All you travellers coming home tomorrow from your wild and crazy Independence Day weekend vacations, don’t be one of 12,000 people who lose their laptops at airports every week. That’s right, that ain’t no typo—12,000 dudes and dudettes somehow manage to misplace their portable computers every seven days. That’s 600,000 machines a year, many containing sensitive information that companies need to account for.
One of the coolest things about the Batpod from the upcoming Dark Knight movie is the fact that it actually works. Previously seen being straddled by Meredith Viera on The Today Show, the decked out motorcycle burned rubber at the slightly more dignified British Formula One Grand Prix this weekend. Who else would give anything to be Jean-Pierre Goy, Christian Bale’s stuntman, right now? [Gizmag]
Before there was the Game Boy, there was Game & Watch. DS Fanboy has a sitdown with two dudes who scoured the world to collect every Game & Watch handheld ever produced: 60 in all, each one a unique and delicious plastic bundle with a single game, like Snoopy Tennis or Donkey Kong Jr. How obsessed is collector Michael Panayiotakis?
With soaring fuel costs and greenhouse gas concerns, zeppelins might get their second chance to be a relevant mode of transportation. According to the New York Times, several countries are now looking into developing dirigibles for transporting things such as sightseers, postal deliveries and scientific payloads. France’s postal service, La Poste, seems to have some of the most ambitious plans in mind: using airships on routes between France and Corsica or the Antilles in an effort to reduce emissions.
Here’s a great product to ensure that you’ll never be invited to somebody’s backyard ever again–the “Easy Install Twist Chair.” Instead of having four legs like regular chairs, the Twist uses a corkscrew base that you plug into the ground and spin until it’s solidly placed. Bring the chair along the next time you go to a garden party and see if your hosts appreciate you aerating their lawn. [Yanko Design]
Have you ever searched for new updates with Windows Update in Vista? It’s slow as balls, no matter how beefy your machine is. But! Windows Update is getting an, um, update that will make it run a lot faster–scan times are down almost 20 percent. If you have automatic updates turned off, obviously you won’t get this happy joy update when it rolls out at the end of the month, unless you go to Windows Update and install it manually. And you should, unless you want update scans to still take forever. [Microsoft Update Product Blog]
Sony is probably OLED’s most vocal prophet as the TV of the future. But according to Nikkei, they’re hedging their bets and getting more serious with another next-gen display tech: field emission display, which is a lot like a good ol’ cathode ray tube, except that it’s super thin–it has all the benefits too, like deep blacks and zero motion blur. A “dream panel” says Nikkei. Plus, they’re easier to build at large sizes than OLED TVs. Sony just agreed to take over a plant run by Pioneer to begin mass production of FED panels in late 2009 after holding the tech at arm’s length for years.
For the ultimate game of Duck Hunt, Marksman Training Systems is offering the ST-2 shooting simulator–the first on the market for shotgun and rifle shooting. Co-developed by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the simulator is so accurate that its used by Russian and Slovakian national clay shooting teams as a way to practice before the Olympics.
Someone I know once had the awesome idea of turning a laundromat (popular here in my neck of the woods) into a singles bar. With this concept washer and dryer from Indian designer Harsha Vardhan, we could up our prospective plans a notch and instead turn laundromats into singles lounges. The make believe washing machine doubles as a large seat whether it’s in active or passive mode. The inner chamber of the chaise acts as a pressure washer and cleans clothes with ionised air instead of water.
Sure, you might loathe Apple with every fibre of your Windows-running being. But look at this iPod USB stick. It’s so cute. How can you hate it? It comes in 1GB and 2GB flavours for £19.95 (about $40) and £24.95 ($50). Yep, still adorable. Awwww. No? You probably hated Wall-E too. [BoysStuff via Nerd Approved]
