Dell's VP of Consumer Design, Ed Boyd, discusses the theory of Dell's latest design, including the Adamo laptop. He uses words like "unbridled" with a straight face.
Here's a design tip for Dell: Stop taking money from Intel and Microsoft so you can get those horrible little badges off the inside of your laptops. [via Core77]
"This is easier if they had simply been painted many times, such as mayonnaise and various sources. Clean look!"
The Magic Five is a crafty, Japanese spread bottle with five parallel holes. If you squeeze just right, you can decorate a plate, food or person (huzzah!) with pretty much any reasonably-thick, chunk-free condiment of your choosing.
After discovering the bottle at an okonomiyaki counter in Kyoto during my first trip to Japan last November, I was hooked -- then mega-disappointed I couldn't find one at Tokyu Hands. Finally, I managed to import one. Find out how after the jump...
I'm a sauce guy. Not exclusively for taste, but play. Anytime a saucy desert, dinner or starter plate is put in front of me, I'm dragging a fork or toothpick through it to create a "spider web" or "checker board" (above) or Jackson Pollack.
The good news: This product is awesome for doing all of the above design work and more. I'm mostly decorating poached eggs with a mix of hot sauce, Tabasco, and ketchup. But mayo or anything with a similar consistency works great. Hot sauce with chunky peppers or skins are not good.
The bad news: It's sold only in Japan, where it's being marketed as an "As Seen On Tv"-style cooking aid. The only online outlet seems to be via shopping.yahoo.co.jp, which currently won't ship outside Japan*. Total bummer.
The good news (for me): Lisa has family in Tokyo. We split a set of two (below) for 1,259 yen, roughly $13 (including shipping, which was pricier than the Magic Five!). Worth every yen. I'll go out on a limb and say Lisa and I are now both budding decorators. She's using Kewpie mayo in hers. I'm jealous, and now very hungry.
*If you live in Japan, buy these and eBay them. You won't be sorry.
Once again I'm breaking my own "don't post things that don't exist" rule, but this "Aulis" logging harvester by Niko Kugler and George Heitzmann gets a pass because it is 1) fancy-pants construction equipment, and 2) awful close to being a Constructicon.
Expect to see this never for infinite dollars, etc. [via Yanko]
On the Intel/Asus-sponsed WePC.com, Destructoid's Niero Gonzalez had the same thought about dual touchscreen laptops that many of us have, but has made it oh-so-much-more compelling with a mockup of playing World of Warcraft on such a machine.
I'm writing pieces on WePC, too, for money. (Here's my latest, asking about gaming on netbooks.) I've been asking if we can get any special access to Asus's engineers so we can actually see if these sort of mockups may actually be produced. God knows Asus isn't afraid of releasing a zillion models with only slight differences in specifications.
In fact, it is their upcoming touchscreen netbook that is the first netbook to actually intrigue me in a while, since it brings something new to the table. I know several people have added touchscreens to netbooks with aftermarket kits, but I'd rather see them from the factory. (Aftermarket kits can be "cloudy", although this Dell Mini 9 with a touchscreen, for example, doesn't look too bad.)
It's impossible to link to stuff or talk about these companies on these conversational hub sites without it having the stink of the shill, which is why I don't tend to link to the stuff we do on these sites even though they really like us to do so. In this case, I actually just discovered Niero's post when it had a hundred-some-odd comments and thought, What has that crafty bastard done now? Couple that with my unfortunate recent inkling to play WoW again, and it's enough to make me think that I could live without a proper keyboard if it were this were my little dedicated gaming machine. (I wonder how WoW would run on an Open Pandora?)
Well this is a thing: AJ Gannon has combined a Speak n' Spell with a Rock Band controller, making for one very wicked-sounding alphabet screamer. [via Music Radar]
"Tweetlite" is a Arduino-powered plexiglass cube that displays a person's Twitter stream in LED flashes of Morse code. That would probably drive me nuts (although its creator Bruce Drummond does make a good point about its usefulness as a Morse code learning aid), but I've always been a sucker for ambient lights communicating status, even if in practice it can be a bit tedious.
Power bricks are the unmentioned overhead that makes laptop lugging a pain. This goes double for netbooks, which sometimes come with generic monster doorstops nearly equal in weight to the machine itself. Texas Instruments is developing a standard that halves the size while retaining the sturdy housing and safety features required by laptop manufacturers.
Jacob Van Order bought a MacBook Pro off a guy on Craigslist and ended up getting a prototype model that only runs Mac OS X Tiger, since the wireless card and some other bits are non-standard and were never supported on Leopard.
He's put up a Flickr gallery, but to honest it's basically just a MacBook Pro with some stickers on the bottom that say "Hey Apple Employee, don't sell this prototype on Craigslist, okay?"
This gorgeous wooden machine, from Japan's Novac, converts cassette tapes to MP3, WAV or WMA and pipes them up to your computer via USB. It's Windows-only, according to the specs, and will be $80 when it comes out later this month. In Japan.
Amazon can, at its pleasure, suspend your account: for example, if you return too many books or other purchases. This also means that your Kindle can no longer get virtual books and subscriptions you already paid for. From The Consumerist:
Your Kindle still works, and the books you already bought for it will work, but you can't download those books ever again (better have made a backup on your PC!), you can't receive your magazine, blog, or newspaper subscriptions on it anymore, you can't email documents to Amazon to have them converted and sent to your Kindle, and you can't buy any new books for the device. That $360 device only works so long as Amazon decides it will work.
What better example of how DRM makes "piracy" mainstream? If it's the only way to stop companies deleting the things we buy, otherwise law-abiding people will be happy to get their hands dirty.
Forget sleek aluminum monoliths from Lian-Li or Antec: this is where minimalism is about more than just looking pretty. The Acrylic Cowboy, previously a hard to find oddity, is now available in the U.S. for $76. It holds ATX and Micro-ATX motherboards, power supplies, and peripherals.
Today on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol takes a deeper look at the recently much-hyped promises of "cloud gaming" services like OnLive and Gaikai -- who suggest that the days of buying powerful home processing hardware are numbered if our games were processed on the cloud and delivered via video streaming -- and what questions and concerns remain if and when the fantastic claims are seem fairly reasonable in a few years time.
Amazon can, at its pleasure, suspend your account: for example, if you return too many books or other purchases. This also means that your Kindle can no longer get virtual books and subscriptions you already paid for. From The Consumerist:
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