Gadgetstronics

If you’ve ever called tech support, especially at your company, and wondered what they were doing while you were complaining, this is a must-watch video. If you’ve ever been behind the scenes in a tech organization, this is a must-watch video. If you’ve ever … I think you get the point.

The creator of The Website is Down, Josh Weinberg, manages to perfectly capture both what’s happening behind the scenes and on the front line of a technical support call where the “sales guy” complains about the site being down to the “web dude”.

I won’t give away any of the plot but I do have to say that I’ve lived a number of pieces of this video–from both sides–in the past. It’s completely true to form and they really must have done their homework for this one.

Check out the video at thewebsiteisdown.com.

You may not get excited by mice, but I have quite a collection of the cute critters. There’s the Logitech multi-media zoomer, my pink Kensington travel model, the Wow-Pen ergonomic version, not to mention the drawer full of reject mice that weren’t up to my exacting standards.

The SlimBlade Presented Mouse by Kensington is my newest pet. It combines a full-function laser mouse and presenter in one sleek device, and is still small enough to fit in your pocket.

Bluetooth connection; switch to go to presentation mode; goes to sleep when your notebook does; ultra-thin design for traveling - what’s not to love? $59.99 at Kensington.

Back in May we wrote about XP coming to the XO laptop. At the time there was only speculation about how it would truly operate. Earlier this week, our favorite analyst, Michael Gartenberg, posted a piece on his blog about the XO running XP. The most interesting thing about his post though, was that he actually posted it USING XP on the XO. According to Michael, XP is running off a 2GB SD card, with about a gig left over for storage. He says that it’s working well, though he doesn’t love the hardware.

Sounds like Microsoft has done a solid job of bringing XP to the XO.

We’ve had a lot of fun hacking and upgrading the XO in the past, but nothing would beat me being able to put XP on it. Maybe that will be an option in the future for those of us who own an XO?

Read more about Michael’s experience so far on his blog.

Ah, finally the day has come where e-book readers resemble the traditional tome more and more, this time with a dual screen display for a more natural reading feel to it. This prototype functions like a normal book, and you can fold it back into a single-page version if you decide to conserve battery life, or choose to separate the pages so that you can share whatever you’re reading with another reader on the other side. It would be interesting to see just how long the battery life is on something like this. No idea on when the prototype will be turned into a mass manufactured device though.

Publisher’s note: Is there a need for dual-display ebooks? I don’t think so. I would rather have a one-dipslay e-book that does not have these huge bezels… I can only read one page at a time, but may be it’s just me…

T-Mobile has decided to offer a new home service at a price many consumers will find hard to pass up. The service called T-Mobile@Home will begin July 2nd and will be offered for just US$10 a month. In order to receive the home service you need only subscribe to a qualifying T-Mobile wireless plan.

The home phone service will include unlimited nationwide long-distance calling, call waiting, caller ID, three-way conferencing, voicemail in addition to call forwarding. Subscribers will also be able to take advantage of CallerTunes. This is a ringback tones service typically associated with wireless services.

The T-Mobile@Home service was initially piloted in Dallas and Seattle before it was launched to other T-Mobile subscribers. To utilize the service, T-Mobile customers need only to have an existing broadband Internet connection and the T-Mobile@Home HiPort Wireless Router with Home Phone Connection. The router is US$49.99 with a two-year service agreement.

Read more from the T-Mobile press release.

Brian’s Opinion

Wow, talk about some price competition from T-Mobile! US$10 a month for home phone service is an incredible deal. It is also one heck of an incentive to attract new T-Mobile subscribers considering the savings customers can realize by having both a mobile phone and home phone service with T-Mobile.

It’s been kind of entertaining to watch telecommunications companies enter the wireless industry market and we now are seeing wireless companies entering what was traditionally a service only offered by traditional phone companies. Clearly, the line between what phone companies, wireless companies, and cable companies offer has been blurred due to the Internet revolution.

I’d be very curious if any other wireless company will follow suit and offer a similar US$10 a month home phone service. If one of the other wireless companies were smart they would team up with Vonage to offer a subsidized form of the Vonage service. Not only would that be good for any of the wireless companies, but it would be extremely good for Vonage as well.

In an impressive mix of visual sciences and sci-fi, the ICT Graphics Lab at USC has created a low-cost volumetric 3D display that brings every kid’s hologram dreams closer to reality.

The process is not simple but can be defined through a few key concepts: Spinning mirrors, high-speed DLP Projections, and very precise math that figures out the correct axial perspective needed for a 360-degree image (even taking into account a viewer’s positioning.)

When projecting video frames into a rapidly spinning mirror, close to 5,000 individual images are reflected every second within the surface area and come together to create a real-space three-dimensional object.

Because the images projected from the mirror jump out ‘toward multiple viewpoints in space,’ the USC team created a formula that renders individual projections at different heights and traces each projected beam back to the display area to find the correct position of the viewer.

The system also updates itself in real time (at 200Hz), adjusting to the height and distance of the viewer, producing an image that will ’stay in place,’ (or rather, that ‘adjusts its projected perspective.’)   

In this way, every person in a room will be able to have a correct POV of a holographic image, like that of the TIE fighters in the image above. It also allows for the correct image occlusion as well as the appropriate image shading necessary for each item. More importantly, it enables simultaneous viewing — no one will need to use dorky, uncomfortable glasses to see them battle in mid air. 

Ultimately, this breakthrough in 3D holographs is another key push towards the technology’s inevitable conclusion. It’s only a matter of time before our own Princess Leas tell us we’re their only hope.

Source: ICT Graphics Lab

To Numark, its new PT-01USB is a “portable vinyl archiving system”. To you and me, it’s a record player with a USB plug.

The main purpose of this portable (although AC power only) turntable is the ripping of vinyl to digital (MP3 or WAV) but it has a few neat features which help it survive in today’s vinyl-unfriendly world. For instance, in addition to the USB out, which sends pre-separated tracks to iTunes, the turntable also has a line-level output, obviating the need for an amplifier with a phono pre-amp.

It also has a built in “monitor” speaker, which, along with the snap on lid, reminds me of the piece-of-junk portable record player I got for my tenth birthday (along with a copy of Miami Sound Machine’s Doctor Beat).

Still, we dig the retro looks, the fact that it will work driver-free on OS X and Windows, and also the bonus line-in socket for digitizing your old tapes. It will be launched after the summer for an unknown price, although it shouldn’t be too far off the current generation, USB-less PT-01, which is $150.

Product page [Numark via Retro Thing]

In the city of Sakai, Japan, the Sharp company has eyes on building not one, but two huge solar arrays that will be the largest of it’s kind in the world.

The two solar plants will be built in partnership with Kansai Electric Power and will be used primarily to help power Sharp’s factories and other production facilities in the area.

The ambitious idea has been called the “Sakai City Waterfront Mega Solar Power Generation Plan” and the 2 plants will generate 10,000 kilowatts and 18,000 kilowatts respectively, for a combined maximum output of 28,000 kilowatts. 

With this plan, Sakai will definitely make itself one of the greenest cities in the world in regards to renewable energy sources.

The two Sakai Solar Plants are set to go online in March of 2010.

Read the Sharp Press Release via DVICE.

Sony Ericsson W350

You’ve lusted after your high-school crush for two semesters, and you’ve finally got a date. But now that you have alone time, every feature that you found cute or enticing shows a transparency, a shallowness. As you spend time together, the very things you liked start to grate on your nerves, and new discoveries show how ill fit you are for each other. That’s how it goes—and that’s how it is with the Sony Ericsson W350: What appeared to be a cool little phone proved itself to be an annoyance and a hassle to use.

Not that it doesn’t look good. The W350 has style to spare. Sleek and petite, this Walkman phone is dwarfed by an average hand, slimmer and narrower than most candy-bar handsets. the matte-black surface is accented by metallic range trim and Walkman nav controls. A small flip panel that houses the controls opens to reveal a keypad composed of glossy Chiclets and a squared-off oval navigation pad.

Though pretty, it’s these design touches that are the more irritating features of the phone. The smooth keys are hard to isolate and press. The navpad leaves little room for easy navigation — you’ll often press up when you mean to select, opening the wrong menu item or app. and the flimsy flip panel takes great skill to open one-handedly, bad for efficient answering.

And the Sony influence brings frustration in new forms. The proprietary headphone connector is ungainly, jutting from the side awkwardly and removing any trace of grace from the unit. The phone also comes with what looks like a 512MB microSD — not so fast — it’s Sony’s own version, the incompatible Memory Stick M2. When was the last time you’ve seen any Memory Stick slots in a non-Sony notebook?

Call quality was muffled, but this was a prototype, so that could improve before the final version ships. Don’t forget to lock the phone after every call, when flipped shut, the phone defaults to Walkman mode, and a key in your pocket could start an impromptu jam session in a company meeting. In our case it was the lone provided song, an electronica instrumental sounded like hold music or the background track to a ’90s sexual harassment training video.

On the bright side, when this phone comes out, it’ll be cheap, around $29 with a two year contract. It seems you can also buy unlocked handsets now for about $200, but why on earth would you?  —Roger Hibbert

WIRED It’s as tiny and as pretty as a music-box ballerina. Includes an FM radio (which will be cool until the HD takeover next year).

TIRED The keys and navpad are unfit for grown-up human use. The phone’s clunky headphone connector has all the charm of a tumor. The awkward flip panel makes for clumsy, fumbling answers.

$29 (estimated) with 2-year contract, sonyericsson.com

(Photo by Jon Snyder for Wired.com)

This is the Image Fulgurator, half guerilla art stunt and half homemade gadget awesomeness. Berlin based artist Julius von Bismarck uses his oddly named camera-mod to project images onto street furniture where they appear in the photos of strangers, but remain invisible to their eyes.

How? It’s simple. The device has a slave unit on top which is triggered when it sees a flash fire. This triggers his own flash, which fires through the back of the camera, through a film slide containing his slogan and then on and out through the lens at the front. This works because a camera is prety mucha projector in reverse. And because the light-graffiti is fired at the exact same moment the unsuspecting victim takes a picture, it ends up in their photograph and paranoid mind ramblings result. Neat.

Here’s a video of von Bismarck in action at fake Berlin tourist hotspot, Checkpoint Charlie (no relation):

Bismarck isn’t the first to use a camera that looks like a gun. The kind of thing that would see Statesiders lobbed in Guantanamo has a history in Europe. Take the Enjalbert Photo Revolver de Poche, for instance, a French gun-cam from 1883 which recently sold for around $90,000.

Inside the barrel is the lens, and inside the magazine are ten 16×16 photographic plates. It seems gimmicky, and at the time the image quality from those tiny negatives would probably be terrible, but being able to fire off ten shots between reloads would have been a novelty for those used to plate cameras.

Rare gun cam sells for £45,000 [Amateur Photographer]

Over in the States, meanwhile, the Orange County Cops take the obvious step for a SWAT team. Instead of making a camera which looks like a gun, why not just clip a camera onto a real gun? The PistolCam is just that.

The video camera sits below the barrel and captures 30fps video for up to an hour. We covered this $700 accessory when it entered testing at the Newburgh Police Department, and I mentioned that it was nothing more than an amazing real-life game of Quake. I stand by that, although so far no footage has turned up on YouTube, which was my other prediction.

Pistol Cam shoots while you shoot [BBG]

Skipping back across the pond to Germany, we find this antidote to all the cameras. The IR.ASC is an infrared light mounted on a headband. Invisible to the eye, it whites out your head on security cameras, protecting your identity whether you are up to no good or just tired of being watched everywhere you go.

We imagine that if this were used in the same place as the Image Fulgurator, some kind of singularity would result, and the Universe would end in a matter/antimatter, don’t-cross-the-streams implosion.

CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible [Gadget Lab]

Tomorrow I will be meeting up with von Bismarck for a chat about his Fulgurator and to see what other hardware hacks he has in mind. Until then, here’s a schematic of the device. The website says it is copyrighted, as any creative act should be, but that doesn’t stop you making your own.

Project page [Julius von Bismarck]