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The FujiFilm Finepix Z200fd Glam Cam is yet another digital camera on top of the massive mountain of sleek point and shoots. Yeah, it’s really thin and will capture shots at up to 10MP with a 5x zoom lens. But it stands out for an odd reason-it’s got a fantastic-and creepy-timer system. The Couple Timer…
Apple’s just seeded the push notification API to developers through the second beta release of the iPhone 2.1 firmware. What this means to you is that developers can now tailor their apps to receive notifications in the background while it’s not running, something supremely useful for apps like AIM, and to a lesser extent, Twitter…
This week, the Photoshop Contest is gonna be a little different. How so? Well, it’s not going to be a Photoshop Contest at all. It’s going to be an MS Paint Contest. Last week we saw some of the most technically-proficient entries in a contest yet, which was awesome. But let’s lower the barrier to…
Sure it’s an ad, but taking over your office building’s lighting system en masse with an army of thirsty friends as an homage to every Irishman’s favorite stout is a pretty refreshing dream while you’re pinned inside your cubicle. Now if we could just do this with a massive INSTEON installation-then we’d be set. Check…
Giz reader Nicholas Buechi created this real liquid display that really doesn’t display anything but bubbles. And that’s enough, because it is mesmerizing enough as it is. The liquid display is driven by an Arduino processor, and the events are triggered by a water keyboard. Sounds crazy, but in action it looks very pretty and…
The iPhone 2.0 software is pretty good. We like the App Store a lot; it adds a boatload of new functionality to the iPhone. But it’s certainly not perfect. Having used it for a few weeks, we’ve discovered a number of little quirks that we really hope are addressed in the upcoming update. From bugs…
This week at Uncrate: We enjoy the mythical battle of the Bigfoot vs Unicorn T-Shirt, catch up with the Star Wars Legacy Collection Millennium Falcon on Tatooine, and head south of the border for the Mastretta MXT. We also get buff using the Titan T1 Gym, get serious in the John Varvatos Star USA Suit,…
Sheathing something as slick and pocketable as the iPhone in a holster feels wrong to me for many reasons, but this particular holster adds the handy ability to charge your drained batteries with its own rechargeable Li-ion battery back. It’s good for one full charge before it needs to be recharged itself. Handy, and at…
For the DIY DVR enthusiast, Hitachi just announced their new CinemaStar 7K1000.B. Coming in sizes up to 1 terabyte, the 7,200 RPM drives promise to be the “industry’s quietest, most energy-efficient 3.5-inch hard drives.” But what can a 1TB CinemaStar actually do? It can store 247 hours of HD MPEG4 and handle 10 streams of…
What wonderful times we live in. If you’ve got some funky stuff going on down below, a good way to diagnose exactly what’s happening is to swallow a pill-sized camera robot to have a looksie. Only problem is, those things have trouble swimming upstream, if you will, to stay near the specific trouble spot. Carnegie…
It’s sort of cheating to use one big Lego to build a “Lego” anything, but for this lamp we’ll make an exception. By 25togo from Japan, the Lego Lamp is powered by white LEDs and has snap-off caps to store stuff in the pegs. But maybe the most promising premise is to interlock multiple units…
DIY builder Mikhail Levchenko’s homemade backyard observatory once made a drunken Russian give up the sauce for good after revealing Saturn’s rings to him one fateful night. Now, the telescope, which has been dormant for years, is getting a push to be restored and brought back online in time for a full solar eclipse which…
Intended as an artistic statement by William Lamson from his collection Intervention, we can’t help but to take note of the helium balloon as a clever, non-destructive way to defeat security cameras. Tethered at the right height and loaded with static electricity, a less honest man might use the technology to sneak into Nordstrom late…
After the START II-the second strategic weapons reduction treaty with the former URSS-was signed, the US Navy had to reconvert many of their Ohio-class nuclear submarines, giving new uses to their missile bays. They talked with Lockheed Martin about it, who came up with the idea of the Cormorant: a Halo-looking plane that launches from…
Continuing with its series of animal robots designed to entertain kids, tenderize adults, and more importantly, don’t poop, Sega is going to start selling their Hamster robot in Japan this August. The 3.5-inch robot is fluffy, does cute cute cute things, and you only need to feed it four batteries. Hamsters everywhere, it’s back to…
Sony is now recruiting beta testers for PlayStation Home, the virtual world that PS3 users will use to interact with each other-and try to have virtual sex. They will invite 10,000 users from today to August 11, with the beta starting later in the month. The beta will include only a limited number of places,…
The IEEE has approved the new FireWire 2008 specification, which will include the S1600 and S3200 standards, running at 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps each. The new IEEE 1394 flavors will use the same connectors as FireWire 800 and will be fully compatible with the previous standard. [TG Daily] https://gizmodo.com/giz-explains-an-illustrated-guide-to-every-stupid-cabl-5030810
In its constant battle with the OLPC, Intel is selling half a million Classmate laptops to Portugal at maximum price of $78 each. An impressive deal… until they tell you they are going to make them in Portugal. I smell Euro-politics everywhere here. Well played, Senhor Intel. [The Register] https://gizmodo.com/negroponte-to-intel-you-suck-262260
The iBird Flight Simulator was easily the most creative demo at Microsoft’s Research Summit yesterday. Also developed in conjunction with NYU (like the UnMouse Pad), it uses a USB controller with dual retractable, pulley-style cords, the iBird tracks your movement in 3D space. The iBird then relays that information back to the computer and offers…
No word on what it does besides “improve stability and performance”. Keep in mind that this comes a few days after iPhone app DRM was cracked, so if you’re dabbling in the black arts of app swapping, you probably want to wait til someone else reports on whether this affects that or not before upgrading.…