Hasta La Gadget!

It was a giant late-20s hearing aid (a 1924 Siemens heading aid, as the story goes). So says an expert on the matter–and conventional wisdom, really. That supposed time traveler gabbing on a cell phone, who popped up in footage from the 1928 Hollywood premier of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus was actually fiddling with her hearing aid–which, it turns out, were giant back then.

“As you can tell from these, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,” a St. Louis-based archivist told MSNBC. “Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.”

The hearing aid explanation has been around for about as long as the rumor. It’s a logical, if not particularly exciting answer to the question that has befuddled the Web for the past week or so. What it doesn’t explain, however, is why the woman appears to be talking to someone who’s not right there.

“Now, I can’t really explain why the woman appears to be talking (other than yelling at the man who quickened his pace ahead of her),” Skroska said. “But I think it’s fair to say it would be a hasty judgment to dismiss the possibility that it was a hearing aid she was holding up to her ear.”

Clearly she had to shout so the person on the other line in the future could hear speaking on a cell phone that apparently worked without the aid of wireless towers or satellites.

Duh.

Bummer. Just a few short days after PlayOn support was apparently added to Roku’s stable of set-top boxes, it looks as if the fun has come to an abrupt halt. Based on quotes from both PlayOn and Roku staff members, it sounds like the PlayOn channel will no longer work on those who try to get it installed, but those who managed to slip in early may be in the clear. Jim, a PlayOn staffer, stated that his company was “contacted today by Roku and told that they were going to disallow this channel,” and because neither the Roku channel developer nor Roku “are affiliated with PlayOn, [they] have no control over the situation.” On the Roku side, one Patrick has confirmed that “while… many of you are excited about a PlayOn-compatible Channel and may be using it, it unfortunately presents the possibility of legal exposure for us; as a result, the current PlayOn channels have been removed and are no longer available to add to your Roku player.” If your bubble has just been popped in the worst possible way, we’d probably start looking into that 30-day return policy — for you early birds, is PlayOn still working on your Roku box? Hit us up in comments below.

[Thanks, Brian]

Roku ‘disallows’ PlayOn, cites ‘possibility of legal exposure’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Record shipments of the iPhone 4 during the third quarter propel Apple to become the world’s fourth biggest mobile phone supplier, according to the latest stats from IDC.

Originally posted at News – Apple

If you happen to be in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park (right next to the historic Flatiron Building) at night, you might catch a glimpse of artist, MIT grad, and self-described “nerd” Jim Campbell’s latest public art project “Scattered Light.”

The work is a three-dimensional, 80ft x 16 x 16 array of 1,600 hanging light bulbs. Up close, the project presents itself as a swarm of shimmying lights. But when taken in
from afar, the viewer is able to make out shadowy figures walking across the
project (the actual video used in the piece consists of footage of people
walking through NYC’s Grand Central Station).

Every bulb in the project is fitted with an LED which is hooked into a central computer and syncs the whole project together. Each bulb acts as a pixel in, what is essentially, a huge television screen that has exploded into three-dimensional space.

The work appears with two other
multimedia works by Campell in the park: “Broken Window,” which is a
large wall of glass tubes that also plays with the concept of
low-resolution images, and “Voices in the Subway Station” which embeds
20 glass panels in the park lawn that light up in synch with audio
recorded inside a New York City subway station.

The works will be
on display through February 2011.

Video after the jump.

via
switched

Have you ever needed to attach “your digital camera to cylindrical objects in extreme conditions”? Perhaps you find yourself cold and shivering in a torrential downpour, Thermos in one hand and umbrella in the other, yet desperate to snap a picture whilst you sip your hot beverage?

With the Flymount, you can do it all, and stay dry, warm and refreshed as you clamp the camera onto either the umbrella-shaft or the Thermos itself. The Flymount is an Australian camera-mount and, being from a land that spawns fit, sporty and outgoing progeny, it is made more for extreme sports than for extreme coffee-sipping (itself a real sport in my run-down Barcelona barrio).

The mount is made from glass-reinforced nylon and stainless-steel, and holds on to your camera in two ways. First is the standard tripod-screw, and second is an adjustable retaining-strap which wraps around the camera’s body and stops it from unscrewing itself as it is jiggled and whacked.

On the other end, the urethane-covered jaws screw-clamp down onto “cylindrical objects in extreme conditions.” Your Thermos will have to be very thin, though: the jaws can only bite down on cylindrical objects of between 20-40mm (0.8-1.6-inches) in diameter. It will, however, hold them tight in non-extreme conditions, too.

The Flymount looks pretty tough, and so it should if you are to entrust your ruggedized camera to its embrace as you do “extreme” things on windsurfers or mountain bikes. Having been out of action for a week due to an “extreme” broken leg, I’m thinking of ordering one of these and attaching a camera to the base of one of my crutches, whereupon it can witness me doing some “extreme” hobbling from room to room, and witness the meteor-storm-like hail of fragile cups and gadgets that rain on the kitchen floor as I lumber incompetently through the house and sweep them from every surface.

Available now for AU$95 ($92), cylindrical objects not included.

Flymount product page [Flymount. Thanks, Tom!]

See Also:

• Extreme, Custom and Pimped-Out Kegerators
• Extreme-commuting
• GigaPan Releases Camera Rig for Automated Panorama Photos
• Monsterpod Camera-Mount Sticks to Almost Anything
• Helmet Mount Puts Cameras Up-Top and (First) Personal
• Shake, Rattle and Roll: Camera Mount for Bikes