Hasta La Gadget!

It’s one thing to sacrifice style for battery life via an extended cell, but it’s another thing entirely to do this to your poor, innocent netbook. Newton Peripherals is causing all sorts of mixed emotions with its $99 MoGo Mouse, a stick-on mouse that measures in at five millimeters thick (including the holster). Granted, most netbook trackpads aren’t worth the curiously textured material they’re constructed from, but this just seems like an awfully short-sighted solution. After all, do you honestly think the average eBayer will be into buying a netbook with a mouse-infused lid? Doubtful.

Filed under: Peripherals

Newton Peripherals’ MoGo Mouse uglies up your netbook, hates your trackpad originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It started out as just disheartening, but now it’s downright frustrating. With rare exception, each and every SSD release we hear about these days scuttles skillfully around the issue of price. Take Toshiba, for example, who has just confessed to shipping its 43nm MLC NAND-based solid state drives to five undisclosed OEMs. Not only do we have no clue as to which companies will be integrating these into their machines, but we’ve no idea what these mystery firms are paying. What we do know is this: Tosh’s new range of 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs are leaving the docks now in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB — good luck figuring out where they’ll land.

[Via HotHardware]

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba ships 43nm MLC NAND-based SSDs to OEMs for unknown amounts originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 07:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Watergate is a psychological barrier made physical. Instead of stringing wires or ropes across gaps to steer bleating flocks of people around, or to simply keep them where you want them, the Watergate fires jets of water across the gaps and provides a physical barrier which can easily be broken, but which – psychologically at least – is likely to be a better deterrent than more tangible solutions.

The gate could be used to replace turnstiles and has several advantages (other than the obvious fun use of shoving people into the water-jets). In an emergency, it can’t lock up, and even if the water fails to stop squirting, the worst that can happen is that you get wet. Also, they’re wider than regular gates so bikes and wheelchairs can fit through easily.

It’s certainly not high-security, but then, neither is any unmanned turnstile. I have seen people jumping barriers in London, New York and Barcelona. Ironically, the only city I have lived in where the metro doesn’t have gates is Berlin, where pretty much everybody pays for a ticket.

Oh. I almost forgot. Insert Nixon joke here: __.

Watergate – No Scandal! [Yanko]

If further proof were ever needed that inventors should leave the naming of their inventions to others, here it is. Swiss designer Andy Muff has come up with some clever new length-adjustable stem and layback-adjustable seatpost designs, and he has given them the snooze-worthy name of “ISA”, or Integrated Size Adjustment.

The seat-post fits any saddle, and clamps onto the rails in the way of any modern tilt-adjustable post. This one, though, has an internal, eccentric section in the middle which can be turned 180º to move the mount an inch backwards (or forwards, depending on where you start).

The stem works similarly, with an insert that can change position, like a big, movable shim, to alter the POSITION of the handlebars by 30mm, or just over an inch.

Neat, patent-pending and not yet for sale, these are of limited use but for the right purpose could be very useful, in a shared bike for instance (although if you’re going to spring for presumably expensive, specialist part, you should probably just buy another, cheap, bike).

Designer invents stem and post with 30mm of adjustment [Bike Radar]

In the vein of the breathalyzer, Philips has developed an on-the-go drug test, that can be used by the side of the road to test suspected imbibers for cocaine, heroin, cannabis, amphetamines and methaphetamine. Unlike the standard alcohol testing equipment, this one is used by having the suspect spit into a small receptacle, which is then inserted into the measurement chamber which contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with ligands that bind to one of five different drug groups, delivering color coded test results in about 90 seconds. Philips, which has been developing the device since 2001, built it as an optical device that would be easy to mass produce for law enforcement. The company expects to ship them by the end of the year, though there’s no word on exactly which markets will employ them as of yet.

[Via Coolest Gadgets]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Philips to unveil saliva-based roadside drug test later this year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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