Jan 27

This Hearing Aid Goes in Your Mouth, not Your Ears

Posted in: audio, Medicine, science, Today's Chili

Sonitus SoundBite

Most hearing aids live next to your ear, and use microphones to pick up sounds around you, and a tiny amplifier to pump up the volume so people who are hard of hearing in one ear can discern what’s going on around them. The SoundBite Hearing Aid from Sonitus Medical is a little different: it still uses a behind-the-ear microphone to pick up sound, but instead of piping that sound through your ear, it uses a tiny transmitter to send the sound to a bone conducting audio device that’s worn next to your back molar. 
Bone conduction isn’t new: a number of headphones manufacturers and medical technology companies have used them to help people who are hearing impaired or people looking for audiophile-quality sound without jamming earbuds in their ears. The technology isn’t perfect, and the SoundBite is one of the first being used for medical purposes that doesn’t require a surgical implant. 
Sonitus has received preliminary approval from the FDA to go forward with clinical trials with the SoundBite. In coming years, we could see more people with mild hearing loss popping their hearing aids into their mouth in noisy areas instead of behind their ears. 
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Jan 27

MSI’s Windows 7-based WindPad 100W now on sale for $710

Posted in: android tablet, AndroidTablet, hands-on, msi, tablet, tablet pc, TabletPc, tablets, Today's Chili, windows 7, Windows7

MSI’s first entry into the wild, wonderful, and oftentimes wishy-washy world of tablets is now on sale, but frankly, we aren’t too sure we’d be jumping to hand over our $710 — er, $709.95 — for the WindPad 100W. The retailer is Simply Electronics, which just so happens to rank a few rungs below Amazon in terms of heardability-ness. At any rate, those willing to take a flying leap of faith should expect a 10.1-inch device loaded up with Windows 7 Starter, Intel’s Atom Z530 1.6GHz single-core processor, 2GB of memory a 32GB SSD and a battery that’ll keep things humming for around six hours. Here’s hoping it’ll perform better than that first wave of Win7 tablets, and you know, that you actually receive one.

MSI’s Windows 7-based WindPad 100W now on sale for $710 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Laptoping  |  sourceSimply Electronics  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

Hentai-don school girl slipper and rice dish

Posted in: LIFESTYLE / FASHION, Today's Chili

Police have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing student girls’ indoors footwear (uwabaki), adding a touch of dashi, and selling them as “hentai-don” (変態丼).

Don is the rice bowl dish that restaurants like Yoshinoya sell with meat and onions on top, usually as gyudon, and a recent symbol of Japanese deflation as chains compete to discount their ubiquitous meals and attract customers feeling the pinch of the recession. However, I expect even this product innovation was beyond the imaginations of the executives!

hentai-don-slipper-rice-bowl-japan[Pic source]

The nefarious suspect is 49 years old and and is amazingly said to have stolen around 748 gym shoes and slippers. He apparently simmered the pilfered goods for a week, before adding them to tamago gohan. The final pièce de résistance were bras and swimsuits grated and sprinkled on top. He then sold the groundbreaking “hentai-don” for 850 yen (about US$10). Even the eggs in the tamago gohan were stolen from the school hens!

Still, it seems the current trend with Japanese men accused of terrible crimes is for them simply to write a book about their escapades, so perhaps the publishing industry will embrace this culinary pioneer!

[Via Kyoko Shimbun, aka the “Fictitious Newspaper”]

japan-trend-shop-630x100

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Jan 27

Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S

Posted in: Android, gingerbread, nexus s, NexusS, nfc, Today's Chili, video

To hear most mobile companies tell it these days, you’d think that NFC (or near field communications) is only for mobile payments. That’s not the case at all, of course, and a group of researchers at Stanford’s MobiSocial lab have now thrown a few new ideas of their own onto the table after getting a pair of Nexus S phones to play with. After first making a few tweaks to overcome some of Gingerbread’s limitations — it only uses NFC for reading tags — they were able to develop a few social-minded applications that make use of the P2P functionality possible with NFC. That includes one example that lets you share photos simply by pressing two phones together, and a second that lets two phones share an application — collaborative whiteboard, in this case. Unfortunately, those aforementioned tweaks to Android mean you can try out the apps yourself just yet, but the researchers are hopeful that similar applications will eventually be supported by Android and other platforms. Head on past the break to check them out on video.

Continue reading Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S

Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceMobiSocial News  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

OpenPandora begins ‘private’ sales, fast-track your open-source gaming handheld for an extra $150

Posted in: gaming, handheld, open source, opensource, Today's Chili

What with all the excitement about Sony’s quad-core handheld and Nintendo’s autostereoscopic screen, we have to say, we nearly forgot about the open-source Pandora handheld slowly but assuredly shipping from the UK. Well, we’ve got some bittersweet news to share, and here it goes: you can now purchase a Pandora for $500, and have it ship within a week. What’s bitter about that? Because normally you pay $350 and get put on the pre-order waiting list. That extra $150 sounds like quite the surcharge, but it’s an option if you simply can’t wait for your number to come up, and OpenPandora chief Craig Rothwell tweets that some portion of those monies will help support the project. Still, those extra units have to come from somewhere, and if you’ve been standing in line for months, we imagine you won’t happy to hear that some rich kid can just swoop in and buy your Pandora out from under you without a care in the world.

OpenPandora begins ‘private’ sales, fast-track your open-source gaming handheld for an extra $150 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceGBAX, Craigix (Twitter)  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

Pioneer Elite HDTVs to ride again in 2011… as rebranded Sharp LCDs

Posted in: LCD, Sharp, Today's Chili

It was a dark day when Pioneer announced its mighty Kuro HDTVs would be no more, but the Pioneer Elite brand still has significant cachet and will return in 2011 on new high end TVs. The bad news? They will be LCDs, not plasmas, manufactured by its partner Sharp, a not entirely surprising move since this was actually the original plan for the Kuro brand back in 2008. Apparently both see potential as Sharp will gain access to higher-end AV salesrooms and integrators for its products, while Pioneer will have TVs to match its continuing Pioneer Elite Blu-ray player and receiver lines. Despite an impressive local dimming demo at CES we’re still not sure Sharp can create enough new pixels to replace what we once had, but we should find out for sure when the new models arrive the end of the year, check the press release after the break for more details.

Continue reading Pioneer Elite HDTVs to ride again in 2011… as rebranded Sharp LCDs

Pioneer Elite HDTVs to ride again in 2011… as rebranded Sharp LCDs originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceSharp  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

Otterbox now has Kindle and Nook covered

Posted in: Today's Chili

Otterbox has moved into the e-reader arena with its new Commuter series case for the Kindle, Kindle DX, Nook, and Sony Reader Touch Edition.

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Jan 27

Motorola Atrix 4G goes up on AmazonWireless, $150 on February 11th — mistake? (update: Inspire 4G, too)

Posted in: amazon, Android, Google, moto, motorola, Today's Chili

We suspect the boys and girls over at AmazonWireless threw their Atrix 4G product page up early, because — among other red flags — the buy button doesn’t work, but one important detail we can glean from it is that they seem interested in selling it for $149.99 on a new contract or $599.99 off-contract. Now, there are a couple of possibilities here; first off, since the page likely isn’t supposed to be online, these prices might just be guesses or placeholders, but furthermore, keep in mind that AmazonWireless and other third-party wireless resellers typically charge less for devices on contract than carriers do, so we’d expect this to be at least $50 more directly from AT&T. Oh, and one other tidbit: searching for the phone on Amazon reveals a possible release date of February 11th, which would be even more aggressive than Moto’s end-of-February guidance. Again, possibly another guess or placeholder on Amazon’s part… but it’s a date to keep in the back of your head nonetheless.

[Thanks, Roman]

Update: Turns out the Inspire 4G is listed, too, for $99.99 on contract or $499.99 contract-free. Thanks, Justin S.!

Update 2: …and they’re gone. Whoops!

Motorola Atrix 4G goes up on AmazonWireless, $150 on February 11th — mistake? (update: Inspire 4G, too) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceAmazon  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

Diamond shaped supercapacitors could result in faster-charging, higher capacity batteries

Posted in: ev, Japan, Today's Chili
Diamond shaped supercapacitors could result in faster-charging, higher capacity batteries

Superconductors pass electricity with zero resistance and make stuff float. Superfluids have zero viscosity and can climb vertical walls to escape containers. Supercapacitors? Well, they don’t do anything quite so dramatic, but they could result in batteries that charge faster and hold more charge than ever. Capacitors in general have to run a balance between capacity and fast charging, but these fancy ones with diamond-shaped nanopores in zeolite-templated carbon, developed at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, are said to offer the best of both worlds. How good? Cellphones that charge in minutes, electric cars with longer lasting batteries, and free Superman Underoos for all. Naturally there’s no word on when these things might actually escape the lab and show up in real batteries, but you already knew that, didn’t you.

Diamond shaped supercapacitors could result in faster-charging, higher capacity batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PhysOrg  |  sourceJournal of the American Chemical Society  | Email this | Comments

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Jan 27

Customize your YouTube Player

Posted in: Google, Today's Chili, videos, Web Sites, YouTube

This article was written on July 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

We had heard about a corporate version of YouTube coming, but all of a sudden YouTube launched a new feature for everyone that lets you customize the YouTube player. It’s definitely a unique aspect that I think some sites will really grasp onto, but as it stands right now it looks as though you can only choose from a few default themes.

I tried it out (as you can see above) and it is actually pretty nice. It makes it easy to embed an entire playlist of videos (from some you’ve uploaded or added as a favorite), and you can even have it show the playlist along side the video so that people can easily navigate between them. This is actually really useful for when videos are broken up into a series because each video wouldn’t have to be embedded separately. If you decide to choose the standard-looking player, which I used above, users can navigate between the different videos using the thumbnails at the bottom which normally represent the related videos.

It will be interesting to see what route Google decides to take on this, and it really has me wondering whether users would be able to completely customize the theme later on. I guess that could be one of the perks for the corporate users though.

And if you haven’t seen the "Quick Change Artists" video that I embedded check it out. It’s pretty cool, although I can’t quite figure out how they do it.

Source: Google Operating System

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