Sadly this doesn’t have “I am become death, the bringer of MP3s” inscribed upon it—it’d chime nicely with the ohmygod tackiness of the Digital Skull Belt Buckle. It’s in fact so terrible it’s wonderful: A metal belt-buckle in the shape of a skull with interchangeable modules in a cutout in the forehead. One’s a cheesy flashing LED light panel, the other’s a 1GB MP3 and video media-player that can also be a digital photoframe and comes with headphones. Passers-by will see your headphone cable disappearing apparently into your nether regions, but maybe you’ll see that as a plus. There’s no pricing info, but it’s out “soon” gothic gadget fans. [Chinavision via BBG]
Adobe is set to demonstrate a full-functioning build of Flash on Windows Mobile 6.1 today at the Adobe MAX conference, indicating that the era of hacky stop-gap measures and the mildly convincing Flash Lite may soon be coming to an end, at least for some. But what of the two most net-centric phone OSes? Android development is mercifully under way, but as far as the iPhone is concerned, all we hear is an echo:
Fujitsu’s taken the handy exterior cameras found on high-end, larger vehicles today and applied some nifty video processing to make them a driving aid par excellence. In fact, Fujitsu’s saying it’s the world’s first 360º wraparound vehicle view. The system has four exterior video cameras at the vehicle’s corners, and a central processing unit that takes the feeds and processes them to give you exactly the best view to aid your current requirements.
This concept alarm is simple, but self-contradictory: shaped like a giant Esc key, you mash it with a fist to deactivate it, and it wirelessly communicates to a dock to (presumably) turn off the sound. But, it won’t let you escape the inevitable requirement of exiting the bed and getting to that early morning meeting at work. Still, there’s something satisfying about thumping a giant computer key for an alarm. [DesignLaunches]
The Gadget: Australian company Maxon’s Visimax pocket-friendly projector.
After promising long ago that Mac software for the Pulse Smartpen was in the works, Livescribe finally delivered on that promise, today announcing that the OS X beta client will be available for download next week. The Mac version of Livescribe Desktop not only does the same things it’s PC counterpart can do (digitized notes, Paper Replay audio syncing, handwriting recognition), but it has a couple of new tricks up it’s sleeve as well.
HP doesn’t want you to travel the world for work. They don’t want you to earn enough frequent flyer miles travelling business class to the US so you can enjoy a European holiday at Christmas time without spending a cent of your own money. No, they want you to stay in the office, conducting important international business through their new Halo teleconferencing setup. Especially when the starting price for a single room setup is $153,000, plus monthly ongoing costs of at least $23,000.
The service uses a dedicated fibre-optic network that’s always on and has enough bandwidth for real-time high-definition video streaming. You can connect with multiple locations at the same time, while a HD overhead object camera lets you zoom in and read documents from anther location easily. The main camera automatically adjusts to foster “eye-contact” as well, making it feel like you’re actually just sitting across from the person on the screen.
There’s a variety of setups available, which you can read all about in the press release after the jump. In the meantime, let’s think about what else you could buy for $150,000 if you decided to instead just use the (albeit unreliable and not really HD) Skype for video conferencing…
You’ve only got four and a half days left to get your entry in for our Gizmo-grow competition for your chance to win a 42-inch LG LCD TV. That’s still plenty of time to get the Giz Logo from the original competition post and then head outside to somehow share the Giz with the world, viral style.
Seriously, this could be the easiest 42-Inch LCD TV you’ll ever win, so make sure you send photographic or video evidence to competitions@gizmodo.com.au before 5pm on Friday.
When NASA released this image from their Lunar Orbiter 1 back in 1966, the first photograph ever of the Earth rising above the Moon’s surface, it was low resolution but they still amazed the world. This week, they have surprised every space aficionado re-releasing the same image in ultra-high definition. The cool part now is that NASA hasn’t used any upscaling or magical infinite zoom-in filter from CSI. Instead, they have created a new technology that uses refurbished analogue machines and a new digital process that fully extracts the information stored in the program’s old magnetic tapes, something that was impossible to do in the 60s. Click on the image to watch it in its 3673 x 1740 pixel glory.
Originally I was going to write this post about the local launch of the Monster Beats headphones in rap-format – you know, because of the whole Dr. Dre connection – but then I realised that doing so would not only offend any rappers with an inkling of talent out there, but also the global white population for such a terrible attempt at humour. So instead, I decided to write about the Australian arrival of the Dr. Dre Beats headphones in the only poetic artform my heritage as any experience in: The Limerick.
