Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or either of its sequels), you’re probably aware of the fact that its characters have a striking and awesome penchant for gadgets. The thing is, those gadgets are from… 2002. While reading through the books, we took the opportunity to jot down all that name dropped gear, and what we’ve got here is both a list of that gear and a walk down memory lane. Author Stieg Larsson (who was the first writer to sell one million Kindle e-books) often gives out actual lists of specs, which we find to be pretty endearing, but where he’s left anything to the imagination we’ve tried to use context clues to fill in the gaps. Like we said, the action takes place in Sweden in 2002 (the books were published in Sweden in 2005, though Larsson died in late 2004 so they were likely written somewhere between 2002 and 2003), so the options were… a little more limited. There are some mild spoilers below, so if you plan on reading the books and don’t want to know what kind of gadgets await you, then beware. Otherwise, join us, won’t you?

Continue reading The Girl with the Insanely Long Gear List

The Girl with the Insanely Long Gear List originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you think the housing market is bad, or the rental market in a city like New York is ruthless, maybe all you really need is The Bufalino, a three-wheeled concept vehicle designed for transportation and shelter. When you need to get to the office, simply fold up the driver’s seat and hit the gas. When you’ve left work for the day and you find a nice place to park your ride for the night, you can fold the seat back down into a bed and settle in for a good night’s sleep.

The Bufalino, a mini-RV concept car from designer Corneliu Comanns, features a stove, a basin that works like a sink, and a connected water tank so you have running water, a small fridge, and both walls have slots for storing your clothes and personal possessions. There’s even space for a desk and a workbench so you can get some work done if you feel like “working from home.” Admittedly the Bufalino will likely never make it into mass production, which is just as well since there doesn’t seem to be a toilet or a shower anywhere in the vehicle.

[via Dvice]

The very first line of the forum post on xda-developers says it best — proceed at your own risk — but if you’ve been kept up at night waiting for root to be gained on Verizon’s recently-released Droid 2, it looks like your day has come. The process involves tethering up to your PC and transferring a couple binaries, but seems straightforward enough and should open the door to surcharge-free tethering and other apps that require root access. We’ve no doubt Motorola will be looking to patch this up with the next OTA push, of course, so update carefully from here on out.

[Thanks, Jonathan]

Droid 2 root method finds its way online originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Using Internet access terminals at an airport might put you at risk of losing personal information. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20014713-83.html” class=”origPostedBlog”News – Security/a/p

Indoor positioning systems have long been a holy grail for malls and big-box retailers where labyrinthine aisles and massive floorplans that rival small towns often leave customers begging for mercy, but the obstacles to deploying them are many: you’ve got to create detailed maps for every facility where you want it to work, and you need some sort of system for locating users with a reasonable level of precision since GPS is out of the picture. Start-up Point Inside has been hard at work on IPS for some time now, figuring that modern stores and malls teeming with WiFi access points and reliable AGPS are good enough to make it work, and now they’ve hooked up with Midwestern superstore chain Meijer to trial a system in four Michigan locations that will let users locate “more than” 100,000 items in store along with facilities like bathrooms and customer service. Conveniently, these stores have some 26 WiFi nodes deployed, which helps triangulate users down to a reasonable level of precision — though it’s probably not going to be able to tell if you’re standing in front of the Frosted Flakes or the Raisin Bran. It’s a free download for iPhone and Android users, and if you’re close to one of the trial stores, be sure to let us know how well it works. Follow the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Meijer deploys indoor positioning trial, helps you find the Morton Salt faster

Meijer deploys indoor positioning trial, helps you find the Morton Salt faster originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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