Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

Some of the following, for legal reasons, may or may not be fictional.

My first modem was a 300-baud Apple-Cat II. It was an expansion card for the Apple II and simply plugged into a phone line. It was, simply put, a bad-ass piece of technology that turned me into a total digital delinquent. While my parents thought I was innocently learning to code BBSes (bulletin board systems) I was actually learning how to get things for free and paving the way for software pirates, phone phreaks and straight-up frauds of the future.

The Apple-Cat II could connect to other Apple-Cat IIs at 1200 baud, which made file transfers pretty quick for the time. This meant we could trade entire games in about an hour. We’d log into bulletin board systems, share lists of things we had and set up times to dial one another to trade games. Usually a barter would take place — your Aztec for my Hard Hat Mack. It was a lot like trading baseball cards, I imagine.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Now that the Space Shuttle program is over, NASA is remodeling the Vehicle Assembly Building where they were built. It’s a huge building, one of the largest in the world. How huge? Here’s some info to (maybe) help put it into perspective:

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Have you ever been to a movie so shocking that the theater management offered you a life insurance policy just in case you died of fright? Filmmaker William Castle devised a scheme that did just that for the release of his 1958 suspense/horror film Macabre. Thankfully, they never had to pay out.

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This Magic 8 Ball is a little different.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET.)

The classic Magic 8 Ball toy has been giving vague answers about the future for many decades. It’s about time it got a modern update.

Maker Jason Poel Smith has unveiled an Instructables project that uses a digital photo keychain, a cutting tool, and a lot of glue to create a digital version of the fortune-telling device.

This project has the added bonus of giving you a peek inside the workings of a Magic 8 Ball. There’s a lot of plastic to saw through in order to open it up. What you find inside is a tube filled with blue fluid that holds the fortune-telling piece. You don’t need that part anymore, since you’re going digital.

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The rest of the steps involve the installation of the digital photo keychain in place of the tube. You also have to attach some button extenders so the keychain can be triggered from the outside of the ball. Cutting out a… [Read more]

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I recently bought one of those elongated spoons because I got tired of ending up with sticky hands all the time after getting the last few spoonfuls of peanut butter from the jar.

I’m sure many of you have a problem with the same thing. The good news is that this first-world problem might soon be resolved. How? By re-doing the jar.

You might be wondering, how do you re-do a jar? How do you “redesign” something that’s been used for many, many decades already?

Just ask the folks behind the Jar-with-a-Twist. They came up with the twist-jar that you’re supposed to twist so its contents are slowly “raised” from the jar so you can swipe at it more easily with your spoon or knife. It’s sort of like a giant lipstick, but for your peanut butter, salsa or jelly.

Its creators hope to make the jar affordable enough for mass production so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of having a jar that twists up.

[Reddit via Foodbeast via Laughing Squid]