Hardware Beyond the Hype
This one for fans of Japanese WTF? It appears to be a speaker made from a nano box. I’m assuming it’s a kit for transforming your own expensive MP3 packaging into a speaker? A Google translation offers such Dada poetry as: “It stops biting, (the paper sounds) the speaker” (That’s the NAME of the product, BTW. Catchy.)
Thanks, Jay!
Hot on the heels of the new Stylus rotary tool, Dremel has announced a new Dremel Wokstation, a very versatile mount that can turn a Dremel rotary into a drill press, a sander, and other tool configurations where you want your Dremel firmly fixed for hands-free work. It can also be used as a stand for the flexi-shaft attachment. At U$45, this thing looks to be a great deal, if it’s as sturdy and useful as it appears.
[Via Toolspotting]
Here’s one from the “why the HELL didn’t anyone think of this before?” department. It’s a Dupont smoke alarm (US$33.95) that a lightbulb screws into. The battery on the detector charges when the light is being powered. When fully charged, the detector can allegedly work for 30 days without the need of recharging. I’ve seen emergency flashlights that charge this way, but never detectors. I don’t know about you, but I HATE changing the 9V batteries on screechy smoke alarms.
[Via OhGizmo!]
As you may know, Street Tech is now part of the Federated Media network. Each day, Federated puts together a page of “best of” excerpts from sites on the network. It’s a great bookmark, a way of keeping abreast of the latest developments in tech, the business of tech, Web 2.0, etc. As the network grows, and other sites of record are added, this “metablog” should become even more useful.
Last week, we brought you a story about Josh Ellis, a Net journalist who was passing the virtual hat to do a story on Los Alamos/Trinity Test Site (which is only open to the public two times a year). Pay Josh’s way and he offered to write a piece, take a butt-load of pics, and maybe shoot some vid. He got his target amount of platinum pieces and off he went.
The result is “Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age.” We definitely got our money’s worth. This is a really nice piece of writing, with some fascinating factoids about the bomb and the Cold War and some lurid local color, namely in the form of Ed Grothus, a nuclear bomb engineer (retired and repentant) who now runs The Black Hole, a surplus store/nuclear junk shop (in a decomissioned Piggly-Wiggly). You’ve got to see the video of Ed giving Josh a little tour of the place. It’s a riot (in a Dr. Strangelove sorta way).
I’d say this little experiment in Net-funded journalism was a roaring success. Where to now, Josh? I’ve got some extra whuffie in my account with your name on it.
Did you happen to see that dim bulb on American Inventor whose bright idea was “skins” for your car, outfits you could put on it to fit your mood or activity? Those otherwise equally-neuronally-challenged judges couldn’t get him out of the building fast enough. 
Well, who would want such a viral idea to go to waste? Vincon of Spain sells similar temporary skins for your home appliances. Don’t worry, we don’t get it either. Do you really want your washing machine to look like its made out of giant mutant coffee beans? And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had too much crummy luck with appliances to want to totemically associate lemons with any of them.
[Via Techie Diva]
According to an AP piece, Amazon and Barnes & Noble will not be showin’ the love for the forthcoming Sony Portable Reader. Fans of electronic books think the next-gen reader could be a turning point in the fledgling e-book market, and as you might imagine, that makes some dead tree booksellers a little flop-sweaty. Borders is a refreshing exception. They do plan to sell the device. While e-book enthusiasts are excited by the readable resolution of the new device’s screen and the respectable battery life, they’re not so psyched by the projected US$300-400 pricetag.
Bringing a personal computer into your living room sounds like a good idea and offers many advantages of PC/TV/Home Theater convergence, but controlling the PC (most of which are not designed for remote control) can be a challenge. The folks over at DenGuru are up to it, with an exhaustive look at six remote control systems that work with Windows PCs.
I nearly did a spit take of Java juice all over my keyboard this morning when I read that Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp, their upcoming application (which’ll be built into Leopard) for dual booting OS X and Windows XP. Check it out.
We keep hearing more and more about “nano” tech these days. Hell, the pants I just bought claim to offer “nano-care” that’ll help prevent wrinkles and reduce stains. As one blogger put it: “nano” is the new “turbo.”
It’s not all hype, obviously. Take “nanofluids,” a technology being researched at Leeds in the U.K. (among other places) where nano-particles are suspened in water or other fluid (which can then transfer heat 400% faster than a non-nano’d liquid). The resulting nanofluids offer all sorts of cooling applications, from cooling the hardware in super-PC processors to cooling the wetware in your cranium during major surgery. They could even be used to deep freeze cancer cells while leaving surrounding cells unaffected. Protein Feed offers more details.