DVICE
A company recently sent me DVD called Living Earth. It's a disc full of high-resolution pictures of spectacular nature scenes that you play as a slideshow. The idea is that you'd have it on while throwing a party, presumably to give your guests something to look at other than your crappy living room.
After popping in the DVD and hitting play, I was horrified. Both sides of my widescreen 47-inch flat-panel TV were completely black, while photos cycled in and out inside a squarish area in the middle. That's right, the disc was made with a (gasp!) 4:3 aspect ratio, with no widescreen (16:9, to those in the know) option. When was this DVD made 1998?
The real tragedy is that Living Earth is just one example of how technology gets aspect ratio wrong. All. The. Time. Why is it that my browser can resize websites when I change my window size, and my iPhone can resize photos when I turn in 90 degrees, but somehow the tech world gets video aspect ration wrong again and again? Click Continue for the answer and the solution.
Industrial designers Christopher Bauder and Christian Perstl have designed a kinetic façade called FLARE that dynamically controls how much light a building lets in and how much heat. Architects frequently design their buildings around these principles, but suffer from the fact that buildings are static, and good planning only goes so far. With FLARE, all of the pneumatic-powered, computer-controlled metal flakes covering the building can adapt to seasonal climate changes, and make the building look unique to boot. The best part: the nature of the flakes allow for FLARE to be a made-to-order system, depending on the size and shape of a structure.
Click Continue for an impressive building of the FLARE shifting façade in action.
When a company buys ad space on a billboard, it wants as many people to see its product as possible. A good billboard for that? The 'Podium' ad wall in Dubai: a 33-story-high LED display that can be seen from a mile away. The LED wall is planned for an upcoming commercial building, and its designers are working on building the wall so that it won't block out all of the light reaching the offices it obscures important for easing energy for lighting, heating and cooling, and making them feel less like bats in a cave.
Let's just hope they turn it off at night, or there's going to be irritated people for a solid mile.
Speaking of not being able to use a computer mouse because you don't have working arms, how much would it suck to not have any arms? That's what happened to Karl Merk, a German farmer who had a really unfortunate run in with a combine harvester. But now, he's the world's first recipient of a double arm transplant.He can do basic tasks with his arms now, like opening doors and turning lights on and off, but as they heal he should get better control over them. It's going to take time, and he's going to have to take medication for the rest of his life ensuring that his body doesn't reject them, but it's still and incredible feat of medicine.
Using a mouse to navigate a computer is certainly convenient, at least it is if you have working arms and hands. For the disabled, however, it's much harder. That's why researchers from the University of Washington have developed a mouse that's controlled via various sounds you can make with your mouth.So how does it work, exactly? Well, saying "ahh" moves the cursor up and to the right. "Ooo" will send it straight down, while "ohh" sends it down and to the right. To click, make a soft clicking sound. It allows a relatively precise way of controlling the mouse without needing to use your hands at all. And while yes, it might make you sound a little crazy as you control your computer, it's certainly better than not controlling the mouse at all.
Via Physorg
Now you can network your water faucets together. The Elettronico Faucet by Carlo Frattini lets you control the water's temperature and flow rate on its touchscreen, which can also control other faucets you hook up together in a special plumbing network. Whoa!
We've seen some fancy faucets before, but this one beats all. Say you're cleaning up after breakfast from the kitchen sink, you can start the shower at your favorite temperature as you finish up those dishes. You can even control all your fixtures via the web.
Frattini also touts its water-saving capabilities, letting you turn off all the faucets in the house from one location before you go out the door. Really? Might be great for those absent-minded rich people who are constantly leaving the water running all over the house.
Flying cars are all hat, no cattle. But wait. What's this? A flying car that will actually exist, roll on real streets and highways and then take off into the wild blue? You betcha. Pony up your $194,000, and by the end of next year you'll be cruising skyward in a 1300-pound Terrafugia Transition and then parking it in your garage when you're done. It's more like a drivable airplane, but we'd rather call it a flying car.
Let's do a walkaround. Out back is a push prop, and the front canard does double duty as a wing and bumper. Its gas engine will push it over a range of 460 miles through the air. Look at the cool way the wings fold up into a compact package, completing its metamorphosis from airworthy flying machine to street-legal road rocket.
We've been hearing about this Terrafugia Transition for ages, so this is great news that it's actually going to be shipping to paying customers. The first flying prototype is scheduled to take off next month. Nice. Covert that prop to a jet engine and give it vertical takeoff capabilities, and we'll be living in the future.
Why are we spending all this money on telescopes on the surface of the earth when they have to be able to see up through our atmosphere to get to the good stuff: space? What we need to be doing is building gigantic telescopes on the surface of the moon, where they'll have room to spread out and won't be bothered by a pesky atmosphere.That's exactly what NASA is planning on doing, and using liquid mirrors, no less. In order to create absolutely massive telescopes, they'll set a new form of ionic liquids spinning on the moon. The spinning will cause the liquids to naturally form a parabolic shape, perfect for telescopes. Due to the liquid nature of the mirror, the telescope wouldn't be able to be tilted, but due to the natural rotation of the moon, a telescope pointed straight up would still cover a good chunk of the sky. Cool, cool stuff.
Space Fellowship, via Slashdot
There are rumblings of cheaper Mac notebooks on the horizon, with one Apple fan site asserting that we might see an unprecedented $800 MacBook rolling out at an Apple event next Tuesday. That's $300 cheaper than the least-expensive MacBook available today. If true, that price decrease won't come a moment too soon, because yet another test has shown that you might be paying a lot for that cute Apple logo.
The experiment configured hardware with the same specs as those inside an iMac, and comparing the prices between the two systems, found the "Hackintosh" with a 24-inch monitor to be $1178.90, $1121 cheaper than the iMac. Even when you pay the $129 cost of the OS X Leopard software, you're still shelling out nearly $1000 extra for a Mac. This is not the first time we've seen such claims. Is that little Apple logo worth it?
The How-to Geek, and Inquisitr
Now you can pop your collar and survive all the bullets you're likely to take for being so Caballero has made a name for himself by making security products for fashion-minded security professionals and contractors, and has attracted the attention of high profile figures such as Prince Felipe of Spain and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
High profile attention also means high prices, though, and this is probably the most expensive shirt you'll ever buy: $12,000. Caballero's outfit also does custom designs, if you needed some bulletproof slacks to match.
Miguel Caballero, via Affluent Page Luxury Index, via Born Rich
More proof that the obsession in America with all things Japan has infiltrated the design field comes in the form of this new concept vehicle by industrial designer Seyhan Sitti. The three-wheeled Dune Buggy is called the Kawaii ("cute" in Japanese) and the beetle-esque vehicle would probably do quite well in the land of Hello Kitty and Doraemon. Built for two people, the tiny vehicle would never make it on the giant SUV plagued streets of the US, but we wouldn't be surprised to see something like this on the streets of Tokyo very soon. Via Tuvie
Would you want to live in a house with no privacy whatsoever? Because this stack of window-walled blocks is exactly that. Its designers over at Julien De Smedt Architects worked with a guiding concept that would give George Orwell chills: "We have designed a house around the principle of big brother, a place where one can watch and be watched."
Big Brother? Dubious role model. But it did yield an interesting building: a series of block rooms stacked around a central courtyard. All of the rooms can see into one another, anyone in the courtyard can peep into the rooms and what's maybe the most intrusive the outside walls are windows as well, so you're not obscured from outside scrutiny. It's nice to look at, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Check out the gallery below for some interior shots, or click Continue for the press release.
Here's a DIY project for you this Halloween a pumpkin with glowing LED eyes that will light up automatically when it gets dark. The idea of rigging some circuit board inside of a pumpkin may be a little daunting to you, but it's really not all that hard.
The core of the project is the light-sensing circuit. It takes quite a bit of natural light to get its sensor to turn off the lighs, so you won't want it in the shade or else they'll always be on which is a shame, no hiding creepy pumpkins. You'll need some simple components to get it together: a phototransistor so the circuit can sense light, some batteries to power it, LEDs and some other components. Learning how to toss these components together would definitely help you understand the basics of circuitry, and create a holiday decoration to boot.
Head on over to Evil Mad Scientist if you want to give your porch some spunk this Halloween.
Snooping just took a giant leap with the R/C ATV-360, whose Borg-like LCD display and audio-monitoring earpiece let spies see and hear everything from its remote vantage point. The 10-inch vehicle's tank tracks let it traverse rough terrain, spinning around 360 degrees on your command. If you want to keep your distance, it can be controlled from 75 feet away.
This is a $150 toy, but we're thinking somebody is going to attach a Taser to this thing and turn it into a ground-based Predator drone. Might be great for lazy security guards, if they can afford the dozen AA batteries it requires. If an enterprising inventor could just figure out how to make this baby invisible with silent running, it could actually be dangerous.
Spy Gear and Think Geek
Shacknews has a look at four Wii games your grandparents won't be interested in playing. Based on demos at a recent Nintendo media event, the writer was unimpressed with the ports of Dead Rising ("controls with all the intuitiveness of a 1996 PlayStation FPS") or Call of Duty 5 ("like the [Xbox 360] version, but with more difficult controls and fuzzier graphics").The more intriguing Wii offerings for hardcore gamers are the traditional sci-fi shooter Conduit and the stark black-and-white gore-fest Madworld. Like the best Wii games, they're both exclusives, built specifically for the system. They both look good in their own way: Conduit looks good for a Wii game and Madworld just looks good, period. Unfortunately, they're not due out until next year, after a Wii Christmas likely to be dominated by Animal Crossing, Wii Music, High School Musical 3, and a freaky new Cooking Mama in 3D. For the rest of 2008, the best of the Wii looks like it will continue to be insufferably cute.
