Archive for September, 2008
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
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When seeing such a setup, you start asking yourself some questions about the way your place looks like and how you would have liked it to be. As far as I’m concerned, I will always have in mind the image of a huge brown wall with a centered dirty pink square which has probably been the only dream about the place I’ll be living for the rest of my life. I’ve grown up and my taste of fashion has progressively changed during teenage years. Therefore, I’m not sure I still want my brown wall (‘cause it’s mine, even if it doesn’t still exist), particularly because there are millions of options today for a place to be designed.
But you come across something like this: a sic-PC render farm for your business (or a place, whatever that is) which looks actually great. The render farm is a computer cluster built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI) and it’s usually used to integrate visual effects in a movie or a television show, through off-line batch processing. When industrial designer Fredrik Perman moved his offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, he decided to trick up the company’s render farm which was used to churn through conceptual designs and to put his six Intel dual-core PCs up on the wall of the lobby in a custom plexiglass case. The device is being lighted by LED fans and ten 10-inch cold-cathode tubes hidden behind the aluminum frame. There are six fans meant to cool the render farm and they each blow upward. In order to increase the ventilation, the acrylic case isn’t provided with the top and sides. The server room is placed on the other side of the wall so that the 8-port KVM switch is embedded between the two spaces and the cabling goes straight behind the PCs.
To directly control the farm, there are a 15-inch monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, while the speakers entertain the atmosphere in the lobby, whenever the device doesn’t crunch conceptual designs.
There is no information yet about price and availability of the setup, but I guess we could easily get to an estimate ourselves. The only thing we should not forget is to take in consideration the manual labor of the designer and the feeling of pride towards his work, as he confessed that “the project was a ton of fun, and it proved not only to be very functional and convenient – it instantly sparked an interest by anyone walking through the design studio front entranceâ€. Keep that in mind, you guys, because when there’s demand, the cost of the manual labor I was earlier talking about could easily be overrated.
(Source Dvice)
Posted in Computer Gadgets | No Comments »
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
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Everybody is wishing a Happy B-Day to Google and we don’t want to miss this special day either!!!
Many of you landed on our website in searching for the latest cool gadgets right on Google and we are happy to have you all here celebrating together 10 years of Google’s work.
During the last decade, the search engine has been improving with tones of cool stuff for all of us, including the new web browser called Google Chrome, web search on the mobile phone, Gmail, Google Maps with traffic details, translation support for several languages and many, many others.
Ten years and counting…
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Saturday, September 27th, 2008
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Smartphones are more and more popular nowadays because they offer advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, often with PC-like functionality. If some people define the smartphone as a phone able to run complete operating system software providing a standardized interface and platform for application developers, others consider it like a simple phone provided with advanced features such as e-mail and Internet capabilities and/or a full keyboard.
But how multi-functional a smartphone can be? Does it cook your breakfast, at dawn, and then politely serves it to you in bed? Is your smartphone capable of making your morning coffee? Because if it’s not, then you should reconsider the choice you’ve made.
The first Android smartphone has lots of features, as does the HTC Touch HD, but I’m sure they can’t make coffee. Designer Francesco Lerro spotted the lack of such a characteristic and make it available on his Mokia 8015 concept phone. I suppose he needed an impressive imagination and he must be addicted to this delicious beverage, in order to come up with such a device. As for us, the rest of the ordinary mortals, we must prove a great sense of humor to imagine that, one day, smartphones will be able to serve espressos.
Francesco Lerro turned out to be a very ingenious guy, as he named his concept “Mokiaâ€, which seems to be a pun intended at mocking Nokia or even all smartphone brands. But who knows? Maybe one day we’ll attend the release of this witty concept phone and it will be possible for smartphones to pour espresso coffees into cups. The Bluetooth headset doubles as a spoon for stirring the coffee.
We have had all sorts of smartphones: multimedia centric, camera-centric and music centric. Therefore, why shouldn’t we have a coffee centric smartphone also?
Even if its designer is the self-proclaimed Italian “espresso junkie”, I wonder if such a concept phone will ever make it on market. Moreover, I’m pretty impatient to see what manufacturer will have the guts to fling Mokia 8015 into the mass production! I’m looking forward for something like this to happen! And I bet it won’t be a bargain, whatsoever!
(Source concept-phones)
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Friday, September 26th, 2008
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Pay attention when staring at this chair and try to guess what this piece of furniture is made of. I could bet all my money on the fact that most of the people will think of LEGO, and with good reason, as a matter of fact. It looks like the interlocking plastic bricks assembled in the form of a futuristic chair, but we’re far from the truth.
Designer Matthew Plummer Fernandez chose to take design cues from the most unusual “place†ever, rather than inspiring himself from nature, architecture or any other traditional aesthetic sources. The angular contours of the so-called Sound/Chair are the consequence of a mapping sound waves experience. In other words, the result is an exact replica of a sound wave graph and embodies two different entities: a sound and a chair.
The product begins as a sound that is precisely crafted to imitate the shape of a chair when visualized as a 3-dimensional object using a volume, time and frequency plot. Made of polyethylene foam, water-jet cut (the first prototype was hand-cut expanded polystyrene), this chair is the first step to a project aiming at exploring the translation of furniture into sound and vice versa. If the sound can be visualized as a 3-dimensional object as long as it’s graphed mathematically, its “image†is brought to light: a landscape of spikes and shapes that vary accordingly to the type of sound. Altering those three parameters (volume, length and frequency) we’re facing a sound wave in the shape of a chair, which inherited the aesthetic of the specific sound.
After trying 719 different sounds, the designer put the chair into production. The Sound/Chair was launched at Selfridges’s pop-up shop as part of London’s design week and can be bought for an incredible amount of £3950 ($7280). This is one hell of an expensive chair, for god’s sake!
(Source Dvice)
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Friday, September 26th, 2008
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The upright position is the most natural for the human being ever since the first forms of life on earth. But the most modern people prefer to sit. This is a widely spread tendency and it’s visible right about everywhere: in offices, colleges, schools and libraries, where over 95% of people slouch while sitting and often when standing also.
Surfing the web is one of the main reasons why modern people enjoy sitting so much these days and is as bad for the health as “insidious†smoking, for example. Professor Marc Hamilton of the University of Missouri says that those millions of workers who sit at desks for hours are increasing their chances of heart diseases, Type 2 diabetes and obesity. And guess what? People neglect the impact of sitting too much and they become “unaware potential victimsâ€.
That is why we should consider more and more the value of the ergonomics, because the number of people suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome, a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist and causes pain, paresthesias and muscle weakness in the hand. Don’t try to find the cause of the plague of repeated wrist syndrome beyond your computer, because the mouse is the source of all evil. The device contributes to carpel tunnel and precautionary measures must be immediately taken unless you long for some metal bands on your hands.
Humanscale, largely known for their cool looking office chairs, announced the release of a new product called Switch Mouse, an innovative ergonomic mousing solution that aims to reduce stress injuries. This groundbreaking peripheral device features a V-shaped base that puts the user’s wrist and forearm at an optimal 45-degree angle and a symmetric design ambidextrous use. This is great news for all of the left-handed out there, since most mice are designed for right-handed people.
In addition, the Switch Mouse features a size adjustability to provide a custom fit for any computer user, a built-in palm support for proper mousing posture, so that the stress on the wrist could be prevented. There is also a four-way scrolling dish which prevents injuries from constant scrolling and three programmable button for user-specified functions.
Designed to accommodate natural arm positions, reduce repetitive motion stress and provide customizable function and comfort for all computer users, the Switch Mouse picked up three noteworthy awards during 2007. The revolutionary ergonomic mousing device earned a Gold Award in the 2007 Best of NeoCon competition, the Grand Prize in the Product Innovations Awards presented by Buildings magazine and the top nod for Best Ergonomic Solution at Mixology07, an award program sponsored by U.K.-based mix interiors magazine.
The plug-and-play Switch Mouse is based on an optical scanning technology and a USB connector. In addition, it works with Windows Vista and Mac OS X, but it’s also compatible with Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP and Mac OS 9.
The Switch Mouse is available on ergodirect.com for an amount of $99.00.
(Source coolest-gadgets.com)
Posted in Computer Gadgets | 1 Comment »
