Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 |
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Now here’s a watch totally whacked out; still it’s a very fancy and expensive-looking digital watch that combines telling time with the Chinese philosophy of I Ching. I Ching is taken from the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes†and it is a form of divinatory practice involving 64 hexagrams (patterns of 6 broken and unbroken lines), which are used in a divinatory way by the throwing of yarrow stalks or coins. The philosophy based on I Ching hexagrams is a symbol system used to identify order in chance events.
The I Ching is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. The text describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is intrinsic to ancient Chinese cultural beliefs. The cosmology centres on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process and acceptance of the inevitability of change. In Western cultures and modern East Asia, the I Ching is sometimes regarded as a system of divination. The classic consists of a series of symbols, rules for manipulating these symbols, poems and commentary.
I’m not sure how this is made to work and how the philosophy was introduced into this mechanism, but it involves inserting a hexagram generator into the watch to help you decide your own future. It seems very confusing and complicated, because it requires an understanding of I Ching, but, after all, it’s a pretty nice looking watch.
Strangely enough, the Oracle Watch, designed by Andy Kurovets, does not tell you the current time, but will instead assist you in identifying the order of chance events via 64 digital hexagrams. All you need to do is to press the button six times and a hexagram will be generated that correlates to your future.
If you’re the irresolute type of guy and you usually manifest the tendency of procrastinating things and you’re also a fan of both high-end timepieces and I Ching, I’m pretty sure you’ll be interested in this I Ching hexagrams based accessory.
(Source Dvice)
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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 |
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You have to admit that the urban area nowadays can easily be defined as an authentic jungle, which isn’t exactly a safe place for bicyclists. In order to make your participation to the traffic a whole lot simpler, you need all sorts of tools to keep you one step ahead of irresponsible motorists. Therefore, the Nike Hindsight gives you supernatural powers with extended peripheral vision so all these sneaky cars, so you have to be careful.
The Nike Hindsight cyclist’s glasses from designer Billy May are based on one thing and one thing only: stop cyclists from getting hurt on the roads. They work similar to bifocals except for your peripheral vision. At the extended side of each lens, there is a carefully arranged high-power Fresnel lens that captures the view to the sides of the wearer’s head and sends it into the peripheral vision. This way, riders can detect motion in a field of view beyond the normal human limit of 180 degrees. Hopefully, the extra data won’t be too distracting. But this is a very clever way of avoiding being side-swiped by a fast moving vehicle that was sitting outside your normal vision zones.
High power, diverging Fresnel zones aligned vertically distort into view an extra 25 degrees on both sides. Vision is radically distorted in the periphery, but as the eye detects only motion in that area, little clarity is lost in the process. A very clear advantage is the early warning of approaching vehicles, but a less obvious one is reducing the necessary head rotation to check behind. These glasses were designed for the use of bicyclists, but there are lots of other sports and activities where a greater field of view becomes an advantage.
These glasses remain just a concept product for the moment, but they might be expected by lots of sport-addicts out there.
(Source YankoDesign.com)
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Monday, October 20th, 2008 |
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The Nintendo Wii was designed to be a socially interactive console and is most fun when played with four consoles simultaneously. But imagine what happens when all four Wiimotes are fully exhausted! Your game is ruined and you don’t have enough chargers at your disposal in order to juice them up. MeWe World, Inc., an independent Wii video game accessory manufacturer, has launched the first Quad Charger for the Nintendo Wii that allows users to charge up to four Wii remotes with their rechargeable battery packs.
This new quad charger comes in package with four fast-charging rechargeable nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH) battery packs for up to 13 hours of play time per remote. Thus, the need of constantly purchase and replace standard AA batteries is dead and buried, which is a benefit to both pocketbooks and the environment.
Popular Wii Sports four-player games such as bowling, golf, tennis and multi-player games such as Mario Party 8 generated the frustration of not being able to keep up to four players in the game. Until now. Because you can conveniently charge up to four remotes at the time and all parties can have continuous uninterrupted play.
“When the remotes are in the charging station, an LED display lets players know the charging status and keeps the remotes organized when not in use. The patented-design quad charging station ensures secure connection for the Wii remotes with a uniquely designed storage well along the sidewalls, keeping the Wii wrist strap channeled outside the cradleâ€; this is what we find out from the press release that announced this brand new device.
“We are very pleased to introduce the first true quad charger. Other chargers claiming to be quad chargers actually hold two Wii remotes and two batteries. The design and usability of this charging station was born out of a need in the marketplace for convenience and cost-effectivenessâ€, said Al Benyameen, Chief Technology Officer at MeWe.
The Mewe Quad Charging Station retails for $49.95 (with a 1-year warranty) and can be purchased online at MeWe’s official website.
(Source coolest-gadgets.com)
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Friday, October 10th, 2008 |
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What do you think it happens when you’re in a tiny little country that makes more money than countries five times your size? Well, let me tell you: you’re as eccentric as you can be and you try to make your wildest dreams come true. With other words, you spend money on crazy stuff. But if you think about it, it might sound logical: you’re a prosperous company and you buy ad space on a billboard. You don’t make such an acquisition just to have it in your patrimony, you hope for as many people to see your product as possible.
United Arab Emirates development company Tameer Holding announced it will develop the world’s largest LED screen to be embedded on an intended commercial tower in Majan district of Dubailand. The project was dubbed as “The Podium†and will be a world first, boasting a 33-storey high LED media façade that will be visible from a distance of 1.5 kilometers. The idea of Tameer Holding’s marketing team has been worked out by LED technology experts from Dactronics, a company who also designed the Grand Lisboa and surrounding skyline in China. Podium will be, therefore, a powerful medium for advertising, messaging and art, upholding Dubai’s repute as a pioneering stronghold for architecture and civil engineering.
Ghassan Sakhnini, CEO of Tameer, said that Podium is not only a significant technological advancement, but also an expression of the company’s focus on the community, as the huge screen façade enables mass communication through a traditionally powerful medium. This way, companies, non-profit organizations, government authorities and other parties will be able to broadcast their message to the wider public.
“With today’s ever evolving environment, we thought it imperative to combine the best of integrated technology with mass media in a commercial realty development to provide both investors, end-users and the wider community with an unparalleled experience that incorporates all the elements of technology, environment, design, sophistication and comfort, true to our commitment of building perfect living and working spacesâ€, said Mr. Sakhnini.
In addition to the LED façade, the Podium provides 33 levels of premium commercial office space and two floors dedicated to retail, as well as four floors for parking. The important thing is that Podium will not only be the world’s largest LED screen ever, but it will be created based on a sophisticated design and advanced technologies, so that the screen will not impede the flow of natural light into the building. This means that the offices placed behind the massive screen won’t suffer from a total lack of light and will have the same open feel as those on the opposite side of the building.
If you imagine that Podium will be based on a highly complicated concept, you are wrong. A series of LED bulbs are arranged in a matrix that is mounted section by section on the structure, following its curve and adhering to the final shape. The concealed fasteners allow people to see through the screen and the water-tight connectors are waterproof. The component sections are powered, a signal is broadcasted, and then each pixel connects to its own individual address and becomes uniquely programmable and capable of projecting one billion colors.
Dubai seems like an alien place on earth, with their skyscrapers with tennis courts on them and soon-to-be-reality rotating buildings, so why not a 33 storey LED display?
(Source Dvice)
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Thursday, October 9th, 2008 |
Mozilla is preparing Firefox to enter the realm of geo-awareness with a new Labs creation dubbed Geode. The company made an official announcement yesterday and unveiled the experimental Firefox add-on that will take advantage of the W3C Geolocation Spec in Firefox 3.1. The idea is to introduce a location-awareness to the browser, so that whenever you find yourself in a strange town, you could use your laptop in order to find information about location and nearby restaurant suggestions and directions.
Therefore, arriving in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop, won’t be a headache anymore. The insecurity of not knowing where you are will be dead and buried. This is when “you pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite site review. It automatically deduces your location and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple of blocks away and plots directions thereâ€, as we’re told on Mozilla Labs’ blog.
But don’t rush to become too enthusiastic about this, because things aren’t as simple as they sound. In order to do this, your browser needs to know where you are. And for something like this to happen, the future versions of Firefox are expected to support new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to your location. The specifics aren’t ready yet, but there are hopes about location to be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods, such as GPS-based, Wi-Fi based, manual entry and so on.
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Geode is therefore an experimental add-on meant to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 before implementing it in a future product release and provides an early experiment which involves W3C Geolocation specification. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.
Besides restaurant lookups, Mozilla also offers other possible examples such as RSS readers adjusting based on your present location, knowing the difference between home and work, location-restricted logins and websites that deliver news based on your physical location.
As far as the privacy implications, when a web site asks for your location, a notification bar will ask how much information you are willing to give that site: your exact location, your neighborhood, your city or nothing at all. To map the WiFi signals in your area to your location, Geode uses Shyhook’s Loki technology. Compared to normal GPS-based methods which can take upwards of 45 seconds for a lock, Geode works both inside and outside and has an accuracy of between 10 to 20 meters, normally within a second. In this early implementation, location and IP information you give to the site, are sent to the current provider, that is Shyhook, whenever a website is granted access to your location. But don’t worry, according to Shyhook’s privacy policy, personal identifying information will not be stored and there’s a promise of only keeping data in anonymized aggregate. Mozilla has big hopes concerning Firefox, planning to make service providers and geolocation methods pluggable and user selectable, so that users could have a wide range of choices and privacy options.
The API used by Geode is identical to the one about to debut with Firefox 3.1, but developers can use either in testing applications. The still-in-development Firefox 3.1 version will give you the possibility to choose a geolocation service provider: a peripheral device like a GPS or a web-based service provider like the one used in Geode. A preview version is available to Firefox 3 users starting yesterday, so that people can play a little bit before it is fully integrated into 3.1.
(Source gizmodo.com)
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