Author: Kyle VanHemert

If you have an old 8-track player you’ve been holding onto and feel like leapfrogging a few generations of music media altogether, here’s a handy guide on turning that old piece of junk into a shiny new iPod dock.

So you’re ready to upgrade from 8-tracks to 8000 MP3s, but you want to keep your sound system matching your lava lamp and your bean bag chair. Unplggd’s, advice, in short: find a working 8-track and cram a tape adapter all up in that piece.

It’s sort of like That 70’s Show—you get the novelty of the retro aesthetic without forfeiting the modern familiarities you’ve grown to love. Somehow I just compared your MP3 collection to Ashton Kutcher. [Unplggd]

If you’re looking for an edgier way to tune your axe—one that uses your sense of sight rather than that of sound—look no further than the Stimmmopped, a device that uses LEDs to keep your licks sounding sweet.

The Stimmmopped, which might be more fun to say than it is to use, bombards your guitar’s strings, one at a time, with two LEDs. The lights flash at the exact frequency at which the string should be vibrating, so if it’s tuned too flat or too sharp the LEDs will appear to move. When the string’s tuned correctly, the lights will look like they’re perfectly still.

This is, of course, how all the rowdiest rock stars keep their guitars tuned just right. [Make]

Clayton Boyer‘s intricate wooden clocks are, without a doubt, incredible works of art. But here’s what’s even more incredible: he thinks that with his woodworking plans, you’ll be able to recreate them yourself.

Yes, Boyer believes that anyone with a little determination can put together any of his clock designs, like the one shown above, the Celestial Mechanical Calendar and Orrery. “As far as skill level required,” Boyer explains in the frequently asked questions section of his site, “I would suspect that if one has the tools necessary that skill is not as important as perseverance.”

I’m not so sure about that myself, but thanks for the vote of confidence.

Boyer sells full schematics of his designs, of which there are a few dozen, through his website. Though some designs—the “hard” ones, ha!—are relegated to the Masochist’s Corner, Boyer thinks that even a beginner woodworker could handle his projects:

When I started building these, I had almost no skill whatsoever, but that always develops after getting a little sawdust into your lungs. These are not difficult to build, but they do take some time.

So if you have some time on your hands and are looking to make a little time with your hands, Boyer’s collection is definitely a good place, if a challenging one, to start. [Clayton Boyer via BoingBoing]

In today’s Remainders: possibilities. Bing hopes to expand its search empire by adding Yahoo’s results; T-Mobile looks to add WebOS to its roster; the next iPhone might get a Super AMOLED screen (it won’t); and porn possibilities abound for troops.

AMOLEDOMG
You’d think that OLED-display.net would be a trustworthy source for OLED-related news, especially when their info comes from “OLED industry sources,” but their claim that Apple’s next iPhone will use Samsung’s Super AMOLED screens isn’t very convincing. We heard this business in the run up to the unveiling of the iPad, too, and there isn’t really any indication that this newest report is anything other than idle speculation. It’s also noteworthy—or un-noteworthy, as the case may be—that the post ends with this bit: “the CEO of Rapid Repair believes also that Apple use Samsungs SUPER AMOLED in their next generation Iphone 4G.” Neither the grammar nor the sourcing of this sentence do much to help the rumor’s case. [OLED-display.net]

Posterity Tweets
As you probably know by now, your Tweets don’t stick around forever. Unless you’re Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary and Twitter n00b. After some debate on the matter, governmental lawyers have decided that Gibbs’ Tweets, like other forms of communication, will be recorded in adherence with the Presidential Records Act of 1978. To read Gibbs’ everlasting missives, check him out at http://twitter.com/PressSec. [Binghoo!
Today Microsoft and Yahoo were cleared to go ahead with their search sharing deal, which will push Yahoo’s search results into Bing’s corner of the internet. They hope to complete the cross-pollination by the end of the year, though the process could spill into 2011. Not much of a surprise here—we didn’t expect the Binghoos not to get clearance—so just keep in mind that your search world will be shrinking in months to come. Where’s that Jeeves when you need him? [Business Insider]

Fitting Palm To A T
According to the our precocious phone-loving friend, WebOS might be making its way to T-Mobile by way of a small, Pixi-ish handset. Okay. [Boy Genius Reports]

Porn Returns To The Front Lines
Back in 2008, the U.S. military banned flash drives, memory sticks and other forms of removable media because of the Agent.btz virus that threatened to compromise their networks. Though nothing much has changed in terms of the security threat that flash drives pose, the ban has been lifted, allowing soldiers to transfer data (read: porn) more easily amongst themselves. It’s sort of a bummer to read the Departa of Defense’s defeatist attitude on the whole matter of cybersecurity, though. One member of the U.S. Strategic Command explained:

Simply put, DoD [Department of Defense] cannot undo 20+ years of tacitly utilizing worst IT security practices in a reasonable amount of time, especially when many of these practices are embedded in enterprise wide processes.

If that’s how they really feel, I guess they might as well give the troops their removable media. And all the goodies they contain. [Wired]

At this year’s TED conference, Bill Gates discussed the importance of eliminating CO2 emissions, bringing out a jar of fireflies as an example of a living “energy miracle.” Now you can watch Gates’ entire talk—bugs and all—online. [TED]

In today’s bursting-at-the-seams Remainders: laziness. We’ve got a new Adesso keyboard for the couch-potato web surfer; a Taiwanese truck driver sleeping behind the wheel; a lazily conceived concept car; a demo that takes Farmville procrastination anywhere; and more!

WiMaxed Out
Every month or so we hear about a new fistful of medium-sized American cities that have been blanketed in the warmth of Clearwire’s snappy WiMax network. Although things are growing slowly but surely here, WiMax is apparently rolling out at a much more frenzied pace pretty much everywhere else. Here are some illustrative numbers, from our friend the Boy Genius:

* Asia Pacific: 237 million people covered by 100 network deployments
* Europe: 115 million people covered by 153 network deployments
* Central/Latin America: 113 million people covered 109 network deployments
* Africa/Middle East: 108 million people covered by 142 network deployments
* North America: 47 million people covered by 51 network deployments

But wait, these numbers don’t see 100% trustworthy. While 47 million North Americans might technically be in a WiMax coverage area, I don’t believe for a second that nearly that many are using the network. So sure, smaller nations with more densely packed populations would reasonably have more “covered” users, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate a worldwide WiMax phenomenon. That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to bask in the WiMax glow myself some day soon… [Boy Genius Reports]

Crash
I’m not sure when exactly this accident transpired, but for some reason this runaway bus in Taiwan was strapped with no less than three cameras—one on the front and one on each side. The first angle, shot with the camera on the front of the bus, doesn’t look too bad, especially to someone who has seen cumulative hours of YouTube wrecks and spent hours creating them in games like Grand Theft Auto. But when you switch to the side views and watch the runaway bus flip cars like flapjacks, then things get pretty gruesome. [YouTube]

Keyboard Potato
Adesso’s WKB-4200UB is their newest wireless keyboard, designed for maximum from-the-couch-computing laziness. It’s even got a built-in track pad for your greasy little fingers. But a real couch potato would know that wireless keyboards with built-in track pads have been around for ages and, besides its ability to work simultaneously with other keyboards, there’s nothing new to really get excited about here. Still, if you’re in the market for a new input device for computing across the room, the $120 WKB-4200UB is worth a look. [Engadget]

Typo$
You know how sometimes you type a URL incorrectly and end up on some fake portal that’s covered in ads? Well, according to two Harvard professors, Google could be making as much as $500 million a year from those typos. The practice of “typosquatting” is nothing new, and is something that most internet users probably just ignore altogether, as I’ve always done. But $500 million should make anyone’s ears perk up. But some ears perk differently than others—it turns out that one of those Harvard professors, Benjamin Edelman, is a lawyer who happens to be representing a lawfirm whose barely-misspelled URL is contributing to Google’s typo windfall. Edelman and Google are engaged in an ongoing case on the legality of typosquatting and selling ads to those who do so. Oh well, the typo money was good while it lasted. [NewScientist]

SkinnyTV
LG’s new Skinny Frame TVs are indeed skinny: something to the tune of 25mm. But while these television sets may in fact have a sharp enough edge to cut a block of cheese, they are not the skinniest we have ever seen, with some upcoming sets boasting a so-thin-it’s-almost-not-even-there single-millimeter thickness. These particular slabs support 1080p resolution and manage to pack 3 HDMI ports and a USB one for good measure. If you’re impressed, a 50″ Skinny Frame will run you $1500, if you can manage to import one from Korea. [SlashGear]

Little Giant
AeroGel. Carbon/Kevlar composite. Liquid metal. These are all things that comprise the “structural skin” of Chu Hyung Kwon’s concept automobile, a Transformer-chic ride with the ability to flip itself over if it ends up on its backside. Sure, sounds good—now to figure out how to actually implement any of those technologies anywhere other than Adobe Illustrator. [Yanko]

FARM. VILLE. TABLET.
We got to check out the Nvidia Tegra Tablet back during CES, but can you say you’ve really checked something out until you’ve determined its ability to play Farmville, the life-consuming Facebook game that’s taken the digital world by storm? No, no you can’t. Thankfully SlashGear checked out the Tegra Tablet in this capacity and can report that an adapted Farmville runs with satisfactory snap. Exhale. [SlashGear]

There’s a saying that a watched pot never boils. You could also say that a watched plant never grows—unless it’s being watched by a laser-wielding, 3D plastic sculpture-printing, growth-tracking megarobot.

David Bowen’s “Growth Modeling Device” uses a circular rig to scan an onion once a day with a laser, then employing a “fuse deposition modeler” to generate a plastic sculpture of that scan. When the model is done, a conveyor belt burps into action, moving the recreated onion out of the way and making room for the next day’s piece.

What you end up with is a visual record of the onion’s growth over the course of a few weeks—with no tears involved!

David Bowen has all sorts of other neat kinetic sculpture works up on his site. [David Bowen via Boing Boing]

If you don’t quite think you have what it takes to GoPro, now you have another option: GoBandit. This waterproof, GPS-enabled videocam can capture your finest moments in HD and then overlay the footage with location, speed, and altitude data.

In addition to capturing 720p video, you can set the GoBandit to take 5 megapixel snapshots every 2 or 5 seconds. All these extreme memories are recorded onto 2GB of internal memory, expandable by an SDHC card.

The GoBandit’s most attractive feature, though, is its ability to augment your video with information on your activity—so when you tell your friend, “I swear I was flying down that hill at 35 MPH,” you’ll have some hard evidence to back it up.

The GoBandit is currently available for preorder in the UK for $470, though apparently the bandits are hoping to hit a $389 pricepoint when the camera comes stateside. [GoBandit via Engadget]

If your children are a bit too at ease with insects, grabbing ants or putting ladybugs into their tiny chocolate-ringed mouths as they are wont to do, introduce your little ones to bugs’ terrifying, too-fast-to-keep-track-of nature with HexBug Nano Newtons.

We’re not unfamiliar with HexBug’s line of robotic creepy crawlies, including crabs, ants, worms and more—but the new Nano Newton might be the creepiest of the bunch. Whereas the other ones are big enough in size that they are discernible as harmless plastic imitations of the real thing, the Newtons are so tiny that at first glance they could just as well be radioactive cockroaches. And they act like it.

The Nano Newtons doesn’t so much move as they freak the fuck out, skidding around on their miniature rubber feet and bumping into things like real cockroaches would—if you gave them each a human-sized cup of coffee. They can even flip themselves over if they end up on their backs. Here is a whole intrusion of the Newtons, thankfully contained beneath plastic in a maze:

See?! Icky.

The first Nanos were out last year, but the Newtons come in collectible test tube packages with various different genetic “mutations” (read: colors). They’re available to teach your kids the important, lifelong lesson of insect-fear at Toys R Us or HexBug’s website for $9.99, along with special collectors cases and modular habitats if you really grow fond of your microbots. [HexBug]

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

The flagship toy in Jakks Pacific’s new SpyNet line is the Secret Mission Video Watch, a piece of wearable tech that lets spies-in-training covertly record video and audio and upload those sensitive materials to a secure website for further analysis.

For my generation, Macaulay Culkin’s use of the Talkboy in Home Alone 2 was the single most glorious realization of usable spy technology that we had ever seen. Following in its lineage, the chunky SpyNet watch—no, I don’t have baby hands—actually gives kids real spying capabilities: the ability to shoot up to 30 minutes of video, 2 hours of audio, or 2000 pictures with a built-in camera for playback on the watch’s color screen.

OK, it’s not going to be HD-quality, “enhance, enhance” type stuff, but from the demo I saw, the recorded footage is definitely good enough for some low-stakes familial blackmail. Your kid won’t quite be James Bond, but he won’t be the goofball from Get Smart either.

Anyway, the fun doesn’t stop at the wrist—the watch interfaces with a proprietary website that will allow kids to transfer their files online via the watch’s mini USB port and securely review their files online. There they can run lie detector software and video analysis, or download specially-tailored missions for use with their SpyNet watch.

The USB port also allows for the addition of accessories, like the SnakeCam for recording audio sneakily around corners.

The watch will be available later this year for kids who are ready to do some real spying. Or for grown-ups who can’t bring themselves to order real, professional quality spy gear.

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

With the era of the tablet upon us, eBook readers were the gadget du jour in a technological moment that is about to pass, if it hasn’t already. But your kids don’t know that, now do they?

The VTech FLiP, an eBook Reader geared towards preschoolers, is definitely a worthy gadget for a budding bookworm and might just pack enough bells and whistles to engage a text-ambivalent tot.

The Flip looks just like Mommy and Daddy’s eBook Readers but with a see-thru flip cover and a grabbable bubbly border. There are two colorways—a blue and a pink—and each has a matching backpack accessory that can be purchased separately.

The books themselves—a mix of franchise favorites like Shrek and Toy Story and kids book classics like Thomas the Tank Engine—can be loaded via cartridge or, eventually, downloaded directly onto the device. The pages are displayed on a 4.3″ color touch screen are all packed with interactivity—the device will read aloud and highlight words as it goes, and kids can play instructional games or use a limited, built-in dictionary to look up the tough words using the touch screen or the QWERTY keyboard.

The VTech Flip will be available early in the Fall for $59.99. Though by then your kid might want a full-on kiddie tablet.

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

Kaspersky Labs, a cybersecurity group based in Russia, was recently awarded the patent for a hardware antivirus device that aims to keep your computer secure by attaching directly to the disk drive, below rootkit access.

Software can always be compromised, and solution proposed by the mad geniuses at Kaspersky is to put an antivirus system deeper in your computer than your infected software can reach. Here’s the device, as explained the abstract for the patent:

An anti-virus (AV) system based on a hardware-implemented AV module for curing infected computer systems and a method for updating AV databases for effective curing of the computer system. The hardware-based AV system is located between a PC and a disk device. The hardware-based AV system can be implemented as a separate device or it can be integrated into a disk controller. An update method of the AV databases uses a two-phase approach. First, the updates are transferred to from a trusted utility to an update sector of the AV system. Then, the updates are verified within the AV system and the AV databases are updated. The AV system has its own CPU and memory and can be used in combination with AV application.

As some people are pointing out, the device’s lack of network access means that it has to be updated via some software, somewhere on your machine, which ostensibly is just as susceptible to attack as anything else.

Still, the idea of putting a teeny tiny shield right at the heart of my computer definitely makes me feel safer from viruses. And it would also probably be a lot less annoying than my current AV software. [PC Mag via CrunchGear]

I’m not one of those people who ever figured out the secrets of the original Rubik’s Cube, so it was with some trepidation that I tried out the Rubik’s Slide, the newest take on the classic toy. It was hard.

Instead of a cube, the Techno Source Rubik’s Slide is a thick slab with only one face. You’d think that reducing the number of blocks to keep track of from 54 to 9 would make things easier, but the slide provides its own unique challenges: the top of the slab can be slid up, down, left, or right to nudge the colored blocks in that direction or it can be twisted to rotate the blocks into a new orientation. When blocks get nudged over the edge, they pop back on the other side, like the tunnels in Pac Man.

It’s confusing when you try to explain it with words and only slightly less so when you see it demonstrated in action:

To play, you press a “check” button that displays a solution and then try to rearrange the blocks into that configuration. Not all of the blocks are lit at once—the less you’re managing the easier—and you can play against the clock or just see how many solutions you can rack up. As they’re solved, the puzzles give you more blocks to slide into the correct place.

My spatial reasoning isn’t the strongest, and even though my brain didn’t understand exactly what I was doing, I still managed to figure out a couple of the easiest puzzles after only a few seconds of playing with the toy.

Whereas last year’s Rubik’s TouchCube seemed like all of the frustration of the original with none of the tactile satisfaction, the Slide’s sliding feels pretty pleasing in your hands and keeps you wanting to fiddle even when your mentally spent.

The Rubik’s Slide packs over 10,000 puzzles and will be available soon for $17.99 [TechnoSource]

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

Boys love three things: sports, spies, and cryptozoology. At least that’s what Fisher-Price is banking on with their new remote control Big Foot, an expressive monster that can sleep, somersault, and stomp with the best of ’em.

Big Foot comes with a foot shaped remote that controls its movement as well as its emotions, including buttons that make him happy, angry, or sleepy. Each button has several routines, so Big Foot won’t always be the same kind of angry when you mash on the big, kid-friendly angry button. His different states of contentment are displayed with grunts, shrugs, and movable facial features including his nose, eyes, and eyebrows.

Some of the functions can even be stacked; you can make Big Foot sleep—he lays down on his back with his big feet up in the air—and then press “angry” to give the monster a bad dream. When it’s time for him to wake up, his long arms allow him to himself up with a backwards somersault.

Big Foot will be available in June for $100, if he doesn’t go back into hiding.

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

Fisher-Price’s iXL is a learning tool for young’ns that lets them read interactively, draw, look at pictures and play games—pretty much everything your kids currently do on your iPhone but without you having to worry about jam-hands.

OK, the chunky clam shell gizmo doesn’t owe much to the iPad in terms of physical design, but the applications it contains line up pretty closely with those of Apple’s tablet. While Apple has evolved past the use of any input devices besides the ones attached to your palms, the iXL is a stylus-based gadget, geared towards three- to six-year-olds.

There are six programs that come loaded on the device: story book, game player, music player, art studio, note book, and photo album. All of them are geared towards learning and interactivity: the story book reads out loud and lights up words as they go along; the note book helps little ones hone their handwriting by providing upper case letters to trace; the art studio offers easy options for drawing with brushes or stamps on a variety of cartoon backgrounds.

Some of the programs are intended for landscape orientation and others portrait, with a little monkey chiming in when the mini-user is supposed to turn it.

All of the programs work snappily and have some neat features, and while they’re intuitive to an adult, it still seems like this device offers an awful lot for a four-year-old to get the hang of. Adding to the complexity, more officially-licensed programs will be downloadable in months following launch. These, as well as audio files and pictures, can be loaded via USB or with the built-in SD card slot.

But maybe I’m selling kids short. In any event, if you’re hoping to get your kid started on the gadget-obsessed track early, the iXL is a toy to check out. It will be available in October for the nice price of $79.99

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

It’s 2010 and everyone is dancing. Well, maybe not everyone but at least Donny Osmond and Mickey Mouse, as I saw this morning at the unveiling of Dance Star Mickey, the newest plush incarnation of everyone’s favorite rodent.

Donny Osmond, reigning Dancing With the Stars champ, was on hand to unveil the new toy which, I’m glad to report, actually dances really well. Mickey stands about two feet tall and packs a lot of gear that makes him wiggle his tail with surprising fluidity. He gets down in six styles, including soul, disco, and techno, but sadly there’s no fist pumping in that last one. But he does squeak out some suggestions while dancing to pump up his audience.

His moonwalk ain’t bad, either. And despite his impressive dancing abilities Mickey doesn’t lose any softness on the outside, remaining cuddly as ever to the touch.

While Dance Star Mickey’s limber moves stole the spotlight, Donny himself couldn’t help challenging life-size Mickey to a little dance contest of their own.

Dance Star Mickey, whose moves are powered by two AA batteries, mambos onto shelves in October and will electric slide into your home for $69.99.

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

Yes that’s right, you can now be a certified couch potato anywhere you find yourself with the new update to SlingPlayer Moblie, which can play back your DVR shows and control live TV from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Do you hear a faint fapping? That’s the sound of thousands of iPhone and iPod Touch users who have been hotly anticipating 3G SlingBox streaming for the some time now, finally able to control their home TVs on the go. Full channel-changing and PVR support is included.

The app costs $30 or comes as a free upgrade for existing users and can be snatched up riiiiiight now on iTunes. [iTunes – Thanks David!]

Though the dust has hardly started to settle after the privacy shitstorm that immediately followed the launch of Google Buzz—Google claiming it was going to untangle Buzz from Gmail and then denying that it had any such intentions didn’t help matters—the Don’t Be Evildoers have in fact made some tweaks to the system. Here’s what’s changed so far:

As of this morning, private e-mail addresses that were left out there naked for all to see in @replies are now covered up by asterisks.

Starting this week, Google will switch its auto-follow function to a suggestion-based system.

Those fixes are a good start, but at this point it’s possible that Buzz’s bad vibes are so pervasive that people won’t be able to forgive and forget. At least not until Facebook’s next privacy blunder. [TechCrunch and Business Insider]