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Sticking with the green theme, don’t those dead handsets deserve a better deal than just rotting away in your desk’s bottom drawer? Because apparently there are about 15.5 million such phones cluttering up drawers all around the country.
Mobile Muster is all about finding the closest place to recycle your dead phones, and they don’t just send them off to a secret ‘green’ landfill. They actually extract all the useful minerals for reuse in the industry. Cool stat for the day: One tonne of mobile phone circuits can yield the same amount of precious metals as 110 tonnes of gold ore, 123 tonnes of silver bearing ore and 11 tonnes of copper sulphide ore.
Through to end of June, every phone received through Mobile Muster will lead to Landcare Australia running off a planting a tree on your behalf. Double the green! 1,900 drop-off points out there, including Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, 3 Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Crazy Johns, FoneZone, and Allphones stores. -Seamus Byrne
Official Site [Mobile Muster]
theANEMIX is a modular, customisable lighting system inspired by the bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures that produces 3D effects in space. It uses an easily modifiable panel composed of a reflective and a luminescent layer, which is LED-powered, to produce its effects. However they do it, it looks pretty damn sweet, as you can see in the gallery below. – Matt Buchanan
galleryPost('anemix', 4, 'theANEMIX'); [via Geekologie]
When we saw these Fragpedal USB Gaming Footpedals back at E3 2006 buried in Kentia Hall, we thought the concept was interesting, but reserved judgment until we could get our feet on them. i4u just got a pair and they seem to really like them.
The Fragpedals are essentially four buttons that you hit with your feet that you can map macros to. It’s useful when you map functions that are either inconvenient to hit with your keyboard or ones that you want to hit simultaneously with your keyboard.
Kudos to Dell, who over the weekend gathered up 35 tonnes of old computers in a free recycling day – their most successful to date.
Looking at some of the shots, you wonder how much of this stuff actually has some life left. Could some have been donated to charities for distribution to the other side of the digital divide? In the past, I have tried to donate machines to charity, but it doesn’t seem like there is anyone happy to take them — a lot of hoops to jump through, which makes recycling the easy (easier… it still isn’t easy) option…
Hit the jump for more pictures, and my conspiracy theory on ‘recycled’ computers out of Canberra.
According to an assortment of unrelated sources, the best guess is that Microsoft is finally launching its PlayTable concept as a full-blown entertainment product. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley says PlayTable, aka Project Milan is a “multi-touch, gestural- and object-recognition interface technology” that Microsoft has demoed to a lot of people lately, but mainly as technology rather than a product in development. Matt Hickey over at CrunchGear suggests that, based on a demo he saw, it might be a touch-friendly game console that competes with the Wii on intuitive user interface front.
We have another source that confirms the table-ness of the announcement, but says that it will be a kiosk-type of device, meant to provide gaming entertainment and a retail interface for Zune, but that, at a cost of $10,000 a pop, it won’t be something that people actually buy for their homes.
With this $15 set of 4 steak thermometers, you’ll no longer have to yell at your kids whenever he or she cooks your steak the wrong way. Just plop the reusable thermometer inside your steak and watch as the gauge goes from Rare to Medium to Well.
We’ve been cooking steak for a while and still don’t know what the “optimal” temperature for it is, so an easy-to-read thermometer like this is perfect for idiots like us. And your kids. – Jason Chen
Product Page [Surlatable via Uncrate]
The Moshi Celesta keyboard has two things going for it. One, it looks very nice with its blue LEDs and “diamond-cut” aluminum frame. Two, it has laptop-styled keys to make typing quieter and faster. Yes, we know some of you like to type at 90db with your click-clacking IBM keyboards, but not everyone does.
Lord Percy tested out the keyboard and said it was easy to use and had the full amount of keys. This is important, because many laptop-styled keyboards don’t have the numpad—this does. It also supports OS X’s function keys and comes with a black pouch if you want to travel with it. But for a price of $120, only the people who use their computers a lot can justify buying the Celesta. – Jason Chen
Product Page [Aevoe via Lord Percy]
There are certain members of the Windows coding community that just can’t seem to let go of the fact that Windows Vista isn’t quite the Windows Longhorn OS that Microsoft demoed to them back in 2004. These nerds have gone and created a new build of “Longhorn,” complete with Windows File System (WinFS), and other stripped-out features.
What’s the point of this?
You need some fruit. Seriously. Go eat some fruit.
Local Forza 2 launch, with video of triple-screen racing action. We posted this late yesterday, so thought we’d better flag it here at the top of the day. Forza’s support of triple the hardware definitely triples the pleasure.
Toshiba saying hello to AMD. Everyone wins when all options become available.
Super Hi-Vision: Japan’s 4320p future. So high-def, YOU start to look low res in the mirror.
Possible Thinkpad Reserve Edition? 2005 Lenovo concept design could be about to hit reality.
Fast, large solid state drives coming very, very soon. Sure, they’ll cost you a limb, but 256GB drives at 60MB R/W are as ‘holy grail’ as grails get in this business.
Planning to redecorate your place with a Villain-esque theme? Then this old-school TV/Liquor Cabinet should be just the thing for you.
You can set up a CCTV camera feed from your front door to this TV and know exactly when your mother-in-law arrives. Once she’s inside, activate the Auton lift system to reveal the booze underneath. That’ll keep her from yapping about how you should get a better job. – Jason Chen
Product Page [Auton via Geekologie]
