Hasta La Gadget!

Chumby, the cute device that lets users play internet-based apps and music, has become a hacker’s delight because of its extensibility and Linux-based operating system.

It’s latest avatar is as the face and brain of a bipedal robot created by EMG Robotics. The robot is using accelerometers from Freescale to balance and walk. And while it is rather slow and clumsy, it’s a pretty neat hack.

“One small step toward our future robotic overlords,” wrote Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang, founder at Chumby on his blog. “But hey, at least they’ll be open source. That might even be an improvement over what we have today.”

In itself, the $120 Chumby One is a pretty interesting device. It has a 454 MHz Arm0 processor, a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity and USB port. It is designed as open source hardware so schematics and layouts for the device are available to everyone. In the past, users have taken Insignia Infocast, a photo and app viewer, running on the Chumby platform and turned it into a $170 Linux tablet.

The latest Chumby hack may not be as functional but it is definitely fun.  Check out the video to see the Chumby One walking around. (The demo begins at the 1:40 mark and the earlier portion of the video has no sound.)

See Also:

• Chumby Guts: Robot Viscera For Hackers
• For Hardware Entrepreneurs, Getting From Idea to Reality Isn’t Easy
• Hack Turns $170 Media Viewer Into Tablet
• Twitter-Enhanced Cuckoo Clock Chirps — and Tweets

You know that little buzz you hear whenever you put your cell phone next to a speaker? It’s the sound of the cell signal being amplified–and it’s really, really annoying. It’s a problem that occurs with GSM phones.

Such handsets comprise about 80 percent of global market share–that number’s closer to around 50 percent in the U.S. If you’re on T-Mobile or AT&T, you’ve got a GSM handset.

The Buzz Killer Card is aimed at eliminating that buzz. Just stick your GSM phone on the card (the company compares it to a mouse pad) and the buzzing should stop. Buzz Killer is being sold as a branded product. It’s actually a bit like a business card with the added bonus of making your life slightly less irritating.

You can also buy unbranded versions of the card for $7.49 through sites like Amazon.

This article was written on June 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

We’re playing a little game here. Who said Microsoft’s usability stinks? Read the quotes below and give us your best guess…

Quotes:

” I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards…”

—

When talking about an experience downloading an application from Microsoft.com, they said:

“This site is so slow it is unusable” and once again “The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.”

—

Referring to trying to find a Microsoft download, this person said:

“It is more like a puzzle that you get to solve.”

—

Talking about after downloading an application and then installing it on Windows:

“So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time. What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy.“

—

When talking about Windows movie maker, they said:

“What an absolute mess. Moviemaker is just not there at all. So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.”

—

Talking about trying to get the Digital Plus Package to work, this person said:

“So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website, I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places…”

—

Who said it?

Any guesses on who made all of the comments listed above? It sounds like a consumer who is just fed-up with Microsoft, doesn’t it? That’s why you may be surprised to learn that it all came from the mouth of Bill Gates back in 2003 in an email that he sent to various people within Microsoft. The subject of the email? “Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame.”

If you read the whole email (which I recommend you do, it’s found here) you’ll see that Gates clearly wasn’t having a great experience trying to get Windows Moviemaker. He got frustrated, just like many of us do, when he couldn’t do what he wanted to.

Some people have criticized his rant saying he would have been better off telling the team working on the project that it needed to be fixed, and soon, instead of just complaining. We, on the other hand, think it’s great that Bill Gates took the time to outline the difficulties that he had because upon receiving the email, that team probably got their butt’s in gear to get the problems fixed. He was the voice of the consumers, except his voice gets heard much louder than that of the consumer.

Todd Bishop over at Seattle P-I recently interviewed Bill Gates and showed him a printout of the email from 2003. He asked Gates if he ever did get Movie Maker to work which Gates then pointed out how Movie Maker will be part of Windows Live, so improvements must have been made. Gates also commented about the nature of the email and said, “There’s not a day that I don’t send a piece of email… like that piece of email. That’s my job.”

Now that Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft at the end of the week, hopefully there will be others who take the time to do what Gates did and simply rant and complain about the usability and other various problems they have with products and services because that’s how Microsoft will be able to make the best products out there.

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Boom: Apple was just awarded a patent on pinch-to-zoom for multitouch displays. That’s the first directly applicable patent we’ve seen on the gesture since we first started looking during the Apple / Palm war of words in January 2009, and it certainly gives Apple some potent ammunition against its competitors — although there are some specific limitations on what Apple’s been granted that will prove to be important. Let’s break it down, shall we? Patent #7,812,826 was first applied for on December 29, 2006, and over the course of the patent process the claims have been significantly narrowed to cover a very specific set of actions:

1. A multitouch display detects at least two contacts.
2. Those contacts perform a first gesture.
3. That gesture adjusts an image in some way: magnification, orientation and rotation are specifically claimed, but the patent is broad enough to cover virtually any adjustment.
4. The first set of contacts is broken.
5. A second set of contacts is detected.
6. The second contacts perform another gesture within a pre-determined period of time.
7. The gesture continues to adjust the image in the same way.

It’s steps 5, 6, and 7 that are critically important here: Apple doesn’t have a patent on “pinch-to-zoom” generally, but rather pinching to zoom, and then pinching to zoom again within some fixed period of time. How long that period lasts is totally up in the air, but it has to be defined somewhere — this patent doesn’t really apply unless there’s a clock running and a second gesture takes place. Still, it’s the first granted patent on the now-ubiquitous gesture we’ve seen, and based on its filing history it’s essentially effective as of December 30, 2005 — long before anything multitouch products with pinch to zoom had arrived on the market. That’s no small weapon to bear — we’ll see what Apple does with it.

P.S.- Apple was also awarded some 17 other patents yesterday, including two more that deal with multitouch, but none of ’em are nearly as interesting as this one. Hit the via link for more on those.

Apple awarded limited patent on pinch-to-zoom originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Master modder Ben Heck has always dazzled with his hacks that transform the Xbox 360, PS3 and other video game consoles into the devices, the likes of which you have never seen before.

Now Heck is back with a mod that stuffs the Xbox 360 into what he calls a ’slim’ laptop like casing. The device has internal power supply and is pretty quiet, he says.

The machine is 16 inches x 10.5 inches in size and has all the regular features of an Xbox 360 including Wi-Fi and online connectivity. The system has touch power and eject buttons and is connected to a 17-inch Gateway LCD capable of 720p display.

And if you are wondering if the Xbox 360 laptop can act as a regular laptop too, the answer is no. Heck says in the video below that the device doesn’t have dual-boot functionality.

Heck, who has made three of these Xbox 360 laptops, is giving away one on his show. The other two will be available for purchase.

See Also:

• Hanging With Ben Heck at World Maker Faire
• Ben Heck Goes Back to the 1980s with Commodore 64 Laptop
• Ben Heck Unveils One-Handed Xbox 360 Controller
• Ben Heck is back, and this time it’s portable

Photo: Ben Heck

[via Engadget]