Feb 22
Red Wine Audio’s Isabellina headphone amplifier fuses state of the art with retro technology.
Originally posted at The Audiophiliac
Feb 22
Smithsonian Museum will have a video game gallery next year, wants you to vote on what’s in it
Posted in: Games, gaming, plans, Today's Chili, video games, VideoGames
Nobody tell Roger Ebert, but the Smithsonian Museum has announced plans for a new exhibition, called The Art of Video Games, which will run between March and September next year. Charting the 40-year (now there’s a number that will make you feel old in a hurry) evolution of gaming from paddle-based pixel exchanges to sophisticated online multiplayer extravaganzas, this collection of memoirs will focus on the most visually striking and technologically innovative titles. Perhaps knowing how heated debates about video games can get, the Museum has sagely decided to co-opt its audience into the curatorial process — the second source link below will take you to a voting page where you can select your top 80 games from a shortlist of 240… and of course express your rage at the omission of some obscure title you totally loved late one night in 1995.
Smithsonian Museum will have a video game gallery next year, wants you to vote on what’s in it originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Feb 22
Autoblog drives the 2012 Fisker Karma, deems it ‘best handling large premium car’
Posted in: hybrid, Today's Chili
Karma, in a religious sense, is the sort of divine retribution or cause for your deeds or misdeeds. In an automotive sense it’s a $95,900 plug-in luxury performance car that Fisker has been teasing since 2007. That machine is finally nearing production and Autoblog was lucky enough to take an early model for a spin around California Speedway, a brief test-drive that left the pilots concluding “the Fisker Karma is a rolling dream machine for anyone who wants something very different that works and drives exceptionally well.” For the rest of the impressions on this $100k plug-in hybrid that offers a combined 657hp and 981lb-ft of torque from three motors and will go 50 miles on batteries alone you’ll need to click on through the source link below. For the details on what’s in store from your own karma you need only look inside yourself.
Autoblog drives the 2012 Fisker Karma, deems it ‘best handling large premium car’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Feb 22
Australian Town Changes Name to “Speedkills” to Promote Traffic Safety
Posted in: Cars, Today's Chili, Weird News
Drive the speed limit. That’s the succinct message being driven home by a town in Victoria, Australia, which is changing its name from “Speed” to “Speedkills,” in hopes of raising awareness for traffic safety. The name change will be in effect for the month of March.
Said Phil Reed, a spokesman for the country’s Transportation Accident Commission, “Most people recognize that drink driving is a socially unacceptable activity, they are less convinced about the merits of speed. Our underpinning business objective here is to make the issue of speeding [as] socially unacceptable as drink driving.”
Speed has a population of 45 people. Its Facebook page, on the other hand, is doing much better, currently boasting more than 34,000 supporters. The name change became “official” when the page hit more than 10,000 in less than 24 hours.
Feb 22
George Hotz, a self-described hacker caught up in a legal battle with Sony over custom packages on the PlayStation 3, says he has received enough donations to cover his legal fees.
Originally posted at The Digital Home
Feb 22
What Is Amazon Instant Video? [What Is]
Posted in: amazon, streaming, Today's Chili, top
Amazon’s long-rumored video streaming service has finally arrived. But what is it, exactly? More »
Feb 22
PlayStation hackers reportedly able to unban selves, ban others, turn tables
Posted in: hack, hacked, playstation, playstation 3, Playstation3, ps3, sony, Today's Chili
Just last week Sony said that those found to have hacked their PlayStation 3 consoles would have their PlayStation Network access “terminated permanently.” Harsh words that, unsurprisingly, weren’t too warmly received by the hacking community. Destructoid is now reporting that not only have those tinkerers found a way to unban themselves, but that they can in turn ban any other console they want. There’s apparently a catch, though, with the hackers having to know the unique ID assigned to the other console that they’ll be banning, which makes this sound like perhaps the hack is simply swapping a “good” ID onto a “bad” console, but at this point we have no details on the supposed procedure here. Regardless, if some random girl with a cute avatar hits you up on IM and, after a few minutes of casual conversation, asks you for the serial number on your PS3, think twice before handing over those digits.
Update: We were a little leery about this given Destructoid‘s lack of a source, and thanks to a note from reader Omega we now have what looks to be the actual source — indeed this all is sounding rather theoretical.
PlayStation hackers reportedly able to unban selves, ban others, turn tables originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Feb 22
The first generation iPad is out of stock in retail locations all over Europe. Over at the Carphone Warehouse in the UK, the 64GB WiFi model and all 3G models are sold out. Ingram Micro is similarly sold out of a number of models. Carriers Orange and T-Mobile, meanwhile, have slashed prices on the iPad 3G.
Apple’s refusal to restock supplies could well reflect what we’ve known all along–the iPad 2 is coming soon. We’ve seen a similar scenario play out before the launch of past Apple product refreshes.
Feb 22
Google Launches App to Locate Christchurch Earthquake Survivors
Posted in: Google, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 struck New Zealand, near the city of Christchurch on Tuesday around lunch time. At present, 65 casualties have been reported, though hundreds still remain missing after the quake, with authorities predicting a death toll of up to 400.
Google is doing its part to help people locate their loved ones in the city. The company launched a new Person Finder, where people can locate survivors or upload any information they might have. At present, the site has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 records. It also carries the note, “All data entered will be available to the public and viewable and usable by anyone. Google does not review or verify the accuracy of this data.”
Google launch similar initiatives after earthquakes in Haiti and Chile.
Feb 22
Giant and Midget by Ryuji Nakamura
Ryuji Nakamura decided that he’d turn himself into a giant. A virtual giant. With some paper, a sharp blade and a few minutes of careful cutting and folding, Nakamura came up with this webcam covering house, which makes any video conferencer look as if they are a huge monster, peering one-eyed through the window of a tiny home.
Nakamura’s model comes complete with a minuscule dining suite of table and chairs, and was built for the DesignEast exhibition at the end of last year. What I like best about the piece, called Midget and Giant, is that the outside is as carefully made as the inside. You can’t see the overlapping roof or any of the upper floor from the webcam, but they are there, cutely propped atop an old iMac.
While you could just snap yourself as a giant and forget about it, there may be more practical uses, too. I imagine a miniature replica of the office to use when chatting to my editor, Dylan Tweney, via Skype, or a virtual cocktail bar to make me look more cosmopolitan when I send pictures to dating sites. It seems foolproof, except for one thing. I’ll have to explain why I have grown so huge. Dylan should be easy to fool — I’ll just tell him I’m testing out a new shrinking machine and it went wrong. The dating site? Well, that could be a little trickier.
Giant and Midget [Ryuji Nakamura via Unplggd]
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