How’d you like a sweet Xbox 360 portable? How about if we sweetened the pot even more by making it look like an old Atari 2600? Well if you enter this contest over on Facebook now, you could be the proud owner of such an awesome franken-console.
The guys over at Atari are celebrating the 40th anniversary of PONG by giving away this retro-styled Xbox 360 portable. It’s got a complete 360 system, along with a built-in LCD monitor, and a nifty woodgrain Atari 2600 styling package.
All you need to do to enter is to head on over to this Facebook page, and follow the directions by December 2nd for a chance to win this awesome bit of geeky goodness. Sadly, for our international readers, the contest is only open to U.S. residents.
Remember when you used to need a map or city guide in order to find what was best when you visited family or friends, or just moved to a new place? That’s so old school. The free SPUN app makes this all a thing of the past thanks to its geo-targeted “what’s happening” app.
SPUN uses a cool 3D interface that I find nice to use for navigating between its application panes. It currently delivers personalized news and cultural information for eleven cities in the USA, including New York, Boston, Philly, DC, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Portland, and Seattle.
Employing hundreds of media sources, the app aggregates results on dining, culture, lifestyle, news, entertainment and events, along with mapping of their locations. The app is designed to curate the best local content from a variety of leading digital publications. It can even remind you when events you like are coming up so that you’ll never miss them, and you can save favorite destinations so you can be alerted when you’re nearby.
I’ve gotten so used to Tokyoflash having a corner on the cool digital watch market, that I’m always pleasantly surprised when another company comes along with a nifty LCD watch. Up until now, the guys over at Ziiiro have focused on analogdesigns (and putting too many ‘i’s in the name of their company.) Now, they’ve released a slick digital watch that can keep up with the best of what Japan has to offer.
The new Ziiiro Saturn tells time using a set of concentric circles. The 12 longer segments on the outer ring indicate hours, while the 60 smaller slivers on the inner ring tell minutes. The watch uses LCD tech for its display and offers a cool electroluminescent backlight for nighttime viewing as well.
The Saturn is available in black, gunmetal or chrome finishes, all made from stainless steel. You can pre-order the Saturn now over at Watchismo for $229.99(USD), and they expect to ship the watches this December.
While driving off-road can be a lot of fun, it can also be a challenging and dangerous activity, especially if you’re not a skilled 4×4 driver. Well thanks to some cool technology in Toyota’s trucks you can rest a little easier when driving off-road or in challenging terrain.
I recently had an opportunity to test out a couple of Toyota’s trucks with their new five-speed CRAWL control, a technology which helps drivers focus on steering while off-road, increasing safety and driving efficiency in difficult terrain.
At the center of the system is the ability for the vehicle to automatically regulate engine speed and braking force, while all the driver needs to do is turn the wheel. So when you’re making your way across rough ground or steep grades, the truck can do almost all of the work for you. The system works its magic by watching the wheel speed at each corner of the vehicle, and modulates the powertrain and braking system to ensure a safe and stable speed as you navigate treacherous roads.
You can use lower speeds to navigate rocky terrain downhill, while the higher speeds are best for uphill climbs on rocks, snow or gravel. Plus it works in either Drive or Reverse. And even if you’re not going off-road, the Hill-Start assist feature is very helpful if you live somewhere with steep hills. It automatically holds the car still at the top of a hill, so you don’t constantly need to keep your foot on both the brake and the gas.
There’s also a nifty mode called Off-Road Turn Assist which helps you make extremely tight turns by pulsing the rear brakes individually, depending on the direction of the steer. Think of what happens if you lock up a single wheel on a shopping cart – it pivots. This same principle is at work here, and all you need to do is turn the wheel. The truck takes care of the rest.
Our friends over at TechBargains.com compiled a list of daily deals and we wanted to share them to help you save money.
Keep in mind that as with any true deal, the products are limited quantity and can sell out quickly – so don’t hesitate to check them out now. Also if you’re looking to buy a product from a specific store, you save money with updated and verified coupon codes here.
A while back, I found some lamps that were pretty reminiscent of the ghosts from Pac-Man. However, they weren’t officially-licensed, and they looked really cheaply made. On the other hand, these new Pac-Man lamps are totally official, plus they look like they’re well built and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Ghosts do have sleeves, don’t they?
These ghosts have one big feature absent from the cheaper clones from last year. Each official Pac-Man ghost lamp includes a wireless remote control, which lets you set your ghost to one of sixteen colors. Want Blinky red? Check. Inky cyan? Yap. Pinky pink? Absolutely? Clyde orange? Indeed. Blue ghost blue? Of course. You can even make up new ghost colors and names. Personally, I like the idea of a purple ghost named “Barney”.
You can also set the lamps to blink, flash, dim, fade and strobe modes if you like ghosts at your raves. The ghosts also look like they’re floating above the surface of your desk for added effect.
The Pac-Man ghost lamp is available now over at Firebox for about $56(USD), and if you order now, you should be able to get one in hand in time for Christmas gift-giving.
Now all we need is a Pac-Man lamp to go with, and we’ll be all set.
If you’ve followed Technabob for a while, you know that we’ve always enjoyed the cool and offbeatmodern watch designs coming out of Tokyoflash Japan. The latest digital model to find its way from the watchmaker is no exception.
The new Kisai Polygon features an unusual display which uses a series of triangles and other polygons to indicate the current time. The triangles around the outer edge point to the current hour, while the next ring of triangles indicates 10 minute intervals of time. Then the large, hexagonal digit in the middle of the watch indicates individual minutes. It takes a minute to understand the display, but once you get used to it, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Plus, it’s definitely unique.
If you’re still confused, check out the video demo below, and it’ll make perfect sense:
The display of the watch is an LCD, which comes in a black, mirror, blue or pink color schemes. It’s also got EL backlighting for easy reading in the dark.
You can order the Kisai Polygon now in black or silver stainless steel with your choice of display color over at Tokyoflash now. If you order by Thursday, 11/29 at 4pm Japan time (2AM Eastern time), you can get the watch for an introductory price of $99(USD) – after which point the price goes up to $129.
Our friends over at TechBargains.com compiled a list of daily deals and we wanted to share them to help you save money.
Keep in mind that as with any true deal, the products are limited quantity and can sell out quickly – so don’t hesitate to check them out now. Also if you’re looking to buy a product from a specific store, you save money with updated and verified coupon codes here.
It’s never good when your bathroom scale gives you inconsistent readings. That’s probably one of the reasons why people seem to like these new high-tech scales that can track your weight history via your smartphone. There aren’t too many available on the market yet, so it’s good to see more alternatives popping up like this one from Wahoo Fitness.
The Wahoo Balance Smartphone Scale is powered by Bluetooth, and it allows you to track your weight and BMI over time. It will send your weigh-ins directly to your iPhone or iPad via a free app. The scale itself can manage up to 16 different users and it can hold up to 130 weight readings. Keep in mind that it only works with the Phone 5, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch (5th generation), iPad (3rd and 4th generations), and iPad Mini – presumably because it’s using Bluetooth 4 tech.
The scale is available for pre-order now for $99(USD). Orders will start shipping in the first week of December, so they could make a nice gift idea – assuming the recipient doesn’t think you’re trying to send them a message about their weight.
I’d wager just about everyone has stayed in a hotel that uses the key card locks where you slide a little card into the door to release the locking mechanism. One hotel called the Hyatt in the Houston Galleria district that uses these locks had a rash of break-ins in September. The most puzzling aspect of the break-ins was that the locks weren’t picked, the doors weren’t forced open, and a key wasn’t used to unlock the doors.
During the investigation, hotel staff learned that an enterprising thief was using technology to hack the key car door locks, tricking the doors into opening with ease. The hotel staff came to this conclusion when a device capable of reading the memory on the key card lock determined that none of the hotel staff keys had accessed the lock on one of the violated rooms. In fact, the device showed no key had been used during the theft.
The thief who was behind the string of hotel room break-ins in Houston was believed to be taking advantage of a previously theoretical intrusion technique that security researchers have warned about months before. Even more troubling is that hordes of hotel rooms around the world are still vulnerable to this exact same attack. The vulnerable locks come from a company called Onity and are estimated to be in use on 4 million hotel rooms around the world.
The flaw that investigators believed to have been exploited was demonstrated by a software developer for Mozilla at the Black Hat hacker conference last July named Cody Brocious. Brocious showed that he was able to trick the lock into opening using a portable programmer device designed to be used for designating master keys and opening locks when the batteries had died. The device Brocious used was small and cost less than $50 to build. Also worth noting is that lock maker Onity isn’t paying to fix the flaw in the 4 million locks estimated to be in use, and is asking hotels to pay for the fix. That could mean many locks remain vulnerable as hotels refuse to pay.
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