Check out the Floater by Balmuda Design, a stand for your MacBook Pro that lets you close up that laptop, holding it up on vertical display for all to see. Connect your keyboard, screen and mouse for the perfect desktop replacement. Carved out of a solid block of aluminum, it matches the MacBook Pro and even helps to cool things off a bit, acting as a natural heat sink.
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While Apacer hasn’t given up trying to make iPod competitors, its time is better spent creating frilly stuff, as evidenced by this pretty little Mega Steno USB card reader. Whether you dig its frilly etchings on its case is a matter of taste, but at least someone is trying to make these prosaic devices a little prettier.
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There’s nothing like a bit of LA weirdness for a sunny summer morning. LA-based artist Jed Berk is the brains behind Blubber Bots, rather dreamy autonomous helium blimps that float around the place looking beautiful – rather like me, in fact. And just like us hoo-mans, all they really care about is “food” (represented by LED lights) and friendship.
Want an iPhone? Too busy being lazy/filthy rich/nonchalant/a sex slave? If you have money to burn, then you could get one of these nice young men to loiter sadly outside your local Apple Store, your greenbacks in his mucky paw. More »
Andrew Green, he of the FloatingCat blog, has been in the kitchen baking like you wouldn’t believe. And here it is, the Transformer cake. galleryPost('transformercake',8, 'transformercake');
Based on the 1984 version of Optimus Prime, it cost Andrew and his lady, Jessica, $85, and was four hours in the planning and 22 hours in the making. The key question here, though, is how many hours in the eating?
The finished cake, G1 Toy, and cartoon based toy [Flickr via Floating Cat] More »
An eco-friendly hot tub, the Dutch Tub looks like something out of a soft-porn Euro flick from the Seventies. Which is A Good Thing.
Apart from its looks, the $6,000 tub has rather a special USP: As well as being totally transportable (throw it on the top of the SUV, don’t forget the fuel, find a nice spot and set it up) the log basket doubles as a cooker, meaning you can barbecue while you stew.
Product Page [Dutch Tub via Gadget Candy] More »
Designed by Simon Kingston and James Rennick for German appliance über-maestros Miele, this modular kitchen is perfect for those long hours we Giz worker ants have been putting in this week as we bring you all the iPhone coverage* as fast as our sweaty little paws can type.
With spaces for either Miele gear or seating (I guess it depends just how lazy/minimalist you are) I think that if this concept gets the green light, it may soon be finding its way into many a minuscule NY apartment.
FLOTspotting: James Rennick and Simon Kingston [Core 77 via Born Rich]
* Did you like the gratuitous iPhone mention? Thought not… More »
This is John Shepherd-Barron, the scottish guy who invented the first ATM. First installed 40 year ago by Barclays, it worked with Carbon 14-impregnated cheques, the same radioactive material that is used to date fossils. But fret not: not only it wasn’t radioactive enough but they were soon replaced by cards and now even dogs can use them. The next step according to him:
He says that moving money around costs too much, so ATMs will disappear in just a few years. Instead, he predicts the cellphone will become our next purse for all kinds of transactions.
The ATM also brought other things, like the 4-digit PIN number. Shepherd-Barron thought that he could use his six-figure army number as his password, but his wife thought otherwise: “Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard.”
The man who invented the cash machine [BBC News] More »
Does the idea of leaping out of a spaceship with just a specially-adapted spacesuit and parachute thrill you? Thanks to a group of space scientists, the day you find yourself awaiting the order to jump 120,000 feet above earth could be closer than you think. And it’s not just an idea for extreme sports fans, as the two men behind the idea reckon that Space Diving could be used as a safety function for astronauts whose ship has malfunctioned.
The news is that T-Mobile is rolling out a three-tiered HotSpot @Home strategy: • First, there’s a pair of $49.99 phones, the Samsung t409 and the Nokia 6086, that can jump from the cellular GSM network to the Wi-Fi network in your home or Starbucks then back again. • Next, T-Mobile is giving anyone who signs up a free D-Link or Linksys router that can be a standalone wireless hub for your home, or an add-on to your network that makes Wi-Fi calling more reliable and less of a drain on the phone’s battery. • Finally, it’s $10 per month extra for the service, unlimited calls originating from a Wi-Fi hotspot, even if you walk out the door and the call is handed off to the cellular network.
I say this is T-Mobile’s long delayed attempt to make good on its Wi-Fi overzeal. I know for a fact that this is something they have been trying to pull off for years, and that the handoff on a cheap little phone is more of a trick than the handoff on a smartphone, not that that’s super easy. But three or four years is a long time to wait just to hear that I can buy a special phone to save cash when I’m at home or in a Starbucks, especially when T-Mobile’s regular rates are noticeably lower than the heftier competition.
A dear colleague of mine thinks it’s a “loser’s play”, the last chance that the network with no high-speed data service (and no iPhone for its EDGE network) has to get attention. Either way, it’s a hell of a week to try and sell it. What it really needs is a test, and that hasn’t happened yet, at least not here at the Giz. Stay tuned, and we’ll let you know how it feels. For now, check out the press release: More »
