put those towers up because the Secret Service said…
While I admit that this Zhejiang 001’s mini car looks rather wacky and utilitarian thanks to its solar top, I wouldn’t mind looking like a dork if that can save me gas or electric power—if I had to have a car, that is. This one can charge using the sun electricity in 30 hours, giving…
Along with their 9600M GT card for portables announcement with the MacBook Pro, Nvidia has also announced their new Nvidia Quadro CX. The $1,999 PCIe card, which according to them has been “specifically designed and optimized the Quadro CX to enhance the performance of Adobe Creative Suite 4”, will accelerate all most common operations in…
The Scope 2 RGB LED watch is a beautiful piece of nerd time-keeping—fantastically future-retro, there’s no goddamn way you can tell what time it is from a glance, thanks to its Rube Goldbergian way of signifying the march of seconds, minutes and hours. Depending on the model, green or red horizontal lines relay hours, while…
Boy Genius—whose BlackBerry track record is close to impeccable—has early word from his sources that RIM is dropping not one, but two berry-flavored bombs at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in May: a Storm that runs on full U.S. HSDPA (i.e., AT&T’s 3G, not just the 2100MHz band), and more awesomely, a BlackBerry wiith a touchscreen…
Designer Zinc Chan’s Icono Finger phone concept is confusing: it’s a phone inspired by a hand gesture, which was originally inspired a phone. By capping your thumb and little finger with a D cell-looking mic and speaker, the Icono converts your hand into a piece of hardware, leaving it stuck in a position that simultaneously…
Sometimes it’s painfully obvious that there is no rule in the world of electronics that someone has to need (or even have a single conceivable use for) a new product before it’s designed. That might help explain what you’re seeing above: a double-sided LCD panel by LG, first heard about a few months back. This…
3D printers are a boon to industrial designers, many of whom have been happily using ultra-expensive real-life Star Trek replicators for years now. Yeah, cool, good for them, but when the hell will I be able to print my own Army Men? Considering the recent announcement of Objet’s Alaris30 3D desktop printer, my miniature plastic…
I’ve never been enough of a photography purist to bemoan the switch to digital, but if you’ve really missed shooting film on a fully manual machine, the folks at Lomography have released an upgrade to the classic 1970s camera, the Lubitel. Called the Lubitel +166, it keeps its old-fashioned looks but adds a couple of…
Humping dogs are great and all, but sometimes we’d prefer to have something cuter do the nasty with our USB ports. Why not go for the animal that everyone associates with overbreeding anyway? Imported from Japan (no surprise there), each satisfied-looking rabbit comes with adorably humping motions and 1GB of memory. You can get one…
io9’s and Tokyo Mango’s Lisa Katayama has explored the Tokyo Science Museum’s newest 3D planetarium theater, the Synra Dome, and reported back with all the tech specs we’ve been dying to know. Synra uses twelve projectors to throw images onto a 33-foot, 3000×3000 pixel single-paneled screen. A pair of $200 3D glasses then allows you…
