Last time we talked about Blackbox gizmos from Gear4 it was a largeish Bluetooth speaker, but this new one is different. It's wired, USB-powered and designed to be a portable companion for an MP3 player. You may think size sacrifices bass power, but apparently it's got an "SFX gel" base, meaning it uses any flat surface you stick it to to amplify sound volume and bass. It's got a normal driver too, takes line-in, and can be powered with a power-brick. Gear4's site doesn't reveal exactly how small it is, but it's out August in the UK for US$40. [Gear4 and Pocket-Lint]

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While most of us wonder why planes aren't built of the crash-proof "black box" flight recorder material, one modder has requisitioned a black box of his own to use as a PC case. While the package itself is quite large (and disappointingly red), the interior is so cramped that only a Mini-ITX motherboard could fit inside, running Slackware Linux on a 800MHz Via C3. But have you ever seen the inside of a black box before?

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Someone finally found a good use for a digital picture frame. The Telepresence Frame by Revital Cohen displays a live-feed of a patient's vital stats for his or her entire family to see. Cohen, an artist studying the increasing relationship between humans and machines, shows through the frame that a patient on life support is made up of more than flesh and bones, and has become one with the gadgets surrounding them. That's nice and all, but what happens when the life support ends is downright freaky.

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Honda's Drive Recorder will detect impacts and save information for the 12 seconds before and 8 seconds afterwards, aircraft black-box-style: forward-view imagery, along with sound and data on speed and deceleration rates all get stored on an SD card in its main unit, ready to be uploaded to a PC.

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This is Sun's datacenter-to-go, Project Blackbox. And the video after the jump shows what happens in its interior when you put it at the epicenter of a 6.7-magnitude earthquake.

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