Hardware Beyond the Hype
It looks sort of like a high-tech Roach Motel on wheels, but it means roaches no harm. In fact, it wants to hang out, to be an accepted member of the pest community.
These sweet-looking bots are part of a project at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne to study roach behavior up close and personal. The site has all sorts of detailed information on the project and the bots’ construction.
[Via Make]
C’mon, Street Techies, represent! Gizmodo is running a contest to find the biggest dork photo amongst their readership. We know you got the pictures to prove your pownage!
I wish I had the pic of my son Blake, at 3 or 4, sitting at a Unix dumb terminal at his grandmother’s “Deathstar village” home (one of the neighborhoods around Bell Labs in NJ, where she worked). He’s in one of those za-zen sitting chairs, holding onto a humongous 3-button mouse, working in a drawing program. He was destined to be a geek. Sorry to out you, son.
Sega, the engineering masterminds that brought you the impressively silly iDog, have outdone themselves with the introduction of IZ, a wacky alien dude that lights up, moves various bulbous things, and makes an obnoxious racket when it’s feed MP3s.
C’mon, think about it. Would even a child pay attention to this silly widget for more than a few days? This is the kind of thing you get for the children of people you don’t like.
Taking a cue from NetFlix, an Internet-based handbag company called Frombagstoriches is offering a similar type of borrowing service for handbags. Now fashionistas on a budget can kick it like Paris Hilton, never being seen with the same handbag twice.
We’d love to see this model catch on in other product areas. Personally, I’d love to subscribe to a boardgame service or a robot rental. Luckily, many of the robots and robot building sets I own, I didn’t pay for (review units), but honestly, most of them only hold my attention for a few solid days and then I’m done. I’d love to be able to mess with a Robosapien or a nuvo or whatever for a few weeks and then send it back so that another bot can show up on my doorstep.
[Via Gizmag]
This apparently is not a joke. According to a piece on Phonedaily, a Taiwanese phone site (via Akihabara), it looks as though young phone users in Japan are trying to achieve that sexy phone lineman look by attaching landline phone handsets to their cellies and then dangling the sets from their belt loops. The site also shows the handsets being customized with paint, glitter, decals, and the like. Personally, we’re waiting for those gigantic first-gen cellphones to make a comeback.
Update: Mark blogged this on Boing Boing and a reader wrote:
Just the other day i came across a website that happens to sell these very items. They can be found at Fred Flare.” $20.
Watering down the term “hacks” even more with the title “Firefox Hacks You Must Have,” Wired News has an otherwise good piece on the latest and greatest extensions for Firefox 1.5.
Here’s a gadget the Old Ones could get behind: the PowerSquid, a power strip with short lengths of cable running to each outlet, as opposed to the typical slab strip, which never seems to have enough outlets with spaces to accomodate power adapters. Unfortunately, this year’s model only offers power, no surge protection, but next year, the maker, powersentry.com, promises a protected version.
[Via Business Week]
C|Net is reporting that there’s a new worm going ’round the Net, but this one’s got a clever twist: it’s actually an AOL chatbot that sweet talks people into downloading the worm. Like most of these scams, the bot lacks proper grammar and syntax, but that’s not exactly symptomatic of just the worm… it applies to most people I talk to on IM.
It seems as though every day brings some new announcement related to “post-broadcast TV,” “IPTV,” or whatever we’re going to end up calling it: the rapidly smudging margins between broadcast/cable television and Internet-delivered video content. TiVo has recently started offering TV content delivered to your TV/TiVo over broadband (i.e. to TiVo boxes connected to a LAN and the Net). Today’s offering is a free subscription to Rocketboom, a daily NY videoblog of weird and wacky happenings on the Net and off of it. Think: video BoingBoing. No, really. Like a lot of the news content on Attack of the Show, we get the stinking feeling that Rocketboom deeply datamines our BB pals for copy. Why is it that it’s common etiquette to give credit where credit is due in the text blog world, but no such transparency extends to the video blogging world?
So, is Rocketboom any good? Worth subscribing to? Um…it’s got a fetching host, does that count?
Anyway, the news here isn’t about this particular show, but the beginnings of this sort of content delivery over broadband to your TV set.
[Via Make]
We love the Sharpies here at Street Tech Labs; black Sharpies that make us hallucinate on the fumes every time we use them to label our CDs, DVDs, and our interns (it’s so hard to keep them all straight). But that permanent jet-black ink and head-lightening marker aroma may come at a price: the long-term survivability of your disc-based media (oh, and maybe blood poisoning of the interns).
According to a piece on the Media Sciences website, solvent-based markers (like our beloved Sharpies) are the riskiest to use, as the solvent can lead to data degradation. Water-based markers are better. The best thing to do is to write on the plastic center ring of the disc. While some discs are designed to protect the readout surface from marker solvents, others aren’t, and it’s not always clear what kind of discs you have. Of course, we’re talking about long-term degradation, so this is only an issue if you’re looking at long-term storage. For most of us, just using water-based markers is good enough. Dang, we’re going to miss our Sharpie high. I think one of our interns needs a new “tattoo.”