Wind-Up Triceratops Pencil Sharpener May 31, 2007
By Andrew Liszewski
Remember the Wind-Up Robot Pencil Sharpener I wrote about last year? Well now there’s an alternative for those prefer the past over the future. And by past I mean the late Cretaceous Period since this pencil sharpener is shaped like a Triceratops.
Like his robot counterpart the Triceratops can be used to sharpen a pencil which at the same time winds up a mechanism allowing him to lumber across your desk. There’s also a key provided for winding him up when all your pencils are sharp, or if you’re like me and live in the 21st century and haven’t seen a pencil in over 5 years. It also has a built-in reservoir for holding pencil shavings that can be emptied by simply opening his head.
The multi-purpose Triceratops can be found at Vat19 for $6.50.
[ Walking Triceratops Pencil Sharpener ]
Google Maps Gets Blinging Street View
By David Ponce
Google Maps just added a fascinating layer of data to its already impressive feature set. In select cities (New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Denver and Miami) it is now possible to get a viewpoint called “Steet View”, which allows you to get a street level 360 degree view of any point on that given map. In any of the above cities, just press on the “Street View” button, and a little humanoid appears. Drag him to any location on the map, and instantly a window appears with street level pictures. It’s possible to zoom within the picture, and rotate 360 degrees. And yes, we know it’s not the first such initiative, but Google’s implementation is elegant and flawless.
Google achieved this by getting teams in the Bay Area to drive around every single street for about a year, with special cameras mounted on board. The rest of the cities were mapped by contracting a company called Immersive Media. The above picture shows Times Square, but I must have wasted a good hour just checking out different neighborhoods and landmarks, and there’s no better way to kill a Thursday than by doing this. There may be plans to expand this to other major metropolitan centers at a later date.
[ Google Maps ] VIA [ Lost Remote ]
“Real Track Futbol†Tracks Soccer Players In Real-Time
By David Ponce
Managing and coaching a soccer team just got a techno twist. Real Track Futbol is a turnkey solution for tracking your players on the field using GPS, as well as getting real-time readings on their physical condition. Their positions and velocities relative to one another are transmitted to a base station, their absolute paths taken on the field are recorded and the coach is able to then manage his team. It’s kind of like playing a soccer game, except the people are real: when players show signs of exhaustion, replace them. When they screw a play up, you have proof on record, so you can chew them up in the locker room.
Of course, the system could be used with pretty much any team sport, but Real Track Futbol was designed in Spain, with soccer in mind. Sure, the software was developed around the specific complexities of that particular sport, but how hard could it be to port this to good ole American Football?
Pricing and availability are not immediately clear, but their website has an English section, so browse away.
[ Real Track Futbol ] VIA [ Xataka ]
Paperweights Make You Seem Very Busy And Important
By Evan Ackerman
Okay, okay, we get it. It’s a paperweight that looks like a piece of crumpled paper. It’s witty, it’s ironic, but is it useful? Here is what I suggest: buy a bunch of these paperweights, leave them strewn about your desk, and whenever anyone approaches you with some new task, glare at them angrily from behind your sturdy fortress of faux crumpled paper. If they don’t leave you alone because they think you’re massively busy, they’ll leave you alone because they think you’re massively nuts. And if all else fails, there’s always long range bombardment… Despite their substantial weight, the paperweights are made largely of vinyl and have no hard edges. $28 each.
[ Important Paperweight ] VIA [ Uberreview ]
Gratuitous Video: C-RAM Phalanx
By Evan Ackerman
Wired’s Danger Room defense blog has voted the C-RAM (Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar) defense system as it’s #1 example of war tech, which gives me an excuse to post a video of the system in action. The C-RAM is a Phalanx 20mm gatling cannon that can spit out 75 armor piercing shells per second, and using it’s sophisticated radar tracking system, is able to shoot down missiles, rockets, artillery shells, and mortar shells in flight:
The US Military isn’t the only force with this kind of technology. See some more examples (even if the videos are slightly less cool) after the jump.
The Thales Goalkeeper, a 30mm gatling system from the Netherlands. My apologies for all the soccer:
The Russian Kashtan system, a combination of two 30mm gatling cannons and four missiles. My apologies for all the Russian: VIA [ Danger Room ]
Hanwang Two-In-One Tablet Mouse May 30, 2007
By Andrew Liszewski
At the CHITEC 2007 show in Beijing, China a company called Hanwang showed off a new mouse with a built-in tablet called the ‘T&MOUSE.’ The tablet surface sits in a sunken crater on the back of the mouse which probably makes using it feel a little weird. The ridiculously small size of the tablet also limits how useful it could be. While I wouldn’t exactly rely on it for Photoshop work it might be useful for jotting down a single character now and then. But even something simple like creating a digital signature would be difficult given the limited writing area.
There’s currently no word on pricing or availability but you can be sure it won’t be hitting North America anytime soon.
[ Hanwang T&MOUSE ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]
Wall Gear Clock Provides Mechanical Eye Candy
By Andrew Liszewski
I’m a sucker for watches or clocks with lots of moving, visible parts so needless to say I find this one pretty cool. Designed by Wil Van Den Bos all of the gears on the ‘Wall Gear Clock’ are exposed and slowly (and quietly) turn as time ticks by.
And instead of using a face with moving hands the clock uses one large gear (over 22 inches wide) labeled with the hours that slowly rotates past a stationary arrow to indicate what time it is.
Unfortunately though it seems we’re a bit late to the party since the clock is currently sold out. But if you’re willing to wait until the 3rd or 4th week of June you can pre-order one for about $150.
[ Wall Gear Clock ] VIA [ Coolest Gadgets ]
Air Powered Cars Are Too Good To Be True
By Evan Ackerman
The media has been getting a lot of mileage out of compressed air powered automobiles, touting (in the midst of remorseless witticisms of the sort that I was just guilty of) the fact that air is both plentiful and environmentally friendly… But I don’t entirely agree. The following video, from the Science Channel, profiles Motor Development International’s forthcoming Air Car: After the jump, I hope you’ll enjoy a brief rant about why this sort of thing doesn’t entirely make sense.
If you pause this particular video 1:33 from the end, you’ll notice a bunch of storage tanks accompanied by a box that looks suspiciously like an air compressor. The video talks about how cheap easy it is to refuel the car, but they go out of their way not to discuss in detail the fact that compressing air takes energy, energy which is likely piped straight from your local coal-burning power plant. Furthermore, you’re taking electrical energy and converting it to mechanical energy to compress the air, which is then stored and converted back into mechanical energy again in the car’s engine to drive the wheels. As anyone who has taken freshman physics will recall, every time you transfer energy from one type to another, you lose some.
So basically, compressed air is just being used as a storage medium for energy. It’s certainly true that other energy storage mediums (say, batteries or hydrogen) might be more expensive or more dangerous or both, but it seems as though when it comes to environmental impact (and perhaps even efficiency), a lot of these air powered car claims are just full of… nonsense. I applaud the fact that such innovations are being pioneered, but I feel like we (as potentially environmentally conscious consumers) deserve full disclosure as to what the total costs and benefits are, both environmental and financial.
[ MDI Air Car ]
PQI Takes SSD Up A Notch
By Evan Ackerman
PQI has officially announced the production of a high speed 256 gigabyte (!) solid state drive. Their Turbo+ SSD is able to transfer data at 60 mb/s, which, while still 5 times slower than SATA, is still respectable enough, especially with the much lower seek times and low power consumption that make them so obviously the future storage medium for portable computing. You can bet that 256 gigs isn’t gonna be cheap: there’s no price tag yet, but a PQI Turbo+ IDE SSD drive, at (only) 32 gigs, will set you back a cool 1.5k, so you can extrapolate the math on that one. But cheer up, although basic SSD style flash memory might be about $20/gig now, prices are forecast to drop by a factor of ten in just 3 or 4 years.
If you’re wondering how in the heck there’s even a market right now for relatively small SSD drives at such crazy prices, read on after the jump.
Far from having a casual, geeky interest in SSDs (although I have that too), there is an important practical side to hard drives without moving components… I, for example, happen to work for a company that takes digital images of vineyards from unpressurized light aircraft, and we’ve learned from experience that conventional hard drives don’t work very well (or, sometimes, at all) much above 10,000 feet. The reason why not is pretty interesting: it turns out that when a standard hard drive is operating, air pressure created by the moving magnetic platter pushes up “sliders” which keep the read/write heads at the proper height above the disk. At high altitudes, there’s not enough air pressure to keep the sliders up, and they’ll descend and cause the disk to temporarily fail… and there’s nothing like drive failure after you’ve spent four hours bouncing around in the back of a Cessna collecting imagery in between bouts of airsickness.
VIA [ Fareastgizmos ]
Microsoft Surface: “It’s Real And It’s Spectacular!â€
In the dead of the night, Microsoft has taken the wraps off Surface, formerly known only as Project Milan. MS Surface is a surface computing device, one which could very well change the way we expect to interact with technology. “Surface computing device” really means that it’s a touch-sensitive table, with a powerful PC inside, and fancy software running. But the things it can do are stunning. It allows you to manipulate digital pictures as if they were right there in front of you, while resizing on-the-fly. It interacts with other devices, such as Zune’s and cellphone, allowing you to drag multiple “objects” into them, be them pictures, songs, maps, itineraries or calendar items. It recognizes the object with which it is being touched, allowing you to use paintbrushes, pencils or other tools the way they’re intended to be used. The list go on for some time.
Right now, the technology is aimed squarely at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues where the use of such hardware could revolutionize point-of-sale dynamic for some time to come. Things like placing an order in a restaurant, or splitting a bill in a particular way become possible in a way never before experienced. The price tag will also likely keep it out of consumers, at least initially, with MS Surface expected to cost anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000.
For a fuller picture, you should really watch the above video, a Popular Mechanics exclusive. We sound like gushing groupies, but you might share some of our feelings once you’ve seen for yourselves. Release date: Winter 2007.
VIA [ Everywhere ]
P.S. In case you’re wondering, the headline is a slightly modified Seinfeld reference.
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