Hasta La Gadget!

Bike Hanger: Where Spiderman would park his ride. Photo Manifesto Architecture P.C.

If you have a couple of heavy locks and choose a busy street and not a dark and dingy side road, then a regular bike rack is plenty secure enough for most people. But that hasn’t stopped Manifesto Architecture from trying to improve on it, and the Bike Hanger sure is an interesting take on bike parking.

The Bike Hanger parks bikes vertically, using the spare walls of buildings instead of rectangular chunks of street. You roll up on your bike and then lock it to a spare hanger. A stationary bike is connected to the whole rig and lets you hoist your bike up the wall, making space for the next guy who wants to park

When you get back, assuming you bike hasn’t been stolen, you hop back onto the bike and pedal until your own bike is returned.

It certainly makes good use of space, but it makes terrible use of time. Faced with a single open space at the top of the machine, most people would opt for a nearby street-sign instead. And if the machine breaks, you may be left bikeless until the repair crew turns up.

Oh, and according to Manifesto’s proposal, the budget required to put some of these onto a building is $100,000. It might be cheaper for city councils just to replace stolen bikes.

I have partially gotten around the need to lock my bike at all. I’m allowed to ride again after almost six months out due to a broken leg (it’s much better, thanks for asking), so I bought myself a Brompton folding bike. It’s great to have a take-anywhere bike when you still can’t walk very far. But the best part is that you never have to lock it. Instead, you just arrogantly assume you can enter any building or business with it, and simply leave it in sight over by the bar as every other customer trips over it.

Bike Hanger / Manifesto [Arch Daily via FastCo]

See Also:

• Cyclehoop Turns Every Street-Sign Into a Bike Rack
• Crazy Underground Storage Unit in Japan Retrieves Bikes in Seconds …
• Terrifying Robot Bicycle Shed Can Eat Over 9000 Bikes
• Over-Designed Petal-Like Bike-Rack
• Bike Racks

We here at Engadget are in favor of hitting the books from time to time, but we can’t have lame gadget-less backpacks hurting our true techie rep. That’s why we’re excited to see Ralph Lauren outing its first solar–equipped knapsack as part of its RLX sports line. Four solar cells around back harness the sun’s power to generate 3.45 watts — completely juicing up an iPhone in a purported two-to-three hours, assuming you’ve got “proper sunlight orientation,” of course. Like the optional orange hue (it also comes in black), the sun-sucking cells aren’t particularly low profile — but for $800 don’t you want something, uh, recognizable? Still, if you simply must be that guy be sure to hit the source link and don’t look back, but for everyone else, might we recommend a portable USB charger for a little less coin?

Ralph Lauren’s solar-panel backpack charges your phone in hours, your credit card in seconds originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The one Android tablet that isn’t riding NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 dual-core chip and Google’s Honeycomb iteration (but might still be worth buying) has this weekend become available to pre-order in the UK. The Carphone Warehouse is listing a £600 ($983) fee for owning the HTC Flyer, which is more or less a match for the €669 price Amazon.de is offering to German slate lovers. In exchange for a dozen rose-tinted notes with the Queen’s face on them, you’ll get a 7-inch, 1024 x 600 display, encased in an aluminum unibody case and powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm chip. HTC’s Sense UI has undergone some tablet-friendly tweaks and there is of course that Scribe stylus to flex your artistic muscles with. 3G connectivity and 32GB of storage flesh out the Flyer’s hardware offering, while the underlying Android Gingerbread OS is promised to get a Honeycomb-flavored update, most likely some time this summer.

HTC Flyer hits UK pre-order status at £600, comes with 3G and 32GB of storage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ralph Lauren’s solar backpack looks like rescue-wear, but it’s fashion, dammit

If solar powered apparel is to make it into the mainstream, then it needs to be pushed by a mainstream brand. And who could be more mainstream than Ralph Lauren, hawker of overpriced t-shirts to the gullible and easily confused?

The RLX backpack seems to embrace the geekier side of design rather than the usual Ralph Lauren style, and is all the better for it. Made from “waterproof material”, it comes in black or orange and has a solar panel on the back which puts out up to 2.45 watts. This is enough, apparently, to charge a phone in two to three hours. Don’t get too excited about charging an iPad, though: Even a standard five-watt USB port can’t slake the thirst of the iPad’s huge battery.

Bag-wise, the backpack has a buckle-closed top flap, zippered pockets along one side and a side handle for carrying in the hand.

It seems competent, as theses things go, but let me tell you about the price. You can probably guess that this wouldn’t be cheap, but at $800 only the most well-heeled geek will even consider buying one. And anyhow, I think a much better use of Ralphie’s time would be coming up with a lame, middle-class baseball cap with a solar panel on the peak. I’d totally wear one of those to my next WASP cookout.

RLX solar-powered backpack [Ralph Lauren via Uncrate]

See Also:

• 'World's Only' Solar-Powered Light-Bulb
• CES: Voltaic's Solar-Powered Backpacks To Get Greener

Deconstructing the Airport Express. Photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

Programmer James Laird wanted to help his girlfriend stream her iTunes music in her new house, so he hacked away at Apple’s private key for streaming music, reverse-engineered the script, and made it available to the public.

Laird calls his open source Perl script Shairport, which lets hardware and software receive AirTunes music from iTunes.

Apple uses a public-key encryption scheme for AirTunes streaming. This lets anyone encrypt and stream audio to the AirPort Express (or other compatible device), but iTunes would only stream to Apple devices. Now, with Shairport, iTunes can be tricked into streaming audio to anything at all.

Laird did this by cracking open the AirPort Express (literally), dumping the ROM and then searching around for the private key. Apparently this was easy to find, as Apple had hidden the private key “in the ROM image, using a scheme that made the de-obfuscation code itself stand out like a flare.” He then cracked the crypto and now has the key.

This is combined with an ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) decoder to make a small package that can be installed on computer. It’s unlikely that hardware manufacturers will risk using this solution, but it’s easy to see how a home user could install it on an unused computer or even a Linux-based router.

That means we’ll likely see some third-party programs taking advantage of Shairport. For example, someone might make an app for the Xbox 360 capable of streaming music from iTunes on your PC. Or, say you have a MacBook Air and want to stream music to your friend’s iMac — Shairport makes this possible.

When up and running, the Shairport machine shows up as a regular AirTunes share in iTunes, or on your iPad or iPhone, and works just as you’d expect, so Laird’s girlfriend can use it just like her old AirPort Express.

I wonder: Will Apple will close this hole? It seems pointless to do so, as this hack will likely only be used by intrepid hackers such as you, dear Gadget Lab reader. Still, with Apple, you never know.

ShairPort 0.01 released [Mafipulation via Hacker News via Apple Insider]

See Also:

• Apple TV Has Airtunes Built In
• Apple TV Update Adds Support for Any Remote, AirTunes Streaming
• Hands-On With Airfoil Speakers Touch