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Those crazy inventors over at Mertec in Japan have recently unveiled their newest creation—a robot elephant designed to clean urinals. The man behind the unique design claims that the elephant theme came to him because he imagined the trunk as “a powerful reversal of the urinal drain.” The idea of reversal is even represented in…
Here are the meaty bits in the cold platter of numbers that is Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report. Windows sales are way down (the client division, which makes Windows, saw sales drop by 24 percent vs. last year). Office is doing alright, but they’re losing their ass on online services. The entertainment division (Zune and Xbox)…
This is classic corporate espionage/sabotage at its finest. Dish Network is accusing News Corp.—which used to have a 39 percent stake in DirecTV and still provides its security tech—of hiring hacker Christopher Tarnovsky to break into Dish’s network, steal the security codes, and use them to make pirated cards to flood the black market. It…
Why get drunk on cheap booze when you can get drunk on cheap booze that actually tastes good? That is the question Jon Sarriugarte asked himself when he and a buddy set out to solve the problem of how to artificially age brandy. Inspired by a single sentence in a book from the 1930s, they…
As Adrian pointed out, if we had these PSP bath bags when we were nine, we’d be a whole lot cleaner and a whole lot wrinklier than we are now. It’s a bag. It holds your PSP. It goes into baths. That’s pretty much all you need to know. It’s unclear to us why you…
Yesterday’s question involved how much digital music you currently own—if you took part you may have noticed that the distribution was fairly even, but there are plenty of people out there with seriously large collections. That got me thinking about where all this music is being stored—iPods in particular. As my own feeble collection has…
If you ever drunkenly stumble into one of these prototype Blockbuster stores in Dallas, you’ll wonder why Best Buy has stocked up on so many movies and ditched the inkjet printers. These proto stores, or storetotypes, lay out little kiosks in the middle and test interesting concepts that have a tenuous relationship to renting movies…
There have been a number of attempts to modernize the much beloved Post-it note, but the “Quickies” concept developed by MITs Ambient Intelligence Group may be the most viable to date. Using RFID technology, AI and ink recognition, Quickies relay written information to our computers and cellphones—making the notes more effective as reminders, and much…
If, for some reason, you were interested in picking up one of Sharp-Willcom’s new D4 WS016SH UMPCs, the device will be available in the States starting on June 20th from GeekStuff4U. Personally, I would not be thrilled about dropping $1,526.33 on a device running Vista huffing and puffing with only a 1.33Ghz processor and 1GB…
No surprises in Motorola’s quarterly checkup. They’re still bleeding out marketshare (and money) like an anemic guy who fell into a people-sized blender, down to just 9.5 percent of the global market with a half billion dollar loss. Worse, everyone expects them to plummet even further next quarter. A little over a year ago, they…
This Flare Facade is a fancy building exterior that allows it to “express, communicate and interact with its environment.” It’s certainly neat looking, but it doesn’t seem to have any, you know, practical application. I wonder if it would be possible to stick solar panels on these and have them automatically tilt towards the sun.…
Two months after Sharper Image declared bankruptcy, they’ve gone and put themselves on sale, saying it would “preserve values and yield the best recovery to the company.” They’re as serious about selling themselves off as they are about selling you laser instruments and brushed metal meat thermometers. Sharper Image wants to finish the sale by…
Geeksugar’s got an interesting scoop on a supposed iMac refresh coming next week. Their guess is a speed bump and a storage increase, but the design will be exactly the same and will be priced the same as before. If you’re curious whether or not their source is accurate, it’s the same person that tipped…
A month after the beta dropped, Linux distro Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is officially out. Besides running GNOME 2.22 and Firefox 3 Beta 5, a big new feature is Wubi support, which’ll let Ubuntu live on the same partition as Windows and makes it easy to uninstall if you want to retreat back into Microsoft’s…
If you don’t want border agents to see nekkid pictures of your significant other, you might wanna leave your laptop at home when you travel abroad. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this week that computers are like any other dumb luggage, so they’re subject to search even without reasonable suspicion that…
You remember that lousy mosquito noise device generators in the UK that were supposed to drive teens away because only they could hear them? The ones that actually turned out to be audible to just about everybody? They’re coming to the US. People here aren’t too happy about it, with some bans and protests after…
While Samsung seems a tad wishy-washy about exactly when they’ll be producing OLED TVs, LG has set out a clear date. It’s 2011 apparently: Though they’ll be investing in next-gen LCD production lines too, the plan is to have volume production of 32-inch OLED screens within three years. [Digitimes] https://gizmodo.com/samsung-oled-tvs-in-2009-382434
Scanning a book manually is a colossal pain in the ass. Scanning a book with the DL 3000 Book Scanner, on the other hand, is easy and hypnotizing. Just look at that sucker go! It can scan a whopping 3,000 pages per hour, tearing through a whole stack of books every day. Want one? Too…
As you can see in the clip above, Panasonic’s Wi-Fi enabled Lumix TZ50 connects to most wireless networks—including T-Mobile Hotspots—and uploads your pictures directly to a Picasa account. It works in reverse also, photos placed online are browsable by the camera. When we tried it out, a picture took about 25 seconds to upload, which…
Seismologists at Stanford are learning from their roommates over in the biology department and rigging up a distributed computing system to gather quake data from laptops with accelerometers. It’s used to save resources for scientists by using assets (your laptops) that are already deployed in a widespread area. They’re rolling this out primarily in quake-heavy…
