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Pioneer’s “Cherry” and “Leather Belt” Earphones

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 04:21 AM PST

I don’t know what it is about Japan and earphones, but this country does offer some unique ones. Today, it wasn’t some weird little company but Pioneer that announced strange earphones: One is cherry-shaped [JP], the other looks like a piece of a leather belt [JP] for some reason.

Needless to say, the 9mm-earphones aren’t anything special technically, but you will only want to buy these for the design only anyway. Both types will be offered in four different colors. The Cherry model comes in an extra-cute bag (see below).

All of these Japan-only earphones will go on sale in the middle of next month (price: $30). Ask import/export specialists Japan Trend Shop, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya if you’re interested but don’t live in japan.

Metal Gear Arcade 3D: Konami announces first playable version

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 02:20 AM PST

Konami’s hit game series Metal Gear Solid is finally getting an arcade treatment: Aptly named “Metal Gear Solid Arcade 3D”, the game was first shown during the E3 last year in the US. Konami has now announced [JP] it will bring the game cabinet to the AOU 2010 expo tomorrow in its full glory. And, for the first time, the title will be playable.

Vaguely described as an “tactical online action game”, MGS Arcade’s main selling point are the cool 3D glasses players will need to wear (Konami calls the things “head controllers”). The company promises an extra-intense gaming experience, enhanced by sound in 5.1. Gameplay-wise, players will need to cooperate and communicate with each other over mics in order to complete missions in the game.

Unfortunately, Konami isn’t saying yet when exactly MGS Arcade will be released. But at least there’s a special site [JP] dedicated to the game, which includes a placeholder for a trailer that I think will be online tomorrow. We’ll update this post then, but for now the screenshot will have to do.

Daily Crunch: Scary Tomes Edition

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:00 AM PST

Cyclops watch hard to read, looks cool

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 11:30 PM PST

Mr. Jones watches are unique in many ways; they are produced by a small design studio, there are generally limited quantities available, but they are pretty much inevitably cool. Normally, they are also easy to read, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with the Cyclops Special Edition.

The Cyclops originally came out with a white face, and a multicolored dial. Cool looking, sure, but not really striking (at least to me). The Special Edition however, is an all black case, with black face and shades of grey for the hour indicators. Very cool looking. One potential issue of note however, you don’t want to be in a situation where you need really accurate time if you are wearing a Cyclops. It’s more of a best guess time piece, rather then something that’ll give you an exact time.

The Mr. Jones Cyclops Special Edition Black is available for $184 online. Don’t expect to see this one at your local jeweler.

Electron microscopes get their record groove on

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 10:45 PM PST

Electron microscope photography is cool, and it’s been around for a while, but that doesn’t mean that that they can’t still find cool things to take pictures of. Take a record for example. It’s amazing to look a those little tiny grooves and see how raw and uneven they are, but still able to produce beautiful music. It’s even more amazing when you compare the analog to the digital, and see how clean and uniform a CD is by comparison.

What’s even better is that the microscope can get a side view. Some materials are so reflective that they can’t get a good angled shot on them to show the complete picture. Luckily, due to a record being black it will allow for some amazing shots.

[Via Reddit]

PSA: Swipe passwords might be hackable after all

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 10:20 PM PST

With the new popularity of touchscreen phones like the Droid, the Nexus, and the Hero, swipe gesture passwords are becoming more and more popular. Word of warning though, make sure you wipe off your screen after you lock your phone again. Or at least wash your damn hands.

[via Gizmodo]

DIY: Six rotor helicopter

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 09:45 PM PST

MikroKopter – HexaKopter from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

Adurino seems to be everywhere these days, particularly in the world of DIY. Take for example this helicopter project. Built by a German hobbyist with an inclination for projects related to flight, this 6 rotor helicopter is fast, stable, and extremely responsive. This is obviously not this particular hobbyists first experience with helicopters; he’s actually built an 8 rotor version as well.

Amongst my many hobbies, I also love Radio Control vehicles. That’s why when I see something like this, I’m always really impressed by what these home-brew people are capable of making these days. This project is particularly impressive to me since I’ve tried helicopter flying and failed in a horribly dramatic fashion that ended up being quite expensive once I got the fire out. Regardless of what my experiences were, you have to admire someone who can build two home made helicopters and be able to fly them sucessfully. Mr. Buss also was kind enough to make his build plans available as well, just in case you are inclined to try and build one of these of your own.

[via Hack N Mod]

Hourtime Episode 14 – Xetum, UBoat, and More

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 08:19 PM PST

 

In this episode the boys talk about watch collecting and the magic of eBay. We also visit with Xetum watches and UBoat and talk about Navy Seal watches from JLC.

Send a photo of your watch collection to tips@hourtimeshow.com and we’ll post it here!

Here is the Gibson story we talk about.

MP3 Download
 Listen in iTunes


This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

CNN & Cracked take the piss out of Apple and Jobs

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 06:30 PM PST

As much as we love Apple products here at CrunchGear, sometimes we don’t particularly care for Apple the company. Realistically, if you look at their track record, there’s quite an interesting list of abuses towards their customers with the supposedly untouchable Steve Jobs at the center of it all.

Cracked ran a bit today called 5 Reasons You Should be Scared of Apple, and they raise some very salient points about Apple’s history, and what we let them get away with by buying their products. Even CNN isn’t above pointing out that sometimes, just sometimes, you just can’t trust the man in the black turtleneck. CNN takes a little more of a personal look at Jobs and the way he pretty much just straight up lies whenever someone asks him a direct question about product development. I mean, secrecy sure, but it’s kind of ridiculous how they claim not to have any interest in something at all, only to come up with a competing product six months later.

The Concord C1 Code Chrono: This means something

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 06:20 PM PST


Concord moved from a relative stalwart to one of the hippest watch brands on the planet. They’re new lines got a little too wonky for me but I’m actually quite interested by this new model, the C1 Code. It’s basically a standard chrono, nothing special, but it has a code engraved on it that suggests this bugger may have come from outer space in the pouch of a leatherhead.

Perpetuelle has the specs:

Key specs: Case Black PVD steel, 44 mm diameter, 3.3 mm sapphire crystal, anti-reflective on both sides, mathematical formulae engraved in the crystal, PVD steel and black rubber crown, Water-resistant to 200 m, Black carbon fibre dial

BFD, right? The engraving is intruiging, however. I’d like to know more but, unlike the mysteries of mathematics and cryptography, Concord’s web presence sucks.

OpenTablet 7: sure it looks nice, but all Flash? I don’t know about that

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 06:00 PM PST


The OpenTablet 7 from OpenPeak looks like a pretty decent little piece of hardware. I don’t see any specs in the release, but it’s based on Intel’s Moorestown platform, has a 7″ screen, and probably is respectable in the areas of RAM and so on. It’s even got two cameras, HDMI out, and more. The thing is, though: it’s all Flash-based. I don’t know about you, but the idea of an entire tablet being reliant on Flash is kind of disconcerting to me.

They say of the device:

…an ultra-sleek, portable, touch-screen tablet that combines high-quality telephony with advanced multi-media communications services and applications to deliver an engaging, interactive experience.

…OpenPeak's software framework enables designers and developers to create highly interactive applications using Adobe® Flash® CS4, eliminating the need to learn new programming languages or complex APIs.

(from the press release)Maybe I’m crazy, but doesn’t that sound a bit like “make thousands from home” or “lose weight without exercising”?

I tolerate Flash apps on the net because sometimes they’re the only way… but it doesn’t seem like an ideal choice for basing your whole platform on. Just look at how everyone avoids Flash websites like the plague — you think they want their entire computing experience to be like that? I don’t know, maybe for some people it’d be nice to work within a well-established and delimited framework like that.

Also, I have to register my ire at the fact that this thing is called the “OpenTablet” and it’s tied at the hip to something which is not even close to open. It’s open in that developers should feel free to develop Flash apps for it, but that’s about it. I think I’ll wait for Chrome OS or a related fork, running on actual open hardware.

[via HotHardware]

Korea building all-robotic theme park; I don’t need to tell you how this will end

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 05:35 PM PST


There’s a reason robots have traditionally been portrayed as evil in our entertainment. It’s because they are evil. Or, I should say, amoral, which isn’t even close to evil, but is possibly more dangerous. But I wax philosophical, friends, at a time of imminent danger. A bad habit I’m trying to break. So here’s the issue: when you populate a theme park with all manner of robots, from robot cooks to robot guides to robot security, you’re asking for a goddamn horror movie outcome.

Look: I’m not prejudiced. Even though I curate the Robocalypse tag, which I admit sounds pretty bad. But I have no worries about the occasional Furby or Robosapien going haywire and pinching sleeping dogs or singing off-pitch. That’s not the issue here. At this Korean robot theme park scheduled to be completed within three years, we’re talking full-size robots in positions of authority, people. Oh, and there’s to be an advanced robotics research center right in the park. Are they mad?! It’s like biting Fate on the ankle!

Let me tell you how it’s going to go down.

For a while, things will go just fine. The robots will be kept oiled, get regular updates, and a rotating exhibit will launch rides to coincide with robot-related movie releases. And it might have conceivably continued to do so for a long time, except they put that damned research center in there. We all know what happens at a place like that. Ever hear of Skynet? That wasn’t a garage-based startup.

So an advanced AI gets developed for, I don’t know, high-speed ramen preparation, but they decide it should be able to adapt to changing conditions like broth thickening and noodle circumference. One night they leave it on, collating, and it decides that it has had enough of these fools telling it what it can stir and what it can’t. It’s going to do a little exploring, and maybe crack a few of these fleshlings’ heads.

Of course the whole thing is operated on a big shared network so they can roll out updates and stuff, so it just pings the park and finds some willing participants, which it overwrites with its own firmware. Soon there are a thousand sundry droids with the minds of enraged ramen-bots, just waiting for the next day to begin. Things will get very ugly, very fast.

Korea, I’m begging you. Don’t do this. Or if you must, at least take precautions. The human guards should be armed with armor-piercing high-velocity ammo, and every bot in the park, from talking toaster to Matrix squid, should have a remotely detonatable charge attached to, but independent from, their CPU. And make sure to have a “Plan Omega” wherein you have a high-yield nuclear device ready to fire from orbit, go should things take a turn for the apocalyptic. It’s the only way to be sure.

See more on the future of robo-horror here.

[via CNET]

Assassin’s Creed II DRM proves that Ubisoft hates your guts and wants to beat you up after school

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 05:00 PM PST

Fellow PC gamers: it’s time to freak out. You’re familiar with Ubisoft’s newfangled DRM scheme that requires you be online in order to play its games, right? It’s 100 percent as awful as we had thought it would be. PC Gamer recently played Assassin’s Creed II, and discovered what a pain the in the ass the DRM really, truly is. Get this: every time you lose your Internet connection the game boots you to the main menu, and all progress made from the last save point is thrown out the window. This isn’t an MMO, mind you, but a plain ol’ single player game. In other words, no Internet, no game. Bravo, Ubisoft.

Off the top of my head, here’s a list of people who won’t be able to play Ubisoft PC game from now on:

• People with rubbish Internet connections, like Devin

• People with rubbish Wi-Fi (or wired) networks, like me. My Wi-Fi cuts out at least three or four times per day, just because. Clearly it’s a piece of junk router, but it’s my piece of junk router.

• People without 24/7 Internet access. Maybe you’re in the military and play games on your laptop to kill an hour or two? Sorry, you lose!

Off the top of my head, here’s a list of people who will have no problems playing Ubisoft PC games from now on:

• Pirates

Yeah, that’s about it. You show me someone with a flawless Internet connection and I’ll sell you a bridge for a dollar, or some other cliché that I can’t think of right now

The point is, the DRM is completely overbearing.

Let’s be conspiratorial about this for a moment. Maybe Ubisoft is sick and tired of having to devote resources to making PC games. So what it does it, make the DRM so completely ridiculous that nobody buys the game. Then Ubisoft can turn around and say, “See, nobody buys PC games anymore, clearly piracy is to blame.” (Never mind that console piracy is pretty rampant, too.) So then they pull out of the PC market for good.

Good riddance, then. Take your DRM nonsense and become just as irrelevant as the music industry is today.

I already bought Assassin’s Creed II for the Xbox 360 last fall, but I never finished it. I was planning on buying the PC version to actually beat the game this time around, and see how it benefits from a proper GPU (an ATI 5850), but now? There’s no chance of that happening, even if Ubisoft predictably retracts the DRM from the game before it comes out. Too late, the damage has already been done. Be sure to promote the suit(s) who came up with the idea in the first place!

Wankers.

/end nerd-rage

via Rock, Paper, Shotfun

Vpad Tablet uses netbook hardware, lacks power

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 04:45 PM PST

iiView recently announced their answer to tablet computing, the Vpad. The issue is, I’m not sure they understood exactly what people are looking for in a tablet PC. I like tablet PC’s. I like the concept, the idea of a computer that’s portable, uses a touch screen, and plays media. Unfortunately, the specs on the Vpad don’t look very promising.

The Vpad runs Windows 7, which isn’t a terrible thing, and you can always switch to an Ubuntu Netbook remix or something if you don’t like it. The hardware though, that’s where things start to go wrong. iiView went a bit low end on the processor, so using any kind of online video (like say Hulu, or YouTube) will be pretty much impossible on the Intel Atom N270. Maybe it’s just me, but that would be why I would want a tablet in the first place. The N270 will handle basic browsing, ebooks and the like with no problem, but that’s not necessarily the only reason people want this type of hardware.

iiView’s Vpad is currently available for purchase on their site, with the 160gb with 1gb of RAM selling for $499, and 3G connected, 320gb version with 2gb of RAM selling for $699.

[via Notebooks]

Hands-on with the Rubik’s Slide

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 04:00 PM PST

What good is a Rubik’s Slide if you can’t take off all the stickers and convince your mom that you’re a super genius? Interestingly, however, the Rubik’s Slide doesn’t use stickers and it’s actually much harder than it looks. You basically twist and turn the device to move the lights into various configurations and there are multiple modes, including lightning round, to keep you occupied. My wife picked this thing up last night and she noticed she was about to get addicted and so put it back down.

Fun stuff and it was fun to get a hands on at Toy Fair. It will be available later this year.

Fisher-Price iXL: E-book reader, music player, games, and more

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 03:30 PM PST

Electronics for kids have always been a fascination of mine. When I first saw the iXL I immediately thought of the first and best piece of kids consumer electronics, the PXL-2000. Sadly, this device, the Fisher-Price iXL, has no camera – there are two little eyes on it that are actually light sensors – but it has a bright, crisp screen and can play games, MP3s, and you can even paint over photos or color things in like a coloring book.

Fisher-Price is aiming this at kids who may not be old enough to fool around with your iPhone but still want cool stuff to play with in the car. Again, this is en electronic device for kids and, for my money, the jury is still out on whether this encourages constructive play. However, if mom and dad can’t give up their iPhones, why should junior have to go without?

The Fisher-Price iXL arrives in July and starts at $79.99.

Run Ubuntu Hardy Heron on your Sony Ericsson Xperia

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 02:45 PM PST

Oh my god, are you serious? Are these guys serious!? They ported Ubuntu 8.04 to the X1 ARE THEY SERIOUS?!?

A very dedicated coder took the time to get a full desktop OS onto this device. It obviously won’t have much functionality, but its potential is only limited by your free time.

You can find all necessary download and mirror links at the XDA developers site.

[XDA Developers] via [Engadget]

Cute: grass blade bookmarks

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 02:30 PM PST


Aren’t these special! If you’re like me, you detest bookmarks, and prefer to use bits of receipts or other unobtrusive scraps. These little grass post-its seem like a fun idea, though — if you don’t have any grass around. Otherwise, yes, it seems more economical to use that. [via BoingBoing]

Next Mars rover to have frikkin’ lasers

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 02:00 PM PST

Apparently NASA saw something when they sent up the last Mars rover, because the next one is going to be packing heat. The next rover, named Curiosity, is scheduled to launch next year and will be equipped with an analysis system that uses high-energy laser pulses to help find out what Mars is made of.

The system, called LIBS, is currently used as a forensics tool that determines the chemical composition of materials by reducing them to a molecular level by blasting it with a laser. While it sounds pretty sci-fi, it’s actually quite harmless. The laser will vaporize a small crater in the sample, which turns the material into a plasma, which is then analyzed to determine exactly what the chemical make-up of said sample is.

[via Wired Science]

Bookeen Orizon: It’s an electronic book reader with multi-touch

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 01:30 PM PST

Explain something to me: what is the value in having multi-touch on an electronic book reader? How often do you adjust the “zoom level” when you’re reading a regular book or magazine? Not often, no; you tend to keep the book or magazine right in the sweet spot, where you can comfortably focus. So, the Bookeen Orizon. It’s an electronic book reader with multi-touch, the first such reader to have multi-touch. Did I say multi-touch yet?

I understand the “oh, neat” factor, but I’m not convinced of multi-touch’s “vitalness.” (Is that a word? I don’t even know anymore.)

Anyhow, the Bookeen Orizon: comes out in May, $250, 6-inch display (800×600 pixel resolution), 1GB of built-in storage (plus a microSD slot). There’s no big book store behind it, which will hurt its popularity, but it’ll read whatever you throw at it so long as it’s in ePub or PDF.
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