Babygadget: Think this little crib on wheels looks like a hospital incubator? There’s a reason for that! Castor & Chouca, French designers, take inspiration from the best design in the medical field, reinterpreting it for the home. Looks like there’s a little more room to be playful in the domestic arena.
If you thought only a semi-deity like Ben Heck could splice consoles into laptop-shaped cases, here’s some evidence to the contrary. This week, CollinE from Ben’s forums put the finishing touches to his own, rather professional looking, Xbox 360 laptop. Adorned in a red and black color scheme that features a throwback giant X on the top lid, his 360 stays true to the original console in almost all respects — including the “wind tunnel” noise generated by Collin’s five fans. The fact he also consulted our guide on how to do this is just a cherry on the top for us, and you can find a video tour of the hardware after the break. Should it take your fancy, the machine’s now on auction with all proceeds going to the “make Collin’s Christmas merrier” foundation.
Gallery: Xbox 360 laptop mod
Continue reading Xbox 360 laptop brings retro looks to an eBay near you
Xbox 360 laptop brings retro looks to an eBay near you originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Want a better shot at getting a lost digital camera back? If your finder has any heart at all, a multi-frame photo message will give both motivation and instructions. Check out Andrew McDonald’s smirk-inducing series as an example.
Children’s author and blogger Andrew McDonald never deletes 25 photos on his camera’s memory card—presumably kept in a separate folder from the standard image outputs. Flipped through on a camera viewfinder, they offer a pretty amazing personal story about the importance of that camera, the unique humanness of the owner, and, most importantly, an email address for coordinating a camera return.
Andrew’s posted all the pics at his blog, but you can get the viewfinder-flip effect by checking out the animated GIF version, courtesy of Your Daily GIF Blog. Oh, and while you’re adding permanent camera card fixtures, tossing in a helpful TXT file couldn’t hurt, either.
Thanks to Zombie Ms. Skittles for leaving us that #tip, which anyone can do.
Continue reading Rfiddler zapper kills RFID tags dead, the hard way
Rfiddler zapper kills RFID tags dead, the hard way originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Unless you live in what the Lady calls “Carpeted England”, where even the bathrooms have a thick mantle of Axminster ready to soak up smelly spills, you probably don’t have much use for a vacuum cleaner. A broom and a mop will do the trick just fine, and leave you in silence so you can enjoy some music along the way.
But if you are unlucky enough to have carpeted floors, you could at least do yourself the favor of sucking the filth out of them in some style, with this Electrolux/Toshiba collaboration, the Escargot. Weighing in at just shy of five pounds, the brushed metal machine can be slung over a shoulder for easy navigation of hallways, or just dragged by its handy handle. And its not just the size that is discreet — the Escargot puts out just 65dB of whine, which isn’t too much more than the superior brush/mop combo mentioned before.
In fact, the only confusing part about the Escargot (apart from making me wonder why you have carpets in your dirty house) is the name. Not only does it not look like a snail, we doubt it tastes anything like those wonderful, succulent creatures. $130.
Manufacturers page [Toshiba via Design Boom]
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Digitimes, a site which likes to predict the future of Apple hardware by keeping track of the components Apple orders from its suppliers, has a juicy tidbit regarding the iPhone camera. Not only has Apple, apparently, ordered 40-45 million camera units from OmniVision Technologies for 2010 (up from around 21 million for this year), but those camera-chips are packed with five million pixels apiece.
That Apple would be upgrading the camera in the inevitable summer iPhone announcement is not a surprise, but it’s good to see the camera being taken seriously after the neglect of the first two iPhones. Hopefully these five megapixels will be good pixels, and not the terribly noisy pixels like those found crammed shoulder to shoulder in my Samsung 5MP phonecam, squashed onto the sensor like Tokyo subway commuters at rush-hour.
This rumor points to one other interesting iPhone fact, too. Now that the handset has everything it needs, from 3G to GPS to a compass, what can Apple do to improve it? The iPhone is really about software now, so we don’t expect the hardware to change much at all, other than faster chips and a few visual flourishes to make last year’s model look like, well, last year’s model.
OmniVision orders for iPhone expected to rise significantly in 2010 [DigiTimes]
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Photo illustration: Charlie Sorrel
The Hipstamatic, contrary to its name, isn’t a camera to be used whilst wearing tight pants, showing your underwear and doing elephant trunk skids on your fixed-gear track bike. Instead, it is an iPhone application which will apply all manner of image degrading, film-like effects to your pictures.
Hipstamatic is certainly not the only Lomo-fication application in the iTunes Store, but it is notable for its wonderful interface, which lets you choose from various films, add flash-gel effects and swap “lenses”. For instance, swapping lenses is done by swiping across the front of the camera body, and changing films is achieved by flipping the on-screen camera open and choosing which one to use. Thankfully the visual metaphor doesn’t continue as far as making you engage the sprocket-holes. When you are all set, you flip the camera back around and view the action through a tiny, low-contrast, on-screen “viewfinder”.
The app itself comes in at $2, and further effects packs can be bought from within. The Williamsburg (ho ho) pack, for example, comes with a Helga Viking lens, Pistil film and a three-pack of gels (shouldn’t that be a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon?) These bad puns are to be found throughout Hipstamatic, and spotting them is part of the fun.
Perhaps I will give this to myself as an early Christmas gift, to remind me of the plastic-lensed, light leaking camera that was part of the Starsky and Hutch kit I got for Christmas so many years ago.
Hipstamatic Application [Hipstamatic]
There are a LOT of great pre and post-show moments. This is merely a sampling of the best from 2009.
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Originally posted at Gadgettes, the blog
If the San Francisco Department of the Environment gets its way, starting as soon as next month Bay Area residents might start noticing the radiation levels of cellphones displayed prominently next to their respective price at retail outlets. This is, of course, despite no definitive research that the handsets cause harm and the FCC’s insistence that the devices sold to consumers are safe. The proposal is being endorsed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who as it’s noted is not about to stop using his iPhone anytime soon. Not to worry, Maine, you’ll still keep the top spot for most ridiculous cellphone warning label.
San Francisco considers displaying phone radiation levels next to price tag originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Is it any surprise that when I asked a bunch of Gizmodo readers to share their holiday horror stories, you guys sent in tales of frozen cameras, techno-challenged dads and—yes—porn-filled PS3s?
A fellow who goes by Skunkabilly sent his pictorial tale on Flickr, which documents a camping trip to Monument Valley and the miserable story of a D90 which froze up—literally. Apparently the poor camera was set up outside the tent in an attempt to capture one of those gorgeous swirling-star slow exposures of the sky.
I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life, so I don’t really understand how this whole cold and frost thing works.
When he woke up, his precious DSLR was covered with frost. “What the crap is this?” he asked himself. “Ahhh, yes. All hail Frosty the Nikon!” He tried to thaw his camera on the engine block of his Subaru, but ultimately decided to take it inside the car. Sure, it fogged up on the inside for a bit, but it was fine eventually, and the rest of the trip was smooth.
The part that caught our attention though? Skunkabilly ended the tale by saying, “Hopefully I won’t rappel into a pool and drown it to death like I did with my D200.” Yikes! Sounds like there’s a history of gadget abuse here.
Marte, better known as infmom, sent in this photo from 1961. It’s Christmas morning, and she and her brother are admiring the elaborate electric train set their father had bought and built for them. Only that fact in itself was mysterious, as their father “could barely change a lightbulb.”
Marte explains that, to his dying day, her father referred to record players as “Victrolas” and refrigerators as “iceboxes.” Not so much Luddite as someone who didn’t usually get involved with the technical processes of the household, he decided that year to break the trend, and get constructive.
A few days before Christmas, Dad brought home the train set and the plastic scenery and the controllers and a bunch of wood and nails and smuggled all the stuff into the basement through the outside door and told us to stay out of it. He borrowed a hand saw and a hammer from the neighbors and set to work trying to build a table to put the train set on. Including sawing a sheet of plywood to size. With a hand saw. Laid across our basement coffee table, which was a hollow core door on legs. When my mom heard the language coming from the basement she told us to stay way away from it.
Though his effort to this point was valiant, the electrical engineering—and a certain amount of required drilling, for which he lacked a drill—did him in. Still, on Christmas morning, the train set was up and running. How?
We were thinking some kind of miracle had occurred, until our mother told us that later that day we were to go over and thank our neighbor, who worked for the phone company, for responding to Dad’s late-night cry for help.
Marte thinks that’s the point where she vowed to grow up learning how to fix things herself. And considering that she’s lurking around Lifehacker and Gizmodo, odds are that she did. I feel bad for her father though. While Marte and her brother got to enjoy their gift, to him this must’ve been a genuine holiday horror.
We’ve heard of coal in the stocking, but Jeff’s story sounds worse. One Christmas, he hit the jackpot, scoring not just a cool RC car, but a set of Crazy Bones figurines too. So the next Christmas, he was reasonably quite excited:
I used to love sleeping by the fireplace at night, right next to the Christmas tree. Every season, I would do this with my little brother, and fall asleep to the warm glow of the fire, and wake up in the morning with presents all around us. I went to sleep too giddy to even imagine what I was going to receive the next morning.
I awoke to the sound of wrapping paper crumpling around me, as I stared at two of the biggest packages I had ever seen. I immediately started shredding the paper [the first one] was wrapped in, like a hungry wolf digging into its prey. What did I uncover? Two brand spankin’ new… comforter and blanket sets. [And in] the smaller package next to it? A 100-capacity floppy disk lock box.
Sadly, he did not even receive any floppies to put inside it.
Photo by alliet
Luckybob343 grew up in the ’80s, a time when “Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a remote-controlled, battery-operated something.”
The trouble was, Santa brought all the cool electronic toys but he never brought any batteries. Those we had to buy ourselves, but in our house we could only buy batteries from my dad’s independent electronics store.
Sure, sounds nice to keep it in the family, but there were two catches: First, his dad bought hisbatteries in bulk from Walmart, and jacked up the price by $2 per pack. And second, Luckybob’s dad’s store was closed from Christmas Eve until January 2nd.
Come the new year, we’d fork over three weeks of allowances over to my dad to get to play with our toys one week after we got them.
Luckybob finally got some revenge though. This year, he got a multi-instrument weather station that he knew his dad had been eying, and he took out all the instructions except the ones written in French.
Photo by cosmic tito
Jose was happy to return home after finishing Navy boot camp last Christmas. Most of his family members, from age one to age 65, were gathered at his house. There his step-father had recently installed a 50-inch plasma TV and all the gaming console goodies that should go with it, including a PS3.
One of my little cousins wanted to play the PS3 so he turned it on and a porno came on. Everyone’s mouth just dropped to the ground. My sister quickly turned it off but it was too late.
Jose told us that about 25 dear family members heard and saw what was likely a film by the Bang Bros. Everyone stared down his step-father, giving him “the look of shame.” Some family members left because of it, and are pretending Jose’s step-father doesn’t exist. Needless to say, his mom had to throw out some DVDs. There is a silver lining, though: “We are having the Christmas eve party at my aunt’s now!” Yikes.
Photo by me vs gutenberg
So, who wins the pizza? Each story has its own particular charm (and nastiness), so we thought we’d put it to a vote. Have at it, and by the end of Christmas Day, whoever has the most votes on this baby wins.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
