Street Tech – Page 137 – Hardware Beyond the Hype

February 19, 2005

Is THIS the future of home stereos?

iPodLounge has a rather in-depth look at the Sonos Digital Music System. While this particular system might not end up in your home entertainment cabinet, the Lounge ponders:

“Has Sonos developed the home stereo of the future? If we were betting, we’d say “yes” – at least, something very much like the company’s new Digital Music System will soon come to replace the oversized stereo components that have dominated home audio for decades. Given the success of the iPod, it seems only natural that hard disk-based music players will become more common, and they’ll be accessed using iPod-like menuing systems, existing speakers and headphones, and soon enough, wireless technologies.”

February 19, 2005

Microsoft’s “Attentional User Interface”

Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, has a nice op ed piece in the New York Times about Microsoft’s development of the “Attentional User Interface,” software that thinks it knows when you’re free to be interrupted for reminders to perform various maintenance tasks (save, backup, clean your desktop, and other machine interrupts) and how the general trend towards blinking, winking, crawling, popping up, and chiming in, might not be good for those of us who like to attend on our own time, not the machines, and certainly not Microsoft’s. [Login requires annoying password]

[Thanks, Kate!]

February 18, 2005

Next iPod Mini to Have Color Screen, More Storage?

ThinkSecret is reporting (via “highly reliable sources”) that the next-gen iPod Minis (to be announced in the next few weeks) will sport a color screen (176 x 132 active-matrix TFT). Storage capacity will also increase from the current 4GB to either 5GB or even 6. Perhaps the coolest thing about this is that, even with these significant product upgrades, the price will allegedly stay the same.

[Via Gizmodo]

February 18, 2005

Free Web Service for Verizon Phones!

Gear Live has a simple hack for how to legally gain Web access on your Web-enabled Verizon phone simply by changing the server adress from the official Verizon server (which costs you US$5/month) to a free public server. Links fron Gear Live to instructions on how to do this for each Verizon phone and to a database of public servers. Nifty!

February 18, 2005

Amiga MP3 Car Hack

Check out this MP3 player, game machine, and nav system some German dude kludged together from an old Amiga 600. Slacking off is the mother of invention.

[Via Hackaday]

February 17, 2005

Back-Up Power Supply for US$10!

CompUSA is selling a 500V/275W Belkin UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) for $9.99! Okay, so that’s after a $70 rebate, but as we detailed in an earlier posting, if you’re good about mailing in these rebates (and who wouldn’t be for seventy bucks?), this is a great way to get some sweet deals.

And this unit is no low-end, low-featured piece o’ crud. It offers up to 25 minutes of backup time, as well as serial and USB ports, RJ11 (phone) and RJ45 (Ethernet) protection and has a three year warranty. Also has control software for both Mac and Windows. The only significant negative is that it only has four outlets (three with batt backup, one with surge protection-only). Oh, and there’s only one rebate per household.

February 17, 2005

Evidence of Life on Mars?

We’re still feelin’ spacey this week. Space.com is running an exclusive piece about several NASA researchers who claim they have found “strong evidence” of microbial life on the Red Planet. Their full findings will appear in the May issue of the journal Nature. Their evidence is indirect, in the form of methane signatures, similar to those found on Earth and remarkably similar to recent findings of such signatures as they appear in caves. They believe that’s where this life might be found on Mars, in caves and in small pockets of water.

February 16, 2005

Incredible Soviet Space Program Archive

Continuing with our sci-tech history lessons, here’s an amazing site of Soviet space history, specifically, their Venus explorations. It’s amazing to realize just how little media coverage all of these missions received in the US, with three atmospheric probes, TEN(!) landings, four orbiters, eleven flybys or impacts, and two balloon probes. That’s a lot of mission success, in fact, the Soviet Venus missions constituted the largest effort to date to study a single planet. I love the images on this site. The look of Soviet space hardware is so unique and so different from ours. Retro-futurism, dude!

February 16, 2005

Hot or Not Hubble Images

In the grand tradition of “Hot or Not?” image voting sites, Space.com has a series of gorgeous photos taken by the Hubble telescope. These babies are awe-inspiring, and really make you sad over the fact that this device will soon be reduced to space debris.

February 16, 2005

Video of Mouse Debut

Stanford has put online the video of Doug Engelbart’s 1968 live presentation of the work he and his collegues at the Augmentation Research Center had been working on since 1962. Besides showing off the computer mouse (seen here on the right) for the first time, an amazing array of technologies are demo’d, including hyperlinking and shared-screen network collaboration with audio and video. A tech demo’d that didn’t catch on (widely, anyway) is the Chord Key Set (seen on the left), a input device that used combinations of five keys to send commands to the computer.