The Gadgets Page

Seeing this car in action just reminds me of all the cool cars that James Bond drives. He’ll be begging Q for the Rinspeed Splash.

It’s a two-seater car with no room for even a metal suitcase full of diamonds in the back. I guess you’ll just have to jettison the girl (she’ll probably stab you in the back anway).

With just a few changes, the Rinspeed Splash can take to the water.

Best of all, it’s powered by natural gas, so it’s a little more earth-friendly!

You can see it in action here:

Via: The high-speed sports car that turns into a boat at the touch of a button | the Daily Mail

If you have ever played Guitar Hero or Rock Band, then you have imagined yourself to be a Rock God with the game. The Guitar Zeros, however, are a real band that have harnessed the power of the Guitar Hero controllers and are creating real music with them.

• THE GUITAR ZEROS

You can see them in action here:

They have the complete instructions on how to turn your own Guitar Hero controller into a musical instrument here:

• THE ZERO GUIDE

Using just a laptop computer, a Guitar Hero controller and some software from the Guitar Zeros, you can play music too. You don’t have to take apart your controller and it will still work to play your favorite game. It will just have super-hero abilities when you plug it into your PC.

Via: Guitar Zero is a band that has repurposed the Guitar… (kottke.org)

Once again, Jerry Van Amerongen, the author of Ballard Street, hits technology on the head.

Larry has come to learn his computer is capable of great cruelty.

I see the tears running down his eyes and I remember every time I’ve accidentally saved an altered photo over the top of the original. Or maybe I remember all the times a power flicker demolished hours of writing. How about those times when I’ve written something online and a glitch with the site eats my entry. Just thinking about it makes me click on the save button.

Here are some tips to prevent accidental sacrifices to the Technology Gods:

Always use Save As… instead of the Save option

Whether you’re working on a photo or using an old document for a template, the FIRST thing you should do is click File – Save As… and save the document with a different name as the original. Even if you think you’ll never need the original, do this. There have been so many times that I have mortally wounded something and have had my butt saved because I used Save As… instead of Save.

Save Often: Control+S Command

When I was a kid, I learned to program on an Atari 800. The first year we had these computers at our school, there was no way to save. If you wanted to load up a program, you had to type it in and run it. By eighth grade, we got some tape players that attached to the computers where we could save our programs. It was lovely being able to just load up something I had typed in class a few days before and all I did was buy a cassette tape.

After that, it was only power glitches that stole my work away from me. Since I lived on a side of town that had spotty power coverage at best, I learned to save every couple of minutes or so. I would listen to the tape machine grind away at saving my hand-typed program. It took FOREVER to save something back then. Now, it only takes a couple of seconds.

Get into the habit of pressing Control+S (on the PC) or Command/Apple+S (on the Mac) to save your work often. Where I live now, power glitches are few and far between, but saving often prevents me from losing things when the computer crashes.

Save Before Submitting: Control+A, Control+C, and Control+V Commands

With the advent of the online world, I found entirely NEW ways to make inadvertent sacrifices to the Technology Gods. For example, I would be writing up a scathing comment on a blog, send the submit button and something would screw up and lose my “brilliant” retort. Sometimes it was a stupid captcha filter, sometimes it was an incorrect password, sometimes it was just a weird problem with the Internet. Whatever it was, my comment was lain on the alter of the Technology Gods and ritualistically slaughtered.

To avoid this, I have learned a new habit. Before pressing the submit button, I press Control+A (or Command+A on a Mac) to select all I have written. Then I press Control+C (or Command+C on a Mac) to copy whatever is highlighted onto the clipboard. Then, if my comment is eaten by the Technology Gods, I am able to just Control+V (or Command+V) to paste it back in and try again.

Your Computer Is Capable of Cruelty

Once you realize that your computer is capable of cruelty, you have the ability to protect yourself from it. With just a few little keystrokes, you can learn habits that will save you and you will never have to cry in agony at the computer screen.

Joan and Henry from The Smart Show learn about alternative energy sources from Ben Luce in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Joan: How come we’re not completely solar and wind powered?

Ben: We have to overcome a 150 years of tradition of producing power from coal, uranium, and sources like that. You can make giant solar farms which could power entire cities. It would only take an area of 59 by 59 miles to provide all of the energy for the United States. We actually have the means to do this.

A swath of land 59 miles by 59 miles is HUGE. Really, Ben? Would it really ONLY take an area of 59 by 59 miles? Are YOU willing to give up that much? What about the beautiful wild areas near your home town of Santa Fe? Are you willing to put a gigantic black square on the face of your state between Santa Fe and Farmington?

Ben Luce has worked hard in New Mexico with the New Mexico Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy to help get the state running on cleaner fuels. Solar power is an alternative and adding a panel or two to your home would certainly help keep your footprint lighter, but the biggest problem is that adding solar panels to homes is difficult and expensive. We’re not trying to overcome 150 years of tradition. We’re trying to overcome the costly and complicated process of adding solar power to our homes.

The best use of your time, Mr. Luce is to work with a manufacturer to create solar panels that are EASY to install and work EVERYWHERE, not just sunny climates like New Mexico. Fighting against legislation is just a waste of effort.

One of the highlights of the Ion Audio booth at this year’s CES was the Rock Band video game. Now, Guitar Hero and Rock Band were probably featured in about 50 booths this year—many companies faced the fact that a video game was far more exciting than their own products—but Ion had a unique take on it.

Ion made a professional drum kit for use with Rock Band. This kit not only has higher quality drums than the ones that come with the game, it also has separate cymbal pads you can use for authenticity. (The game doesn’t know about the cymbals specifically, but each one is the same “color” as one of the lower drum pads.)

Ion makes “real” drum kits—electronic drums that can trigger samples—and here they’ve adapted one of them to play Rock Band. This was a prototype, but with any luck they’ll turn it into a real product. The only potential issue is that electronic drum kit prices start at about $300, but they can probably get the cost reduced. I’m sure there are a few Rock Band fanatics out there who will want it regardless.

[That’s Dan Amrich of the Official XBox Magazine playing the drums. I tried them myself, but Dan is a Gaming Professional and did a much better job.]

Patrick Norton at Tekzilla Daily had an EXCELLENT guide on how to organize your life with your digital camera. These are some great ideas and you can check them out here:

Here is a quick list of their ideas:

• Travel Companion: If you’re visiting an unfamiliar country or city and don’t want to get lost, take pictures of your hotel building as well as the nearby street signs. If you end up getting lost or turned around, try showing these pictures to a friendly local who can point you in the right direction to get back home.

• Use Your Camera As A Scanner: If you see important information that you need to jot down like a business card, a white board or a document. With today’s mega-pixel cameras, that image is going to be big and legible enough for you to read all that detailed information from.

• History Viewer: Say you’re working on a complex project like repairing a car or remodeling a room with lots of steps and pieces. It can be insanely easy to forget how it goes back together. As you start, take a picture of every step along the way to see how things come apart. Keep doing it as you progress in your work. Take pictures every step of the way. If you get confused about how things go back together, you have a trail of photos that have the answer for you.

In addition to those ideas, I have a couple others:

• Use your camera to keep track of your diet: When you are eating throughout the day, take a picture of everything you eat. You can use the photos as a food journal or just as a reminder so that you can keep your written food journal honest and accurate. This works especially well with a camera phone because it’s more likely to be with you at all times.

• Comparison Shopping: Sometimes it’s hard to remember which store had the best deal, especially when you are looking for high price items. When you are shopping, take pictures of your favorite choices at each store along with the price tag. When you are at a different store, you’ll have a good idea what the same item cost at the store down the street. Be careful, some stores have policies against taking photos of their merchandise, so either ask permission or be discreet.

There are so many different ways to use your camera to organize your life. How do you use your camera? Leave us your tips in the comment field.

How did this gorgeous little USB hub escape my attention? Just take a moment to enjoy the beauty of it.

Seriously, look at it, will ya?

You don’t think it’s that beautiful?

This is how the Belkin Travel Swivel USB Hub is shown on Belkin’s website. This is how it is shown on Amazon. It just looks like a piece of plastic and some USB ports. Not very sexy.

How about now?

It’s not sexy just because it’s plugged into a MacBook Pro. It’s sexy because it is showing off its best feature. See how the hub swivels away from the ports? THAT is a killer feature! Slim, easy to carry and gets the heck out of the way. How did I miss this one?

I spent a lot of time at the Belkin booth at CES and I didn’t see this little guy once.

Via: Belkin Travel Hub on Nicole Lee’s Flickr

I’ve talked before about the idea of Car Sharing. You don’t actually own a car, you own a membership in a car sharing program, so you can pick up a car when you need one, but not have to deal with all the ownership problems of autos.

MIT has taken the idea one step further with these stackable City Cars.

MIT is working in conjunction with GM on these cars:

The City Car is a stackable electric two-passenger city vehicle. The one-way sharable user model is designed to be used in dense urban areas. Vehicle Stacks will be placed throughout the city to create an urban transportation network that takes advantage of existing infrastructure such as subway and bus lines. By placing stacks in urban spaces and key points of convergence, the vehicle allows the citizens the flexibility to combine mass transit effectively with individualized mobility. The stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them. Similar to luggage carts at the airport, users simply take the first fully charged vehicle at the front of the stack. The City car is NOT a replacement for personal vehicles, taxis, buses, or trucks; it is a NEW vehicle type that promotes a socially responsible and more effective means of urban mobility.

You can see a video of how they might work here:

I LOVE new ideas for transportation and I’m sure Walt Disney would be just giddy with excitement if he was alive to see this video today.

Via: Popgadget Personal Technology for Women: CityCar paves the way for smart parking

I LOVE these commercials that interact with the New York Times’ webpage:

This advertisement couldn’t have been done with newspaper, television or radio. It only makes sense on the computer. I love the inventive advertising that is showing up for the computer age. It makes me WANT to click on the ad.

Thanks to Mahalo Daily, here is the 2008 Macworld Keynote in 60 seconds.

You might have to watch it two or three times, but all of the details are there. You just don’t get the cool demonstrations and the nervous CEOs of other companies trying to act cool next to Steve Jobs.

Via: Macworld 2008: 90 minutes of Steve in 60 seconds — but zero “booms”