GadgetsLoverz: Jul 11, 2010

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Bendable bicycle wraps itself around a pole - by design

Parking your two-wheeler in a shady neighborhood, but left your secondary lock at home? No problem -- to protect your wheels, just bend your bike around a nearby post and thread your U-lock through the whole kit at once.

Inhabitat's Week in Green: solar aircraft, freshwater wind farms, and the Automotive X Prize

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.

This week Inhabitat saw the world's first solar-powered aircraft soar through the night sky as it successfully completed its first 24-hour flight. We also took a look at the 15 ultra-efficient cars currently vying for the Progressive Automotive X Prize. Electric vehicles also made the headlines left and right this week as Korean carmarker CT&T announced plans to produce EVs in South Carolina and California rolls out plans for a whopping 1,600 charging stations.

Full-fledged humanoid robots helping the elderly are certainly well and good, but what about somebody that just needs a little help staying in touch with their family? They might one day be using something like this so-called Kompott "robotic agent" designed by some students at the Zurich University of the Arts Interaction Design lab.

Who says the USB monitor fun has to end at seven diagonal inches? Not Mimo, that's for sure. The famed secondary display company has issued its latest device, and this one's a looker. The 10-inch iMo Monster is aptly named, offering 10 full inches of touchscreen real estate with a native 1,024 x 600 resolution panel.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 hasn't even been officially announced, much less reviewed, but that won't keep you from buying the company's latest Fermi-based graphics card anyhow. Over at Newegg, usual suspects ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Palit have fielded twelve models in all, most with slightly different features, thought it seems the base configuration has 336 CUDA cores (down from 352) and a mere 768MB of GDDR5 memory.

Oh, sure -- this has certainly been tried before, but given that things like this need a critical mass of followers to be effective, we're particularly jazzed about Google's own initiative. Dubbed 'Open Spot,' this bloody brilliant Android (2.0 and up) application enables motorists to search for unclaimed spaces that have been reported by other Open Spot users, and once they head elsewhere, it allows them to mark their spot as open and available.

Looks like more than HTC's description was erroneous yesterday afternoon -- we've just confirmed that the HTC Sync desktop client for the AT&T Aria allows users to install third-party apps on non-rooted devices, just as promised.

When it's time to migrate, how do birds find north? The going theory is that some avians can literally see the magnetic fields. Talk about a birds-eye view. However, a recent experiment shows that ability is hampered unless the creature in question has good vision in the right eye.

Shocker of shockers -- Onkyo has outed a pair of home-theater-in-box bundles, and both of 'em are 3D ready. Crazy, ain't it? The HT-S6300 and HT-S7300 both have 3D-ready HDMI-1.4a inputs, 1080p video upscaling, lossless Dolby and DTS high definition audio, Dolby height processing, Audyssey automatic room equalization and seven total loudspeakers (plus a subwoofer).

How to Play SNES on your iPad in Four Easy Steps

The iPad's capable of 3D games and complex mobile applications, but if you'd rather go back to a simpler time, you can install an emulator (or three) on your iPad for some serious classic gaming.

Note: You can follow all the instructions below, or just watch the video walkthrough above.

Lego ML-Explorer 01 Not Practical, But Beautiful

I can't see NASA clamoring to get this Lego design onto the Moon

Enjoy Cutting-Edge Safety in the Lap of Luxury in the All-New 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee

More than 45 safety features come with the all-new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, including two types of air bags and stability control. Blind-spot detection and collision warning systems are also available so you can breathe easy as you breeze down the highway.
Enjoy Cutting-Edge Safety in the Lap of Luxury in the All-New 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee

Air Bags and Seat Restraints

Standard full-length side-curtain air bags extend protection to front and rear outboard passengers, while seat-mounted side thorax air bags enhance protection of the driver and front passenger. Standard Active Head Restraints deploy in the event of a rear collision in order to minimize the gap between the head restraint and occupant's head.

Locate Dropped, Cracked iPhone 4's Faster with This Glowing Decal

This handy iPhone 4 decal does double duty as an antenna-protecting film and a glow stick.

Google Quietly Invests Over 0 Million in Zynga, Readying Google Games

Whoa. TechCrunch reports that Google has invested between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, the social gaming behemoth behind Farmville, Mafia Wars, and others, in preparation for the launch of Google Games later this year.

Behold This Miserable List of Cellphone Failures

I'm baffled. How a phone that is both a writing utensil and a device for making calls to other humans—humans who might also be writing with their pen phones when I call upon them—could fail is beyond me.

Upscale Burger Kings Douse Japanese Patrons with "Musical Showers"

I haven't been to Burger King in a long while, but if the States implemented the "musical shower" heads that the Japanese experience in their "upscale" Burger Kings, I could be enticed back into the glutinous fold one last time.

Fujitsu the Latest to Jump On Android Smartphone Bandwagon

Fujitsu, former iPad trademark owner and soft-spoken tech manufacturer, is jumping into the Android smartphone game. It will be the company's first smartphone since it stopped selling the multifaceted devices back in 2007.

A Faucet This High Tech Is Not Necessary

Renshui has designed a futuristic faucet that uses an integrated chipset to control water temperature and a touch-based interface to control water flow. As cool as that tech sounds, I'm not sure it's any better than the classic two-knob setup.

The Idea Behind Stanford's New Library: Remove All the Books

Stanford University's new Engineering Library is scheduled to open this August, and when it does it will have 85% less books than the one it's replacing. It's a big step toward what the school's librarians envision as a bookless future.

An 80 Mile Long, 4.5 Billion Year Old Asteroid Gets Its Close Up

This is an up close picture of Lutetia, an asteroid that hangs out somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It's the largest asteroid ever visited by a satellite.

Bulletproof Custard: Liquid Armor That Can Stop Bullets

When it comes to bulletproof material, I think of strong, dense objects like concrete and really thick glass. I've never thought of liquids. But British scientists have, and they say liquid armor is better than ordinary Kevlar.

Here's a textbook example of how not to restore a movie. On the left, a frame from the original Predator, released in 1987. On the right, the same from Fox's forthcoming Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition, starring bizarro, wax-figure Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Contrary to popular legend, Pulsar wristwatches don't use the light of dying stars to keep time. However, if researchers at the University of Manchester are correct, the strobe-like effect generated by a collapsed star's spin may indeed be the most accurate clock (sorry, Atom) available to mankind. While pulsars have long been studied for insight into the nature of time and gravity, their patterns weren't as

Onkyo netbook gets covered inside and out with Miffy

Miffy (or Nijntje) is a small, Dutch, female rabbit who appears in picture books. How exactly she became a cultural hit in Japan we don't know, but we do have a good idea how she found herself plastered all over this netbook: some combination of Onkyo having a bunch of extra C4 units lying around and Namco-Bandai having a Miffy license it wasn't fully utilizing. On the hardware side this thing is particularly

Since their third-place finish in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, TORC Technology's had quite a climb -- the company founded by Virginia Tech graduates has since provided IED-scouting Humvee kits to the US Military, and a vehicle for the blind uses the drive-by-wire platform that they designed. Now, the Marines are testing a TORC kit called the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate (GUSS), which autonomously navigate off-road terrain.

We've nothing against sustainable living -- in fact, we wholeheartedly support it -- but Wollersberger & Charlesworth's first project is certainly out there. Showcased at the opening of the 'Project Vienna – How to react to a city?' exhibition at MAK Vienna, Citizen Evolution demonstrates four specific service models for humans of the future.

Word on the street had it that Tesla's $50 million deal with Toyota wasn't formal back in late May, but evidently things have made positive progress since. According to a new (though admittedly brief) report over at CNN, Toyota is currently working with the electric automaker on a pair of prototype vehicles. As the story goes, Tesla will be delivering two prototypes to

While we've no clue how widespread AT&T's generosity is, or how you might get one, it appears that the company's "most valuable customers" are now receiving free range-boosting femtocells. Today, loyal reader Jason got a old-fashioned paper letter in the mail, offering his iPhone-wielding family a 3G MicroCell with no strings attached.

Portraying the digital still camera as an endangered species has been a popular pastime for years in the cellphone industry, and with the high-resolution stills and high-definition video capabilities of the latest round of smartphones, the argument is more convincing than ever when applied to the casual snapshot. But this week at the World Expo in Shanghai, Canon -- a name synonymous with high-quality photography -- offered a vision of a device that not only supersedes the digital still camera, but will likely eliminate photography as we know it.

Word on the street is that only 170 Droid X handsets have leaked out from the mothership so far, but in the off chance you're in that elite group of early early adopters, it seems Verizon has cured a snag that was preventing you from activating the phone on its network.

Vapir NO2 Vaporizer Review: Cut the Cords and Get Portable

The Vapir is like many other small vaporizers, with one key difference: it's powered by a rechargeable battery, allowing you to bring it with you anywhere.

It's a neat trick. Most vaporizers require you to keep the thing plugged in to power their electron-hungry coils. A monster machine like the Volcano could probably never go wireless, but a smaller unit like the Vapir does quite well.

Select Your Terrain with the All-New 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee

Off-road or on pavement, the all-new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee adjusts to your driving needs. With an brand-new 290-horsepower 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6 engine, Selec-Terrain, and Quadra-Lift Air Suspension, your ride is fully-customizable.
Select Your Terrain with the All-New 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee

Pentastar V-6 Engine
Chrysler Group's all-new 290-horsepower 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6 engine boasts an 11 percent improvement in fuel economy for the Jeep Grand Cherokee, delivering up to 23 mpg and over 500 miles on one tank of gas. The all-new flexible-fuel engine is standard on the Grand Cherokee, and features Variable-valve Timing (VVT), double overhead camshafts and a high-pressure die-cast aluminum cylinder block in a 60-degree configuration.

The World's Tallest Tent Is 490-Foot High

This is the impressive Khan Shatyr, the world's tallest tent at 490 feet (150 meters).

Aluminosilicate glass. CNC-machined steel. A4. IPS panels. Unibody. Retina display. It sounds like jargon plucked from a stuffy science journal. But it's straight out of Apple marketing.

The iPhone 4 is a zenith for materials discourse in Apple's online marketing: Parts and process. How something is made, the actual process of putting it together, and what it's made of. They're justifiably proud of their baby.

The introduction video for the unibody MacBook Pro was an exegesis on the production of a notebook. According to Apple's implication, other companies' notebooks are made out of multiple parts, so they're weak. The MacBook Pro is made out of a single piece ofaluminium, Jon Ive informs us. It's CNC-machined. It goes through 9 milling operations. The video even shows us how it's done. A factory worker leisurely examines a unibody frame.

That original Motorola Droid looking long in tooth? Not sure what to do with it once you upgrade toIncredible, X, or even the progenitor's most direct descendant? Take a cue from Mike Partain, who threw in a Lego NXT Robot kit and some ingenuity to create a rather clever proof of concept. The building blocks serve as the bulk of the structure and motor skills, the phone serves as camera, GPS, and compass.

Yeah, it'd be far more egregious if Nikon lowered itself to using Canon gear for press photos, but even still, Sony should know better. And by "know better," we mean "remove telling EXIF data before hosting press shots up for the world to see."

No patience to wait until Q3 for an official Froyo build? Fret not, dear Desire owners, as udK_dev has managed to push out a near-perfect Android 2.2 port that's working spectacularly well so far. As you'd expect,

So this little number just rolled into our tips inbox -- and at a glance, it appears to be the anti-Droid X, if that makes any sense. We're being told this is the Motorola WX445 for Verizon (street name unknown), featuring Android 2.1, a flash-less camera of unknown pixel count, a touchscreen ranging somewhere between 2.5 and 3 inches, and a pretty light 1170mAh battery on board.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 has been rooted, all is right with the world

Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 has been out and about for some time, facing off against the competition and predictably getting ripped to shreds. Now it has reached the next natural step of its evolution: receiving the root treatment by a bloke at xda-developers.

Is this the honest-to-goodness iPhone 4 jailbreak we've been waiting for, or just another userland JB? It's hard to say from here... but either way, don't expect Geohot to release it into the wild. In a mildly jaded blog post,

Marty Cooper may have kept a fairly low profile since inventing the cellphone in the early 1970s, but he has been out in the public eye a bit more recently, and has now given a fairly lengthy interview to CNN in which he ruminates on the invention that quite literally changed the world.

Critix has been touting its "Nirvana phone" concept -- a handheld device that can be paired with a monitor / keyboard for remote desktop use -- for quite some time now. Back in February, the minimum hardware specs were nothing to challenging, and as it turns out, Apple's iPhone 4 pretty much exceeds 'em by a long shot. And it has VGA out capabilities and Bluetooth keyboard support. So, you can imagine where this is going.