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If you’re anything like us, HDTV has become a bit of a necessity when it comes to watching TV. Thankfully, LodgeNet is making going to hotels a little bit easier with their decision to include HDTVs and HD channels in 160,000 of their hotels. Pretty soon, no longer will we be forced to watch standard…
NEC recently announced that after years of research, they have developed a technology that makes the difference between robots and their on-screen computer graphics (CG) counterparts less marked. NEC demonstrated the new technology with this friendly-looking robot named PaPeRo and its CG sidekick, PaPeRo CG. The whole purpose of this is to make interaction between…
Maybe our friends in the UK recognize Sir Alan, but to our Stateside readers, just know that Sir Alan is kind of like their Donald Trump, star of The Apprentice, but with better hair. What we have here is an animatronic head of Sir Alan (like in Futurama) that spouts mean and nasty things to…
Putting an Addam’s Family-esque twist on party games, this little contraption gives the unsuspecting loser’s finger a jolt of electric shock when the game comes to end. After a number of “victims” is selected, players put their fingers in and watch as the lights start moving in a circle, accompanied by rapid beeping. The beeping…
For all those beautiful, frame-worthy pictures you take with your… uh… camera phone, Parrot introduces its LCD camera phone frame. The frame has a 3.5 ” LCD screen, 32 MB of memory (about 100 camera phone pictures) and comes in styles ranging from leather grain, to wood, to faux crocodile skin. The frame’s interface is…
The combined might of Team Giztaku got footage of the crowd rushing into West Hall this morning just as the doors opened. The Playstation 3 booth is on the left, the Nintendo booth’s the big white and blue thing on the right—notice where the stampede’s headed? Yeah. Here’s an itty bitty sampler of the kinds…
Word around the PDA-fire is that Palm is launching a Palm OS version of the Treo 700 on Monday. How do we know this? Some brightwads over at TechWorld posted, then yanked, a story about the smartphone. The biggest deal is that this thing can act as a wireless modem via Bluetooth or USB. It…
If the Armedchair works as advertised, it may just be one of the coolest, yet least useful things we’ve ever seen. It’s a $12,000 chair from Sybaris that bumps and bounces around the person sitting down according to the on-screen action of the nearly 500 movies that it’s programmed to work with. It’s controlled by…
Like the painted harlots that once danced for David, these Mac minis bring shame unto the house of Jobs. For it is said that when a mini colors itself or lengthens its neck to be more beautiful, it is a harlot and drives men to lust after her. FastMac even includes a special putty knife…
I got the chance to play with the Nokia N91 aka the Music One for a few weeks and I said I’d get back to you all with my impressions. I am happy to say that 4GB on a phone is quite a useful bit of hard disk space but that with the added bulk…
“Translator II: Grower” (Raaf, 2004-5) Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen With an ever-increasing amount of technology intended to “improve”, “augment”, and/or “add convenience” to our busy lives, there seems to be less of an emphasis on creating devices to reflect or comment on our natural or built environments. Taking this challenge as a starting point with…
MTX Audio chose the big E3 get-together in L.A. to roll out its iThunder boombox, compatible with any iPod that’s ever been made. It’s got a couple of 4-inch speakers, a retractable boombox-style spring-loaded carrying handle and an infrared remote. Plug it into AC power at home or load it up with a giant handful…
One of the nicer features of Apple’s AirPort Express wireless router is that it can wirelessly stream iTunes audio from your PC or Mac to a real life sound system, so that you don’t have to listen to your undoubtedly cool tunes on your small computer speakers. But what if you want to stream audio…
The usefulness of this iMac bag seems pretty limited, but it’s a great idea and a cool design, so whatevs. Made by some French guys, the timbags are big enough to hold a 17-, 20-, or 23-inch iMac and they cost $200 to $500, give or take. They are specially reinforced to ensure things don’t…
While this thing isn’t particularly ground-breaking, its always great to see mini-PCs and hard drive enclosures come together in a way that is both ingenious and useful. The Mvix Multimedia Player plays video, audio, and images from a 3.5″ disk—not included (!!)—and can transmit the audio via an FM transmitter. Hmm, you’re saying, couldn’t I…
If you thought cellphones were already thin, they’re set to get even smaller and more powerful toward the end of this year when Infineon Technologies markets its handset chips that use a 65nm (nanometer) process, putting more than 30 million transistors into an area scarcely larger than a postage stamp. The company unveiled the working…
Alpine was only waiting for this moment to arrive—the company apparently figured since it already makes lots of embedded auto navigation systems, it might as well fly into the porto-navi market with Blackbird. It features 16-channel embedded GPS, and it’s pre-loaded with 6 million points of interest in US and Canada. In addition to giving…
Have you ever been in a situation when you had to sleep over at your buddy’s house, only to find him pointing to a stack of week-old newspapers, i.e., your bed for the night? Of course you have. Next time, consider the itbed, a foldable bed made entirely out of 7mm (0.27 in.) -thick cardboard.…
The guys at car company Fiat apparently got tired of hearing that joke about how their brand name is an acronym for “Fix It Again, Tony” so they decided to branch out into other products such as jackets, shoes and skiwear. Their next trick is to start selling cellphones sporting the Fiat logo, combining the…
With the amount of e-mail that we get here on a daily basis, finding the time to read it all is quite a chore. Maybe we should look into the UBi.ach, a stuffed animal that alerts the user when a new e-mail has arrived. With a little coaxing (think white list), it’ll read subject lines…