Hey ladies, imminently expecting to bring a child into the world? No, but you have a sneaking suspicion about the mysterious expansion of your abdominal area? Wouldn’t you like to be absolutely sure when/if your water breaks to avoid implausible sitcom rush-to-the-hospital hijinks? The AmniScreen is a schmancy pantyliner that detects the elevated pH in amniotic fluid (gross) and turns teal if you’re about to enter a world of birthing pain with a 96 percent accuracy rate. Wow, I got this whole post without puking! I’m pretty impressed with myself. [Barr Pharmaceuticals via Medgadget]
Waiting in line at the airport sucks. Especially with people who act all surprised when they get to the scanners and suddenly bust babies, knives, lighters and giant sports bottles of water out of their pocket. Well, Transportation Security Laboratory Director Susan Hallowell wants to combine the harrowing misery of an airport line with the electronic patdown into a single gropefest creepily called “The Tunnel of Truth.”
“Can we say that the MacBook Air has a perfect, sophisticated external appearance, but its insides are full of waste?” And by waste, the Japanese engineers doing Nikkei’s teardown really mean screws. Thirty of them. (We thought it was marvelous.) Apparently, Apple is as anal about its manufacturing specs as it is about aesthetics. A common practice for Japanese PC companies is to let the manufacturing plant “improve” the design or implement ones that cut costs. Like, use less screws. But one of the noted that: “The MacBook Air gives me an impression that its manufacturing plant packaged the computer exactly as ordered by Apple.”
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Although Mossberg’s Lenovo X300 vs. MacBook Air fight compared things like weight, portability, inputs and functionality, it didn’t compare the thing that power users care about—performance—in absolute numbers. Notebook Review did. In their CPU benchmark, the Air finished the test in 68 seconds while the X300 took almost double the time at 118 seconds. Things flipped around when they tried another benchmark.
There’s no better way to annoy your travel companions than to take something like this handheld-computer design wherever you go. Not only can you hold it up to buildings and get the address, history and architectural schematics (you know, for a heist), but it also supposedly hooks up with your personal organiser, a dictionary and Google—for that extra bit of information overload. Good thing that this camera/touchscreen display/GPS/internet 3G device is a design or we’d be forced to actually spend the money to buy one. [PetitInvention via Yanko Design]
Hate doing your taxes? Balancing your checkbook? Grinding for loot in World of Warcraft? Just take a look at Han’s face to know that someone has it even worse than you. As painful as it is to look through all your receipts from the last year, it’s much worse to have all the cells in your body lowered to such a temperature that you make that face. You know the one. If you want one of these desks, and we bet you do, you’ll have to ask Tom Spina Designs to create one for you. Money will be involved. [Therpf via Boing Boing]
Nintendo, the current third-place for online console gaming features, just announced Wii Pay & Play. What this means exactly is still fairly vague, but Nintendo says they will collect “fees for some services [that]will allow us to adapt flexibly.” To us this says that they’ll start charging for some online content or functionality (either for downloads or for the privilege of playing certain games online) in order to provide an even richer (read: not that lousy friend code garbage) functionality for the user. More details will surface when Pay & Play gets closer to launch. [Kotaku]
That awesome little native web browser for Apple TV, Safari HD, is no more. It emerges from the crucible of Apple Legal as Couch Surfer—as we like to say, more original, more better. [Apple TV Hacks]
This Antique D2 project is a homemade, one-of-a-kind R2-D2, if R2 was made in an era when barrels were used as bodies for helper robots. Which is to say in an era that never existed, but I suppose that’s what makes it fun, right?
While James and Marguerite Driessen’s patent covers a sort of vaguely broad concept—gift cards for pre-defined items that you buy at a B&M store but use online—I kind of feel for them, given that Apple apparently dropped iTunes custom cards in the US (while continuing to offer them in the UK) to get around licensing the patent after they asked. Then Apple brought it back with Starbucks under their “Song of the Day” program, which gives you a gift card for a pre-set song at Starbucks.
