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An odd, if useful, little bugger is this JC-U1008T. Looks like a foldable portable game pad that you can carry with you to the skanky PC bang or your dirty friend’s house so you don’t befoul yourself with someone else’s filthy controllers. There’s an extremely helpful graphic on the product page which shows the potential…
While we don’t foresee the Scooba being trained to wash the old and infirm, Toyota is planning on creating a set of robots to assist in day-to-day childcare and nursing home supervision. Citing a declining birthrate and an increasingly aged population, Toyota’s Japanese researchers have decided that it will be easier to make silicon service…
Computex 2005—which is very far away in the Mystical Land of Taipei—is essentially the Pacific Rim equivalent of the CES/old school CeBIT. Some choice news? Nothing too explosive. VIA has a new low-power desktop chipset with built-in encryption algorithms, ATI is talking up its dual card CrossFire tech, and the booth babes are actually men…
So you’ve just about given up on things. The wig isn’t working, the biker gloves aren’t getting you anywhere, and the too-small tee just is just too 1999. What do do? Wrap your cellie in a rubber banana! This cellphone cover supports flip and candybar phones and can make anyone look like the street fair…
Start the little consumers early with this branded Aprica Batman Begins stroller complete with batrang and patented Joker Sugar Teat. Yes, the Japanese have done it again: in a baffling case of tie-in marketing, this all-black Bat stroller is just a standard Aprica W-Mini Eye-to-Eye Thermo stroller with a bat logo on the side. There…
Inventor Dennis Bellehumeur has created a system for testing alcohol consumption through the skin which allows for spot-checking yourself before you hit the open road with too many Jack and Coke’s in your tum. Bellehumeur, whose own son was seriously injured in a drunk driving incident, patented the system for embedding in steering wheels and…
A story from the Times’ news service talks up the new trend for kids: iPods (!?!). Well really, they’re talking about ‘gadgets’ in general, talking about how the success of the iPod has made it “part of the uniform” for teenagers who know how to turn their parents’ screws. So that’s good, because I like…
T-Mobile has finally stated when to expect their 3G high-speed wireless data service rollout in the United States: T-Mobile USA is preparing the launch of new third-generation (3G) mobile phone services — which allow video phone calls and music downloads over mobiles — in 2007, even though it has yet to make a formal decision…
It’s good to visit these top-end gaming PCs from time to time, just to reflect on what it must be like to have more money than brains. The Falcon Northwest Mach V’s claim to fame are dual 512MB Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultras in SLI—and each card goes for $1k a pop. That brings the entire…
We can’t vouch for this hack, because we are too lazy to try it (and we never, ever violate copyrights or EULAs), but kind reader Martin explains the process for turning an Windows XP Home install disc to a Windows XP Pro disc after the jump. It sounds pretty simple to do (just some registry…
A custom, Star Trek-style touch screen interface for music? Jazz Mutant’s Lemur sounded improbable when it was first announced last fall. It’s real, though, and shipping from Cycling `74 in the next few weeks at a price that’s a bit more probable for high-end touch tech: US$2500. That’s likely to put Lemur out of reach…
Itronix, makers of uber-rugged tablets, have created a new Duo-Touch system which uses both a touch-screen and an active digitizer for twice the tablet excitement. Aimed at the emergency services and military market, you probably might want to consider something a little lighter provided you don’t expect to be dropping yours into a pond at…
Here’s a product in an attractive case, with complementary peripherals, with an obtuse and uninformative name, dedicated to a single purpose that can be effectively emulated by a PC for about half the 3000€ price. Oh wow, and it’s from Sony. Who would have guessed? In fairness, the PCS-G50 is a dedicated videoconferencing box, all…
The boys behind Pokia have launched their new brand, called ‘Hulger,’ as well as their first product, the ‘P*Phone.’ It’s a corded handset for your cell phone, just like the Pokia models were, with the notable exception that it’s going to be mass produced and retailed, making those one-off eBay auctions a thing of the…
The AP has a nice profile piece on Helen Greiner, one of the co-founders of iRobot, who is coincidentally also launching their next wave of home robots, the floor-mopping Scooba. While we know just about everything we need to about iRobot’s current offering (the Roomba, mostly, along with the PackBot military bot), there is a…
The Inquirer is all over the Computex trade show in Taiwan, including Gizmodo favorite Charlie Demerjian, the man we’ve insulted not once, but twice (including one to his face, which is rare honor, indeed). While all their coverage is worth a nod, check out this crazy video card heat sink called the ‘VC-F117 Nighthawk,’ clearly…
German computer magazine C’T is reporting a procedure that will let you change Windows XP Home Edition to Windows XP Professional just by changing two bytes in an installation file (implying, at least to us, that it can only be done on a fresh install, not an existing one). There’s no information online, though, so…
As we all know, the highest form of comfort known to humankind is the wet and sticky undersea world of the placenta. Everything else is just a Chino Motel 6 compared to our mother’s insides. What better way to recreate that experience than to make a big Mork and Mindy chair that supports the human…
Toppan Printing has developed a paper that can prevent the data maintained on RFID cards from being read by unauthorized readers. Essentially a tin-foil hat for your RFID cards, the paper has a very thin layer of metal inside (the paper being only about 0.2mm thick) which effectively blocks any RFID read attempts on the…
Limor Fried has developed a pair of Media-Sensitive Glasses as part of her Social Defense Mechanisms thesis which darken when a television is visible, preventing the need for therapy inevitably required after too many hours of watching G4 or the Food Network. The glasses can also be configured to darken based on how much TV…