Damn you, Microsoft. Just when I think I'm free, you pull me back in. After the whole "free" flash drive debacle, I swore to never again ask Redmond for anything. Sure, I need my copy of XP to play the PC games to which I'm addicted, but that doesn't me I have to like it.
Then you announce this wireless backlit rechargeable keyboard. What's a guy to do?
Covet. Covet madly.
Looks like someone finally ponied up and bought Microsoft that industrial design team they always wanted. It's no iPod, to be fair, but it's a sight better looking than some of the previous products they've pulled out of the abyss. I love the idea of backlit keyboards, and it seems like they've come up with a recharging solution that doesn't entirely suck. Granted, it's still a Windows keyboard primarily, so I'd hesitate to put it too close to my Mac desktop, less they start hissing at each other, but hey: that's what wireless is for.
This thing drops "soon," but we have no price as of yet. We'll keep our ears to the ground for you.
[via Gearlog]
Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have apparently come up with a way to record smells, then play them back later. The device works by analyzing a scent, and then recreating it by mixing a bunch of chemicals together.
Somboon's system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon. "We can even tell a green apple from a red apple," Somboon says.The suggestion is that this technology will allow customers to "smell before they buy," but I bet you dimes to dollars that it's only a matter of time before pre-adolescent boys are using it to record gross smells and play it back to their friends. Kids can be so cruel.
Reproducing smells has been tried before. Smell-O-Vision (pictured) was one in a long line of inventions in the 1950s and 1960s that were supposed to keep movie theaters competitive against the encroachments of television (3D movies were another). The device worked similarly, except that instead of mixing chemicals, it used a number of scents distilled from actual objects and placed into vials. The smells could then be "piped" into the theater. It was not, unsurprisingly, a resounding success.
[via we make money, not art]
[Emru Townsend at Digital World writes:]
In recent months, the plots of both 24 and The Inside Man hinged on characters using pens with built-in voice recorders. If you want to get your own superspy mojo working, consider this multipurpose gadget available from Brando Workshop: not only does it let you get incriminating evidence from ne'er-do-wells, you can listen to MP3s, tune in to FM radio, use it for 512 MB of storage, and -- oh, right -- write things down.
Dan's Thoughts: I wonder how many people accidentally end up accidentally filling it with the sound of themselves writing things.
Taking a page from the playbooks of cellular phone providers, music purveyor Napster has begun offering free/cheap music players to users who sign up for a year long subscription to their music download service. The player comes in two flavors: a free 256MB flash player, and a 1GB player that costs $50 after the 1-year subscription.
Of course, both players are compatible with Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" DRM scheme, but they also seem to support vanilla MP3 and WMA files. In addition, the 1GB player features a color screen, and can display JPEGs and play MPEG4 videos, though no video content is available on Napster's service. The 1GB model also has a built-in FM tuner for listening to the radio while you're on the go.
Engadget got their hands on the 1GB player and gave it a thumbs up:
...everything is accessible via a convenient and fast iPod-like menu system. We'd estimate the player is 10-12mm thick, but while it's shorter than the iPod nano, the player felt comfortable in our large hands, and the buttons were plenty easy to use. It might all come down to your preference of music service, but we can't see this little OEM player standing in your way.It's an interesting idea, and as I noted above, one that's worked pretty well for cellphones providers. Whether it'll be enough to take a bite out of the music monolith that is Apple remains to be seen.
I don't do that much real camping, tending instead to the bastardized version that my hardcore woodsy friends call derisively "car camping," but I've spent my fair share of nights in a tent. And while I often pack an electric lantern so I can read for a little while before falling asleep to the sound of howling coyotes and mysterious snuffling noises, the batteries invariably run out pretty soon.
But if I got me one of these Woods Solar Powered EZ-Tent™ with LED Lights, I'd be all set. Basically, it has a solar-panel that can be used not only to power built-in LED lights, but can also be used to charge batteries for all your technological devices. That you take with you into the woods. Right.
Still, why not? What have you got to lose? It's solar-powered, so it's environmental friendly. In fact, if my apartment lease doesn't go through, I may find myself living in one of these things before long.
[via Gizmodo]
Honestly, the shocking fetish has to stop. First it was Shocking Roulette (to steal a quote from a friend, "where even the winners are losers"); then it was the Shockolate Vault, the jar that prevents you from eating your hard-earned treats.
But the biggest problem with these remote controlled shocking tanks is that they actually sound kind of cool (despite being billed as "The Ultimately Sadistic Office Gadget"). You are your opponent each get a remote controlled tank; try to shoot your opponent's with the infrared gun, and when you hit them, your victim gets a nice shock from the controllers. And if you're concerned about your delicate electronics, you needn't be concerned: each controller comes with a wrist strap, so your opponent won't drop it while he's crying out for his mommy.
Something tells me I would be awful at this game. $50 for a pair o' tanks. But the pain lasts a lifetime.
Video conferencing has been The Next Big Thing for about twenty years now. I mean, it's 2006; how come we don't have video phones? Sure, your webcam can do a passable job, but they have plenty of limitations. For example, ever tried to get more than one or two people in a webcam shot?
Microsoft has a plan for changing that, and a nifty piece of hardware to go along with it. The big MS is developing a VoIP stragety as part of its Unified Communications Platform is targeted specifically at businesses. As such, they've developed the Microsoft RoundTable, a 360 degree webcam that allows you to see a panoramic view of everybody around a conference table, or, alternatively, focus in on the people who are doing the speaking.
It's a clever idea, and one that fills in a pretty glaring gap in webcam technology. While Apple's iChat does allow up to 4 people to have a video chat, it doesn't really have good support for more than one person using a single webcam. Could this do for video conferencing what speakerphones have long been doing for audio?
[via Gizmodo]
The monolithic search engine/adveritising/kitchen sink company has launched yet another new service: Google Checkout. Billing itself as "a new service that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure," Checkout lets you store your payment details in one centralized location, and then use that account to buy from supporting merchants.
Certainly having to remember only one login is a great idea, and the fewer places that have your credit card information, well, the lower the risk that it'll be compromised. Still, Google has some hurdles to overcome here, not the least of which is acceptance by the merchants. While they have lined up an impressive slate of participating stores, notably absent from the list is Internet shopping Mecca (and Google rival) Amazon. And, of course, there's stiff competition from eBay's established PayPal standard. Will the Google name be able to lure customers from PayPal, or will the two be able to co-exist peacefully? Google's GMail quickly became the email account to have, but other attempts by the company (such as Google Talk) have yet to achieve resounding success.
And of course, there is the key question one should always ask when it comes to Google: how does this play into their core market, i.e. advertising? While the company is taking a small cut from each transaction, as PayPal and credit cards do, one wonders if they'll farm the information to provide you with targeted ads, such as they do with their GMail service. Looking over the Google Checkout Privacy Policy does yield an opt-out "If you don’t want us to use any information shared between [Google Payment Corporation] GPC and Google to promote Google products and services to you," but I couldn't find any other specific mention of targeting ads. It should be noted that your entire transaction history will be stored as well, which would no doubt provide Google with an extremely profitable store of data to analyze for trends and the like.
