CrunchGear |  |
- HP Issues TouchPad Liquidation Order – Get Yours Now For $100
- Cane 2.0: The Tacit Is Hand-Mounted Sonar For The Vision Impaired
- Review: Brite-Strike Rugged Flashlights
- Fake Steve Jobs Biography Already Available In China
- LinuxCon: All About Clouds
- Kickstarter Project Empowers Students, Plays The Mario Theme With Plasma
- Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 6 To Developers
- Apple’s “Inaccurate Evidence” Debacle, Part 2: Smartphone Edition
- Pineapple Watches: An iPod Nano Watch Without The Music Player
- Intel To Computer Makers: Ultrabooks Will Save You
- The Vibram Trek LS And Bormio: Ugly, Crazy Monkey Shoes Get Even Crazier
- Samsung Teases For IFA, Glowing Handsets And Beautiful People
- Daily Crunch: deadOS
| HP Issues TouchPad Liquidation Order – Get Yours Now For $100 Posted: 19 Aug 2011 08:36 PM PDT  Wow. The day after HP announces they’re discontinuing all their webOS devices, and they’ve already issued a liquidation order. Best Buy, Future Shop, The Source, London Drugs, and Staples will be selling the 16GB TouchPad for $100, and the 32GB version for $150 starting tomorrow. Well, in Canada at least. No word on when this will spread to the US, UK, EU, and so on — but somehow I doubt many TouchPads will be selling for full price while this fire sale is going on, so the switch will probably happen right away. Also unclear is the 64GB version’s fate. Buy one recently? Get thee to the refundery. Got a few bucks? Try picking one up. That’s a hell of a price for a decent device — even if it won’t be getting any support, people will be hacking the hell out of it soon. One commenter says they already have Honeycomb up and running. Your best bet is to call your local gadget shop and check for stock and pricing, then run like a bat out of hell to get yours before they’re gone. [via Pre Central]
|
| Cane 2.0: The Tacit Is Hand-Mounted Sonar For The Vision Impaired Posted: 19 Aug 2011 03:29 PM PDT  Every once in a while you see an invention that seems a long time coming. The Tacit, a hand-mounted system that pings surroundings and transmits distance information to the user, is one of those. While the reliable white cane and occasional accommodations for the blind and vision impaired ameliorate the difficulty of navigating the world sans sight, technological advances that are both useful and ready for deployment are few and far between. We’ve seen a lot of research into artificial vision systems, and there are often hacked-together projects by people personally concerned with issues like vision or mobility — we’ve seen a Kinect-powered navigation system, the Eyewriter, and Ken Yankelvitz’s paraplegic-accessible controllers. This project is an amazing example of what one guy can do with a soldering iron, some off-the-shelf parts, and an inventive mind. The system uses two ultrasonic sensors that can detect the distance of objects between 2cm and 3m away. Mounted facing off to the right and left, they can be swept across a room and will be able to sense most common obstacles and dangerous objects. They send their signal through an Arduino Mini controller, which governs a pair of servos. These servos each press a loop of foam down on the wrist: the closer the object, the harder they press. The whole thing is powered by a 9V battery and straps onto either hand. Designs like this are the reason we have a patent system. And while tech companies are filing thousands of patents for trivial UI items and software methods, the inventor, Steve Hoefer, has opted instead to give away his invention for free under a Creative Commons license. As is increasingly common with interesting hacked inventions like this, he has published the parts list, detailed instructions, a circuit diagram, and the source code for the Arduino controller. Hoefer says the system has a learning curve of “seconds,” and I can’t see why that shouldn’t be the case. Nothing is naturally intuitive; everything is learned, even vision and our concepts of space and navigation. Hand-based tactile feedback is something many blind people have grown up with, and the addition of this extra information, while at first foreign, will likely be welcomed as highly beneficial. They have also proven themselves very capable of synthesizing this kind of information into a cohesive mental map — sometimes incredibly so. There are some other haptic vision projects, like the HALO system — but this seems more practical to me. The sweeping of the hand mimics the path of the eye, and unlike a head-mounted system, this one can be used to, say, locate a pen on a table. With such a low cost, it could be easily manufactured and made a common aid item, unlike fascinating but costly and impractical (at the moment) ideas like vision substitution. It’s always heartening to see real inventors inventing real things, and for no other reason than a problem needed solving. [via Hack A Day]
|
| Review: Brite-Strike Rugged Flashlights Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:30 PM PDT  I was sitting outside a cafe the other day when an older man sat down next to me and attempted to assemble a flashlight he’d bought at Walgreens. It was the chintziest piece of garbage I’ve seen in a long time, and I had to help him put together this thing, which after some tinkering finally emitted a feeble glow. He wanted something to keep in his car just in case. I wouldn’t trust that junk device, however cheap it may have been. Flashlights are something you want to buy once and appreciate forever, which is why I wanted to check out EPLI’s line of waterproofs — is it something I can recommend to friends, perhaps over the traditional Maglite, or just another toy? Fortunately I can say that these little guys are definitely worth recommending. I think I’ll always want to keep a traditional four-cell bulb Maglite around, but an emergency or rainstorm, a Britestrike or something similar is a good bet to make. EPLI and Blue Dot I checked out two sizes: the “Executive” pen light and a mid-range “Blue Dot” tactical-style light, meant for police and so on, attachment to pistols and rifles. Both are bright LED lights, both have three lighting modes (high, low, and strobe), and both are waterproof. The differences between the two are bulk, brightness, finish, and of course price. The EPLI is just over five inches long, a bit thicker than a pen, and produces 160 lumens. The tactical is actually a bit shorter, but much wider, and it covered in a crenelated grip pattern that makes it practically impossible to drop, and also makes it into an effective impact weapon. It produces 210 lumens from two cells. They’re made for single-handed operation, which sounds silly at first, but many flashlights require you to hold them and turn a dial or rotate the crown to switch modes or focus. On the Brite Strikes, it’s done by hitting the button on the end once, twice, or three times. The bright mode is bright, the dim mode is dim, and the strobe mode just gave me blue spots in my eyes for a few minutes. It’s very bright when you’re in its focus and it’s ideal for signaling your location, getting the attention of motorists from afar, or flashing in the eyes of that puma or mugger. Both flashlights are extremely well-built. I tried pretty hard to damage them, but they resisted all my attempts at banging, bending, dropping, and throwing. They’re also waterproof, their openings sealed with rubber o-rings. I’m not sure I’d trust the EPLI in a dive, but I wouldn’t have any problem taking these guys out in a rainstorm, dropping them in puddles, or putting them down on wet ground. The tactical one is naturally the more robust, with a thicker o-ring and only one opening. Both have the eerie white light of LEDs, of course, which isn’t something you can avoid. The EPLI has a colder light and narrower focus, as you see above. Conclusion The classy look of the EPLI makes it a solid addition to the nicest nightstand, desk, or pen cup. It provides a pretty insane amount of illumination for its size, and it’s not going to break or short circuit if you drop it down the stairs or leave it on the ground while you fix a flat in the dark. To be honest I would feel more comfortable if my friends and family kept one of these around in their glove box or purse. It’s capable, rugged, and I wouldn’t want it flashing in my eyes if I were a mugger. You can find it for under $50 right now, which I think is a good price for a serious device like this. The tactical one can be found for the rather higher sum of around $125. That’s a lot more than a Maglite. But this thing would live through a hurricane and a half, and will probably last forever. It also has a nice little range of accessories. Want to make an investment you won’t regret? This thing will probably pay off its price tag a few years from now. I spend so much time with cheap plastic gadgets that it was nice to get my hands on something that I don’t think I could break if I wanted to. Why don’t they build phones like this?
|
| Fake Steve Jobs Biography Already Available In China Posted: 19 Aug 2011 12:06 PM PDT  If you can’t wait for the official Steve Jobs biography, why not pick up a fake one for $8? “Translated” by someone apparently named “John Cage” (presumably there are 4.33 pages blank near the middle), the book has sold 4,000 copies at $10 a pop. MICGadget has a quite a bit of poorly translated info on the book, which has been out since April. No one is claiming that this is the real deal but they’re not going to pull it from the shelves, either, claiming it’s close enough. The book’s title translates roughly to “Steve Jobs Gives 11 Advices To Teenager,” which suggest this might be a clever mash-up of a commencement speech and a 19-page Ars Technica OS X Lion review. Regardless, you probably won’t be reading this biography over here any time soon, but it’s nice to note that iPhone 5s aren’t the only unreleased Apple-related products being pirated in China.
|
| Posted: 19 Aug 2011 12:00 PM PDT  Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved “cloud” in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there’s no single definition of “cloud”. There’s no doubt that Amazon has really pioneered the default cloud offering, but there’s a lot of work going on to build better, more robust, and more open cloud solutions. Red Hat has OpenShift, their Platform as a Service offering, and CloudForms, their Infrastructure as a Service offering. The long-term vision, according to Whitehurst, is that a company’s developers would begin building something on OpenShift, and not worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. When that product is ready to be deployed internally, it would go on the customer’s CloudForms installation inside the company’s firewall. Basically, developers will select the platform and operations can then own and manage that platform. Canonical is pushing Ensemble, their “service orchestration” solution. Rather than think about applications, Canonical wants to see folks start thinking about services. Rather than deploy a web server application that talks to a database application to present information and receive input from Internet visitors, instead think of a “blog service” that you can deploy through a series of recipes. According to Canonical’s Allison Randal, Canonical feels that Amazon’s AWS sets a good standard, and the Amazon APIs should be adopted by everyone. This will allow users of cloud services to have some modicum of portability: if my cloud provider jacks up their prices, I should be able to transition smoothly to a different cloud provider — or onto my own private cloud — because the underlying mechanisms for interacting with it (the published APIs) should be the same between providers. When Randal told me this, I was initially skeptical. If your cloud provider jacks up their prices, that’s a business problem. It’s not specific to the cloud, or to the technology sector in general. Is there real value in being able to switch from one cloud provider to another, or to bring a public cloud solution in-house? Then I listened to Marten Mickos’ keynote. Mickos, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, is now at Eucalyptus Systems pioneering private cloud solutions. His keynote touched on a couple of very interesting things. First, he succinctly cleared up the confusion around public and private clouds and why you might want to use both. Consider the telephone. The public telephone infrastructure has been around for about a hundred years, and yet almost every company still runs their own internal PBX system. This is a pretty solid analogy with respect to clouds. But the most interesting thing that Mickos brought up was the importance of the free software principles as applied to cloud solutions. With the old paradigm of Linux distributions, the four freedoms provided by the GPL are fundamentally essential to the long-term success of the platform, because it specifically allows derivative works. Moving to the cloud, though, we’re looking at images, rather than distributions, and the entire notion of a derivative work becomes fuzzy at best. How are the four freedoms of the GPL applied to cloud situations? Suddenly Randal’s comments make a lot more sense. So, too, does OpenStack, a result of collaboration between RackSpace and NASA to build a common, open cloud framework. Mickos wrapped up his keynote by reiterating that Linux has gone from a disruptive force to an innovation force. His closing remarks dovetailed very nicely with Whitehurst’s opening remarks: Linux is now the default choice for new technology deployments, and is the foundation upon which most future technical advances will be built. Both Whitehurst and Mickos observed that the transition we’re seeing now to the cloud is at least as fundamentally radical as the shift from mainframes to client/server. As innovation continues atop Linux in the cloud, Mickos offered some very profound advice: we must strive to ensure that no one closes that which we have opened. Photo credit: Clouds by karindalziel, on Flickr.
|
| Kickstarter Project Empowers Students, Plays The Mario Theme With Plasma Posted: 19 Aug 2011 11:49 AM PDT  This cool Kickstarter allows you to build a working speaker using plasma energy. It’s a little esoteric, but here’s the deal: this is a little kit that contains everything you need to play music using a plasma arc. If that doesn’t seem like your idea of a good time, you might be reading the wrong post. That said, here’s how it works: for $40 you get the bits that make the arc vibrate and for $80 you get all of the bits, including a power supply and flyback transformer. The kit was designed and built by StudentRND a group of cool kids in Seattle who, along with volunteers, build wild technological artifacts. This looks to be one of their first Kickstarter projects and they requested $2,000 to build a few kits and support their mission. They’re over their minimum, so the project will get funded and you will be able finally play Smoke On The Water using a tiny plasma arc. Even if you’re not down with shooting electricity through the air, StudentRND seems like a great organization and they’re clearly having fun with science, which is something I can definitely get behind.
|
| Apple Releases iOS 5 Beta 6 To Developers Posted: 19 Aug 2011 10:37 AM PDT  It’s that time again! Right on schedule (with “on schedule” meaning “roughly 2 weeks since the last one”), Apple has just released the sixth Beta build of iOS 5 to developers. You know what that means: developers, get to updating (Remember: OTA updates work now!) Non-developers pretending to be developers, carry on (Just don’t be a jerk and go reviewing applications.) And everyone else? Be happy to know that iOS 5 is one big ol’ step closer to going gold and hitting your handset. Now, as for whats new in this build…
Though most are just crackin’ into beta 6 right this second, we’re not hearing much in terms of new stuff here — it’s mostly bug fixes and itty bitty spots of polish at this point. Which, of course, makes sense: Apple’s presumably nearing the end of the Beta phase here, so it’s less about adding new stuff and more about making sure everything that’s in there works as expected. With that said, we’ll update you if we hear about anything new and noteworthy lurking around in this release. Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...
|
| Apple’s “Inaccurate Evidence” Debacle, Part 2: Smartphone Edition Posted: 19 Aug 2011 10:28 AM PDT  Apple has again submitted what the blogosphere is calling "inaccurate evidence" in its case against Samsung. A photo found on page 77 of Apple's complaint to the Hague district court in the Netherlands shows the Samsung Galaxy S next to the iPhone 3G. And guess what! Apple screwed with the dimensions once again. But don't freak out. This may not be as big of a deal as everyone's making it out to be. Here's what's up: The battle has migrated to the Netherlands, the only EU country as-yet untouched by the brawl. Within Apple's newly filed complaint (which is only available for inspection at the Hague court, but has been seen by Weberwerld.nl) the company asks for an EU-wide ban on almost all Galaxy devices, including the Galaxy S, Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab 7 and Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple also asks that all remaining inventory be pulled from retailer shelves. This time around, it's not just about appearances, and that makes all the difference. When Apple first submitted that screwy picture of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany, the lawsuit was entirely concerned with design, so there's really no obvious reason to mess with the images. That's not to say that it was some crazy under-handed move by Apple, but it does make it a bit harder to justify a tampered-with aspect ratio. However, the BBC reports that the German judge inspected the devices hands-on and did not base his decision solely on images provided by Apple. In the Dutch case, Apple's complaint is far more reaching, and cites patent infringement not only regarding the same EU Community Design (iPad), but other functional European patents concerned with mobile photo management, interpretation of touch events, and Apple's swipe-to-unlock. In other words, we've moved on to software, which makes things 100 percent more complex. In the image (Weberwerld’s rendering of the picture is above), the Samsung Galaxy S is scaled to the same proportions as the iPhone 3G. In reality, the Galaxy S is both longer and wider than the iPhone 3G. Specifically, the Samsung Galaxy S measures in at 122.4mm x 64.2mm, whereas the iPhone 3G sports dimensions of 115.5mm x 62.1mm. But in the image provided by Apple, the Galaxy S has been resized by about 6 percent, making it appear identical in size to the iPhone. Unlike the situation with the GalTab, the aspect ratio has not been measurably tampered with. Since we can't actually get our hands on the court documents, it's hard to tell the context of the side-by-side comparison, but weberwerld.nl reports that Apple did mention the Galaxy S's "non-identical elements, such as the slightly larger size” (also on page 77). Chances are if Apple is actually stating on the same page that the Galaxy S is bigger, there is probably a good reason for scaling the photo. Granted, the Galaxy S design is under scrutiny due to its similarity to the iPhone 3G, but there are other facets of the device in question, as well. It's entirely possible that the image of the Galaxy S was resized so that the judge could investigate something unrelated to design. Then again, this is the only side-by-side comparison photo of the Galaxy S with the iPhone 3G, which makes me wonder why a more realistic comparison wasn't presented, too. To add to the confusion, Samsung's lawyers claim that Apple did manipulate evidence, since this time Samsung actually got to be a part of the court proceedings. "[Apple has been] manipulating visual evidence, making Samsung’s devices appear more similar to Apple’s," said Bas Berghuis of Simmons and Simmons law firm. Because we're going off of translations it's hard to be sure, but it looks like Mr. Berghuis evidence was not substantial enough to convince the judge. Google translates weberwerld.nl's reporting as follows: "But this claim was by Samsung at the meeting was not substantiated by evidence." I can't imagine Mr. Berghuis would make a claim that Apple is tampering with evidence without presenting said false evidence to the court. Therefore, Apple's imagery in the filing is probably resized for good reason. Plus, if Apple was trying to purposefully deceive the court systems with this false evidence, the company probably would have abandoned that plan as soon as the original GalTab photo was discovered.
|
| Pineapple Watches: An iPod Nano Watch Without The Music Player Posted: 19 Aug 2011 09:15 AM PDT  With a name like Pineapple and a trade dress that looks like an iPod Nano with the clip cut off, you can tell the gents behind Pineapple watches aren’t very well-versed on trademark law. But lets, for a moment, pretend it won’t be a problem. These watches come in seven colors and guys are inexplicably taking pre-orders on Paypal. Why they don’t use Kickstarter is beyond me. However, the styling is quite stark and nice and they cost about $90. The pair making these is based in Montreux, Switzerland. A clever quartz watch for less than a Benjamin? Good enough for me.
|
| Intel To Computer Makers: Ultrabooks Will Save You Posted: 19 Aug 2011 09:14 AM PDT  As I write this, I’m sitting in my office. Around me, there are nine computers — seven of them run Windows. I have three slates, too — only one is an iPad. Welcome to the Post-PC world outside of San Francisco where Microsoft is still top dog and Apple is a niche, but admittedly, influential player. We may be in the post-PC era, but the Windows PC is far from dead. Apple is growing rapidly but seemingly focused on high margin products and massive flying saucer headquarters rather than advancing society into the next age of computing. That’s Intel’s job. And they’re going to do with a MacBook clone. Intel and major PC makers are toiling away at the next generation of PCs, that if marketed correctly, could usher in the next golden age of computers. Ultrabooks, as they are called, are essentially MacBook Air clones. They’re designed around a compact motherboard, CPU, and flash storage option. The first crop is likely to use Intel’s current CPUs, codenamed Sandy Bridge. The real fun comes when the 22nm Ivy Bridge models hit later this year for under a $1000. HP essentially exited the consumer PC realm yesterday; they went the way of IBM and Sun. The consumer PC world is a brutal marketplace with companies constantly racing to the bottom with cheap, brand-damaging hardware. Profit margins are razor thin and the churn is nonstop with completely new product lines debuting every quarter. Only Apple, seemingly taking the high road, sticks to a slow, profit-friendly pace, introducing slight hardware bumps every couple of months and totally new computers every other year. But HP might have jumped ship a bit too soon. Ultrabooks are exactly what the Windows PC world needs. The ultraportible notebooks drip with appeal and even with modest specs, the rock solid Windows 7 should run perfectly fine. The first batch of these ultrabooks are reportedly hitting next month but, as per earlier reports, might command a slightly higher price than expected. Asus has the UX21, and then just today, Digitimes reports that Acer also has an upcoming Ultrabook scheduled for a September release. It’s disingenuous to state that everyone wants an Apple computer; Windows’ massive market share tells a different story. But it’s hard to imagine anyone that wanders over to Best Buy’s Apple display not being impressed with the sleek hardware. For various reasons, though, the data states they often head back to the main notebook display and purchase something a bit more familiar and less expensive. This is what Intel is trying counter with ultrabooks by giving computer companies a dramatically smaller platform to build around. Apple had the foresight to see that mobile computers needed a shot of excitement. The MacBook Air and iPad certainly invigorated its bottom line and a major reason why Apple dominated other players in the second quarter of 2011. Apple saw a 136% year-over-year growth in that segment and ended up shipping 13.5 million mobile devices. (notebooks and tablets) Yet, Windows/Android devices as a whole outsold OS X/iOS products two to one. The Windows PC market is slightly stale. There hasn’t been a new paradigm in the personal computer space for some time. It’s like those Microsoft Store commercials where the lady says “I don’t need a new computer. My computer does everything I need it to do.” Windows notebooks today look physically just like the Windows notebooks from three years ago. Since most computing these days happen inside a web browser, it’s hard to tell consumers that they need a new, five pound notebook just to run Chrome. But what they really need, is a new, two pound ultraportable that gets three times the battery life. Ultrabooks aren’t going to “save” Windows PCs; they don’t need saving. Ultrabooks will cause many consumers to shelve their bulky Windows notebook and jump into the wonderful world of the true portable computer and not the also-ran tech that they have been saddled with for the past half-decade. Intel is best known for producing the microprocessors found in many personal computers. The company also makes a range of other hardware including network cards, motherboards, and graphics chips....
|
| The Vibram Trek LS And Bormio: Ugly, Crazy Monkey Shoes Get Even Crazier Posted: 19 Aug 2011 08:10 AM PDT  I hope you’re not eating anything because you’re about to see some real Jame Gumb stuff in a second. Vibram, famous makers of Sergey’s crazy monkey shoes (that I actually wear while running, much to my wife’s chagrin), have released two new models, the acceptably styled Trek LS, a lace up trail shoe/sneaker, and the absolutely abhorrent (yet strangely alluring) Bormio boots. BirthdayShoes has reviews of both the Bormio and the LS but we’ll highlight a few points below. The LS shoes are more like a sneaker with Vibram soles and toe pockets. They’re actually quite classy if you ignore the monkey-feet aspect and, if you’re man enough to wear them on the street you may actually get compliments as opposed to smacked. They cost $139 and come in brown and black. And here are the Bormios: If you’re anything like me, you’re imagining Hobbitses in their holes right now. These are basically boots with toepockets, which makes them pretty much amazing. BirthdayShoes notes:
If you’ve been going through life thinking “I’d like lion feet,” you’re clearly in luck here. These demonic things cost $160 and are available in brown and black. Both are made of kangaroo hide and, personally, I wonder where they’re getting all the kangaroos for these things. So there you have it: these are the shoes Tim Ferriss, Sergey Brin, and every sycophantic SXSW-bound SEO/Social Media/Google+ Guru will be wearing next season. Geeks, prepare to get your monkey feet chic on.
|
| Samsung Teases For IFA, Glowing Handsets And Beautiful People Posted: 19 Aug 2011 05:50 AM PDT  Samsung has something big in store for IFA 2011 — but don’t they always. The company just unveiled two videos for its latest marketing campaign that, per the rules of Viral 101, do not show anything of interest. Still, IFA is Europe’s CES and they company is bound to have something newsworthy like a Galaxy II successor or a Galaxy Tab of the 7-inch variety. The second video after the jump has most of the action and shows peeps walking around with glowing handsets, which likely forecasts a new smartphone. Whatever it will be, we’ll be onsite next week, drunk on gadgets and German beer.
|
| Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT  Here is a selection of yesterday’s TechCrunch Gadgets stories:
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch » Gadgets To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment