Raon Digital’s tiny Everun Note reviewed

Filed under: Laptops

Don’t call it a netbook. Placing Raon Digital’s featherweight powerhouse up against relative monsters like the Eee PC or MSI Wind leaves you looking at a device that is tiny and fast, but at $879 is woefully overpriced. UMPC Portal was loaned one for perusal and found that it stands on its own, filling the gap (niche of a niche?) between ultra-mobile and ultra-portable. The six-page review was itself “written, edited, and post produced on the Everun Note in the car, bed, sofa and on the desktop.” UMPC Portal rates its battery life as below that of your typical 6-cell netbook (3 hours on average or 2:15 if you can’t live without WiFi), but indicates its dual-core AMD Turion X2 gives it the power to “span ultra mobile and desktop duties” — even serving as a respectable gaming machine, which can’t be said for your average Atom-based portable.

[Thanks, benz145]

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Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 unboxed to yawns, fuller bank accounts

Filed under: Laptops

We’re still having trouble spotting anything on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 more special than its price point or that most excellent short film, but that is one special price point, so let’s give the thing a chance to wow us with an unboxing…

Hrm. Nope. Not wowed.

[Thanks, Johnakadoe]

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Filed under: Robots

Your regular, inefficient robot legs getting you down? Maybe you should check in with researcher Jonathan Hurst and his robo-leg project under development at Oregon State University. Apparently most jointed legs driven by motors have a tough time recycling energy due to a lack of snapback from proper tendons, but Hurst’s work hopes to clear all that noise up. By utilizing a new design powered by steel cable tendons with built-in springs, roboticists want to get closer to the 40 percent retention of energy our fancy human legs get up to. While a student at CMU, Hurst created “Thumper,” a single leg attached to a boom that puts his theories in motion, and he’s collaborated on bi-pedal models more recently. The hope is to eventually create robots with more natural, animal-like gaits, which will allow them to run towards or chase their human victims and terminate them with a more ruthless intensity. Check the video after the break to see exactly what we mean.

[Via Medgadget]

Continue reading New robot leg design becomes more human, more deadly

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Via [Engadget]

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Filed under: Robots

Your regular, inefficient robot legs getting you down? Maybe you should check in with researcher Jonathan Hurst and his robo-leg project under development at Oregon State University. Apparently most jointed legs driven by motors have a tough time recycling energy due to a lack of snapback from proper tendons, but Hurst’s work hopes to clear all that noise up. By utilizing a new design powered by steel cable tendons with built-in springs, roboticists want to get closer to the 40 percent retention of energy our fancy human legs get up to. While a student at CMU, Hurst created “Thumper,” a single leg attached to a boom that puts his theories in motion, and he’s collaborated on bi-pedal models more recently. The hope is to eventually create robots with more natural, animal-like gaits, which will allow them to run towards or chase their human victims and terminate them with a more ruthless intensity. Check the video after the break to see exactly what we mean.

[Via Medgadget]

Continue reading New robot leg design becomes more human, more deadly

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Via [Engadget]

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Tokyo Shrine Blesses Computers from BSoDs [Japan]

Leave it to Japan to continually live up to their own charming stereotypes. At the Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine in Tokyo—a temple otherwise like any other—visitors can bring their computers to be blessed for protection from problems like malware and BSoDs. Not-so-coincidentally, the temple is very closely situated to Tokyo’s famed tech mecca Akihabara and offers these microchip-like talismans:

Apparently the move to bless computers was less a tourist trap than a natural progression of their visitors. Those who frequented Akihabara also frequented the temple. And therefore, those who frequented the temple also needed a lot of help with the tech in their life.

But are such faiths so strange? I, for one, sleep better knowing that Steve Jobs blessed my MacBook Pro in a bath of oil and frankincense before shipping it from China, just for me.

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