Hasta La Gadget!

The problem with oscilloscopes is that they cost a lot of money. Even on Ebay you’re looking at $400-plus, which is a shame as these things are essential for real electronics hacking, and fun to play with at all times.

The “Digital Storage Oscilloscope” could change this. The tiny instrument is little more than a circuit board with a screen, and looks like nothing as much as a Game’n’Watch. The headline feature is the price — at $50 this is as affordable as a decent multimeter. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a full-sized ‘scope, but it does most of what you need, and it fits in your pocket.

Best of all, it’s open source, and the firmware can be downloaded and tinkered with. Actually, that’s not the best part. The real best part is that you can buy the whole lot in kit form and it together yourself. Take this option and the price drops to just $33. Electronic nerdery just got a whole lot easier.

Product page [Seed Studio via Retro Thing]

It’s hard to believe that this video is real, but apparently it is. What you are seeing is the official, MPAA sanctioned method for teachers to make copies of DVDs for educational purposes. Are you ready? To make a copy you play the DVD and aim a camera at the TV screen. I told you it was hard to swallow.

So desperate is the movie industry’s crazy uncle to stop anyone breaking DVD copy protection that it actually made the above presentation at the Library of Congress, where a hearing is held every three years to decide whether or not any exemptions should be made to the DMCA laws.

Needless to say, it’s already too late (cough, Handbrake, cough), and this is clearly just an attempt to protect the DMCA in its current form rather than to actually stop teachers from copying movies. What we find particularly ironic, though, is that this is the exact same method that the MPAA wants to stop in cinemas, where evil teenagers use their cellphones to record movies off the screen.

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set [Vimeo]

You might be surprised to hear that I think laptop desks are a pretty good idea, especially when you consider them to be little more than tea-trays, and uni-tasking tea-trays at that.

You will be less surprised to hear that I think that buying laptop desks is a terrible idea, even if they are as sleek  as the Cushdesk from Belkin. The name aptly sums up the design — it’s simply a small flat surface with a cushion stuck to the bottom.

The problem is that it costs $30, and that’s $30 you could be spending on beer instead of just squandering it. Reading the features list shows just how much spin is needed just to come up with a mere four bullet points. Sample: “Its slim design allows for easy storage in your home but with its stylish design, you may want to display it around the house.”

Better to roll your own, and — in the words of Blue Peter’s Lesley Judd* — here’s one we made earlier. It’s a beauty:

I made this a while back from an old aluminum baking tray, and in its original incarnation it was just that — a plain metal sheet on which to rest a MacBook Pro. The aluminum is perfect for “wicking away” heat from the hot underside of the computer and even in plain form keeps things cool enough to sit atop your legs. However, a modification was in order. Remember the Laptop Lifters, those slug-like rubber lozenges which keep the air flowing under the notebook? That’s what you can see in the photo — I removed them from my MacBook as I didn’t like the extra height but there was enough stick left on them to attach to the tray.

Now, it is the perfect size for any machine, including the Lady’s white MacBook. Better, it means we can watch movies in bed without anything mechanical overheating. Well, without anything mechanical and computer-shaped overheating.

Product page [Belkin via Gearlog]

See Also:

• Laptop Lifts Lift Low Laptops
• Hands-On With Laptop Lifts

*Sorry, readers outside the UK and/or under 30 years old. This joke is not for you.

This is Noteboek, a short film by Dutch artist Evelien Lohbeck. It is also the product promo for the best multipurpose gadget that ever lived, a little notebook whose pages bring drawings to life. Geeky life.

Many of our childhoods were filled with such things. I’m old enough to remember drawing pretend computers into my school notebooks, which, when not ignoring geography lessons to work on my comic book “Extreme Team”, was my main school pass-time.

Lohbeck actually has a computer, though, so he was able to make his fantasies real. This meta rabbit-hole, using a computer to make a notebook into a non-computer, continues in the short film. YouTube becomes the portal through which real-life enters, only to be corrupted again by paper machines, including an amazing pop-up toaster.

Check Lohbeck’s site for more — Noteboek actually contains some other shorts made separately. In all, a fantastic little movie. And is it just me, or do you all want one of these magic books?

Movie page [Evelien Lohbeck via the Giz]