Hasta La Gadget!

The crew at iFixit were jonesing for something to disassemble recently, and Sony Ericsson’s X10 Mini seems to have been the nearest thing they could lay hand and screwdriver upon. We’ll admit HTC has us kind of spoiled with the colorful interiors of its phones, so we were a little underwhelmed by the demureness of the X10 Mini. Everything is packed into the utilitarian logic board, and although you get to decouple the screen and antenna assembly, it’s still mostly a thick slab of highly integrated technology. Still, if you want to see a Qualcomm MSM7227 all naked and exposed to the elements, this is your chance. The source link contains all the intimate photography you could wish for.

Sony Ericsson X10 Mini teardown reveals densely packed, tiny hardware originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 06:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Suntory Fine Zero. Asahi Strong Off. Kirin Yasumu Hi no 0.00%. Cheap and even cheaper. Low alcohol, non-alcohol. Just when you thought you had a grip on the beer stand at your local supermarket, there’s always a new product right round the corner…

Now liquor store Yamaya has perhaps finally trumped all the others with the latest in their new own brand of “beer”: the Gugutto. In fact, it’s an import from a Korean manufacturer but you can’t argue with the price: just 85 yen (even with the weak dollar, that’s still less than a buck)!

Of course, this isn’t real beer. It’s daisan biiru, an ersatz beer, which, like happoushu, is designed to get around taxes levied against beer by including almost no actual malt. Even more significantly, this new Gugutto is non-alcoholic, which not only surely lowers the costs, but also allows the makers to market it as the beer you drink when you want to drive (much like Kirin Free has been advertised).

The trend towards ever-cheaper beer has resulted in a plethora of daisan beers over the years, with new ones appearing from the main manufacturers every summer (and probably swiftly disappearing again). The marketing for these beers now focuses on their price, their low fat ingredients and (if they are non-alcoholic) how they allow you still to go about your other activities. They have ever more ridiculous names; their packaging is ever more bright and breezy. The days of the chic Kashiwa Sato-designed Kirin lager beer seem to have slipped away like a forgotten hangover.

With a declining consumer base the big drinks manufacturers are fighting for precious space in people’s bellies and on the shelves in the supermarket. A constant stream of new products (with the requisite advertising campaign with a celebrity) is one way to maintain your drinks in the public’s eyes and perhaps achieve sales, even if quality is thrown out the window.

Known to many foreign residents in Japan as a good chain store to pick up import wine, Yamaya is hoping to sell 2.4 million cans of Gugutto Non-Alcohol annually.

This video is eight and a half minutes long. It is also a beautifully shot, hypnotic look inside a DSLR lens, which is easily worth your time. Oh, and it’s a follow-along hack, too, if you have the guts.

Y’all probably know how to turn any SLR lens into a super-close-up macro lens: you just pop it off the camera and flip it around, pointing the rather delicate rear element at your subject. There are even reversing rings available which make an interface betwixt camera bayonet and lens filter-ring so you don’t need both hands all the time.

But this amazing how-to from Lozzless goes way beyond, using a drill, a hacksaw, lots of epoxy glue and even some soldering to make a permanent macro-lens from a Canon 18-55mm kit zoom. Out come the autofocus controller, out come the electronics, and in comes a ribbon cable and a whole lot of work to join the computronical parts back together.

The result, apart from the beautifully shot video (we’re guessing it was made on a Canon 5D MkII due to the short depth-of-field, so shallow even a spider couldn’t drown in it), is a lens which snaps snugly to the front of a Canon SLR and still gives it full electronic control over the aperture. It also looks like some amazing Gibsionian hack. Good job, Lozzless. And nice music choice, too (it appears the Yo-Yo Ma and Philip Glass “collabo” is actually allowed by YouTube).

How to create SuperMacro lens [Lozzless / YouTube via Photography Bay]

This article was written on May 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Everybody has their favorite way to search, whether it’s Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.  I think I’ve been programmed to search Google, at least that’s what my fingers tend to automatically type when I need to do a search.

While Yahoo and Google are great ways to search, there are alternatives that may suit you better for certain searches.  Below you’ll find five alternatives that you can try out in place of the search that you regularly use.

Rollyo

Rollyo stands for “Roll Your own Search Engine.”  It allows you to create and publish your own search engine giving you a customized search experience that includes only the sites and categories that you want included.  It’s supposed to help reduce the amount of irrelevant search results that you receive.

For Firefox fans, you can add any Searchroll (a compilation of sources to search) right to your Firefox searchbar.

NetTrekker

This one is designed with the kids in mind. Kids are becoming tech-savvy at a young age, and this search is the perfect collaboration of age appropriate material. They have a whole line of search products just for schools and children.

Sometimes you come across web services that aren’t free, as is the case with NetTrekker. But sometimes, it’s also worth that cost.

Draze

This one isn’t taking you away from Google or Yahoo, instead it’s comparing the results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN all in one search. It’s like Dogpile except it doesn’t include searches from Ask.com.

Each of those services return different results, so it’s nice to get the combination of results that Draze offers. When you perform a search, it will let you know where the item ranked for each of the three search sites.

Kosmix

Kosmix is in the very early stages of development, and because they’re a topical search, they only have few select categories for now.

The categories that they offer include health, video games, finance, travel, US politics, and Autos. If you’re searching for something that would fit under any one of those categories, give it a try.

I did a search on “Iraq War” under the politics section, and it pulled up a page with the search results, news, blogs on the topics, and they also offered suggestions for refining the search. At the top they included a snippet from the Wikipedia page on the topic.

ChaCha

ChaCha is probably one of the more original, unique ideas I’ve come across in terms of a search engine. Their focus is to provide you great results using professionals.  You’ll get a guide (this is free) who will provide you results that match your specifications.

You can perform automated searches, but if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, try clicking on “Chat Live with a Guide” and see if they can do better. This too is in beta.

Source: FoxNews.com
Thanks for the tip Cory!

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Check out that sweet, sweet box. Yes folks, we seem to have received our very first in-the-cardboard picture of the retail iPhone 4 out in the wild. We don’t work at Walmart, so we can’t verify this one for ourselves, but our tipster says Apple’s latest phone has just landed in the big box retailer’s storehouses.

P.S. — Before you start frothing at the mouth, the CDMA coding on the box in the background relates to an LG 290C handset also stocked by Walmart.

Update: A shot of a Best Buy arrival is past the break.

Continue reading iPhone 4 arrives at Walmart (update: and Best Buy!)

iPhone 4 arrives at Walmart (update: and Best Buy!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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