It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything new from Tokyo Flash, but I guess if any company would have trouble keeping track of the time, it would be them. Like their past efforts, the Kisai Denshoku gets high regards for style and design, but not so much when it comes to usability. The watch’s face is made up of 12 orange acrylic bars that light up like a graphic EQ, but interpreting the time takes a little know-how.
Pressing the button on the side of the watch causes the bars to light up 3 times, first indicating the hours (3 lit bars = 3 o’clock) then groups of ten minutes and finally single minutes. As is usually the case, there’s a bit of counting involved, but if you’re OK with that you can order the Kisai Denshoku in a black or silver finish from Tokyo Flash for $239.
While many people will tell you that vinyl produces a better sound than a digital audio file, there’s no denying that an MP3 player takes the cake when it comes to portability. So the DP-200USB turntable from Denon allows you to easily convert your old records to MP3 files, before your kids go all DJ Qbert on them. (Though the belt drive motor could hinder their DJ aspirations.)
Recording an album is as easy as inserting a USB flash drive into the front of the player and hitting the start and record buttons. From what I can tell, the DP-200USB creates a large single MP3 file of the entire record, but it comes with Trans Music Manager software which will automatically split the file into individual tracks by detecting the gaps between songs. The Denon DP-200USB is available now for around $300, and comes in your choice of silver or black.
Back in April of last year, we posted about a video camera that you could strap to your dog or cat for a pet’s eye view of their wanderings. Jose Luis Ortiz had the same idea, except his pet happens to be what looks like a Golden Eagle:
If you thought that was cool, you can watch a Peregrine falcon with a video camera strapped to it perform a stoop here. It’s from an episode of Nature called Raptor Force, which is definitely worth watching if you ever accidentally change the channel to PBS.
On a side note, if you’re interested in birds of prey (or just think they’re badass), there are lots of zoos and rehab facilities that need volunteers to help care for and train their birds. After you’ve committed some time, you may get to hold and even fly or release some of the birds, which is an experience like nothing else. I’ve been doing it for years, and believe me, having a raptor stand on your arm and look at you never, ever gets old. If you contact your local zoo, they’ll probably be able to point you in the right direction.
The Visible Energy UFO, which I ran across at Stanford’s CPX, is a remote control powerstrip that allows you to monitor and track your energy consumption. It’s not designed to be a color changing (and collapseable!) snack bowl at all, but in spite of that, it would make an excellent one. The UFO has four color coded outlets (plus a surge protector) inside, spaced around the central axis so that you can fit even the bulkiest of power adapters into them. If you don’t need the snack bowl part, you can fold the flexible plastic cover down to keep everything nice and tidy. The light on the top of the UFO changes color (green, yellow, or red) depending on how much juice it’s sucking.
The reason that you might want one of these, however, is the slick iPhone app that comes with it. The app connects to each one of your UFO power strips separately, and lets you see at a glance how much energy you’re using. You can also turn each outlet on and off, from anywhere. Setup is supposed to be fast and easy, and as far as home automation goes, I can’t imagine it gets much simpler than this. The only problem is, if you don’t have your iPhone, there aren’t actually any switches on the thing. Oh well.
The Visible Energy UFO should be available this summer for less (hopefully a lot less) than $200.
I stopped by Stanford’s Cool Product Expo yesterday looking for (you guessed it) cool products. And lo and behold, I found some, including this Mind Lamp from a company called Psyleron. It’s called the Mind Lamp because it changes color when you intend it to, based on measurements of quantum level probabilistic events. That’s what they say it does, anyway. I bet you want to know how it works, and I’ll tell you (as best as I can understand it), after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to laptops, there are only two things that you can really do to upgrade your hardware. That would be adding RAM and swapping out your hard drive. With the latest round of MacBook Pros, there have been some issues finding compatible RAM that isn’t direct from Apple (which is always on the expensive side). Luckily OCZ has your back on both RAM and a new hard drive for your Mac.
This week OCZ announced two new lines of RAM, and a new SSD specifically aimed at Mac users. First their “Qualified for Mac” RAM comes in DDR2 and DDR3 flavors. The DDR2 is 667MHZ PC2-5400 with a CL of 5-5-5-15. These can be found in single 2GB sticks either alone, or packaged in a pair. As for the DDR3 sticks, these are 8500 MHZ PC3-1066 with a CL of 7-7-7-20. They can also be found in single 2GB sticks, or in pairs.
OCZ also announced their new Vertex Seris Mac Edition SATA II 2.5-inch SSD. The drives boast sequential read/write speeds of 240MB/s and 170MB/s respectively, and 64MB of onboard cache. Not only will these boost the speed of your activities, but increase your battery life as well. The new Vertex SDD’s will come in 30, 60, 120 and 250GB capacities. No word on pricing or availability of these newly announced products.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who didn’t enjoy Wall-E when they went to see it in theaters last year. After it came out there were lots of different homemade Wall-E’s floating around the internet. However, this Wall-E case mod definitely takes the cake.
Apparently some Russian guy went and saw the movie, and decided that he absolutely had to have a Wall-E computer. He’s a pretty cool little robot, so I can understand putting in a little effort and making something decent looking. However, this guy went the whole nine yards. He flawlessly fashioned the entire thing from sheet metal. The pictures here hardly do it justice, so I recommend checking out the full step-by-step process on the original site. My only suggestion for the next person that tries this is to put a Mac in there. Everyone knows Wall-E was a Mac.
I tend to play more video games than board games, but when you have a group of friends over sometimes it can be fun to go old school and whip out some board games. Star Trek fans looking to prove that they have the most useless sci-fi factoids stored away in their neural net will be glad to hear a new Star Trek board game is available.
The game is called Star Trek Scene It and it’s a trivia game that uses a DVD to show clips from the various TV series and feature films int the Star Trek franchise. I see Picard is included on the box image; he was the best Enterprise captain ever if you ask me.
Intel has announced new Atom processors to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of the launch of the Atom line. It’s hard to believe with the Atom processor now inside so many netbooks that it has only been a year since the processor launched.
The new processors are aimed at MIDs and include the Z550 and Z515. The Z515 processor runs at 1.2GHz and uses Intel Burst Performance technology for small and sleek MIDs. The Z550 processor runs at 2GHz and features Intel Hyper Threading technology.
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