Let’s say that you’re the ultimate Star Wars fan out there,what do you sleep on at night? Sure, you could go with your vintage Empire Strikes Back sheets atop your otherwise normal bed. But don’t you think that you can show your love in a better way? Perhaps one that will make most people even more reluctant to share your bed. That’s right, you need a bed modeled after the Millennium Falcon.
One fan has decided to craft such a bed, with a good bit of accuracy. There aren’t a lot of details on how to replicate it, but it does give you something to think about. The front includes a pair of working “headlights” and a string of LED lights provides the perfect mood lighting for any geeky bedtime encounter. The pillow shaped like a radar dish is the icing on the cake.
I don’t know how they do it, but somehow, Thanko manages to keep coming up with gadgets that are silly and borderline useless for most people and yet are potentially just perfect for just enough people that I don’t quite feel comfortable making fun of them. And even then, this USB radio is a more useful than most, considering that it receives AM, FM, and shortwave.
There’s an external antenna jack, and the actual tuning is done via software. You can record anything you’re listening to directly to MP3, and you can even schedule different recordings on different frequencies, sort of like a really cumbersome and old-school Podcast. But I guess if you don’t have internet, then it could be a great solution for you.
‘Course, if you don’t have internet, then you’re not reading this, so what do I care?
You think you got the biggest, fastest rig in town, don’t ya? Well lemme tell you, it ain’t got squat on the FASTRA II from the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp. That’s because this baby packs a whopping 13GPUs, from “six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards, and one GTX275 single-GPU card, resulting in a massive 12TFLOPS of computing power.” Since the fine people at the University are using the machine for projects that are quite a bit more noble than gaming (think “3D imaging of bone tissue in mice, which is commonly required in medicine research for osteoporosis “), a massive CPU cluster is not required. So there’s a single Core i7 chip along with
an ASUS P6T7 WS mainboard to accommodate all seven video cards; one 1,500W power supply and three 450W supplies keep the extreme power demands in check. A 1TB Samsung hard drive, 12GB of DDR3 memory, and [a] Lian-Li case. The only modifications are a custom cage to suspend the GeForce boards and a custom kernel for the CentOS Linux build that runs the design.
Building one yourself would set you back 6,000 euros.
For a fascinating video tour of the machine, keep reading.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LeapFish Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.
By David Ponce
You might have heard over the last few months: the Internet is entering what many are referring to as “The Real-Time Web”. In other words, where static pages were all the rage in the 90′s, and blogs, social networks and interconnectivity became popular in the early part of the new millennium, we’re now entering a phase preoccupied with what’s happening now. As in right this minute. One salient example where this played a critical role was in the controversial Iranian presidential election, where Twitterers on the ground were able to get reports out live, without any help from the press.
Of course, like any emerging movements the early days can be a little confusing. Everyone is a content creator and at any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people are updating their Twitter accounts, their MySpace pages or Facebook profiles causing a cacophony. To filter through the noise, tap into what is effectively democratized journalism and allow an orderly Real Time Web to emerge, several companies are getting into “Real Time Search”. Recently Google joined the fray with the display of scrolling live results to a large number of searches. Watch the video we’ve embedded below for more on this. Another company is LeapFish who’ve launched a portal that includes a Live Search section with content from Digg, Twitter ([Update] Yeah… that’s it) and other social networks.
Again, watch their video at the end of the article if you’re interested.
Designers Yoonsang Kim & Eunsung Park have envisioned the above keyboard, called the “Keystick” as a fully functional qwerty device that would fold up like an accordion when not in use, into the shape of a stick. It’s arguably better than some of the current solutions, like rolling keyboards, since they’re mushy and don’t feel like normal keyboards. Or regular folding keyboards (like the Matias) that take up so much space they might as well not bother trying to be compact.
Sadly it’s just a concept at the moment, but you can look at a few more pictures after the jump.
If you’re not a fan of eye rape, then please do yourself a favor and do not watch the above video. Remember, it cannot be unwatched.
Much as I’m as fan of the Chevy Volt and what it can potentially represent, I’d like to have a word with whoever thought the above number was a good idea.
Remember back when the display in Minority Report was the future technology that everyone was talking about? Well, now it’s the past, ’cause MIT’s Media Lab has come up with a display that can potentially do all that fancy gestural stuff, except without the gloves.
Called BiDi (for Bi-Directional), the display works on a very basic level a little bit like a Microsoft Surface table: there’s a screen, and behind that, there are cameras (of a sort) to watch what’s going on at the screen. And also like Surface, because cameras are in use as opposed to just a touch panel, the display is sensitive to actions that don’t directly contact it. Where the MIT display really takes the cake, though, is that it uses a field of optical sensors embedded in the display combined with some fancy image processing to make a detailed three dimensional map of exactly how far things are from the display, which not only allows you to make recognizable gestures much farther from the surface, but also allows you to gesture in and out. The LCD alternates back and forth very quickly between displaying and image and capturing data (sort of like Microsoft’s SecondLight Surface mod), and it does it so quickly that all you see is the image itself.
MIT says that they’re trying to steer away from novelty applications a bit, which is sad, but they hope to “inspire” LCD manufacturers to start working on this stuff. So, you know who you are: GET INSPIRED. I want one of these.
Are you finding that your mouse is both not aerodynamic enough and not soft enough to effectively throw at people or animals without risking injury related lawsuits? Jelfin has the solution for you, with a mouse that’s about the size and shape of a baseball and covered in squishy gel. It’s supposed to be ergonomic and super comfortable, kinda like a stress relief ball, and includes two buttons and a three dimensional optical scroll wheel.
And a “travel can,” for whatever that’s worth.
This sort of reminds me of Apple’s terrible little round mice that came with the iMac. SORT OF reminds me, just because it’s round and strange… I’m not saying that the Jelfin is going to be terrible or anything, but as with any unorthodox peripheral as critical as a mouse, I’m inherently skeptical, simply because mice have been around for a while, and there’s an accepted shape that seems to work. I will say that this mouse would be infinitely more appealing if somehow the ball shape could be used to enable a few additional axes of control, kind of like a Space Navigator or something. Just a thought.
The Jelfin mouse is available in 5 colors, none of which are black or white or anything else normal, for $35 right now on Amazon.
Back when we wrote about Novelquest’s first Emperor, this is how Andrew described it:
It features almost everything any PC user might need including 3 x 19-inch LCD monitors, a smaller 7-inch touch screen which serves as the control center, a webcam, custom work lights, a well-configured computer, a HEPA air purification system, a 30 minute UPS and even limited motion allowing the whole thing to recline or rotate 360 degrees.
That was the Emperor 200. It cost $40k.
The Emperor 1510 seems to cost slightly more than $4k, or one tenth of the price with pretty much all the same functionality. Some things that appeared to be standard are now options (or or three screens? Colors? 2.1 or 5.1 sound?). But really, if you’re an office manager looking for the baddest work environment ever, the Emperor 1510 doesn’t get much better. Word is, the Prince of Dubai just ordered 10 of these bad boys.
It officially launches December 15th, but is currentl available for pre-order.
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