Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been pushing for a Russian satellite navigation system known unfortunately as GLONASS, and yesterday the system had its first launch: a tracking collar for the PM’s dog, a black labrador named Koni. According to Putin, “She’s wagging her tail, she likes it.”
Forget the 1,000 metre-high 200-floor Nakheel Tower because it’s no longer going to be the highest skyscraper in the world. The new upcoming beast is this amazing 2.5km-high skyscraper planned for the Jumeirah City project in Dubai. The building is so tall that its main elevator is in fact a vertical 200kph bullet train. This city-in-a-skyscraper will consume 37,000MWH/year, with a 15MW peak usage, but as the plans show, it has been designed to generate most of it using wind, thermal, and solar power:
See how this commercial for Zyliss’s new electric multipeeler exploits all the techniques of a razor commercial in order to make men feel more comfortable about giving potatoes a clean close shave. But if the intended result is that manly men feel good about kitchen prep, why promote a battery-powered peeler? Know what? Manly or unmanly, I still want one. [YouTube via Core77]
German artist Tom Schmelzer is one troubling dude: His proposed interactive walkway, Out of Joint, is supposed to give you a physical feeling of turmoil to match the cataclysmic ups and downs of the global financial markets. So, thanks to avalanche-simulating hydraulics, instead of just feeling sick to your stomach, you will actually be sick to your stomach.
French cable provide Canal+ teamed up with touted OLPC and Jawbone designer Yves Behar to produce “Le Cube,” their new, ultra-stylish HD cable box with DVR and Video on Demand functions Looking like a Wii all dressed up for a formal event, Le Cube blends simple geometry with simple colours to create something that’s visually striking.
Not so long ago we told you about Touchtype, a 99-cent iPhone app that adds a sort of universal landscape typing option to the iPhone. You write up a message in a wide mode text editor and that content can be forwarded to other programs, like your email. Now a competitor named Firemail has hit the scene and it looks to do the same thing but for free. Who knows, maybe Touchtype is somehow one million times better than Firemail, making its users smarter, stronger and better looking. But now most of us will never find out. [Firemail via LifeHacker]
Ian Shepherd, the same Mastering Engineer that claimed Metallica’s latest album sounds better on Guitar Hero III, has recently come out and said that even the vinyl version sounds better than the CD. Keep in mind that the heavily distorted tracks on the album are the result of an editing process that sacrifices dynamic range for an increase in volume. This philosophy on mastering CDs is based largely on a self-induced paranoia that sales will decline if the album isn’t loud enough. Some have even blamed the popularity of the iPod and its lo-fi earbuds for contributing to this problem.
I’m going to give credit to Kazu Terasaki for designing a pair of robot legs for his iPhone. After all, creating a platform that will bring gadgets to you is a lazy, yet noble endeavor. Unfortunately, a couple of kinks have to be worked out before this can be a viable product. First of all, it still requires a laptop to coordinate the movements. Second, it is very gimpy (watch in horror as it stands up the edge of a table then hurls itself off). At any rate, his plan is to develop autonomous robot legs that can be attached to any device—which sounds good. He has a little work to do on the design though. [Project Page via Get Robo via BotJunkie]
The LG S210 isn’t quite as small as a netbook with its 12-inch screen, but at just 1kg it’ll put up a fight in the weight category. Featuring a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and an impressive 4GB of RAM, the S210 also features some little things you don’t normally see in laptops of this class, like an ExpressCard slot, dual eSATA/USB port and even HDMI-out thanks to its undisclosed graphics chip from Nvidia. Unfortunately we don’t know what the S210 costs or whether the or not it will ever show up in the States. We’ll keep an eye out. [aving]
Web-based employee tracking company HourDoc.com has just released a new service that will enable employees working on remote projects to clock-in and out by sending a simple text message. The system consists of four commands: “in”, “out”, “bin” or “bout” meaning “clocking in”, “clocking out”, “taking a break/clock in” or “taking a break/clock out.” Obviously, this SMS system is reserved only for the most anal retentive and overbearing of bosses, but I don’t see how it would be effective in the first place. Couldn’t you just clock back in from lunch while sitting at the bar? [HourDoc via Textually via New Launches]
