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Video: Awesome Gesture-Controlled Robot Arm

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:58 AM PST

Gesture-driven robots are nothing new, but this robot arm, developed at Japan’s Tsukuba University, stands out with some impressive tech. The system lets humans control the arm by analyzing the movements of their hands and arms based on a video stream (the arm then replicates those movements almost in real-time).

What makes this robot unique is that the two cameras it uses not only measure movements, orientation and position of a human’s hand but also the shape – over 100 times a second. For example, the robot is able to detect a human clenching his fist or grabbing an object (and to act in the same way).

The next step for the researchers is to modify the arm so that it can be used to operate 3D-based displays in the future.

This video (shot by Diginfonews in Tokyo) provides more insight:

Daily Crunch: Steve Sighting Edition

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 12:00 AM PST

Barnes & Noble Confirms Android Market Definitely Not Coming To Nook Color

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 06:23 PM PST


I’m not sure there was every any real conviction that the Android Market would eventually make it to the Nook Color, but nevertheless, Barnes & Noble has made it clear that no, there’s no chance. The Nook Color will have apps made just for it (the SDK was recently released), but beyond that, apps are verboten.

Of course, the device has already been rooted and if you’re feeling brave, you can go through the many steps required to run Robo Defense. I’d wait until there’s an easy rooting tool, though. Too risky.

The Dangers Of Externalizing Knowledge

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 04:50 PM PST


Contemplating the shortcomings of the younger generation has ever been a hobby of the elder. As I start to transition to the latter population (perhaps a bit early for my age), I’ve found myself worrying more and more about the kids, and how little they seem to appreciate things. That kind of complaint is neither constructive or original. But the fact is that the kids are growing up pretty weird these days, because of the way technology has outpaced our institutions of learning and standards of knowledge.

The short attention span and reliance on non-text media are to be expected in an age where attention is indulged by on-demand information, and the effects of these things will continue to be written about, rightly and wrongly. There is a more subtle and insidious trend, however, that may prove to be more damaging than tech-born changes in learning modality.

It’s a process that has been going on for a long time, but that recent developments may push to the breaking point. The problem, as I see it, is that we have stopped valuing the accumulation of information within ourselves.

Continue reading…

The Chinese 3-in-1 iPad Camera Connection Schools Apple In Convergence, Customer Solutions

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 04:35 PM PST

Forget the official Apple iPad camera connection kit. This Chinese clone combines the USB and memory card slots into one device that costs the same amount as just one of Apple’s lame solutions. Too bad it’s just as large and unwieldy as the official one, but for only $29.99, we’ll gladly take it and its USB port, SD, and microSD card slot over the single purpose ones Apple sells. [Gizmodo via M.I.C. Gadget]

Mortal Kombat Brings It With The Kollector’s Edition

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 04:00 PM PST

Looking forward to the next version of Mortal Kombat? Well, some people must be because Game Stop just added information about the Tournament Edition of the classic fighting game.

Along with the game, GameStop announced (indirectly) that the Tournament Edition will include a customized MK Fight Stick, as well as classic character costumes and other download bonuses. The Fight Stick is the real winner here, with the buttons in that classic arcade layout for the true Mortal Kombat warrior. You’ll even have the ability to open the controller up to store the cable for it, along with the game and the severed fingers of your fallen enemies. Don’t expect to get this tasty package for free though, GameStop lists it at $149.99, and available for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Finish Him!

[via Kotaku]

Video: The Engineer Guy Explains How Quartz Watches Work

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 02:25 PM PST


Quartz watches are one of the little marvels of our age, the kind of thing you have around you at all times but don’t realize, and rely on without knowing it. I had a vague idea of how they worked (quartz crystal, current, resonance), but this video by The Engineer Guy goes into a little more detail and mentions a few things that are truly interesting.

A little while back he took apart a vintage black box from an airliner. I think I like this guy.

12 Days Of Christmas: Razer Starcraft II Gear Set

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 01:30 PM PST


Bonus giveaway because I forgot what day it is!

Got a Starcraft fan in the family? Zerg them with gifts this season courtesy of Razer, whose SCII gear we scoped some time back. They worked with the Blizzard team to make these things extra-appropriate for the game, and there are lots of custom lights, alerts, and macros for making your Starcraft II experience all the more complete.

And what do you have to do to win? Just leave a comment below saying which Starcraft unit you’d like to have as a friend, pet, or ride.

For example: I’d like to have a siege tank. Sure, they’re vulnerable to melee, but I’d like to see someone try to tow me.

Yours doesn’t have to be as awesome as mine, though. The winner will receive one each of the Razer Starcraft II peripherals: the Banshee headset, Marauder keyboard, and Spectre mouse.

Official rules:

  • One comment per person and yes, we can check these things
  • Entries must be in by December 15th, 11:59pm PST.
  • The winner will be chosen randomly
  • Use a valid email address as that’s how we’ll notify the winner
  • US shipping addresses only

Be sure to use your real e-mail address! It will not be shared with anyone, period. It's just for this contest. Keep your eyes out for more giveaways over the next two weeks and don’t forget about our big Santa item: a gaming rig valued at nearly $2,300. This contest runs through Christmas Eve!

Come Watch TRON LEGACY With Us Before It Opens In New York And San Francisco

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 01:10 PM PST

Okay, readers, here's our holiday gift to you. Come see the coolest movie of the season, TRON LEGACY, with us in New York City or San Francisco on Thursday night. This might be your last chance to join our Tron-tourage. TRON LEGACY officially opens this Friday, December 17th, but we are inviting you to see it with us before the big release date. Buy a ticket for yourself, your friends, your family, and invite a co-worker or two. This is going to be a blast, right before Christmastime. Heck, if you are startup CEO, take the whole company out for drinks before, then bring everyone to the show and call it a holiday party. Did we mention we are seeing in two of the biggest theaters in each city, with more than 400 seats each? We've already bought out the theaters.


Good Old Games’ Epic 2010 Holiday Sale Has Begun!

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 01:00 PM PST

Good Old Games is having itself a bit of a holiday sale (not that their prices aren’t already low!) that you’d be a fool to pass up. Highlights include Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 for $6.99, Planescape: Torment for $6.99, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2 for $6.99, Gothic and Gothic 2 for $6.99 each, and, to pick something that’s not an RPG, Duke Nukem 3D for $2.99. Why pay $60 for a four-hour campaign with today’s popamole nonsense when you buy literally hundreds of hours of gaming for a fraction of that?

The sale is part of Good Old Games’ big holiday countdown. Every day for that past few (and next few) day there’s been various little specials. Enter to win a holiday card, we’ve now fixed Arcanum to work more stably on Windows 7, etc.

The sale lasts for the next three weeks.

In other sale news, it’s EA week over at Direct2Drive, and you can grab various EA games for much less than you’d otherwise pay.

I think that about does it.

The Chameleon X-1 Is Both Mouse And Gamepad? Witch! Burn The Witch!

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 12:30 PM PST


Let me just say that when this thing was first brought to my attention, I made just about the sourest “skeptical face” I’ve ever made, and that’s saying something. But I’m going to be honest, when I saw what they’d done, I relaxed a bit, though my skepticism is still mostly intact. I mean, there are so many ways this thing could have totally sucked, but it looks like it could actually be pretty decent. It’s impossible to say without trying it, of course, but it passes the smell test — barely.

The X-1 is by Shogun Bros, who either have a great sense of translation humor or need to hire a different localization service. Believe your eye, indeed. But hey, it’s the product that matters, and it’s pretty clear they’ve based their device on two solid devices: the Logitech G-series mice and the Dual Shock controller.

I’m sure it’d be a better controller if the buttons stuck out a bit more, and it’d probably be a better mouse if it didn’t have a controller stuck on the bottom. But hey, it could have been a lot worse.

[via Gearlog and SlashGear]

Make Your Own Steve Jobs Christmas Ornament

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST


This is a must-have for every Machead’s Christmas tree. Download the PDF and get your papercraft on. [bemm.at via 9to5mac]

Computer Engineer Barbie Loves Tux!

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 11:30 AM PST


Blogger Elizabeth Krumbach got her new Computer Engineer Barbie the other day. She was delighted to find a penguin on the box. Barbie loves Linux! I’ll bet that’s a picture of Linus Torvalds, and not boring old Ken, on Barbie’s cubicle, too!

‘Hey Soul Sister’ Tops iTunes Charts For 2010, SHODAN Among Top Three Albums

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 11:00 AM PST

Apple has revealed its year-end iTunes charts, and it turns out that Train’s "Hey, Soul Sister" was the single most downloaded song of the year. My first reaction was, "That’s Train singing that song, what?!" Shows how little I’m plugged in to popular culture these days. Now, if you want my opinion on who should win the Ballon d’Or, on the other hand…

Following "Hey, Soul Sister" was Katy Perry’s "California Girls" and Eminem’s "Love The Way You Lie."

This is why I listen to talk radio and/or podcasts all day long: pop music is largely rubbish.

In other Eminem news, his album Recovery was the top downloaded album of the year, followed by Ke$ha’s Animal and Lady Gaga’s The Fame.

Ke$ha, eh? It’s good to see that SHODAN has transitioned to a successful pop music career.

(I’m saying that Ke$ha sounds like SHODAN, if that’s not clear enough.)

The Seagate Barracuda Green Is A Low-Power 2TB HDD

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 10:30 AM PST


Low-power consuming hard drives are popular these days for the latest crop of servers and NAS units. And why not, right? These drives like don’t need to spin at breakneck speeds for storage, which means they don’t suck down as much power as other hard drives. Seagate’s latest, the Barracuda Green, brings 4K sector performance to the line through the SmartAlign technology while featuring class-leading 5900 RPM speeds. 1.5TB and 1TB drives complete the line with all three drives available in SATA 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s flavors. Amazon currently has both the SATA 6Gb/s 2TB and 1.5TB drives available for $127 and $99 respectively.

Seagate Ships Industry’s Highest Performance “Green” Desktop Hard Drive
Barracuda Green features Seagate SmartAlign technology for seamless transition to 4K sector desktop hard drives

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. – December 14, 2010 – Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today announced the availability of the Barracuda® Green hard drive, the industry's highest performance eco-friendly 3.5-inch desktop drive for low-power personal computers, multi-drive home networking systems and external PC storage.

Seagate Barracuda Green, the world's highest performance eco-friendly desktop hard drive.

The Barracuda Green hard drive, formerly Barracuda® LP, combines the industry's highest spin speed (5900 RPM) with Seagate's SmartAlign™ technology to deliver best-in-class performance. SmartAlign technology enables all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance. The cool-running, lower-power Barracuda Green hard drive delivers whisper-quiet acoustics and helps reduce system costs associated with the fans and power supply devices often required for power-hungry systems.

Barracuda Green hard drives also support Seagate Think Green™ programs for a greener more sustainable world:

70 percent or more of the materials used to build the drive can be recycled.
All Barracuda Green drives use low halogen components to reduce the negative environmental impacts related to these substances.
Barracuda Green is designed and built to the highest environmental standards.
"Not only do Barracuda® Green drives offer environmental improvements in power consumption and material usage, but these drives are also among the first hard drives from Seagate to offer SmartAlign™ technology," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management. "This is important because the industry is transitioning to 4K sector formatting called Advanced Format to improve capacities and maintain strong error correction. However, the transition to Advanced Format without SmartAlign™ technology can be complex and require additional integration steps and software utilities to avoid performance degradation. SmartAlign technology removes these concerns and makes this transition virtually invisible for our customers."

The Barracuda Green hard drive, offered in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB, is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel.

With SSD, Gran Turismo 5 Load Times Are Halved

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 10:00 AM PST

Fact: if you install Gran Turismo 5 on your PS3′s hard drive you’ll speed up loading times. Additional fact: if you install Gran Turismo 5 on your PS3′s solid state drive (SSD) you’ll speed up loading times considerably. And yes, you can even try this at home—maybe!

The only way you’re able to install an SSD into your PS3 is if you have an old school "fat" PS3. A user on the Beyond3d forums stuck a Corsair F120 in there, and saw his Gran Turismo 5 load times plummet, sometimes by as much a 50 percent. That’s nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you’re not keen on waiting upwards of 30 seconds for the Nürburgring to load.

That’s what the chart is up there for, yes.

Now, it’s not exactly breaking news that SSDs are fast little guys—see Apple’s decision to make an SSD the default drive in the new MacBook Air—but it’s important to see how the technology performs in real world scenarios.


Anticitizen One: PatriotApp Turns iOS Users Into Walking, Talking Eyes & Ears Of Various Government Agencies

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 09:30 AM PST

This App just makes me laugh. It's called the Patriot App, and it's designed to "[empower] citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities via social networking and mobile technology." That sounds suspiciously like the App intends to create a network of informants, but whatever. This is the world we live in now: if you see something, say something, no thinking allowed.


Humble Indie Bundle 2 Available, Now With Y Combinator Backing

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 09:00 AM PST


You may remember the Humble Indie Bundle from May, which was a sort of experiment in payment, trends, and distribution. It was extremely successful, raising quite a lot of money for the EFF, Child’s Play, and of course the developers themselves. Now, just in time for the holidays, a new bundle is being offered with similar terms, and it’s just as tempting.

One new wrinkle is that the sale is now being run by Humble Bundle, Inc., a Y Combinator startup. With downloadable games becoming an almost disturbingly large business, the company could have carved itself out quite a comfortable little niche. The independent games and apps scene is quite active and prolific, and projects like this one are an excellent way to reward developers who often create these things in their spare time.

The bundle itself is five games that have been around for some time, though two are still under development (as indie games tend to be). There’s the mind-bending and poignant Braid, combat and physics sandbox Cortex Command, the enigmatic Machinarium, hypnotic iPad hit Osmos, and one I haven’t heard of, Revenge of the Titans, which nevertheless looks pretty amazing. Braid and Cortex Command are also newly available on Linux as of their inclusion in the bundle, which means that all the games work on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

So it’s a solid line-up, and as before, you can choose how much you pay and how that money is divided:

New is the ability to directly “tip” the Humble administrators. The default amount for this is 5%, and with the last bundle pulling in well over a million dollars, that could be a substantial little payoff if people don’t fiddle with the knobs too much.

The “pay what you want” model is in the process of proving itself, but I think it’s an easy way to recoup potential losses to piracy, though of course the last bundle was also pirated many thousands of times. There are pirates, of course, who will pirate even if the cost is a penny. there are also people who feel justified in pirating because they don’t think a game is worth more than $10 (I don’t comment on the wisdom of this position, but it exists), and a pay what you want model will garner a lot of untapped revenue from this crowd.

As for the future of the Humble Bundle Inc. startup, I think we’ll see them branching out into similar but well-proven markets, perhaps selling apps or Kickstarter-type products. They’re not announcing anything yet, but I’m sure we’ll hear more from them soon.

At any rate, it should be available now (or very shortly), and now (or shortly after now) is a good time for giving.


Kickstarter: The Ultimate iPad/Android Arcade Machine

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 08:38 AM PST


The demo video is a bit rough, but it’s just that, a demo. The thought process is solid though: An iPad arcade machine with joystick, built-in pico projector and speakers. Of course there’s some kinks to be worked out in both the design and concept mainly because there’s already a popular competitor through ThinkGeek. Still, this homebrew option should be able to stand on its own as long as it’s funded.

The creator, Justin Hubbard, is looking to raise $10,000 through Kickstarter. The monies would be used primarily for the purchase of an CNC machine, which will cut down production time and expenses.

Is it worth your money? Maybe. It’s not exactly novel, but it’s still clever with the pico projector built in and the neat artwork. At least with a $25 pledge, Justin will ship you a 3D printed iPad magnetic mount, which seems more than fair. $200 gets you the complete DIY arcade kit with $300 netting you a fully-assembled unit.

12 Days Of Christmas: Roku XDS streaming player

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST

Like Uncle Eddie said, “Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.” And so, kind readers, in that spirit today’s daily giveaway is a Roku XDS. Cut the cord, stream Netflix, and keep your hard earned money instead of paying for the power bill on Comcast’s massive 2100-foot HD wall. Or don’t cut the cord. We don’t care. We just want to give a reader this Roku XDS for the holidays so click through for the instructions and rules.

All you need to do is leave a comment below mentioning your favorite TV show that’s currently on the air. For example:

I’m a Stargate fan. The original series is only second to Top Gear on my list of all-time favorite TV shows. The latest incarnation, Stargate Universe, started out a bit rocky, but quickly become a top-notch TV show just this season. Love it.

The winner will be chosen randomly and awarded the following prize:

One Roku XDS streaming player

Official rules:

  • One comment per person and yes, we can check these things
  • Entries must be in by December 14th, 11:59pm PST.
  • The winner will be chosen randomly
  • Use a valid email address as that's how we'll notify the winner
  • US shipping addresses only

Be sure to use your real e-mail address! It will not be shared with anyone, period. It's just for this contest. Keep your eyes out for more giveaways over the next two weeks and don’t forget about our big Santa item: a gaming rig valued at nearly $2,300. This contest runs through Christmas Eve!
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