Before there was the Game Boy, there was Game & Watch. DS Fanboy has a sitdown with two dudes who scoured the world to collect every Game & Watch handheld ever produced: 60 in all, each one a unique and delicious plastic bundle with a single game, like Snoopy Tennis or Donkey Kong Jr. How obsessed is collector Michael Panayiotakis?
After collecting them all, he reset his goal and sold most of them to collect only sealed games, ones in their original blister pack or rare versions (like the special edition Super Mario Bros. box he spent $1200 on). They\'ve also got a pretty sweet gallery retrospective of the Game & Watch that\'s definitely worth checking out on this lazy weekend. [DS Fanboy]
With soaring fuel costs and greenhouse gas concerns, zeppelins might get their second chance to be a relevant mode of transportation. According to the New York Times, several countries are now looking into developing dirigibles for transporting things such as sightseers, postal deliveries and scientific payloads. France\'s postal service, La Poste, seems to have some of the most ambitious plans in mind: using airships on routes between France and Corsica or the Antilles in an effort to reduce emissions.
Most experts say that the dirigibles will likely remain a niche vessel. The flying machines can only reach top speeds of around 100 miles an hour, fly in fair to good weather, and hold a maximum capacity of several dozen passengers. Not to mention, each one is still about the size of a football field. But at least now, thanks to improvements in materials and safety standards, passengers won\'t have to worry about being trapped in another Hindenburg. [New York Times]
Here\'s a great product to ensure that you\'ll never be invited to somebody\'s backyard ever again—the “Easy Install Twist Chair.” Instead of having four legs like regular chairs, the Twist uses a corkscrew base that you plug into the ground and spin until it\'s solidly placed. Bring the chair along the next time you go to a garden party and see if your hosts appreciate you aerating their lawn. [Yanko Design]
Have you ever searched for new updates with Windows Update in Vista? It\'s slow as balls, no matter how beefy your machine is. But! Windows Update is getting an, um, update that will make it run a lot faster—scan times are down almost 20 percent. If you have automatic updates turned off, obviously you won\'t get this happy joy update when it rolls out at the end of the month, unless you go to Windows Update and install it manually. And you should, unless you want update scans to still take forever. [Microsoft Update Product Blog]
Sony is probably OLED\'s most vocal prophet as the TV of the future. But according to Nikkei, they\'re hedging their bets and getting more serious with another next-gen display tech: field emission display, which is a lot like a good ol\' cathode ray tube, except that it\'s super thin—it has all the benefits too, like deep blacks and zero motion blur. A "dream panel" says Nikkei. Plus, they\'re easier to build at large sizes than OLED TVs. Sony just agreed to take over a plant run by Pioneer to begin mass production of FED panels in late 2009 after holding the tech at arm\'s length for years.
Sony\'s plans for FED displays are to push them to broadcasting and medical apps first, building slowly, rather than to jump right into the high-stakes plasma/LCD war, where nobody\'s making money thanks to the very bloody price war. Then it\'ll inch into the consumer market, first with 60-inch displays (at the level they can be more profitable, obviously). Looks like after plasma vs. LCD, we might have yet another fight on our hands: FED vs. OLED. [Nikkei]
For the ultimate game of Duck Hunt, Marksman Training Systems is offering the ST-2 shooting simulator—the first on the market for shotgun and rifle shooting. Co-developed by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the simulator is so accurate that its used by Russian and Slovakian national clay shooting teams as a way to practice before the Olympics.
The ST-2 gives exact feedback after every shot, including hit position and a replay of the aiming movement. Results can be saved and kept in a file to record short- and long-term progress. You can even bring your own gun, which can be hooked up to the system\'s programs. Pricing is on a case by case basis, but you can expect this outfit to cost a pretty penny. Snickering dog not included. [Marksman Training Systems via Born Rich]
Someone I know once had the awesome idea of turning a laundromat (popular here in my neck of the woods) into a singles bar. With this concept washer and dryer from Indian designer Harsha Vardhan, we could up our prospective plans a notch and instead turn laundromats into singles lounges. The make believe washing machine doubles as a large seat whether it\'s in active or passive mode. The inner chamber of the chaise acts as a pressure washer and cleans clothes with ionized air instead of water.
While the Alternative Clothes Cleaner unfortunately still remains in the realm of fantasy, I\'d like to believe that someday an appliance like this will finally exist. Then we can all place bets on how many cosmopolitans I\'d need to chug before I can pull out my unmentionables in front of the cutie two sofa-washers down. [DVICE]
Sure, you might loathe Apple with every fiber of your Windows-running being. But look at this iPod USB stick. It\'s so cute. How can you hate it? It comes in 1GB and 2GB flavors for £19.95 (about $40, damn weak dollar) and £24.95 ($50). Yep, still adorable. Awwww. No? You probably hated Wall-E too. [BoysStuff via Nerd Approved]
Now that we\'re headed deep into the middle of summer, it\'s time to bring out water balloons and figure out ingenious ways to fling them at your enemies. Here\'s a great tutorial at Instructables for making a wicked water balloon catapult using surgical tubing, a rag and other random doohickies from around the house. According to the dude responsible for this weapon of watery destruction, this shooter will never explode the water balloon prematurely, unlike some of the types you get in stores. [Instructables]
Making robots even more hardcore, British roboticists have designed machines that will only dance to punk rock music. Standing 2 meters tall, padded in leather and decked in various punk scene insignias, the pogoing robots wait until they hear the familiar strains of anti-establishment rock before they start dancing. Is it just me, or do these things sound like they\'d be a minor threat in the mosh pit?
The machines were designed by a collaboration of artists and scientists from Queen Mary University in London. They use neural networks, a collection of computer processors that function like a simple animal brain, to differentiate between Black Flag and say... Bob Marley. The result: robots that can dance to a genre of music even if they\'ve never heard the song before. Check out the BBC link to see a video of the robots gleefully pogoing to The Fumadores. [BBC]
Windows Mobile users have had to look on in envy as people poked and drew penises on their friends\' walls with dedicated apps for BlackBerry and Palm, wistfully hoping that joy could one day be their own. And now it is! Apparently the first full Facebook app for Windows Mobile, FriendMobilizer will let you do all of the basics like stalk your newly single friend, send messages or ignore requests from people you\'ve never met. It\'s a lot greener (and uglier) than the Centro\'s app (which I like a lot) but hey, beggars can\'t be choosers. And I mean, you guys were begging for this, right? [Face of Mobile via ReadWriteWeb]
Father de Carli, the flying priest who got lost last April, has been found dead in the middle of the Atlantic. In an effort to raise funds for a local charity organization, De Carli planned to stay for more than 19 hours up in the air using a thousand party balloons, taking a GPS with him to communicate his position in case emergency. Unfortunately, the trip ended in disaster.
The body of the priest was found yesterday by the Anna Gabriela, a tug working for Brazilian oil company Petrobras, 683 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Father De Carli\'s starting point. His trip started on April 20 after a mass, and his last contact was a desperate attempt to learn how to use his GPS and communicate his position as the wind took him deep into the Atlantic Ocean.
I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.
Not much of el Padre has been found, but a Petrobras official spokesman said that "his clothes and shoes indicate that it\'s him." And now I don\'t know if I should say "Godspeed, Padre De Carli" or "Another potential winner for the Darwin Awards," so I guess a "rest in peace" will do. [Bloomberg]
As part of Sharp\'s recent efforts to shove itself to the forefront of solar innovation, the company is showcasing a prototype of a 26-inch LCD Aquos TV that can be powered entirely by the sun. Now even the 1.6 billion people on earth without electricity won\'t have an excuse to miss the next season of Lost.
The set has a contrast ratio of 10000:1 and a 20mm thick display panel. It requires about 30% less power than regular LCD TVs and gets its juice from one of Sharp\'s triple-junction thin-film solar cell modules. The modules are about the same size as the television\'s screen.
Sharp plans to market the LCD and the energy system as a pair and says that its product could be a hit with both people living off the grid and environmentally-conscious consumers. The company will be exhibiting this, and other energy-saving technologies, at the G8 summit on Monday. [Physorg]
The second Futurama DVD hasn\'t even stopped spinning in our drives and we\'re already looking forward to the third one. It\'s a much geekier affair than even Futurama fans are used to, as they\'re delving into the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Will this Ender\'s Game Futurama movie be any good? We\'re pretty sure it will, seeing as the Kirk and Spock heads are back, and that was probably one of the best episodes ever.
Before we completely bid adieu to our nation\'s birthday, we here at Taranfx would like to give one more shout out to the fourth of July. Seems like even the stars in the sky can\'t resist putting up a display for good ol\' American freedom. These red-white-and-blue pictures of Supernova remnant SN 1006 are what\'s left over from a star explosion first observed by humans in year 1006.
The flash in the sky is a remnant of a blast 7,000 light-years away in the Lupus constellation. Scientists say that it was the brightest observed supernova in recorded history, and that the light from the explosion could be seen in the daytime for weeks afterward.
The supernova sent a shockwave that traveled outwards at nearly 20 million mph. In the 1960s, radio astronomers first detected the ring of material pushed out by the shockwave. With the latest imagery, released by the Hubble Space Telescope\'s science team, you can see a gossamer stripe with starlight shining through it – the rocket\'s red glare indeed.
The Gadget: Lego Egg Timer. The Price: $7.99 The Verdict: It\'s cute. It\'s makes a wonderful tic-tock noise. It helps you do roasted lamb and chicken and Beef Wellington and cakes. It\'s Lego. Really, it can\'t get any better than that. I only wish it could do more than one hour.
I bought the Lego Egg Timer while visiting Legoland in Denmark, at the end of my visit to the Lego factory. Since then I\'ve used it many times and its design doesn\'t cease to entertain me. The top half of the mini-fig head rotates as it counts time, changing the expression as the minutes pass. Nothing else can be said about it, really, except that it\'s cute and it works great.
By the way, I will resume the chronicles of the Lego trip next week, after giving you a week of respite. Coming soon: an inside look at how the Lego bricks and sets are made, how they are designed from concept to final product, and what it\'s like to work there, among many other things. Stay tuned. [Lego]
How do you celebrate July 4th like a true Gizmodian? If you answered "waking up on the 5th with a severe hangover and sparkler burns where the sun don\'t shine," you\'d be correct! Oh, that, and visiting our July 4th tag.
Faithful readers will know I am not even close to finished exploiting my painful job experiences at the Chuck E. Cheese in the Bergen Mall for Taranfx fodder. God I hate that place. When I was growing up, the cooler place to be with way better pizza and far better games was ShowBiz Pizza. ShowBiz also had another advantage: this terrifying but captivating animitronic musical band called Rocka-fire Explosion, which is the subject of this documentary. I am watching it, and lighting a candle in remembrance. And Fuck Chuck E. Cheese. [Youtube via BoingBoing\'s David P.]
In this week\'s New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about the Danish isle of Samsø, which over the past 10 years, has gone from exclusively using fossil fuel energy sources, to living exclusively off renewable energy. Using a combination of onshore and offshore turbines, private mini-turbines, solar panels, straw-burning furnaces and biofuels, the 4,300-resident island has become a sort of a sandbox for green experimentation.
The man responsible for Samsø\'s shift is Søren Hermansen, who after deciding farming wasn\'t for him, became an environmental sciences teacher, and then a renewable energy expert. Growing up on the island and seeing the impact the people were having on the environment, Hermansen felt he could talk the residents into making some changes. The public response was favorable, and the transformation began. The island now has 11 onshore turbines, a biomass plant, and a straw burning plant, which are invested in by the residents of Samsø, as well as outside, private investors. All the while, this green movement has brought in a constant flow of researchers, scientists and sociologists trying to figure out Samsø\'s mojo.
And for those in the giant turbine market, I think it\'s worth noting that giant turbines come with panoramic sunroofs. Not sure about power locks and cruise control, however. [New Yorker]
The majority of Apple rumors ignored by the veterans at sites like Macrumors and Apple Insider are non-sourced, usually building up from the updrafts of the blog/analyst/network news circle jerk vortex. This new site, with almost no content right now, has a great idea: Drop the pretense of claiming to know what Apple is working on, forum mongers, and write them in their true form as desperate pleas for Crazy Apple Gear. Given that the nice domain name, also feel free to drop suggestions and open letters for the City and Mayor of Cupertino in here, too. Maybe an Apple-designed swing set off of N Stelling Road or something. [DearCupertino]
Well, we hope you\'ve had a good day off, a great BBQ and plenty of watermelon. Also, we hope that you didn\'t blow up your face. We\'ll leave you with one last Consumer Product Safety Commission clip that proves, once and for all, that it is NOT okay to point fireworks at friends and family members. They may end up in a storm of smoke and fire. Happy 4th everybody! [CPSC]
These numeric keypad chairs are pretty amazing in a nerd chic sort of way. If you tried cramming these into your 700-square-foot bachelor pad, you\'d look like the biggest tool alive. But in a place with a million square feet and that white, minimalist vibe, they\'d be pretty amazing. These appear to be concepts, but the obscure Japanese site they came from makes it hard to tell. [PantoGraph via misterstarfish via Technabob]
Laredo, Texas (Agencies) - Surprising everyone but industry guru Gene Munster, Dell has announced a partnership with Apple Inc. that will see the former licensing the latter\'s exclusive Manila Case technology to ship all their computer products and accessories, like their Dell Rubber Chickens and Dell Texas-Style BBQ Ribs. "It was bound to happen," said Munster in a telephone interview from his room at the Cupertino Inn, which he uses as a base to stalk Steve Jobs.
"I mean, given Dell\'s constant focus on cutting costs, it was a matter of time before they focused on packaging to save some dollars here and there" added the Piper Jaffray\'s analyst, "and let\'s face it, Apple\'s solution is the most efficient, light, and cost-effective in the industry. Like everything else they do. I predict they will hit the $500 [price per share] mark before 2009. Even $510."
Reportedly, Dell will have to pay Apple $20 per manila envelope, but they will save "a lot of money" in postage stamps, according to Mr. Munster. Dell representatives were not available for comment, but Mr. Munster told this reporter that Steve Jobs called Michael Dell late last night to say "who\'s my bitch now, huh? Who\'s my bitch?" [Thanks Hawkskater0]
The BlackBerry Kickstart is by far not RIM\'s best looking phone. But it is a real live BlackBerry and it will run a mere 50 bucks when it launches on T-Mobile in September.
The Centro has proven that a cheap smartphone can sell like hotcakes. Granted the Centro is cute, the Kickstart is not. But $50 (with a two-year contract, natch) puts it in the same mass market as the crappier LGs and Sammys. It\'s a crazy way to hook the kids, but it might just work. (It\'d work better if the phone wasn\'t so ugly.) [Crackberry via Silicon Alley Insider]
Acer\'s G24 gaming monitor is apparently the only one badass enough for its Predator gaming PC. Besides being slathered in the same hue of rusty orange, according to Acer, this 24-incher is the world\'s highest contrast monitor, with a 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. Stuff should pop big, in other words.
Other specs: 1920x1200 res, 2ms response time, 400 nits, HDMI and DVI out ports. The arguably most important numbers—price and date—are nowhere to be found. But "not cheap" and "later" sound like reasonable guesses! [Acer via Engadget]
If you\'re anything like us, you\'re probably deep into your 12th beer by now. You may think that now\'s the perfect time to test some of those firecrackers in your kitchen. Well, don\'t, or you may end up like this guy and his house, both blasted to smithereens by some lousy M-1000s. Take it from us and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and have a happy 4th everybody! [CPSC]
The Gadget: The Moto E8 ROKR is a candybar music phone that makes use of a touch-sensitive, haptic feedback panel on the bottom half of the phone. It\'s nearly buttonless, save for a few on the side.
The Price: $199 (after 2-year contract)
The Verdict: Long story short, the hardware is great, the music interface is decent, the T-Mobile interface sucks. But let\'s start with the good. Not only do I like build quality, and how the button layout changes according to the phone\'s function, I also like that the haptic feedback really feels like the phone has buttons (Herrman is still convinced there aren\'t haptics). As a music player, the capacitive ring and menu system give it an iPod sort of feel, which is nice. It\'s pretty easy to use, and doesn\'t suffer from much lag. Syncing with Windows Media Player is a relatively painless process, but that means it\'s also Windows only (Mac Users have to transfer files via MicroSD, ugh).
The thing that makes me never want to touch the phone again is T-Mobile\'s UI skin, which takes competent phone software and turns it into a laggy, unresponsive pile of crap. Seeing as this phone is a T-Mo exclusive, I think it\'s important to highlight how much I dislike it. Frequently I try to enter into a menu for the camera, or text messages, only to be thrown back to the MyFaves home screen. After hitting another button in response, the phone decides it wants to go to the app I was originally trying to use, and then respond to my subsequent button pushing. The dialog boxes also like to clash with the menus, which allow for frequent input errors. I liken the process to playing voicemail tag with someone, which is to say it\'s totally annoying.
Other than that, it\'s just slow, the capacitive ring is no good for navigating the main menu, and trying D-pad feels cramped. So while I think the phone is an above average candybar, I\'d hold out for a version running different software.
TiVo has been setting the bar for timeshifting television (what you want, when you want it) for the better part of a decade. Its latest models, the TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD, further refine and extend functionality to high definition TV and downloadable movies. But the future might not be so bright for TiVo, as other players such as Microsoft\' Vista Media Center, Apple\'s Apple TV, Netflix\'s Roku player, and upstarts like the Vudu aim to drink their milkshake. What\'s a company to do? Innovate. Use the internet. Connect users together. Go beyond broadcast TV. Here\'s what we think TiVo needs to prioritize in their next box in order to dominate the living room for the next decade.
Most importantly, they need to embrace the internet, which includes BitTorrent. There\'s no sense in fighting it since people are currently using software like TED to automatically search for and download episodes of their favorite shows. It\'s like BitTorrent TiVo. West Coast users can even use it to download episodes shortly after it\'s done showing on the East Coast, giving them the ability to watch shows before broadcast and without commercials.
A source close to TiVo we spoke to says that they\'ve looked at BitTorrent, but they need to differentiate between BitTorrent the protocol and BitTorrent in the sense that people are using it now to pirate shows. The current TiVos are designed to record two HD shows simultaneously, which leaves little power to run the fairly CPU-intensive BitTorrent protocol now. If there\'s a way to use it to help digital distribution in the future, TiVo will consider adding it. Here\'s how we think they can use the technology.
• Use BitTorrent to download shows legally. Say you somehow missed recording a show because they changed up the schedule from Tuesdays to Mondays (unlikely since TiVo auto-updates the guide, but still possible if your internet connection is down) or you forget to set a recording for a new series or you start watching a series in the middle. Why should you be punished into waiting until the entire season is out on DVD to watch this? If you\'re tech savvy enough, you\'ve already been hitting the torrents and grabbing the episodes—or even seasons—you missed. Why not have TiVo centrally record a show, then let you torrent it out, complete with commercials, if you happen to miss recording it yourself? The ads keep the studios happy, and the fact that you get to watch a show keeps you happy.
• Enable peer to peer sharing. A company called NDS tried to do this in 2007 before legalities made it impossible. Picture being able to watch shows with your friends across the country at the same time, streamed from users who\'ve already got that recording on their TiVos. Using BitTorrent will drastically reduce bandwidth costs on TiVo, but still give a very fast transfer rate to end users.
• Stream network\'s web content. ABC and NBC have both started getting into web video in a big way, putting their shows online for viewers to watch the next day on a browser. Extend this to a TiVo box (keeping the ads in so people who need to get paid get paid) and you\'re set.
• Stream your shows anywhere, including laptops, cellphones and other TiVo boxes. Yes, would essentially be a Slingbox built into a TiVo, allowing you to watch your shows on the go with your cellphones without any additional hardware. But why not have your living room TiVo networked together with the one in your bedroom? If you recorded Lost on one and Heroes on the other, you could stream it to each other without having to waste hard drive space doubly recording it.
• Download movies from every service. This is a tough one, but TiVo should expand their current Amazon Unbox movie service to include iTunes, Netflix and whatever service decides to pop up between now and doomsday. Be service agnostic and everyone will love you. DVDs don\'t distinguish between movies sold at Best Buy and movies sold at Circuit City.
But TiVo can\'t survive off of networking features alone; they need to expand the core functionality of the box as well. Here\'s what we\'re proposing.
• Auto encoding and syncing to devices. TiVoToGo is fine for grabbing shows off of your TiVo, encoding them and uploading it to your iPod when you\'ve got lots of spare time, but if you\'re in a hurry, it\'s not nearly as convenient. A TiVo only needs all its CPU power when recording two HD shows, so they can easily use the excess cycles during idle times to automatically encode shows into a format your iPod or Zune can understand. All you have to do is simply dock your player into a USB port and choose the shows you want to carry with you.
• Messaging and communications. This ties into the peer to peer sharing feature above, but being able to have Xbox Live-like messages exchanged between your friends or even being able to chat with them while you\'re watching the same show (group chat!) would be phenomenal. Or if you don\'t want their jibber jabber during the show, just chat it up during commercials. A branded TiVo wireless keyboard and a wireless headset would be optional peripherals, or you can just hook up your own USB keyboard and USB headset.
• Ultimate file playback support. The one thing that\'s absolutely necessary to make the TiVo the core of the living room entertainment center is support for popular file formats. We\'re talking h.264, DivX, XviD, OGM, MKV, MOV, FLV, and anything else people encode their videos with. This way even users who don\'t have cable TV can get a TiVo and use it as a file dump for their BitTorrented shows and movies. Playing these files back easily in HD, without prior conversion, would truly make this the ultimate set top box.
Hey everyone, just checking in again to make sure your day is going well. And you haven\'t blown your face off with some giant aerial fireworks. Because believe me, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission: If you act like the mannequin (manikin?) in the clip above, the last place you\'ll end up is in a hospital emergency room. Happy 4th everybody! [CPSC]
In your daily dose of science geekiness, you may appreciate another event going on in the sky this July 4th than the annual combustion of your neighbor\'s illegal stash of gunpowder—Mars and Saturn will align for the evening. Then on the 5th, the Moon will join those two for a little celestial ménage à trois. We know, it\'s usually too much work to grab your telescope for these things. But since you\'ll be staring at the sky already... [NASA via TFOT, Image]
