Hasta La Gadget!

Though prison seems an unlikely place for (relatively) modern gaming consoles, petitions for devices have grown in recent time. Last year, an Australian inmate took legal action in an attempt … Continue reading

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It looks like a cultish gathering of smartphone users, and in many ways it is: this image shows African migrants on the shore of Djibouti, holding their phones aloft to snatch cheap phone signal from nearby Somalia.

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A lot of the major technology firms out there are trying to do their part to help the environment and to be green. That effort often extends to encouraging their workers to use public and mass transportation. Some of those tech firms, particularly Google and Apple, even run their own bus services.

Facebook has now announced that it has started its own ferry for workers. The water taxi service will float workers from San Francisco to Redwood City and back. The Redwood City drop off is apparently only a few miles from Facebook HQ. The water taxi service launched last week and is operating under a 90-day pilot period, after which point they will decide if they’ll roll it out more permanently.

The boat is a catamaran that can hold 30 people and has Wi-Fi, coffee, and snacks aboard. The water taxi should make for a nice trip considering how congested highways tend to get.

[via Mashable]

A company called Tivitas is working on the gamepad equivalent of Mad Catz’ R.A.T. mice, and then some. It’s called the Sinister, a glove-shaped gamepad that’s adjustable in different aspects. It also has a haptic feedback technology that’s supposedly more nuanced compared to the rumble motors used in most gamepads.

The images here are of the Sinister’s prototype, but the major features should be intact in the retail product. Like Mad Catz’ mice, Sinister’s overall length and the height of its arch are adjustable. The customization extends to its buttons and analog stick. These switches come in small magnetized modules that can be rearranged on the fly to suit your preference.

Finally, you can pick from different ways of using the gamepad.  You can have the gamepad and your mouse emulate an Xbox 360 controller, with the mouse acting as the right analog stick. You can also emulate an Xbox 360 controller with just Sinister alone, leaving you free to use all of your mouse’s functionality. Finally, you can have the gamepad emulate a keyboard and map commands to its keys.

In its hands-on with Sinister, Polygon said that Vivitouch, the gamepad’s haptic feedback technology, is “lighter, smaller, quieter and more energy efficient than rumble devices and offers a more targeted haptic feel. A bullet shot feels a lot different to a sword clanging against a shield, or a long fall.” Polygon also said that the gamepad will have different rumble settings for different types of games, though Tivitas made no mention of that in its Kickstarter page.

Tivitas claims that Sinister is already compatible with Windows and Linux, with support for OS X on the way. Pledge about $109 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a beta version of the Sinister gamepad as a reward. I think the Sinister can make gaming on a PC more comfortable, but I can do without the rumble feature. Hopefully Tivitas will consider releasing a cheaper, rumble-less model.