If you have ever tried to play the guitar using drumsticks, you were probably drinking the same paint thinner as I was drinking, because it’s impossible. Unless you are playing with Guitar Hero III. And you have a custom midi controller designed to play as it if you were drumming. And you kick arse playing drums. But then, you would probably be the crazy guy who recorded himself in this amazing video just to show that he can a) replace Animal in The Muppets and b) beat the crap out of you playing Guitar Hero III using sticks. [College Humor -- Thanks Jon B.]
Here you have it. Linux running on the iPhone. Yes, it’s only the first port, but it’s the iPhone running the Linux OS, controlled with a USB keyboard running off the iPhone multi-purpose port thanks to the reverser engineering of Apple’s hardware drivers by iPhone Dev Team member planetbeing. And while it is still limited and doesn’t have support for many things, this work opens the door to a much more interesting thing than just a character-based terminal: Google’s Android running on the iPhone hardware.
Mary Lou Jepsen—the XO Laptop’s designer and OLPC’s CTO before defecting and founding Pixel Qi—has even grander ambitions for new laptop project than hitting a mythical $US75 pricetag. Pixel Qi is working on a laptop will be able to run on a standard for 20 to 40 hours, no pixie dust required.
NASA better come up with some good reasons to keep Ares and Orion alive, because Barack Obama is no JFK: The office of the President Elect has send them a questionnaire asking some tough questions about our favourite space program, Space News reports. You know, the one which is supposed to take Humanity back to the Moon and go to Mars. In fact, the questionnaire goes as far as asking if NASA could redesign the Orion spacecraft so it could be launched by the European Ariane 5 or the Japanese H2A:
Star Place is a new Taiwanese department store designed by Dutch architects UNStudio. Outside, the building is beautiful, with a curved façade that glows in a weird star-like moiré pattern. However, the best part of this structure is inside, in its 10-storey atrium, where the designers have constructed a spiral stair made by rotating escalators over a central axis.
The general consensus, among experts, analysts and other blowhards has long been that when Blu-ray players legitimately hit $199, the format would finally go mainstream. Well, $US200 Blu-ray players are all over the place for Christmas, even Sony’s BDP-S350, with its unshakeable $US299 MSRP. But according to ABI Research, only 8 percent of holiday buyers were even considering upgrading to Blu-ray even though about half of American homes have gone HD and it’s totally uncontested by HD DVD this year. What about you guys? [PC World]
Joost lost the video war a while ago, thinking a P2P app that imitated TV would be the way people wanted to watch TV and movies on their computer. They were wrong, and only recently rectified the mistake. It’s probably too late for them. But their new iPhone app, which streams over 46,000 videos including full movies like Men in Black and Starship Troopers for free over Wi-Fi, is actually kind of exciting.
We love pretty much everything about mimobots—designer USB flash drives that come in flavours from Star Wars sex to pirates—except their designer price. But through Monday, they’ve knocked 36 percent off everything they sell (because that’s how much of its value the Dow has lost through year), officially bring them into reasonably priced geek.gift territory. [mimoco]
Greg Parker is a professor of electronics at Southampton University. He’s also a wizard. Like his co-author Noel Carboni. Real wizards, capable of obtaining images rivaling the best of Hubble’s using less than $US15,000 in equipment and more patience than any money in the world could buy. Their magic: A refrigerated CCD chip inside a special digital camera, a manually-operated dome, and some smart post processing in Photoshop.
“Stylish and amazing decoration” says manufacturer Lumigram. “Oh yes!” we say, because we are glad they keep adding glowing class and elegance to our sad dark lives, specially these Holidays. To me, nothing says smart and sophisticated Xmas better than their dashing LumiTable fibre optics table runner, available in elegant red, stylish green, and always-fashionable blue.
