What’s better than stealing highly guarded secrets through your special digital camera glasses? How about stealing said secrets to AC/DC’s Night Prowler? An otherwise gaudy but inconspicuous set of Oakley Thump knockoffs, these Spy Camera+MP3 Sunglasses capture shots through a wireless shutter control–1.3MP photos saved in 2GB of storage–and they play your favourite MP3s for up to 6 hours through the rechargeable lithium ion battery. If only these were around when we were ten, oh the parliament buildings we could have pretended to infiltrate. US$165. [brando]
We’re sad that after all these years, the only place QR codes are actually useful is still good ol’ Japan (where they’re everywhere)(AU: And they’re growing over here as well). That said, San Francisco has recently dabbled, and there are readers available for just about every mobile platform (including iPhone)–which you’ll have to make sure all of your friends have installed if you’re going to wear one of these. The US$20 patch points to a proxy server which redirects phone browsers to the URL of your choice when someone takes a photo of your shoulder, back, um, wherever. Which means you can take them to your innocent little blog, or perhaps something a bit more nefarious. You wouldn’t do that though, would you? [p8t.ch via Pocket Lint]
…they might not have been so different from these external drives from Meninos Design Studio. Acrylic cases coated in customisable vinyl, 250-500GB, 7200RPM drives are hidden behind your favourite take on glossy commercialism (from mock Red Bull containers to giant Marlboro packs…or even your own custom skin.) Our favourite is this little Pulp Fiction reference, but all of their designs beat yet another silver box:
Splashtop, the instant-on Linux mini-OS found embedded in many Asus motherboards as well as the Voodoo Envy 133, has been hacked to allow installation of additional apps, access to the computer’s main file system, and more. Initial impressions of the Envy have noted that Splashtop can go from off to surfing in 15 seconds with SplashTop (which Voodoo calls “IOS”), but out of the box it’s somewhat locked down and only works with a predefined list of common applications. Being a Linux system, it’s not that hard to believe that someone has successfully made SplashTop jump through some hoops, but it beats waiting for an official SDK, which has been delayed. Give it a shot on your SplashTop-capable machine if you’re not afraid of a whole bunch of terminal messiness. [Phoronix]
Via’s Nano and Intel’s Atom low-power processors are intended for slightly different purposes, but that didn’t stop HardOCP pitting them against each other in performance tests, and coming up with some interesting results. In every single benchmark, the beefier Nano beat the Atom. In particular it was 59% better in MP3 encoding tests, 37% in Divx encoding and achieved double the frame rate in Quake 4. No surprises there: the Nano is designed to draw a little more current (53W against 45W) than the Atom, so it won’t make it into quite the same hand-held gizmos as Intel’s chip. But the tests revealed that under normal “desktop” usage, the Nano actually drew less power when idling. Looks like Via’s got a hot one in its grip: we might expect to see more of this chip. [HardOCP via BBG]
In a recent leaked Dell PowerPoint, the very last item on the very last slide reveals a pretty neat product in the works. It’s a tiny LED projector. Just 500 grams and smaller than Dell’s resident coffee mugs, we can’t wait until the “projector in the tea” pranks start. Oh, man, that’s gonna be great. [Ed. note: What if that's just a gallon-sized coffee mug? [engadget]
Garmin has just made a announcement stating that the much-hyped Nuvifone GPS/mobile phone product is going to be delayed until the “first half of 2009.” Apparently “meeting some of the carrier specific requirements will take longer than anticipated,” so it’s going to miss its previously mentioned slot at the end of this year. Sounds like bad news for a phone that’s entering an increasingly populated multi-purpose handset market. [GPSTracklog]
Nintendo engineers are busily preparing new hardware, while trying not to break the concentration of Mario-in-Chief Satoru Iwata while he counts the US$3.9 billion in sales and US$992 million in profits they have made this quarter. “We are always preparing for the next hardware. We are under development,” he declared. However, according to Chris Morris, he warned fans not to expect too much:
See that happy-looking lady in the pic? She’s standing in an Emirates A380 in-flight shower room, details of which have emerged after we first alerted you to this airborne luxury. The “shower spas” are pretty decently kitted-out, and the aircraft carries an extra 500kg of water to allow every one of the 14 first-class passengers to have a splash. As a result, the shower only runs for five minutes, and there’s a traffic-light system to let you know how the time’s going. And if you’re planning on trying to form a new “mile-high, in the shower” club, you’d better forget it: the showers are small, “designed for single usage.”
You call Marty McFly’s hoverboard a movie prop? Nahhh…. this is a movie prop. The Tie Fighter that dinged Vader’s own craft, sending him spinning out of the Death Star trench? Yes, the very same, from the original Star Wars movie. It could be yours, if you take part in an Ebay Hollywood auction scheduled for Thursday. And, of course, if you have around US$170,000 lying around—and probably a bit more too, as the estimated price goes to US$200,000. The 17-inch high resin, plastic and metal model comes with a letter of authenticity from effects wiz Richard Edlund, and two shooting reports describing its use in the film. It’s legit, it seems. Hmmm…. sports car/tie fighter, sports car/tie fighter. Tricky choice. [Ebay via Geekologie] galleryPost('tiefighter', 3, '');
