The Gadgets Page

Car manufacturers tell us that the new RFID key systems are theft proof. They are so secure in this knowledge that insurance companies refuse to pay for claims when a car with this system is stolen. Are they really that secure? Wired Magazine says no.

• Wired 14.08: Pinch My Ride

The RFID systems disable the engine so theives can’t steal them. It sounds unbreakable, right?

“The carmakers are calling these passive antitheft systems, but they’re not,” says Rob Painter, a Milwaukee-based forensic locksmith who has testified in dozens of auto insurance court cases, for both sides. “They are just theft deterrents. Tell me a car can’t be stolen and I’ll show you how to do it.”

When we bought our VW vehicles, I remember feeling a sort of inpenatrable safety regarding them. They would only start with our keys, I thought. That’s not so. There are multiple ways to steal cars with this safety feature. Now that our cars are over six years old, we have another safety feature: no one wants them.

Driving a piece of sh*t car is the best passive antitheft system around.

This is an entry in a Photoshop contest at Worth 1000. It really seems that Apple bothered a lot of people with its I’m a PC and I’m a Mac commercial spots. I’m still a little bitter over them…

See Also: The Gadgets Page » I’m a PC and I’m a Mac: Tables Turned

It has been a question that I’ve wondered for a long time. Why doesn’t my Treo have GPS? The answer and its solution is in the following article:

• Lowering the Power: GPS for Handsets – 8/2/2006 – Electronic News

They have finally been able to explain to me why most phones don’t have a GPS feature.

“One of the reasons handsets have been slower to market is their sensitivity to applications that use a lot of power.”

GPS chips suck power from your batteries like you wouldn’t believe. That’s not much of an issue if you are using your GPS system in a car where you can plug it into the cigarette lighter, but on a handheld phone, it’s more difficult to keep your battery charged on the run.

Here are my questions:

• Why don’t they let me choose when the GPS chip is running? Then I could use the GPS when I needed it, but it wouldn’t drain my battery when I didn’t.

• Why are they using GPS at all? You can get a general positioning from the readings from the cell towers around you. Based on signal strength and which cell towers your phone is accessing, you could extrapolate the approximate position of the person holding the phone. It’s not GPS perfect, but most people don’t need that. They just need to know where the closest gas station is. Would the computation of the cell tower data suck more power than a GPS chip? I don’t know, but I don’t see any companies talking about using the data they already have floating in the airwaves.

It looks like some companies are working on low power GPS chips, so it might be a moot point. Until then, we wait for the totally cool things to show up in our lives. I’m still waiting for my flying car, but the practical GPS phone might be a little closer to reality.

I find it strange that this would make a headline at Yahoo! News. It’s amazing! Women like gadgets?! This is something I’ve known about for a long time.

• Study: Women like tech toys more than shoes – Yahoo! News

If given the choice, I would definitely choose a new iPod over a little black dress and a cool cell-phone over designer shoes. A cell-phone isn’t going to give me pain if I use it for more than two hours.

“TRU for Oxygen surveyed 1,400 women and 700 men 15 to 49 years old to compare tech attitudes among the sexes.”

“In the Oxygen survey, 59% of women agreed with the statement ‘Women are much more tech savvy than they give themselves credit for.’ Among the men, just 38% agreed.”

“More than three out of four women said they’d choose the TV over a diamond solitaire necklace. Women preferred a top-of-the-line cellphone to designer shoes by a similar margin. And a little white iPod narrowly trumped a little black dress.”

I’m glad that so many women answered positively on the phrase, “most of the time people rely on me for technology help.” I was always the girl that people came to when the computer wouldn’t print or the copier was jammed. I like to see more girls who aren’t scared of figuring out what’s going wrong with the gadgets in the office.

Next time you’re thinking that you just can’t figure out all this technology stuff, stop yourself. We are ALL smart enough to figure this stuff out. Don’t let a gadget intimidate you, no matter who you are.

Big Brain Academy is the American game made hurriedly to ride the “Train Your Brain” wave started by Brain Age. You would think that its second-in-line status would make is a cheap rip-off, but it’s actually a pretty good game in its own right.

Instead of measuring the age of your brain in years, where twenty years old is the ideal, like Brain Age does, Big Brain Academy weighs your brain. An ideal brain “weighs” 1400 grams, but I haven’t been able to get my brain over 800 grams and it keeps telling me that I have the brain of a museum curator. It measures your brain based on several different activities called Think (?!), Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Identify.

The heartening thing about this game is that it seems more in tune with training your brain than the activities in Brain Age. I was talking to a woman whose husband is dealing with aphasia, which is a mental impairment that causes you to lose your words. His doctor tested him by taking out groups of coins and asking which group was more money. That exact test is one that is in the Compute section of the game.

There are a total of 15 tests that you can play with as much as you want every day. Dr. Lobe doesn’t tell me that you’ve already played a game for today, he just lets me keep trying to get a gold medal on Bone Yard over and over until I lose interest. He also doesn’t notice if I didn’t play yesterday and he doesn’t compliment me when I play every day.

It’s obvious that Dr. Lobe doesn’t inspire the kind of love and affection that Doctor Kawashima of Brain Age does. There are no Flickr groups dedicated to him and no one is collecting a fund to buy him sinus medication. He’s just a blob, really. Sure, he gives me medals when I do well, but I don’t really love him like I do Doctor Kawashima.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like playing Big Brain Academy. What it lacks in personality, it makes up for in interesting games. With over 15 training games to choose from and three levels of difficulty for each, I’m extremely happy with this game. I play it every day, even though Dr. Lobe doesn’t give me positive reinforcement for daily play.

Update 08-27-06: Gear Live does a weekly video showing how to play Big Brain Academy in single card multi-player mode.

• Bleeding Edge Byte 026: Big Brain Academy Review | Gear Live

This video is too long, but it gives you a good idea of what the game is like and a shocking example of the Nintendo DS vs. the DS Lite.

The promise of intelligence is an appealing one to me. Brain Age tests you on your puzzle solving skills and rates your intelligence.

Brain Age is a game that took Japan by storm. I can understand why. Doctor Kawashima welcomes me every day and laments my absence when I miss a day. He entertains me with his over-the-top facial expressions and urges me on when I do poorly. I actually look forward to doing my “training” every day.

This game has such a strong Japanese feel to it. Doctor Kawashima is shamed when I do poorly and hangs his head. He gets so excited when I do well. He waits patiently while I decide what I’m going to do. I love it when he says, “Well aren’t you a trooper coming by every day like this!” He says it every day I come in, but I still like to see it.

People LOVE this game so much that they actually take pictures of their accomplishments. You can see their drawings on this Flickr Group:

Flickr: The Brain Age Drawings Pool

Seeing these pictures makes me feel sad that I haven’t taken pictures of my own Brain Age Drawings. I am so proud of myself when it tells me my Brain Age is younger than my actual age. At one point, it said that my Brain Age was 70 years old. I was screaming at it. Mike came into the room to see what was the matter. I told him that my game was stupid and it was broken. I pushed the next button and it seems that Doctor Kawashima was playing a joke on me. Really my Brain Age was 26 years old and he had miscalculated. Doctor Kawashima, he’s a joker.

Whether this game really makes me smarter is debatable. I KNOW it makes me better at solving the kinds of puzzles in Brain Age, but whether it really is keeping my brain young remains to be seen. I bet there are behavioral scientists somewhere in the U.S. testing just that.

Tune in Monday to see my review of Big Brain Academy, its American counterpart.

I purchased my Nintendo DS Lite about a month ago and I haven’t written a review for it yet because I’ve had so much fun playing with it. I have been in love with game consoles before, but the Nintendo DS Lite is so much more because I can take it with me wherever I go. I never thought I would love a GameBoy so much.

In fact, we’ve owned portable gaming devices in the past. We owned an Atari Lynx, an original GameBoy and a GameBoy Color, but I never bonded with them as much as I have with this the Nintendo DS Lite.

The reason, of course, is the games. The DS would be useless without the fun games available. For me, the Killer App was Brain Age. It was a game that promised me that it would make me smarter. Not only that, it would measure my progress and give me Sudoku games to play with to boot. I’ll review Brain Age and Big Brain Academy tomorrow.

I resisted buying the Nintendo DS Lite for so long because I carry around a Treo. The Palm OS has more computing ability than a little Nintendo game and my phone is small enough to carry around with me everywhere. The Nintendo DS Lite isn’t quite portable enough to warrant carrying in my purse with the phone and the camera, so I thought I wouldn’t use it very often. I was wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, the Palm just doesn’t have the cool games like Nintendo does. There are new DS games being created every day, plus the huge library of GameBoy Advance games. Since the Nintendo DS is backwards compatible, I have a gigantic selection of games. Plus, if I buy a game for my Palm and I don’t like it, I’m out of luck. With GameBoy Advance and DS games, I can resell the cartridges back to the game store and get a portion of my money back.

Secondly, the Nintendo DS has taken over all my gaming time. The Xbox is sitting in the living room unused while I cart around my little white box around the house. I can play in the bed before I fall asleep. I can play in the living room on the couch with Mike. I can play in the car on a road trip. I seriously haven’t turned on the Xbox since I bought the DS, even though I was obsessing about the Lord of the Rings games that I had bought recently.

I’ve even gone as far as replacing some games I already own on Xbox with the Nintendo versions. I bought Klax and Atari Retro, even though I have those games on Xbox to play whenever I want.

In short, I’m completely and madly in love with my Nintendo DS Lite and I can’t wait to play games against my sister-in-law when she comes to visit. I’m excited to see how the wireless connectivity works.

Gorillas certainly outweigh Ducks, especially in the tape category. I am intrigued by Gorilla Tape and I want to get myself a roll as soon as possible to check it out. It claims to be the toughest tape on earth.

This picture says that it’s “tape so tough it can hold up a brick.” I don’t know that holding up a brick is the true test of a tape, but the picture makes me want to buy a roll. I want to be able to hold up a brick with some tape.

As a teenager, I used Duck Tape and a plastic bag to cover my leaking sunroof on my 1968 Beetle. Every week, I needed to apply a new plastic bag to the roof of my car because the Duck Tape would peel off in the blistering heat of the Utah sun. I wonder if Gorilla Tape would have lasted longer.

My question: is it harder to rip than Duck Tape? If it is, it would make a roll of Gorilla Tape nearly useless for me. I guess I’ll have to try it out and get back to you.

Via: Cool Tool: Gorilla Tape

Mike bought this Panasonic DMC-FX01 for himself about a month ago. I shrugged and went about my business, never thinking to give it a second glance. About a week ago, he took a small video of the cats. When he showed it to me, I commented on it,

“Man, that’s a clear video. What resolution is that?”

“I don’t know. I think you can take HDTV quality video with this. I can only get about 10 minutes on my SD card.”

“Can I borrow your camera tomorrow?”

Mike shrugged and I woke up early. I film walking videos for Starling Fitness and I wanted to see how well his little camera could do. Let me tell you, it blew the Sony DCR-DVD300 Handycam out of the water. The video on the Panasonic isn’t perfect, but it’s clearer than the Sony and it has an amazing anti-shake setting that makes taking a walking video a breeze.

Here is a 3-minute example of the video I took with the Panasonic DMC-FX01:

After playing with the Panasonic DMC-LX01, I no longer fantasize about buying a “real” video camera. His tiny camera fits in his pocket and goes with him everywhere. What’s the point of lugging around a huge video camera if you have one that’s almost as good with you wherever you go? There isn’t one.

The full-length DVD of this video is actually for sale at Starling Fitness for $5 including shipping and handling. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can find it here:

Starling Fitness – Fitness, diet, and health weblog » Walking Videos For Sale

Trevor Blackwell has built his own self-balancing scooter that works like a Segway.

• Building a Balancing Scooter

He insists that it’s easier than you might think to build a scooter like this, bragging that the code controlling the gyroscope is only 500 lines long.

“Although the Segway has several exotic components, mine is built from common low-tech parts like wheelchair motors and RC car batteries. The parts, even at small quantity retail prices, cost less than half of a genuine Segway.”

Of course, a Segway has been made consumer safe with all sorts of fail-safes to keep you from hurting yourself. His version may not be as safe.

“There is one very important difference between what can be built as an experiment and the commercial Segway: The commercial one has a lot of safety features, redundancy and fool-proofing. Mine has none whatsoever (Well, it does have a kill switch so it doesn’t go zooming away if I fall off, and it does shut down if it finds itself tipped more than 45 degrees.) This is pretty darn important, and you should think about it very carefully before considering building such a thing yourself. With a scooter like this, if it stops working for any reason (software crash, hardware failure, low battery) you will fall, hard, and probably on your face.“

In the end, I think a bike would be better. My bike can go way faster than a scooter and no one will stop me and ask me about it.