Score one for parents. Sprint has announced a new program called “Sprint Mobile Controls”, which lets parents of cellphone-toting kids get very granular control over just how they get to use their devices. While we agree that kids owning cellphones is kind of important for their social development, we also believe in effective parenting. With this program, here’s a few of the features you’ll have access to:
- Easy-to-read dashboard of phone usage, including voice and text messages broken down by time of day.
- Seeing who your son or daughter has been calling or texting recently – and how often.
- Quickly and easily setting phone use limits by time of day and day of week.
- Establishing an allowed list of phone numbers from which your child can receive a call or text.
- Seeing a list of your child’s contacts with an associated picture ranked by overall texting and calling activity.
- Allowing your child to override phone restrictions in case of an emergency.
- Setting Watchlist contacts: Receive alert notifications when your child communicates with a Watchlist contact.
Man, you’re going to have some happy kids on your hands if you sign up to this! But that doesn’t mean they won’t be a little safer…
So this took about 20 years too long, but here’s a portable Super NES. Yeah, as in the entire system in your hands. The SupaBoy can use any of your own SNES cartridges and even Japanese Super Famicon. Enjoy portable gaming the way you wished the Gameboy could have been, in full color on a 3.5 inch display. There’s even a TV out socket and two slots for classic controllers, in case you want to travel back in time a couple decades. The battery should be good for a disappointing 2.5 hours and if your friends start getting annoyed at the Super Mario Bros. music, there’s a headphone jack. Although quite frankly, if you have friends like that, you need to upgrade…
This roll-up travel charger comes with one wall plug and four different charging tips: iPhone®, Mini USB, Micro USB, Samsung. Samsung?… Anyway, yes you can recharge up to four gadgets at once and although it looks like brown leather, it’s actually pleather. This does take away a little from its rugged Indiana Jones-y vibe but we don’t care because we won’t be buying this. We’ve been trying to determine the odds of ever being in a situation where four different devices with four different connector types need to be recharged simultaneously and the numbers don’t look good. Then again, we failed math so don’t take our word for it.
Because there’s apparently no shortage of people with more money than good sense, there appears to be a market for items such as this. The brainchild of Stuart Hughes, the iPhone 4S Elite Gold is the world’s most expensive phone.
The most unique mobile phone ever created with a total construction cost of £6 million. The bezel is handmade from rose with approx 500 individual flawless diamonds which total over 100ct. The rear section is formed using 24ct gold with the added touch of its 24ct gold Apple logo and 53 diamonds. The main navigation is made from gold which holds a single cut 8.6ct diamond. Also included (not shown in picture) is a rare 7.4ct single cut Flawless pink diamond which can replace the existing one. The chest is made from solid Platinum with polished pieces of original Dinosaur bone from the T-REX along with rare stones such as Opal, Pietersite, Charoite, Rutile Quartz, Star Sunstone. The handset is 64gb and limited edition of only 2 to be ever made.
Did you read that? The part about bits of T-Rex bone thrown in? We say don’t buy this until there are bits of moon rock as well. After all, it is almost $10 million…
Argentinian ad agency Del Campo/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi is on a roll. First we heard about their work with the BGH Quick Chef, a microwave oven that signals readiness with customizable music instead of a beep. But their latest campaign with Norte Beer, a South American brewer, is pure genius. They’ve created the Norte Photoblocker, a beer cooler that makes it impossible to take a good picture of you within its effective radius. It does this by detecting a flash and immediately flashing one of its own, ruining the pic. Why would this be good? Ok, picture this. You’re out at the club getting into all kinds of trouble. Great times… until pictures are taken and you’re inevitably tagged. By the time you get around to doing some damage control, well, by then it’s too late. Better to have the photoblocker around.
The device actually exists and works. It’s been planted in a few regional bars and photoblocked pictures were still uploaded with the subjects well protected. Savvy club owners would do well to look into ways of acquiring more like these. As the ads say, “What happens at the club, stays at the club…” However, there doesn’t appear to be concrete plans to bring the device to North America.
Incidentally, do yourself a favor and hit the jump to watch the two commercials in question. They’re really, really good.
For less than the price this editor paid for one 21 inch LCD a couple of years ago, you can now get your hands on two 20 inchers from Dell. LED backlighting at that. “Dell IN2020M sports high-gloss slim black bezel , DVI (HDCP) and VGA connector, 8,000,000:1 high dynamic contrast ratio, 1600 x 900 resolution, 5ms response time, and tilt adjustable stand.” That works out to $85 per monitor. Heck, at that price, you could get 4 monitors and get the kind of workstation you typically see in the movies.
Not the first such video where someone takes a bunch of old timey electronics and hacks it into an improbable orchestra. But not all are good. This rendition of The Animals’ House of The Rising Sun is decent and was made using the following:
a. HP Scanjet 3P, Adaptec SCSI card and a computer powered by Ubuntu v9.10 OS as the Vocals.
b. Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope as the Organ
c. Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope as the Guitar
d. Hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller as the bass drum and cymbal
Next time a light bulb burns out, consider replacing it with these AudioBulb Wireless Speaker Light Bulbs. There’s an LED ring that outputs about as much light as a traditional 60W bulb, and a speaker in the center. The set of two connects wirelessly to a docking base station, which you can pair with iPhones, iPods of really any music device through the auxiliary input.
Well this is about as low tech as things can get, but it’s interesting anyway. The Harbin Public Transport Company in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang has seen it fit to include specially labeled “emergency” bricks onto 300 of their 700 bus fleet. Why? So you can easily break windows and exit should the doors somehow become inoperable in an incident. There’s one brick by the driver’s seat, and another towards the back of the buses.
Wouldn’t a purpose-built hammer be easier for stunned and shocked accident victims to use? Perhaps, but… “The special hammers are expensive and people were always stealing them,” explained a spokesperson from the Harbin Public Transport Company. “We don’t think anybody will be interested in stealing bricks.” Famous last words?
This being China, perhaps there’s some hope that they won’t be misused or stolen, but you can bet that if this was America…
Related Tags: Cellphones, tracking
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