Tag: Digital
Thingiverse – share your digital designs for physical objects
This morning, while investigating a rather awesome-looking steampunk laptop stand, I came across the brilliance that is Thingiverse. It’s a site that allows you to share your designs and plans for the building of real-world physical objects. The idea is that you can use digital cutters and fabricators to cut out the object relatively easily, and voila – a new.. er.. thing.
The best bit about Thingiverse is that it uses Creative Commons licenses, and encourages people to use them. Combined with a recently-added ‘derivatives’ function, it’s incredibly easy to create designs based on other people’s work, or improve existing objects. The steampunk laptop stand was a regular laptop stand before someone added the gear design.
Thingiverse is a great site if you’re remotely interested in making things in the physical world. Although it’s a little clunky at the egdes, there’s tonnes of potential, especially as the tools for easily making the objects on the site become cheaper. If you’ve invented a revolutionary new coathanger, then head over to Thingiverse and tell people about it.
Thingiverse (via Likecool)
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Ion gear turns you into a podcast king, DJ star, and converts your old records too
Ion has announced three pieces of kit that could help turn you into a broadcast hit, as well as bringing your old record collection firmly into the 21st century.
The Ion UCAST lets you record professional podcasts with a high-quality microphone and stand, headphones, USB cable, and Windows/OS X software.
The kit costs £59.99, with a subscription to Alesis Podcast that lets you host your podcast and have it listed on iTunes and Podcast Alley…
One-eyed artist plans Borg-like installation of webcam into her spare eye socket
San Francisco-based artist Tanya Vlach lost an eye in a car accident in 2006 – now she’s planning to replace her standard-issue fake eye with a webcam. Preferably wireless – and with a 3x zoom. And infra-red support so she can see what she does in the dark.
Here’s what Tanya asked for in an advert she placed for a suitable technician for the job…
Become a renowned photography expert thanks to the Universal Photo Timer
The Universal Photo Timer definitely lives up to its universal tag. You can set it up to be triggered by motion, like the clever person who took that fancy droplet splosh photo to the left there did, by aiming the trigger sight at the area and letting it automatically take a photo when it senses movement.
Or, if you’re feeling arty AND dangerous, the thing can be set up to take photos via sound, so you may take pics of bullets going into watermelons if you’ve ever wondered what the insides of a watermelon look like. Or you can just have it take a shot when you tell it to, thanks to also having a simple wired remote…
DRM on Sacred 2: Fallen Angel encourages sharing
Now this is what I like to see. DRM that rewards customers who’ve bought games, not punishes them. The DRM system on a new PC game – Sacred 2: Fallen Angel – allows any purchaser of a full physical or digital copy the right to pass the game around as many people as they like. The recipients will get 24 hours worth of full gameplay before they have the option to either uninstall or buy the game.
It’s fantastic because it lets people who’ve paid for the game share their love of it, but still helps people buy it. Users who upgrade from a shared copy won’t need to do any more installing, just put in an activation code. A round of applause for publishers ASCARON, please.
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Pure intros EVOKE-2S portable stereo DAB radio
Pure has launched yet another model in its line of EVOKE portable radios, claiming that this is the best yet.
The EVOKE-2S features both analogue FM and DAB radio, and boosts sound thanks to PURE’s Clearsound technology, a completely digital system incorporating Class D amplifiers, digital audio shaping technology, and custom-tuned speakers…
Minox DigitalSpyCam – neither surreptitious, nor sneaky
Pictured to the right is the Minox DigitalSpyCam. It’s small, but that’s pretty much the only thing going in its favour. It’s just 3.2 megapixel, meaning that your phone can probably take better photos. It comes with a flash, but that’s even bigger than the camera, so although it’s still portable, it’s not exactly handy…
NOISE GATE: Lala launches idiotic "web song" concept
After the joy (and surprising popularity) of Spotify the other day, my palm is firmly back on my face thanks to Lala and their launch of “web songs” – cut price music that’s locked up tighter than a… actually I probably shouldn’t pursue that simile any further.
Lala is offering music for 10 cents a track. “Great!”, you cry. But wait a sec. The only way they’ve got the record labels to agree is to limit you to only listening to that song in your browser. You’re essentially paying 10 cents for something that you can get for free on Spotify, Last.FM, MySpace, or even YouTube, for god’s sake. As the unnamed head of a digital music service once said, “you want the world’s best on-demand music service? Go to YouTube and close your eyes…”
Sky adds iPlayer listings to Sky Player, but Discovery doesn't want anything to do with the Internet
Sky has just added listings from rival BBC’s iPlayer to its own content-catchup service, Sky Player. The new sections carry BBC branding, but just consist of links to play the content in BBC’s own iPlayer environment…
Spotify – stream all the music you could ever want
Gosh. I can get a bit jaded with all the rubbish new music services I get bombarded with every day, which is why it’s such a breath of fresh air when something comes along that ticks every single box. For me, Spotify is that thing. Spotify is a streaming service. It just streams, but by golly does it do it well. It has three things that set it apart from other, similar offerings – catalogue, speed and social functions…
