Hasta La Gadget!

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine, worried that her little brother played too many video games, asked if there was a way to make money while gaming. When I told her about e-sports, she returned quite the guffaw at the concept.

I suggested she tell her brother about …

Don’t take it personally, Blu-ray — we still love you and all, but there’s just something dreamy about baking 1.6TB of information onto a blank piece of optical media we can actually afford. According to a new report, a crew of researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the properties of a certain gold nano-rod that will theoretically enable them to shove 300 DVDs worth of data onto a single disc. Calling the method “five-dimensional optical recording,” the technique “employs nanometer-scale particles of gold as a recording medium,” and according to developers, it’s primed for commercialization. Essentially, these gurus have figured out how to add a spectral and polarization dimension, giving them the ability to record information “in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc.” As for the chances this actually makes it out of the laboratory and into the lives of real humans? Slim, Jim.

[Thanks, Sam]

Filed under: Storage, Science

Aussie whiz-kids can cram 1.6TB on a DVD-sized disc, go Outback tonight originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 May 2009 06:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacBook Pro owner Ken Brinkman has been having some trouble with his notebook. After the Unibody MBP managed to trash not one but two magsafe power supplies, the logic board and fan died and the Mac had to take a trip to the Apple Store. Ken, quite sensibly, decided to run an immediate backup and went to bed, leaving the machine to send over 100GB of data to his Time Capsule.

A few hours later he woke up to the smell of burning plastic:

There was smoke coming out of the keyboard, around the edges and out the ports on the left side. It wasn’t a black smoke really, it seemed like a lighter, grayer smoke. The magsafe, though, was completely engulfed. There were green flames coming off of it. I had a folder underneath the computer too and that burned as well.

Ken’s local Apple Store says that it will replace the machine free of charge. Good news, especially as it had apparently just “fixed” it. But it doesn’t make the inferno any less scary. I actually unplug my MacBook most nights, but that’s because the glowing green “charged” light annoys the Lady. Now, though, I will make sure I unplug it every night, instead of just tossing my underwear at my desk to cover the light up.

MacBook Pro – Unibody MacBook Pro Fire! [Mac Forums via TUAW]

Photos: Ken Brinkman

Brick by brick, Lego has been building its way out of the near bankruptcy it suffered around the turn of the century. It has done this by a seemingly simple strategy — making awesome product after awesome product. Now it is releasing the almost ridiculously fitting Architecture series, beginning with the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection, six planned sets including the Guggenheim in New York and Fallingwater, the iconic cantilevered waterfall-house outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This, we don’t need to tell you, is inspired. Real bricks turned into Lego bricks. The sets are as yet unpriced, but are unlikely to be cheap. The Lego Taj Mahal, for instance, is $300. What’s better is that this is just the beginning of Lego’s Architecture series, as we can see from the teaser on the product page. We’ll put in a vote for Le Corbusier right now (as a bonus, his buildings should be pretty easy to construct in Lego).

Available now, if you can make it to the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim.

UPDATE. The sets are priced at $45, plus shipping from $10 to $25 depending on how far way from the US you live. I have added a link to the online store below.

Fun Lego Facts:

• Worldwide, seven boxes of Lego are sold every second.
• Heo Young-Ho of South Korea left Lego on the top of Mount Everest in 1987.
• According to Lego, even just two bricks give 24 different combinations.
• All Legos are made equal. Every brick is compatible from the first brick made in 1958 (the year before the Guggenheim was completed and Wright died) to those made today.
• The Lego minifig was born in 1974, and it took another 30 years for them to get proper, skin-colored faces when licensed figures dropped yellow for flesh-tone.
• Kids waste around 5 billion hours a year playing with Lego.
• I once got a Lego brick stuck in my nose and it took almost half a day to sneeze it out.

Product page [Lego]

Online store [Brick Structures. Thanks, John!]

Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO Sets (and press release) [Prairie Mod via The Coolist]

If we were a Palm employee and someone caught us using a Pre in public right about now — being the bumbling, unsuave fools that we are — we imagine the conversation would go something like this:

“Excuse me, sir, is that a Palm Pre?”

“What, this? No, it’s a RAZR.”

“Why does it look like a Pre then? And why does the screen say Palm on it?”

“Ah, uh, [unintelligible] emulator… it’s in the App Store. I, uh…”

“You can use the App Store with a RAZR?”

“Yes. Gotta… I’m late for… good talking to you!”

And with that, we’d hurriedly stuff our crap into our Jack Spade (nervously dropping the Pre three times in the process), knock over our triple tall latte, apologize to no one in particular, and run-walk aimlessly away.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Palm Pre casually boots from the cold comfort of a blue Corian countertop originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 May 2009 04:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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