Hasta La Gadget!

It can fly, it can travel through time, its doors flip up when you open them–is there anything the Delorean can’t do? If you said “hold up to 500GB of data,” you, my friend, are sadly mistaken.

Flash Rods is offering quite possibly the coolest external hard drive we’ve seen this year, just in time for the holidays. The Delorean Time Machine is a 1:18 scale model of the Back to the Future time machine with a built-in 500GB Seagate hard drive. The doors and the hood flip up, the wheels roll, and there’s a USB port located on the rear license plate.

The stainless steel hard drive will run you $250.

For millennia, the greatest theological minds have vehemently debated one the great questions of existence: what kind of connector does Satan use to link his peripherals and his P.C.? Well, we now have a definitive answer: that dastardly trident-branded USB.

At least that’s what one Brazilian “evangelical cult” claims. Welder Saldanha, the founder and “apostle” of “Paz do Senhor Amado” (Peace Beloved of the Lord) has forbidden followers from using the connector which is branded with Satan’s soul-poking tool of choice, citing that “The symbol of that name [USB] is a trident, which is used to torture
the souls that go to hell. Use of that symbol proves that all users of
this technology are actually worshipers of Satan.”

Brazilian blogs have been bouncing this story around since at least early summer (link with Google translation). But only now are we snarky secularists of Europe and North America starting to take notice.

There are some elements of this story that seem too wacked to be true, such as when asked which peripheral-connector followers are permissible, Mr. Saldanha answers Bluetooth because “Blue was the color of the eyes of our savior Jesus Christ.” I haven’t been able to find any independent verification that this “cult” even exists. So, there is a chance I may be putting up a post in the near future explaining that this is all a prank or a joke that did not properly bridge the Portuguese-English divide.

But for now, it’s all pretty nutso.

pic via

In 2003, LA-based graffiti writer, publisher, and activist TEMPT1 was diagnosed with the degenerative neuromuscular disease ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease). The disease has left him almost fully-paralyzed, except for his eyes. He has since teamed up with the Not Impossible Foundation and Graffiti Research Labs to create the Eyewriter, an open-source project that will allow users to control what a machine draws using only the movement of their eyes.

I’ve never been a huge fan of graffiti art, but knowing that an image like this was created only using the movement of an eyeball is beyond impressive.

Eyewriter 2.0 made its debut at the recent 2010 Cinekid festival in Amsterdam. The technology combines the Eyewriter software with the ROBOTAGGER, an industrial arm that is able to replicate human-like marks on a huge scale. (Video after the jump)

The Eyewriter project not only aims to develop this technology as a low-cost communication tool for those whose physical bodies may otherwise be impaired, it is also a shining example of how a group of artists, hackers, and assorted techno-folk can create an impressive piece of technology outside of a corporate setting.

And that’s hopeful for so many reasons.

Omnio isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of a keyboard that pulls double-duty as an iPhone dock. A number of companies have keyboards with a space to dock your iPhone so it can charge when it’s not in use, but the new Omnio WoWKeys looks sharper than the competition and comes in a smaller, more compact package.

The WoWKeys crams a laptop-style keyboard in to the left, and on the right is a dock where you slide in your iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS to charge or use it while it’s docked.
 
The keyboard has built-in hotkeys that allow you to turn your iPhone into a remote control or multi-touch trackpad for your computer, or use your iPhone (and an app installed on it – one that’s not included with the keyboard) to control media keys or serve as the number-pad that you lose in order to get the space for your phone.

Pricing and availability haven’t been officially announced, but the keyboard is expected to run about $100 USD at retail and ship from Korea.

[via AVing]