Author: Kyle VanHemert

Faced with an “unprecedented mobile response,” mGive and the Red Cross have collected over $10 million in relief for Haiti. With text donations pouring in at a rate of 10,000 a second, and average donations of $10 automatically charged to phone bills of mobile users, mGive’s system has proved essential for those looking to contribute.

For a full list of ways to donate, as well as how to avoid scams while doing so, check out LifeHacker’s guide.

It’s now also possible to donate via iTunes. [NewsDaily]

Here’s a Genius Bar horror story for you: Justin Barry, an apparently disgruntled seventeen year old, walked into a Staten Island Apple Store and typed this message on one of the display machines. He’s now facing seven years in prison.

I have threatened your store and all its employees with a bloody death … whoever the crew maybe working, or the innocent citizens that walk in … will be eliminated with the force of a… bomb loaded with C4, strapped to my chest.

Barry claims he was joking—he signed the threat with the name of a friend’s father—but he’s facing terror charges that could leave him locked up until his mid-twenties. With any luck he’ll be out just in time to get in line for the iSlate Nano. [MacWorld]

iPod docks can already be found on speakers, alarm clocks, kitchen scales, space heaters, lamps, cars, bikes and I’m sure in a bunch of other wacky things. Leaving no stone unturned, Buffalo is releasing the Dualie, a hard drive/dock combo.

The Buffalo Dualie probably doesn’t solve any problems you currently have, but it certainly makes more sense than some of those docks I mentioned above. The Dualie combines a docking station for iPhones and iPods of all generations with a 500 GB hard drive, saving you some desk space and coughing up two USB ports for your trouble.

The device allows for simultaneous iPod- and iPhone-syncing and access to the hard drive’s files. It supports USB 2.0 and FireWire, comes formatted for Macs out of the box, and is Time Machine-ready, though drivers for Windows are included.

The Dualie will be available exclusively at the Apple Store for $249.99. [Walyou]

mGive, a non-profit organization working with Red Cross to collect donations via text message, has announced that they have collected over $4 million for Haitian relief. Jenifer Snyder, mGive’s executive director, said that donations are coming in at the rate of $200,000 an hour, though they have capacity to take on more.

By way of comparison, Red Cross collected only $400,000 in mobile donations after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

To donate in increments of $10, text the word “Haiti” to the number 90999, or visit the Red Cross site for more information. [PhysOrg]

The Doomsday Clock, a metaphoric measure of the threat posed by nuclear weapons, biotechnology, and climate change, has been moved back one minute, to six minutes before midnight, signaling a more “hopeful state of world affairs.”

The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences cited the increased discourse on climate change and further developments towards a nuclear weapons-free future as the cause for dialing back the clock.

It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization — the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

This is the nineteenth time the clock has been changed since it was originally set at seven minutes to midnight in 1947. It has been as close to two minutes to midnight—in 1953, at the height of the Cold War—and as far away as 17 minutes to midnight, in 1991. [TurnBackTheClock.org]

New gadgets are the stars of CES, but there was a ton of gear behind the scenes that was instrumental to our coverage of the event. Here’s what kept us alive in Vegas.

Let’s get this out of the way: MacBooks. We all use them. Except for Rosa.* It hasn’t always been this way—a few of us are recent converts—but the fact of the matter is that Windows Vista couldn’t handle the multitask demands of the field—running 3G while switching from Photoshop to a video editor to 15 different open tabs in Firefox, dealing with God knows what Web 2.0-related antics all the while. Maybe Windows 7 can be a great field-reporting platform, but at this point, it’s all Mac.

We carried a healthy mix of Canon and Nikon (though admittedly on the high end, Nikon reigned) including the Canon 7D, Canon T1i, Nikon D3S, and a Nikon D700.

We used some great lenses too, from BorrowLenses.com, including one of our two Nikon 24-70mm f2.8, a Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 vrii, a Canon 35mm f1.8. The wide aperture lenses helped us shoot in low-light situations, and the zoom was great for picking up far-off demos, like Ballmer’s unveiling of the HP slate. The video we shot with these DSLRs surprised us with its uniformly high quality, and we needed a tripod, the Manfrotto 785 Modo Maxi proved to be a videographer’s dream.

When DSLRs weren’t around, we toted two Canon PowerShot S90s and one PowerShot G11, all of which packed some serious punch for point and shoots.

You’d think that internet connectivity would be a given at a convention with over 100,000 gadget-lovers, but bandwidth was anything but guaranteed at this year’s CES. To connect, we used a variety of 3G cards from Sprint, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, the last two of which were the most dependable of the bunch.

We also dipped our toes into the pleasant pool of 4G, first with the Clear Spot hotspot and then, briefly, with the Overdrive hotspot, both of which let several of us connect to WiMax at once. The connection cut out here and there, but when it did work, we were able to tether five machines all running at nearly 4 Mbps, with (mostly) no trouble. Clear’s USB WiMax modem doesn’t have drivers for Mac yet, so all of us except for the lone PC user were left to access the hotspots wirelessly.

For the most part, the Gizmodo team wielded iPhones, though AT&T’s coverage was often frustrating and we had to switch to EDGE to receive calls with any reliability. This made the two newly-minted Nexus Ones and the pair of Droids in the mix all the more covetable. One of those Droids tethered like a champion all week long.

We operate under the notion that every person on the team should be able to publish a story at any time, and because of this, we just can’t be waiting for the press room’s connections, or someone else’s camera, or a public computer to free up. All of this gear enabled us to capture the best moments of CES and to report them on a moment’s notice. We don’t know what we’d do without it.

Special thanks to BorrowLenses.com and also Canon and Nikon, for providing us with our camera gear; thanks to Clear for the WiMax Clear Spot, and also Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon for the 3G connections.

*while writing this, Rosa e-mailed everyone to ask what applications she should download. On her new MacBook Pro.

We’ve covered Life, BBC’s just-as-jaw-dropping follow-up to Planet Earth, a few times before. Mike Gunton, the program’s executive producer, offers more insight into how they made nature look so incredible.

In this clip, Gunton explains some of the cutting-edge technology that is instrumental to capturing nature in such an impressive fashion. In addition to the advances in time lapse high-speed, and low-light photography, Gunton mentions the development of the “Heligimbal,” a stabilized mount which allows photographers to fill an entire frame with action from over a kilometer away.

On the advances in macro photography, Gunton notes: “[There are] such advances that actually you don’t really feel like you’re in a miniature world anymore. So, for example, when you’re with a column of ants on the march, it feels like you’re with a herd of wildebeests on the migration…Emotionally what that’ll do is it’ll make you feel like you’re really part of their lives”

Mike Gunton will be speaking at the Entertainment Gathering conference in Monterey, California, next month.

In a brief post this morning reminding readers that cellular carriers do not necessarily get sneak peeks of Apple’s top-secret products, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber said that his (often reliable) sources suggest that Apple’s tablet will not have any camera.

Gruber, who has an imperfect but pretty solid track record on these matters, suggests that the Apple’s tablet will not be any sort of videophone game changer, as has been widely speculated. In fact, he hears it won’t have a camera at all:

And, for what it’s worth, I’m hearing there is no camera, webcam or otherwise, on The Tablet.

So if you were looking forward to revolutionizing the way you interacted with your friends and family across the globe by holding this thing in front of your face all summer long, you might be disappointed. [Daring Fireball]

In today’s remainders, the big and the little. A big quantum computer simulates a little molecule. A big series of tubes make a big difference at Stanford hospital. And a Big Brother ad makes me a little worried.

Quantum Time
Quantum computing, like Pilates, is one of those things that sometimes seems to offer more in theory than in meaningful results. In the case of the former, the tide may be turning. Chemists at Harvard University have used a quantum computer to calculate the exact energy of a hydrogen molecule, a finding that could only be approximated by conventional supercomputers. These traditional computers, working in binary bits of zeroes and ones, falter as molecular simulations become increasingly complex. Instead, the quantum computer works in qubits which can test configurations with both ones and zeroes, allowing for more precise models. Still, some might say that “meaningful results” have yet to be achieved. [Eureka Alert]

Half Past Cloudy
One of the makers over at Make has made this handsome clock which instead of telling time tells the weather. The weatherpiece checks for updates on the Environment Canada website every quarter of the hour via an Arduino micro-controller, its lower hand adjusting to the correct temperature and its upper hand swinging to show the day’s forecast. Though the clock’s case gives it a decidedly old-school feel, it hosts a web server so it can be tweaked from any browser. It may not dispense the most robust meteorological data but what it does display it does with style. [Make]

A Dose of Tubes
Your local bank isn’t the only place that’s zipping your information around using pneumatic tubes. This report on the Stanford Hospital’s pneumatic tube system reminds us that the very old technology is still very much alive today. Stanford’s system, which includes over four miles of pipes, is one of the largest in the nation. The containers navigate the complex system with computer guidance and reach speeds of up to 18 miles per hour as they send important patient data to and fro distant areas of the hospital. Dating back to the 19th century, pneumatic tubes are not a new technology, to be sure, but they are an important one. As Leander Robinson, chief engineer of Stanford’s system, puts it: “The tube is everywhere.” [Stanford School of Medicine]

Ad Watch
At seven and a half feet tall and packed with super-smart tech, not only do you read Intel’s Intelligent Digital Signage Concept, it reads you, too. Conceived by Frog Design, the multi touch-enabled, data-collecting, life-size advertisement (which we mentioned and showed briefly when covering Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s keynote at CES 2010) looks to make signage an interactive affair.

Intel’s concept engages shoppers with captivating graphics and a touchable screen and then uses a built-in camera to register their demographic data. Fast Company has a video of the gigantic advertisement, but thankfully it’s just a prototype and there are currently no plans for it to invade malls or your privacy anytime soon. [Fast Company]

Adventurous Droid owners looking for something new can now load their phones up with the yet-to-be-released HTC Espresso’s Sense UI update. If you have a rooted Droid, check out this guide for full instructions. [AllDroid via Redmond Pie]

MOTO Development Labs devised a simple method of analyzing capacitive touch screens using drawing programs. They put the iPhone, the Nexus One, the Droid, and the Droid Eris through the paces and proved not all touch screens are created equal.

Using only your fingers and a drawing app, MOTO shows how you can test out the accuracy of your smartphone’s touch screen. The test is simple: draw some slow, steady lines across the screen with your finger. If they’re smooth and straight, your touch screen is tracking with relative accuracy. If they’re wavy or jagged, your phone might not be giving your fingers the attention they deserve.

MOTO’s test showed the iPhone tracking the most accurately of the four, with smooth, straight lines. The Motorola Droid fared worst of the bunch, its crossing lines tracking so jaggedly that the screen looked like a jigsaw puzzle. The Eris and the Nexus One landed somewhere in between.

If jagged lines are the symptoms of a subpar touch screen, MOTO suggests that the affliction can be any combination of too large a sensor, too low a touch-sampling rate, or too inaccurate an algorithm. [MOTO Development Labs – Thanks Sabrina]

Death Calls the Tune, a project by German designers lab binaer, looks like a regular turntable, until you turn the lights off. Instead of playing “California Dreamin’,” this record displays text messages in phosphorus.

Rather than producing sound, this hacked record player produces light. By covering the record platter with four bands of light-sensitive phosphorescent paint and replacing the turntable’s cartridge with a LED light, the player creates beautiful bands of green that quickly spring to life and then fade away

A microcontroller determines the pulse of the LED cartridge, allowing for the display of individual letters and, in turn, the fading 50-character messages seen in the video. It’s just too bad this psychedelic project’s messages are so hung up on death and destruction. [Hackaday via Make]

Base jumping, one of the world’s most dangerous sports, is very cool. The Burj Khalifa AKA the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, is also very cool. The two together? Well that’s just God damn crazy.

See that little speck falling off that building? That’s either Nasir Al Niyadi or Omar Al Hegelan, two extremely extreme extreme sports dudes, flying all 2,716 feet down the side of the recently-opened Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

Head over to The Guardian for video of the amazing feat.

The video includes helmet-cam footage of the world record-setting, half-mile drop. One of the jumpers moments before taking the plunge: “You’re still looking at us like we’re crazy.” Uh, yeah. [The Guardian via @designobserver via Fast Company]

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued recalls on Acer’s AS3410, AS3410T, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ, and AS3810TZG laptops, all 13.3″ models, due to bad internal wiring of the microphone. Apparently three incidents of short circuiting have been reported, causing the laptop’s plastic cases to melt.

For more information, check out the CPSC website or contact Acer. [CPSC via SlashDot via Engadget]

The Tweets are flying with reports that upon connecting to Google’s free holiday Wi-Fi, people are getting redirected to Google’s Nexus One page. Smart, sure. But is it fair play, or does this self-promotion spoil Google’s charitable act?

Travelers are reporting that, in many airports, connecting to Google’s free Wi-Fi redirects browsers to the Nexus One home page at http://www.google.com/phone/. Between the iPhone’s ubiquity and the Droid’s aggressive marketing campaign, Google has to think outside of the box to stay competitive in the smartphone market. Plenty of people took advantage of Google’s generous offer this holiday season, and redirecting to the Nexus One page is a surefire way to raise awareness about the new phone.

This promo comes in addition to the Nexus One banner that was displayed under Google’s search box when the phone launched earlier this week.

When Google displayed a Chrome banner on their homepage last month, we wondered if it could alter the course of the browser wars. Could their considerable influence change the status quo for smartphone advertising as well? As Google’s empire continues to expand, this type of self-promotion seems inevitable. But does it leave a bad taste in your mouth? [TechCrunch]

D-Link’s giving your popularity the benefit of the doubt by offering 8 Ethernet ports on their new DIR-632 802.11n router. If you’re worried about all those open ports bumming you out, D-Link has 3 other new devices to check out.

If the DIR-632’s 8 ports seem like overkill, there’s the D-Link Rush (DAP-1560), the Touch (DAP-865), and a new 802.11n pocket router that has no epithet.

The Rush is a secure, powerful access point designed to beef up your current home network for bandwidth intensive content, like HD movies. The Touch, as its name suggests, has a 3″ touch screen for, you know, changing all those settings you change on your router. The pocket router can function as its own router or as an access point, extending an existing network.

The new routers will be available in the first half of 2010, and prices will be announced at launch. In the case of the DIR-632, that gives you just a few months to secure your LAN party RSVPs. [GDGT]

D-LINK ANNOUNCES THREE NEW 802.11n
WIRELESS HOME ROUTERS FOR GREATER SPEED,
DISTANCE AND PORTABILITY

The D-Linkâ Rush™ and D-Link Touch™ in Fast Lane of Home Connectivity; Wireless N Pocket Router
Provides Unlimited Mobility

LAS VEGAS, CES Booth 36232, South Hall, LVCC, Jan. 6, 2010 – D-Link today announced three innovative 802.11n wireless devices for the home – one that boosts network speeds to unprecedented levels for existing routers, another that combines high speed and range with stylish functionality in the digital home, and yet another that offers convenient wireless connectivity on the go.

The D-Linkâ Rush™ (DAP-1560) is D-Link’s fastest, most far-reaching and most secure wireless device yet. It takes home networking to a new level of performance for homeowners who demand the fastest streaming possible of high-definition content, such as movies, HD video and photos. There is no need to replace the home router – its unique 4×4 antenna design helps boost the power of any existing 802.11 a, b, g or n router with up to 600Mbps* speed and greater signal coverage.

The dual-band selectable device transmits in 2.4GHz wireless band for applications such as surfing the Internet or in 5GHz wireless band for HD media streaming, online gaming and large data file transfer. The latest D-Link AP can also be used as a wireless client to Ethernet-enabled media devices such as video game consoles, Digital Video Recorders (DVR), and Digital Media Adapters (DMA) for seamless access to the Internet.

The D-Link Touch™ (DIR-865) blends power, speed, range, security, functionality and energy efficiency into one economical and attractive router for homes or small businesses with ever-growing multimedia applications. It sports a 3-inch interactive touch screen for easy setup, configuration and management of the router and Internet traffic.
Its concurrent dual-band capabilities and three data streams support data transfer rates up to 450Mbps*, allowing users to stream HD content faster than ever before in the 5GHz wireless band, while surfing the Internet without lag-time and checking email on the 2.4GHz band. The 802.11n Wi-Fi router is backward compatible to earlier standards (802.11 a/b/g).

The D-Link Wireless N Pocket Router is an ideal travel companion featuring multi-mode functionality. It can be used either as a wireless router to create an 802.11n Wi-Fi network anywhere one is needed, or as an access point (AP) to add Wi-Fi to an existing wired network. It is small enough for travellers to carry with them, includes a travel case for convenience and SharePort™ technology to enable users to share USB devices. The device also can be used to connect an Ethernet-ready device, such as a desktop PC or Xbox 360®, to a Wi-Fi network for increased flexibility and convenience.

Lightweight and compact with its own travel case, the Pocket Router is small enough to carry while traveling and sets up easily to share an Internet connection or connect to an existing wired network in a conference room, hotel room or anywhere a Wi-Fi network is needed. It delivers powerful 802.11n performance and offers the latest wireless security features to help prevent unauthorized access.

Price and Availability

The D-Link Rush, the D-Link Touch and the D-Link Wireless N Pocket Router will be available in the first half of 2010 through the company’s network of retail and etail outlets, and at D-Link’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com. Pricing will be announced when the products ship.

What do you do when you’re stranded on a desert island and you’ve gone through the last of your bottled water? You save yourself and the planet by recycling those bottles into a DIY kayak and outrigger.

Bear Grylls eat your heart out. This Instructable gives you step by step instructions to building a recycled-materials kayak. It’s probably the most eco-friendly way of keeping yourself from becoming a raving, bearded maniac if you find yourself marooned on an uncharted island sometime in the near future.

This particular kayak was built for a recyclable boat race, but if you’re planning on a Man Vs. Wild adventure of your own anytime soon, this Instructable is a must-read. [Instructables]

With a 7″ screen and a book-like form factor, the Album2 is well suited for sharing your digital files in a non-digital setting. It was satisfying to hold, simple to navigate and kept the emphasis on content.

Instead of audio, video, and images, the Album2 sorts your media in terms of the actions “Watch,” “Look,” and “Listen.” But it doesn’t seem like it’s dumbing things down as much as it is simplifying them: the Album2 achieves a delicate balance between being a technically competent media viewer and a device that lets people enjoy their digital content without worrying about the device displaying it.

You can throw pictures, video, or audio in all the common formats onto the Album2’s 4GB HD via USB or SD, or access content from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other big name sites via WiFi. The three simple buttons on the right side of the viewer were the only controls, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone who couldn’t figure out the UI right away.

A leather cover attaches magnetically to the back of the Album2 and folds over as a stand, letting you rest the viewer on table like a digital photo frame. Whether standing on its own or being passed between friends, it’s nice to see a gadget that is focused on fostering physical interaction based on the digital media we collect.

The Album2 will be available in Q2 2010 with a pricetag of $199. [Album Life]

We know it’s tough keeping up with all the CES craziness. To help you cope, we updated our recap of the coolest stuff we’ve seen at CES: [Gizmodo’s Best of CES]