Meet Bat. Bat is an unmanned aircraft system with a 12-foot wingspan, short wave infrared camera, real-time moving target indicator, and dual payloads. In other words, this is what Batman himself would use for recon.
Northrop Grumman, the company behind the Bat series of UAVs has reported that the first test flights were a success, so Batman and governments will soon be able to order these things for their shady work. [Northrop Grumman]
These 1GB lightsaber flash drives may have been imported from Japan and they may light up when plugged in, but they still don’t feel quite right without some woosh-woosh-zzwoommm-zwing sound effects. Worth $20 without those? [ThinkGeek via Nerd Approved]
There are reports of Google CEO Eric Schmidt forcing his mistress to take down her naughty tell-all blog. Whether that’s the reason for its disappearance or not, we’re glad that our Gawker friends preserved some of the amusing details.
Former Forbes journalist Kate Bohner is supposedly the gal behind the now-deleted “Recovery Girl 007” blog and as the former mistress of married Google CEO Eric “Dr. Strangelove” Schmidt she had quite some stories to tell. You can read them over at Gawker. The best thing on that blog though though, was a commentary about a prototype iPhone and Steve “Stephen” Jobs:
I haven’t thought about Dr. Strangelove in such a long time-I try to sweep all of that data completely under the Persian carpet. That’s a lie. I think about him every so often in these fleeting cinematic flashes…I have completely stopped sleeping. My friend Jason is so worried about it that he confiscates my Blackberry… I’ve been sleeping with my Blackberry just in case Strangelove might send an e-mail. If I was really smart I ditch the Blackberry for the iPhone he gave me – the prototype version. But I have yet to arrive. Stephen Jobs is not St. Stephen. He’s just a stoned Jesuit priest lost in his garden. Strangelove still has his stranglehold on me and nothing is new under the sun.
This lady’s walking between panels of thermally-bonded polypropylene filaments which I keep thinking are giant dryer sheets. Either way, her body’s static charge is all that’s required to make the panels jump apart.
There’s no real purpose to this art installation set up by design group SpaceOperaFoam other than to use static charge for a pretty, dreamy effect. But that doesn’t keep me from wanting to run between the sheets to make them dance. [Dezeen]
This was Nikola Tesla‘s letterhead. It reminded us that along with the often overlooked little things which change our lives, we need the loud, filthy, slaughter-filled battles just as much. Like the dirty War of the Currents.
Just in case you’re not familiar with the War of Currents—one of my favorite messes in the history of electricity—allow me to catch you up. On one end of it all we had Nikola “Wizard of the West” Tesla, George Westinghouse, and alternating current. On the other hand was Thomas “Dirty Fighter” Edison and direct current.
The whole trouble began when the United States were ready to move away from Edison’s idea of direct current and try that newfangled AC. Dear ol’ Tommy couldn’t just sit back and let that happen. So, he did what any man in his right mind would do and started a smear campaign against the new system:
[He spread] disinformation on fatal AC accidents, publicly killing animals, and lobbying against the use of AC in state legislatures. Edison directed his technicians, primarily Arthur Kennelly and Harold P. Brown, to preside over several AC-driven killings of animals, primarily stray cats and dogs but also unwanted cattle and horses. Acting on these directives, they were to demonstrate to the press that alternating current was more dangerous than Edison’s system of direct current.
When that wasn’t enough, Edison got a bit more personal:
He also tried to popularize the term for being electrocuted as being “Westinghoused”. Years after DC had lost the “war of the currents,” in 1902, his film crew made a movie of the electrocution with high voltage AC, supervised by Edison employees, of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant who had recently killed three men.
Considering that we don’t refer to someone being shoved into the electric chair as a “Westinghousing,” I’d say Tommy didn’t do so well. Anyway, we’re not here to make fun of killing animals, Tommy’s lost war, or to brag about Tesla. The point is that a good idea—alternating current—wasn’t taken down by a dirty fight. And that, ladies and gents, is a #lifechanger.
Letterhead image from Letterheady. Some information from Wikipedia and the Nikola Tesla Museum
When on vacation and not wanting to tote around two laptops and three spare external drives, it’s nice to have a gadget to dump and view photos on. Sanho’s HyperDrive Album could be that gadget—if it weren’t overpriced.
The HyperDrive Album is supposed to serve as a way of clearing out your memory cards and backing up your treasured moments without a computer’s intervention. And it does just that with a 640GB capacity, 2GB per minute transfer speed, and a 4.8-inch display to double check that all went well. The trouble is that while the device’s speed and capacity are tempting, the price range of $350 to $600 for 160GB to 640GB is tough to look past. [HyperShop]
Sprint’s expanding its 4G mobile broadband service—also known as WiMax—quite a bit this year. They intend on making it available to a whopping 120 million people by the end of 2010. The lucky cities to be among the first in the rollout are:
Guess the rest of us will just have to be patient. [Sprint via Android Central]
After all the talk of Flash Player 10.1 and what it does to gadgets’ battery lives, the folks at FlashMobileBlog decided to take the old-fashioned approach to finding out how the Google Nexus is affected: Playing a lot of videos.
They found that “video can be played for well over 3 hours over Wi-Fi from YouTube in H.264 (Baseline 1.2).” One’s gotta wonder whether this is acceptable battery consumption or not, but the big idea is that we can extend that time by playing with configurations (backlight, Wi-Fi vs 3G, etc) and encouraging the availability of optimized content.
You can read more about what content providers can do to optimize content and about the various configurations tested by FlashMobileBlog at their site. [FlashMobileBlog via Carolyn Penner]
We’ve heard Steve Woz talk about the acceleration issue with his Prius and our friends at Jalopnik have been covering Toyota’s whole recall mess. The entire time software and electronics were blamed for the issues, but now Toyota President Akio Toyoda is telling the House oversight committee that “he is “absolutely confident” that the electronics of Toyota’s gas pedal systems are not the source” of these problems.
Guess it must be the floor mats again. [SF Gate]
Long ago, someone wrote about how Google is out to control your dog and marry your wife. I don’t know how right he was about all that, but I certainly know that Google Voice is out to ruin relationships.
You see, reader Pascal wrote us about a recent experience he had with Google Voice’s transcription feature:
I recently set up Google Voice on my wife’s new Nexus One, and today I was leaving work late and left her a voice mail whilst there was some background noise in the rain admittedly.
My message was supposed to be something like ” Hey babe, I’ve just left work, its about 7:15. I’ll see you at home. Bye. “
Pictured above is what his wife saw as a result of a voice transcription mangling. It reads like a dirty confession about Pascal’s upbringing, drinking habits, and age.
Of course I’m exaggerating about something like this ruining a relationship, but it could certainly create some temporary confusion. Especially if you call your girl to tell her about the “trucking stunt” you saw earlier in the day. [Thanks, Pascal!]
The latest iPad/iPhone SDK not only makes it easier for developers to build universal iPad/iPhone apps, but it also appears to have support for a front-facing camera, zoom, camera flash, and video conferencing. Oh, and some snazzy accept/decline buttons.
Keep in mind that the iPad SDK is the same as the iPhone SDK at this time, so we can’t really know which sections of the framework are intended for which device. Not to mention that Apple sometimes leaves some stray test conditions in the code and those may never make it into a final OS.
In other words? Let’s not get too excited here. [MacRumors]
I get a lot of emails from cruel, annoying, persistent individuals and I sometimes don’t know how to deal with them. If I had this little extra button in my email program though, boy-oh-boy-oh-boy. I’d be even more passive aggressive.
Maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t have this button after all. [Murray the Nut]
Ten 200 ton buoys—each measuring 150 feet by 40 feet—are being installed off the coast of Oregon to build America’s first wave power farm. They’ll power 400 homes by harnessing “the energy of wave motion.” Worth $60 million?
Of course, of course. Clean, renewable energy is almost always worth it. The trouble with wave farms is that they haven’t shown much success yet. They’re currently about six times as costly as wind farms, are easily damaged by large waves, and the first ones didn’t work out so well:
The world’s first commercial
windwave farm opened in 2008 in Portugal, but power production was suspended due to financial difficulties. Moreover, two years ago, a Canadian-produced wave power device sank off Oregon’s coast.
Yikes. I’m sure that in the long run we’ll start seeing positive results, but it looks like the path there will be long and expensive. [USA Today via Good via Inhabitat—Thanks to GitEmSteveDave for catching the typo!]
Doing the right thing by exposing a company’s shoddy product, customer service, or iffy privacy policy can have consequences. Our friends at Boing Boing just finished dealing with MagicJack and a groundless defamation suit because they were brutally honest.
You can read a full account of the events along with the post that started it all over at Boing Boing, but the ordeal boils down to this:
Boing Boing posted about MagicJack’s “terms of service-which include the right to analyze customers’ calls-and various iffy characteristics of its website” in April of 2008. According to Robert Beschizza:
The post was titled “MagicJack’s EULA says it will spy on you and force you into arbitration.” This EULA, or End-User Licensing Agreement, concerns what subscribers must agree to in order to use the service. I wrote that MagicJack’s allows it to target ads at users based on their calls, was not linked to from its homepage or at sign-up, and has its users waive the right to sue in court. I also wrote that that MagicJack’s website contained a visitor counter that incremented automatically; and that the website claimed to be able to detect MagicJacks, reporting that “Your MagicJack is functioning properly” even when none are present.
He also notes that “the post didn’t criticize the service or the gadget itself, which works very well.”
In March 2009, Boing Boing was notified that MagicJack was filing suit because “these statements were false, misleading, and had irreparably harmed MagicJack’s reputation by exposing it to ‘hate, ridicule and obloquy.’”
A great deal of back-and-forth followed until the suit was finally dismissed and MagicJack was ordered to pay Boing Boing “more than $50,000 in legal costs.”
We may think that all’s well that ends well and that the truth prevailed, but it took a great deal of time and legal costs. Perhaps a site smaller than Boing Boing could not have handled the effects of a defamation suit like this—justified or not—and would’ve given in to a company’s demands. And that’s more terrifying than some wonky EULA. [Boing Boing]
Apple’s making life simpler for developers with the iPhone 3.2 Beta 3 SDK which makes it easier to develop universal apps by allowing devs to easily update “existing iPhone projects to include the necessary files to support” iPads. [Apple] Updated again.
Update 1: Commenter apple1loop and others are reporting that Apple has pulled the SDK from their developer website. No word on why this happened just yet.
Update 2: Once again, apple1loop</a is reporting with an update, this time to let us know that the SDK is back up on the developer site.
Over the past few days we’ve watched app after app after app become a casualty in Apple’s gradual clean up of the App Store—a ban on nearly all titillating apps. Apple executive Phil Schiller finally explains what happened:
It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.
As those women ignore the existence of parental controls, Schiller continues to explain that Apple “obviously care[s] about developers, but in the end ha[s] to put the needs of the kids and parents first.” Somehow that’s supposed to help us understand why Sports Illustrated’s and FHM’s apps remain in the App Store:
When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.
So the lesson is that as long as your parents and grandparents recognize the brand, it’s acceptable wanking material? Or is it that if enough mums complain about fart apps then those too will be purged from the App Store?
As mentioned before, what’s sad about this is that in Apple’s early years, it was somewhat of a counterpoint to corporate computing for suits, by suits. They were supposed to make computers for people, by real humans. Founded by a man who asked potential employees when they lost their virginity as part of an interview. Today we have a company that has baby music in its commercials, like we’re all 10 year old idiots who have never heard the word fuck—let alone have fucked—and need to be protected from little programs that may have breasts in them. Then again, Steve Jobs knows his legacy and it isn’t sex apps. It’s great hardware and software.
But why the hell can’t gadget porn and real porn coexist? [NYT via Tech Crunch]
The year is 1982. Michael Jackson’s Thriller‘s climbing the music charts, E.T.‘s in the theaters, and a patch of land dubbed Silicon Valley is catching notice. The drug-fueled, theft-filled, innovation-driven culture of it’s pulsating to the beat of the future.
That year, National Geographic printed an article called “High Tech, High Risk, and High Life,” playing on the key elements of the atmosphere. You can read the full article here, but two parts—two predictions—stood out from all the anecdotes of success. The first shows the significance of Silicon Valley then and now:
Befriending the computer, and putting it to work and play in daily life a decade before most of us found the courage to touch a keyboard, Silicon Valley and its families may well be a glimpse of a computer-and-communications culture that is the prototype of the future.
For most of us, it might be difficult to believe that there would’ve been a time when communication through phone and fiber lines wasn’t the norm—that it was almost intimidating—for people of our current ages. In Silicon Valley though, it was becoming as common as it is now. Nearly 30 years ago, that little area was already rushing toward everything we love and hate about technology today.
It was also developing into a place that would survive all the failures it would breed with every success story as a quote from Sal Accardo implies. He remarked that “Silicon Valley will continue to be the cerebrum, a magnet for creative minds.” Not so far off, was he? We still gravitate to that western corner of the United States for our newest gadgets, for the hottest in social media, and for the strangest of startups. Old as it is, Silicon Valley is still giving birth to another generation of wild kids with even wilder ideas.
I recommend reading the full article over at Modern Mechanix for a stroll down tech memory lane and a few giggles over the way we spoke of the future back then, it’ll bring an odd feeling of familiarity. [Modern Mechanix]
Since 1997, a man has been keeping detailed track of his instant noodle consumption. Such detailed track, in fact, that you can read reviews of the 4,308 types of noodles he’s eaten on his website.
The website is in Japanese, so you may need to run it through a translation service. While you do that, I’ll be here and wondering what kind of health issues could come as a result of all the preservatives in a few thousand pre-packaged servings of instant noodles. [i-Ramen via Boing Boing]
Hotel rooms tend to have locks that use magnetic swipe cards—something reasonably high-tech and innately trusted. Bad news? A piece of bent wire can defeat these locks. Good news? A towel prevents such low-tech break-ins.
The tool shown in the video isn’t just a plain piece of wire, instead it’s a special “government only” tool, but I’m sure that something similar could be constructed or purchased through not-so-legal channels. The point remains that it’s a bit laughable that you’d have to resort to shoving a towel into your door handle when you leave your hotel room just in case some guy is smart enough to just circumvent the supposedly secure lock entirely. [BlackBag]
Since switching from paid iPhone game apps to a free-to-play model with in-game purchases, iPhone game startup ngmoco has managed to raise $25 million in venture capital funding. That’s enough to buy up another top developer and expand even further.
Freeverse, the company bought up by ngmoco, is is behind paid iPhone games such as Skee-Ball, Flick Fishing, Flick Bowling, and Moto Chaser. There’s no word on whether the purchase will lead to a change in the sales model, but it’ll definitely lead to us seeing the familiar ngmoco logo even more. [Tech Crunch via Business Insider]
