Scrabble Keyboard: Never Be Stuck With Only Vowels Again

scrabble1.jpg

Hey, Scrabble geeks-even if you can’t play the addictive game 24/7, at least you can pretend with the Scrabble keyboard. Although not (yet) for sale, the Scrabble keyboard is made from real Scrabble tiles that were all hand-beveled and built into a USB, clicky, mechanical-switch keyboard. Granted, not all of the keys, like the Caps lock key, are original Scrabble pieces, but for the most part, the keys are authentic.

The keyboard’s creator received such a positive response, that a note was added on Jan. 19 saying a batch of keyboards is being considered for the near future. The legality of the Scrabble name could be an issue. “Please don’t sue me, Hasbro, I’m just a guy in a garage over here!” said the keyboard’s creator.

Here’s hoping Hasbro lets him make more of those keyboards, because playing online Scrabble with the Scrabble keyboard would make it just that much more fun.

Doc Datamancer’s Scrabble Keyboard Gets Triple Word Score

Scrabble

This amazing Scrabble keyboard comes to us by way of BoingBoing Gadgets’ John Brownlee who, in the course of describing Doc Datamancer’s steampunk hack, makes some startling admissions.

Those of you familiar with his work might expect a smattering of references to wet bodily functions, or at least some show-off allusions to the works of Vladimir Nabokov. You would, just this once, be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Brownlee gives us a revealing insight into his writing process, something which turns out to be far more complex than just letting dolphins push balls printed with random words to the top of their tank and copying the result — our previous assumption:

[W]riting is not about randomly shaking up a tray of letters in one’s head and plucking words from the alphabetical mnemonic slurry… if it was, my posts would make more sense. [emphasis added]

As somebody who has spent time with Brownlee in his Berlin bachelor pad, this is thick with irony. He actually owns a Scrabble set which he keeps at his desk. And while he doesn’t shake the letters "in his head", he invites his neglected parakeet to peck at the tiles, thus outlining post after post. It’s a testament to the bird’s uncanny language skills that we understand the man at all.

Product page [Doc Datamancer via Humbert Humbird]





Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to digg



Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother’s delight

It’s our best guess that University of Florida PhD student Jason Winters woke up at 10:00AM ET this morning and took an approximately 18-minute shower. How did we come to this conclusion? Using an AC clamp attached to an ioBridge, the biomedical engineering scholar measures the main electrical lines entering his house and sends the data to a Google charts widget on his personal blog that reports the kilowatt-hour usage in real time. As a footnote, he presents an example graph of when the hot water is turned on, which then produces close to 4500 watts. That’s just over the amount of power he used this morning for about 1100 seconds. Of course, we can’t say for certain any of these morning events really transpired, but then again, we don’t exactly want to know. Hit up the read links for directions on DIYing this.

Filed under:

Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother’s delight originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Handcrafted Scrabble keyboard could stand to be commercialized

Um, can you say “sell like hotcakes?” Datamancer‘s incredibly amazing Scrabble keyboard is one of the slickest, most ready-for-market DIY projects we’ve ever had the pleasure of eying, with each letter key being constructed from an actual pre-owned Scrabble game piece. The USB keyboard itself was built with an aluminum casing for an “industrialized twist,” but obviously it’s the top that keeps us drooling. Oh, and there are even LEDs hidden beneath the Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock keys, suggesting that a completely backlit iteration isn’t too far out of the realm of possibility. A few more images are tucked away in the read link — you owe it to yourself to check ’em out.

[Via SlipperyBrick]

Filed under:

Handcrafted Scrabble keyboard could stand to be commercialized originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Chumby gets retrofitted into retro telephone, will soon make collect calls

We’ve seen the elusive Chumby hidden behind all sorts of facades before, but this one is probably the most heartwarming yet. The brilliant minds at MAKE have figured out a way to retrofit the highly tweakable gizmo into an old school telephone, putting all sorts of web-connected widgets at your fingertips while keeping that blast-from-the-past flair in tact. Sadly, it cannot yet make or receive calls, but what’s stopping you from taking this same project on and making sure that functionality remains in tact? Nothing, that’s what.

[Thanks, Gerry]

Filed under:

Chumby gets retrofitted into retro telephone, will soon make collect calls originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Dealzmodo Hack: Revitalize Your Windows Mobile Phone

For the legions of helpless Windows Mobile users, the Pre is just the latest in an endless, corrosive barrage of ego-draining next-gen phones. But living with Windows Mobile doesn’t have to be so bad.

Work rules, lame carriers, prohibitive contracts—whatever the reason you’re shacked up with a WinMo phone, you’ve been through the same experience. You toil with the layers of menus, hidden device settings, poor browsing and crashy, inconsistent performance. Surrounded by fancy, shiny phones with even fancier, shinier OSes, you’re even getting a bit jealous, and feel like you have a genuinely last-gen device. Well, as Windows Mobile enthusiasts (who are out there in droves) will tell you, it’s not that terrible. With the right apps you can get quite a lot of utility and—yes—enjoyment out of your aging phone.

For God’s sake, get a new browser
Internet Explorer Mobile, even in its latest incarnation, has rarely been described as “good.” In fact, it’s pretty much the complete opposite. No worries though—Windows Mobile, through third parties, has the broadest and most versatile collection of browsers of any of its competitors.

Opera Mini/Mobile: A Java-based browser, Opera Mini is a free download that will immediately give your phone a new lease on life. Fancy this: Now, with your phone, you can visit actual websites, rendered to a reasonable degree of accuracy! OH MY GOD!

There’s also Opera Mobile, a native app with a few more advanced features, which has recently shifted its emphasis to a relatively narrow set of touchscreen devices (mostly from HTC and Samsung), on which it performs as a reasonable counterpart to Safari Mobile or Chrome Mobile. It’s free when it’s in beta, but will cost you for long term use.

Both browsers Opera Mini routes content through Opera’s servers for optimization and compression, which can occasionally break formatting. Update: Opera Mobile runs independently of Opera’s servers, though there is noticeable compression performed—presumably locally—on some images.

Skyfire: This upstart company has produced a phenomenal browser, dedicated to bringing a full desktop browsing experience to Windows Mobile phones. This powerhouse app is now available to the public, and lives up to most of its claims.

Skyfire routes web content through its servers like Opera Mini does, but with a greater emphasis on exact page reproduction. For the end user, that means fully optimized streaming Flash video, which will allow you to watch everything from Hulu to Megaporn—all automatically transcoded into a lower, EDGE or 3G-appropriate bitrate. Skyfire works wonderfully on most WinMo phones, touchscreen or not, but its version for VGA-resolution phones needs better visuals.

TorchMobile Iris: This is another browser that claims to bring the “desktop experience” to your phone, and for the most part it does, assuming your phone has a touchscreen. It got its start on the LG Dare, where it performed relatively well. In short, this WebKit-based browser render quite well, but it’s not terribly fast and the navigation paradigm isn’t the most intuitive of the lot. But! It’s free and it’s not Mobile IE, and for this I am grateful.

Give your old phone a new look
This is where Windows Mobile feels the most out of date; its interface is a classic example of design by committee, only this time the committee was made up primarily of the visionaries responsible for Windows Bob, Windows ME, Windows Vista and possibly the Pontiac Aztec. The solution? Skin it.

PointUI: About a year ago, our own Jason Chen raved about PointUI, and not much has changed—it’s still fantastic. This layer, not unlike those designed by HTC, Samsung and Sony to mask WinMo, will provide pretty, finger-friendly navigation to a touchscreen Windows Mobile phone. It looks like the project is on temporary hiatus, but the app is still available here.

SPB Mobile Shell: This one isn’t free ($30, actually) but does provide a fairly complete conversion. It reaches deeper into layers of the interface than PointUI does, is a bit more friendly for QWERTY-based phones and offers a load of user skins.

ThrottleLauncher: HTC’s TouchFlo 3D is a wonderful Windows Mobile shell, but unfortunately can be difficult to port due to its 3D acceleration requirement. ThrottleLauncher is a TF3D replacement, which works on most Windows Mobile touchscreen phones. It looks like TF3D, and offers skins to look like Android, iPhone OS and others. There are a fair number of bugs present, but they’re tolerable.

Fill out your app list:
Most of those things that modern smartphones have—the swank maps, the messaging services, the productivity apps—you can have too. They may not be as polished, but they work very, very well.

Google Apps: Aside from plethora of mobile web apps offered by Google, there are a few native ones as well. Google Maps is a must-download, and provides almost all of the functionality of its iPhone/G1 brother, including GPS integration. Google Mail provides a nice, speedy interface for your Gmail account, offering relief from Windows Mobile’s occasionally frustrating mail app, and allowing for relatively easy switching between accounts.

Skype: Here’s an area where Windows Mobile generally trumps all others OSes—voice over IP. The native Skype app is lovely, functioning well over Wi-Fi and cellular data connections, provided your carrier allows the latter.

Palringo: Palringo is a multiprotocol IM app, which enables messaging on many networks at once in a single program. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ—they’re all there. Like any decent IM app it works with the WinMo notification system and runs in the background, so you can be constantly apprised of your new messages, just like those smug BlackBerry users. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that in the area of messaging, Windows Mobile shines. Similar, also good: Fring.

TCPMP Media Player: Its development has been discontinued, but the app is perfectly usable as is. What is it? It’s a barebones media player that’ll handle almost any codec, audio or video, that you throw at it. In other words, you can encode video for mobile consumption however you like, something that can’t be said of most other OSes (cough*Apple*cough).

Pocket Scrobbler: An unofficial client for the fantastic Last.fm internet radio/social network service, this app will handily stream endless, personally catered internet radio over a cellular data connection or Wi-Fi. Windows Mobile actually has a distinct advantage with this type of programs: the ability to run apps in the background!

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

iPhonepad Combines Paper and Pixels

Iphonepad

Clearly Stephen Barry is a smart man. When looking to get some coverage of his iPhonepad he send it in to the Wired News hotline, whereupon it inevitably trickled down to the Gadget Lab, provider of Molekine hacks to the nerdy and curious — remember our Moleskine iPhone  disguise?

Stephen’s prototype, which he actually hopes to get into commercial production, combines a snuggly iPhone case along with a twentieth century artifact: the pen and paper.

Stephen says that the case is designed to let the phone slide easily in and out when open, but fixes it firmly in place when closed. We’re not quite sure how this works, but we suspect it has something to do with fancy origami-style folding.

We like it. It’s simple and stylish, and actually quite useful. And of
course, it comes with an Apple-style lock-in: Stephen plans to sell
refill pads and these will of course be a non-standard size and only
available from him.

Gallery [Stephen Barry. Thanks, Dylan!]

See Also:





Add to Reddit
Add to Facebook
Add to digg



Video: Chris the Carpenter shows off Walter the Robot’s servo-powered head

Chris the Carpenter shows off Walter the Robot's servo-powered head and drill-powered torso

We love us a good robot, the more clearly home-built the better, and it’s hard to get more DIY than a bot-to-be called Walter from Chris the Carpenter at Let’s Make Robots. Right now Walter exists in halves: a torso comprised of a custom chassis powered by some DeWalt drill motors, and a head with a small LCD display turned on three axis by a collection of servos. As of now everything is controlled by a remote, but the ultimate plan is for Walter to be able to locate a person, face them, and display a list of functions. We’re not sure what Walter’s purpose in life is to be in the future, but based on the second video below we’re reasonably sure it won’t be serving as a shuttle for reluctant wives.

[Via Hacked Gadgets]

Continue reading Video: Chris the Carpenter shows off Walter the Robot’s servo-powered head

Filed under:

Video: Chris the Carpenter shows off Walter the Robot’s servo-powered head originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Sony’s DualShock 3 controller hacked to work in Windows

Love your SIXAXIS controller? Wish you could just plug it into your PC and enjoy the spoils of familiarity when engaging in PC gaming sessions? You’re in luck, so long as you’re not terrified of branching out a bit and loading up some new drivers on your rig. A Japanese coder has whipped up four drivers that not only enable Sony DualShock 3 controllers to operate within Windows, but also support rumble and enable all sorts of tweaking. Hit the read link to get the show started, and be sure to let us know how it goes.

[Thanks, craig]

Filed under: ,

Sony’s DualShock 3 controller hacked to work in Windows originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Steampunk monitor initiative goes awry, out pops wooden enclosure

The monitor you see above was awfully close to becoming exactly like this, but thankfully, the wood gods spoke to Scuba_SM’s heart before he could round up another batch of Victorian-era tubing. The 22-inch wooden enclosure completely covers up the fact that an awkward looking LCD monitor is sitting on the table, and the solid maple top / base caps, light cherry stain and light coat of satin finish polyurethane make for something that’s actually enjoyable to gaze at. Overkill? Maybe. Classy? Yes, please.

Filed under:

Steampunk monitor initiative goes awry, out pops wooden enclosure originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments