Hasta La Gadget!

Warning: Do not watch this video if you lay awake at night, kept from sleep by the terrifying knowledge that one day soon the human race will be thrown into slavery by The Machines. For the more naïve amongst us, here’s the clip:

Oh, I forgot to say that if you don’t like to see a finger being locked in a vice and then whacked with a metal bar, you probably shouldn’t watch, either. Sorry.

The robot hand you see is German made, by researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. In building the first part of the Terminator, the researchers were going for robustness, and they appear to have achieved quite chilling success.

Not that utility has been traded for toughness: As the video shows, the hand is capable of an astonishing range of movement. The fingers are controlled by 38 tendons, each of which is driven by its own motor inside the forearm. Two tendons serve each joint. When their motors turn the same way, the joint moves. When they turn in opposite directions, the joint stiffens. This lets it toughen up to catch balls, yet be loose enough to perform delicate operations.

During tests, the researchers went all Joe Pesci on their robot creation, and took a baseball bat to the arm — a 66G whack. The result? Nothing. The hand came away unscathed.

Not only can the hand take punishment, it can also deal it out, exerting up to 30 Newtons of pressure with its fingers, plenty for either a stimulating massage or a deadly choking grip. It is also fast. The joints can spin at 500-degrees per second. If it tenses the springs joined to the tendons first, and then releases that energy, the joints can reach a head-spinning 2,000-degrees per second, or 333 rpm. That’s fast enough for it to snap its fingers and summon a human slave to do its bidding.

It doesn’t stop there. The head of the hand team, Markus Grebenstein (don’t you just wish it was Grabenstein?), says that the plan is to build a torso with two arms. His excuse? According to an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Grebenstein says that “The problem is, you can’t learn without experimenting.”

Yes you can, Mr. Grebenstein. Just watch Terminator 2.

Building a Super Robust Robot Hand [IEEE Spectrum]

See Also:

• Robot Hands Get a Grip on the Future
• Video: Fingerless Robotic Hand Can Pick Anything
• Getting a Grip: Building the Ultimate Robotic Hand
• Car-Crushing Robot Hand Could End Up Back in Scrap Heap
• A Low-Tech Robot Hand
• Robotic Hand Handles Eggs, Runs On Compressed Air
• Super Realistic Bionic Hand

Just in case you thought I get a little too mean when writing about certain products, here’s an email from the people at Waterfield Designs regarding a writeup of their keyboard carrying case. You may remember that it caused “tears of pity and sorrow to moisten my normally parched, cracked ducts.”

Since the keyboard case signaled the end of civilization, I thought you’d enjoy this new case too. (End of the planet as we know it?)

And what is this mystery new case, the accessory that will extinguish all life, not just human, from this abused sphere we call home? It’s the SuperDrive Sleeve, a pouch that makes the keyboard case (and its good friend, the trackpad cover) seem positively useful.

Item: You haven’t used the optical drive in any of your computers for the last year. Many of you will have owned a desktop or notebook and not even know whether the SuperDrive even works.

Item: You have bought a MacBook Air, which comes with a USB key to restore the operating system and leaves out the DVD-drive in favor of useful features like battery life and portability.

Item: You can download movies these days, you know.

Despite this, the Waterfield SuperDrive Sleeve presumes not only that you will somehow decide that you need to own a CD/DVD reader/writer, but that you will actually carry it with you. Not only that, but that you will do so often enough to need a purpose-made case. A $25 case with a ballistic nylon shell, a soft, coddling neoprene lining and a mesh pocket for the cable (or a floppy disc, I suppose, considering that you are clearly living in the past).

I’m willing to admit I may have gone in a little hard on the keyboard case, but a SuperDrive case? C’mon. What next? A Fax Bag?

SuperDrive Sleeve [Waterfield Designs. Thanks, Heidi!]

See Also:

• Protective Keyboard Cases Signal End of Civilization
• Protective Keyboard Case Joined By Trackpad Cover
• Leather Case Turns iPad into Netbook
• Aluminum Shell Hides iPad Keyboard

Having a Market full of apps is a very good thing for owners of Android handsets, but those owners buying few premium apps is a bad thing for developers who keep that Market full. That, of course, is also bad news for Google, which is making a variety of changes to appease devs, some of which Android Platform Manager Eric Chu outlined at the Inside Social Apps conference yesterday. After already nuking the 24 hour trial period Google is now working on an in-app payment system, which would enable the direct-selling of add-ons, costumes, and enough other bits and bobs to ensure you’ll never buy a fully-featured app again.

Google is also negotiating with more carriers to allow users to have app purchases appear on their bill, rather than using a separate payment system, as is already possible on AT&T. Finally, a team of honest to gosh humans is working on helping to weed out apps that violate the company’s terms of service, sifting through the Market to find bogus downloads, perhaps an admission that the “open and unobstructed environment” ideal isn’t working out. We wonder if they’ll also be looking for free apps that quite capably provide the functionality of premium ones. Those, it seems, are the greatest threat to the paid apps — and perhaps the greatest asset of the Market itself.

Google ‘not happy’ with Android Market purchase rates, many changes coming originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon’s personal hotspot feature for the iPhone 4 will cost subscribers an extra $20 per month on top of their regular data plan. This is the same pricing structure you get with Verizon’s other smart-phones.

There has been speculation that Verizon would stick it to AT&T by offering the hotspot feature – which lets you share your internet connection with up to five devices via Wi-Fi – for free. As it is, the feature costs the same as AT&T’s tethering plan. It is also possible that the wireless hotspot feature will come to all iPhone’s with the release of iOS 4.3.

Verizon still wins, though, even if AT&T allows the hotspot feature. Whereas AT&T charges you $20 just to share your already limited pool of data, Verizon gives you an extra 2GB. This is separate from your iPhone’s regular data allowance, and presumably precludes the use of Verizon’s limited-edition unlimited data plan with the service.

The biggest news about the Verizon iPhone isn’t about coverage or network performance. It’s about competition. Look anywhere else in the world and the choice between multiple carriers has lowered prices. Now, with the Big Two going head to head over the exact same hardware, things may get a little better for the consumer.

Verizon dishes on iPhone hotspot pricing [Macworld]

Photo: Jon Snyder / Wired.com

See Also:

• Verizon iPhone Gets $30 Unlimited Data for Limited Time
• Everything We Know About the Verizon iPhone, So Far
• Verizon Denies Tethering, Hot Spot Features to Droid Customers …
• Verizon or AT&T: Which Will Deliver the Best iPhone Experience …
• Many iPhone Customers Want to Hop to Verizon, But They Probably …
• Verizon Wireless Finally Gets Apple's iPhone

Father of the internet, Vint Cerf, is taking one on the knuckles this week for the inevitable diminution of the world’s IPv4 addresses. Last Friday, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a sensational story titled, “Internet Armageddon all my fault: Google chief,” in which Cerf warned of an end to unique IP addresses “within weeks.” The story was, of course, a bit tongue-in-cheek, considering the industry has long anticipated and prepared for said Armageddon. Back in 1977, Cerf led a team of DARPA researchers in creating IPv4, which limits IP addresses to four 8-bit numbers or 32-bits total, providing for 4.3 billion addresses: not nearly enough by today’s standards. In the article, Cerf said he never expected his protocol to take off, adding, “Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?” The IPv4’s successor, IPv6, which enlists four 32-bit numbers or 128 bits total, was developed soon after Cerf’s protocol and is now getting attention from internet giants like Google and Facebook, who will launch World IPv6 Day this June. Considering IPv6 makes for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses, we probably won’t be hearing of an IP apocalypse anytime soon.

Vint Cerf on IPv4 depletion: ‘Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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