Hasta La Gadget!

Berlin is a curious place, a city with an extraordinary amount of layered textures. This is most obvious in the bars and streets, where you see old, peeling walls and graffiti alongside organic produce and gleaming coffee machines. It is also seen in the city’s tech, most interesting of which is left over from previous ages. Here’s a quick zip through some of the things I saw recently on yet another trip to the city. And we know that Berlin has an East and a West. These pictures are from the East.

The Hot Mangle

If this were purely about the retro, we might have picked the eye-tearing color scheme. As this is a gadget blog, we’re looking at that huge, industrial Heissmangel, something that would look more at home rolling through a field and harvesting wheat.

The name of the hot mangle is somewhat confusing when translated into English — it appears to be more of a rolling iron than a real, water-squeezing mangle. However, it looks like great fun, and the instructions don’t even warn against wearing a necktie while operating it:

Bondi Blue Macs

Many bars still seem to be running their music software from ageing Macs. Ironically, many of these bares also have big plasma screens dedicated to showing looped footage of a cosy fireplace — tacky in the extreme but also somehow comforing under Berlin’s Tupperware skies (they’re like solid gray lids hanging above you).

Here we have two fine example. First, the original iBook:

This was spotted in a Prenzlauerberg café which seems to be unchanged since the days before the Wall fell. The screen went to sleep just before the photo, but the machine is running OS 9 quite happily. We’re not sure if those cassette tapes are ever actually used, or if they are there just to make the Mac feel at home, but they’re a great touch. Photo by John Brownlee.

Here we have another Bondi Blue Mac, this time an iMac. It’s hard to tell which OS it is running from the picture — that beach screensaver is still bundled with Macs today, but I’d be surprised if it was OS X. We would have checked with the owner, but at this stage we were already a little drunk.

The Hurricane

This one is slightly outside of the target area — the Hurricane dryer was found in Geneva — but as I got the mail whilst still in Berlin it counts. It is also the best clothes dryer ever, as it is called the Hurricane. The device is best described by the mail I got from the dicoverer and photographer, Travis Tarr:

Guys, check out this awesome contribution to clothes laundering technology that’s in the basement of the place I’m staying in the Carouge suburb of Geneva…

The HURRICANE Dryer!  By Tachsel.  Pics attached.  Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that all Geneva basements were made to double as Cold War radiation shelters.

The Hurricane looks to be a cabinet into which is pumped hot air. My mother used to have something similar, a freestanding English version which loaded from the top and made the electricity meter spin like hip-hop DJ. Hers however, was not called a Hurricane, and was therefore rather dull.

Bonus: Fridge

Last, and most certainly least, is this old refrigerator, tucked away in a bar on a bleak Berlin corner. Made by Bosch, it has the stylings of a 1950s US model, complete with dangerous, child-trapping trigger lock handle (I’m not kidding — there were actually public service ads in England in the 1970s warning kids against climbing inside these). This fridge could, of course, be a completely modern model with retro styling but, given the surroundings, we doubt it.

We’re pretty sure a good lot of you with PSPs have used them for, shall we say, less than reputable means — like playing 16-bit era games using emulators. Soon, there might be a more legit outlet for that fix, as Sony‘s head of US marketing for PlayStation hardware John Koller tells MTV Multiplayer it’s looking to bring classics from before Sony entered the arena to the handheld, à la Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console. The company’s also expanding North America’s library of PSOne downloads to eventually match the plethora of titles available to the Japanese market. It’s all part of a greater initiative to make more digitally-distributed, download-only titles, which we wholeheartedly support — now, about those pesky UMD-less PSP2 rumors…

[Via Joystiq]

Filed under: Gaming

Sony plays catch up with hackers, mulling over PSP ‘virtual console’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This monster machine is a Chinese typewriter, circa 1970, on display at the CCCB cultural center in Barcelona, Spain. Sadly, the exhibition is not full of these kinds of crazy gadgets, although there is a kick ass scale model of Beijing, but this amazing contraption is enough on its own. Intrigued by the machine, and disappointed by the lack of documentation, I decided to do some digging.

The only part that resembles a QWERTY typewriter is the rubber roller at the back. From there, things quickly become absurd. Take a close look and you’ll see that the flat bed is in fact full of tiny metal symbols, similar to a letter case used for traditional typesetting.

In that case there are a couple of thousand characters, and other cases can be swapped in as needed. You’ll notice that there’s no keyboard — instead, the operator uses the levers to line up a kind of grabber over the required letter. Then he hits a switch and the letter is moved up to the paper and the letter printed. Slow? Very. Apparently a good typist averages just 20 characters per minute.

There have been improvements. A later design uses a "magic eye" and real keys to speed things up. The "Mingkwai" (clear and quick) invented in the 1940s by Chinese author Lin Yutang, had 72 keys and could print a stunning 90,000 words. The picture at right, from the November 1947 issue of popular mechanics, shows it in action.

To choose a letter, you press two buttons together, each of which chooses from a bank of images which represent the top or the bottom of a character. The "magic eye" is a magnifier which shows a preview of the letter to the typist. Hitting the keys sends one or two of the six rollers into action, which between them contain 7000 full characters and 1,400 partial characters.

And it doesn’t stop there. Foreign typefaces can be added to allow Russian or English to be printed. In this case, though, you’ll need to turn the paper sideways — Chinese is written in columns.

It doesn’t get much easier with computers, either. Because Chinese is made up of meaningful symbols instead of letters built in to words, a keyboard simply can’t contain everything without being the size of a table. To get round this two methods are commonly used. Wubi is similar to actually drawing the ideograms — the typist hits keys one by one to build up the picture from a series of strokes marked on each key. This is then translated into the correct symbol.

Better is Pinyin, which involves typing the letters phonetically in Roman letters (the ones we use). The computer then translates these into symbols. This is still something of a pain, but short of dropping their entire alphabet, what are the Chinese to do.

As an aside, there is one thing about written chinese that is immensely useful. Although the many Chinese dialects are mutually incomprhensible, when written they are exactly  same and understandable by the speaker of any Chinese language. Think of them as being like western numbers. Both a Frenchman and and Englishman understand the number "1" when seeing it as a figure, even though both pronounce it very differently.

In the Chinese city. Perspectives on the transmutations of an Empire [CCCB]
Chinese Typwriter [Modern Mechanix]

It is more than just a bit quirky, but I could understand how the Sanyo people back in the 1970’s might have thought that washing machines made to bathe humans would be a natural progression in technology. To make everything automatic was a goal back in the day, hence the bathing chamber called Ultrasonic Bath. Sanyo showcased the curious contraption during the 1970 Osaka World Expo along with other appliances the company thought would be a common fixture in modern homes.

A user would have to climb into the contraption, the process beginning with a pre-rinse cycle by a five minute water jet spray, followed by a three minute massage bath that fills the chamber with hot water. Golf-ball sized massage balls pelt the body during the massage process, combined with pressure jets made by a whirlpool. Next, a wave generator creates bubbles to wash off dirt, followed by a rinse cycle and a “5-minute dry cycle blast” that makes use of infrared and ultraviolet light. Knowing all that and realizing how much energy might go into each use, you’d have to wonder how hard Sanyo thought it was just to take a bath the old way.

One year before I dropped onto this earth, Sanyo was demonstrating this astonishing human washing machine at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, in 1970 AD. The Ultrasonic Bath is a giant, six foot high contraption into which the victim must climb (yes, using a ladder).

Once settled into place, the lucky user will be bombarded by various cycles, much like a carwash — pulsing water jets, a rain of plastic golf balls ("massage") and an ultrasonically stimulated mist of steam. After this, air-jets will dry your moistest parts and then the body is disinfected with infrared and ultraviolet rays.

Stunning. The entire cycle lasted 15 minutes and all the while voyeurs at the show could peek through the plexiglass plate on the side, something doubtless intended to be removed from a production model.

Alas, the production model never was. Perhaps it was because nobody could fit a tub the size of a mobile-suit robot into their bathroom (especially in cramped Tokyo) or perhaps it was the cost — subsequent industrial versions for sprucing up oldsters in retirement homes went for $50,000.

Ultrasonic Bath: Human washing machine [Pink Tentacle via Neatorama]