Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, Yoko. John Lennon’s widow told The Daily Mail that, were he alive today, the 70-year-old former Beatle would have been really down with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Also, he would have loved Lady Gaga. Oh, and just for the record, she didn’t break up the Beatles.

“If John were around today he’d love Facebook,” the artist told the paper. “He would love the way the world has changed. He’d love the internet and Twitter. He’d be sending out pronouncements and messages and giving his opinion all the time on everything. He would be 70 years old, but he’d want to know everything that’s going on.”

Ono used the opportunity to discuss her new pal, Lady Gaga, as well. “She performed with me on stage wearing a see-through lace catsuit and people thought it was an insult because you could see her bottom. I’m the lady who did an exhibition of bottoms. How could hers offend me? She has a very lovely bottom. I think she’s wonderful. John would have loved her, because she’s an artist, she’s fearless and she pushes every limit, which we both always adored.”

And before you even ask, no, she didn’t break up the Beatles,

The Beatles were a group made up of four very complex men, and my small hand could not have broken these men up. They broke up because they had reached an end, but in doing so they all also created new wonderful beginnings.

To the Japanese, the crack of splitting apart a pair of chopsticks is apparently as satisfying as the splitting the membrane-like seal on a jar of instant coffee is to us. More, it signifies the start of a meal, even if that meal is the kind eaten with disposable, takeaway cutlery.

This has led to the slow uptake of a “‘my chopsticks’ movement”, which encourages people to reuse their own sticks, saving trees and so on. And this is why the Stickpecker exists – to bring that satisfying crack to regular chopsticks.

They manage it by putting a pair of magnets into the acrylic shafts. These require a good, hard yank to snap them apart, presumably an adequate placebo for the fulfilling fracture. The design – a stylized woodpecker and tree – is supposed to evoke the wood that these sticks aren’t made of.

I think they’re cool, and the magnet part definitely sounds like fun to play with. They can be had for ¥3570, or a jaw-dropping $44.

Stickpecker [Microworks via Book of Joe]

See Also:

• Lightsaber Chopsticks
• Chopsticks for Better Cloning
• The Cat That Eats Noodles With Chopsticks
• Chopsticks, Spoon United
• Folding Baskets Made From Chopsticks

If there’s one thing the 90s taught us, it’s that these silly 2D interfaces are only a passing fancy, and soon everything will be VRML-based mirror worlds of our physical space. SurfCube is a small, tentative step in that direction, turning the browser into a fake 3D experience of sorts, with favorites on “top,” and history and settings on the “sides,” while the front face of the cube is, naturally, the browser part. You can get around with swipes and flashy tilt gestures, and for $1.99 on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace it’s hard to go wrong. Just remember our VRML warning, and start investing in MicroVideoGoggles Inc. stock with your carphone once you get home from the record store.

SurfCube gives Windows Phone 7 the 3D browser it needed so desperately originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s hardly a fresh idea — researchers have claimed that GSM calls could be cracked and listened in on for years. But there’s a difference between being able to do something with a $50,000 machine and a warrant, and being able to do the same thing with a few $15 Motorola phones, a laptop, open source software and 180 seconds of spare time. Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl and OsmocomBB project programmer Sylvain Munaut recently spoke about a new GSM hack at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, and they were able to walk the audience through the eavesdropping process in a matter of minutes. According to them, it’s not terribly difficult to use a $15 handset to “sniff out” location data used to correctly route calls and texts, and once you’ve nailed that down, you could use modified firmware to feed raw data into a laptop for decryption. Using a 2TB table of precomputed encryption keys, a cracking program was able to break in within 20 seconds — after that, you’re just moments away from recording a live GSM call between two phones. Of course, speeches like these are made to encourage security officials to beef up the layers between you and ill-willed individuals, but it’s hard to say what (if anything) will change. For now, we’d recommend just flying to each and every person you’d like to speak with. Unless you live in the Greater New York area — you’re probably better off risking a hacked conversation than heading out to LGA / JFK / EWR.

Researchers eavesdrop on encrypted GSM call: all you need is a $15 phone and 180 seconds originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If your morning’s been running low on a little thing called awesomeness, hurry past the break and gorge yourself on the stuff in the embedded videos. For the more patient among you, we’ll set the scene. A young chap by the name of Ryan has repurposed an old mini-fridge from his college days into a beer-firing drone, which can accept instructions on beer brand, temperature, and destination, before launching it at the target with a force of 50psi. An embedded webcam assists the iPhone user in aiming the throws, while it’s also said to record every toss and tweet it out for posterity as well. If this thing could slice bread, we’d probably offer to marry it.

Continue reading iPhone-controlled beer cannon is the robot friend of our dreams (video)

iPhone-controlled beer cannon is the robot friend of our dreams (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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