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- A Unique View Inside An HP Laptop Assembly Line
- This Vision Of The Future Includes Eyeball-Embedded AR, Hackable Humans, And Gamified Everything
- The Tombox Is A Beautiful Retro Speaker Stuffed With Modern Conveniences
- Tubbs And Crockett May Need To Borrow Your Handsome Bluetooth Brick Headset
- OnLive To Ship On The OUYA Android Gaming Device
- Chinese Case Maker Reveals Potential iPhone 5 Design
| A Unique View Inside An HP Laptop Assembly Line Posted: 27 Jul 2012 08:39 AM PDT A Reddit user found this video recorded on his brand new HP laptop. It was stored in the My Documents folder and clearly depicts the mundanity of life inside a hardware manufacturing plant. This was taken in the Quanta Chongqing Manufacturing City in Chongqing and the worker seems to be testing the camera on this particular model. Usually evidence of this testing is wiped out. It wasn’t in this case. Essentially, you’re looking at the face of modern manufacturing. He’s not mistreated, he’s not chained to his desk, but he’s building the same thing, over and over again, a prospect not many of us would relish. It’s a mundane view inside a fairly secret world that we as consumers rarely get to see.
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| This Vision Of The Future Includes Eyeball-Embedded AR, Hackable Humans, And Gamified Everything Posted: 27 Jul 2012 08:16 AM PDT  It’s impossible to predict the future, but the idea that our technology will soon collide with our biological sense of vision continues to pop up in the world. Minority Report is the best fictional example, while Google Glass is obviously the closest real-world iteration of this type of collision to date. But a new video (below) posted by Sight Systems takes a stab at how this marriage of sight with technology could manifest itself in the coming years (or perhaps decades). The video depicts some kind of system in which the technology itself is embedded in your eyeball, meaning that tons of apps lead you through your day without any extra hardware at all. You see the main character, Patrick, work out on his floor, watch TV (on an entirely blank wall), get dressed using some type of virtual closet app, and use the Wingman app to help him through a date. As with any large shift in technology, this type of lifestyle will have its pros and its cons. People are constantly complaining about a lack of real-life interaction now that smartphones have pervaded the our world. You can’t talk to someone for five seconds without either their phone or your phone interrupting. And even without an interruption, there’s this constant need to Instagram it, post it to Facebook, tweet about it, text someone else about it, or even whip out the phone to look up the next stop on tonight’s journey. Sight Systems, if it was real, would change that disconnect a bit, but it would also externalize even more knowledge. Devin explains it best in his post on the matter, but in short, the more we use knowledge found on the Internet (and not in our own minds) the less capacity we have to actually hold that knowledge internally. The best example in the video would be Patrick making his breakfast. Rather than knowing the recipe and cooking it, his Sight System gamifies the process and walks him through each individual step, virtualized on his counter-top. While we’re already sliding down this slippery slope, Googling knowledge instead of retaining it, there are still limitations to it. Even in our hyper-connected world, there are certain times when you simply don’t have access to the Internet, and even if you do, there are things (very few things, but they exist) that cannot be looked up. But by embedding the technology within our bodies, the externalizing of knowledge becomes internal. That sounds really meta — let’s see if I can clarify. Here’s an example: The other day I realized that I can’t quite remember which temperature certain types of clothes should be washed at. I looked it up, and washed the clothes. That is knowledge that my mother gave me, but that I pushed out of my memory because I knew it was easily accessible (this is all subconscious, of course). If the Internet were broken, globally, and there was some sort of world disaster, the consequence wouldn’t just be me not knowing how to wash my clothes. The consequence would be billions of people who have no idea how to deal with an Internet-less world. By embedding this type of technology in our bodies, there is absolutely zero freedom from this externalized knowledge. There is no way to resist the temptation to “look it up.” And thus, everything we know comes from the technology inside us rather than our own brains. It’s a scary thought, but so is the ending of the video.
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| The Tombox Is A Beautiful Retro Speaker Stuffed With Modern Conveniences Posted: 27 Jul 2012 07:33 AM PDT  It can be argued that today’s modern electronics lack the soul found in older devices. There was a time that a radio felt nearly alive thanks to its glowing inner tubes and wooden casing. But now, with printed circuit boards and mass produced plastic casings, electronics feel dead, disposable and down right stiff. Tombox speakers are a bit different. Using repurposed vintage electronics, these speakers combine the warm feeling of older electronics with features of a modern kit — think steampunk without the gaudy nonsense. There are a 10 models in this company’s collection, each with a 3.5mm input. The best looking model, the tombox 145 (top), is already sold. Since these are one-off products, they’re gone when they’re gone. The tombox 144 (below) is another good bet. Or, if you need something larger, the company also sells large floor models complete with casters and a large leather strap for wheeling it around a room. Prices are bit rough with models starting out at 190 EUR. Worse yet, it’s rather difficult to give this company your money as the buy button links to an email account. But never mind those trivial features, these radios and large speakers restore my faith in design by ironically rehashing older designs.
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| Tubbs And Crockett May Need To Borrow Your Handsome Bluetooth Brick Headset Posted: 27 Jul 2012 06:51 AM PDT  If you’re heading down to Radio Shack to buy a brand new Tandy 1000 (the hottest PC out there!) then you may want to bring this handsome brick handset designed to work with your “smaller” phone via Bluetooth. You can whip this baby out in line while you write a check out for your PC, modem, and MS-DOS 3.0 purchases. Designed by a husband and wife team, Shisa Labs, in Jersey City, NJ (the home of the rolled up sport coat sleeve), the device is ready to start tooling and shipping in a few months. It costs $85 for the early bird model. Phones will come in multiple colors including Fisher Office Supply Beige so you and your buds can color coordinate your parachute pants as you roll down to the club, Cutty-Sark-pre-party-buzz just kicking in, and talk about how great Star Cops was. The phone lasts for about 20 hours on one charge and works with any Bluetooth compatible device including cellphones and desktops. You can also use the phone as speakerphone for Skype or just as a funny prop for the skit you’re putting on at the Lock-in down at the Junior Rec Center. They’ve hit $5,601 of their very ambitious $150,000 goal, so here’s hoping they can bring out the old Eye Of The Tiger and totally push this into the Danger Zone.
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| OnLive To Ship On The OUYA Android Gaming Device Posted: 27 Jul 2012 06:28 AM PDT  The OUYA could change the gaming scene. The low price Android gaming set-top box has the makings of something great. But as the old saying goes, content is king and without killer titles, the OUYA will have a hard time attracting consumers and developers alike. Enter OnLive. The two companies took to the interwebs this morning to announce OnLive will ship with OUYA. This means the little Android device will have access to first-run traditional gaming titles at launch. OnLive’s library currently includes Assassins Creed Revelations, L.A. Noire, The Darkness II and a ton more. Having access to this deep library will likely give the OUYA’s creators a bit more time to court Android devs to make exclusive titles for their new gaming device. “OUYA is rethinking the console business, making waves by using standard technology to make gaming for your living room accessible, affordable and more innovative than ever,” wrote OnLive’s general manager Bruce Grove this morning on the company’s blog. “In OnLive’s case, we pioneered a groundbreaking, cloud-based system that instantly delivers games to any device on demand.” Along with announcing OnLive, OUYA also revealed the latest design of its gaming controller. Don’t worry about the colored buttons, the company noted on its Kickstarter page that they’re just placeholders. “We won’t leave out colorblind gamers. “, they said. OUYA is the latest Kickstarter superstar. With 5.5M in preorders on Kickstarter and 12 days to go, the device is exciting gamers and developers alike by bringing Android gaming to the living room. The company behind the product aims to bring it to market at just $99, a relative bargain in the space with the Xbox 360 and PS3 retailing for $199 and $249, respectively. Since the device is powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, the device should be able to produce quality graphics, too. However, in order to be successful, the OUYA needs killer games, which is something OnLive can provide in large quantities at launch. This is has been a good week for OnLive. Just days ago the gaming company helped the $99 Vizio Co-Star Google TV device sell out in just 12 hours. OnLive, and with that, alternative gaming systems in general, has had a hard time breaking consumers away from the big three gaming companies, but it seems, at least after this week, that times could be changing.
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| Chinese Case Maker Reveals Potential iPhone 5 Design Posted: 27 Jul 2012 06:20 AM PDT  The iPhone 5 is coming. The latest rumors peg September 21 as its release date. But even though Apple has yet to announce the phone, there are already countless, as in, hundreds and hundreds, of cases available for the model. It was just a matter of time until one of those case makers filled in the blanks by inserting a logical prototype into one of their cases. Now, the device shown here is likely not a real-life, completely working iPhone 5. Even if it is a real thing, it doesn’t matter since Apple already revealed most of iOS 6′s goodies. Case makers are given specific specifications, and from there, they design cases to properly fit the device. The hundreds of cases available tell a story of a taller iPhone like the one in the pictures here. As Gizmodo points out, Shenzhen Coolzone Technology is responsible for this latest leak. The case maker is currently hawking 29 different iPhone 5 cases, each with the taller design and with the headphone jack located on the bottom of the device, next to what appears to be a spot for a smaller dock connector. This isn’t the first time that an upcoming iDevice was revealed by case makers. It has happened to nearly every iPhone and iPod over the last few years. The sheer amount of cases with identical specifications seem to confirm the new, taller design. Last fall, when the iPhone 5 was supposed to hit, just a handful of cases spoke to a radical redesign. But this time around, Alibaba is filled with cases of the same form factor. Assuming the prototype displayed here correctly foretells the next iPhone’s design, it’s a bit strange that it will look simply like a tall iPhone 4. Sure, the current design has a stately, almost classic design, but the style is over two years old now. And in the mobile world, two years is near-retirement age. Haters will no doubt point and laugh at the rehashed design, but Apple has its massive bank account for comfort.
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/28/2012 05:27:00 AM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:03:00 PM
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Posted By e Readers Tips to e Readers Reviews at 7/29/2012 07:04:00 PM
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