Hasta La Gadget!

This may sound weird, but maybe the children—the future engineers, programmers and techs of our world—deserve crappy gadgets as presents this holiday.

It’s not that I think all kids are bad. Nor is it about avoiding breeding spoiled brats. Buying high end gadgets for kids is not quite like buying new driver a sportscar. Not exactly. But a kid driving a beater that is slow, handles poorly and needs mechanical love once in awhile can teach an early driver a lot more about how to coax the maximum performance and life out of a car when learning on a piece of junk. Likewise with tech. Giving them great gadgets can deny kids the unavoidable toil poorly designed or rough-around the edges technology offers that can be so educational. I don’t have kids, and I won’t presume to actually propose parenting advice to anyone, but I can draw on my own childhood, where I learned tech by taking the harder way.

My dad wisely refused to buy me a complete toy remote controlled car, but instead had me work on a Tamiya kit car, which required me to learn how to solder at age 7. The kid across the street from me eventually had to ask me how to build his own car. He was 16. In another instance, one of many, I couldn’t get Ultima to run on my dad’s old 386 until I got the autoexec batch file set up right. It was a pain but getting that game to run right taught me a nugget of knowledge. I had plenty of experience like this, and they all added to my collective experience with machines.

One famous geek dad I put this theory to said he didn’t think high end gear in itself was the problem.

Because computers suck so much, every high-end gadget requires learning all sort of tricky OS stuff like managing several devices, understand DRM, password and username management, updating firmware, rebooting when things go wrong, etc. Compared to a games console, practically everything involving a computer is a mini lesson in IT.

I can agree with that, but I think it strengthens my point. What’s funny is that the types of devices I use manage most of these problems he mentions very elegantly. Today, most of the gear I use is from a certain manufacturer that prides itself on making things very easy to use and consumer oriented. And I appreciate it, but I can’t help but feel like I’m becoming dependent on technology so polished, its no harder to use than biting into an…Apple.

Then again, other tech parents I talked to believe what I’m saying is nothing new. One creative family in particular thought the philosophy here could be applied to all mediums. For example, Instead of having their kid listen to pop music, they give her weekly music lessons. And although their daughter has total access to all the gadgets her father and mother do, they’re using it to ramp her up to more difficult and advanced ways to interface with and control tech. That is, she’s getting programming lessons soon. Knowing the girl, I think she’ll enjoy them, even thought she’s been raised on easy to use tech. But perhaps the difference here is how that energy is diverted — instead of using a tinkering mentality to get the baseline OS working, she might use it to write programs.

Another parent says this is all theoretical. I heard on some NPR show awhile ago that there’s not much you can do to encourage or discourage the spirit of a young person. I guess what I’m saying is that giving junior geeks personal tech problems from a young age can be can be good basic training, so what benefit do we get by buying them stuff that works out of the box?

Did we just blow your mind with this all-black T-Mobile Dash? Besides sporting a new look, this furtively shot handset seems to confirm details we received from a tipster over the weekend. According to the source, the new phones have been seen in a few T-Mob stores across the country, and they’re sporting Windows 6.1 and a camera upgrade of some sort. We’re light on details, like whether or not this bad boy is 3G, but then again there’s no telling whether or not any of this is even for reals. But that is a picture, isn’t it? We’ll just have to wait and see.

[Thanks, Scott K]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile Dash may not be getting an overhaul, may not be in stores now originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though not much of a looker — feel free to insert your own beer goggles joke here — Basil the Robot is an experiment by Jim and Louise Gunderson to train an AI to identify its surroundings symbolically. That way, the couple hopes, he can react dynamically in new environments. Basil was intended to be shown off at a Cafe Scientifique meeting by having him go to the bar and order drinks for his creators, but that proved unsuccessful when Basil’s battery died. The couple did videotape a successful trial run from the night before, which you can see after the break. Basil will next receive a microphone for voice commands and be upgraded from his current sonar navigation to a video sight system. The eventual goal is to teach Basil to go to the local brewery and pick up beer. Sure, we’re still terrified of the robot revolution, but let’s get serious here — who are we to deny our mechanical overlords if they keep proffering us six-packs? Hit up the read link for the full story.

[Via Metafilter]

Continue reading Basil the Robot trained for symbolic recognition, beer toting

Filed under: Robots

Basil the Robot trained for symbolic recognition, beer toting originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the latest episode of the Gadget Lab podcast, Brian Chen and Priya Ganapati discuss Apple’s shocking announcement that Steve Jobs will not appear at January’s Macworld Expo. And beyond that, Apple said the corporation would cease attending Macworld after 2009. We talk about what this all means for Apple and Macworld. (One thing’s clear: You can expect pretty boring Apple products to launch at Macworld, such as the rumored upgrade for the Mac Mini.) 

On a related note, we also discuss the possibility of Dell working on an ultra thin notebook to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air. Then, we analyze a new trend seen in netbooks: Cellphone-like contracts.

If the embedded player above doesn’t work, you can download the Gadget Lab podcast MP3.

Use iTunes? Subscribe to the Gadget Lab Audio Podcast in iTunes. Do it now!

You also simply must check out the Gadget Lab Video Podcast — available on iTunes and the Gadget Lab blog.

Book review by Wired.com photo editor Jim Merithew; photographs courtesy of pdxcross

Bicyclists who put their rides away at the first sign of inclement weather will get a gritty reality check when they see Dirty Pictures.

The beautifully photographed book documents the 2008 cyclocross season in Portland, Oregon, showing the muddy mess that the sport’s dedicated riders get themselves into in their pursuit of winter thrills.

Cyclocross, invented as a way for European professional road cyclists to stay fit during the off-season, takes place in the fall and early winter and consists of riders tearing through multiple laps on imposing courses composed of pavement, dirt, rocks, grass, short pitches and a variety of obstacles. Pedaling bikes specially designed for cyclocross’ dirty demands, they ride what they can and run the rest.

Looking at the rich black-and-white photos in Dirty Pictures for the first time, you could easily mistake the book for a collection of images from historical European cyclocross races. But these muddy faces, smiling through the grit in their teeth, are members of the Portland scene. The beauty of the book is that the photographers are having as much fun as the racers: The photogs have undeniably immersed themselves in the subculture.

The photography possesses a distinctively European aesthetic, encouraging readers to be like participants in the shenanigans rather than mere voyeurs.

We are there as the riders line up en masse, mount their bikes, race for the first corner, scramble up hillsides, sprint up stairs, get cheered on by family and friends, slip in the mud, scramble back aboard their rides, cross the finish line and share a beer or two as they tell each other the tales of the day.

We are there from start to finish, during the trials and tribulations of riding cross in the soggy, foggy Pacific Northwest.

Dirty Pictures, distributed by self-publishing house Blurb, was designed by Deborah Pang Davis and edited by her husband, former White House photo editor Mike Davis.

It’s not cheap at $70 for the hardcover version ($50 for soft-cover), but no self-respecting bicycling/photography nut should be without a copy.