Hasta La Gadget!

Data, like all things, eventually dies. Your music, your movies, your documents, your files, your computer. You don’t expect it to live forever but… what if it did? Hitachi claims that they’ve developed a new quartz glass plate that can store data forever. More »

Do you constantly get greasy fingerprints all over the screen of your shiny glass tablet? If you’re like me, you probably just wipe it off with your shirt sleeve or maybe an eyeglass cleaning cloth. But if you’re looking for something that’s designed specifically for the task, then check out the Colocolo tablet cleaner.

Looking like one of those masking tape lint rollers your use to remove pet hair, or maybe a Schticky, you roll the Colocolo across the screen of your tablet to remove dirt, grime and fingerprints. The sticky tape surface on the Colocolo is said to work for about 500 cleanings before you need to buy a refill, and is specially designed to mop up oils from fingerprints.

If your shirt sleeve isn’t doing the trick, you can order the Colocolo over at Gizmine for $29.99(USD), though if you happen to live in Japan, it can be had for ¥1260 ($16 USD), and refills sell for ¥525 (~$7 USD). It comes in three colors, white, black and pink, making you wonder why all lint rollers don’t offer color choices.

A colocolo, by the way, is a small spotted and striped cat native to the west Andean slope in central and northern Chile, so the name makes perfect sense, no? Not unless there’s a cat included in the box that’ll lick your tablet’s screen clean.

We were talking with the New York fashion community about postponing New York Fashion Week for a few days while we ran Disrupt, but they just wouldn’t listen. What’s more, Sergey Brin and Google sent a bunch of Google Glass devices to Diane von Furstenberg (a famous designer) who outfitted her gamine charges with some of the most sought-after tech in the nerdosphere.

Also Sarah Jessica Parker tried them on.

It’s clear that Google feels that these GooGlasses will probably receive a chilly welcome from the world at large and this is one of the outreach efforts that will encourage folks to at least give them a fair shake. I worry that these sorts of shows will turn Glass into the must-have accessory of the year and that space-age Internet glasses will replace the Bluetooth headset as the douche gear of the next decade.

It’s not all bad. After all, it’s about to democratize VR for the masses, which is pretty amazingly badass. As Joel Johnson of the new blog Mote And Beam notes, “I don’t hate it? As a gimmick, it’ll only work once. But it’s not overly distracting.”

via Buzzfeed

Eking out more power from solar cells is an ongoing challenge for scientists, and now architect André Broessel has developed a spherical glass energy generator that’s said to improve efficiency by 35 percent. Acting as a lens, the rig’s large water-filled orb concentrates diffused daylight or moonlight onto a solar cell with the help of optical tracking to harvest electricity. In certain configurations, the apparatus can be used for solar thermal energy generation and even water heating. In addition to the oversized globe, Broessel has cooked up a mobile version of the contraption for domestic use and an array of much smaller ball lenses with dual-axis tracking that offers 40 percent efficiency. These devices aren’t the first venture into concentrated photovoltaics, but they are likely among the most visually impressive. If the Barcelona-based architect’s vision of the future comes true, you’ll be seeing these marbles incorporated into buildings and serving as standalone units. Hit the source links below for the picture spread of prototypes and renders.

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Spherical glass lens concentrates sunlight by up to 10,000 times, boosts solar cell efficiency originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 09:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They say that nature has inspired its fair share of scientific advancements, and the same can be said of this special glass coating that gained its inspiration from spider webs. This particular spider web glass, if you will, has seen action in the UK for the first time, where it was specially installed by a lookout tower at Lindisfarne in order to offer sanctuary and protection to the hundreds of species which flock to the island that is located off the north-east coast of England. Thanks to its Ornilux glazing, it is capable of reflects ultraviolet light that can be seen by birds but appears invisible to humans. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Self-cleaning glass is also fog and glare resistant, Google Project Glass heads-up display undergoes public testing,