Tom’s Hardware tested battery life in laptops with SSDs yet again and found that they aren’t such a power suck, correcting a previous study. SSDs didn’t outperform their HDD counterparts in all tests, but combined with Laptop Mag’s study I think we can safely put the issue to rest for now. [Tom's Hardware]
If you use your Wii to surf the web because you really miss your WebTV and want to relive the frustrations of using the internet on your television, this new Logitech Cordless Keyboard for Wii was designed with you in mind. It broadcasts using 2.4 GHz wireless technology and works from up to 10 metres away. Designed with the Wii in mind, it comes with dedicated buttons for Zoom In/Out, Forward/Back, Quit and OK. If it was really designed with the Wii in mind, you’d be able to move forward and back by swinging the entire keyboard around, but alas, that feature isn’t included. No word on a release date, but it’ll set you back US$50 when it drops. [Product Page via CrunchGear]
It’s missing the built-in shifter and faux-carbon of the Driving Force GT, but it does offer force feedback and, of course, the ability to play Gran Turismo unencumbered by realism-killing wires–a first for Logitech. It’ll work with both PS2 and PS3 for US$100. [Product Page]
A team at MIT and Harvard Medical School has worked out how to cast bricks of artificial tissue into different shapes, and then get them to assemble automatically. The “living Lego bricks” are cast of polyethylene glycol—a biocompatible polymer—and solidified with light exposure. The self-assembling part happens when the bricks absorb water and are then agitated in a bath of mineral oil: The oil/water mix means the bricks move around and can be fixed when they’re in the right place with more light (as shown in the picture here, rod-shaped bricks in red stuck to a central green-stained piece).
The skin-ablation laser tattoo we showed you recently was creepy mainly because burning your naked skin is going to hurt, but this new laser body-mod tackles a safer target, fingernails. The portraits of famous bods you can see in the image are laser-etched into black nail polish (I know, it looks like they’re made of seared, blackened nail, but they’re not), and member lamedust over at Instructables has got a pretty comprehensive guide. So if you’re crazy, you too can etch pics onto the end of your digits. The video makes for interesting watching.
So this morning you and your manhood woke up in bed, alone again, thinking, “really, what can I do to improve this? Perhaps I need a “penis bodybuilding” apparatus that makes my outer self grow to infinity and beyond with ease and without pain? A slingshot-like device that attaches to my underpants? Is that really it? “
Just four days after its launch, the iPhone 3G has been unlocked for the first time exactly like the original iPhone: using a special card that piggybacks to your SIM card, fooling the phone into thinking it’s using an official carrier. While this is not the software unlock being developed by the usual suspects, the video clearly shows that it works fine.
A six-legged robotic sheep, with grass-mowing teeth and GPS navigation: gotta be inspired by Philip K. Dick, right? Yes, it is: Mower was created by Osman Khan, a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, and is on display as part of the Bigbots exhibit at the Robot 250 festival. Mower roams around using GPS to place itself on grassy areas, has collision avoidance sensors and makes the most amusing array of sounds as it clatters about. Clearly intended to be a humorous reference to robotic lawnmowers and the “green” method of using real sheep to do it, he’s on display at Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens. Robot 250 runs until July 28th. [Robot250 via BotJunkie]
Intel and Nvidia’s cold war over the discrete and integrated graphics chipsets that sit inside our computers seems to have at least partially thawed. Nvidia’s announced that “it will be bringing the power and performance of its SLI® multi-GPU technology to Intel’s upcoming line of Bloomfield CPUs.” Upcoming SLI motherboards will have the nForce 200 SLI processor alongside Bloomfield CPUs, and Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, which should come as good news to gamers with top-end gaming PC setups. Nvidia’s press release below (including some interesting “customer viewpoints”)
Toshiba’s Qosmio G55 has popped up on Giz over the last couple of months, talking about its advanced gesture controls which rely on its use of the PS3′s Cell processor tech, and now it’s official. Toshiba’s calling it the “world’s first laptop with cell processor tech inside,” and concentrates on four functions it gives the machine. Upconvert/upconversion (basically 1080i upscaling,) transcoding of video formats, face-based video indexing and gesture control. The laptop will have a starting price of US$1,299.99. Press release below.
