Hasta La Gadget!

In today’s episode of “But will it run Zork?” a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) — a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late ’70s / early ’80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced — transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD’s narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren’t exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We’d love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses’ photo blog at the source link.

Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading NASA asteroid mission could explain how life began (and how ours might end)

NASA asteroid mission could explain how life began (and how ours might end) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Daedalus Touch may be the first truly iPad-ready text editor

Despite the ridiculous amount of iPad text editors in the App Store, none have yet managed to feel like truly iPad-exploiting apps. They may be controlled by touch, but they could exist equally well on a desktop machine, controlled by keyboard and mouse.

Daedalus changes all that. It is a gesture-driven app that could only work on the iPad. It also adds some interesting metaphors for documents and — despite some v1.0 glitches — it looks very promising.

The main navigation device is pinching. Your documents are organized in stacks consisting of infinite sheets of paper. To expand a stack and see these sheets, you pinch (or double-tap). To edit a sheet you pinch again.

The other gesture is the swipe. Swipe to move between stacks and pages. When you are at the last page in a stack, you swipe to create anew one and keep typing. You can drag the pages in a stack into any order, which makes Daedalus useful for sketching out stories and screenplays.

Here’s the view of a ‘Paper Stack’, a pile of document pages

The other big features is called “modeless search.” Theres a search bar at the top of the screen at all times. Enter a terms and the instances of that text string are highlighted in yellow. This search stays active as you pinch out to a stacks overview or pinch into a document. This lets you quickly get to any search term, wherever it might be.

There are other niceties, too. Daedalus supports TextExpander for quicker typing. It also lets you tap in the left and right margins to move the cursor left and right, and you cans switch between day and night modes to change the color of text and paper. There is also a persistent character and word count, and one really neat feature: a built in web browser. This gives quick access to Google, Wikipedia or Dict.cc, a multilingual dictionary site which also offers translations.

And of course it will sync with DropBox (as well as mobile me), and will let you export pages as text, stacks as zip files and even let you open the current document in any other plain-text capable app on your iPad.

There are some glitches. The zooming animations can be jerky, and the app likes to crash when you perform some bulk deleting operations. Given that v1.1 showed up just moments after I’d bought v1.0, and that the developer has already submitted a fixed v1.2, it looks like this part is under control.

Daedalus is available now, for $4.

Daedalus Touch product page [Soulmen]

See Also:

• PlainText: iPad Text-Editor from the Makers of WriteRoom
• Elements for iPad, a Dropbox-Syncing Text Editor
• Essay: iPad Rich Text Editor Shows Promise, Needs Work
• Essay for iPad Adds Clever Keyboard Shortcuts
• 15 iPad Apps You Should Download Today
• Dropbox Updated for iPad, External Editing Added

Software giant plans to take the wraps off a new operating system at some point next week, according to a Bloomberg report that cites three sources.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

You’d think that making a speaker from hard, brittle porcelain would result in an equally splintered, frangible sound. Apparently, though, according to Joonsoo Kim and Jungyou Choi of Joon & Jung, it lends the sound a resonance, a “natural vibe and ambiance,” which lends music some properties of acoustic instruments.

This is the thinking behind their Natural Speaker, hand made from porcelain and a fagot-like bundle of sticks which produces a resonance chamber. The internals are shaped to allow sound to bounce around before exiting, and the exterior looks beautiful in un-smoothed, unglazed porcelain. This lovely video shows the hand-made construction (complete with an oddly violent reverse-smashing section in the middle).

If nothing else, these speakers look wonderful, and there’s something enticing about speakers that are individually tuned, no matter how serendipitous that tuning might be. The Natural Speakers can be ordered now. And the price? If you have to ask…

Natural Speakers product page [Joon & Jung via Core77]

See Also:

• Hi-Fido, A Dog-Shaped Ceramic Speaker
• Joey Roth's Ceramic Speakers a Sight to Behold
• High-End Hemp Speakers Are All the Buzz