Tag: tech Digest
SONOS announces multi-room music system for £699
Since not everybody has more than £699 to spent on a new wireless multi-room music system, SONOS has announced their new bundle will cost exactly that. The BU130 bundle from SONOS will include “a ZP80 which can be connected to an existing stereo or home theater receiver to instantly make it part of a digital music system; a ZP100 which can be connected to speakers and placed in any room; and a CR100 providing wireless multi-room control of all your music from any room in the house.” SONOS’s gear is compatible with Audible, Napster, eMusic, Pandora, Rhapsody, Yahoo!’s Music Unlimited, the Zune Marketplace and some other doubtless equally delightful vendors. [GT]
BU130 bundle from SONOS
Sign & Seal is magnetically adorable
I’m picky about my pens, but might make an exception for the cute little Sign & Seal that balances eternally atop a little plastic nose. In true seal fashion, courtesy of super-powered magnets embedded in its plastic body you can even spin the pen with the most tasteful little tap of your finger. $10. [GT]
Sign & Seal [via Nerd Approved]
Sensear protects your ears and fills them with knowledge
The Sensear noise-cancelling, audio-enhancing headphones use multiple directional microphones in order to reduce Noise Induced Hearing Loss (such as that experienced by rock musicians) and also uses a massive set of algorithms to filter out the nonsense and provide clear communication. It’s also Bluetooth enabled, so the wearer can wander freely (though will resemble someone on his way to shoot up a paper target). The Bluetooth also allows integration with your mobile so you don’t have to keep shouting “WHAT? NO, I DON’T WANT ANY CHICKEN LIVERS.” Release date is September 2007; price TBA. [GT]
Chinese scientists continue thumbing nose at nature
If rain approaches Beijing during the summer Olympics in 2008, cloud-seeders will go aloft with silver iodide to force premature rainfall to prevent it from reaching the Olympic grounds. China employs 1,500 weather controllers which have eliminated hail in almost a half million square kilometers of land and created 250 billion tons of rain since 1999. By 2010 China intends to institute a national command center to co-ordinate the China Meteorological Administration with the military forces used to enforce their whims on nature. Apparently Three Gorges Dam was just a side project! [GT]
KornTech's $1 million Rogun robot can get to know you
Korean company KornTech’s one-meter tall robot, Rogun, can walk (which is actually trickier than it looks), learn to recognize its masters’ faces and voices, and has a 7″ LCD in its stomach so that your children can think of it as a walking, talking TV. It can even route video phone calls through to its midriff if you like the idea of bending over to talk to people who aren’t even in your house. It may not really cost a million dollars; translating dollar figures can be tricky, but given what it does, it probably is pretty expensive for how cute it is. [GT]
Hitachi RFID chips sleeps on the Singapore fishes
Keeping track of what fish is which can be difficult when there’s only a few of them, and when you’ve got a whole aquarium featuring hundreds of identical swimmers it can be close to an idiot savant talent. Underwaterworld Singapore has streamlined the process by using Hitachi RFID dust to tag individual fish with a lightweight payload that lets aquarium visitors easily tell an arapaima from a pacu. When the fish swims past a sensor, the name of the fish is displayed. The system cost a little under £10,000 to set in place and will be extended soon to include their shark population. [GT]
Kawaii USB light-up critters from Sanwa Supply
Take your pick of bunny rabbits, hedgehogs, frogs and puppy dog Sanwa Supply USB-powered toys with colour-changing LEDs to perk up a gloomy real-world desktop. Their rechargeable batteries last 8-10 hours and, if you want to pretend these cute little doodads are actually useful, they have magnets in their paws for your paperclips. ¥3,129, which is around £12 each. [GT]
Sanwa Supply USB-powered toys [via technabob]
Finn courts say: breaking DRM A-OK (for a surprising reason)
Somewhat hilarious news from Finland: it’s legal to break DVD DRM there because their law only protects “effective” DRM, and “since a Norwegian hacker succeeded in circumventing CSS protection used in DVDs in 1999, end-users have been able to get with ease tens of similar circumventing software from the Internet even free of charge. Some operating systems come with this kind of software pre-installed. […] CSS protection can no longer be held “effective” as defined in law.” If “effective” means it hasn’t been cracked, doesn’t that suggest the DRM becomes unprotected as soon as it is cracked enough? As though vandalism might become legal if you tagged someone’s car thoroughly enough? Or is it simply that the Finns are too sensible to allow the letter of the law to coldcock the spirit? (Disclaimer: I’m a quarter Finn, and I’m devastastingly sensible.) This is not just a Finnish issue, however. “The conclusions of the court can be applied all over Europe since the word ‘effective’ comes directly from the directive. […] A protection measure is no longer effective, when there is widely available end-user software implementing a circumvention method. My understanding is that this is not technology-dependent. The decision can therefore be applied to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as well in the future.” [GT]
Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective” [via Boing Boing
Wall-mountable wireless printer
Ransmeier & Floyd have come up with a new concept in printers. You can hang this printer on the wall and the printout is displayed like a picture in a frame. A brilliant idea, although how exactly the printer is to be powered does not seem to be addressed (a rechargeable battery and wireless charger maybe? Are those things ready for prime time?). It wouldn’t be handy if I’m printing out my novel, but when I’m printing out my photos, I can see how they’ll look on the wall. [GT]
Multi Meter with spirit level and laser
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the right tool for the job, and the Multi Meter with spirit level and laser is a tool that’ll find jobs for you to do – it finds everything else! Able to locate hidden power cables (and whether there are breaks in said cables), test diodes-fuses-capacitors-heating-elements-and-light-bulbs, it can also test polarity on two cable AC lines and locate hidden metal objects like nails. Then it also has a spirit level and a laser level, and lasers that are actually useful are paradoxically the most fun (who doesn’t want to brandish their tool importantly and tell people they have important laser business?). Also includes an LED torch. £20. [GT]
Multi Meter with spirit level and laser [via Red Ferret]
