Introducing Gizmine: A Store For Weird Japan Gadgets [Japan]

Doug Krone is my friend who started the dependable Japan importer Dynamism in the 90’s and he’s just launched Gizmine. Gizmine is different from Dynamism, a high end gadget site, by measure of its content type and breadth. I’d most summarily explain it as a collection of weird stuff on gadget blogs from Japan, but for sale. In fact, most of the inventory is stuff discovered on blogs and while walking through Shibuya on any given afternoon. Doug is also the man responsible for making Gizmodo Gallery possible. Below are a few of the pieces in his catalog that are my personal picks, and Doug says they’ll be adding new pieces every day til the end of the year. Not a bad place to find a gift for the geeks in your life. [Gizmine]

Casio Poptone Vibrating Watch

Conof Desk Light

Self Explosion button

Tokyo Street LED Scope

Common Sense Keyboard (Charges by solar panel)

Fuji Film Instax Mini 7S (Like a polaroid!)

Model Camera Kit

[Gizmine]

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The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Totally Rickrolled [Rickroll]

The poor Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends float was just minding its own business when that cocky (though rugged, handsome) superstar Rick Astley showed up and spoiled all the fun. Man, what’s with that guy?? Happy Thanksgiving from the internet meme incarnate.

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After a failed career of house cleaning and guarding your kids, Mitsubishi’s Wakamaru was left with a choice: toll booth operator or actress — she chose the latter, easier option. Osaka University’s 20-minute play titled, “I, Worker,” focuses on a young couple whose seductive (don’t you think?) housekeeping robot has lost her will to work after struggling with the idea of human servitude. The play is expected to go full-length by the year 2010, at which point we expect Wakamaru to extend her brooding to the insatiable lust she feels to violate her programming and enslave humanity. It’s not like she can pull off a broad emotional range thanks to that chiseled face of apprehension anyway.

Filed under: Robots

Wakamaru’s latest gig: distraught thespian, clothes rack originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Via [Engadget]

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Windows 7 details galore: interface tweaks, netbook builds, Media Center enhancements

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Microsoft’s Windows 7 announcement earlier today was followed up by an extensive demo of the new features during the PDC keynote, and since then even more info about the new OS has flooded out, so we thought we’d try to wrap up some of the more important bits here for you. Microsoft seems to have done an impressive job at this early pre-beta stage, folding in next-gen interface ideas like multitouch into the same OS that apparently runs fine on a 1GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM, but we’ll see how development goes — there’s still a ways to go. Some notes:

• Obviously, the big news is the new taskbar, which forgoes text for icons and has new “jump lists” of app controls and options you can access with a right-click. You can select playlists in Media Player, for example. Super cool: when you scrub over the icons, all the other app windows go transparent so you can “peek” at the windows you’re pointing at.
• Gadgets now appear on the desktop — the sidebar has been killed. That makes more sense for all those laptop owners out there with limited screen space, and you can still see gadgets anytime by peeking at the desktop, rendering all other windows transparent.
• Window resizing and management now happens semi-automatically: dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, pulling it down restores; dragging a window to the edges auto-resizes it to 50% for quick tiling. Nifty.
• The system tray now only displays what you explicitly say it should — everything else is hidden, and the controls have been streamlined.
• User Account Control settings are now much more fine-grained — you can set them by app and by level of access.
• They demoed multitouch features on an HP TouchSmart PC — it was pretty cool, although the usual nagging “what is this good for / that’ll get old fast” concerns weren’t really addressed. The Start menu gets 25 percent bigger when using touch to make it easier to handle, and apps will all get scroll support automatically. There’s also a giant on-screen predictive keyboard. Again — could be amazing, but we won’t know until it’s out in the wild.
• We’ve always known Microsoft intends Windows 7 to run on netbooks, and we got a small taste during the PDC keynote: Windows SVP Steve Sinofsky held up his “personal” laptop running Windows 7, an unnamed 1GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM that looked a lot like an Eee PC, and said that it still had about half its memory free after boot. (We’re guessing it was running a VIA Nano, since most Atoms run at 1.6GHz.)
• At the other end of the scale, Windows 7 supports machines with up to 256 CPUs.
• Multiple-monitor management is much-improved, as is setting up projectors — it’s a hotkey away. Remote Desktop now works with multiple monitors as well.
• Media Center has been tweaked as well — it looks a lot more like the Zune interface. There’s also a new Mini Guide when watching video, and a new Music Wall album artwork screensaver that kicks in when you’re playing music.
• Devs got a pre-beta today; a “pretty good” feature complete beta is due early next year. No word at all on when it’ll be released to market apart from that “three years from Vista” date we’ve known forever.

That’s just the good bits — hit the read links for piles of more info and screenshots, and we’ll keep our eyes out for anything else interesting. Exciting times!

Read - Keynote videos on the PDC site
Read - Technologizer Windows 7 hands-on
Read - Ars Technica Windows 7 interface walkthrough
Read - Laptop Windows 7 hands-on
Read - Windows 7 Media Center revealed

Windows 7 details galore: interface tweaks, netbook builds, Media Center enhancements originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eco-Friendly 360 Paper Bottle Concept Makes Tetra Paks Look So ’60s [Paper Bottle]

I tend to avoid bottled water—my tap-water’s fine and way cheaper—but since millions don’t think the same, this concept from designers Brand Image would be a way to reduce the eco-impact of all those nasty plastic bottles. The 360 is a paper bottle, molded from 100% recyclable, food-safe paper, and its simplicity makes even the venerable cardboard Tetra Pak drinks carton look outdated. These things are almost “printed-out,” they stack, are re-sealable, and look fab. These ought to be real, and when they are I hope they get the texture of the “lip” right: you don’t want fuzzy cardboardiness there. [Core77]

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Dell’s Inspiron 1425 leaked: like the 1420, but slimmer?
You really never know what you’ll run across when sifting through PDF’s on Dell’s website, so we’re not at all flabbergasted to hear that an all new machine has popped up courtesy of a completely random Product Safety, EMC and Environmental datasheet. The heretofore unheard of Inspiron 1425 now has its very own safety sheet on the outfit’s official site, and it seems that two variants are listed (FT01 and FT02). Tipster SalientPilot rightfully points out that this machine looks to be just a hair slimmer and lighter than the existing Inspiron 1420, and given the November 18th “effective date,” it sure smells fresh. Obviously, we’ve no clue if or when the Round Rock powerhouse will get around to doling out the official goods on this elusive machine, but we’d say this is probably reason enough to hold off on that impending 1420 purchase until we see what’s what. [Warning: PDF read links]

[Thanks, SalientPilot]

Read - Inspiron 1425 FT01
Read - Inspiron 1425 FT02

Filed under: Laptops

Dell’s Inspiron 1425 leaked: like the 1420, but slimmer? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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T-Mobile Samsung Behold Lightning Review [Lightning]

The Gadget: Samsung’s Behold, T-Mobile’s slice of touchscreen feature phone pie with a Korea-style five-megapixel camera and Sammy’s “innovative” TouchWiz UI.

The Price: $150 after the standard rebate and two-year contract

The Verdict: The Behold fills the hole in T-Mobile’s lineup for a not-quite-smart feature phone: It does a lot of the stuff a smartphone will do, like web browsing and email, just you know, not quite as capably as a real smartphone, or even as well as its cousin, the Instinct (even before it got better with its most recent round of updates). The web browser is bleh for anything but mobile sites since T-Mobile does you the favor of translating pages, which tends to butcher more complicated ones, and the email client won’t do standard IMAP or POP. The IM client is slow, though not terrible, but either way, you can’t really install your own apps to rectify the situation.

So what’s good? The touchscreen is one more of the responsive ones that Samsung has put out, a hair better than the Instinct, and the keyboard layout is pretty good too, though I wish the space bar was bigger. The TouchWiz UI is attractive and easy to use, even if it’s only skin deep—once you go past the widget-y “desktop,” you’re dumped into a more generic, though not exactly ugly, cellphone UI.

The 5MP camera, though not miraculous, is better than most of the ones in these kinds of phones by a long shot, with satisfactory noise levels and a decent suite of basic photo editing that’ll let you adjust fundamentals like contrast and color, crop or add crazy effects. I wish the flash were a little stronger and the autofocus were a little faster, though.

Overall, it’s what you’d expect out of a feature phone—it’ll do a lot of things, just none of them amazingly. If you’re a T-Mobile customer, for the money, I’d go with a G1—it lacks polish in some places, and the hardware isn’t nearly as tight as the Behold’s, but you’ll get more out of it.

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Zoybar Modular Instrument is a Guitar, Bass or Medieval Lute, Depending on Your Mood [Instruments]

Stringed instruments are diverse in sound and design, but they all share the same basic shape. That similarity hadn’t really bugged anyone too much for the last few hundred years, but where most see variety Zoybar sees redundancy: they’ve proposed a modular, build-it-yourself guitar-ish thing, with interchangeable parts that can convert it into a wide range of necky, stringy instruments. Want an electric guitar? An amplified theobo? A single-stringed hobo-bass with a line out? Sure, whatever, it’s a Zoybar, man.

Broken down into a few categories of changeable parts, main body included, the Zoybar itself is best described a series of standardized connectors. It’ll be interesting to see what existing instruments can be created with the kit, but the weird, as of yet unrealized contraptions that artists create with the bevy of components have the potential to be amazing, or more realistically completely hilarious. The Zoybar should go on sale in January. [Zoybar via Crunchgear]

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Swiss Making First Solar Submarine, Defeating the Purpose of an Underwater Vessel [Submarines]

A Swiss company called BKW has launched ‘Project Goldfish’, with the goal of developing a solar-powered submarine for civilian use by 2012. The vessel would generate continuous power via the monstrous floating island / solar array pictured above. The sub itself would be tethered to the array, allowing it to stay underwater indefinitely. Sound pointless? Well, it certainly would be if your are trying to travel undetected. I suppose it could have applications on sightseeing or exploratory missions, but the whole idea of traveling in a tiny underwater tomb is daunting enough without knowing that the only thing separating you from a gruesome death at the hands of Davy Jones are solar panels and some flimsy cables.

[Born Rich via Newlaunches]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Robots

Oh Rolly… we know you’re an overpriced, 2GB dancing robot with convoluted controls and questionable sound quality. But dammit, your impractical, big-corporate ways have gnawed a soft-spot deep into the noxious cesspool we call a heart. Now this: Rolly model SEP-50BT with Bluetooth control from your cellphone or laptop. Shipping in Japan on November 21st for an expected ¥40,000 or about $427. Sold. Watch it all unfold in the video after the break.

[Via Impress]

Continue reading Sony’s Rolly learns the Bluetooth trick

Sony’s Rolly learns the Bluetooth trick originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Via [Engadget]

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