Emmanuel Florac and the rest of his officemates had a bit of a problem: while they could freely leave the office as they pleased, none of them could get back in. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with the new ironclad door and accompanying electronic locking mechanism that was recently installed. Try as they might, [...]
The Gadget: The Flip MinoHD, the most recognizable name in pocket camcorder’s HD camera, it shoots 720p video on 4GB of built-in memory.
The Price: $230
The Verdict: Once again, Flip has done a respectable job of bringing dead simple, high quality video recording to the masses. The MinoHD is light on features—no macro shooting, still picture [...]
Say hello to Keiko. She’s the world’s first robot with Down Syndrome. She’s designed to help doctors diagnose people who come into the ER with a bad case of the Downs by answering their questions and responding to touch. What’s that? She’s not supposed to be retarded? Well what the hell is with that forehead [...]
I was never jealous of my friends who had those Viewmaster slide-viewer toys when I was a kid—they just seemed kinda boring, but I would have been jealous if the toy was as clever as this mod. This guy’s taken the toy and added an Arduino-driven display unit, accelerometers and a Bluetooth connection to a [...]
Acidmods just can’t get enough of hacking up our console controllers, and now the company has replaced the Wiimote’s A button with a clicking trackball (a la Blackberry Pearl). The result is an easier way to scroll through webpages and certain menu systems, as you can see in this video:
However, this trackball [...]
More bad bad news. Just two days ago Phoenix Mars Lander sent his last words, and NASA announced the end of the mission because of a storm that covered its solar panels with Martian dust. Today, we have learnt that the Mars Spirit rover may be dying too because exactly the same problem. In fact, [...]
Here in America, we use paper to pay for things—maybe plastic if we’re lucky. But over in Japan, wireless RFID is gradually becoming the rage. And this NEC robot supports the trend of paying for something without feeling like you’re actually paying for something.
Using the robot is easy enough. You push the touchscreen on its [...]
Pumping out a sustained 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (1.64 petaflops) after a recent technological overhaul, the Cray XT Jaguar is now the world’s latest fastest supercomputer (huge disclaimer coming) for non-classified research. And once you see what’s under the hood, you’ll know why.
The system is powered by 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors that [...]
This weird looking chap is the Waseda Talker-7 robot, and it makes those strange vowel sounds not through a loudspeaker, but a biomechanical simulation of the way we humans speak. To that end, it’s got a 19 degrees-of-freedom motorized system that replicates lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips: basically the whole deal. Most interestingly, Takanishi labs [...]
You can’t wait for the movie. You have the t-shirts, the tricorder replica, the klingon doctorate, your room looks like the Enterprise’s bridge, your face has morphed already into a sexy Vulcanian, and you have been writing your first Star Trek novel for years now. But do you have these plates for your electrical wall [...]