Let me be honest, I don’t want surfboards to be designed on computers, sent to factories in Thailand and shipped back to us en masse without the shaper ever touching the material. I’m not a purist—really I’m not. And as someone who doesn’t make surfboards, and will never try, I have no right to expound righteously on this subject. But still, a big part of me—I think the part that wishes we all grew a different rare vegetable on our windowsills and bartered with each other from our front porches at meal time—wants surfboard shapers to be people who still draw their visions in the sand and give boards away from banana leaf huts.

To anyone actually trying to make a living from designing surfboards, which have notoriously low profit margins, that’s unfair. But you should know my bias, and know that as I drive to meet this former Apple designer guy, Thomas Meyerhoffer, the man who designed that translucent eMate for Apple in the 90s and has become recently renowned for using his technology chops to design some revolutionary type of surfboard, one that looks like a compressed hour-glass alien spaceship, I have my reservations. It doesn’t help that Meyerhoffer, a very hip man with a Swedish accent, a thin goatee, and a shaved head, meets me in the parking lot of his home break in Montara in a shiny white BMW.

Man, this is not how it should be, I’m thinking from the smelly confines my rusting van with 370,000 kilometres on it (you do detect a hint of jealousy). This is just not, not—not wholesome.

But neither would it be wholesome for me to judge this man so early in our day-long relationship. I have to give him a chance. It’s our first date. And since the waves are slop here in Montana, we decide to drive up to Ocean Beach, San Francisco, for a better shot at testing out his gizmos. (And no, I don’t like calling surfboards gizmos, and yes, I’m feeling a little bitter that Meyerhoffer wouldn’t let me take photos of his Miami Vice looking home to remember the scene. I mean, what surfer cares about that kind of stuff? But the drive will give me a chance to drop into a less judgemental space. We are all one, all one.)

We are rounding the bluffs on Highway 1, chatting casually now, and while Meyerhoffer explains about quitting Apple 10 years ago and starting to surf everyday, I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about the fact that I too am so dependent on technology, recording our conversation on my iPhone. I’m forcing myself to see myself as the same as Meyerhoffer. These are the exercises strange people have to do to feel normal. And surprisingly, it doesn’t take long.

For starters, Meyerhoffer is nice. And I like nice people. And he doesn’t seem at all weirded out by the fact that the doors on my van don’t work, which goes a long way in my book. Also, he went to art school. One I haven’t even heard of. And he’s deep. “A surfboard is a very complex shape, a never-ending curve,” he says at some point in the conversation, and I like this statement. With his accent, it sounds like a sort of koan. Can curves really never end?

And like this, five minutes into our drive, Meyerhoffer has transformed into a sort of bohemian guy who just happens to have lots of money, a friend you might want to give you advice on your love life or what sort of refrigerator to buy or whether to quit your job and take up oil painting.

In other words, I can finally listen to him.

So let’s start over, shall we?

Curves are a good place to start. Meyerhoffer is all about them. He recently designed the first “soft computer” for a start-up called Chumby, which is like a little beanbag with Wifi. It’s very cute. He also designs bubbly ski goggles, snowboard bindings, expensive chairs that look like something George Clooney would model in, windsurfing sails. He is a refiner, taking stuff that already works well and making that stuff work better, in an out of the box kind of way, of course.

That’s cool. Whatever.

But a surfboard? This is sacred terrain. Every surfer knows that real shaping is an art that only a select few—usually hand-craftsman who have been surfing since they were in the womb and who have been anointed by the Hawaiian gods—really excel at, and even fewer become innovative enough to design something that is profoundly innovative and functional. Meyerhoffer started surfing later in life and he designed these alien boards with CAD software, which would be the equivalent of making French wine in steel barrels. You might get away with it in Napa, but you’d be barred from Bordeaux for life.

Meyerhoffer is clearly used to the heavy scepticism. “I never did this to get famous,” he says without my prompting. “I did it so people could enjoy a different feeling…People see the board and they think that I made it like this to differentiate it from other surfboards. Or they think, ‘oh parabolic, it’s like a ski.’ But it has nothing to do with that. I didn’t design the board to look like this. It just became like this. I started to take away, and I took away a lot of mass. So where do you take away? You take away where you don’t need.”

Meyerhoffer determined that what you don’t need is all that rail, and he basically scooped out chunks at the waist of the board and took in the tail drastically, making it long and narrow.

The idea came over five years of trial and error at solving a problem. Meyerhoffer loved longboarding because of the momentum you get with a big boat-like plank. But he missed the agility of a high performance shortboard. He also liked single-fin hulls, a sort of in between model, for their speed and glide. But those boards, Meyerhoffer found, really only work well on point waves that usually have a predictable way of peeling down the line. Most of us surfers find ourselves in the same predicament and so spend enormous amounts of time and money acquiring just the right combination of boards to fit the changing conditions and our fickle moods. Meyerhoffer set out to make a board that could do it all. He was bound to be criticized, at least by those closed-minded surfers, whoever they are.

The model he has started to settle on, the one we are about to ride, is the result of letting himself make a lot of boards that simply failed. “Sometimes I’d go out on these really weird boards that I know won’t work at all and I look like a total kook,” he laughs. “But I still have to take them out to test a theory.” Anyone who has suffered the stink eye one gets from surfing poorly on a good wave knows what a sacrifice that is. But it appears, at least from the press, to be paying off with this model, which has been receiving praise from the likes of pro surfer Peter Mel. Retired pro surfer Mike Tabeling has gone so far as to buy one Meyerhoffer in every size. He recently told Surfer Magazine, “That’s what the Meyerhoffer does-it brings back the fun of your shortboard days, as you can make this longboard really turn.”

But this is all rhetoric. I may like Meyerhoffer after our friendly drive, but I still think his alien babies in the back of my van are likely dripping radioactive material into the bag of stale chips I’m planning on salvaging for lunch. And since I’m not a longboarder, I wonder if Meyerhoffer’s claim that I can surf it like a shortboard will be even close to true. Doubtful.

We’ve arrived at Ocean Beach, which is basically slop as well: barely one metre waves and disorganised. Meyerhoffer doesn’t seem like the stressed out type, but he is visibly uncomfortable from this. Even after good press in Surfer Magazine, The Surfer’s Journal and some The New York Times, Meyerhoffer seems to be trying to convince the surfing community that his works of art are worth around $US800 a pop, not to mention worth every single person you meet on the beach asking, “what the hell is that?”

“It’s just going to feel like crap if we go out here,” he says.

Excuses excuses. He’s already lowering our expectations.

And there is no time to keep looking for waves. So, after fielding 10 or 15 questions from surfers who approach with their heads cocked—”are you the Apple surfboard guy?”—in we go, paddling over the rough, textured deep green lines, through wisps of fog, on our brand new Meyerhoffers, which, to my surprise, feel really good to paddle: light, streamlined, comfortable.

I have a theory that any good board feels that way from the very first paddle. So far, I have to admit that the alien board feels down right proper. And fortunately, it’s not as bad as it looked from shore. A relatively clean line churns toward me.

Game time.

I get in easy, just like I would on a longboard, minimal paddling, and begin cruising down the line of a waist-high crumbler. I do some pumps along the face and—wow, OK—it bobs along the face much more easily than a normal board this length. Less responsive than a shortboard, but still, impressive. Without much rocker, the board is certainly fast and as the wave peters out, I edge toward the nose to hang five. That works too. Damn it, these things actually surf, like, well.

I paddle back unable to conceal my grin, but trying. Meyerhoffer grins back. He can tell I like it. Technology is winning. Maybe a dolphin will come and bite the nose off. Yea, that’d be cool.

And besides, that was just one wave. I didn’t need to turn. I’m pretty sure that when I do the board will just topple over with all that rail missing. But, on my next wave, as I go to cut back, the thing just flips around in a 180, like one of my little twin-fin boards would. And that’s just weird. Boards this long and buoyant don’t turn like that, not the ones I’ve ridden.

This is—I admit—very, very fun.

And so I surrender to the superiority of the machine. My crusade is over. Insert a chip in my head and get it over with. And the icing on the cake is that you can feel how the Meyerhoffer works while you’re riding. If feels just the way he described it to me in the car. “Once you’re on a steeper wave,” he explained, “you ride on the back of the board, the tail, so you don’t need the stuff on the front of the board and it will feel like a shortboard. But you still want to be able to nose ride it and have that length, plus have the board transition so that once you paddle into a slightly steeper wave it has the drive of a shorter board too. And that’s it.” I get it: a shortboard inside a longboard. It’s sort of like, oh screw it, an iPhone.

And there’s your sure sign of the apocalypse—comparing a surfboard to a mini computer. We might as well, as Stephen Colbert recently put it, go have “end of the world sex”.

I’m still holding out some hope that Meyerhoffer will stop having his boards manufactured in Thailand and start hand shaping them from recycled egg carton foam and sell them only to Tibetan refugees within a 16 kilometre radius of his garage. (He’ll have to make an exception for my friends and me, of course.)

But I have a hunch that his new design may be the beginning of a whole new wave of surfboards. I still think the design has something to do with aliens and radioactivity, but that will just be fodder for a cool comic book series where Meyerhoffer becomes immortal.

Trademark on that idea by the way. I’m not that much of a hippie.

[Video/Photos by Robert, who took many waves to the head to get them]

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

[noquedanblogs via notcot]

Is it a matter of preference and practice? Yes, but no.

Think about it. The distance it takes to move your hand from the QWERTY to the trackpad, usually below the spacebar, is much closer than the distance it takes to drop your hand on a mouse, reorientate your arm/wrist and fingers into place. And a trackpad’s control scheme uses a finger, which has a lot more dexterity than an arm/wrist you use when handling a mouse. Also, the future is multitouch trackpads. No other control scheme can match the potential of pinching/scrolling with multiple fingers, zooming, etc.

The touchpad is also a really natural movement, practiced by everyone since childhood days of drawing in the sand on the beach, or fingerpainting. The only more natural movement is to trace movement on an actual screen, but any screen we use in a non mobile environment is too big and vertical to do this easily on, for extended periods of time. Besides, the touchpad itself would work great with a secondary LCD display under it, making it essentially, a touchpad.

So, here’s to a future where the trackpad is everywhere. I look forward to it.

[SanwaNexus404, AdessoNexus404, Adesso2Nexus404, DinovoGiz, KeysonicKustomPC, SandbergTechhook, Adesso3Pcrush, MCEallproducts, McsaiteGeekalaert, TruFormProKeyboardco, ToshibaOverclockers, iKeyGadgetadvisor, iKey2Geekwithlaptop, FentexMiniGeekwithlaptop, EeeKeyboardDeviceDaily, LogitechHomeTheaterDialectical, special thanks to Quinton Ma for researching the models in this gallery.]

Here’s one way to raise energy consciousness: Share Aware lights are connected to each other by radio, and share a finite amount of energy. When you make one brighter, the others get proportionately dimmer, but dim yours, and the rest get brighter. I can’t see any problem with that.

Oh wait, yes I can. Say I’m downstairs reading and my wife is upstairs reading, and I’m all like, damn, this light is too dim! And then she’s like, no, my light is now too dim. Pretty soon you’ll either have a strobe scenario to rival the heyday of Club MTV, or you’ll have two people yelling at each other in the dark.

But maybe that’s it, the point of Share Aware and the other Aware products conceived by designers Karin Ehrnberger and Loove Broms (not “Love Brooms”) of the Interactive Institute in Sweden is to bring this sort of thing to our attention: We do all share a finite amount of electricity, whether our lightbulbs show it or not. Still doesn’t change the fact that I would be labelled a “light hog” in no time. [Dezeen]

It takes a connoisseur to pay a fortune for a sculpture, but it takes a maniacal boozehound with major ducats to burn to buy one to stash his (or her) liquor.

Core77 says Liquor Master was conceived by Atelier Van Lieshout, and made from foam, fiberglass and metal, and is intended to be part of a furniture collection that “uses the human form as a jumping-off point for process-based, sculptural furniture.”

(Pardon me for one quick second while I get this out of my system, but doesn’t all furniture by definition use the human form as a jumping-off point? And isn’t all furniture sculptural? And while we’re at it, doesn’t Champagne need to be chilled?)

Pseudo-intellectual yammering aside, Atelier Van Lieshout is my new favourite Dutch art posse. (Sean already knew about them.) If you think the man-shaped liquor cabinet is wacko, check out Lieshout’s inhabitable large purple sperm (named Darwin), or CasAnus, another house modeled—anatomically correctly—after the human digestive tract, or the extra large BikiniBar, or the sculpted entity simply known as Dickhead Baby, all thumbnailed for your pleasure below.

Yes, Lieshout, we’ll be watching you and your sick sick creations from now on. Keep up the full-bore insanity. [Atelier Van Lieshout via Core77]

The NYTimes has a post on Vertical Circuits, a company that has developed a 3d circuit stacking technology using a silver based epoxy—goo, basically—to closer fuse flash memory chips together.

The goo surpasses other 3d circuit technologies based on wires or solid material because it saves even more space. In that case, we’re talking about 1.6mm of height, but that’s enough to fit in a bigger screen or battery in something as thin as an mp3 player or slim phone.

The piece is pegged to ex CEO of Seagate Bill Watkins’ arrival there. [NYT]

Today was a bad day. Unrelated, gadgets were misbehaving. Someone had to pay for it.

I was rushing off to meet with Owen from Valleywag, and I was late. I forgot that a surfboard on my roof was not tied down on my roof rack and as I stopped for a stop sign at the bottom of a steep hill, it just slid off and jammed itself under a car. Thank god no one was hurt. As I strapped it back on, carefully, some guy in a teal benz rolled down his window and said “nice pahking jaab!”, to which I shook my fist and made a giant “errrrrrr” sound. I was a little annoyed, since the board belonged to a friend and is now scratched up.

Through this angry, angry lens, every gadget’s flaw is amplified 1000 fold. It has nothing to do with how much they deserves the scorn. Sharp edges and obtuse design bother me more when in a wicked state because I’ve become more sensitive to their design hiccups and less patient.

I got back in my car and drove a block, now really late for my meeting. I tried to call to say I would be late, but the call dropped. And I was angry, so I did that thing where you try redialing 20 times in a row, pushing the buttons really hard. Then I noticed that I couldn’t get my car’s GPS to simply route to an intersection without clicking through two dozen buttons presses. And later on, every moment my phone hung while going through apps felt like an eternity. My rage built upon itself, one red wave after another, driving my ability to see clearly down deeper and deeper.*

Once, I crossed a line with my gadget-rage. I was trying to install a music player on a new notebook, and, as many of you know, sometimes wireless settings do not stick. It doesn’t matter who makes the operating system here, that’s not the point. What happened was that I was having a pretty frustrating day for various reasons, and after an hour of setting it repeatedly and having it reset repeatedly, I ended up discus throwing it onto a couch and punching in the keyboard. Ridiculous, I know. I am guilty of ridiculous things, often. But I never would have been this incensed on a machine that worked flawlessly.

The point is, I wonder how many gadget companies test user experiences when users are rushing, focusing on other things, stressed out about work, or plain pissed off. Maybe they should, because I bet they’d find such a test—a super user experience test—to be most useful for their designs for gadgets to be used in the real world.

Just like phones that can withstand drops from table height without shattering, and militarized solid state drive laptops that are dust and moisture proof, I would bet that testing gadgets to be smooth and invisible during user experiences where the users are in less than ideal states of mind would probably go a long ways towards making them better for all users. Angry or calm as monks.

*To feel better, I spend time with my dogs or hang out in the water.

Technically, the elastic membrane covering the desk and chair is to stretch so that you can stash your own stuff, whether it’s books or silverware or hashish. But in the example, Carbonell apparently chose something a little close to mammalian intestines for my taste.

The rest of the furniture is just cool, in an organic Buckaroo Banzai 8th-dimensional sort of way, all with little pockets to store your bidness. As Carbonell himself said to Dezeen, “You’ll feel like playing hide and seek!” I don’t know, Nacho. I don’t feel like playing anything right now. Hey, is your brother really Bat Manuel? [Dezeen]

Even though that guy from Dyson is right re: these things never, ever drying your hands sufficiently, it’s fascinating to see the variety of designs. (Looks like Wilson has yet to run across an AirBlade in his travels).

Check out the full set on Flickr, and Douglas’s portfolio site as well. [Flickr, Douglas Wilson via Build]