This month, exactly 10 years ago, the father of all MP3 players, the MPMan F10, was released. Initially presented at the 1998 CeBIT exposition, the MPMan F10 featured 32 MB of memory, which could stock around eight songs, and a tiny LCD screen. The gadget’s starting price was set at $250, and for an additional [...]
I don’t usually fall for useless desktop accessories, but when I saw this 3D Living World model of the Milky Way, my brain started trying to convince me that I couldn’t live without one. Each 12 X 12 cm glass cube is created using real space data collected from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory and holds [...]
By Mark O’Neill Serge Nicaudie asks : I have a Blackberry and one thing I would love is the ability to speak into it and it would write an email for me. Like a dictation machine. I also want to use it for quick notes to remind myself about stuff. Can you see if there [...]
By Mark O’Neill I am normally rather wary of anything coming from AOL, but I have to admit that their free little music desktop widget, which runs on Adobe AIR, has impressed the hell out of me. It’s a nice little program to have running while you’re surfing away on the net. If you download [...]
If you think that your “working-class” shower isn’t quite as effective as you’d like it to be, then you’ll want to have a look at the $100,000 Silver TAG Shower. This baby comes equipped with 18 computer-controlled showerheads, including one that looks to be specially made to clean dirty derrières, and features six zones, which [...]
Researchers at Carnegie mellon University’s Robotics Institute are currently developing a magnetic levitation system that they claim provides the most realistic sense of touch yet to be seen on similar devices. Possible applications include microsurgery, computer-augmented design, robot control, and even data visualization. Haptics is the study of touching, and haptic technology refers to that [...]
By Mark O’Neill Are you an environmentally-friendly geek? Then how about discarding your plastic keyboard and having a bamboo one instead? Judging from a quick Google search, it seems that the concept of the bamboo keyboard came first from Japan, and now, it is gradually making it way across the rest of the world for [...]
The Nokia Morph is a flexible, two-piece concept device that can adapt its shape according to the task its user wants it to accomplish. Thanks to nanotechnology, Morph can sense its environment, harvest solar energy, and also clean itself automatically. Featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, the Morph [...]
The Aquaskipper is an innovative human-powered watercraft that rests on hydrofoils, propelling itself forward when its driver hops up and down on it. According to its manufacturer, this is the fasted human-powered water vehicle on the planet. Built out of aircraft aluminum and fiberglass, the Aquaskipper only weights 26 pounds and goes at a top [...]
Did you actually think that HD-DVD was going to die gracefully? Perhaps with a solemn mourning ceremony and a tribute to the next-gen format that could have been? You didn’t think about how retailers were going to dump their excess HD-DVD players though, now did you? Apparently. both online and brick-and-mortar stores, are renaming HD-DVD [...]
Momenta, one of the finalists in Microsoft’s 2007-08 Next-Gen PC design competition, is a personal computer that attaches to your neck and records what it considers as “the most memorable moments of your life”. The device works by monitoring your heart rate, and as soon as it detects some kind of excitement in your day, [...]
Tiny computers come in handy pretty often. Whether you need a beefed-up firewall/router or a cool way to store and access your media remotely, a small linux-based computer is the perfect solution. The palm-sized Linutop 2 sports a 500MHz AMD CPU coupled with 512 megs of ram and 1GB of flash-based storage. Four USB ports [...]