How-To: Hack the Wii Gift Card

Target is using these really cool glowing LED GiftCards this holiday season to commemorate the launch of the Nintendo Wii. You knew it was only a matter of time before people starting crackin’ the cards open and futzing with the internals. The time is now. As someone points out in the comments to this Instructable, this thing would make a pretty cool project box for something.

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Aliens: Why They Hate Us

This giant Colonel Sanders logo was built in a field in Nevada, “near Area 51,” to be the first brand visible from space. It took a team of 50 designers, engineers, architects, and scientists (scientists?) to create the image which is over 87,000 sq. feet. It was made to commemorate the new version of KFC’s logo. He wears an apron now. Gawd, I wish I was making this up. I really do. I think I’ll go medicate myself and curl up in a fetal position now.

After the jump, see the inevitable photoshopping (from Soupy Trumpet) of our intergalactic brothers enjoying some of that opposable flipper-lickin’ goodness of the Colonel. Missing the nuisance of the whole human master/spokesbot versus domesticated fowl business, they just went ahead and herbed, spiced, and deep fried the old bastard. Now THAT’s good eatin’

Thanks, Ron!

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Solarbotics Announces Mousebot Kit!

Our pals over at Solarbotics have just announced an awesome new robot kit, Herbie the Mousebot (US$40). The kit uses the Herbie circuit, first developed by Randy Sargent at MIT, and used in several modded versions, including my “Mousey the Junkbot” project from my robot book and MAKE Vol. 2.

This kit looks really cool, adding a mouse-like PCB body that will tickle kids and terrify the housepets. The traditional Herbie circuit has also been modded to include two tactile whiskers in the front and a touch-sensitive tail so that it can work its way out of tight spots.

A portion of sales of Herbie will be donated to the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, an org that Randy Sargent is involved with, which uses robotics to get kids excited about science, technology, engineering and math.

This kit would make the perfect gift for a kid, or anyone, who’s interested in electronics and robotics, but maybe not confident enough to build a similar project from separate components. Solarbotics is taking pre-orders now and will ship kits out on November 24th.

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MAKE:Philly Meetup Makes BEAMbots

MAKE posted a link to the Flickr photoset for the MAKE:Philly group. One of the things that they did at their most recent meeting was to have a Maker Challenge to build Trimets, the type of BEAM solar spinners I wrote up in MAKE Vol. 6. So cool to see all of those people hacking up old components scavenging for parts, pouring over circuit diagrams, blasting away brain cells with lead fumes, etc. In short: Good times!

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Holiday Gadget Guide: Logitech FreePulse Headphones

This year, Street Tech is honored and delighted to be part of Federated Media’s network-wide Holiday Gadget Guide. We’ll be doing our usual Street Tech Gift Guide, but it will be in concert with Federated’s Guide. Today, I have a review of the Logitech FreePulse Wireless headphones on the FM Guide. Read my breathless review, breathless not only because I’ve fallen in love with these phones, but because I couldn’t stop shakin’ my ass after I put them on.

Reviews coming up from me in the next few weeks include the Panasonic PV-GS300 Video Camera, the Kensington Digital FM Transmitter for iPod, the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. and the Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard.

Check out current reviews on the FM Guide for the TiVo Series 3, the Fossil Bluetooth Watch, an Input Device roundup, and more.

We’ll have the first installment of the Street Tech Gift Guide up within the week. In the meantime, here’s a link to last year’s guide. Since we tend to cover solid tech that sucks less, these gifts are all still worthy contenders.

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Wild Wii Weekend

The folks over at iLounge spent a lost weekend with a Wii console (gawd, it’s going to be hard to live with that name for the next few years). As usual, the Loungers do an incredibly thorough job of detailing the hardware and some of the release-day games (namely Zelda, Excite Truck, and Wii Sports (which, uh-hum, despite the name, IS work safe)). So what was their overall impression. I’ll let them tell you:

“Nintendo’s Wii is strong. Way strong. Like, “okay, we thought Nintendo had a nice new console to play Zelda and Mario on, but now we actually like the whole crazy controller thing” sort of strong. (The controller is a two-piece, fully wireless device that tracks its position and orientation, allowing you to point at the screen like a wand or laser pointer, twist and turn the controller like a 3-D steering wheel, or play games with more traditional buttons and an integrated joystick.) The surprise is that Zelda didn’t convince us. Excite Truck began the process, and Wii Sports was the tipping point.”

Read the first of the four-parter here.

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Here Comes Super Memory!

Iddo Genuth from the highly recommended The Future of Things sent us a link to an article he did about MRAM, a new type of memory that combines the advantages of volatile and non-volatile memory. He writes:

“In early July 2006, Freescale Semiconductor announced the first commercial availability of a new type of memory with the potential to surpass most existing types in terms of speed, power consumption, and durability…”

“In an attempt to combine the speed of the faster volatile memory with the benefits of non-volatile memory, Freescale (which originated from Motorola Semiconductor about two years ago) created a new type of non-volatile memory – Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory, or MRAM. The roots of MRAM can be traced back to the 1940’s at Harvard when physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo and later Jay Forrester and colleagues at MIT worked on developments that led to Magnetic Core Memory and later on to the discovery of the “giant magnetoresistive effect” in thin-film structures by researchers from IBM in the late 1980’s. Like Flash, MRAM retains data after a power supply is cut off, potentially eliminating that seemingly endless boot time of conventional computers when data from the hard drive is transferred to RAM, as well as loss of data when the computer is suddenly shut off. MRAM has much faster write speeds than Flash and has an unlimited endurance, meaning that MRAM is not subject to the degradation suffered by Flash.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

Thanks, Iddo!

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Walt Weighs in on the Zune

One of my all-time tech journalism heroes, Walt Mossberg, gave his take on the MS Zune last Thursday. After spending a couple of weeks with it, he comes to the conclusion that, while it has some cool features, and bests the iPod in a few areas, he’s not sold on this first version.

It’s interesting that Mossberg liked and disliked most everything that I do, and I haven’t even seen a unit in person yet. Many of the things I’ve seen and felt from a distance appear to only get stronger up close. For instance, he likes the user interface and found it more attractive than Apple’s and in many ways easier to navigate. In looking at online demos, I’m really attracted to the UI as well. And people are making a big deal about it having a faux wheel (it just looks like a scroll wheel, it’s actually a four-way switch), but honestly, I don’t like the wheel on the iPod. Walt says that in many instances, it was quicker and easier to navigate the menus than on an iPod. Some of the drawbacks he found included the clunky design (as he says, it looks like a blocked-out prototype, not a final product), poor battery life (a big drawback in my book), lesser quality display than on the iPod (while the screen is bigger, it renders at the same resolution, so images appear grainier). And as I’ve been suspecting, all that “Welcome to Social” jazz (who the hell came up with THAT tortured tagline?) and the temporary song sharing appears to be a feature that sounded good at an R&D brainstorm but is unlikely something that’s going to catch on in a significant way. Mossberg had problems with the sharing and thinks it’s downright ANTI-social that the Zune desktop software doesn’t allow network sharing of music libraries like iTunes does (when my son Blake comes home from college and his PC laptop joins the LAN, I love to check out what he’s listening to and he does the same with the library on my Mac. It’s a great way for us to turn each other on to new music). And the Zune store has a goofy points system where you need to buy at least $5 worth of points to start downloading tracks.

After seeing some of the hands-on demos that have been cropping up in the last few days, I was starting to think that the Zune might be cooler than I’d thought (I DO like the look and feel of the UI and the four-way button), but overall, I think that Gen1 may prove to be more of an annoying insurgence and less of a full-fledged overthrow of the iPod. But one can imagine a serious threat within a few years.

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“Hello, I’m a Mac” Actor Hangs Up His One-Button Mouse

Saw this awesome ad spoof on Gadgetopia and a news item about the Mac Guy (Justin Long) bailing from future “Hello, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads ’cause he’s too busy being a movie star. Wha? What movies? Dude, I’d stick with the steady paycheck and the every night TV exposure. When’s the last time you saw the Dell guy up on the big screen? Or the little one, for that matter.

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MAKE Vol. 8 is Here!

MAKE Vol. 8, the Toys and Games issue, will be on newsstands any day now. I have three feature pieces in this one: a piece on making the papercraft toys from Chris Ware’s amazing ACME Novelty Library, a piece on sci-fi tabletop wargame terrain, and a piece on building “Pummers,” a kind of stationary plant-like BEAM lifeform.

The latter article is available for free as a MAKE sample PDF. You can download it here. The Pummers pictured in the piece were done by Zach Debord, the same builder whom I covered in Street Tech’s Twin-Engine Solarroller piece.

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