Hasta La Gadget!

Boom! TDK’s Sound Cube will rock your outdoor party — if you can afford the batteries

TDK’s portable boombox line continues to grow, and joining the rather more traditionally styled, giant-cassette-deck-shaped two and three speaker “Boomboxes” is this cheaper and more compact Sound Cube.

Like those Boomboxes, the cube looks amazing, with big metal knobs and jumping readouts on its retro-styled glowing display. It has two speakers to kick out some big bass and you can hook it up to pretty much any music source via line-in or USB. And music on USB devices (including iDevices) can be controlled directly from the Cube’s front panel. Buskers may like it too, as you can mix a mic or musical instrument input with the music.

Also like its bigger brothers, the Sound Cube requires a mountain of D-cell batteries to work — 12 in this case.

Battery-powered speakers are a lot of fun. I went for a bike ride with friends recently and we cruised around town beaming music to the Bluetooth Jambox speaker from Jawbone. Passersby seemed to dig on our all-Bee Gees playlist, but it would have been a lot cooler with a giant bass bin like this.

The TDK Sound Cube is available now, for $300.

Sound Cube product page [TDK via Uncrate]

See Also:

• TDK Resurrects the Boombox
• Gadget Lab Podcast: TDK Boombox, Screwy iPhones

The Plug and Player concept is cool, but probably wouldn’t work

As an Englishman, this plug-in MP3 player from Giha Woo terrifies me. After suffering decades of brainwashing propaganda in the form of public service ads which outlined the myriad dangers awaiting anyone stupid enough to plug things into power outlets, I take one look at Woo’s Plug and Player and see a potential death trap.

This is nonsense, however, as the device is both a) a concept and b) uses a euro-style plug, which means it couldn’t be used on Britain’s shores anyway.

The idea is simple: The MP3 player is housed in a power plug, so wherever there is a power socket you can plug it in and charge it. It does seem, though, that there isn’t enough space inside for the transformer that would be needed to drop the voltage from 220v to the 5v required by most pocket media players.

So perhaps this concept would be better housed inside a UK plug. These giant blocks of plastic would certainly be able to house a small transformer. Take a look:

Every time an Englishman wants to plug something in, he has to lift this behemoth all by himself. Photo Wikipedia

The idea of a charger-less gadget is a nice one, though. I just wonder how you’re supposed to get the music on there is the first place? I see no USB port anywhere.

Plug and Player [Giha Woo via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Power Plugs
• Ejector Plug Makes British Sockets Pensioner-Friendly
• Promiscuous Power-Socket With Built-In Shelf
• Gallery Of The World's Power Sockets

Well, it looks like folks in Brazil that live in one of the twelve host cities for the 2014 FIFA World Cup now have another reason to be glad their city was chosen. The Brazilian government has just announced that those cities will be the first in line to get 4G service when the country’s long overdue network upgrades eventually begin. Unfortunately, it’s still not clear exactly when that will happen — a government official only said that companies will go through a bidding process to win the contract for the network, which should presumably roll out sometime before the World Cup kicks off in three years’ time.

Brazil’s World Cup host cities first in line to get 4G upgrades originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 06:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The thinnest 15-inch laptop “on the planet” is coming tomorrow, costing a measly $999, according to the Wall Street Journal. In a profile of Dell’s recent history and forthcoming plans in the consumer electronics market, the financial paper twice makes reference to an ultrathin, $999 laptop that is set to launch on Tuesday of this week. Pairing that intel with the abundance of leaks surrounding the slinky 15.6-inch XPS 15z — including a Michael Dell tweet promising it’s “coming soon” — leads us to the conclusion that we’ve finally gotten ahold of the price and date for Dell’s next big thing. Interestingly enough, the WSJ article goes on to say that Dell had canned a similar set of slim laptops earlier in the year, which might give us greater hope for the quality of the 15z — it survived where others didn’t.

Other disclosures in the piece include a quote from Michael Dell, saying that he “didn’t completely see” the tablet boom coming, which might explain why sales of his company’s Streak tablets have been low enough to be described as “immaterial.” There’s also a discussion of the abortive Zing music service and related MP3 players that never were, but you’ll have to hit the source link to learn more about them.

Update: As further evidence of the 15z’s imminent release, the tease has turned into a show with a video that fully reveals its slimline chassis and declares that the new Dell packs the Streak’s Stage UI as well. [Thanks, Ishai and Ming Han]

Update 2: And now we have the answer to our headline question: yes.

Continue reading Dell XPS 15z coming tomorrow for $999? (updated)

Dell XPS 15z coming tomorrow for $999? (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 06:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Great Picture team turns an aircraft hangar into a giant pinhole camera

This is the world’s largest camera. You won’t be using it to take holidays snaps or to send pictures of your dinner up to Instagram, and you won’t be able to carry the resulting photograph in your wallet. In fact the massive photo — of a dull scene of a scrubby Californian land — is rather unimpressive save for its size. What this giant camera is about is numbers. Big, big numbers.

The Great Picture was carried out back in 2006 as part of the ongoing Legacy Project, and turned an airplane hangar in Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, California into a pinhole camera. The camera measured 13.71 x 48.76 x 24.38 meters (45 x 160 x 80 feet) and produced a photograph of 9.62 x 33.83 meters (31.6 x 111 feet). And that’s just getting started.

How do you turn a drafty, cavernous hangar into a light-tight box? With lots of hands. Six artists used 24,000 square feet of black plastic sheeting, 1,300 gallons of foam gap filler and 1.52 miles of black tape to seal out the light, and spray 40 cans of black paint around to cut out reflections.

The “film” was a giant sheet of muslin hand-painted with 80 liters of Rockland Liquid Light emulsion. This was done under safelights (the film was black and white).

Finally, a quarter-inch pinhole was punched into the wall, 15 feet from the floor, and the film was exposed for 35 minutes.

This is the result of two months of hard work

Then the development began. A swimming pool sized developing tray was filled with 600 gallons of developer, and the the image was fixed with 1,200 gallons of fixer. Rinsing, the final stage before drying the print, was done with fire hoses hooked up to a pair of hydrants sending through 750 gallons a minute.

It’s an amazing feat, although its a shame that the photo had to be of a nearby control tower and runways. Still, I guess getting a cute dog on a skateboard to stand still for half an hour is even harder than building a three-story camera.

The Great Picture product page [Legacy Project via Petapixel]

See Also:

• Pinwide: Wide-Angle Pinhole Lens for Micro Four Thirds Cameras …
• The Battlefield: DIY Three-Hole Pinhole Camera
• Six-Month Pinhole Exposure Shows the Sun's Travels