You’ve seen Ben Heck’s homemade gaming devices featured here a lot, and there’s a reason for it: Adam Frucci cares about him. Which is why he slathered much praise on the hardware modder in this Reuters profile. What would you want to know about the guy that turns two handed controllers into one handed ones? How about that he used to work for a sign-making business and doesn’t actually play a whole lot of games, despite the love he gives to the accessories. [Reuters]

Via [Gizmodo]

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Plasma speakers have been around in science labs since the 1950s, but that doesn’t make them any less astonishing in the 2000s. Like a standard speaker, plasma speakers work by creating compression waves in the air. But unlike a standard speaker that uses magnets and paper/plastic/etc to drive these compressions, plasma speakers are using the non-gas, non-liquid, non-solid “fourth state of matter” plasma.

What can be tough to see in these demonstrations (the first is the completed setup, the second is an FM-based prototype) is that pitch is altered by the constantly shifting intensity of the plasma arc (the creator puts the frequency response range at 200Hz to 12kHz, and the speaker runs at 50W).

So are these beauts for sale? From the creator:

A lot of work to do before I could consider selling - the safety aspect for starters.

Apparently someone needs to send this guy the memo. The danger is precisely what makes plasma so freaking cool.

Thanks Martin!

Via [Gizmodo]

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Programmers, college kids and anyone else who needs one or two (or more!) cups of joe (n. Morning Joe) to get through the day might enjoy this unusual coffee maker, Kahva. (”Kawa,” pronounced the same as “kahva,” is “coffee” in Polish. Other cognates exist, too. We’re educational.) While the premise is not all too dissimilar […]

Programmers, college kids and anyone else who needs one or two (or more!) cups of joe (n. Morning Joe) to get through the day might enjoy this unusual coffee maker, Kahva. (”Kawa,” pronounced the same as “kahva,” is “coffee” in Polish. Other cognates exist, too. We’re educational.) While the premise isn’t all too dissimilar to a percolator, the fact that the water flows upward bemused more than one passerby.

Not me, though. Not bemused.

UPDATE~! Oh man, egg on my face. Seems Kahva can more accurately (read: “correctly”) be described as a vacuum coffee maker. What do I know? I go to Starbucks and spend $2 on a grande bold each day.

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Via [crunchgear]

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The ABB IRB 340 FlexPicker’s legs instantly put me in mind of a kind of merciless Matrixesque robot, snatching up human bodies and doing terrible things to them. But apparently, it’s the world’s fastest industrial robot, and is used to pick and sort items on a production line— innocent things like sausages and croissants. By fastest, it means 10g of acceleration: that’s zero to 280mph in a single second. Which makes for one heck of a rapid sausage, as the fascinating (and eerily Matrix-like) video reveals.

That arm/pincer thingy can do over 150 picks per minute, deal with payloads as massive as two kilos, and carries a camera so it can check products that don’t meet the grade. Looks like it’s using it to sort those croissants… the funny-shaped ones go where, we wonder?

Extraordinary stuff, even if I can’t get those scary images out of my head. It’ll be nightmares of robotic world domination tonight. [ABB via BotJunkie]

Via [Gizmodo]

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This morning I got my mytreo.net Newsletter and despite the fact that the page anchors don’t work in Gmail, I read (skimmed) the first paragraph and decided to try the service they were promoting, Jott. The link in the email took me to a Palm page with a longer article that I didn’t actually read and […]

This morning I got my mytreo.net Newsletter and despite the fact that the page anchors don’t work in Gmail, I read (skimmed) the first paragraph and decided to try the service they were promoting, Jott.

The link in the email took me to a Palm page with a longer article that I didn’t actually read and no swift and simple way to get to what ever Jott was going to make me do to use it (sign up or download whatever).

A swift Google search and I was on Jott’s website, cleverly called jott.com
Set up was simple, nothing to download. First and last name, email, password, and telephone number. Then a confirmation email, then you’re asked to place a call to a 866 number to set up your phone.

With the email and phone confirmed, an automated lady voice at the other end of the phone asks you to make your first Jott, which unless you have already added contact thru the web interface is to yourself. In true geek fashion, she recommends sending yourself “Hello world”. Original. I spoke into my phone, sent my self a message, easily set up a reminder (which texted and emailed me at a set time). So far so good. This could actually be useful.

Read more…

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Via [crunchgear]

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Starting October 1, if you’re flying first class from Dubai to New York on an Emirates Air A380, you’ll have the option of grabbing a hot shower midflight. It’ll cost you $18,000, but some showers are worth it, am I right? “No!” say those party poopers in the environmental lobby.

You see, in order to offer each first-class passenger a shower, the airline will have to add one metric tonne of water to its payload, dragging a carbon cost of around 50,000 lbs. per trip.

All part of the luxury experience, right? No one has seen pics of the upcoming A380 first-class cabin, but it is allegedly something on par with the “seven star” Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, and that it makes Singapore Airlines’ front end—with double beds and dining “environments”—look like a dog’s backend.

Sure, an in-air shower might negatively impact the earth in catastrophic and irreversible ways, but think about it this way: the only people who will make use of it come from oil wealth, so they probably wouldn’t give a shit to begin with! [Times UK via Luxurylaunches]

Via [Gizmodo]

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A well known 18 year old graffiti artist that goes by the name “Skullphone” has expanded his repertoire of vandalism to include 10 digital billboards around L.A. Earlier this week, onlookers were treated to Skullphones’s calling card in between the normal ads running on the display. Nice work dude, let’s hope that the police and the folks at ClearChannel appreciate art. [Skullphone and Curbed L.A. via Textually and Supertouch]

Via [Gizmodo]

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Did you know that i can has, along with Jones Soda, is having a LOLCat contest? It’s funny, but true! Anyone can enter. Come up with a good LOLCat and submit it. Whoever gets the most epic lulz will has their LOLCat macro pasted on bottles of Jones Soda across the country. That’s so awesome. […]

Did you know that i can has, along with Jones Soda, is having a LOLCat contest? It’s funny, but true! Anyone can enter. Come up with a good LOLCat and submit it. Whoever gets the most epic lulz will has their LOLCat macro pasted on bottles of Jones Soda across the country.

That’s so awesome. If you’ve never had Jones, I suggest giving it a try. And it’s not just the hometown Seattle pride talking. Jones uses cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, which most scienticians concur is made of the blood of Satan himself and isn’t good for you.

You’ve LOLed Peter Ha, now LOL a cat and win!

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Via [crunchgear]

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This week at TreeHugger: Everybody adores kites, right? Even high-sea commercial cargo ships, especially with fuel savings of up to $2000/day. GE has figured out a way to print out OLEDs like paper. A mechanical dinosaur sat on a pile of coal in Germany, and Solaria figured out a way to make cheaper and more efficient solar panels using the very exotic material… plastic.

The Beluga Skysails is a cargo ship that was used to test a new system that uses kites to harness the power of the wind as auxiliary propulsion. It set sail (literally) to Venezuela from Germany on January 22nd and reached the Norway on March 13th after traveling a total of 11,952 nautical miles. “In even moderate winds, the first flights of an initial 160-square-meter towing kite was able to alternative for 20% of the engineís power.” After the pilot phase, the towing kite will be replaced by one that is twice the size, providing twice as much energy and saving twice the fuel (which could mean $2000/day).

“Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process,” said Anil Duggal, manager of GEís Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. “Now weíve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.”

Greenpeace activists marched in front of the offices of Vatenfall in Hamburg, installing a dinosaur on top of a pile of coal to emphasize the point declared on their banners: “Stop dinosaur technology”. The dinosaur of rusted steel towered 5 meters (16 feet) over a 3 ton pile of coal which was dumped, under cover of darkness, in front of the entry to Vatenfall employee parking.

The type of silicon used in photovoltaic panels is expensive, and as long as supply is constrained, the price of electricity produced by solar panels won’t be as cheap as it could be. Solaria’s solar panels produce about 90% of a conventional solar panel’s power, while using half as much silicon by cutting the silicon into thin strips and using clear molded plastic to collects light from the entire panel and funnels it to the strips of silicon. Clever.

TreeHugger’s EcoModo column appears each Tuesday on Gizmodo.

Via [Gizmodo]

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Plextor has just announced a couple of new Blu-ray drives that also read HD DVDs, clearly designed for the poor saps who made the wrong choice in the format war. At first it might seem like an OK choice for people with a HD DVD collection quickly growing obsolete, but for $500 for a read-only drive or $600 for a burner, maybe a better idea would be to just get a straight-up Blu-ray drive and consider your HD DVD losses an early adopter tax. [Product Page via Electronista]

Via [Gizmodo]

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