In case you missed it, part of the news about Pioneer’s radical restructuring includes this shocker: The Kings of Plasma are about to start making Pioneer-branded and (maybe even) Kuro-branded LCD displays using Sharp’s panels. Boom!
The Arduino platform has been the basis of some awesome projects in the past, but I have yet to see an application of the technology that is more fun than this Etch-a-Sketch clock. At the beginning of every minute, the device draws out the time in a matter of seconds and then erases it to start the process all over again the next minute. Fan freakin’ tastic. [Make]
A chess board recently unearthed in the Czech Republic takes an fresh look at the classic game by adding a third player into the action. Apparently, the game starts out like regular chess, but somewhere near the middle all hell breaks loose in an orgy of complex diagonal moves. Moreover, because their are three players, a certain amount of cooperation must take place to determine a winner.
The race to release the world’s first mobile projector continues to heat up with the word that 3M has found a “leading consumer electronics company” to help get its product out the door. It appears that the product in question is the same half-inch think LED illuminated projection engine that 3M was shopping around back in January.
Buffalo’s managed to cram 500GB into this MiniStation Turbo, which is a small, portable, 5400RPM USB hard drive with “shock absorbing material” to protect from unintended drops. Buffalo claims that it’s got up to 30% faster transfer rates than “most USB hard drives”, but chances are you’re going to be buying this for the size and not so much for how fast you can get your data off of it. 500GB in your pants? Yes please. The only thing holding us back is the slightly high price of US$329. [Buffalo]
In an attempt to get back at her husband for walking out on their marriage, a Chinese wife gathered up the entire stock of mobiles from the retail store they once shared, and proceeded to burn the entire lot before leaving the house. After the smoke cleared, the total damage was estimated to be 400 phones valued at US$42,000. No word on what kind of charges this woman is looking at, but I think the lesson here is that if you are an ass with a psychotic girlfriend—hide your gadgets. [cnews via Fark]
If the Sony exec saying there have been talks with Microsoft about making a Blu-ray Xbox 360 add-on wasn’t enough to make you believe that a drive is coming, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just said “Toshiba has moved on. We’ve moved on, and we’ll support Blu-ray in ways that make sense.” [Games Industry]
Panasonic’s just become the first manufacturer to make a DivX-certified stand-alone Blu-ray player, the BD30K, which will be available in Europe and Russia starting this month. It’s not the first machine to have both DivX and Blu-ray (the PlayStation 3 did that a few months ago), but it does signal the continuation of a trend that started with many DVD players getting DivX functionality. Do you really need DivX on your Blu-ray player? Probably not, but if you’re frequently downloading stuff off BitTorrent, having another machine that can play back last week’s Lost is pretty convenient.
Pioneer’s Kuro plasma sets are the best TVs on the market, right now, bar none. So it was a little disconcerting to hear that they’re officially quitting plasma panel production and outsourcing it. We just talked with Russ Johnston, Pioneer’s Executive VP of Marketing and Product Planning for Home Entertainment about the future of Pioneer’s plasma business, in particular, Kuro. Good news, plasma theater diehards: Kuro is going nowhere, and they’re keeping (most) of its magic to themselves. How?
The enthusiastic high-fives of future iPhone instant messaging users yesterday might be quite a bit less enthusiastic today when they find out that Apple is not going to allow user-made SDK applications to run in the background. This means every application, from IM to VoIP to GPS mapping, will have to terminate entirely when the user switches out to take a call or change a song. How does this affect you? It means you won’t be a be able to receive IMs unless you’re currently inside the IM app, forcing you to disconnect when you take a call. There’s an upside and a downside to this decision.
