Hasta La Gadget!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could listen to internet radio in your car? With Livio’s new Carmen, you can, provided you’re happy with a rather weird, convoluted, time-consuming and almost Rube Goldberg-esque experience.

The best way to give you an idea of the whole complicated mess is to describe the process. First, plug the Carmen into your computer, fire up the companion software and then choose the from the internet radio stations available (“more than 42,000 stations”). The Carmen will then record these for you, DVR-style, in real-time. To make that clear, you won’t be downloading an hour-long show in seconds like you would with a podcast: you’ll be waiting an hour for it.

Once the 2GB stick is loaded up, you take it to the car and plug it into the cigarette-lighter socket. Then you turn on the car’s radio. The Carmen works by sending the MP3s via FM (although you can opt for an aux cable). It even comes with a small remote control so you can search on the floor for that instead of squeezing the Carmen’s tiny buttons.

To recap: You spend hours recording radio shows only to re-broadcast them to your car stereo. And for this you spend $60. Alternatively you could just use the radio in your car, or hook up the cellphone or MP3 player you already have to your car stereo. That would cost you nothing.

For all my complaints, I admit I have a soft spot for the Carmen: the idea of recording songs and shows off the radio to listen to in the car takes me back to my childhood. Thank goodness somebody is applying today’s tech to 1970s problems.

Available for pre-order now.

Carmen Car Audio Player [Livio. Thanks, Joe!]

Still caught up in the vinyl vs. CD war? No, me either. I own precisely zero plastic disks. But say you were wondering which version of techno and electronic musician Jeff Mills’ latest pressing to buy. Would you go for old-school grooves or up-to-date digital pits?

The good news is that you don’t have to decide. “The Occurrence” is a double-sided 5-inch disk with a CD on one side and a record on the other. Slide it into a CD-player on onto a turntable (if you can actually find one), and it will play. Mills has a history of experimental presentation, and this disk is the latest in his Sleeper Wakes series which, according the his label’s site, is about a spacewalk in the middle of a radiation storm.

Sci-Fi plots aside, this release is obviously more conceptual than useful, but it does at least make some sense: Mills is both musician and DJ. Bonus fun fact: Jeff Mills is, in some clubbing circles, a slang term for “pills”.

The Vinyl And CD Release On One Disc From Jeff Mills [PSFK via Geekologie]

At the recent BevTech Japan trade fair we caught a display of Japanese regional ciders (sadly, non-alcoholic) and loved the retro labels so much we wanted to share them here.

On the left below there is the Unzen Lemonade (温泉レモネード) from Nagasaki, complete with charming lass on the front. The bottles on the right are the beet cider Sepia no Shigeki (セピアのしげき), from Hokkaido.

Local Japanese cider is apparently experiencing a minor boom. Asahi’s Mitsuya Cider might well be the only one you can see in your convenience store but, according to the Japan Soft Drink Association, the number of regional ciders has increased from 62 in 2007 to nearly 130.

The success of Showa era films like Always has made even younger consumers yearn for “nostalgic” tastes (including when the nostalgia is for a time before they were born).

Recent bloggers have also highlighted growing sales and the incredible variety of flavors from around the country. At BevTech alone we saw a wide range, including apricot, takoyaki, mango and yuzu drinks. Certainly beats endless variations of canned coffee!

Given that many of the ciders are completely new products, this “retro” could be said to purely be about the packaging and not much else. Another sure way to attract young consumers, though, is pricing: the drinks come pretty cheap, most bottles costing 2-300 yen ($2-3).

[Pic source]

We also like the Kamen Rider series of ciders too (above, left), which taps nostalgia not so much for furusato (old hometown) tastes but retro pop culture.

Sony may not shed a tear for the 3.5-inch floppy disk when it meets its maker in March, but you’d better believe the company’s crafted a retirement plan for the format that propelled it to fame: the compact cassette. To be fair, the CFD-A110 CD / cassette boom box above isn’t actually a new product — it’s a relabeled CFD-A100TV from 2003 minus the nigh-obsolete analog TV band — but if you’re rocking magnetic mix tapes we’re guessing you’ll welcome this blast from the past. For your projected ¥20,000 (about $215) you’ll get a pair of full-range speakers, 14 AM/FM presets, an external microphone port for karaoke and a remote when it launches in Japan this June 21st. What that won’t buy you, however, is an obnoxiously large gilded chain, a beefed up left shoulder for carrying it around, and a time machine needed to actually fit in while using this. Ya heard?

Sony’s last cassette-blastin’ boom box is precisely how Ruff Ryders roll(‘d) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 08:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just point and shoot.

Video after the break.

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Canon DSLR shutter remote hacked into Atari joystick originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 03:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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