Hardware Beyond the Hype
I just love the look of this laser-cut plastic body that Chris Myers, a product designer, built for his Palm Pilot Robot. The pieces are cut from 1/8″ plexi and the layers stack in such a way that glue or fasteners are not needed. Graphite was the design program used.
While you’re on the site, check out some of his other projects, such as the bots built in a class that he teaches. It shows off a number of cool critters, including a variation on Mousey the Junkbot, with two bump whiskers.
This one could go in our “Why Didn’t Someone Already Think of That?” File. An Israeli inventor, Eliyahu Nir, has come up with a way of getting people out of the windows of burning buildings by using a spiral-tube slide which can be raised and lowered on an extendible boom.
We won’t go so far as to say that it could make fire escaping fun, but it’s certainly a lot less frightening than having to jump onto a inflatable bull’s eye or being pulled up into a helicopter.
A Street Tech reader hipped us to this Reuters story about an amazing bed designed and built by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars:
“[He] took inspiration for the bed — a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth — from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cult film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.'”
The bed is held in place by strong magnetic forces from magnets in the floor below and magnets in the Monolith…er… bed.
I like this last paragraph:
“Although people with piercings should have no problem sleeping on the bed, Ruijssenaars advises them against entering the magnetic field between the bed and the floor. They could find their piercing suddenly tugged toward one of the magnets.”
I guess you want to make sure you take your belt off before getting near the bed, too.
[Thanks, Ron!]
CNet has a nifty
photo piece, from the BlackHat security event, showing the innards of the BlueBag, a drive-by Bluetooth sniffing and attack device. Here’s the deep caption accompanying this image:
“Luca Carettoni (left) and Claudio Merloni are security consultants at Milan, Italy-based Secure Network. The two created the BlueBag to raise awareness about the potential of attacks against Bluetooth-enabled devices, they said in an interview at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.
‘The BlueBag is a roll-aboard suitcase filled with hardware. That gear is loaded with software to scan for Bluetooth devices and launch attacks against those, the two men said.
“We started evaluating how Bluetooth technology was spread in a metropolitan area,” Carettoni said. “We went around airports, offices and shopping malls and realized that a covered bag can be used quite effectively for malicious purposes.”
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around. This is your iPod nano tooling around in an “I-Tank,” a bullet-proof case that its maker claims can withstand an “a RPG or mortar shell explosion 85 percent of the time.” Um, not that you likely need that… yet. But I guess if it can withstand an IED, it can weather more homely assaults in your backpack, on the dash of your car, and in the pocket of your cargo pants. The cases weigh from 3 oz. (nano) to 5 oz (60GB Video) and sell for US$45 to $75. Ouch. I think I’ll take my chances with incoming ordnance.
[Thanks, Jay!]
There are some delightfully absurd wireless Internet antenna solutions out there, from the ubiquitous Pringles and other “cantenna” to the soup-box antenna to the somewhat unsettling Bluetooth sniper rifle.
Which brings us to tonight’s creative antenna feature: Wok-Fi, wi-fi antennas made from woks and wok accessories (such as the large mesh “cooking scoop”). This site from New Zealand has a bunch of these “Poor Man’s” antenna hacks.
The caption for the above image here reads:
“Athough offering impressive gain (~24dB?) solid dishes of this size (600mm) are VERY prone to wind. This setup (on a sturdy weighted tripod) detected Access Points in the Hutt Valley — >10km away, across the Wellington Harbour — but a wind gust almost tossed it & the notebook PC away…”
[Thanks, Craniac!]
You know we have a little thing for the bamboo here at the Labs, so these portable bamboo speakers on I4U caught our attention. Called the Bird-Electron EZ-TAKEGTF2, they are made from a special type of Japanese bamboo called SuSu which is smoked and aged for up to 100 years. I guess you pay for the century’s worth of aging, as these babies will set you back 200 bones. Um, do you have something in a decade-old bamboo? (Actually,they do have a “black bamboo” set for US$170). Doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to make your own.
It won’t win any awards for hacking elegance, but somebody has already figured out a way to copy Blu-Ray and HD DVDs: hit the PrintScreen key. According to a piece on Ars Technica, quoting from an article in the German tech mag c’t, someone has developed a brute force copying method that involves a script which does a PrintScreen for every frame of a high-def DVD. It gobbles up over 300GBs of space, and you have to capture the sound separately and re-sync it, but it just shows to go ya, that if there’s a hacker’s will, there’s always a hacker’s way.
Ben, a UK music blogger, did a series of thoughtful experiments to try and determine what household products could be used to repair scratched CDs. His consclusion, after trying a number of things, was: hair gel.
For those of us who don’t count hair gel as a “household item,” a number of people offer additional scratch-removing products in the discussion that follows, such as… hair spray. Okay, people, *some* of us are bald. Enough with the hair care, already!
Workfriendly.net offers the latest tool for professional office-slackers: Office (as in Microsoft Office). If you want to surf the Big Muddy of Cyberspace, but don’t want the boss, or Edward that stoolie in Accounting, to catch you, just enter the URL of the site where you’d like to go for a little cultural enrichment. Workfriendly ports the page through a stylesheet, re-formating the Web content to look like an MS Word file (with a PC interface). There’s even a “boss key,” in the otherwise non-functional Word toolbar, that switches the content to something more “Word-like” and that hides the URL of the site you’re visiting.
[Thanks, Jay!]