Hasta La Gadget!

It was slightly more than a week ago when we reported that the mysterious Samsung i9260 handset could very well be the successor to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and needless to say, it will carry the name “Samsung Galaxy Nexus 2” for continuity’s sake. It seems that the handset’s existence has just been further confirmed with a leaked set of images appearing on Picasa, where those were touted to be snapped by the Samsung i9260 – or the Samsung Galaxy Nexus 2, if you will.

The photos are nothing to shout at, and chances are, they were snapped using a very early prototype assuming that they are not fake in the first place. Of course, bear in mind that the next generation of Nexus smartphones could also be produced by other manufacturers such as HTC, Sony and LG, and will not remain exclusively as a Samsung domain. Do you think that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus 2 will be able to hold its own against the rest of the smartphone crowd?

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It was slightly more than a year ago when we covered the story on the Ostrich Pillow, where one needs not bury one’s head in the sand if you want to keep out the noise and goings-on around you at the office. That was still a concept then, but thanks to a Kickstarter project, the Ostrich Pillow has already met half of its $70,000 goal in just half a dozen days. Throw in $75 into the Ostrich Pillow’s lot and you will be able to pick one up when it is ready.

It seems to be a fun pillow to have if you want to catch a quick cat nap while keeping out all of the noise and light from around you. I sure hope that it will be easy to breathe in this thing though, as folks who suffer from a degree of claustrophobia might want to give this a pass. Alternatively, you can just drop a few dollars at the local IKEA, sew some pillows together that covers your ears and eyes, and you’ve got a sorry excuse for the Ostrich Pillow. Still far more comfortable than burying your head in a bucket of sand, for sure.

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According to some security analysts, suspicious direct messages from Twitter friends with links to Facebook that have started to make their rounds might not be all that simple, especially when there is the very real possibility of them being malicious “backdoor trojans.” Have you been receiving direct messages on Twitter that resembled spam? Those Facebook links in there tend to be bogus most of the time, and Sophos analyst Graham Cluley wrote about it, sharing with the rest of the world the different variations of the direct messages that include, “your in this [link] lol” and “lol ur famous now [link]“.

Folks who were curious enough to click on this link were sent over to a video player which mentions, “An update to Youtube player is needed.” Following the instructions that follow would see one asked to download “FlashPlayerV10.1.57.108.exe,” which Sophos antivirus products detect it as Troj/Mdrop-EML – a kind of backdoor Trojan which is capable of copying itself to accessible drives and network shares. No idea on whether other antivirus programs will detect it as such though. Now that it is 2012 already, hopefully there will be Internet veterans who stop acting as though this is the first time they are online.

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The idea of a map being covered in “fog of war” has been toyed around enough in video games, and I clearly remember how maps in Doom came in handy whenever one got stuck. RTS titles too, had maps that cleared up as you explored new areas, and in the movie Prometheus, tiny, ball-like robots were sent out to explore the cavernous alien hangar, sending back real-time feedback to the ship so that it can reconstruct a 3D map of the surroundings. Perhaps that is not too far fetched in the future with this new wearable sensor system which is said to be able to automatically create a digital map of the environment, literally opening up new (digital) ground wherever the wearer moves.

Computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim that such a system would come in handy in assisting help emergency responders coordinate disaster response, although I am quite sure that the military, too, has a keen eye on how to use this particular wearable sensor system. A handheld pushbutton device will inform the central system to annotate the map, and future iterations might throw in voice or text tags for added meta data.

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Do you remember how you spent hours trying to avoid barrels in Donkey Kong? Well, this classic platformer has gotten a revamp, nay, it has been transferred over into real life thanks to the efforts of avid DIY enthusiast Martin Raynsford, where this physical representation of a Donkey Kong level relies on an Arduino that will relay signals from the NES controller to the Donkey Kong “screen”. Constructed with near pixel-perfect accuracy thanks to the wonders of laser-cut parts, it is a beauty to behold albeit being rather limited at this point in time.

You will not be able to rack up high scores or anything of that sort since Mario remains smack in the middle, where he is there to face a continuous barrage of barrels and ball bearings to jump over. Torture for the rotund Italian plumber, that’s for sure, while his brother Luigi and Bowser shack it up with Princess Peach, taking turns between themselves. Martin claims that there is a second version in the works, and we certainly hope Mario will have some off time to live out his love life then, too.

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