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Video: Dos Equis shows us the most interesting use of QR Codes in the world

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 12:00 PM PDT

Somehow or other I found myself at a Dos Equis dealie the other day. And while I had zero in common with anyone else there—apparently trying to talk about the Dragon Quest lineage doesn't work well at these things—I did spy several QR Code stations. Surely you've heard of QR Codes?

They're the things that sorta look like rorschach tests that you may have seen at bus stops and the like. As you can see in the hastily cut video here, guests flash one of several different QR Code cards in front of a camera—not sure why some people all night long were trying to have the television monitor read the card when the camera was clearly marked—and up several safari-themed objects. Snakes, Olmec heads, treasure chests, etc.

I thought it was neat.

No, I did not get to meet the World's Most Interesting Man since I had to leave pretty quickly. Maybe next time.

Making Beats: Man Invents 8-bit Chipophone From Old Organ Case

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 09:57 AM PDT

Here's something pretty neat. A man by the name of Linus Åkesson has turned an old organ into an 8-bit synth.

All the original tone-generating parts have been disconnected, and the keys, pedals, knobs and switches rerouted to a microcontroller which transforms them into MIDI signals. Those are then parsed by a second microcontroller, which acts as a synthesizer.

He kind of explains how he made it, so if you're technically inclined, you could try and make one. If you succeed, then it's time join the likes of Deadmau5 and Bassnectar and enjoy that sweet 8-bit sound.

[via Slashdot]

Louis Vuitton Tambour Spin Time GMT Watch

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 05:43 AM PDT

The Tambour watch case has been seeing new life recently in hard to find watches with unique complications. Louis Vuitton is trying to assert themselves a bit as being a more serious watch maker by doing a bit more than placing an ETA movement in a pretty watch. This clever Spin Time GMT watch is a clever take on telling the time, built on top of a base ETA automatic movement (likely a 2893). The module has 12 cubes and turn around showing an Arabic numeral when it is that cubes "turn" to indicate the hour. Consider it an interesting variation on a jumping hour watch.


Daily Crunch: Darth Refrigerator Edition

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 12:00 AM PDT

Dirt continues to fly from under the Apple tree: Droid X is latest victim

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 06:51 PM PDT

We all know that the iPhone 4 is a great device, but it makes calls about as good as BP can plug an oil well. Yeah, put on a case and it works better, or update the phone and see your “true” signal. We went through this last week; “it's not just the iPhone 4, it's every iPhone and every other mobile out there.” But does that explain the new dead zones we see?

In order to prove that the iPhone isn't alone at getting bad service, Apple has been dishing out the comparisons to almost every phone out there. For those of you who thought the Droid X was excluded from Antennagate, guess what? It's not, at least that what Apple says. Eat that Fandroids.

Note to mobile companies: don't make a phone that loses bars when held or else Apple will tattle to everyone. And they'll tell them with a fancy video.

What do you think? Has Apple's control of the mobile market gone to their heads?

Note: Yes, there has been lots of coverage on the iPhone 4. It’s not that we don’t have better things to do. It’s that we hold Apple to the highest standards of excellence. It’s just not like them to produce an expensive product that fails at its basic function. It’s like BMW coming out with a new 5-series that isn’t fun to drive…uh oh.

DISH Network Ends Half-Cooked DTVPal DVR

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 06:35 PM PDT

If you've never heard of the DTVPal DVR – or DTVPal tuner, don't worry, you're not alone. The DTVPal DVR was an interesting device that was a cross between a VCR and a DVR. VCR because it could record shows based on time – unlike the better TiVo model, where it records by show – and DVR because it was, well, digital.

It was one of the only OTA ATSC dual-tuning DVRs available at a reasonable price, but that's right about where the novelty wore off. You see, it was never very buttoned-down in terms of stability. Users often experienced the same issues as with the antiquated video cassette (12:00..12:00..not exclusive). That and only a limited guide was available over-the-air from either PSIP or TVGOS. The kinks were never worked out and DISH's little pet project got scrapped.

You can still get them – and very cheaply – so look to AVS forums or anywhere on the internet. Normal price was ~$250, but now it wouldn't be hard to find one for $129.99.

Novelty motorcycle helmets will probably get you killed by laughing drivers

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 05:41 PM PDT


We’ve seen smart helmets, cheese helmets, and imitation skull helmets, but I can’t say we’ve ever seen a walnut helmet or butt helmet. Perhaps there wasn’t much demand for such things. Well, in this age of the long tail, someone is sure to buy a helmet that makes you look like a golf ball because… okay, I don’t have any reason to believe that, but somehow I know it’s true. I can feel it in my watermelon. More at Good (NSFW helmets alert).

[via Geekologie and LikeCool]

Liverpool launches firefighting motorcycle crew

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 05:00 PM PDT

Apparently a motorbike enthusiast works at the Liverpool fire department, because while this is a great idea, it only could have come from a bunch of guys sitting in a pub. Currently there are only two of the specially equipped bikes, and with chemical foam and water, the two of them can reportedly put out a burning car in two minutes. The catch is the cost: these things cost $45,000 each, but are certainly more maneuverable then a fire truck. I like it.

[via Neatorama]

But will people who are tired of FPSs like Medal of Honor?

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 04:00 PM PDT

Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I found "Medal of Honor Beta" in my Steam Library What?! I didn't pre-order the game (seriously, $60 for a PC game? No thank you.) so something was "up," as the kids say in 1988. But then Matt Burns, angel that he is, did a little bit of sleuthing. Turns out that anyone who bought Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has access to the beta. Lucky me!

I start the game up, and after fiddling around with the video settings—max everything, thank you very much—I log into my EA account then create an in-game profile. Then I select server browser, not wanting anything to do with matchmaking, select a non-full lowish ping server, then off I go.

The multi-player part of Medal of Honor is being developed by Dice, the same company behind Battlefield: Bad Company 2. You would have guessed that right from the word "go," since the game looks and plays pretty much identically to B:BC2's multi-player. I literally said, "Did I launch the wrong game or something?"

Nope, this is MoH, all right. I know this because everyone has beards.

And let's just say this now: when the game comes out this fall, I fully expect to see fake outrage from people who excel at spreading fake outrage, like the Drudge Report and Fox News. They're going to call it "anti-American," "anti-troops," or "pro-Taleban" or "pro-al-Qaeda." This is because the teams are broken up into two parts: the Americans and the Taleban/al-Qaeda (I’m pretty sure you’re only the Taleban in the beta). But honestly, you might as well be playing between the Red team and the Blue team; there's nothing distinctly "American" when you play as the Americans (well, outside of the equipment you start with) just as there's nothing distinctly "Taleban" when you play as those guys.

It really is merely: Team A attack the base, Team B defend the base. Nowhere, at least in the multi-player beta, does politics even get hinted at. There's nothing so much as "you're fighting for your country!" when you play as the Taleban in the streets of Kabul.

The game is 100 percent agnostic. Which, of course, will be ignored when the game comes out, and EA will be attacked for not being pro-American enough. And it will be completely unfair to EA, since, by all accounts, they've tried to make the game as unoffensive as possible.

But yeah, when the outrage beings, remember where you saw it first. "Wow, this is just like what Nicholas predicted." Call me Nicholas the Octopus.

The beta itself? Look, if you even remotely like games like B:BC2 or Modern Warfare 2 you will feel right at home, again, particularly if you've played any of Dice's games in the past. The beta is limited to basic modes, and I'm not even sure if Dice will have anything more complex in the final game, but I had no problem jumping into a game and spraying bullets.

The Americans start with newer equipment than their opponents, but that doesn't mean the fighting in unbalanced. It's not rocks against tanks or anything like that. It's one well-armed side against another well-armed side. One attacks, the other defends. Simple as.

Each side has the same three classes: Rifleman, Special Ops, and Sniper (I play as sniper because I'm sneaky like that), and there's a few different modes. There's a standard team deathmatch and a mode where Team A has to attack a base and Team B has to defend a base. So, you shoot your fellow man over and over again until your side wins (hopefully). Along the way you earn points that you can later use to upgrade your equipment, like an extra magazine clip. Presumably the final game game will have more "prizes." You also earn medals for your in-game heroics.

If none of this sounds revolutionary that's because it isn’t. But that doesn't mean it's bad

It's no secret that I'm essentially burned out on shooters. I can still tell whether or not a game is good, but you can only eat so much ice cream before you're like, "Man, do we have anything else to eat?" I suspect that people who are still into these games will be more than happy with the game when it comes out, but for those of you who are a little more like me, maybe a little tired of the genre, well, I'm not sure that there's too much here to sway your opinion. What's here is all sound—I did notice a few graphical glitches while playing, but that's to be expected a few months away from release—but it really is a case of merely more of the same.

Furthermore, I tend to be more into the single-player campaign when it comes to FPSs. I'll play the multi-player for a bit, usually until I get frustrated with the fact that everyone else seems to be Jedi Masters. So if I were to get MoH, it would pretty much be exclusively for the campaign mode.

Does that make me a bad person?

GM to start using green refrigerant in 2013

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 03:30 PM PDT

The refrigerant that we use in our automobiles are some of the most environmentally unfriendly chemicals that we produce. The change to R-134a helped, but unfortunately that gas has a life of 13 years in our atmosphere, and contributes to global problems. GM announced today that they are changing to a friendlier coolant, one that doesn’t hang around and cause problems like the current product.

The new refrigerant is made by Honeywell, and remains in the atmosphere for a mere 11 days, instead of the 13 years that R-134a does. The new coolant will be used in GM’s Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac cars starting in 2013. I’d expect that the new refrigerant will end up being required by the EPA, assuming that it performs as expected.

[via Cartech]

Call of Duty may go subscription according to analysts

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 03:00 PM PDT

Oh the irony. For years, players of games like Medal of Honor, Halo, and Call of Duty have made fun of MMORPG players because of the recurring subscription requirement. If analyst predictions are correct, however, they may soon be eating their words.

Recently, analysts predicted that Activision will be using a subscription service for their incredibly popular Call of Duty game. Activision was quick to deny the rumor, stating that online play will always be free. Of course, there’s free and then there is free. Today, another analyst firm jumped onto the bandwagon, and predicted that Activision will still announce a subscription play for COD, but instead of being required to play at all, it would just drop better items, and have more new maps. Given the fact that the analysts predict that 4 to 5 million of the current COD players would pop for the premium version, that would pretty much print money for Activision. I guess they learned something from the Blizzard acquisition after all.

[via Business Insider]

CTIA sues San Francisco over plans to require cell phone retailers to display radiation ratings

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 02:40 PM PDT

Unless you live and breath all things cellular, you might not know what CTIA is, or what they do. Prior to becoming a mobile blogger, I knew CTIA as “those dudes that throw the big cell phone trade shows a few times a year”. Now that I’ve been a mobile blogger for a few years, I know CTIA as “those dudes that throw the big cell phone trade shows a few times a year, do some hardware certification stuff, and represent companies within the wireless industry whenever stuff goes crazy.”

And now, they’ll be known as “those dudes who sued the city of San Francisco over their new wireless laws”.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch

Pick up your 7-inch Android iPad clone from Amazon

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 02:27 PM PDT

There are more Android tablets available now than the market knows what to do with. If you must have one of the random Chinese imports — and have a hankering for the iPad – why not opt for this 7-inch model from Amazon? For only $123, you get a 7-inch touchscreen running some random 550MHz chipset, 2GB of local storage, 802.11 a/b/g, and, get this, Android 1.7(!!!) Sounds great, right? It even has an average 1.5 rating from Amazon’s reviewers, although they seem to care more about the deceptive iPad-ish packaging more than anything else so YMMV. [Amazon via Boing Boing]

“Unavailable” Mac Pros hint at upcoming refresh

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 02:00 PM PDT

We wrote just last week that Apple was likely prepping a refresh for some of its lineup. The Mac Pro, iMac, and MacBook Air seem ripe for revision, and few “unavailable” notifications at the Apple Store seem to confirm it.

It’s not a full-blown “no more!” — really, it’s just a hint — but it does indicate that Apple stores are getting to the end of their Mac Pro stocks. If they aren’t getting resupplied, you know what that means.

[via MacRumors and iClarified]

HP: No Windows Phone 7 for us, thanks.

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 01:46 PM PDT

Now that HP’s purchase of Palm has earned them a smartphone OS of their very own, how do they plan to offer up products running competing operating systems like Android or Windows Phone 7 without dampening their efforts?

Easy answer: They don’t.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch. >>

Mock up your next Android app with this handy-dandy stencil

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 01:34 PM PDT


App design is a sort of art and so some might be more comfortable approaching creative process outside a computer first. Enter this stencil, which has all the general logos available along with lines and even a text input bar. Not too shabby for only $25. [Uistencils via Android Guys]

Saitek and Mad Catz put out new controllers for flight sim fans

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 12:00 PM PDT


I remember playing Flight Simulator 4.0 way back when I was a kid, and thinking then how it was the most realistic game of all time. It probably still is. We played it on a keyboard, though my friend’s dad eventually got a whole instrument bank and yoke, at which point he pretty much played it 24/7 and we had to find something else to do. The point of this story is that flight sim people are into it, and although you might think that the information panels and switch collections they collect are over the top, for them it can never be close enough to the real thing.


Saitek’s new gear looks pretty cool, though to be honest I’m no judge of this stuff. But the throttle knobs and switch bank piece looks pretty meaty, the information panel looks legit, and the combat-style pedals will make you think you’re really flying an F-16, and not pretending to fly a Sopwith Camel.

Of course, this stuff comes at a price. $200 for the pedals, $150 for the each of the panels. Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but remember, this is more than a game. This is a hobby, and nobody thinks twice about paying a thousand bucks for a new bike, or surfboard, or tool bench.

An analysis of a PDF exploit

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 11:16 AM PDT


Most people think of PDF documents as static pieces of information. How could a PDF file compromise your computer? The reality is that PDF documents can contain all sorts of stuff, and clever miscreants have figured out how to exploit that stuff to wreak havoc on your computer. PDF exploits are on the rise, and they’re especially nasty not just because most people don’t realize this is a viable attack vector, but because the symptoms simply look like a PDF file won’t open: click, Adobe Acrobat fires up, then randomly closes some seconds later. “Huh, bad file” is what most people will think, and move on with their lives, completely unaware that the computer is infected.

Here’s a really good analysis of a malicious PDF. The PDF document structure has obfuscated Javascript code embedded in it. After a delay of 10 seconds, the Javascript makes a request to an Internet site to download an executable file, and *boom* your computer is compromised. Your anti-virus software may catch the roguefile, but it might not. The Internet: this is a dangerous place.

I’ve seen exactly one malicious PDF file in the wild. It hit one of the students I support, and we got really lucky in catching the infection before it could spread to other hosts on our network: the malware payload was not recognized by our antivirus software, so we might never have known except that the student reported problems opening this PDF. It was a fascinating thing to diagnose, because it’s so far outside the realm of what we normally see.

It’s a tired old refrain: update all of the software on your Windows computer. Everyone is tired of hearing it, because frankly it’s too much work. Too many applications update in different ways, and on different schedules: Windows Update, Mozilla’s built-in updater, Adobe’s Update Manager, Java, etc etc. The reality is, though, that it is quite important to do, despite the effort. Microsoft could likely make a lot of users very happy if they were to implement a solid unified update solution, like that used in OSX and most Linux distributions.

One option, at least with respect to PDF files, may be to use something other than Adobe Acrobat. I don’t know if things like Foxit or CutePDF are similarly vulnerable. Can anyone weigh in on the comments about that?

The Zephyr: The UK-built green military aircraft just flew for 2 weeks straight

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 10:30 AM PDT

Some more aviation news for your edification. The British-built Zephyr is a solar-powered, unmanned aircraft that just flew for two weeks over the Arizona desert. That's two straight weeks, mind you. It's a triumph of engineering!

The aircraft, created by the impossible-to-pronounce Qinetiq, was created with the military in mind. The idea is that you launch one of these aircraft over a battlefield and can spend several days in a row doing nothing but collecting intelligence from the safety of the skies. That, and no pilots' lives are at stake. Granted, since there's no human inside the cockpit that could make commanders more apt to deploy it in less-than-safe conditions, but that's a concern for another day.

The two-week flight broke several records. The previous continuous flight record, set way back in 1986, was a little more than nine days in the air. Consider that record smashed.

The only problem with the aircraft seems to be that, well, what if you're fighting a war at high latitudes? Not a lot of light there as compared to the zones of the tropics.

Surely I'm not the only person who find the idea of green warfare a little silly, at least on the surface?

Be on the lookout for the Darth Vader bank robber!

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 10:00 AM PDT

Ladies and gentleman of Comic-Con: Please be on the lookout for anyone in a Darth Vader costume. He may well be a notorious BANK ROBBER~!
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