Hasta La Gadget!

Inspecting power lines isn’t the safest job we can imagine having, so we’re pretty happy to see that robots — which don’t have the same… feelings we do about getting injured — can be hacked to do the job. Hydro-Quebec’s LineScout can get past most power line obstacles by partially detaching itself from the line and then grabbing a hold of it again once said obstacle has been cleared. It can also easily get from one section of the line to the next relatively quickly, and of course, the best part of this bot’s ability is that it can pull all this off while the lines are powered. Check out the video below to see the bot in action.

Continue reading Power line inspecting robot isn’t afraid of getting juiced

Power line inspecting robot isn’t afraid of getting juiced originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jonas Damon’s retro TV-shaped iPad case is at once completely useless yet utterly compelling. Try to use it and you’ll soon discover just how ergonomic is a vertical touch-screen. But take one look and you’ll not only be whisked back to a 1970s, black and white childhood, but you’ll also wonder how two simple wooden boxes can evoke such a clear facsimile of a television set.

Damon didn’t gut an old television for this mod. It’s built from scratch to house the iPad. But that doesn’t stop its shape being immediately recognizable. And what it lacks in thick, bulbous glass screens, it makes up for with the faux off-center mono-speaker enclosure.

It might be the pictures, which show a little girl staring rather too intently at the screen, but these shots make the TV-cabinet rather creepy. They remind me too much of the movie Poltergeist and its soul-swallowing boob-tube, right down to the snowy screen. And the designer’s last name is “Damon”. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Jonas Damon’s iPad Case and Fruit Bowl [Sight Unseen via Mac Stories]

See Also:

• Generation Gap: Mac Classic iPad Dock
• USB Typewriter Turns iPad Into Paper

Nobody uses the iMac for real work, right? After all, the huge 27-inch screen, the fast Core i3-i7 processors and the discrete graphics cards across the entire lineup render the machine hopelessly underpowered for video and photo editing. No wonder Apple hasn’t included an eSATA port. Who would need fast external storage?

Wait. Everyone would, especially as the standard disk is a single Terabyte in size. OWC feels your pain, computer buyer, and will take drastic, deep-cutting measures to help you. The accessory company will literally chop a hole in your iMac and add a speedy eSATA port to the machine. USB2 and FireWire are fine for shifting a few files around, but eSATA-connected drives run at the same speed as the hard-drive inside the computer.

The mod will cost you just $170. If you run a video facility, you’re probably already arranging shipping right now (tip: arrange it with OWC and they’ll pick your iMac up for just $30). If that still looks expensive to you, think about the alternative: buying a Mac Pro instead, which start at $2,500 without a monitor. While your machine is in OWC’s shop for surgery, you can also add more memory and upgrade the existing hard drive.

The service is available now. Rumors that OWC will add a USB-port to the iPad are unfounded.

OWC iMac eSATA upgrade program [OWC. Thanks, Grant!]

See Also:

• New iMacs Add IPS Displays, Core 'i' Processors Across the Range …

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Take it with a grain of salt, but it’s looking like some prayers have been answered on this Fourth of July — Flash (or is that “Frash”?) is running on this man’s iPad, cleverly ported from Android. The YouTube video claims that by using a compatibility layer, the Android runtime can play Flash content natively in Safari, but only on iPad so far — iPhone 3GS support is planned soon, as is iOS 4, and there’s a call for developers to move the project forward at GitHub. We’ve no way of determining its legitimacy at this moment, but it sure seems like Comex (he of the iPad “Spirit” jailbreak) has outdone himself this time, and hey, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? See Strongbad answer emails on iOS, right after the break.

Update: It appears Comex has indeed been working on this project for some time; a second blurry video after the break (running on iPhone) shows us what it used to look like.

Continue reading Flash 10.1 ported to iPad, burninates the countryside (video)

Flash 10.1 ported to iPad, burninates the countryside (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Jul 2010 11:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Redmond Pie  |  GitHub, YouTube  | Email this | Comments

Hey, look at what we have here — it’s the new Xbox 360 that was just debuted a few days back — and there’s a lot going down with this one which has somehow made its way into the wild. We get the full unboxing treatment, a detailed teardown, and finish up with some delicious, light-paneled modding. While we can’t really gather much beyond what we already know, the drive appears to be a Philips Lite-On DG-16D4S — just in case you were wondering about that one. There’s a video below showing off this one’s new, modded exterior.

[Thanks, Thomas C]

Continue reading New Xbox 360 shows up in the wild, gets unboxed, torn asunder and modded

New Xbox 360 shows up in the wild, gets unboxed, torn asunder and modded originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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