Feb 19
As smartphones and tablets land in the hands and bags of more and more people. users start consuming more amounts of data than a network can handle. Slow loading times, … Continue reading
Feb 18
Wearable technology has quickly gained traction over the past couple years, and consumers now have access to a variety of wristband-based items: smartwatches and fitness trackers being the most notable. … Continue reading
Feb 18
George Zisiadis – one of the designers behind the sweet mistletoe drone – shares with us one of his latest concepts: a public art installation on the facade of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History filled with large pinwheels. Visitors will be able to make the pinwheels move by blowing into horns located around the installation.
George said that there will be about a dozen oversize pinwheels in total, with the largest one about 10ft. in diameter. But visitors won’t need to blow as hard as they can into the horns, because the pinwheels are actually powered by electric motors. Microphones will be hidden in the horns to detect when someone is blowing into them.
To encourage interaction, George will make it so that blowing into one horn triggers only some of the pinwheels. Therefore visitors will have to man all the horns at once to make all the pinwheels move simultaneously. Here’s George testing his prototype:
If the museum picks George’s concept, visitors may be able to play with the pinwheels this summer. Good luck, George!
[via George Zisiadis]
Feb 18
To say that Sony has done well so far with the PS4 game console would be an understatement. The console has been so popular that it is still hard to find in many areas.
Sony bragged today that it has sold over 5.3 million PS4 consoles around the world as of February 8 – that’s an additional 1.1 million units in the last 40 days alone. By all accounts, the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One by nearly 50%. The estimated sales for the Xbox One were 3.6 million as of the same date. Of course, both the Xbox One and PS4 are massively outselling the Wii U from Nintendo.
Nintendo sold fewer Wii U consoles all year in 2013 than Sony and Microsoft moved in PS4s and Xbox Ones in only a couple months. I keep wondering if Nintendo is going to get with the program or just pack it in.
What makes Sony’s numbers even more impressive is that the PS4 isn’t even available in all countries yet. Japan, for instance won’t get the PS4 until February 22.
Feb 17
Some of us may have been playing with LEGOs when we were 12-years-old, but most of that revolved around making pyramids and accidentally leaving bricks in places bare feet fear … Continue reading
Feb 17
We’re living in a time of extreme technological change. Gadgets that didn’t exist a decade ago are shaping your existence. So we need science fiction, more than ever, to speculate about the future of technology. But here’s the hard part: You can’t speculate about technological change without also speculating about social change.
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Feb 16
Valentine’s might be over, but who can really resist a chocolate treat any time of the year. Especially when it comes in a bite-size form of a Ford Mustang that … Continue reading
Feb 16
We’ve seen a handful of unique analog digital clocks, but the Plotclock has to be the most unusual of the bunch. It’s also a metaphor for a dozen sad things. Made by Thingiverse member joo, Plotclock writes the time by hand, then erases what it just wrote so it can write again.
Joo used an Arduino Uno, three servos and 3D printed components to make the clock. Though I strongly suspect that he also added a liter of sighs, a patch of wrinkled skin and some shredded tax forms to the device.
This clock knows life’s a waste of time. Check out joo’s page on Thingiverse for more on the futility of it all.
[via I Heart Chaos]
Feb 16
NES in a VHS Tape: VideoTendo 2000
Posted in: Today's ChiliBoth the original NES console and VHS tapes were popular back in the 1980s, so it actually doesn’t seem that unusual to see the two in the same picture together. Though I can honestly say I’ve never seen an NES inside a VHS tape – until now.
The VideoTendo 2000 is a fully-functional gaming console built into a VHS cassette. And while it’s actually an NES clone that’s Etsy seller ShinoBicycle used to achieve the feat, at least it plays physical cartridges. In fact, it’ll play Famicom games as well as PAL and NTSC NES games.
It’s a pretty neat mod, though it looks to me like he had to rip the tape out from the inside of the VHS cassette and stuck images of them in the windows in their place. At least that’s what it looks like to me from the pics. It’s not like you were going to try and cram this into your VCR anyhow, were you?
So bust out your big hair and your Power Glove and head over to Etsy, where you can grab the VideoTendo 2000 for the odd price of $224.94(USD). Remember when buying a movies on VHS cost $89.95? Now the price of the VideoTendo doesn’t seem so bad does it?
Maybe someday, he’ll put an Atari 2600 inside a BetaMax tape.
Feb 16
We’ve featured a couple of unusual keyboard and mouse hybrid devices, but so far it looks like people like their devices just as they are – separate and not looking like devices you’d use to pilot an alien spaceship. I wonder if Solid Art Labs’ King’s Assembly will fare any better. At the very least it’s the least weird-looking of the bunch.
The King’s Assembly is a pair of devices (a left and a right “hand”) that each have an optical laser sensor, 35 keys with Cherry mechanical keyboard switches (30 in front and 5 near the thumb rest) and an analog joystick. Because you only get 70 keys at most, one of the keys can be set to serve as a modifier. Hold that down and you can access the secondary function of the other keys, giving you a total of 139 key mappings. Speaking of which, each device will have a preset key mapping, but you’ll be able to create new mapping profiles as well.
Each hand can serve as a mouse and keyboard on its own. But if you have both hands you’ll need to link them using the included interconnect cable if you want to use them in tandem. Once they’re linked, your computer will only see one mouse and one keyboard instead of two of each peripheral. Also, each hand has its own USB cable, but when they’re linked you only need to connect one of their USB cables to your computer. This means you can connect a pair of hands to two computers at once.
How will the two mice act as one? The King’s Assembly’s built-in Atmel microcontroller will average the input from the hands’ optical sensors and send that as one signal to your computer. That may sound weird, but we’re used to using just one of our hands to move our mice anyway, so that shouldn’t be a big problem. You’ll also be able to tweak the sensitivity of each hand’s sensor separately or even disable a hand’s mouse input altogether.
Finally, the joysticks will be useful in playing video games, but you can also use them as scroll wheels.
Pledge at least $110 (USD) on Kickstarter to get one King’s Assembly hand as a reward; pledge at least $200 and you get a pair. I think I’m good with my low-tech keyboard and mouse for work and daily use, but I can see myself using these for gaming.
[via Geeky Gadgets]
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