This TED talk from Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and founder of Intellectual Ventures, is entertaining to say the least. There isn’t any useful information here, or news, or anything but Nathan is a fun engaging public speaker to listen to. With his voice’s wide dynamic range (both baby bear and papa bear) and interesting and unpredictable topic matter, his talks could be considered the prototypical template for entertaining mad genius speeches. Oh, and he makes backyard nuclear generators. [TED via BoingBoing]
Despite the stigma, I’ve always wanted a pair of video goggles. I never did mind the nerd factor accompanying any piece of gear, at least not after admiring sci fi heroes like Cyclops of the X-men and Geordi from ST:TNG. But they’ve never been cheap or high-res enough until now. The Zeiss Cinemizer (US$400) and the Myvu Crystal (US$300) both do 640×480 resolution, which is best in class. And so today I’ll try to figure out which one is better headset. During it all, I will suspend all disbelief when it comes to the practicality of wearing a second screen for your video iPod on your face. I mean, what are you really saving here but neck cramps?
newVideoPlayer("splintercelltrailer.flv", 506, 423,""); These are the most badass earbuds on the planet, worn by the most badass people on the planet. Made by Silynx, the C4OPS are noise-cancelling earbuds made for Special Forces that have a built-in GPS receiver which transmits securely through tactical radio and has voice navigation.
Santa Monica has delivered a bright and shiny upgrade to its Pacific Ferris Wheel, dismantling the old one to make way for a new behemoth that boasts 160,000 LED lights. The 27-metre ride, manufactured by Chance Morgan Rides, delivers visual performances every night and cost the city US$1.5 million. Thanks to solar panels that soak up energy during the day to power the wheel, those extravagant light shows have a minuscule carbon footprint.
We know the iPhone is going to be centre stage on Monday. But maybe you don’t want a new iPhone, you want one more thing. Cult of Mac has convenient interactive timeline of big announcements from every Stevenote (with video!) so you can figure out what’s more likely than not, using history as a guide.
AT&T chief tech officer John Donovan has told Wired that they’re going to test bandwidth caps in the fall, making them the third of the four major ISPs to do so. (Verizon stands alone, but for how long?) He lays out the familiar rationale, a small group of users (5 percent) pillage the network (40 percent) and they’ve got to stop them. But then he slips what’s probably the real reason they’ve moving to caps: “Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not.”
Interesting fact about the laundry list of magical powers bestowed to Japanese mobile phones–it makes ‘em really hard for mere mortals to use. In this Wired article, Nobi Hayashi (who’s like Japan’s Pogue) estimates people use less than 5 to 10 percent of their handsets’ functions–his Panasonic P905i has a 3-inch TV, 3G, GPS and motion-controlled, Wii-style games, which he shows off to amaze Americans, but in truth most of it doesn’t work that great (motion controls are slow, TV cuts out). Complicated menus bury cool functions that you have to dig for like an archaeologist. So the easy-to-use but fairly feature-full iPhone seems like it’d go over well right? Eh, maybe.
Addy fiddled with the HTC Touch at the official unveiling about a month ago, but we’ve just got our own units delivered to us for extensive in-home testing. The exterior looks as nice as we’ve already seen in unboxing shots, and the TouchFlo is much more refined than the previous incarnations in HTC’s ever-expanding Touch line. The problem? TouchFlo is slow as balls. And that’s kind of an insult to balls, which are actually pretty fast from our past experience.
You may have heard about a monkey controlling a robot arm that was in the news a week or two ago. It’s a pretty incredible story (albeit one that we reported on in 2003, 2005 and 2007). In the above video, Paul Scheer from Human Giant and Best Week Ever demonstrates the down sides to giving a monkey control over a robot. Because really, at the end of the day, a robot controlled by a monkey is really just going to act like a monkey. (Video after the jump) [Funny or Die]
Some French message board has rumour of a new Samsung Blu-ray player called the BD-P2500. There have been countless before, but the hot thing about this is that its the first with the hardware to support full spec BD-Live from the Korean company. Update: Samsung has said that the previously announced BD-P1500 will come “BD-Live-ready,” with a firmware upgrade required to take it to the full 2.0 spec. This rumoured player would likely come with 2.0 action already built in.
