Asimo, Honda’s adorable humanoid robot, has been known to conduct symphonies and climb stairs, but what has he done for you lately? The new Asimo desktop widget maintains the little robot’s endearing demeanor while adding some new functionality. More »
The free Epicurious app for the iPad takes the impressive achievement of the iPhone version—packing Gourmet’s Big Yellow Cookbook into a finger-friendly format—and adds some serious garnish. Now the cookbook looks as delicious as the food itself. [iTunes] More »
Greensforged sells hand-made steel mouse pads. Their lineup includes the Cirque du Pwnage, the Teardrop, and the Hugepad. They’re all steel and they’re all badass. But the The Ravenholm, with a circular saw design, is the baddest-ass of them all. More »
Even if the PR2 is aware that other robots are out there climbing, drawing, and saving lives while it’s stuck at home folding towels, it doesn’t let it on. It just goes about its business, folding away, slowly but surely. More »
According to Digitimes, Hewlett-Packard and Dell have “significantly reduced their investments” in the development and production of 10″ Pine Trail netbooks. HP might cut the size altogether, Digitimes reports, focusing instead on its 11.6″ netbooks. Sales for the 10″ machines haven’t been strong—Dell’s 10″ did, however, win our recent review showdown—and with an increasing focus on Smartbooks, as well as, of course, the looming shadow of the 9″ Tablet That Shall Not Be Named, 10″ netbook sales don’t stand to improve any time soon. [Digitimes] More »
Current artificial-intelligence systems are typically one of two types: logic-based or probability-based. But an MIT researcher has developed a new language, Church, that combines the best aspects of each, and it’s making AI smarter than ever. More »
In today’s Remainders: feats of amazement. Superman’s first comic book appearance sells for $1.5m at auction; RIM posts its most impressive quarter ever; Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet performed…over Twitter; researchers create a full-screen Braille display; and more. More »
Expensive cables are a big rip-off. No surprise there, we wrote about it at length in our “The Truth About Monster Cable” trilogy in 2007. (1, 2, and 3.) But if you’re a visual learner, Mint.com offers this helpful infographic. More »
Plugging in your electric car willy-nilly strains utility companies and costs you money. Ford’s new vehicles will use Microsoft’s Hohm, a cloud-based application for managing energy consumption, to make sure you’re being smart about charging your electric car. More »
For those people who still have trouble figuring out which way to slide George into the vending machine, a prototype from Hitachi makes things a little simpler: it identifies caffeine-fiends by reading the pulse in their fingertips. More »
One thing’s a guarantee for this weekend’s iPad launch: there’s going to be some confusion.What is this thing? What does it do? Should I buy one? Your audience will have questions. We have answers. Here’s how to get in touch. More »
Sure, you could just give in to your overwhelming nostalgia for 1980s arcade game action and buy an authentic machine. But if you don’t have the funds, or the space, there’s another way: distilling them to their button-mashing essence. More »
In today’s Remainders: journeys. The Xof1 solar-powered saucer car readies for a trek across a Canadian ice road; analysts rain on the Verizon iPhone rumor parade; Google Buzz headaches reach the White House; planetary orbits, visualized and musicalized; and more. More »
If you saw the iPad’s SD and USB connector dongles and thought to yourself, “I swear I’ve seen those before,” well, you might not be crazy after all. They look exactly the same as the iPod’s camera connectors from 2005. More »
In today’s Remainders: the Dark Side of the Force. Boingo tries to seduce you with $2 Wi-Fi access; Fake Steve Jobs runs into TV show trouble; College Humor espouses the Galactic Empire State of Mind, and more More »
We-hell-hell, what have we here? It seems as though those placeholder SKUs that popped up in Best Buy’s database a few weeks ago were for iPads after all. Both TUAW and Engadget have some shots of Best Buy’s confidential “Apple iPad Launch Playbook”—their term, not ours—and the documents suggest that some 675 Best Buy locations will have the iPad available in limited quantities on April 3. More »
This is Tom Shannon creating one of his latest paintings. His process—swinging a giant pendulum rigged with six remote control paint guns over a canvas—is a marriage of chaos and control. His finished pieces…well, they’re incredible. More »
Exactly what Amazon has in store for the next generation of Kindle is unclear. But if they stick with E-Ink, this clip of a color, video-playing E-Ink display from Kindle screen-manufacturer PVI could be sneak peek. More »
Untraceable infrared links. Backpacks full of back-up transmitters. Cloak and dagger secrecy. Hundreds of pirate radio stations broadcast in London every day, but this 20 minute documentary shows that only the tech-savviest stay a step ahead of the police. More »
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