Gizmodo Australia » contest

Design LG’s Touchscreen Phone UI Theme, Win US$14,000

Jason Chen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:30:00 +0000

LG’s in the midst of revamping their touchscreen UI, possibly because their previous touchscreen phones weren’t all that great, but possibly because…ok that’s probably the reason. Not only is the Korean company looking internally at their own designers to fix the problem, but they’ve offered a 14 million Korean Won prize (US$14,364) to the community for someone to come up with a UI theme that’s good enough for engineers to work with. The submission above, although quite nice looking, is a bit too cluttered to be useful in our opinion. What would you say to your grandma that’s trying to make a call? “It’s right there, next to the steampunk valve and the gear icon?” [LG via Unwired View via Crunchgear]

Purdue’s 156-Step Burger Maker Wins Rube Goldberg Contest

Gizmodo US Edition — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:45:26 +0000

We’ve brought you Rube Goldberg-style clocks and toys, but none of them are a match for the 156-step device that’s just won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. This year’s challenge was to assemble a burger with vegetables, condiments and two bun halves. The meat was pre-cooked… a sensible idea to avoid fires and explosions: you’ll understand when you look at the great pics of the machines that MAKE took. Beneath the gallery you’ll find a demo video of some of them in action. Sadly we don’t have one of the complete 156-step run yet, so you’ll just have to imagine its fantasticness.

The whole idea is to create a machine that combines creative thinking with complexity in design, and, most importantly, inefficiency— much in the vein of Goldberg’s cartoons.

The winning team, the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers, have had plenty of practice at this— they’ve won two of the previous three contests. Their machine won them a regional prize earlier in the year, and for the Nationals they added another 55 steps. With somewhere around 5,000 man-hours of work in it, the victory seems well deserved, particularly when the rules stipulate that the task must be achieved in more than 20 steps.

Awesome, pointless, engineering fun. We love it. [MAKE and CNN]

Linux Last Man Standing In PWN 2 OWN Thunderdome

Gizmodo US Edition — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:15:00 +0000

The dust has settled on PWN 2 OWN and Linux FTW! The Ubuntu-equipped Sony VAIO was the only computer to get through the tournament unscathed, managing to elude the assembled hackers. On Thursday the MacBook Air was the first to go, followed the next day by the Vista-running Fujitsu, conquered by Shane Macaulay. No one, but no one, however, was able to bring down the penguin. [ PWN 2 OWN via PC World ]

How Dirty and Gross Is Your Tech Gear?

Jesus Diaz — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:38 +0000

I was working on my 24-inch iMac today when I noticed my cursor moving a little bit erratically. I didn’t know what was wrong. The computer is almost new, I haven’t installed anything recently, and the mouse itself looked ok, as you can see in the photo above. Then I turned it around to discover the true meaning of the words disgoostingly grossirrific:

Obviously, the reason my table is so clean is because the mouse has been absorbing all the crap around—hair, dust, sweat and more hair—to form these four disgusting patches interconnected with head hair. Check the gallery for high definition pictures showing all the crap in painful detail.

After cleaning it, the mouse worked perfectly again, so my guess is that some of the hairs were getting in the way of the laser and making the cursor jump. This got me wondering: can anyone else’s mouse be as disgusting as this? What about the rest of their tech gear?

And then I remembered the dead fly inside the clear plastic Apple Cinema Display 22. And the dust and hair inside the original translucent iMacs. And the rotten beigeness and crap on the keyboard of my original Compaq LTE laptop or the stains and ash on Addy’s old Fukitsu (sic) mini-notebook.

The question for you today is: is your keyboard full of hair of dubious origins? Bitten nails perhaps? Any unidentifiable insect inside your box? How dirty and gross is your tech gear?

Send us your vomit-inducing photos to tips@gizmodo.com. We will do a gallery with them and post it (with prior warning, so that anyone of a faint disposition can avoid it like the plague.)