Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not a hybrid and it’s not a cyclocross either. But Swobo’s Crosby is an undeniably awesome bike. Recently Wired.com senior editor and human powered transportation proponent Dylan Tweney took the two wheeler for a series of spins. His take? The beef-cake of a bike is equally at home on unpaved dirt paths or freshly laden asphalt roads. Additionally awesome is a wheel hub that lets you switch from single speed to fixie mode. From Dylan’s review:

As it comes from Swobo, the Crosby is set up with a Sram Torpedo hub, which can switch between freewheelin’ single-speed mode and hipster fixed-gear goodness with a few turns of a screw. Instead of pulling the whole wheel off and turning it around, as you do with flip-flop hubs, you just poke a narrow screwdriver in a hole at the axis of the hub, turn about seven times, and the hub assumes its new identity. Pretty cool! On the downside, there’s a bit more backlash in the fixed-gear mode than we’d like: The pedals have a few degrees of play before they engage the wheels. For that reason, and because we’re not pegged jeans-wearing hipsters, we rode the Crosby primarily in freewheel mode.

Of course this is just a small snippet. You can read the full write-up of the Swobo Crosby Bike over at our reviews site. Go ahead and check it out!

(Photo by Jon Snyder/ Wired.com)

No surprise that the Zune HD announcement has resulted in a flurry of iPod rumors, and there’s a couple good ones going around today. Obviously the big news is a set of photos purporting to show a next-gen touch with a camera — the sourcing and the backdrop in some of the pics make it feel like it’s a publicity stunt, but the shots of the motherboard next to a current-gen touch’s board seem convincing — especially because of Apple’s recent propensity to leak this sort of thing. The other piece of news? CNET says that whatever Apple does next month, the new Cocktail “next-generation album cover” will be a part of it, at least according to “multiple music industry sources.” That might link into the major labels’ CMX initiative, it might have something to do with iTunes 9, it might be a fun little Tom Cruise movie, or it might be nothing at all — but it sure seems like we’re in for a hell of a September.

Update: As commenter Joseph pointed out, these look pretty fake when you zoom in Photoshop — there’s a distinct square of pixels around the lens. Nice publicity stunt, guys — we’ll totally start listening to your show now.

Update 2: After seeing some high res versions of these pics, we think we can safely rule out the JPG artifacting as the tell-tale sign that these are fake. You know what we can’t rule out? The really bad looking Photoshop work around the lens. Much clearer pic after the break. [Thanks for the pic, Manny]

Read – The Covino and Rich Show blog post with iPod touch photos
Read – iPod touch photos on Flickr in higher-res
Read – CNET on Cocktail

Continue reading Next-gen iPod touch photos supposedly leak out; Cocktail part of Apple announcement? (Updated)

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Next-gen iPod touch photos supposedly leak out; Cocktail part of Apple announcement? (Updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[Via Gizmag]

Continue reading Paul Sr. demonstrates OCC’s electric chopper, Fox News seems mystified

Filed under: Transportation

Paul Sr. demonstrates OCC’s electric chopper, Fox News seems mystified originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Some might call this a bear-y cute Netbook. Bear-y…get it?

(Credit: Tokyo Mango )

Being incredibly hung over can sometimes mean you’re still hammered from the night before. Add a Netbook with a picture of a cheery mammal on it, and you really begin to ask yourself: am I …

Stock up on coasters. A new technology combines the coffee table with a universal remote so that people sitting around the table can tap on a screen to change the channel, turn up the volume or dim the lights.

CRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) is a research project in user interface that attempts to create a natural way of connecting with devices. The system offers a streaming video view of the living room on a tabletop, so users can can walk up to it, see the layout of the room and interact with the TV or the photo frame.

“We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive,” says Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a member of the project. A demo of CRISTAL was shown at the Siggraph graphics conference earlier this month.

The idea isn’t completely novel. Microsoft showed off Surface, a multitouch display in 2008 that allows users to interact with it by using gestures.

Universal remotes have become popular in the last few years, but they are still difficult to use. Their greatest flaw, though, may be that they do not help quash those battles over who gets the remote.  CRISTAL solves those problems, says Christian Müller-Tomfelde, an Australian researcher who is currently writing a book on research in tabletop displays.

“It is a clever use of the tabletop as a ‘world-in-miniature’ interface to control room elements,” he says.

Scott and researchers from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences have been working on the idea for less than a year. It started when Michael Haller, the head of the Media Interaction Lab at the university, found himself frustrated with different remotes for each device: TV, radio and DVD player.

“Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it,” says Scott. “And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home.”

CRISTAL uses a camera to capture the living room and all the devices in it, including lamps and digital picture frames. The captured video is displayed on the multi-touch coffee table. The video image of the device itself is the interface, so a sliding gesture on the image can turn up the volume of the TV, for instance. To watch a movie, drag an image of the movie cover and drop it on to the TV on the multitouch screen.

But it will be a few years before this remote is available at Best Buy. It could take five to 10 years before affordable multitouch tabletops can be created for consumers, says Müller-Tomfelde. “The investment to get such a coffee-table display into the living room is not to be underestimated, as we can see with Microsoft’s Surface technology,” he says.

Scott estimates that a tabletop remote such as CRISTAL could cost $10,000 to $15,000. But she is confident that the idea can become viable enough for consumer production in a few years, especially if it can be combined with Microsoft’s Surface product.

Check out a video demo of CRISTAL below.

Photo and video: Media Interaction Lab

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