As of last night, Flickr/Yahoo has finally bit the bullet and added video support to their service. A cynical response might be that they clearly would like to compete with YouTube. But when reading through the FAQ and examining the system’s limitations, it seems that they really are sincere in supporting “long photo” as opposed to real videos. The kind that come from your cameras, not camcorders.
In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas in Austin is the world’s most powerful laser. Switched on for the first time last week, it has an output of a quadrillion watts—in terms of zeros, that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000. Wired has gotten its hands on some stunning pictures of the US$7-million installation, and has a detailed explanation of how the thing works. The laser will be used to recreate astronomical goings-on, such as supernovae and, as the manager of the laser project says, “You’d have to go out into space and hang out with an exploding star to observe what we plan to observe here in Texas.” [Wired]
Digital picture frames are deepening their grip on society… they’re bored with being on your keychain and desk, now they’ve got designs on your fridge door. Meet fridge magnet digital picture frames and try not to scream. Expensive fridges with built in LCD screens? No… just chuck a couple of these up and you can have cycling slideshow of all the family members. 2.4-inch LCD screens, 32MB memory, 11 hours of pics from the USB-rechargeable battery and a built-in clock display. What more could you ask for? US$60. [Redferret]
IKEA has outfitted a train in Kobe with sofas and curtains—probably with names like Oompa-loompa, Svenssonjohansensson, Frida, and Bucarest. Unfortunately, the makeover is temporary, to mark the opening of a new shop in the city. Good, because otherwise I would move to live in there. I will miss my stair bookcase, yes, but I would make as many one-serving friends per hour as the number of pictures in the gallery after the jump.
I’ve gone off foosball since I had my arse royally kicked when playing with a bunch of friends at a music festival, but Eleven may turn my opinion around. Hand crafted by GRO design and TIM modelling, because they thought foosball was “lacking serious design attention in recent years”, it’s just gorgeous. The players are machined in brass and chrome, the table itself is meant to be a bit architectural, like real stadiums, and minimal to not distract from the game. It’s on show at the upcoming Milan Design Week, 16th to 21st April, and tragically it’s just a working model. [Eleventhegame via Uberreview]
It’s sad but true; wearing a watch phone isn’t going to make you cool, not unless your name begins in “Dick” and ends in “Tracy.” Nevertheless, the crew at Cool have put together the G108 watch phone to try and sway you. The G108 has a round face and a clamshell design; under the watch-face hood you’ll get a 1.5-inch, 256k colour display (128 x 60), circular RAZR-esque keypad and a 1.3MP camera.
Here are the first—alleged—pictures of the Tube, the codename for Nokia’s response to the iPhone we talked about yesterday. It seems that these images were taken at the same developers conference in California. Looking at the second photo, it seems it will have stylus support.
Straight out from Alice’s Wonderland, this magnetic table and dinnerware are designed with four objectives: 1) store your plates, cups and cutlery, upside down, under the table, 2) arrange them neatly on top, 3) erase the data from any hard drive that comes near, and 4) cause head and eye injuries to kids and pets. Or drive them mad. And yet, we still want it. More pics after the jump.
Amazon’s got a pretty damn good deal going on Blu-ray movies right now, offering a buy-two-get-one-free off any of 58 selected movies. Better yet, these movies are already at least 30% off, so you can get three movies for about US$45ish. We suggest Wild Things, The 5th Element and Into the Blue for a triple-play high def boobstravaganza. AU: Thought this was worth posting, but remember that Blu-ray has that totally awesome security feature known as region coding, meaning discs bought on Amazon may not work with your Blu-ray player. Doesn’t it just want to make you max out your download limit on bittorrent smile?
