Hasta La Gadget!

This is way louder than a playing card in the spokes.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET)

Magician and comedian Eric Buss is the new king of pop. He recently combined two favorite human-powered activities, popping bubble wrap and riding a bike, into one. His bubble-wrap-bike creation is a non-stop plastic pop-fest.

Buss uploaded a short video of himself taking the bike for a ride down a neighborhood street. The concept is pretty simple. A massive roll of bubble wrap is mounted on top of the bike, above and a little forward of the front wheel. It unfurls a continuous sheet of bubble wrap underneath the tires as the bike is ridden. Much noise is gleefully made.

Related stories

• Cardboard bicycle starts $2 million crowdfunding campaign
• Rubbee turns any bike into an electric one in seconds

The homemade bike contraption is about as silly as they come. It’s also a rolling road hazard, but it looks like Buss is bright enough not to take it out of the neighborhood. It could use some refinements. A mechanism for picking the bubble wrap back up and reusing it would be a nice improvement.

<... [Read more]

Related Links:
Rubbee turns any bike into an electric one in seconds
Citi Bike leaks private info of 1,174 customers by accident
When the Wright brothers and their ‘flying machine’ were new
‘Drone it Yourself’ kit makes everyday objects fly
Star Apps: Barenaked Ladies

There’s an accessory line in the making said to be coming from Nokia in the form of a so-called “Treasure Tag” NFC dongle. This device has been tipped to The Verge as an invention strikingly similar to what we’ve seen from Tile, bringing NFC-enabled miniature pieces of plastic that attach to your every beloved device and valuable. Here with Treasure Tag, Nokia will allow you to track a collection of tags in real time, using none other than Nokia Lumia devices’ LiveSight app to track these tags in augmented reality.

This system will be working with a combination of Bluetooth and NFC, the actual accessories appearing in at least one form: on a loop made with materials not all that different from what we’ve seen from the company in their ever-expanding Lumia-friendly family. There will also be a Treasure Tag app that’ll work with the tags exclusively, showing the location of each sensor on a map.

The phone you’ve paired the Tag with will be able to be located with a long press on the tag, the phone sending out a notification noise until it’s located. The Tag will be able to be found by the phone with the Treasure Tag app.

The tags will be powered by batteries – long lasting “six months of use” batteries, that is – that will be on all the time. An NFC tag cannot send out a signal on its own without a power source, while this system will work with both Bluetooth signals – Bluetooth 4.0, in this case – and NFC to keep your machines together.

Even in Bluetooth 4.0, the range of this technology stays within 100 m (330 ft). Bluetooth 4.0′s interaction with Bluetooth LE (Bluetooth Low Energy) allows the sensor technology to work with low energy, and doesn’t increase its range – it lowers it to half, in fact – making this next-generation innovation have little effect on Nokia’s proposed set of accessories.

So if you’re leaving your keys in the car and you’ve walked through the park and through downtown, you might not be able to see the sensor anymore. This setup would be much more for an “I can’t find my keys in the house” sort of situation.

Nokia “Treasure Tag” will keep your keys in place with Bluetooth and NFC is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google’s Nexus 7 was the best small tablet of 2012. Rather than mess with success, Google did something uncharacteristically conservative: It made little improvements here and there and left the rest mostly as is. The result? This year’s Nexus 7 is more low rumble than tectonic shift, but it’s still our new favorite tablet. For now, at least.

Read more…

Close to a fortnight ago, we got word that the HTC One mini has already received approval from the good people over at the FCC, and here we are two weeks down the road with press renders of the AT&T-bound HTC One mini spotted. How do we know that this shrunken version of the flagship HTC One (with some changes in the hardware too, of course, as it is not only cosmetic alterations on the outside) is headed towards AT&T? The answer is simple, really, as the press render leak did show off the AT&T name where the carrier name is normally displayed. The thing is, it remains to be seen just when will the HTC One mini be released for AT&T, so we will have to play the patience card this time around.

Interestingly enough in the press render leak, the Beats Audio logo has shed its normal bright red shade, turning grey in the process. As for the Blink Feed home screen that is depicted in the render, the location is Atlanta instead of London where the international version of the HTC One mini is concerned. Do these have any bearings on the final version? Not likely if you were talking about a huge impact, but at least we do have high hopes that AT&T will eventually make this puppy available.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | AT&T HTC One Mini Press Render Spotted original content from Ubergizmo.

Earlier this month, we did mention about how a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phablet was spotted (at least screenshots of it shown off in an AnTuTu benchmark) to feature a Snapdragon 600 processor, and while that remained pretty much on the brink between rumor and reality, it looks like said phablet is very, very real. So real, in fact, that it has showed up in China with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 processor in tow. Now, if we were to turn back the clock a tad, the Galaxy Note 2 that has been available in the US since August last year did come with a 5.5” touchscreen display, 2GB RAM and running on a quad-core Samsung Exynos 4 processor.

I guess the Snapdragon 600 processor in this China-bound version of the Galaxy Note 2 takes a slightly different route, and it remains to be seen whether it will be released outside of China or not. Other than the processor change, everything else about this particular Galaxy Note 2 remains the same, from its display size all the way to the cameras and operating system version.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Samsung Galaxy Note 2 With Snapdragon 600 Announced In China original content from Ubergizmo.