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Making things smaller and more efficient has, at least since the Industrial Revolution, been a staple of American futurist thinking. A women’s dinner event in 1944 included “The Year 2000” as its theme and even the cigarettes were “concentrated.” From the January 26, 1944 Maryville Daily Forum (Maryville, MO): The group was served food suggestive…
Two Chinese-language news services, the Commercial Times and the China Economic News Service, are both reporting that Palm has placed orders for several million units of smartphones aimed at a 2009 release. Unfortunately for Palm OS fans, all these phones are going to be running Windows Mobile, which leads Treo Central to guess that it…
Casino Royale, a film from Sony Pictures, is going to be the title to hold the dubious honor of being first to double-dip on “Sony’s” Blu-ray format. We’re honestly surprised that it took this long. The $39 October 21 release will have seven hours of extras that weren’t in the original Blu-ray or DVD release,…
If those all-terrain Casio watches were too rich for your blood, fret not: There’s a slew of new G-Shocks that look good and are pretty cheap. Up there are the Baby-Gs, which come in some wild bright colors with a patent leather look, have the cool reflective back, and are water resistant to 100 meters.…
Bags deemed “checkpoint friendly” by the TSA are starting to roll out fast and furious now-bags with “creative” names like “ScanFast” and the newly announced “CheckFast” from Solo (I’m still waiting for the “CavitySearchFree”). The CheckFast claims to be “the first laptop case company to have fulfilled the design and testing requirements to be Travel…
A group of mad scientists from Reading University in the UK have hooked up a bunch of rat brain neurons to a circuit board and gotten it to control a robot. What resulted what a robot on wheels that used its rat brain to avoid running into obstacles. How unsettling! This is no ordinary robot…
As our favorite media become more and more digitally-based, that pile of CDs and DVDs is looking increasingly wasteful. Sure, you can sell some of your stuff on eBay or through a garage sale, but what about that bargain bin edition of Bach classics that’s already sitting on your hard drive? Here’s a clever use…
It may not be as inconspicuous as the laundry lounge chair, but this Sfera spherical washing machine design does have a few notable advantages. First off, it is compact and it can be tucked away in the corner of a bathroom. Second, its rotating spherical tank makes unloading a breeze. All you need to do…
The Direct Marketing Association, a lovely group dedicated to forcing ads down your throat, have done a study that found that while a mere 7% of cellphone users are open to receiving ads on their phone, a much more significant 24% say they’ve responded to such ads on their phone. A whole quarter of the…
Haha, boobies. [Apple]
When the Wii console first came out, everyone and their mother commented on how stupid the name was. It still is to be perfectly honest, but after a couple of years we have grown more accustomed to hearing it. But imagine what it would be like if your legal name was Wii? Believe it or…
Click to viewNokia’s teaser site that promised the weirdest clip ever made has just coughed up that video in question, and yeah, it’s pretty damn weird. The first puzzle is almost impossible to solve by non-brute force methods if you don’t have a Nokia phone, but if you do, it’s a matter of watching the…
Click to viewMy experience with R/C toys growing up was limited because it was simply too expensive to take up as a serious hobby. The rich kids had some fancy R/C cars though (damn those rich kids!), and every once in a while I got a chance to take one out for a spin. Needless…
When we heard that PS3 PlayTV DVR recordings would be transferable to PSPs and PCs, we we’re absolutely thrilled, proclaiming, “For the first time in a long time, we want to grab Sony and kiss them square on the lips.” Well, put away the Binaca, because Sony has taken back their promise for undisclosed reasons.Now…
Coming off those fresh G-Shocks from May, Casio has a couple of high-end watches for the sporty-types out now. Up first is the Pathfinder 1500, a rugged looking digital piece crammed with gadgets and sensors for all activities including an altimeter, barometer, digital compass, tide graph, moon graph, and Multi-Band atomic timekeeping. It’s solar powered,…
Start a swarm of these DIY Firefly LEDs a-blinking, and they’ll create a random pattern and blink an angry red. But after a few minutes, thanks to some clever microcontroller code and a light sensor, they’ll soon all be blinking in sync with a nice, calming blue color. It’s a neat bit of DIY electronics…
The folks at the Criterion Collection know a thing or two about movies. They restore classic films for release on DVD and, starting later this year, Blu-ray. So when they set up their screening rooms, you’d expect them to have some crazy $1,000 Blu-ray player, right? Nope. The Criterion Collection people rock a PlayStation 3…
Unless you are a race car driver or something, work is boring. This DIY project is slightly more fun than spinning around in your seat and does a good job of killing around 2 hours of time. And, when all is said and done, you will have the satisfaction that comes with building a USB…
Geologists and people wasting time on the internet alike have failed to explain this particularly repetitious forest in Holland. A pretty clear result of a lazy/botched clone stamping in Photoshop, we can’t help but wonder what Google covered up here. Government secrets? Cloud interference? A leprechaun lair? No one knows, but stay tuned as we…
Funai, whose subsidiaries are more familiar to us as Sylvania, Symphonic and Emerson, is planning on selling LCD HDTVs with Blu-rays on-board starting summer 2009. The company’s previous successes in recent years with combo units (TVs with VCRs and TVs with DVDs) totaled up 40% and 20% of their sales in the US respectively. So…
