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Daily Crunch: Dome Edition

Posted: 11 Jun 2011 12:00 AM PDT

Free Wi-Fi Coming To New York Parks

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 04:17 PM PDT

Are you, like me, headed out this weekend to the park in your handsomest raincoat/shoes/socks ensemble? Or maybe you’re looking for the invisible sheep that live in Astoria park’s many verdant trees? Or maybe you want to chase squirrels away from your pot o’ gold in Brooklyn? Well now you don’t have to worry about screaming wildly into space to get Internet connectivity because AT&T is giving it to you for free.

The hotspots, labelled “attwifi,” will appear in Battery Park, Joyce Kilmer Park, and Thomas Jefferson park right now. Then AT&T will launch in other locations including good old Central, Astoria, the High Line, and Fort Greene. You can look for coverage maps here but your best bet is just to hit your park and check it out.

Sadly, all of this park wi-fi won’t drown out the endless caterwauls of the damned that howl from the Reservoir as I pound along the jogging path wearing a mumu, viking helmet, and Crocs. I will be able to get my email sent straight to my fillings, though.

via Electronista pic via BrookylnPaper.

Japanese Robo-Drone Will Interrogate Your Leia

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 02:58 PM PDT

This odd robot, made of spare parts, has more in common with the IT-O than anything of this world. It can float around for 8 minutes on one charge and goes 40 miles an hour. Plus it’s a unique form factor for this sort of RC drone, making it a real one of a kind. Add some spinning blades and an arc blaster and you’ve got a party.

via Engadget


Weekend Giveaway: A B&N Nook

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 01:10 PM PDT


The folks at Punchtab, eager as beavers to get their products into your hands, want to send you a new Nook. Why? They’re in love with you and you won’t accept their love, so they’re in the friend zone and you refuse to pay attention to their attempts to win your heart. It’s like 16 Candles only with start-ups.

Anyway, here’s how to win.

Follow the steps below. You can JUST enter by commenting below, but you get extra entries for following Punchtab’s recommendations. People seemed to enjoy it last time so I guess we’ll give it another go. We’ll close the contest June 12th, 2011 at midnight PST. Good luck!

DIY Geodesic Dome On Kickstarter

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 12:53 PM PDT

Need a place to hide out when the apocalypse comes? Why not try a DIY geodesic dome! This Kickstarter project offers a $99 10-foot geodesics kit or a 14-foot model for $189. This isn’t really about shelter as much as it is about fun. I’ll let the folks at Effalo explain:

We want to make it easier for everyone (both kids and adults) to visualize, play with, and create their own geodesic structures. Although a dome might not make the best shelter, building one is educational, social, and fun.

Domeraisings require folks to collaborate effectively. Because the structure is wobbly until the final piece is added, you’ll need help putting it up. The more people helping, the faster it goes, and it’s easy to get folks involved.

Project Page


Review: The Fretlight FG-421 Guitar

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 11:48 AM PDT

Years ago I thought I could be in a rock band (right around the same time I thought I could make money writing poetry) but I eventually resigned myself to the fact that I’d never be a great guitarist. I didn’t have the drive to practice and the act of soloing confounded me completely. How did you play along with the Zep and the Beatles? How do you get great? How do you meet groupies? As time passed, I gave up and my guitars lay fallow in the corner, the groupies forgotten.

However, I think Fretlight may have given me a new lease on life. Fretlight makes guitars with LEDs embedded in the neck. You connect these guitars to a computer, run a MIDI player, and then follow along with the lights as the music plays. You can slow things down or speed them up and loop parts of the song over and over to practice certain riffs. The Fretlight will literally show you how to play all of your favorite songs.

Generally, the $429 Fretlight is a one-trick pony although the guitar is obviously quite exciting as a teaching tool and – more important – a long distance training system. A teacher in a central location could teach multiple students at once, running them through chords, riffs, and scales by flashing the LEDs on the neck. This, according to Fretlight, is in the works and is one of the most interesting parts of the system.

In short, the only difference between a “regular” guitar and this one is the lighting, and I think the lighting makes a huge difference. Some dudes just want to know how to play a cool riff. Why not make it easy for them? Would Slash be caught dead with this around his neck? Now, probably not but as a young riffster trying to learn D’yer Maker? Maybe.

In terms of playability I found the guitar itself to quite nice with excellent action and a great sound. The guitar has three pickups, two single and one humbucker. My buddy, Rick, shown above playing the Fretlight with great gusto, found the strings a bit tight on the out-of-the-box model but Marc of IntoMobile, an accomplished guitarist, found the entire kit to be well-made and on par with a mid- to entry-level Strat. Fretlight, in fact, makes their guitars overseas in the same factory as another major player in the guitar industry, so you’re not too far off from industry standard.

The guitar uses a few pieces of software, including a free MIDI player as well as Guitar Pro 6, a piece of training software already popular with guitarists. It works on Macs and PCs, and there is a separate break-out box/foot-pedal that lets you pause your playing or perform other simple actions.

Is the Fretlight a good guitar? Yes. Is it a good training tool? Yes. Is it for everyone? I don’t know. In some ways I can see what concerns critics would have. For example, would Clapton have become great if he had a “crutch” like the Fretlight? Would Jimi have been a better guitarist if he didn’t have to sit by his radio and listen obsessively to every note of every song he ever loved? I don’t know. I honestly don’t.

This is a tool. It’s a teaching tool and a method for training guitarists. While I know that very few Jimis will appear regardless of the tools at their disposal. Talent is rare and beautiful. But it takes a while to get good and maybe this will give a young kid the leg up he or she needs to do a better job than I did at becoming a rock star. The only thing the Fretlight can’t do is show you how to get those groupies and, as I’ve gotten older, that quest has gotten considerably less interesting anyway. Now I’m just happy to play Smoke On The Water.

Screen shot 2011-06-10 at 11.06.09 AM Screen shot 2011-06-10 at 11.03.56 AM

Product Page


Video: Alex Skolnick Trio Trade Amps For iPads At WWDC

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 11:06 AM PDT


Agile Partners, makers of AmpKit and AmpKit Link for iOS, sent me a video this morning of the Alex Skolnick Trio playing a gig at WWDC using iPads instead of amplifiers (except for the drummer). It looks like they are probably running the iPad outputs right into the P.A. system.

This setup probably wouldn’t work for all kinds of music, but in the right situation, like this one, it sounds pretty good. Indeed, if you’ve ever slugged a 120 pound bass cabinet up a rickety flight of stairs for a gig, you will be able to appreciate the small footprint going on here.

Check out the video:

I’ve seen Alex use the iPad before and he is adept at getting good tones through AmpKit’s interface. It’s funny to me to see the guys tweaking the iPad while they are playing and makes me wonder if Agile Partners will be coming out with any kind of physical foot-pedal that works with an iPad.

E3 2011 Is A Wrap!

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 08:04 AM PDT


Oh man was that a lot of gaming. John, Devin and I just spent the last week deep in the bowels of the massive gaming convention that is E3. We went to the press conferences, played the demos, and livestreamed the show floor thanks to Ustream and John and Jon from TechCrunch TV. It was a bit overwhelming, and, as viewers of our livestream quickly realized, gaming isn’t exactly our niche. But we trudged on, forced to play unreleased games, eat free food and hit on booth babes.

Nintendo and Sony brought their A Games this year with the Wii U and the PS Vita. Both will no doubt be hits in their respective markets. The Wii U will finally usher Nintendo into the age of HD while freeing gaming from a dedicated TV. The Sony PlayStation Vita is a wonder of technology. The graphics pumped out of the small handheld are simply astounding, but the novel control schemes of the back buttons, touchscreen and gyroscope opens up portable gaming to newfound experiences. Oh, yeah, Microsoft added Bing to Kinect proving you can’t win E3 every year.

Best Of Show:

The Big Three’s Press Conferences:

Microsoft:

Sony:

Nintendo:

Trailers:

Hands-on:

Hands-On With The Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY At E3 2011

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 07:58 AM PDT


Did you hear? I’m a fan of the Xperia Play. Watch the video above and I say it about a billion times. Thanks to the flights to and from E3 (and several boring bar nights at the event), I’ve put in lots of time with the Android gaming device and have fallen in love. My little E3 meeting calmed my fears of device abandonment as it seems SE is ready to support the Play with a steady release of new games. Full review will drop in the coming days.


Calibur11′s Base Vault Makes Modding Your Xbox 360, PS3 Easy-Peasy

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 07:52 AM PDT


People have been modding gaming consoles since the beginning of recorded history. There were glyphs found deep in Mayan temples telling a tale of how ancient gamers customized their rocks and sticks to better describe their gaming attitude. But never before has case modding been this trivial.

Calibur11′s solution involves off-the-shelf components that when combined, make a clever case mod. We stopped by their E3 booth to check ‘em out. Video after the jump.

The Beercan Bot: Frighten Your Drunk Friends

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 07:24 AM PDT

Imagine cracking open a cold one and, before the sweet nectar hits your lips, the freaking can turns into a walking, rolling, transforming beerbot. Scary, right? Well this young Japanese man has created a canbot to end all canbots. It is controlled via Wiimote and it can transform, roll around, and even walk using a shuffle technique straight out of my worst nightmares.

The most terrible thing? There isn’t any beer inside this beerbot! It’s all gone! It is, in short, the worlds most amazing robotic party foul.

via Make


Will iCloud Fly Or Die? (TCTV)

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 07:08 AM PDT

On Monday, Steve Jobs introduced iCloud to the Apple developers at WWDC, and we’ve been absorbing what it means ever since. John Biggs and I devote this entire episode of Fly or Die to iCloud, explaining what it is, why it’s important, and where it falls short. Watch the video above.

At it’s heart, iCloud demotes your computer as your digital hub and moves that hub online. This is not just for your music or photos, but potentially for all apps. And that is one of the biggest shifts for apps that run on iOS since it got started.

Read More

OnLive Brings Proper Gaming To Tablets, HDTVs And We Go Hands-On At E3 2011

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 07:03 AM PDT

OnLive did E3 big this year. The remote gaming company launched a ton of new games, a universal controller, and displayed their tablet apps. In fact more than a few of our commenters disagreed with our dueling assertion that the Wii U and the Vita won E3 this year; they thought OnLive deserved our meaningless nod. That’s why we made sure we spent sometime at OnLive’s rocking E3 booth.

There’s no questioning the platform’s huge potential. The company seems ready to embed their system in nearly any relevant device and it’s already found in select HDTVs, tablets, computers, and set-top boxes. While I firmly believe it’s not as good as the real thing, OnLive certainly brings proper gaming to systems and devices that would otherwise be left out of the fun. Want to play Duke Nukem Forever using just your Vizio HDTV or Macbook? No problem with Onlive.


CrunchBase Information
OnLive
Information provided by CrunchBase

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Will The HP TouchPad Finally Bring A True iPad Competitor To Market?

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 06:36 AM PDT

Just yesterday, HP finally let slip pricing and availability for the HP TouchPad tablet, which we now know will hit stores July 1. In terms of competition, HP is top-dog when it comes to PCs, but thus far, Apple has dominated the tablet market. The question now is, will HP's TouchPad finally create a true, aggressive competitor for the iPad?

To be honest, we have no idea, although we do think that the webOS-powered slate is pretty sweet. Mark Moskowitz of JP Morgan, on the other hand, thinks that consumers don't share the same enthusiasm we do when it comes to the TouchPad, at least not enough to pull them away from Apple's iPad 2. "While we expect HP's webOS platform to be a differentiating factor compared to the many Android tablets expected to reach the market, we do not think the price points on the TouchPad are aggressive enough to attract the incremental buyer from the iPad," wrote Moskowitz, in a note to investors.

And the TouchPad cost isn't all the analyst was disappointed by. "The lack of wireless connectivity and limited storage options are a setback," he added. "We will look to additional data points as the TouchPad hits the market in coming weeks, but for now, we are lukewarm."

[via BGR]

Daily Crunch: Nook Nook Cranny Edition

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 12:00 AM PDT

Looking For Some Eco-Friendly Lighting? There’s A Lamp For That

Posted: 09 Jun 2011 02:00 PM PDT

To most of us, broken tree branches are a pretty useless find. Unless, of course, you’ve made a habit out of hunting for your own firewood. But to designer Meghan Finkel, they are the most important component of her snazzy-looking eco-friendly lamps.

Since 2004, Finkel has gone out after big storms searching for broken tree branches near beaches and rivers. After stripping the bark and sanding the wood, she slaps on a layer of oil-based paint for a little flare. Finkel then tops it off with a lightbulb and lampshade, and voila: a branch lamp is born. These are a really great way to bring a touch of the outdoors into your home, and of course, keep it lit.

Finkel's designs are available online, and for those of us lucky enough to live in the Big Apple, at the TOUCH Concept Store in Rivington Design House at 129 Rivington Street, as well.

[via Tree Hugger]
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