It’s amazing that you can fall asleep with the polls showing one thing and wake up to a world you don’t even recognise. Despite who I may have supported as of November 4th, as a fervent supporter of both democracy and touchscreen technology, I accept DRE 700:259 as the 44th President of the United States. But I’m totally using a paper ballet in 2012. [The Onion Thanks Mr. Ponies!]
Wireless-N speeds sound great and everything (74Mbps!), but who wants to buy a bulky new adapter? The GW-USMicronN from Planex makes the upgrade painless, assuming you have an N router. Possibly the smallest 802.11n USB adapter to date (1/6 the size of the D-Link beside it), early testing shows that its range and transfer speeds are competitive with its class, and it features all of the security measures found in bulkier adapters. Arriving in the US for $US30 next month, this Planex is definitely worth keeping an eye on. [CNET and Planex]
You may have thought the Embody chair was all very high-tech…but it’s got nothing on Oki’s protoype Leopard chair. It’s got a robot-leg in its design. Based on Oki’s well-named Robot Leg walking robot, the chair is motorised: when empty it perches up in the air, waiting for your butt to settle against it. When you do so, the leg contracts and winds you backwards and down into an ideal position with “seating comfort akin to being held in someone’s arms,” apparently.
Believe it or not, up to November 1st many could and still were buying licenses for Windows 3.x (mainly for embedded systems like cash registers and airline entertainment systems from companies like Virgin). But on that day, Microsoft discontinued their licensing of the product. After 18 years, the iconic Windows platform is no more.
The ObamaBot has been a patient contributor to the Obama presidential campaign. After being assembled for $US250, the 6-foot metal and wooden robot took to the streets of Florida waving signs to promote early voting and now President-elect Barack Obama. From a technical standpoint, the robot is apparently “powered by hope,” which seems like a…unique…approach to constantly fluctuating energy prices. Bonus shot:
Digitised Post-It-alike gizmos aren’t new, but none I can think of is quite as functional as Mintpass’ Mintpad. It’s a web-surfing, Wi-Fi, media player with 1.3-megapixel cam, microphone and built-in speaker, 4GB of memory with microSD expansion. Plus it’s a 320 x 240-pixel 2.9-inch touchscreen note-taker. galleryPost('mintpad', 3, '');
Jettisoned over a year ago and expected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere on its own time somewhere in the beginning of November, one of the ISS’s retired coolant tanks has careened through the Earth’s atmosphere in the skies off the coast of Australia. Two lucky things happened here: the reentry took place — and this was completely up to chance — over water, and the atmosphere broke the 635kg tank into lots of small pieces.
OK, I’ll admit that this self-stabilising bike is clever: it’s kind of a Segway turned sideways, using gyros to detect if it’s off-balancing, and adjusting the steering automagically to compensate. It’s also a standard electric bike, so it propels you along without needing any annoying foot-power: very 21st Century indeed.
Before Tokyo’s Akihabara geek district was laced with neon, it looked like this photo taken circa 1950 which I saw on my recent trip. Despite the horses in the photos, even around this time, gadgets were a part of the trade. (Although as the ads below show, phonographs and vacuum tube radios made up some of the choices.) Doing some research on the area, I did not know that almost 100 years before this time, the area was razed by fires and when it was rebuilt, it was rebuilt with a Shinto shrine on its premises with the name “The extinguisher shrine”. People assumed that the Shrine was devoted to the popular deity of fire-control named Akiba, which is the root of the somewhat similar name of the region today. galleryPost('akiba1950s', 3, '');
We mentioned it before, and were initially upset it wasn’t a revised Speak&Spell…but now Panasonic’s H1 Toughbook for clinical use is out, and its specs list is impressive. It’s water-, dust- and drop-proof from 1 metre, has a smooth-surface and with sealed buttons for hygiene, and is fanless. It’s got a six-hour battery life, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, an in-built RFID reader, 2-megapixel camera with auto-focus and dual LED lighting, barcode reader, smart-card and fingerprint readers and optional GPS. Specifically it’s designed to manage patient notes and collect information to simplify and speed up hospital procedures. But with that amazing array of functions, I’d kinda like it as my main laptop. [Medgadget]
