SAN MATEO, California — Drinking too much Mountain Dew? Then the Soda Bottle Wave might just be the project for you. Reuben Margolin, an Emeryville, California- based artist had strung together a 20-feet tall installed created out of 612 used one-liter soda bottles.
“Think of it as a curtain of undulating plastic bottles,” says Margolin of the project on display at the Maker Faire DIY festival.
Margolin took about six months to create it.… Read More
SAN MATEO, California — To stand out among a beautifully, constructed, near-authentic steam carriage and a fire-breathing installation that spews out a flame every few seconds isn’t easy.
But if one installation can grab attention it is the ‘Hand of Man’, an outsized hydraulic arm that can be operated from a little gloved controller nearby.
“It’s modeled on the human hand and foreman and has all its range of motions,”… Read More
SAN MATEO, California — It’s true your money doesn’t go as far as it used to. Seattle-based Hackerbots Labs can take a coin and shrink it down such that quarters appear the size of a dimes and dimes become little more than little molten balls of metal. What’s amazing is that through this process, the identity and the value of the coin remain almost intact.
Here’s their trick: They take a small candy carton-sized machine that hosts… Read More
Maker Faire, the largest festival for DIYers, crafters and hackers, happens Saturday and Sunday, May 30 and 31, in San Mateo, California. More than 80,000 people are expected to attend this year to check out what the 600 odd makers have to show, including robotics, music, crafts and food.
Rock’n'Roll is a takeaway transformer. The concept design takes a thin sheet of steel and rolls it into a cylinder. The trick is that, rolled one way it becomes a bracelet, and rolled the other way, along the long axis, it turns into a chopstick. You will, clearly, need two.
Would this work? We’re guessing that the natural state of the sheet is the chopstick form, and that you’d have to unfurl this with some force to make the wrist-strap, which would… Read More
Today we’re going to recommend that you visit a museum. “Oh, great,” you’re thinking, “that idiot Sorrel is going to start talking about some stupid place down the street from his house. Thanks a lot, Charlie.”
You’re right. But it’s also right down the street from your house. It’s the Canon Camera Museum, and as you can see from the aerial photo above, it’s a handsome place, and better still, the… Read More
Apple has secretly upgraded the previously terrible unabomber MacBook LCD screen to one that closer matches the pro-level displays in the MacBooks Air and Pro.
Regular Gadget Lab readers will remember that we found the MacBook screen to be somewhat lacking, with a terrible viewing angle and a propensity to send the blacks into a kind of negativity when… Read More
According to Fortunes respectable Apple 2.0 blog, the Palm Pre has a rather sneaky trick up its sleeve. First, a reminder of the main reason for the iPods original success: iTunes. The vertical integration of iTunes (for organization) and the iPod (for playback) was a killer combo.
In order to work as well, the Pre needs something like iTunes. So what about iTunes itself? Thats the Pres trick it will sync with Apples own software. Fortune:
Theres a new iPhone application which will help the Brits fight back at their Evil Overlords, the police who spy on their every move with the nations network of CCTV cameras, tracking the journey of every car as it innocently crosses the cold gray island.
Or at least beleaguered Britons can feel like theyre fighting back. SurveillanceShaker is a viewer for CCTV cameras worldwide. The Axis camera network is a system of net-connected cams which can… Read More
Pixel Qi, a company that promises inexpensive, low-power displays that could potentially rival E Ink screens, has been talking about its product for months.
But Thursday Pixel Qi founder Mary Lou Jepsen posted the first pics of the display on her blog. The pictures are a little fuzzy but they show the display in two modes and also running on a netbook.
We wrote about Pixel Qi earlier this month and talked to Jepsen. Pixel Qis displays called 3Qi will operate in three settings:… Read More
Sony Ericsson announced three new phones–Yari, Satio and Aino–that are easy on the eye and boast some powerful features for multimedia fiends. The phones wont’ be available till the fourth quarter but the pictures out right now are enough to make us drool.
The Satio is a candybar style phone that was first introduced at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress earlier this year. The device was then called the Idou. The Satio is aimed at users who… Read More
Watch out, Sprint: Verizon Wireless plans to offer the Palm Pre on its telecom network in about six months, according to Verizon executive Lowell McAdam.
A second generation version of the BlackBerry Storm, Research in Motion’s touchscreen phone, will also be part of Verizon’s future line up, he said.
The Palm Pre is set to make its debut on the Sprint network on June 6. Sprint hasn’t said how long its exclusive deal for the Pre will last but… Read More
Pared-down, miniature netbooks are not just trendy but also revolutionary, says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
The chief executive this week gushed over netbooks on stage at the All Things D conference, where he debated the impact of netbooks with Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg.
In McG’s turd nugget Terminator Salvation, the cyborgs run on nuclear power cells to keep on truckin’ without a recharge. Their downfall: The power cells turn out to be highly explosive… Read More
Why wait for Apple to deliver a touchscreen tablet when you can make your own?
That’s the idea behind Berkeley student Yotam Mann’s do-it-yourself multitouch musical instrument, which will be exhibited at this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo. A contraption of optical lasers, a webcam and some custom… Read More
There’s nothing here you couldn’t do with a few lengths of masking-tape and a ballpoint pen, but as the whole point of cable management is to be fast, neatly hung and leave a good-looking floor, we’d recommend these sweet, candy-colored caps from Dotz.
There are two kits, the straps, and the “Dotz Identifiers”. The straps are color-coded cable-ties which can be undone and reused, and come with push-out paper inserts to let you keep things further… Read More
Take a look at this and prepare your hatred. The Plug Mug looks like a great idea, right? The cup has a hole in the side which is stoppered by a rubber bung which you keep about your person at all times. This will stop office coworkers from stealing your cup, as any liquid poured inside will spew wastefully through the drain-hole, wetting their pants and further screwing their septic loathing of you toward the sticking-place.
Despite sounding “narrow” (nope, me neither) these eggshell speakers are beautiful:magnificentlydelicate enclosures now housing an entirely different kind of tweeter than nature intended. The precision-cut shells were stuffed and mounted on clay bases (although they look more like plaster to us) and while you won’t be using them to rock out, according to Japanese maker Gomhi, classical guitar sounds great, and not at all scrambled.
German blog iFun has uncovered some photos of what could be the bezel of a new iPhone. Roughly the same size as the current model, the part has turned up on the site of Chinese hardware supplier China Ontrade for $80. It appears that the existing shiny chrome part has been replaced by a black version, more similar to that found in the first generation iPod Touch. The site also carries spare LCD screens for both the iPhone 3G and a mysterious… Read More
You and I might see buildings damaged with World War II bullet holes and pause for a moment to reflect on just how different things were when our cities were war zones. Or you may be reading this from a country which has no bullet-riddled wartime walls, and even if you had, they would have been torn down long since to build a handsome strip-mall.
Jan Vormann, on the other hand, sees an opportunity: For him,every hole is a goal. He has been systematically filling… Read More
You’d have to have a heart of hollow plastic to not like Lego. Over the weekend, Wired.com had a chance to visit the Bay Area Lego Users Group, which will be exhibiting its Lego city at this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo. Check out our gallery featuring some of the group’s projects with… Read More
MSI said Wednesday it has started shipping its ultraslim notebook computer that weighs just about 2.86 pounds and is priced nearly half of that of Apple’s MacBook Air laptop.
The X340 notebook from MSI had a public showing at the CTIA mobile conference in Las Vegas in April but MSI did not reveal the complete specs or the price tag.
Now word from the company is that it will cost $900. Apple’s MacBook Air starts at $1800.
AT&T on Wednesday announced plans to significantly boost its 3G network performance and begin testing its new 4G network over the next two years.
The 3G upgrade involves boosting the network to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2, which the company claims will double peak speeds of the… Read More
Plastic Logic’s electronic book reader is an ultra skinny, extra large device targeted at business users. And if you’re lucky enough to be at the All Things D conference, you’re getting one for free.
In a demo Wednesday at the ongoing at the Wall Street Journal’s conference in California, Plastic Logic showed a prototype device with an onscreen keyboard and an annotate feature, and said every attendee would be getting one. The… Read More
Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.
Steve Chamberlin, a Belmont, California, videogame developer by day, set out on a quest to custom design and build his own 8-bit computer. The homebrew CPU would be called Big Mess of Wires or BMOW.Despite its name, it is a painstakingly… Read More
Online photo contests might not have the fancy award ceremonies of, say, the prestigious Webbies, but they do have the advantage of happening out in the open so you can check out all the entries. In the case of Princeton Tecs Got Lights On Bikes Photo Contest, 300 people submitted their snaps, and most of them are excellent.
The Flickr contest had one simple rule take… Read More
When we took a look at Griffin’s PowerBlock iPod and iPhone charger two weeks ago, we said it was “almost a no-brainer”. The PowerBlock is your usual USB wall-wart with one difference: a spare external battery. That this costs just $10 more than the official Apple charger is what makes it attractive.… Read More
Microsoft may have been playing catchup to the iPod ever since it launched the Zune, but the Zune HD, which todaymaterializedfrom a rumor to a real product, looks to be a rather nice piece of iPod Touch-baiting hardware.
The new player has a 3.3-inch capacitive OLED touch screen at480 x 272 resolution, which will give some kind of multi-touch functionality,Wi-Fi, an HD radio (what?!) and “HD Video Out”, for which you will require an optional dock… Read More
Canon’s 5D MkII is hot, hot, hot in the indie video world. Much cheaper than a similarly specced video camera and able to use pretty much any Canon lens made since the 1980s, it shoots some stunning footage.
The problem has been exposure control, or the lack of it. Up until now, you had to shoot in auto-exposure mode. It was possible to use exposure compensation to tweak the light, or to use exposure lock, but these were clunky… Read More
“It’s Wednesday, you fool. Have you been drinking?”
This, up until the last line, is a genuine conversation between a man and a clock. The iTalk alarm clock, to be precise, a bedside robot which can be programmed by speech alone and asked moronic questions such as the one above.
The Box Amp is a $30 kit from Critter and Guitari which will turn any old cardboard box into a guitar amplifier. You’ll need some basic soldering skills but once the hot-work is done, you’ll need nothing but a craft-knife to fashion an almost infinite array of enclosures.
The Box Amp consists of electronics, jack socket, nine-volt power supply and a speaker. The box acts as both a holder and to shape the sound, and the kit can be modded to run off a nine-volt… Read More
iPod fan blog iLounge claims an insider has leaked details about Apple’s next iPod Nano. The publication says it’s received enough information to produce the above mock-up of the device.
iLounge’s source claims the fifth-generation iPod Nano screen will get widened to a 1.5:1 aspect ratio… Read More
SAN MATEO, California — To stand out among a beautifully, constructed, near-authentic steam carriage and a fire-breathing installation that spews out a flame every few seconds isn’t easy.
Rock’n'Roll is a takeaway transformer. The concept design takes a thin sheet of steel and rolls it into a cylinder. The trick is that, rolled one way it becomes a bracelet, and rolled the other way, along the long axis, it turns into a chopstick. You will, clearly, need two.
Pixel Qi, a company that promises inexpensive, low-power displays that could potentially rival E Ink screens, has been talking about its product for months.
Watch out, Sprint: Verizon Wireless plans to offer the Palm Pre on its telecom network in about six months, according to Verizon executive Lowell McAdam.
MSI said Wednesday it has started shipping its ultraslim notebook computer that weighs just about 2.86 pounds and is priced nearly half of that of Apple’s MacBook Air laptop.
