Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
This is a bathtub plug with a little floating fob in the shape of a man—the aforementioned Mr. Suicide. What is the cultural significance of such a delightful little reminder of our own morality? I don’t know. However, he looks big enough not to get lost when you’re washing the boys or girls. Senor Suicide,…
BengalBoy certainly knows what sort of site he wants to run. His review of the Sony Ericsson W800i (the ‘Walkman Phone’) is peppered with heavily-watermarked images of two sweaty girls, Aurora and Celestrelle, who are surely not strippers but superbeings whose powers are inflamed by the light of our sun. Also, there’s a phone, and…
The upcoming iTunes phone isn’t the only mobile music device from Motorola. They’re also testing out ‘iRadio,’ a podcast-like service for their phones. One of our readers is in the beta program and sent these impressions. OK, so I’ve had the iRadio setup for a few days now. They sent me a new Motorola E680i.…
Okay, this is a bit LifeHackery, but did you know you could access your Backpack pages with a mobile formatting (not fancy AJAX stuff, just HTML) by just adding “/mob” to the end of the URL? I did not realize that, either, and it’s apparently moderately old news. Backpack Mobile is here [BackpackIt]
Since we’ve already determined that wood is the next big thing for gadgets, you don’t have to wait until the manufacturers catch on. If you’d like a pair of wooden headphones right now, Headphile.com can upgrade existing models with their own custom wooden shells, with prices around $150 to $225, depending on the wood choice…
If you’re looking at flash memory-based players, you’ve already resigned yourself to a limited amount of storage. Still, the more, the better, right? Adamond’s ZK1 player has 2GB of memory—the most in any shipping flash player, they claim (although players that take swappable memory cards would certainly challenge that, in their way). The Register finds…
I wanted to classify this under “Gadgets: Weapons,” but anything with a corkscrew can’t be ALL evil. The Guardian is covering the problems facing Swiss Army knife manufacturer Victorinox in a frightened post-9/11/post-March 11/post-July 7 world. An interesting quote from Victorinox CEO, Carl Elsener: “We will have challenges like 9/11. We can get through it.…
Digital picture frames are kind of silly. I have a Nokia model that I turn on when we have guests over so they can say “Oh, wow, a digital picture frame!” and then drink more of our booze. It’s a conversation starter, I guess, but not much else. That said, the AVTech VDPF2 is a…
Just watched Kung-Fu Hustle last night so maybe I’m a sucker for weird semi-Eastern cure-all MP3 players that produce magical Alpha waves that will cure you of gout, palsy, the croup, Zanzibar hot-heels, quinine poisoning, and dandruff. This 128MB flash player plays your favorite tunes—or tune, considering the size—and zaps you with powerful waves of…
We normally steer clear of commodity PC parts (except video cards, because, well, those make everyone happy), but I’ve had an Antec Sonata case for the better part of a year and am a big fan. It’s quiet, it’s nice looking without being fruity, and it wasn’t expensive as these things go. Now Antec has…
London bombs kill at least 33 [CNN] 33 confirmed dead in London blasts [MSNBC] Terror blasts rock London [Guardian] 7 July 2005 London bombings [Wikipedia] London Metroblog
I forgot to thank you all last week when I was going nuts re: my server. Think of this as a tip of the old Giz hat from your friend Uncle John. In unrelated news, Japan has created a system for unlocking doors using mobile phones. Instead of RFID, the system connects via a wireless…
Who was it who was just saying that wood inlay is the new gloss black? Maybe it was Joel? And what do we see minutes later? The Rotolog Watch, a nice quartz piece with inlaid wood and a “pre-digital” dial. Designed by Nixon—the watch makers not the dead ex-president—the Rotolog costs about $200 and it’s…
Some of you are going to be very happy about Motion Computing’s new LS800 Windows Tablet PC. It’s small, for starters—just a 8.4-inch screen. And it’s reasonably powerful, with a 1.2GHz Pentium M (certainly strong enough to get any business computing done). But by being so tiny, it might not serve as the laptop-replacement some…
Audigy has taken over where a lot of other folks have given up. I remember the days of break-out boxes for audio and video and just about every other I/O under the sun. The Audigy 2 ZS is clearly a throwback to a better era. S-Video in, Composite video in, Firewire AND USB ports, and…
While I doubt the gains in audio fidelity that come from crafting headphones from wood are slight—probably not worth $1,000+—you have to admit, these JVC HP-DX1000 headphones are very attractive. Wood grain is the new black, I’m telling you—as soon as some company can figure out how to produce wooden accents on the cheap Inclosia…
Archos has officially taken the wraps off the Gmini XS 202, a tiny and affordable 20GB music player that can be had for just $250. Although it lacks the color screen that even the iPod comes with standard these days, Archos tends to make a very solid, reliable bit of hardware, and if you want…
The last time a bottle of booze talked to me I was in college and we were trying to make grain punch. Now, however, you don’t need to be drunk to hear your wine. Italian printer Modulgraf has created a system for embedding chips into paper labels that can be read with handheld devices. Based…
Fourstar writes: I was driving to my girlfriend’s house after work and spotted this guy holding a sign that said “verizon is evil”. I pulled over walked up to the guy and asked if I could snap his pic and what the problem was. Turned out he couldn’t get a replacement phone because Verizon rep…
The best part of this flash player is the beautiful 650,000 OLED LCD, which, as always, makes us wonder why they don’t make mini media players using flash memory. It’s actually very frustrating, because, as we all know, the value of being able to display JPEGs on something this small is more of a gee-whiz…