For 40 euros (around 52 bucks) you could just buy a bunch of old junk at the Salvation Army and destroy it in the comfort of your own home, but that's how much a junkyard in Spain is charging people for what they're billing as the ultimate stress-reducer: a chance to spend a couple of hours smashing away at discarded gadgets with a sledgehammer.
The headline in the The Times made us a little worried that someday we'd have to a face a world without celebrity spy photos, so it was a relief to read on and realize that the "privacy protection system" HP is working on—that involves a special wearable electronic badge that can stop digital cameras from taking pictures of people's faces—only works with "compatible cameras". (Sounds a lot like those methods for disabling the cameras in cameraphones.) They're billing it as a paparazzi-stopper, but could someone please explain why any member of the paparazzi, or anyone else for that matter, would ever buy a camera that someone else could disable?
[Via picturephoning]
Tag Heuer's been showing off a new concept design for a watch that's business up front, party in the back. Their new
double-sided MONACO Sixty Nine has a mechanical hand-wound movement on one side when you want to keep it old school,
and then flips around to reveal a quartz digital time piece when you want bring things into the 21st century. Anyone
else smell yet another one of those "It'll take you from the boardroom to the __________" ads?
[Via Reluct.com]
In an effort to reduce the number of hernia
patients instead receiving open-heart surgery, SurgiChip has fashioned an RFID sticker that can be affixed to patients
to help nurses and doctors verify what they're there for. The patient's name and site of surgery are digitally
encoded on the card, and readers decode the information. Rather than simply ask, "Where should I cut you?"
patients are then asked to verify the information on the chip. Imagine the hacking potential here: say you hate
some dude and he's going in for a basic appendectomy. Get in the system and sign him up for all sorts of fun
things. R3v3ng3 is yours!
PowerFilm have created a roll of solar material that allows one to recharge cellphones, cars, and other rechargeable electronics with a rollable solar panel. They're made by Iowa Thin Film Technologies and are available in three sizes with varying power outputs. The largest, at 12 x 73-inches, will put out 1.2 Amps and only weighs 1.9 pounds. Available connectors include cigarette lighter, battery chargers, and daisy chain connectors. Prices start at about $150. MMmmm. Sun juice.
[Via TRFJ]
Remember what we said about the Audio Backpack the other day? Um, forget all that, because Burton's Liquid Lounger not only matches the Audio Backpack's "backpack with built-in stereo speakers" thing, but then ups the ante by also helping you get loaded while on the go. Besides the speakers there's also a cooler compartment for chilling beverages, and includes a flask, a shot glass, a stirrer, a wine tool, and to top things off, a collapsable metal chair that you'll be falling out of after a few drinks.
See, those giant inflatable balls aren't
just for pilates sessions at Crunch, as proven by three students at the Interaction Design
Institute in Ivrea, Italy who created Collabolla, a Pac-Man game that is played using two of these giant balls
instead of a joystick. The inflatable balls send commands to a computer, and it actually requires to players to
cooperate together to play, with one controlling the left and right movement while the other controls the up and down.
We'd love to get a set (just so we can say we get exercise, since we never, ever leave Engadget HQ), but
since there is only one prototype right now, maybe they can hook us up with a how-to. It looks like there are just
a lot of touch-sensitive pads involved.
In case you missed any of them, some highlights from the past seven days of Engadget:
Features
Entelligence: People will live with DRM as long as it's done right
Why the Intellectual Property Protection Act is lame and what you can do about it
Interview with David E. Weekly, Founder of Coceve and www.IMsmarter.com
We're sorely tempted to file this one as yet another attempt to cash in on the hype surrounding nanotechnology, but
a company called NanoDynamics says they have a new golf ball made out of nanomaterials that can supposedly correct its
own flight path in midair and shouldn't wobble or break as much during putts. Nice, but could you just get cracking on
a robot that hits the ball for us?
[Thanks, Mike]
by Peter Rojas, posted Nov 19th 2004 at 4:52PM 
I'm not a great fan of slapstick or of Woody Allen, but no movie gadget series would be complete without the inclusion of the orgasmatron – the made-up gadget which has caught the publics imagination like no other, and continues to represent an imaginary benchmark for 'marital aids'. Sleeper, released in 1973, and typically loaded with the obsessions and neurosis of the time, is not such a bad film when you consider the competition in Comedy Sci-Fi – a genre that contains some of the worst excrement ever committed to celluloid.
We occasionally get to write about stuff that's been made to look like a dolphin, but we hardly ever get to talk about stuff actually made for dolphins, like this artificial fin that Bridgestone (yes, the Bridgestone that sells tires) created for a dolphin in Japan that had lost 75% of its tail from some mysterious disease. You'd think that Fuji, the dolphin they made the prosthetic tail fin for, would be grateful, but apparently she rejected it at first (it took her five months to get used to it), and even now they only keep it for 20 minutes day because, and we're not making this up, they're worried that it might fall off and that other dolphins would eat it.
Two researchers from the Kyoto Institute of
Technology have created electronic goggles that help blind people cross streets safely. The electronic eye
detects the location of a crosswalk using a digital camera and computer, then calculates the width of the crossing and
the color of assocaited traffic lights. The system worked 194 out of 196 times in tests. In those two
failures, the system mistakenly said there wasn't a crosswalk where there was one. Better that than the other way
around, we suppose.
We received a TON of email from readers
regarding yesterday's post about the Intellectual Property
Protection Act (which would outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials on DVDs, for example) that is being
railroaded through Congress and what they could do about it, and since we didn't have a very good answer, we asked
Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation if she could provide a little more detail about the issues involved
and some information about what you can do to help stop this bill from passing into law:The first problem with the omnibus intellectual property bill barreling through Congress' lame duck session this week is figuring out what's in it. That's because the bill is a ragtag collection of bills whose special interest backers couldn't get them through during Congress' ordinary session. So now, they're trying again, hoping that their bills will face less public scrutiny in the rush to close the session.
Another one of those concept designs that we're hoping we'll actually be able to buy someday, WATCH PAPER is
basically a clock that's attached onto ordinary paper with a heat sensitive coating so that the numbers blur into one
another as the minutes and hours pass.
[Via Near Near Future]
Yamaha's new Disklavier Mark IV player piano looks pretty much just like any other baby grand piano, except with one difference: you can hook it up to your home wireless network. Alongside all of the strings and felt hammers, they've added a bunch of circuitry and a WiFi connection to the Disklavier Mark IV so you can wirelessly control the piano and what it plays from a WiFi-enabled Pocket PC or Tablet PC. There's even a hard drive for storing all the songs you want it to play, and they also include their SmartKey technology to help you learn how to play the piano, with the Disklavier Mark IV moving the key you're supposed to press and then waiting for your to strike it.
