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Embracing The Mobile Hacker Ethic By Carlo Longino As mobile phones become more powerful and pervasive, it was inevitable that they’d spawn the same kind of homebrew hacking culture as computers and the Internet. While the locked-down nature of cell phones and the closemindedness of wireless carriers has stunted that culture’s growth, a few developments…
If you’re like most people new to the digital age, you definitely know how tiresome it is to go through your entire music collection, rip one CD at a time at the computer, and then stuff ’em into your music player of choice. Or maybe you want a fancy ringtone for your cellphone but don’t…
How much would you pay for a card, encoded with your biometric stats, that allows you to breeze through airport security checkpoints like a (non-threatening) rockstar? Steve Brill says $79.95. [NY Times] Turn the volume down on your iPod: those wacky researchers are worried that our young ears are turning into old deaf ones. [USA…
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Not many folks are really “proud” Bronco owners. Richard Sherman is one of those folks. He’s the guy who won the Newegg Case Mod contest. It took him 14 months to put a PC inside a model replica of his Bronco and then put that model inside on real Bronco’s hood. This required a lot…
The center armrest is not just for stashing jewel cases and weapons any longer: Volkswagen is putting a USB port in there too. The car stereo will recognize the memory device once you plug it in, and display up to six music folders. And then the controls work just as they would for a CD.…
This baby not only keeps track of your next visit to the dentist, but supplies “situational awareness” with a 6.4 inch sunlight-readable touch screen and dual processing with a 200MHz RISC/DSP. The rugged mini-tablet is being shown at this week’s Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition in London. The MINI-T will withstand from -22 to…
It turns out that Xbox isn’t the only fire hazard in the house. Sony Computer Entertainment America is recalling 960,000 AC adapters because of possible overheating. This only applies to the adapters shipped with slim-line PlayStation 2 consoles. Replacements will be provided at no extra cost, of course. To date there have been 38 reports…
The Ricoh GR looks like a Kodak Box Brownie but performs like a champ. 8.1 megapixels, a 2.5-inch LCD, and all kinds of high-end photo features including zoom and RAW format support make it a professional camera in a point-and-shoot body. No production models are available yet, and pricing is a secret, but expect to…
If you’re like me, or most cell phone users for that matter, I’m sure there’s been a time when you’ve spent way too much time trying to talk to your carrier’s customer service, and got absolutely nowhere. Be it a billing problem, bad service or just a general complaint, we’ve all been left holding our…phones…
A lot of digicam freaks have been waiting for the M2 to drop and finally, it’s out. So what’s the big deal? It’s got a sexy aluminum case. As for still shots, it does 5.1MP which isn’t bad at all, and has a Pocket Album mode which allows you to store 1,100 VGA-quality stills on…
New hotness from Sanyo. All of the standard bells and/or whistles are here. LCD screen, color, music player, SD memory, blah, blah. However, this phone has a 1.3-megapixel camera that also supports OCR software. OCR stands for optical character recognition and can take translate written word into computer hoo-haa for grabbing a few pages of…
The hive mind at Fujitsu feels like we’ve suffered enough in our meat pockets and has created the ultimate robo-butler dubbed “Enon.” Enon will bring you your dinner, bring you your bong, will guard the house in case the cops roll up while the deal is going bad, and comes with a touchscreen LCD that…
Are you sick of that damned Yogi bear stealing your picnic basket day after day? Well pull a fast one on him by busting out the Orikaso picnic and table gear. This is a set of durable (??) outdoor food bags that can fold down flat and pop up when you want to get at…
Here it is folks-drumroll please-the world’s first digital recording microphone is finally available for the Karaoke enthusiasts in all of us. Oh, and it is probably pretty cool for the professional musicians too. This microphone uses Sennheiser omni-directional condenser capsule and is also loaded with one gigabyte of flash memory. A pair of AA’s will…
Joel Johnson — So I don’t have a lot to add right now, but we’re doing well after a hard, hard day of work. I’m not sure that we’ll be able to get everything ready in a week—we still have no plans for permanent internet uplinks—but we’ve got some good stuff to show you around…
The Toronto Film Festival is in full swing, and The Globe and Mail says cellphone short films are beginning to have an impact on the movie industry. Two particular shorts that originated on the cellphone have been blown up to 35mm film and are showing at the festival. Globe and Mail] The SF Chronicle reports…
Man, I think that picture is so ripe with promise that we need to just stare at it for a little while. I know Fi Fi is fine, but just imagine what would happen if they turned that thing up to eleven. Apparently, it uses infrared beams to dry dogs. All I know is that…
Gawker Media is looking to fill the following tech-related position: We need a CSS master — a real markup genius and a standards freak who s comfortable working in Movable Type, too. We re looking for someone on a project basis that could lead to a larger role in the future, so you must have…
If you thought that sleeping amid unwanted background sounds of urban life was difficult, now the Italian textile company, Bassetti has added to the clutter. Aimed at providing a soothing background soundtrack for blissful sleep, their “La Natura” series of bed linen and pillow cases pipe in comforting sounds like crashing ocean waves, singing birds…