Boing Boing Gadgets

USB grenade flash drive

2009-11-18T01:47:32Z

Do you think the TSA would let you past security with this USB memory stick in the shape of an itsy-bitsy grenade?

All-in-one ectoplasm measurement device

2009-11-17T17:35:38Z

"Designed exclusively for paranormal investigators, this incredible tool has everything you need to track and detect the presence of ghosts."

How to destroy the market for used gadgets

2009-11-17T14:23:03Z

Microsoft permanently banned about a million hacked Xbox 360s from its online gaming network. Amid uncertainty--you can still play offline--the price of a used 360 collapses. Ebay's warning people not to buy them at all. But so far, some sellers are being honest: is $40 not a great deal for an otherwise working Xbox 360 that can't go online?

100-word fiction competition — win an HP MediaSmart EX495

2009-11-17T03:46:33Z

The prize is a $700 HP MediaSmart EX495 PC, set up as a Windows home server, with 1.5TB of storage and Mac/Time Machine support. The winner shall be chosen at arbitrary whim. Runners-up get something random from the gadget dungeon.

The theme is "Found in Space." 100 words long. Go!

MAKERS US launch at Harvard Bookstore tonight, 7PM

2009-11-16T13:47:27Z

Hey, Bostonites! I'll see you tonight at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Mass Ave) at 7PM for the US launch of my new novel, Makers! (New Yorkers, and Philadelphians -- see you later this week!)

US/Canada tour

Sound-copying technology and countermeasures, 1890-1978

2009-11-16T13:40:55Z

Ed sez, "Here's an article from 1985 in the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal about record piracy in the 19th century. Includes illustrations of three duplicators from the 19th century."

Record Piracy: The Attempts of the Sound Recording Industry to Protect Itself against Unauthorized Copying, 1890-1978 (PDF)

(Thanks, Ed!)

Apple patents anti-user attention-complianceware

2009-11-15T20:53:56Z

Apple's filed a patent on a design for a device that won't let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser's demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention.

It's amazing how many of these vendors fail to understand Chekhov's first law of narrative: "A gun on the mantelpiece in act one is bound to go off by act three." That is, if you design a device that is intended to attack its user -- by shutting her out of her own files and processes against her wishes and without her consent -- someone will figure out how to use that device to attack its user.

Or as Mitch Kapor once quipped, "Architecture is politics." Designing your device ecosystem for 1984 gives you...1984.

Cue Apple Fanboys who want us all to understand that the infallible and immortal Steve Jobs would only use this power to show us lovely, interesting, and informative messages that we're happy to receive in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1....

Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn't simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad -- it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener's attentiveness.
The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device "ad free" on a temporary or permanent basis.

Apple Wouldn't Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

(via Warren Ellis)

Cellphone contracts getting even better!

2009-11-15T14:32:36Z

Saul Hansell suggests that hated U.S. cellular carrier practices such as text message markups and fee-packed contracts ultimately give American consumers what they really want: predictable bills.

In pursuit of this we learn of the psychological "nuances" of pricing and the "supersized logic" of using fat overage fees to upsell customers to expensive all-you-can-eat plans.

"This year," he writes, "the deals are becoming even better."

His piece even claims that the industry would love to give up the adhesive contracts, early termination fees and locked-in subsidy handsets that it won't give up, even when threatened by congress.

Now all the carriers are selling heavily subsidized smartphones. They hate this state of affairs -- and wish that American consumers would just pay full price for the phones, the way people do in Europe.

Hansell's evidence for this is the iPhone, which was "unsubsidized" when it was $600. It only dropped to $400 and then $200, he writes, when they moved to subsidies. He implies that the iPhone launch was initially unsuccessful and that this shows Americans won't buy contract-free phones: "Consumers balked at the high upfront cost. By the second generation of the iPhone, Apple reverted to a traditional subsidy model."

For customers, however, the only practical option with the $600 U.S. iPhone was to activate it on the standard subsidy-payoff contract, with a compulsory data plan to boot. Whatever the unsubsidized payment arrangements between Apple and AT&T, the contract arrangements between AT&T and consumers always assumed a subsidy. In fact, my recollection is that AT&T itself wouldn't even sell you that "unsubsidized" iPhone without activating a 2-year contract on the spot. Buying one from the Apple store did not enforce activation, but everyday customers couldn't activate on other carriers (or on a pre-paid AT&T plan) without using warranty-busting hacks that emerged only later.

In fact, AT&T didn't market a no-contract iPhone until March, 2009 -- for $600-$700 depending on model, more than the original iPhone model ever cost "full price."

Throughout his piece, Hansell writes often of people's confusion. He claims that even economists find cellphone plans baffling. But they're not hard to understand except in the nickel-and-dime details. Hansell's repeated evocation of "confusion" is reminiscent of when characters in novels continually ask what's going on, or when they wake up in white rooms: it's because the writer himself doesn't know.

Excepting the Yale professor whose words introduce the article, the people quoted in it are carrier flacks and cellular industry analysts: a fair sign of a piece tossed off inside a snowglobe of PR.

Hacklab.to's laser-cutter really does play the Mario Bros theme!

2009-11-15T13:27:12Z

I owe the Hacklab.to people an apology. Last spring I ran this post about how they'd tuned the motor on their laser cutter to play the Super Mario Theme as it repositioned itself, and I mentioned that it was too perfect, and wondered "if it's not just some video of a laser cutter with a flanged-out version of the theme cut into the soundtrack."

Yesterday, I dropped in at the Hacklab in Kensington Market (it's an amazing place), and saw the laser cutter do its thing. And you know what? It plays an absolutely perfect Super Mario Theme. Seriously.

Laser etcher plays Super Mario. It's real! Hacklab.to, Kensington Market, Toronto, ON, Canada.avi

Homemade globe

2009-11-14T11:27:15Z

Davesbit made his own globe using maps from the Generic Mapping Tools project; he used a beachball for a mold and cast the sphere with fiberglass and foam.

here is the plastic beach ball covered in paint for the inside of the sphere-half mold...
the stand was made from scraps of red oak from a computer table i built...

globe with stand

(via Make)

Eyeball removal tool

2009-11-14T00:41:28Z

So this is apparently real (?!): an eyeball removal tool for "Reborn" baby-dolls. Holy creepy.

BEST REBORN EYEBALL-REMOVING TOOL I'VE FOUND!

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Previously:

Sony, B&N promise to rekindle rights for book owners

2009-11-13T17:30:21Z

I recently talked to Sony's Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer's respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won't: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. ... We're obligated to have DRM but we don't pull content back."

Sony's adopting the ePub open file format and encouraging DRM-insistent publishers to offer files that use a less restrictive scheme from Adobe. In doing so, Haber suggested that the worst case scenario would be 12 devices per account, effectively "books uncoupled from hardware."

Ebooks can also be digitally "loaned" free of charge for up to 21 days, from participating libraries. This works thought a deal with Overdrive, which facilitates such loans by backing them with hard copies.

Sony's new reader also features a 9" display, page-changing swipe gestures, annotations and a cellular connection to download new titles on the go. At $400, however, it's as pricey as the top-of-the-line Kindle DX that it resembles; Sony already has a new generation of cheaper e-readers out which lack the fancy features and big screen.

Barnes and Noble announced its own reader, the Nook, a few weeks ago. At $260, it's competitively priced and has a secondary LCD display. It also focuses hard on consumer-friendly features that Amazon seems unwilling to indulge: in its case, books can be shared between devices and even with friends. Not all books will be available, and shares are limited to 14 days at a time.

Without solid co-operation from publishers, Sony's adoption of ePub and B&N's sharing feature won't make much of an impact: what use are they if bestsellers aren't included? When the new devices appear and their associated stores are ramped up, we'll get to find out if the proposed changes make a difference--and whether Amazon can be reeled in.

Roomba Pacman

2009-11-13T11:43:25Z

The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

Home made Russian water purifier

2009-11-13T00:57:09Z

Take a look at this crazy home water purification system created by a 68-year-old retired engineer.

Above: "magnetic bottle. Plastic bottle with a magnet (I used magnets for the refrigerator). Here are removed from the water surplus of some metals."

Below: "Fig.6 Capacitance cereal saturation. Funnel neck of a plastic bottle filled with millet. Here the water is saturated with vitamins and gets incomparable flavor Russian fields."

Machine for water purification

Dress made with 24,000 LEDs

2009-11-12T20:30:28Z

This crazy-looking dress, created by two designers in London for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, is made of silk chiffon and 24,000 full color LEDs. It's called the Galaxy Dress. It runs on tiny iPod batteries woven into the fabric so no one part becomes extra-bulky or heavy. The catch: it uses as much electricity as two light bulbs and will only stay lit for up to an hour.

Designer duo create a dress with 24,000 LEDS

Holy water dispensers to combat swine flu

2009-11-12T19:54:06Z

No, this isn't about holy water as a miracle swine flu vaccine. Rather, some Catholic churches in Italy are replacing holy water basins with more sanitary electronic dispensers that spurt out a single serving of the magical fluid. From The Telegraph:

It functions like an automatic soap dispenser in public lavatories - a churchgoer waves his or her hand under a sensor and the machine spurts out holy water.

"It has been a bit of a novelty. People initially were a bit shocked by this technological innovation but then they welcomed it with great enthusiasm and joy," said Father Pierangelo Motta...

"After all the news that some churches, like Milan's cathedral, were suspending the use of holy water fonts as a measure against swine flu, demands for my invention shot to the stars. I have received orders from all over the world," (inventor Luciano Marabese) said.

Holy water dispenser combats spread of swine flu

An evening of confusion with Dell customer service

2009-11-12T13:00:00Z

Photo: ndevil

I got my Dell Mini10V in the mail yesterday. It's small and red and pretty, but I had one minor issue with my order. When I was personalizing my order online, it asked me if I wanted a 24WHr 3-cell battery or a 56WhHr 6-cell battery; the 6-cell was just $35 more, but had double the lifespan. I went with the 6-cell. As soon as I pulled it out of the box, though, I realized it was way too big to fit into my favorite bag. It was my fault; I had ordered the wrong thing. I called Dell's 1-800 number to see if they could process an exchange; it was the beginning of what turned out to be a baffling journey into the labyrinth of Dell's customer service phone line.

After a few minutes of hold music, I got through to a woman who told me I could return the 6-cell, get a refund, and then purchase the 3-cell separately. I wanted to ask her how much the refund would be for, but after telling me she'd email me a UPS label, she hastily thanked me for choosing Dell and then put me on hold so I could speak to a sales rep who would then sell me the 3-cell battery.

The sales rep was a soft-spoken woman named Jame. After asking me about three minutes of questions about what kind of laptop I had purchased and how, she told me I could buy a 3-cell battery for my Mini 10V for $129.99 + tax, how would I like to pay? Before I paid, I wanted to know how much I was going to get refunded for the 6-cell. She said it would be around $135, but she seemed unsure. I asked her to put me back on the phone with the person whom I had talked to about the refund so I could double check.

She refused. "I'd really like to sell you this battery first," she said.

I explained that I didn't want to pay $129.99+ for an extra battery for a $299 computer without knowing how much I'll get refunded for the one I was returning. She kept asking me why I wasn't buying the battery from her, and I repeatedly told her that it was because I wanted to confirm the return amount, and besides, I can buy it on Dell.com for the same price, free shipping, without spelling out my name, address, and credit card number over and over. Finally, she said:

"Ma'am, I didn't want it to come to this, but I'll tell you this, I want to make this sale. If you don't buy the battery, I won't get my commission."

"I understand," I said, politely at first. "But I really don't want to spend that much money without knowing how much I'll be refunded."

"I told you, you'll get about $135."

"Can you please just put me through to the returns person?"

"But then I won't get my commission," she said, refusing to hang up.

"That's really not my problem. Can you please just do your job and put me through to the returns department?"

"I am doing my job. My job is to sell you this battery."

"I'm not going to buy it now. Since you can't answer my question about the refund, I need to talk to the person I was talking to right before you, who might be able to."

"Then is it okay if I call you in 15 minutes to sell you this battery again?"

"Ok, fine, call me back later," I said.

The hold music again. A few minutes later, someone picked up, thanked me for calling Dell, and asked me for some information so that he could connect me to the right person. Two people later, I finally got an answer — I would get $35 for returning the 6-cell battery that retails for $149.99.

"But someone just tried to sell me the 3-cell for $129 and told me I'd get $135 back for the 6-cell," I said. This woman had no idea what I was talking about, so she put me back on hold.

To be fair, I rarely have a good experience calling toll-free customer service numbers for any company. But in the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with Dell, I spoke to about ten different people, listened to an hour of hold music, repeated my customer number, my order number, my address, my return authorization number, my purchase ID number, my phone number, and my computer's service tag number at least two dozen times total, and spelled out my name another dozen times. I got blackmailed into staying the phone with one person eager to make a sale and was commanded to get off of my headset (I'm not kidding — one guy literally yelled at me to get off my headset because he couldn't hear me) by another. At the end of the day, I was left with no idea whether I could exchange my 6-cell for a 3-cell and a conviction that these Dell customer service reps must be unhappy, untrained, underpaid, or all of the above. (I should also point out that I probably never would have encountered this giant battery issue in the first place if the Dell web site made it clear how big and how heavy the 6-cell would be — I mean, I knew it would stick out, but there was no image or metric given to gauge how much with.)

I talked to a Dell spokesperson this morning, who explained to me that the battery can't be broken out of the system and returned or exchanged separately.* "It's part of the components in the system, like the processor, the memory, and the OS; once you receive your system, you can't pull those parts out. Your options are to return the whole thing or to buy a new battery."

But of course! This made perfect sense. What didn't make sense was the wild goose chase that customer service sent me on last night.

*She also said they would use this incident as an opportunity to retrain their service reps, and that it has never been their intention to mislead their customers.

Photos: Disaster Area (Thumbnail) and Ndevil (Mini 10 battery)

8-way video card

2009-11-12T09:58:13Z

It's gadgets like this Matrox 8-way video card -- which lets you drive eight 2560 x 1600 displays at once -- that make me think seriously about going back to a desktop machine and abandoning laptops. If only I could find 1) room for eight displays and 2) a graceful way of using the home partition on my laptop as my desktop's home partition as well, without sacrificing speed (NFS), or having to reboot each time I sit down.

The Matrox M9188 PCIe x16 multi-display Octal graphics card addresses the need to visualize large amounts of data at once in order to effectively make decisions. The latest offering from the M-Series family is the world's first single-slot PCIe x16 octal card, featuring the ability to support both DisplayPort and DVI Single-Link outputs to ensure wide compatibility with today's monitors. With 2 GB of memory and advanced desktop management features, such as independent or stretched desktop modes, the M9188 drives energy, transportation, process control, financial trading, and other mission-critical environments with extraordinary performance.

Matrox M9188 PCIe x16

(via Red Ferret)

Bioshock Hypo replicas

2009-11-12T09:53:33Z

As Alice at Wonderlandblog points out, it's rare to see official merch as good as these Bioshock 2 EVE Hypos -- you usually have to find some fetishistic fan art. But this is an actual in-store tchotchke, and it's a corker.

(via Wonderland)

Kim Stanley Robinson's alternate time-travel life of Galileo, GALILEO'S DREAM

2009-11-12T09:49:07Z

Here's the Guardian's Alison Flood's detailed look at Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Galileo's Dream, a fictionalized biography of Galileo that features time-travel.

What he came up with was three different temporal dimensions - the first moving very fast, at the speed of light, the second very slow and "vibrating slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble", the third - antichronos - in reverse. We experience them as one, creating a three-way interference pattern, which accounts for sensations such as foresight, déjà vu, nostalgia and precognition. The compound nature of time, Robinson writes, "creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming". He's shown the novel to people who are "much more serious about the time travel stuff" and they're "having a blast". "They immediately map my three strands of time onto their system. They think I've partially discovered the real thing," he says gleefully...
So Galileo makes his telescope. He sees the Seven Sisters constellation, surrounded by "thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places ... No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment". He discovers Jupiter's four moons. He studies acceleration and motion. He observes sunspots. He frequently, frequently rings "like a struck bell" as his genius strikes: "Here it was, the truth of the situation - the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun ... Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang." He stamps on the ground after he is tried by the Inquisition for supporting Copernicanism: "'It still moves!' he said. 'Eppur si muove!'"

Kim Stanley Robinson: science fiction's realist

(Thanks, Robert!)