If you have ever wanted the biggest speakers you can get your hands on, AudioOrbs might be just what you are looking for. AudioOrbs are claimed to be the first and only speaker that you can actually sit inside of. The speakers are housed inside a massive clear sphere with a small circle cut out to allow you to climb in and out.
The developers behind the speakers say that the round design almost completely blocks noise from the outside of the speaker. Inside, the speaker is fitted with Tempur pillows to make for a comfortable time inside. The orb has 18 speakers to immerse its occupants with a full audio spectrum.
The company says that it will build two units, perhaps the only two ever built. Each of the orbs will sell for $15,000. The project is on Indiegogo and hasn’t raised a dollar yet. That’s because the only thing you can do is pledge your $15,000 and get your hands on one of the AudioOrbs.
A couple of months ago we found out how Redditor dekuNukem hacked his Nintendo 3DS to automatically hunt for shiny Pokémon in Pokémon X/Y. It turns out he built on that hack and drastically improved it. His new hack, which he calls Poké-O-Matic, not only hunts for shiny Pokémon, it also hatches eggs and does all the other time-consuming tasks associated with hatching.
The Poké-O-Matic is powered by two microcontrollers an Arduino Micro and a Teensy 3.0. dekuNukem switches between his hack’s functions with a push of a button.
As I mentioned, Poké-O-Matic can hatch eggs on its own. That includes biking back and forth to pass the time until his Pokémon at the Day Care Center produce an egg, then retrieving said egg, then walking back and forth until said egg hatches. Then Poké-O-Matic deposits the hatched monster into his PC and repeats the cycle. It can even release Pokémon if his deposit boxes become full.
As before, dekuNukem’s hack can also catch shiny on the field by entering battles repeatedly. It can do so on water…
…on land…
…and even against hordes by using the Sweet Scent skill.
So far so good for the lazy gamer, right? But dekuNukem’s Poké-O-Matic has one more ability, one that is straight up cheating. It takes advantage of the trading glitch in the game to clone Pokémon. It doesn’t work all the time, but dekuNukem himself seems to regret putting this mode. It’s bar none the quickest way to get a shiny, and therefore ruins the monsters’ value.
With all three methods – endless hatching, brute force catching and cloning – it’s no surprise that dekuNukem now has a ton of shiny Pokémon.
Watch his video for the full details and demo. Be sure to turn annotations on so you can read dekuNukem’s explanation.
You can download the Poké-O-Matic program from dekuNukem’s Dropbox, but he recommends that you streamline it further as it’s a mess as-is. As for the merit of this hack, I think this will only cheapen shinies for anyone who uses the hack. As with many things, if you’re not the one who earned it, you probably won’t appreciate its value. But I still admire dekuNukem’s skill and ingenuity for building Poké-O-Matic. The man practically invented a gamer, albeit one that’s a cold-blooded cheater.
Most guys just get flowers, maybe some chocolates, get down on one knee, and pop the question. On the other hand, building a giant Transformers replica tops everything else that you can do. One man in China did just that.
Outdoing all other men, he constructed this 26-foot-tall model of Optimus Prime. It took him about 10 months to build it, all in the hopes that his girlfriend would say “yes.” This machine took 400 drawings, 40,000 rivets and nearly $10,000 worth of stainless steel and iron. There’s no way she could say no after this right?
Well, the news story doesn’t say what her answer was, but I’m guessing the answer was yes based on this image. This is how you get the girl and a cool statue at the same time.
She must be some catch for a guy to go through all this trouble. More than meets the eye.
This cat must be part of the Imperial fleet and he doesn’t even try to hide it. Either that or he is an a never ending war with that TIE Fighter on his fur. Maybe the Empire sends him out to act as a decoy to fool other animals and distract them.
This cat is owned by Ella McConnell, who must make spaceship and laser noises every time it walks by. I know I would. This cat needs to watch out for X-wing cats if he wants to avoid a fight. Maybe he could just face the other way and let it pass.
This is just more proof that God loves Star Wars. Not the prequels though. That is the devil’s work.
Ever wonder why SD cards are dirt cheap? At the 2013 Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker going by the moniker Bunnie recently revealed part of the reason: “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” But that tidbit is nothing compared to the point of his presentation, in which he and fellow hacker Xobs revealed that SD cards and other flash storage formats contain programmable computers.
Bunnie also summarized his presentation in a relatively easy to understand post on his blog. The images I’m sharing here are from the slides (pdf) that he and Xobs used in their 30C3 talk. Here’s the full paragraph where Bunnie claims that flash memory is cheap because they’re unreliable: “Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions…”
“…This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.”
Simply put, Bunnie claims that flash storage is cheap (partly) because all chips made are used, regardless of their quality. But how do flash storage makers deal with faulty hardware? With software.
Apparently flash storage manufacturers use firmware to manage how data is stored as well as to obscure the chip’s shortcomings. For instance, Bunnie claims that some 16GB chips are so damaged upon manufacture that only 2GB worth of data can be stored on them. But instead of being thrashed, they’re turned into 2GB cards instead. In order to obscure things like that – as well as to handle the aforementioned increasingly complex data abstraction – SD cards are loaded with firmware.
And where does that firmware reside? In a microcontroller, i.e. a very tiny computer. The microcontroller is packed inside a memory card along with the actual chips that store the data. Bunnie and Xobs then proved that it’s possible to hack the microcontroller and make it run unofficial programs. Depending on how cynical you are, that finding is either good news or bad news.
For their talk, Bunnie and Xobs hacked into two SD card models from a relatively small company called AppoTech. I wish I could say more about their process, but you can read about it on Bunnie’s blog…
…or you can watch their entire presentation in the video below:
Long story short, Bunnie and Xobs found out that the microcontrollers in SD cards can be used to deploy a variety of programs – both good and bad – or at least tweak the card’s original firmware. For instance, while researching in China, Bunnie found SD cards in some electronics shops that had their firmware modified. The vendors “load a firmware that reports the capacity of a card is much larger than the actual available storage.” The fact that those cards were modified supports Bunnie and Xobs’ claim: that other people besides manufacturers can manipulate the firmware in SD cards.
The slide above outlines the other ways a memory card’s microcontroller can be abused. Malware can be inserted into memory cards to discreetly open files, make data impossible to erase (short of destroying the card itself) and even discreetly scan and replace data. On the other hand, Bunnie and Xobs note that this revelation opens up a new platform for tinkerers and developers. If a memory card is both a storage device and a computer, then it may be powerful enough to control another device on its own.
It’s worth noting that this particular investigation had an extremely small sample size. That being said, Bunnie believes that this vulnerability exists in “the whole family of “managed flash” devices, including microSD, SD, MMC as well as the eMMC and iNAND devices typically soldered onto the mainboards of smartphones and used to store the OS and other private user data. We also note that similar classes of vulnerabilities exist in related devices, such as USB flash drives and SSDs.”
Turns out the memories of our computers are as unreliable as ours.
I’ve seen some really cool Star Trekthemed gear and even rooms over the years. If you are a fan of the original series, you might appreciate the décor in the home of Line Rainville. She has been a fan of the original Star Trek series since her youth.
When she grew up and got her own house, she went about decorating it in a Star Trek theme. The project started as a Trek themed home theater in the basement and grew from there. The house now has parts of Spock’s room, the bridge, and even a transporter platform. Some items in the home are purchased props, while others were created from scratch.
I’ll say much of the décor looks like 60′s and 70′s resale furniture to me, then again I am not a fan of the original series. I am definitely more Picard than Kirk. Regardless, the overall effect will make some Star Trek fans jealous for sure. The entire project cost her about $30,000 to accomplish and over a year of work.
The six-sided die is one of the most recognizable symbols of gaming and gambling. But as Dr. Matt Fleming states, cubes don’t roll well. You know what does? A dodecahedron. So Matt put the numbers one through six twice on a 12-sided die. Hence the name Doublesix Dice.
Aside from being 12-sided, Doublesix Dice also have the same number of pips printed on opposing sides. Matt says this makes the dice more balanced compared to ordinary six-sided die.
Roll a browser then head to Kickstarter to get Doublesix Dice. A pledge of at least $10 (USD) gets you a pack of 12 dice.
While pretty much every smartphone today looks like a thin slab of glass and plastic or metal, this upcoming device eschews these conventions, going with a dramatically different approach.
Developed by Houston-based Noitavonne Instruments, the Noit Spectrum (aka the “Noit Joystick”) looks more like a canister of pepper spray, or some strange gizmo from the Star Trek medical deck than a phone. But if you look closely, you’ll see a numeric keypad there in the middle, and it does look vaguely like the shape of an old-school phone handset. There appears to be a small display at the top, as well as a set of physical buttons, and a screen on its side.
The device is actually being referred to as a “Mobile Companion Device,” so I’m not even sure it’s a full smartphone, or if it’s some sort of funky Bluetooth handset. I’m assuming it’s a standalone device, as it’s described as having a 1.2GHz processor, 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage, according to its entry on the CES website. I did manage to find a concept video up on YouTube which indicates that it is a full-fledged media player, which runs a flavor of Android, and can wirelessly stream content to larger displays.
While there’s no info yet up on the Noitavonne Instruments website, I’d assume we’ll find out more during CES next week.
I’m not even going to pretend that I understand what Mema Haxx did to pull this off, especially since you can watch the presentation in its entirety in the video below. Lesser mortals such as I should proceed to around 47:30 in the video to check out the demo.
You can also read Mema Haxx’ presentation on Google Docs. Although the group thinks that the hack is very promising, it’s still in alpha and won’t be of any use to anyone except coders. For now you’d be better off commissioning a Cross Plane. But keep that Wii U GamePad healthy.
One of the most significant controversies of recent years has been the NSA’s mass surveillance of individuals via telecommunications and internet data monitoring. And while the ‘bots which are watching us are not much more than bits of data coursing through CPUs and electronic storage devices, it’s sometimes easier to imagine a physical manifestation of such unseen evils.
What we have here is just that. Technabob friend and artist Metin Seven designed this satirical, physical version of one of the NSA’s all-knowing, all-seeing spybots, rendering it in 3D. And if you really want one, you can have it 3D printed over at Shapeways. A 4-inch-high full color sandstone print will set you back about $25(USD), though it’ll be rough, not shiny like the rendering above. It’s also available in a variety of other materials, including steel and brass.
Just be careful when you order one, you never know who might be monitoring your purchases.
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