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Alpha Industries has been a prime manufacturer of garments and outerwear pieces for the military. They were pivotal in redesigning the original flight jacket as well as reengineering the M-65 flight. With its strong military influence, it was only natural that Alpha Industries products made it to civilian wear throughout its history. One of the items in their current selections is the McGuyver jacket, an outerwear based on the the classic field coat but with a slimmer fit and heavy custom wash. It’s available in various colors at the Alpha Industries website.

Continue reading for more images.

Last week you were crying out for more ideas from Haier’s wall o’ ideas, so I swung by there on the last day of the show to see if there were any more hare-brained suggestions. I was in luck!

Of course, I’m willing to bet some of these ideas are taking the piss, but if at least one of them is actually serious, humanity is even more doomed than I once thought. Check out the first batch of ideas over here, if you missed them.

Is this guy for realzies?

Until Star Wars comes out on Blu-ray, I really don’t see the point.

The answer is: don’t buy a 3DTV.

Designers can have senses of humor, too.

I’d say judging by the smell of some CES-goers, they didn’t even bother with a catheter.

Spamming goes back to the pen and paper days.

Did anyone see a Dolby marketing guy lurking around Haier’s stand last week?

While phones don’t often fold, I’m pretty sure you can watch TV on them and they fit in pockets.

Dear god, please—no more!

It’s such a simple idea, why didn’t Apple think of it before?

Australians say the darndest things.

Has this guy never seen an iPod Touch, Zune or Creative Zen in his life?

I’ll leave you with the CES equivalent of your mother’s calendar. Enjoy.

by Terry Tamminen

Americans pride themselves on being ________ (fill in the blank with something like “biggest,” “best,” or “first”). Especially in California, we think we lead the world on carbon-reducing advances like ________ (fill in blank with “solar power,” “energy efficiency,” or “suntanned, body-builder, movie star, Austrian-born governors”). Given Obama’s U.N.-busting initiative in Copenhagen last month, our country may soon have more to brag about in the low carbon economy of the future, but for now, we might be smart to follow a few examples from India, Italy, and Brazil.

A company in India that once made plastic bags now recycles them for both environmental and economic gain. K.K. Plastic Waste Management has built about 700 miles of roads around Bangalore, mixing 3,500 tons of plastic waste with asphalt to form “polymerized bitumen.” These plastic roads withstand monsoon rains better, reduce tire resistance (which improves fuel economy), and last longer than traditional paving. The U.S. recycles a lot of plastic, but lately has had little use for it. If state and federal highway authorities mandated use of things like plastic roads, we could __________ (fill in the blank with “save lots of money,” “cut carbon emissions,” or “recycle my faded lawn flamingoes productively”).

In 2001, Italy’s dominant electric utility, Enel, launched a five-year program to install smart meters for some 40 million customers. By 2006, that $3 billion investment, including meters using technology from California’s Echelon (ELON), enabled the utility to offer variable pricing for different times of day, energy management information to consumers, and grid connection of solar power. Enel reports it is already saving about $750 million from the smart meters and will therefore payback its investment in four years. American utilities are just beginning to experiment with smart meters, but the Italian mass-marketing effort shows that the U.S. could _______ (fill in the blank with “use smart meters to cut carbon up to 30 percent,” “enable average customers to become renewable energy entrepreneurs,” or “make tons of money for American smart meter manufacturers such as General Electric (GE), Itron (ITRI), and Sensus Metering Systems”).

Finally, Brazil recently discovered massive oil deposits beneath 20,000 feet of ocean water and a layer of salt. Energy expert Daniel Yergin says this will be one of the most complicated projects in the history of oil extraction and may never get done because of the technical challenges, but the Brazilian government is going to be sure domestic workers and businesses profit from this discovery. Brazil has mandated that its government-owned oil company, Petrobras, own/operate the field and use mostly Brazilian oil rigs and other contractors to commercialize the resource. If the U.S. did something similar, we could _______ (fill in the blank with “put billions of dollars into American companies and stimulate economic recovery,” “generate tax revenues to balance state/federal budgets or to invest in low carbon alternatives to oil,” or “violate numerous global trade and tariff agreements and hope no one notices or cares”).

Americans have many reasons to be proud, but no matter how much we know, there’s always someone who can teach us new tricks. As Congress takes up climate legislation again in the New Year, it may be worth remembering that other countries could help us fill in a few blanks in ways that benefit both the environment and the rebounding economy.

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We’ve been dealing with the Apple tablet rumors for far too long and I can’t wait any longer. I find myself getting fidgety the closer we get to the rumored announcement of the tablet (or slate). We don’t know for sure what Apple is going to offer us, but we can be sure it will be the best mobile gadget ever made. How could it be less, given all the hype and posturing that has taken place? It does have the folks behind it who gave us the Mac, after all.

As we get closer and closer to the big announcement, whenever it will be, I’ve not been wasting any time. I have positioned myself to take advantage of whatever greatness Steve Jobs is going to offer me. I have cleaned off my desk, and I now have two prominent spots ready. One place for the slate, a prime piece of desk real estate in front of me so I can gaze longingly at it all day. The other spot on the desk is to be ready in case Apple makes a dock the slate can sit in while doing amazing things. Oh, that thought makes me giddy.

I know that such great technology, whatever it might be, can’t be cheap, so I’ve taken adequate steps to insure I am ready to grab one of the very first ones. First up, I sold my car. Heck, that decision was easy, I’m not going anywhere once I have the perfect device in my hands anyway. I’d have to put it down to drive a car, and that’s not going to happen. I also cashed in my kid’s college fund. He’ll learn more by watching me use the slate, anyway. It will be able to tap into all the world’s information, and I’ll pass on that to the kid. One day I might even let him use the slate, but that won’t happen for a good while. Maybe never, given how special I will feel the entire time I use it.

I don’t know what the slate will be like, I can only imagine. It is going to be wonderful, I know that for certain. It will make everything I do much easier than before. It will open up new doors I never even imagined existed. It will take me to places I could not go otherwise. It will make me a better person in every way. And I’ll look cool doing it. Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for whatever you’ll offer up. I’ll pay it gladly.

Note: no devices made by Apple’s competitors were harmed in the writing of this piece. Hopefully anyone reading this will understand that it was all in jest. Hey, I’m still exhausted from CES week.

Levi’s goes viral with a very fascinating project that allows for a simple cardboard box to act as a pop-up closet. Store your jeans, shirts, socks, and more, and all you have to do is flatten the box again to save space. The concept comes from the Moriterbrigade agency in Belgium.

Continue reading to view the video and see more images of the Levi’s Pop Up Closet.

Source: Ads of the World

Google has announced a rather bold move today: It will no longer censor search results on Google.cn, the Chinese version of the search engine. Apparently they will maintain this stance, even if it ends in shutting down Google.cn.

According to a post on the Official Google Blog:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Google explains that part of the motivation behind this action are the recent cyber attacks on Google as well as “at least twenty other large companies” over the course of the last month:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China

While it remains to be seen how the Chinese government reacts to this move, I couldn’t be prouder of Google for making it. I hope that other major Internet properties follow suit and that perhaps we’ll see an end of national filters and censorship one of these days. [Google Blog via Guardian]

What if we could outsource the manufacturing process to the very things we’re manufacturing? That’s the tantalizing promise of self-assembling systems, in which scientists use the laws of nature to get components to organize themselves into, say, a computer chip. Or in this case, a solar panel. Researchers have announced the creation of self-assembling solar cells that rely on the a principle known to everyone who’s ever made a vinaigrette salad dressing: that oil and water don’t mix.

The researchers’ efforts to made a self-assembling solar panel had been unsuccessful for years, because the components were just the wrong size. Above a certain size it’s possible to use gravity to drive self-organization; on the nanoscale it’s possible to use chemical processes, like the base pairing of DNA, to drive the assembly process. That leaves an awkward range of devices on the micrometer scale in between that aren’t heavy enough for gravity to drive assembly, but too big to be pushed around by substances like DNA [Ars Technica].

To get around this problem, the researchers designed a kind of conveyor belt. They made a solar cell substrate with regular depressions lined with low-temperature solder, which were designed to receive the individual solar cell elements. Each element had gold on one side and silicon on the other. The silicon side was painted with a hydrophobic molecule that is repelled by water, and was painted the gold side with a hydrophilic, or “water-loving,” molecule. When the elements were dumped into a vial containing oil and water, the elements neatly lined up in a row at the boundary between the two liquids. Each element had its gold side pointed towards the water.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how the solar cell took over the work from there. The conveyor belt process is to simply dunk the [substrate] through the boundary and draw it back slowly; the sheet of elements rides up along behind it, each one popping neatly into place as the solder attracts its gold contact. The team made a working device comprising 64,000 elements in just three minutes…. The method tackles what [experts say] is the most challenging problem – the proper alignment of thousands of parts, each thinner than a human hair [BBC News].

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Image: PNAS / Robert J. Knuesel and Heiko O. Jacobs

Filed under: Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store

Want to see past a ski resort’s lies? There’s an app for that. The iPhone’s ability to track snowfall at ski resorts has been well publicized (it even showed up in an official Apple commercial), but apparently there’s been an unintended consequence: ski resorts are actually losing money. The UK’s Globe and Mail reports that before iPhones existed, people would just call up to the slopes to ask them if there was snow on the trails — and the ski resorts would more often than not reply that there was, in order to pull in some more weekend customers. It was usually just white lies (no pun intended) — they’d usually say there was about 20% more snow than actually existed. But now that the iPhone provides a much more objective look at exactly how much powder there is up there, resorts are finding that they can’t push that weekend boost any more. And that’s cutting into their yearly profits as a whole.

Now, you may argue that resorts being held accountable is a good thing, and according to the article, most of the resorts themselves would agree with you: they weren’t in it to outright lie to people, because telling people that there was a foot on the ground when you can see grass would have an even worse effect on their business. But hearing from someone on the phone that the slopes are plentiful is a much different experience than seeing a number in an iPhone app, and it’s interesting that the difference is directly affecting resort profits in many cases.

Not that resorts have too much to worry about, especially the ones who have plenty of snow anyway. It just shows you how much the iPhone is still changing all kinds of industries in strange ways.

TUAWSki resorts busted by iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Hardware, Multimedia, Peripherals, Odds and ends, MacBook, Graphic Design

Now here’s a fascinating app — Inklet is a new Mac app by Ten One Design that purports to turn your Macbook’s trackpad into a tablet-style input. The program uses the multitouch trackpad interface to sense where and when you’re touching the pad, and then translates that into “drawing” marks just like a Wacom pen tablet. Unfortunately, the trackpad doesn’t have sensitivity built-in (it can only tell when you’re touching, not how hard you’re pushing), but with Ten One’s Pogo Sketch stylus, which I presume sends pressure information back to your Macbook somehow, you can get that “line thickness” functionality — press harder for a thicker line, or less for a thinner line. Pretty awesome. It’s not as big or probably as sensitive as a commercial Wacom tablet, but just for doodling and messing around, it’s a much cheaper solution.

Inklet requires Snow Leopard to work, so if you’re running anything pre-10.6, you’re out of luck. The software is $24.95, and their website has been brought to its knees by recent press, so you can download it from Apple’s site if you can’t reach it the official way. The Pogo Sketch stylus is only required for pressure sensitivity, but it’s a very reasonable $15. Like I said, if you’re like me and want a Wacom but haven’t had the cash or inclination to spend on it, Inklet could be the stepping stone you’re looking for.

We’ll have a full TUAW review of Inkjet within the next few days.

TUAWInklet turns your trackpad into a Wacom-style tablet originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Coupe, Hybrid, Performance

U.S.-based Revenge used the 2010 Detroit Auto Show to introduce the world to its Verde Supercar, and we were there with cameras in hand to capture the event on film memory cards. Honestly, we were impressed with the Verde’s outer appearance, though we couldn’t get close enough to see the interior or the car’s underpinnings.

Speaking of which, Revenge claims that the Verde shares a good portion of its aluminum chassis with the dearly departed Ford GT. Powertrain options are, shall we say… interesting. We’re certainly not complaining about the Roush-sourced Ford Racing V8 with 605 horsepower or the supercharged GM LS9 with 638 horses. It’s the Hp2g Hybrid drivetrain option that we’re a wee bit leery of… not that we wouldn’t love to believe that the V8 engine puts out 400 horsepower while running on E85 and returning upwards of 100 miles per gallon, it’s just that we need to see it for ourselves before we believe it.

Moving on, the bodywork is fashioned from aluminum and carbon fiber, which allows for a weight of 3,500 pounds. Performance estimates put the 0 to 60 time at between three and five seconds, depending on the powertrain chosen. Top speed will reportedly be over 200 miles per hour, with optional gearing that could potentially allow the Verde to hit 240 mph. Pricing is set at $190,000 and Revenge says it’s planning to put cars in paying customer’s hands later this year. We’ll see.

Detroit 2010: Revenge Verde Supercar adds mean to its green originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Budget, Hatchback, Volkswagen

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future, and cars keep on gettin’ bigger. The Volkswagen New Beetle was shown at the LA Auto Show in various Final Edition guises, and the second word on the next edition is that it will be built on the Jetta platform. The first word was that Volkswagen wants the bubbleback’s next design to be more masculine, which probably means – and this is just a guess – you can kiss that flower vase goodbye.

All of this rumormongering comes out of the UK’s Autocar magazine, who opine that an increase in size would also help up the masculinity factor and make for more room in that Leprechaun-sized back seat. The current Jetta’s wheelbase is 101.5 inches, whereas the New Beetle measures up at 98.80 inches. Those 2.7 inches don’t sound like a lot of extra room to play with – especially when considering the New Beetle’s rainbow canopy – but with some imaginative design and innovative packaging, a noticeable improvement doesn’t seem out of reach.

[Source: Autocar]

Report: Next Volkswagen Beetle to use Jetta platform originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s our picks of the best products or services from the Consumer Electronics Show, which ended Sunday after a five-day run in Las Vegas. We cruised the show floor, press conferences, and parties and came up with this list. Enjoy.

1. Que proReader, from Plastic Logic. This product — an electronic book reader with a plastic display — epitomizes what you can accomplish when you design a total solution. Plastic Logic did some fundamental work, starting a decade ago, on how to build a transistor on plastic. It raised $200 million and built its own factory to make lightweight displays that are less than a third of an inch thick. But the company also thought about targeting the business professional and exactly what that person would need, beyond the ability to read books. The 8.5 inch x 11 inch product can display books, magazines, newspapers, Adobe PDFs, and Office documents. The display uses E-Ink to show books in black-and-white, but it also preserves the look and feel of magazines and newspapers. USA Today, for instance, shows up on demand every  morning with its recognizable typeface. You can access your calendar, email or favorite documents from the well-organized Home page on the Que. The battery life can last for days. You can subscribe to numerous periodicals or buy books in the Barnes & Noble online store, where there are more tha a million books to choose from. The Que is pricey at $649 for a 4-gigabyte model and $799 for a 8 gigabyte model with 3G connectivity. But we hope the price can come down in time. For now, no one else can match what the Que does. Watch out, Amazon.

2. AR.Drone quadricopter from Parrot. We move from the useful to the merely entertaining. This helicopter-like robot drone is like something out of a sci-fi film. You can control it remotely using your iPhone, making it move up, down, or sideways by tilting the iPhone. There are four rotors that keep the drone in the air. It has two cameras on board (one in the front, one on bottom) that can use a Wi-Fi network to beam you video of what the drone sees. The machine has built-in stabilizers that keep it hovering in the air, and it even compensates for wind. It’s mesmerzing to watch as it floats in the air. The drone comes with two augmented reality games that make use of the fact that it can detect other drones and track markers on the ground. You can fight a gigantic robot that appears on the screen of your iPhone and circle around it to avoid its shots. You can also duel with other drones using your virtual cannons and missiles. It will be available this year. Price is to be announced.

3. Clickfree for BlackBerry from Storage Appliance. I never cease to be amazed at how small things can be so useful. Under the Clickfree name, Storage Appliance announced it could back up 16 gigabytes worth of data to a tiny microSD card that can fit in your BlackBerry. You can use it to back up your entire laptop or desktop computer. Backing up is easy. You can put the 16-gigabyte card in the phone and then connect it via a universal serial bus (USB) port to the computer. By using this, you can back up your data while you’re on the road. You can also back up data to a 16-gigabyte or 32-gigabyte SD memory card. Backup has grown 400 percent in the last few years as an industry, but the vast majority of consumers don’t back up their data. With devices like this, now there is no excuse for failing to keep a copy of your important Powerpoint presentation or your precious family photos. Look for the product in April.

4. Intel Wireless Display from Intel, Toshiba and Netgear. Putting the images from your computer screen on the TV should be dead simple. Too often, its a complicated process. With Intel Wireless Display, or Widi, the process is a lot more intuitive. You can use it to make whatever is on your laptop screen appear on the TV. You can use it to play YouTube videos, watch TV shows on Hulu.com, or use Skype video conferencing. There is no need to get an Internet connection to your TV. Right now, you can only get it on a limited number of models, such as the Toshiba Satellite E205 laptop available at Best Buy stores. You’ll need a Netgear Push2TV wireless adapter that plugs into the high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) port of the TV. This $99 box, available later this year, can receive a signal from an Intel-based $999 laptop (with a new Core microprocessor) with a new chip set that has a special flavor of 802.11n wireless networking. So far, the Blue Label 2.0 laptops such as the Toshiba computer will have the capability to send data via the Intel Wireless Display.

5. Skype video calls for flat-panel TVs. Both Panasonic and LG will be putting Skype’s video conferencing service into their newest web-connected TVs. The TVs come with webcams on top and you can operate Skype via a remote control. If a call comes in, you get an indicator on screen and can answer it if you want. The picture quality will be dependent on whether or not you can get a good broadband connection to your TV. But for many people, this could be a great way to connect. Skype recommends a 1 megabit-per-second broadband connection — less than the speeds of most DSL phone and cable modem connections. The video resolution can be up to 720p, or enough for high-definition quality. But I didn’t see any calls that came in that well in the ones that I watched. Hopefully, in homes with decent broadband connections, the call quality will be good.

6. Casio Digital Art Frame. The Japanese camera maker showed off a 10.1-inch digital picture frame that can take your family photos and turn them into works of art. In its quest to turn cameras and picture frames into creative digital imaging devices, Casio will let you transform photos intto eight different artistic images. The conversion is automatic, but the results can be very cool. You can upload them to a social network via built-in wireless networking. You can alter faces and expressions. The art styles include: Water Color Painting, Color Pencil Sketch, Pastel Painting, Pointillism, Air Brush, Oil Painting, Gothic Oil Painting, and Fauvist Oil Painting. The frame uses Adobe’s Flash Lite playback technology, which lets users display preset Flash content, such as clocks and calendars. The screens have two gigabytes of memory, an SD memory card slot, stereo speakers and a power-saving display that turns on when you approach. It will be available in the spring.

7. Lenovo Skylight smartbook. The smartbook is the latest gadget creation, a hybrid of a smartphone and a netbook (which is smaller than a laptop and is meant for cruising the web). Lenovo’s Skylight had a sleek industrial design that houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It doesn’t have Wintel, but the machine may be enough to do the job for a lot of people. It has Wi-Fi networking, 3G connectivity, a full-size keyboard and touchpad, a 10.6-inch screen and a full web browser. It also runs for 10 hours on a battery charge, with active usage. It’s actually thinner than many smartphones and weighs less than two pounds. It has 20 gigabytes of flash memory instead of a hard drive, two gigabytes of cloud storage, and it has 18 preloaded widgets such as Roxio Cinema Now. It costs $499 and will be available in April. The whole idea is to use the machine on the run, without plugging it into a wall. If you sign up for phone service, you can get a discount.

8. Intelligent Loudness Control, from Motorola and Dolby. This will be a feature of Motorola’s upcoming DCX set-top box family. It will use the commercial noise reduction technology developed by Dolby Laboratories. Hopefully, it will put an end to the accursed loud sound volume of TV commercials. Advertisers have been cranking up the volume of their commercials in a desperate attempt to get the attention of people who are probably skipping the commercials using TV anyway. That creates a jarring feeling for viewers, and ruins the attempts of parents who want to be able to hear the dialogue on TV but don’t want to wake the kids. Motorola will use Dolby Volume technology in its cable set-top boxes for the North American and Latin American markets. You can expect to see this one spread, if it really works.

9. Liquid Image Wide Angle Video Mask. This mask almost makes me want to learn how to be a scuba diver. It has a video camera built into the face plate of a diving mask. It has an internal 16-gigabyte memory, or you can put in a micro-SD memory card into a waterproof compartment of the mask. Then you can snap pictures or shoot video by pressing a lever on a side of the mask. It sells for $200 and will be available in June. It has a five-megapixel camera with a 135 degree wide angle lens and can record video with a resolution of 720p at up to 30 frames per second with audio. There are versions for skiers, climbers, and others. A 16GB card can record up to 5.33 hours of video or thousands of still images. It operates on two AAA batteries.

10. Sony Dash personal Internet viewer. This little gadget assumes that we all have our smartphones and computers. But it may still have a reason to exist because it enables casual use of the Internet. You can use it as a picture frame until you want to check something quickly without turning on your computer. You can use it to check the weather, the latest headlines, or your calendar. It has a 7-inch color touchscreen that can tilt like a photo frame. It also has stereo speakers; WiFi; and access to more than 1,500 apps from Sony’s Bravia platform, including YouTube videos, Pandora radio, Epicurious recipes, and Navteq traffic updates.

The apps are what really make the Dash more useful and customizable than a typical picture frame. It’s not the sort of device you take on the road, but it fits nicely in the living room. Sony plans to make the device available in April for $199.

Honorable mentions: Sony Bloggie, Samsung TicToc MP3 player, LG’s 6.9-millimeter thick flat-panel TV, the Yogen cell phone charger, and the Jaybird Blue Buds ear phones. Anthony Ha contributed to this story.

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