Here are a couple of exclusive featurettes showing new Watchmen behind-the-scenes footage, including Dr. Manhattan looking like a Tron dork and Silk Spectre looking like the foxy, yumtastic, kick-ass heroine she is. Spoilers ahead.
Apparently a shoe phone similar to this was a really big deal in some dumb movie or TV show. But now the thing actually exists, using common cellphone gear and a hollowed-out heel.
Australian Paul Gardner-Stephen originally created his Gen 2 prototype shoe phone for his church group by carving out the heel of a dress shoe and stuffing in parts of a cellphone, along with a bluetooth headset. As a result, Gardner-Stephen is able to place calls using voice commands, and use a handful of controls using makeshift buttons he created by punching holes in the heel.
The only problem is that Gardner-Stephen says he wants to produce the shoe for the medical industry and help people by using it to relay data from biosensors and other crap. Um, what?! If globalthermonucleardynamic espionage isn’t your primary objective with this thing, Mr. Gardner-Stephen, I believe you’re missing the point. [Gen 2 Shoe Phone via Instructables via Crave]
Which flat panel technology is the best? LCD or plasma? Get mean, get personal, because you can’t be banned for anything you say in this thread. And anecdotes are as valid as scientific study.
Here’s a simple, fantastic idea. This otherwise standard USB cable adorns its wire with an inline SD card reader, creating a 2-in-1 SD reader/USB cable.
Apparently it’s not just an either/or scenario. The cable can simultaneously charge a mini-USB device and transfer photos to your hard drive. Plus if microSD is more your speed, there’s a version for that, too.
MSI’s Wind U120 has only been available for a little over a month, and already received a minor update of its own, but it looks like the company is already planning on adding a few more digits to the Wind line, with its upgraded Wind U123 apparently on track for a release April. While much will apparently remain unchanged form the U120, the U123 does get a bit of a boost from Intel’s new Atom N280 processor, which has already found its way into ASUS’ Eee PC 1000HA, and from a maximum 2GB of RAM, as opposed to 1GB on the U120. You’ll also be able to get it in your choice of four colors, and with a six or nine cell battery if you choose. What’s more, MSI’s director of US sales reportedly confirmed that the company has both 11.6-inch and 12-inch netbooks “in development,” and that it “can bring that out of the gate,” although he unfortunately didn’t go any farther than that somewhat cryptic statement.”
DoubleTwist is a new, open-source, universal media manager in beta for the Mac. It gathers music, videos and photos, supports tons of devices and has a P2P/social networking component. Will it be great?
DoubleTwist was created by the famous DVD copy-protection reverse-engineer who calls himself DVD Jon, so you know it’s friendly to the budget-minded poweruser. So far, it’s been a joy to use, but it’s still in beta and has some flaws. Here’s what it does now, and what it should do:
What doubleTwist Does:
Manages Photos, Music and Video on Your Computer It watches your Music, Photos and Movies folders, and lets you drag and drop any other folders into its media browser. There’s also a Spotlight-esque search function to check your folders. Music is organized in sortable list form, while photos and videos are displayed as tiles.
Lets You Maintain an Online “Feed” and Send/Receive Media To/From Other doubleTwist Users DoubleTwist has a built in social-networking aspect that lets you create an account, add friends and shoot files back and forth. You can post video, photos and music to a “feed,” which is basically a media-rich version of the Facebook wall, and it gets syndicated to all your friends.
They say you can send any type of file back and forth on doubleTwist, which seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. We haven’t yet had the chance to fully test this feature, but they remain pretty vague on its limits . And for those who aren’t signed up, you can send them an email link to the doubleTwist servers, where they can view/watch/hear the content you want them to receive.
Connects to a Variety of Phones and Devices DoubleTwist is really touting its ability to connect with devices here, especially BlackBerry and Android phones. (Not surprisingly, you can’t yet sync with Apple products.) When you plug in your device, it shows up under its model name, and doubleTwist organizes media files in the same way it does for your computer. You can drag and drop freely between the two devices. (see top photo)
Auto-Converts Files to Provide Compatibility With Your Device Because it only works with devices it knows, doubleTwist autoconverts media files as necessary. So if you have a .mp4 video file that your phone doesn’t support, doubleTwist will detect this before uploading and convert appropriately. (We’ll be testing this to see how long a movie in the wrong format might take.)
Connects to Your iTunes Library for Access to Playlists and Other Stuff Like other media devices and apps, doubleTwist can read your iTunes Library XML file, which provides access to playlists and podcasts, in addition to the the rest of your library. Most of the crap that pops up in the left column of iTunes will show up here.
Uploads Photos and Videos to Online Services With Flickr and Facebook integration, you can drag, drop and tag your photos, then upload them with a click, and without exiting doubleTwist. The same thing goes for sending videos to YouTube.
WHAT DOUBLETWIST SHOULD DO iPhone and iPod Support As we mentioned, there’s not a lot of love for iPhone and iPod yet, but the doubleTwist team says this functionality will actually appear in future versions.
AirTunes Support One of my favorite features of using iTunes with an Airport Express is the AirTunes streaming feature. There are 3rd-party apps, such as AirFoil, that take advantage of this feature, so it shouldn’t be too hard to work this into future versions.
Native Playlist Support and Streaming Libraries For now, there is no way to import or create music playlists, aside from what’s already in iTunes. You also can’t connect to other people’s libraries or an iTunes Music Server on your network. This means you’ll still be using iTunes for some stuff.
Advanced File Categorization/Organization Right now, the categorization and organization of media files are a bit rudimentary. Music shows up in a list view, but the only sortable categories are Title, Artist, and Time. Photos and Videos only show up as tiles, with no other view or sort options, except adjusting thumbnail size.
For people with tons of files, this doesn’t quite cut it.
I also don’t really like that when you play a song, it launches a second window which compiles the list of songs played while the app has been open. But there’s no way to remove songs from the list aside from closing the app, nor can you keep playback all in one window. It’s not major, but kinda bleh.
BOTTOM LINE DoubleTwist is an extremely promising app that really could become the de facto standard for media players if they continue to develop and improve on this beta. The idea of not having to use iPhoto ever again (I hate it), or getting more functionality than what VLC offers for videos is pretty exciting.g. [doubleTwist via MacRumors]
Global publishing giant Hearst, the name behind newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and magazines like Esquire and Popular Mechanics, is planning a wireless e-reader with a large screen.
While Hearst has been silent regarding exact product specifications, we do know that the device will feature a 8.5×11ish screen to appease publishers used to large page layouts, and Hearst will allow the device’s “underlying technology” to be adopted by other publishers (we’re assuming that means without licensing fees).
According to Fortune, we’re likely to see the device this year. And with Sony giving up their early lead in the e-reader world, it’s none too soon that the Kindle will get some friendly marketplace competition—even if Hearst isn’t openly chasing after the book market.
If high costs of producing paper goods are hurting the media, I’m not sure it makes sense to get into the game of something more expensive to read from today — when such a device already exists from Amazon — even if it saves them a few bucks tomorrow. Oh yeah, and magazines are better in color (on LCD or paper). [Fortune]
Boy Genius’s tipsters are telling them that an upcoming BlackBerry 9630 is Verizon’s world edition phone, meaning you can travel overseas and DO STUFF WITH IT.
BG says it’s going to have “CDMA 1x, EV-DO Rev. A, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, and 2100MHz UMTS”. The OS might be 5.0, but might be 4.71, it won’t have Wi-Fi, it might come around May/June and it might have a 3.2-megapixel camera. Or it might not have a camera at all! Who the hell knows! [Boy Genius]
While I was going through gear at the Greener Gadgets conference, a dude came up to me and asked, “Hey, you wanna see something?” He pulled out a beat-up suitcase stuffed with old, dirty dishrags.
He pulled away three layers of soiled cotton from the 70s before he pulled out a cardboard box—the Recompute cardboard PC, which Brendan Macaluso insists isn’t a box because he’s a designer “and designers don’t make boxes.”
He didn’t have anything to plug it into, but he assures it and the other model in existence totally work. Inside is a micro-ATX motherboard packed with a Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM and a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive.
The point of the cardboard case—which he says it just an extreme example of his definition of implementing sustainability in design—is to make it easier to dismantle, for “controlled disposal.” It’s made up of 12 different patterns laid out in a CAD program, with all of the layer sandwiched together with plain white glue—the layers give it strength and a degree of durability.
So the hard-to-recycle plsatic case is dealt with, but, uh, what about the guts? He said there’s a company in Florida that properly disposes of circuit boards, grinding them into dust and magnetically separating out the usable elements, but the point of Recompute is that it’s a framework for building ideas. It’s easy to mass produce, and he’s open to working with people to do that.
It’s obviously not the prettiest PC in the room, but it’s better than an ugly planet.
Been brushing the idea of a netbook off for months now? Let’s see you ignore this. Hot on the heels of the Inspiron Mini 10 going on sale, Dell has lowered the barrier to entry on its marginally smaller Mini 9 to a rather amazing $199. For under two bills, you can now grab yourself an Obsidian Black 8.9-inch netbook with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, WiFi, a 4-cell battery, GMA950 graphics, 512MB of RAM, a 4GB SSD and a copy of Ubuntu Linux. Of course, that price heads up a hundred bucks if you just can’t live without Windows XP, but if there’s ever been a time for learning how to deal within an open source environment, we’d say this is it. Good luck with that whole “resisting the temptation” thing.
Here are a couple of exclusive featurettes showing new Watchmen behind-the-scenes footage, including Dr. Manhattan looking like a Tron dork and Silk Spectre looking like the foxy, yumtastic, kick-ass heroine she is. Spoilers ahead.
Apparently a shoe phone similar to this was a really big deal in some dumb movie or TV show. But now the thing actually exists, using common cellphone gear and a hollowed-out heel.
The only problem is that Gardner-Stephen says he wants to produce the shoe for the medical industry and help people by using it to relay data from biosensors and other crap. Um, what?! If global
Which flat panel technology is the best? 
Here’s a simple, fantastic idea. This otherwise standard USB cable adorns its wire with an inline SD card reader, creating a 2-in-1 SD reader/USB cable.
DoubleTwist is a new, open-source, universal media manager in beta for the Mac. It gathers music, videos and photos, supports tons of devices and has a P2P/social networking component. Will it be great?
Like other media devices and apps, doubleTwist can read your iTunes Library XML file, which provides access to playlists and podcasts, in addition to the the rest of your library. Most of the crap that pops up in the left column of iTunes will show up here.
With Flickr and Facebook integration, you can drag, drop and tag your photos, then upload them with a click, and without exiting doubleTwist. The same thing goes for sending videos to YouTube.
I also don’t really like that when you play a song, it launches a second window which compiles the list of songs played while the app has been open. But there’s no way to remove songs from the list aside from closing the app, nor can you keep playback all in one window. It’s not major, but kinda bleh.
Global publishing giant Hearst, the name behind newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and magazines like Esquire and Popular Mechanics, is planning a wireless e-reader with a large screen.
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