Aug 10

Halo: Light-Writing Graffiti Spray-Can

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, Today's Chili

halo

Halo is a beautiful device for spraying light. Shaped like a spray-can, the glass tube has an LED in the cap which shines when pressed. The form factor lets graffiti artists use their existing muscle memory to tag and draw.

Couple this with a camera set at a low shutter speed and you get some great effects, and the caps can be swapped to switch colors. The best part, though, is way you charge it. Inside, designer Aïssa Logerot has put a copper coil and some magnets on a spring. When the lamps finally dim and wink out, you shake the “can”, just like you would if you were mixing paint, and the battery is charged. Ingenious, and sadly not for sale.

Product page [Aïssa Logerot via Geekologie]


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Aug 10

Samsung’s AMOLED-packin’ YP-M1 PMP available in Korea, secret sauce still unknown

Posted in: korea, now available, now shipping, NowAvailable, NowShipping, NVIDIA, PMP, samsung, ship, shipping, ships, South Korea, SouthKorea, tegra, Today's Chili

Surely we aren’t the only technophiles in attendance champing at the bit to find out if Samsung’s fresh YP-M1 has some of NVIDIA’s hotness inside, but it seems as if we’ll still have to wait a bit longer to find out. Right on cue, the AMOLED-equipped portable media player has launched over in South Korea, bringing with it a laundry list of supported file formats, a WQVGA panel, up to 32GB of inbuilt storage and even a DMB TV tuner. If anyone feels like sashaying over to Seoul in order to crack one open and find out what it’s really made of, then by all means, be our guest. Just try not to wander too close to that DMZ — we hear Bill Clinton’s rescue fees are through the roof.

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Samsung’s AMOLED-packin’ YP-M1 PMP available in Korea, secret sauce still unknown originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

Tiny USB Card Reader Packs 16GB, Is Smaller Than USB Port

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili, usb

teensy usb

This tiny little plug might look like an ordinary microSD card reader, and it is. The catch? Buffalo’s diminutive device will cost you $160, although for that the company throws in a 16GB microSD card.

That’s actually quite a good deal, and will turn your cellphone into a pocket media center, allowing you to share music just like the generous kids in my town. They “share” their tunes on buses, trains and even in the street, blasting tinnily distorted noise through tiny cellphone speakers. And if its too expensive, you can always opt for a smaller and cheaper 4GB version, for just $36.

These things are becoming so small that we wonder if the full-sized USB plug is too big. Is there any (technical) reason why the side of my MacBook couldn’t have a row of four mini USB ports on the side in the place of the two honking great holes there now? Wouldn’t that be a lot better?

Product page [GeekStuff4U]


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Aug 10

Retro-Style Cassette Tape USB Hub

Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Retro, Today's Chili

cassette-tape-4-port-usb-hub

Unlike pretty much every other cassette tape hack we have covered (and there have been a lot) the Cassette Tape USB Hub is an actual, real, factory made product, and not an old tape with a few electronic gubbins stuffed inside. And why not? After all, USB hubs are almost universally dull (or hideous ‘novelty’ designs).

The hub’s case is an exact copy of the old-style cassette, right down to spinning wheels inside. It’ll even fit inside an old cassette box, if you still have one laying around. The catch is that this hub costs $25, which is a little steep for something likely to spend most of its time tucked behind a monitor, hidden from view.

Product page [Vat 19 via BBG]

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Aug 10

Webcycle provides pedal-powered internet, reason to dodge browser-enlarging Flash sites

Posted in: arduino, bike, hack, mod, sensor, Today's Chili, ubuntu

Need an excuse to get some cardio into your life? Can’t live without ye old internet? Thanks to Matt Grey and Tom Scott, the answer to your weight loss woes is pictured above. The aptly-titled Webcycle is essentially a sensor-laden fitness bike that requires users to pedal faster in order to snag more throughput. An Ubuntu-based laptop is wired up to an Arduino and an array of sensors that allow more bits and bytes to seep through based on how hard the rider is working. A simple slow pedal is all it takes to load mobile pages and text-heavy sites, but if you’re hoping to actually watch the video after the break, you’ll certainly need to kick things up a notch. Pure brilliance, we say.

[Thanks, Yoda]

Continue reading Webcycle provides pedal-powered internet, reason to dodge browser-enlarging Flash sites

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Webcycle provides pedal-powered internet, reason to dodge browser-enlarging Flash sites originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

Cool Firefox Addons for Twitter

Posted in: Today's Chili

twitterbird11.jpg

Search Engine Journal: Here are 3 interesting Firefox addons that are guaranteed to enhance your twitter experience:

1. Twitter Search with Suggestions
This cool addon has a as-you-type suggestion function, which means that search term suggestions appear as you enter keyword(s).

2. Clean Tweets
Clean Tweets eliminates spam and malware or porn sites, and it does so by automatically deleting tweets from accounts that are less than 24 hours old or any tweet that mentions a specified number or more of trending topics.

3. Twiogle Search Toolbar
This toolbar combines both Google and Twitter search! You can choose to either search on Google or Twitter or both of them at a time.

3 New Cool Twitter Search [Search Engine Journal]

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Aug 10

I-O Data’s SEG Clip brings 1seg mobile TV to iPhone and PC

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, iphone 3g, Iphone3g, ipod touch, IpodTouch, Japan, japanese, Today's Chili

Softbank’s own 1seg tuner / battery charger was a novel idea, but leave it to trained assassins at I-O Data to really expound upon the concept and concoct something nearly worthy of relocating to Tokyo for. The new GV-SC310 SEG Clip is a relatively vanilla USB 1seg TV tuner that plugs into one’s PC in order to pull down some of Japan’s finest OTA programming. Once captured, users with an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS or iPod touch can download a TVPlayer app (shown after the break) that enables them to wirelessly watch whatever content they’ve stored. Think of it as TiVo for your iPhone, but only for those lucky enough to live in the Land of the Rising Sun. Not too shabby for ¥6,615 ($68), huh?

[Via Akihabara News]

Read – I-O Data press release
Read – Hands-on

Continue reading I-O Data’s SEG Clip brings 1seg mobile TV to iPhone and PC

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I-O Data’s SEG Clip brings 1seg mobile TV to iPhone and PC originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

Toshiba applies for BDA admission, Blu-ray players and laptops coming soon

Posted in: blu-ray, breaking news, BreakingNews, laptop, Today's Chili, Toshiba

We’d already heard that Toshiba — the outfit best known for solidly backing HD DVD during the two-year format war of the early 21st century — was preparing to swallow its pride and kick out a Blu-ray player by the year’s end, but now it’s official. The outfit just announced moments ago that it has “applied for membership of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) and plans to introduce products that support the Blu-ray format.” Sadly, Tosh doesn’t bother to mention exactly what kinds of BD-capable wares it hopes to produce, nor is it ready to disclose product launch time frames. We’d tell you exactly how it wants us to just be patient and all, but you’re probably better off hearing it directly from the horse’s trap:

“In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA. Toshiba aims to introduce digital products that support the Blu-ray format, including BD players and notebook PCs integrating BD drives, in the course of this year. Details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration. We will make announcements in due course.”

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Toshiba applies for BDA admission, Blu-ray players and laptops coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

Crapgadget: “Oh yeah, they’re totally serious” edition

Posted in: mouse, Today's Chili, usb

Every so often, we come across a gadget (or five) that’s so offensive, so absurd that we simply can’t help but stick it in our back pocket and show it to the general public. Today, we’re rounding up the worst of the worst once again, proving that there literally is no end to the spewing of gadget-related garbage that comes from unknown caverns in undisclosed corners of the universe. We mean, just listen to these products: “fried eggs night light,” “Bic lighter spy camera,” “hungry caterpillar USB hub,” and “half-eaten chocolate mouse.” Does those even sound like kit that any partially sane individual would purchase? No, no it doesn’t. Have a gander while shaking your head furiously below, and feel free to drop a vote for the king of the crap while venting in comments below. Trust us, it’s therapeutic.

Read – Half-eaten chocolate mouse
Read – USB Penguin 4-Port Hub
Read – Fried Eggs Night Light
Read – Spy camera Bic lighter
Read – USB Bulb Flash Drive
Read – Hungry caterpillar USB hub

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Crapgadget: “Oh yeah, they’re totally serious” edition originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aug 10

Indilinx firmware cleans dirty SSDs, restores performance while idle

Posted in: firmware, performance, solid state drive, SolidStateDrive, SSD, storage, Today's Chili

You know those quirky, not-at-all convenient issues that can cause certain solid state drives to lag with extensive use? Yeah — not cool. Thankfully, the engineers at OCZ Technology and Indilinx are fed up, and rather than sitting around doing nothing, they’ve both collaborated on a breakthrough firmware that can actually clean and restore one’s “dirtied” SSD while the drive sits idle. In short, the firmware instructs the SSD to perform a “garbage collection” process in order to mitigate the unwanted block re-writing quandary, where the drive actively seeks and removes garbage that hinders read / write performance when handling small chunks of data. The crew over at HotHardware managed to run a few speed tests with said firmware firmly implemented, and the results are downright shocking: after just five minutes of idle time, the SSD was restored to near new, with an hour of downtime being enough to “totally restore” performance. Don’t believe us? Give that read link a tap, bub.

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Indilinx firmware cleans dirty SSDs, restores performance while idle originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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