Author: Jesus Diaz

So, you don’t have $191,000 for that F1 car simulator you always wanted? Don’t worry: 1) take some Lego Technic, 2) grab an iPhone, and 3) invent a way to connect your brain to a hamster. [eblogx via RandomGoodStuff]

The Snow White MacBook decal is still my favorite, but as a macho macho man, I have to go with Tony Stark and his iron pants. [Etsy]

When I saw the Lenovo’s Android-based 3.7-inch touchscreen Lephone last week I was all smleh’ed. “Yet another touchscreen Android”, I thought. Now, looking at the shiny marketing shots, I want to lick it, pant it, and rub it all day.

It seems to me that, it has more personality than the Nexus One superphone. I like how the keyboard attachment looks too, although I don’t see myself using it. No announcement about its potential worldwide introduction yet. For now, it’s China only. [Slashgear]

“Oui.” That’s what Stéphane Richard—Orange’s Chief Executive Officer Delegate—answered to French journalist Jean Pierre Elkabbach on radio Europe 1, when asked about the imminent launch of the Apple tablet. And mentioned built-in web cam we heard about.[Updated]

Jean Pierre Elkabbach: According to Le Point, your partner Apple will launch a Tablet…

Stéphane Richard: Yes.

Jean Pierre Elkabbach: …with a webcam…

Stéphane Richard: Yes.

Jean Pierre Elkabbach: …would Orange users benefit from this?

Stéphane Richard: Sure! They are going to benefit from the web cam, certainly we will be able to, in effect, transmit images in real time. We are going to modernize, in essence, the video phone that we knew a few years ago… the size of the resolution, and the quality of the resolution will be better, and it will be available to all in France.

Jump to 6:15 to listen to it (in French):

Update: In an official statement, Orange has said that Stephane Richard’s words were “taken out of context” and that he didn’t acknowledge the existence of the Apple tablet.

However, the translation above is exactly what he said, with all the context. There’s no other mention to the Apple tablet before or after the above. So no, his words weren’t taken out of context, and they are presented as is.

Back in 2007, Orange CEO Didier Lombard spilt the beans on their iPhone partnership with Apple ahead of the official announcement, prompting the rage of Steve Jobs and an “official” denial by the Orange PR machine.

[Nowhereelse and moconews]

Proving once again that Apple’s iTunes approval process is absurd and futile, an app developer got his porn browser approved in under 12 hours, even with all the latest rules in place. The funny thing: Apple doesn’t know about it.

Until now, that is. Here’s what the developer told us:

I developed an app that is currently available in the app store. It’s called forChan and it is technically the first app with nudity that meets all of Apples requirements (hey, it was approved in under 12 hours believe it or not!).

It is a web browser/photo app. You have to enter URLs to browse different imageboards which do/don’t contain nudity. You can switch between categories to decide which uncensored content gets delivered to the
previous URL (blondes, brunettes, etc, etc).

There is currently over 100,000 pics spread between 15 categories with much much more coming soon.

It’s pretty simple. When you get the app, you can only browse a gallery of dogs. They are naked, but they are dogs, so unless you are into furry butts and lipsticks, all is fine.

But after pasting the image board URL, forChan allows you to browse through your favorite smut with ease, including full frontal nudity. While I haven’t seen any gallery with actual sexual intercourse yet, you can basically set this $1 iPhone/iPod touch software to browse whatever material you want. The app is 17+ and its description mentions nudity and sex, so Apple must know about it. However, no other 17+ iTunes Store app shows all the juicy bits.

Would Apple remove this app, like they did with BeautyMeter? That was a interactive application for teens, created to exchange photos and rate them. Porn was bound to happen. This one, however, is just a web browser for images. If they ban it, however, they will be consistent with previous cases: Any app that can be used to browse porn is automatically removed from the store.

But unlike previous cases, the software itself is truly innocuous until you enter a web address in the URL field (one could have argued the same about BeautyMeter, which was innocuous until you uploaded your bust or penis to ie). So, if they remove forChan, they will set yet another dangerous precedent.

I can think about another app in the iPhone that does exactly what forChan does. It comes from the factory.

Its name is Safari. [iTunes App Store]

As if streets didn’t have enough pandemonium, Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki has created a White Noise Machine. He put it in a street in Delhi, India, and this is what happened.

The White Noise Generator analyzes the sound coming into it, and spits it back at you as gibberish. Sometimes I believe that Times Square does this on its own, out of pure acoustics. [Designboom]

Brazil is one of my favorite countries. Cool people, great music, heavenly beaches, and caipirinhas. But if you have to buy a Mac, you are screwed. And like this graphic shows, it’s the same in other places in the world.

Brazil wins, however: The price of one MacBook Pro 17″ there buys you two identical models in the US. It’s the same with other Apple products, so if you can’t live without your Apple fix, you better move to another country.

I’d take the caipirinhas and the beaches, thank you very much. [cmyplay—Thanks]

Here’s a satellite picture showing why I spent 48 hours stranded in London Heathrow’s Terminal 5 last Thursday. I witnessed about 3000 passengers fighting for luggage, another 3000 waiting for hotel coupons. I left before the food riots.

This is Britain covered under the snow, from top to bottom.

I was lucky. I got the last seat on flight BA177 on Thursday. It was the last flight that left to New York that day, after an extra six hour delay (apparently, there’s only one defrosting machine in Heathrow) on top of the two days. The previous day, they canceled two of my flights. The next day, they cancelled all flights again.

While the weather was bad, there was no excuse to what happened at Terminal 5 those days. British Airways and the people at the airport were nowhere to be found after 6pm. Before that, there weren’t helpful, offering no directions except “we don’t know” and “they haven’t told us anything.” They were the most incompetent, most idiotic people I’ve ever found anywhere in the planet, leaving all their customers unattended on the evening, and treating everyone like cattle the rest of the time. There was a point in which passengers had to step in and organize the baggage belts, because the machines were overflowing and jamming. At another point, there were passengers fighting for food in the departures area. Sad.

When the guy at JFK’s customs asked me if I had anything to declare, I quoted Dennis Farina in Snatch, from the very deep bottom of my heart and soul: “Don’t go to England.” And don’t ever fly British Airways. [NASA]

[A lot of you have written to me in protest of Jesús’s post, claiming prejudice towards the British. I think the spirit of the post is Jesús expressing his frustration at BA, and his quote at the end of the post is from a movie, and a joke. Don’t take it too seriously. Have a good weekend. —Blam]

This is Sofia. Like the Italian actress, it will turn heads everywhere it flies. Not because of its cleavage, but because this Boeing 747 has a 15 by 14-foot door on it, which opens to reveal a 2.5-meter telescope.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy—which went through $500-million in modifications after two decades of engineering—has finally been tested after its construction, flying at 15,000 feet and 415km/h with the door fully open. The test was a complete success, and in 2010 they will start testing the telescope itself. [Flight Global]

Behold the smallest world map, created by the Photonics Research Group of Ghent University-IMEC. Its scale is one trillionth. That’s a 40,000-kilometer equator reduced to 40 micrometer, half the width of a human hair.

The map was embedded in a silicon photonics test chip, using a 30-step etching process. The chip has optical circuits, submicrometer scale “tiny strips of silicon called waveguides or photonic wires.” These developments will allow companies to integrate optics in packages that will be a million times smaller than today’s glass-based photonics. The resulting chips will allow for inexpensive integration of photonics in every technology, from consumer gadgets to medical equipment. What does that really mean? Think more inexpensive high-speed network connections—like Light Peak, non-mechanical gyroscopes, and holograms. [Intec ]

China keeps growing like a giant red octopus fed by nuclear power and monosodium glutamate, a country that keeps spending money in pharaonic projects. Some useful, like the fastest train in the world. And some eerie and worthless, like Ordos.

The city of Ordos was founded on February 26, 2001. Ordos means “palaces” in Mongolian, and it’s richer than Beijing. In fact, with a $14,500 GDP per capita, it’s one of the richest in the whole country. With 1,548,000 inhabitants, Ordos is not exactly empty. But much of its modern architecture, sometimes awesomely futuristic, sometimes nafftastically overdeveloped and underdesigned, remains completely empty. The density of this city is only 17.8 people per square kilometer. By comparison, New York City has 157.91 habitants per square kilometer, San Francisco has 6,688.4, and Madrid 5,293.69. Even the city of Dubai, which has only grew in recent years, has 408.18 people per square kilometer.

And yet, the city of Ordos keeps growing like its motherland, with no control and making little sense at times. If at all. [Wikipedia]

Google calls Nexus One a superphone, thinking that we’re all a bunch of imbeciles who would think it’s better that the rest of the smartphones. After all, “Superphone” beats “Smartphone”, right? Tell that to Batman. [JoyofTech—Thanks Robert Grossman]

Strangely enough, I saw this, and my first thought was “hmmm, can he rewind the tapes with his tongue.” Then I wondered how to escape from a man who can eat your head in one chomp. [Fuckyeahdementia via Obsolete]

It had to happen: The Nexus One got knifed in the name of science, love, and pancakes. Because if a pancake could talk on a cellphone, it would use a Nexus One to call the maple syrup.

I know, I don’t even know where the pancake came from. For some reason this made me hungry. I just want breakfast. [iFixIt]

There are times in which a single technical development turns the world upside down, fast-forwarding humans to a new era. The wheel, the printer, the steam machine, the combustion engine, the plane, the transistor, and now, Table Top Pong. [EvilMadScientist]

If you’re looking for the definitive comparison table between the Google Nexus One, Apple iPhone 3GS, Motorola Droid, and Palm Pre, here you have it. From storage capacity to price to plans. Guess who wins (you’ll probably be wrong).

My impression is that nobody clearly wins. Each of these phones have their own strengths and weaknesses, but there’s still not a definitive one. My favorite is still the iPhone just because the user interface design and the amazing applications—it’s not the number, but when you have 126,000 apps, inevitably you are going to have some amazingly good apps in each software category. However, in terms of specs, things are not that clear at all. At the end, it’s still a matter of personal preference. [Billshrink—Thanks Ricky]

What would happen if Angelina Jolie and Chalize Theron had a baby with Megan Fox, Monica Belucci, and twelve hot actresses? I don’t know if this would be the result, but I’d like to watch them try. [Thanks David Keyes]

Here’s the new Samsung Projector Phone showing off the newest Texas Instrument DLP Pico WVGA Chipset, which has a 845 x 480 resolution and a 2000:1 contrast ratio for projection sizes greater than 50 inches, depending on the ambient light.

The cellphone is just your usual 5-megapixel, AMOLED touchscreen device, but it’s the integrated projector what really gets my fluids going. These things are getting better and betterer so fast, that I can’t wait for the day I can project a THX-compliant 3D Indiana Jones remaster over the ass of this dude I have in front of me.

And now we interrupt our CES 2010 programming for some new Facebook religious jibba-jabba. We will resume the gadget spam in the next post. Thank you, thank you. p.s. Satan gives free beer and he has lots of hot jacuzzis.

What’s even more amazing and humbling than a latest Hubble ultra-deep field image? This panoramorgasmic 3.4-megapixel-wide image encompassing “12 billion years of cosmic history” in thousand of galaxies at different stages of evolution.

Click to get the full definition image

The image—which is the first of its kind— was created using two cameras from the Hubble: The new Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The WFC3 captures a series of images in September and October, after its installation. The ACS took them in 2004. After lots of post-processing and matching work, they came up with this overwhelming result. [NASA]