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The final project of a team from Cornell University, this electronic hogu, modelled above by a lantern-jawed mannequin called Bob, uses piezoelectric sensors and a microcontroller to measure the kicks and punches between contestants in a Tae Kwan Do bout. Piezoelectric sensors and a microcontroller are implanted in the transmitter side, while the receiver side…
Normally, I would get excited about these pants with a daisy that changes color when next to your hot hot skin. But it’s Monday today, and Monday’s the day I do the washing and the ironing. Tuesday is J.’s day for LEGO—he’s currently attempting to do the Kama Sutra out of bricks, Wednesday we’re watching…
Hot on the heels of the BlackBerry Bold comes the news that the company behind it is to start up its own venture capital firm. And if it’s a way of besting Apple’s iFund, then the Canadians win, by fifty million buckeroonies. The BlackBerry Partners Fund is a bunk up between RIM and Thomson Reuters,…
The January 22, 1967 Lowell Sun (Lowell, MA) ran this illustration of an experimental city of the future. Typical Experimental City may look like this. At left is computerized communications complex; at center lies atomic power plant, while at right is greenhouse for vegetables and greenery. See also: Transportation in 2000 A.D. (1966) Personal Helicopter…
They said RIM’s BlackBerry 9000 would be formally announced on the 12th. They said it would be called the Bold. Photos suggested that it would be the sexiest thing to come out of Canada since Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. And they wuz right. Boy Genius says it’ll be available this summer on AT&T 3G,…
Not so long ago we reviewed the Eye-Fi, a 2GB SD card that adds Wi-Fi to any digital camera. Now the company is expanding their product line with the Eye-Fi Explore ($129), Eye-Fi Share ($99) and the Eye-Fi Home ($79). The big news? Eye-Fi is now supporting hotspots and geotagging with the Explore. https://gizmodo.com/eye-fi-adds-wi-fi-to-almost-any-digital-camera-316537 It…
The scenario has happened countless times before. A pesky fly interrupts a dinner party. Brad, the club’s resident tennis pro and notorious alcoholic, takes to his feet, Prince racket in hand, and smites the beast violently into a wall with a few tottering swings. OK, so it doesn’t happen exactly like that, but you get…
Our friend Robert Woodhead (of slow-mo Mentos-n-Coke fame) has kindly shared another of his Casio Exilim EX-F1 masterpieces, this time water balloons and china slowly shattering (and occasionally not shattering) to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. They’re a mixture of 300, 600 and 1200 frame-per-second shots, set up in an uncomfortably vertical version of…
One fun rumor bopping around the phone sites is that MWg, the smartphone maker previously known as O2 Asia, will be rolling out a Windows Mobile 7 phone in the fourth quarter of 2008, specifically the Flame II shown above. That’s about a year earlier than we last heard. Everyone sounds skeptical, but you never…
Usually camping and showering are either/or activities, but for those of you who absolutely have to cart the body wash and loofah into the wild, the Pocket Shower from Sea to Summit could be for you. The 2.6 gallon Pocket Shower sports a compact showerhead that operates with twisting on/off valve. Bathers can adjust the…
Last time I was in a store, I was like, “Why is there no creepy animatronic sea captain here to tell me today’s specials?” Apparently that’s what the founders of Characters Unlimited thought too, because they’ve come up with a vast array of Hall of Presidents-style robotic people—and a few animals, too, like the ever-popular…
Remember when it was cool to joke about how the vibrating Wii remote looked, felt and behaved pretty much like a vibrator? No? Well, too bad, because it turns out that the two were more similar than the light-hearted humor suggested. In fact, both tools of pleasure employ technology built from a patent from the…
When I look at the classic Nintendo Zapper I think of my younger days as a screaming, hot-headed 8-bit gamer, but not Fluffypants. No siree. The enterprising DIY lamp artist looked at the orange and gray plastic and saw a lamp. A few hours and one fabricated cardboard NES cartridge stand later, that laughing dog…
The vanity-saturated life of a Gizmodo writer means no scars, visible or otherwise, so this breakthrough procedure for appendicitis is a godsend for those among us who still have the vestigial organ. According to doctors who performed the operation in San Diego, a flexible tube is used to thread miniature surgical instruments down the patient’s…
David Pogue has a quick video review of Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen that does a very good job of illustrating the concept. Worth watching on top of our own review. [Pogue’s Livescribe Pulse Smartpen Video review] https://gizmodo.com/review-livescribe-pulse-digital-pen-recorder-verdict-386809
The iPhone’s recently released firmware 2.0 Beta 5 has a 3G on/off switch for users. Underneath, there’s a warning that 3G browsing will kill your battery faster. While that’s more proof of the upgraded hardware we already expect, what I find most interesting is the manual control. It’s not too late to change it, but…
How many concept products have we shown featuring some form of curved or oddly shaped E-Ink display? A pillion?* Thankfully, the good people at E-Ink have seen fit to make these dreams come true: New “ultra-moldable” E-Ink cells are 40% thinner, can be cut into unique shapes, and even curved. This doesn’t mean they’re bendy,…
An alert AVS forum member posted a cryptic note entitled “Samsung first to lower prices!” I wondered if maybe the member wasn’t referring to the Dealzmodo-tastic flat-panel price war that HD Guru Gary Merson predicted. Sure enough, when I cross checked Samsung’s most recent MAP pricing on the 5 Series LCDs (a.k.a. 550) with their…
Forget those GPS graves in the jungle we brought you a few weeks ago, because in the future what we’re really going to do is pour—yes pour—our loved ones down the drain with the help of some lye and an iron coffin contraption from BioSafe Engineering. The last hurdle, as always, will be to overcome…
At a party once, Jesus was asked if he were a leg man or a tit man. The answer is neither. He’s a LEGO man. Well, to be honest, he’s all three, but rather like faith, hope and charity, the greatest of my husband’s loves is LEGO. I’m not bitter. The colorful, benippled bricks have…
