Our lives today are filled with the latest and greatest technology. Wherever we go, whatever we do, chances are there’s something in our immediate vicinity that runs off electricity or battery power – hell, for us geeks it’s practically sacrilege to leave the house without phones, laptops, MP3 players and digital cameras. But with this growing dependence and acceptance of gadgets as an extension of ourselves, somewhere along the line some of us forgot that we are still people, and still require to maintain a consideration for our fellow man or woman. After all, even though it is our ability to create and use gadgets that separates us from the animals, it is our ability to understand their social impact that makes us truly human.
YouTube may be full of robots, but few as charming as this little drummer bot. Armed with a rudimentary pill-jar plastic drum and a beep-bop-boop synthesiser, he somehow gets quite the groove on.
The last bastion of privacy on airplanes is their blanket of white noise, but that may soon vanish: Pilots are complaining that the Airbus A380 jumbo is so quiet, they can’t get any rest.
Traditional sound machines tend to use white noise or repetitive nature sounds to compete with the cacophony of the outside, but that only works to a certain extent. Ecotones, by Silicon Valley start up ASTI, is hoping to one-up them by actually being able to adapt to the user’s environment. You can choose from 12 different SoundStories–including settings, I bet, like ocean or rainforest–that play at 18-bit quality, better than standard CDs. Audio backgrounds react to cues in the listening space and combine them with hundreds of “natural” sounds to make a soundscape that’s supposedly a lot more relaxing. It’s available through Hammacher Schlemmer for $US299. Wow, anything for a good night’s rest, I guess? [Hammacher]
Weird… but I kinda want to hear more. That’s roughly how I’d describe the sound output of the Thingamakit, a strange “noise monster” DIY synthesiser. I like the fact that it uses some sort of optical feedback: adjusting those tentacles affects how the sounds are generated, which then gets fed back to the LEDs in the tentacles. So it’s a pleasingly tactile gizmo, and if you’re really a strange-noise-machine-ophile, you’ll also appreciate that you can buy it as a kit from maker Bleep Labs. [Bleep Labs via Hackaday]
These little gadgets are perfect for really really annoying your house mates: flip one on and conceal it somewhere, and until it’s dark it does nothing. When the lights are off the fun starts, as the box starts to emit either the distant sounds of dripping water or a barking dog. Of course, your victim will turn the lights on to hunt down the problem, and the box falls silent. Brilliant. We love them, in a very seven-year-old kid amused by whoopee cushion and fart-powder kinda way. Available for about US$10 each. [Red Ferret]
So you’ve gone out and bought yourself a shiny new hybrid car. How good is it? The fuel economy’s fantastic, the thing is whisper quiet and people stop to look at you in the street and think, “That person’s doing their part to save our planet”.
But what about the blind people? Did you ever stop to think about them? How they rely on the physical noise of a car to help them judge when it’s safe to walk on the road, and your new near-silent car is a death trap, enticing blind pedestrians to stroll directly into it eco-friendly maw?
Chances are you didn’t think about that, which is why the US National Federation of the Blind (or NFB, for short) is lobbying for makers of these new hybrid cars to install noise making devices, so blind people don’t have to worry about stepping in front of a silent killer.
There are currently bills pending approval in a number of US states, and a taskforce has been setup to try and find a practical solution to the problem. If it means that every hybrid car gets its own siren, then I’m so getting one.
[CNet]
A new sand-grain-sized chip by Audience being demoed at MWC kills extraneous noise (better than current software-based suppression) so they can, even if it sounds like you’re skydiving at the time.
Basically, this speck of silicon wonderment chills in between the mic and the phone’s circuitry, where it maps sound as a 3-D matrix, scraping away up to 25 decibels of garbage, leaving just your deep baritones or whiny squeal. Besides letting your singing voice come through the way it was meant to be heard, dumping the excess baggage saves bandwidth, giving stingy-ass network providers a reason to push for this thing as well. [NYT]
When darkness falls, the Buzz Box is activated to emit a high-pitched “buzzing” noise, not too dissimilar to the noise made by a large mosquito thirsty for blood. The use?
If you lie awake in fear of someone busting in your door at night, catching you unawares, then slitting your throat, this DSAL-2 door stop will let you sleep slightly easier. It’s a regular door stop in that it stops the door from opening, but there’s a 125db alarm that goes off whenever someone slams the door into it. Options like adjustable sensitivity and an On/Off switch makes sure you don’t make #2 in your pants when it goes off randomly. As opposed to making #2 in your pants just because you’re too lazy to stop blogging for five minutes. We’re not pointing any fingers *cough*Frucci*cough*. [Stunster via ]
