Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

For auto-enthusiasts it’s pretty heart-breaking to see when a rare sports car like a Ferrari Enzo gets totaled in a crash. But many people forget that before these vehicles can be sold to the public they need to undergo safety testing. And unfortunately these tests usually leave the vehicles in a write-off condition.

Here’s a rare video of a McLaren F1 undergoing a crash test at the Motor Industry Research Association facility in England. Even though it’s being driven into a concrete wall at 40 mph fans of the car will be pleased to see how well the carbon fiber chassis actually holds up. In fact reading up on the test it seems that had it not been for a dummy engine being used the car would have actually been drivable after the crash. I guess when you drop a million dollars on a ride you get what you pay for.

The actual crash test video is available after the jump but be forewarned - it’s not easy to watch a car of this caliber being destroyed.

[ Autoblog - McLaren F1 crash test ] VIA [ Motor Authority ]

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By Andrew Liszewski

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more boring, generic looking box than this TV Volume Regulator but since it only has one specific task it really doesn’t need to look that hi-tech. You see through the use of some creative sound mixing and mastering commercials usually always sound much louder than the TV show you’re enjoying. The idea of course is to grab your attention but instead they end up being annoying and quickly muted once you find the remote.

This is where the TV Volume Regulator comes in. When hooked up to your set it will deliver a consistent audio level through loud and quiet parts of your show and will also deal with those obnoxiously loud commercials. I used to have a Magnavox television with this feature built-in and it worked quite well. Normally the adjustments were so subtle you couldn’t tell it was working but once you disabled that feature it was pretty obvious it was doing its job.

The TV Volume Regulator is available from Amazon for $39.97.

[ TV Volume Regulator ]

By Andrew Liszewski

For the paranoid crowd who’ve been relying on wireless signal scanners to detect hidden spy cameras I have some bad news for you. The WiLife LukWerks Spy Camera uses something they call HomePlug technology to send the video feed to a computer over power lines instead of a wireless signal.

While the LukWerks cameras do come in versions that actually look like traditional cameras I know the geek crowd demands them to be small and stashed somewhere unsuspecting and in this case a good old alarm clock is used. From what I can tell the camera can be triggered when it detects motion and is actually capable of recording video itself in Windows Media format which it can then send to a PC for watching.

The LukWerks Spy Camera starter kit is available for $329.99 on the manufacturer’s website but two other kits that include traditional camera designs are also available for $299.99 each. You can also buy an extra spy camera alarm clock for $249.99 if you completely mistrust everyone at your office or at home.

[ WiLife LukWerks Spy Camera ] VIA [ Coolest-Gadgets ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m not a fan of using video projectors as big screen TVs and one of the biggest issues I have is the screens themselves which can be a pain to mount and maintain and usually just end up looking like crap. But if you happen to have a big empty wall in your living room a company called Vogel’s sells a do-it-yourself paint-on projection screen kit.

Cleverly named ‘Mighty Brighty’ the kit basically comes with a set of paints that makes creating the perfect projection screen pretty simple. Just measure out your required dimensions on the wall (16:9 or 4:3) and then paint on a light gray base coat followed by a highly reflective top coat and you’re done. In theory you don’t even have to wait for it to dry before you start using it. The top coat can even be customized to your room’s lighting conditions by adding more or less of an included gray tint before painting it on and in the end you’re left with a screen that’s guaranteed to always be flat and smooth (unless your home has severe foundation issues.)

Vogel’s currently sells 3 different projection screen kits. The cheapest version just includes the base and top coats without the additional gray tinting paint and sells for about $190. The next version up adds the gray tinting paint plus a magnetic paint and magnetic borders that can be easily added and removed to frame your screen and sells for about $380. Finally the ‘premium’ version comes with everything the previous versions do but includes enough paint to cover your entire wall so that the screen completely blends in when not in use and is available for about $580.

[ Vogel's Projection Screen Paint ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

By David Ponce

Fraunhofer are the people behind the MP3 compression format. Little did we know they also made gear, but they do. And they’ve recently announced the development of the world’s smallest HDTV camera, named MicroHDTV. The device is only 3 inches long and 1.5 inches wide, yet is still capable of recording video at full HDTV resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, and 60 frames per second. It achieves this in part by ditching bulky heatsinks:

The camera?s electronics have a very low power loss, which means that little heat is generated and the housing can thus be kept very small. By using highly integrated parts, we were able to fit all of the components such as the image sensor, the analog-to-digital converter, the color processor and several interfaces into the tiny space available inside the camera

Being this small, it can easily be strapped to a skier’s helmet, or embedded in a race car.

There’s no word on price or specific availability, though the MicroHDTV will be on display at CeBIT, in Hanover, from March 15 to 21.

[ Full Article ] VIA [ Electronista ]

By David Ponce

Today, once more, we could talk about the true top story: Yahoo! posted Q4 and 2006 earnings. Everyone’s talking about that, but it’s kind of boring. This is all you need to know: they beat expectations, they’re happy, but a little cautious about 2007. Semel’s putting small fires out, but there’s nothing to get anyone’s panties up in a bunch.

The more interesting news is that Blu-ray technology has been cracked. A while ago, HDDVD fell under the prodigious hacking of one “muslix64″, from the Doom9 forums. And he’s at it again, this time successfully extracting “backup” video from Lord Of War, from Lion?s Gate Films. A small, Alpha (meaning barely tested and potentially unstable) utility has been released, and it’s called BackupBluRay.

Of course, the issue of whether there is a demand for HD backup files is another topic altogether. These files will be difficult to distribute via P2P for various reasons: they’re extremely large, so less people will want to wait. Less people will want to seed them. Less people will want to have them on their hard drives. Not to mention that it’s not yet possible to burn them back into Blu-ray, so you have to watch the HD film on your PC.

Still, now Blu-ray and HDDVD are cracked.

VIA [ Wesley Tech ]

By David Ponce

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s top tech news, today comes word that Netflix is entering the downloadable (streamable rather) movie business as well; another player in an already overcrowded field. Oh, and did we mention: no one is really sure that there’s all that much of a big market for watching movies on your PC… Anyway, here’s the story.

A select number of Netflix’s 6 million subscribers will be allowed to download a special piece of software, with which they’ll be able to stream DVD quality movies right to their PC, from their Netflix account. For free. The free part is what’s got people relatively excited. Of course, you can’t save the stuff, let alone copy it to DVD. And free doesn’t mean unlimited either: members are allotted a specific amount of time, usually in proportion to the type of membership they hold. Most will get 18 hours a month, some more, some less. They will be able to select from 1,000 titles, including stuff from NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers and others. Yeah, it’s a lot less than their 70,000 strong title catalogue, but the service should expand with time.

And how are they getting away with making this free? They’re throwing $40M at it, to cover royalties and overhead, and which aside from wiping out most of their operating profit, could turn out to be simply wasted in a field already somewhat full. At least if Apple, Amazon, MovieLink, CinemaNow and Joost have anything to do with it.

[ Netflix's Press Release ] VIA [ NY Times ]

By David Ponce

The Venice Project, the upcoming online television startup from Kazaa and Skype founders has now acquired an official name: Joost. While we won’t comment on the name itself, let us give you a quick summary of the service in case you’re not familiar.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are two Swedish men with a knack for creating disruptive technology. First they turned the music distribution model on its head with Kazaa (sure, Napster came first, but Kazaa took it to the masses), then they poked a huge hole into the phone business with Skype. Both services share P2P at the core of their technology. And now, they’re set to take on yet another ailing institution: television.

For the last few months, they’ve been working on a project that until now has been named The Venice Project. Now named Joost, the service will consist of a downloadable software based on the Mozilla framework. It aims to improve and build upon what the likes of YouTube, Metacafe and Brightcove are doing by giving both content users and producers superior video distribution (and monetization) tools.

And let me tell you, it all looks very purdy. Right now, the service is still in Beta, but we’ve included a bunch of screenshots inside.

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By Andrew Liszewski

The H3 Series of clothing and accessories from O’Neill are designed to give you access to your electronics like a phone or iPod while still enjoying the great (and snow-covered) outdoors. The Campack is kind of designed to be the central storage place for all your gear but besides phones and MP3 players it can also accommodate a video camera which can be used in conjunction with an externally mounted lens to produce some great Warren Miller-esque footage. (Or sadly some Jackass-esque footage too I’m sure.)

The actual pockets for the camera and other electronics are molded from foam so things aren’t really going to bounce around or smash into each other when you land that jump. The straps of the Campack also include remote buttons for starting and stopping the camera or for controlling volume and track searching when used in conjunction with an iPod. There’s even a built-in Bluetooth module for hands-free calling so I recommend keeping the number for the rescue helicopter on your speed dial just in case.

The O’Neill Campack is available now for about $480.

[ O'Neill H3 Series Campack ] VIA [ Tech Digest ]