Technology
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[ 2 Comments ]Posted on December 19, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
With some random musings on why today’s kids shoot each other, why marshmallows are the new pink, and the fat old bastards who blocked my view at the hobby shop when I was little.
 
Marshmallow is the new black. |
If your dad was anything like my dad, he walked 17 miles to work every day in 6 feet of snow, barefoot, with a headwind both ways, and ate boot broth soup for lunch, so he could make 13 cents a week. He also might look at you funny when you used a calculator to do some multiplication and say “Puh! We didn’t have them things in MY day“, and prove it by asking for some big numbers and then piss you off by easily multiplying pairs of two-digit numbers in his head. My dad could do pairs of three-digit numbers, but would have to stare off into space for a second mouthing and moving his finger in the air. My generation – on the whole – couldn’t do this, but seems to me to be a little more in possession of average intelligence across the board. But when I meet today’s kids, I don’t meet many “average” kids, they all seem to be vidiot savants who can’t spell but can ace you on any video game known to man or fix your wireless network, or Einsteinian freaks who get Montessori training, business and accounting tutoring, and therapy twice a week. I personally think this can all be explained by the toys we had or have. And I have to add that if you ever want to take control of my mind, set me loose in a toy store for about an hour, and after the spontaneous hypnotic age regression that occurs, I will be a pliable drooling zombie drone that will do anything you say. The same thing happens when I browse the doodads on Amazon
, which I made the mistake of doing yesterday, and which led to this roundup of high tech toys I wish I had when I was a kid. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 12, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Thanks to these affordable high-tech surveillance gadgets, your workplace Secret Santa Stalker sees you when you’re sleeping, and knows when you’re awake.
You don’t know it, but this holiday season there’s a special someone who has their eye on you. Of course you don’t know it, because they’re keeping that eye on you with an Audio-Activated Hidden Camera by BrickHouse Security®
, which, as the product description points out, can “capture every detail even in low light situations“. Yes, for some the holidays are a time of love and cheer, for others, a time of loneliness and despondency, and for yet others, a time to enjoy psychotic fantasies of how much you’ll love them for the bizarre gift they can’t decide on because they’re so incredibly in love with you. In love with you the way Robin William’s character in One Hour Photo
is in love with the Yorkin family, but in love with you all the same. So far, their favorite gift idea for you is GPS lingerie, but they’ll agonize over this every sleepless night until Christmas, so who knows what you’ll end up with. You could cleverly and kindly let your high-tech stalker know that you’re on to them with a nice gift like a Spy Camera Watch
or a stylish Spy Camera Pen Hidden Camcorder
, but your effort would be futile, because whether you shopped on line or in person, they would know what you were up to, because they’ve already installed a Stealth iBot Password Logger
on your computer and an Escort Entourage GPS Vehicle Tracker
on your car. So what to do? They say the the best defense is a good *offense, so you might consider wearing a Tell Your Eyes To Stop Staring At My Boobs
shirt when you grudgingly go on a “just friends”, work hours holiday shopping trip with them, but they’d already have on their Tell Your Boobs To Stop Staring At My Eyes
shirt. No, your only hope is probably to scan your home and car with a SpyGear4U Bug Detector
and your office cubicle with a BrickHouse Security Sperm Detection Kit
, and hope for the best. Because, just like Santa, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. So be good, for goodness’ sake. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 5, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Watch out, we’ve taken the time to round up a bunch of cool, not-so-cool, and interesting watches. None of which are second hand.
With the TokyoFlash Retsu,
You Look Cool But Never
Know What Time It Is |
I have what might be described as a poorly-manifested watch fetish. In the 90′s, I probably had two dozen watches. Fossils, Swatches, or any clever design that was in the discount bin near the checkout at stores like TJ Maxx. They all died slow, painful nightclub deaths of course though, and since 2001 I’ve only had one watch; the classic Museum Movado
. Its simple functional beauty and reliability is unparalleled. I laugh every time I dodge the $80.00 “Movado Authorized” battery replacement fee and void the warranty at a nearby jeweler that does it for the cost of the battery: six bucks. But even though I’m not likely to go on another watch-buying bender any time soon, I love a cool design, and the right watch is a superb gift, so we’re rounding up some interesting watches to give you some holiday gift ideas. If you really want to impress that special someone, and money is truly no object, you might consider one of the watches from this selection, which is topped off by the Patek Caliber 89 at $5,120,000. In these lean times though, even the most affluent might consider gold, silver, or real estate before a $5.1 Million watch, so let’s think a little more reasonably. Amazon, for instance, offers the Breguet Classique Complications Tourbillon Messidor
for a mere $131,669.99, which – before you complain – is $8230.01 lower than retail. But honestly let’s get just a little more real now. Personally, I’ve never been much of a Rolex fan; not even of the simple and classic Oyster Perpetual Explorer
(only $4,545!). Somehow, it’s the very message of quality and stability that the watch conveys that kind of turns me off. However, this gorgeous collection of Rolex Explorers designed by Hiroshi Fujiwara for Bamford Watch Department might make me rethink things. While the original is a little over $4500.00, these redesigns are priceless. Literally. I couldn’t find pricing info anywhere. Moving from the outrageously expensive to the unique and peculiar, there are flat-out goofy choices out there like the Nooka Zub Zot SpongeBamo
, the Flud Tableturns
DJ-inspired model, or the Pac-Man Limited Edition Pellet-Time Watch (only 500 made, and it comes with the game for your PC). And then there’s the nerdishly intriguing but ultimately absurd, like the “let’s watch TV on your wrist” Ultimate Style 8GB Steel MP4 Player Watch with 1.8 Inch Screen
or the Super Cool Mobile Phone Wrist Watch
. I think we can rest assured that anything with the words “Super Cool” in the name probably isn’t. If you’re more of a do-it-yourself type, there’s the Pong Watch concept by John Maushammer. It may actually be in production at some point, but for now, he’s just sharing how he made it. If you’re a little compulsive about dates, you might consider the Everyday Special by Mr Jones Watches. At $210, the full year will only set you back about $76,650. Which of course was not their intention; Mr Jones actually does some cool watches (the Cyclops is pretty fun, for instance), and the idea of course, is to pick a date that means something to you, not cover the whole year. But enough silliness, if you’ve seen the kinds of hip and unique watch designs that pop up on gadget blogs or sites like BoingBoing, they’re almost always from shops like TokyoFlash, Nooka, or trendy lines like Diesel. And if you’re looking for the TRULY innovative, Trendhunter has a roundup that includes things like the Pierced Wrist Watch and the Seiko E-Ink Watch for women. Below are more interesting timepieces available on Amazon. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 29, 2009 by admin in Technology
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
I’m a firm believer that size matters, but a 120 inch wide monitor might be a little excessive, in my opinion. Unless of course you’re Dr Evil or you’re running the Matrix or something.
This kind of behavior is probably okay
if you’re runnin’ The Matrix or somethin’ |
You may remember a time not too long ago when a 19″ monitor was quite adequate, and anything larger than 21″ was considered absolutely luxurious. Those days are clearly gone; the advent of widescreen laptops changed our expectations forever. And now it’s frankly getting a little out of hand. I can understand an extra monitor if you’re a music producer, movie maker, or designer that uses more than two or three applications at once, but personally, I think going beyond that is simply engaging in a sort of high tech display behaviour. I mean c’mon. Does anyone really need a 42″ wide monitor? Well if they do, they’re in luck. Although Alienware debuted the monstrosity at a trade show back in early 2008, the version that’s actually now available is made by Ostendo , and and is also being sold by NEC. If these numbers mean anything to you, it has a 32:10 aspect ratio, 2880 x 900 pixel native resolution, and for you gamers: yes, it’s fairly fast with 0.02 millisecond refresh rate. For the rest of you, that means it’s BIG. See the comparison images below. Of course, this already wasn’t big enough for some nerd, so you can always string three of them together (YouTube clip, also embedded below) for the ultimate pretend driving experience. And if you need this kind of silliness on the go, there are also dual screen laptops available. The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds
is probably not the way to go; at around 12 lbs, 2 inches thick, and a battery life of about an hour and forty-five minutes (if you’re using its crappy second screen), it’s hardly what you’d call “portable”. It also costs almost five grand. Perhaps a bit more on the mark is the Kohjinsha dual-screen netbook. You’ll have to pay for it in Yen for now though; it’s only available in Japan as of this writing. But if you’re still intrigued, Engadget has a hands-on look here. At least it actually exists; its only competitors are stylish pre-production concepts. One is the GScreen SpaceBook , the other is the Estari Canova. Of course, too much is never enough for some people, so if you’re looking for that “Dr Evil” impact try an industrial vendor like CGM, and if you need to run The Matrix or something, there are modular solutions
. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 21, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
In home, motion-simulator iMax theater, epic marketing failure, and a device that any nerdy gamer guy would love to get his hands on, the BRA CONTROLLER.
Who wouldn’t want a motion simulator
chair like the DreamFlyer right in their
own home? Well, anybody who’s
not a total freaking nerd, I guess. |
The information highway is littered with the debris of half-baked ideas for interface and input devices. Vintage sci-fi movies like Lawnmower Man
and Johnny Mnemonic
suggested a future in which we’d all be living partially in some kind of virtual world, wearing goggles and gloves to interact with it. Well, VR gloves do exist, but a quick look at a product like CyberGrasp raises the reasonable question: Why? Recently a friend was telling me about how cool their Wii was because of the fact that the shooting game they were playing gave a recoil feeling in the remote. I told them I’d get excited about this kind of feature when I could feel the bad guys shooting back. For some slightly more practical applications of your Wiimote, check out developer Johnny Lee’s do-it-yourself projects for Minority Report-like multi-touch interactive interfaces. It’s a little like an iPhone for your whiteboard. Then there are some interesting twists on the mouse concept. You may remember the now extinct and not-so-cleverly named CueCat for instance. Some of us received these doodads free in the mail back around 2000, as part of an attempt to tie real-world products with information on the web via bar codes. Although the marketing failed, thousands of CueCats roaming the wilds led to a large hacker community. Around the same time you could also get a free keyboard called a RocketBoard. The only thing that made it unique was that it had a bunch of orange buttons that acted as hotkeys to connect you to soon-to-be-defunct Internet Bubble startups or dinosaurs like AOL. One of the few descendants of this kind of “trapped in the box” thinking is the Open Office Mouse, which, although developed with the Open Office platform in mind, possesses none of its functional genius. In fact it’s a rather ugly and cumbersome-looking doodad. With a wire attached, no less. But if odd and customizable multi-button input devices are your thing, you might get one and supplement it with the Ergodex DX-1, which, to be fair, at least looks like it would be of some use to people with cognitive, sight, or motor impairment. Then there are input devices which make sense or are at least rather clever in some way, like the TactaPad, which is sort of like a tactile Wacom Tablet
, or the Swiftpoint TriPed, which is a smart multi-purpose stylus/mouse conceived for use with tablet PC’s. While clever, they’re probably a little too counterintuitive or niche-market oriented. And if you’re into that whole interactive and immersive tactile experience thing, maybe you should hook your gaming system up to a Predator Motion Simulator or a DreamFlyer, stick it in your VisionDome personal iMax theater, and go ahead and put that CyberGrasp glove to use. Personally, if I were looking for a tactile input experience, I might opt for Jenny Chowdhury’s bra-powered Intimate Controllers. An input device I’m sure the typical thirty-going-on-thirteen male gamer would love to get his hands on. Read the rest of this entry »
