Somehow slipping under our toilet-obsessed butts at CES, the iTouchless Auto-Flusher saves you the effort of pressing down on that flush handle once you’ve gone. Using IR to sense you, it does make using the toilet a little more hygienic and its 4 “C” batteries will last for 23,000 flushes, which seems incredibly reasonable (3 years of use, apparently). Buy it for $US199.95, install it in your toilet cistern and you could impress your visitors with that “Oooh… it’s just like a 5-star hotel!” feeling. Thankfully a manual override is available. [iTouchless via ChipChick]
The latest edition of Nature magazine details a new method scientists have derived for converting heat energy into electricity, using silicon to instigate the conversion. Researchers have more investigations to carry out, but if preliminary findings are indicative of what is to come, appliances that charge using your own body heat may be on the horizon.
We did not spot this ebook concept from iRiver at CES, but their website is showing it off nonetheless. To say details are light would be true. So, details are light, but what the concept ebook does promise is a colour display and handwriting recognition.
Spotted on the floor of CES by Kotaku, Fenda’s “On Play” 2.1 speaker system has speakers that resemble a Wii Nunchuk and a subwoofer that looks like the Wii itself. In addition to having a dock for the Wii to sit on, Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor says the speakers sound pretty good and will only cost around $55 when they come out later this year. [Kotaku]
While much of the internet may be up in arms over Richard Blakeley’s recent IR-induced video stunt, a 14-year-old boy from Poland allegedly took an IR hack to more tragic proportions this week, and has been accused of hacking a standard TV remote to override track switching at rail junctions in the city of Lodz. Four trams were derailed and (luckily) only 12 people were injured with none killed. The youth in question was described by teachers as an “electronics buff and exemplary student,” according to The Register.
The lesson? From here on out, Blakeley takes a cab. And he stays the fuck away from our train set. [theregister via boingboing] [image]
newVideoPlayer("gizpitcrew.flv", 475, 286,"gizmodo_ces_2008.png");When the Gizmodo Crew isn’t working, their favourite hobby is to pretend they are a world famous F1 pit crew. So when CES was finally over, they headed over to the BMW booth to test their pit stopin’, tire changin’ skills. With teams of two on each side of the BMW F1 car, the Giz pit-crew raced head-to-head to swap out the car’s tires. As you’ll see in the video, Team 2 (Adam Frucci / Benny Goldberg Goldman) beat Team 1 (Haroon Malik and Matt Buchanan) by a huge time of 1.2 seconds. Since both teams have the same coach, Wilson Rothman, he didn’t know if he should celebrate the win, or beat the losers; but in the end Rothman was still comfortable stating, “We’re the best around, and nothin’s ever gonna keep us down.”
We’ve shown you snippets throughout the week, but we wanted you to have access to the full 20 minutes, too, so you can catch every little nugget from the conversation, and see how the chat evolved to the point where Bill could be frank and open about all things Microsoft. It’s in YouTube so you can share it or do whatever. Just remember it’s long, so you may want to get a beverage or a snack before pressing play.
newVideoPlayer("Sony_HD_Camera.flv", 475, 376,"gizmodo_ces_2008.png"); Amidst the 16 new Sony camcorders at this show, the HDR-S12 is the best HDD model they make, with a Carl Zeiss lens, 5.1 Dolby surround, 120GB of space, 1080p resolution, and face detection during video. It also take 5mp native photos and simultaneous slow motion (240fps) and regular movies. Not bad.
Blasting HDTV from one place to another without wires is a revolutionary concept that made evolutionary strides at CES 2008. We found numerous companies showing the technology that’s able to move luscious HDTV video either across the room, or in some instances, through walls and around the house. Some of these systems are shipping soon, while others are only in the experimental stage. The remarkable thing is, all except one of the transmit/receive concepts we saw looked indistinguishable from wired HDMI video to the eyes of a normal person:
You’re telling us you can’t get enough of the booth babedom, so we found a few more shots from the leches at Think Computers. We give you the best on the next page, but you’ll have to mosey on over to the Think Computers site for 30 more.
