This Philco PC harks back to the very stylish Philco Predicta TV from the 50’s, old pre-war typewriters and just a dash of steampunk. It’s just a concept at the moment, produced by SchultzeWorks Design. The design is being shopped around to manufacturers so maybe we’ll see these in the not too distant future. More pics here.[Via Yanko]
The design of the “Philco PC” was inspired by the 1954 design classic Philco Predicta, as well as an eclectic mixture of modern minimalism, the steampunk movement, and antiques. As lead designer Dave Schultze explains, “The result is a design aesthetic that blends multiple elements of the familiar, but with some surprisingly fresh styling that just so happens to house a state-of-the-art Windows 7 PC.”
Digital Video Camcorder With Optical Telescope Lens – Got zoom?
Is your current camera zoom making you feel inadequate? Can’t quite zoom close enough for the action? Chinavasion can help with this Digital Video Camcorder with Optical Telescope Lens. The camera is a 30fps digicam that shoots in MPEG4 and stores it on SD card. It can also shoot 12 megapixel stills, has a built in flash and a 3″ TFT flip-out screen. The camera doesn’t have a native optical zoom but it does have a 4x digital zoom and a macro focus mode. Bolting on the telescope provides 8x optical zoom. Pretty darn cheap too, ~US$97.
This DV cameras best feature is the screw-on optical telescope zoom lens, allowing you to take pictures of long distance objects. The zoom lens also has a manual focus adjustment, giving you ultimate control over the focus and quality of your distant shots. When combined with the camera’s native 4x digital zoom, you then have a monster of a zoom camcorder!
SkyPix Handheld Scanner – scan your life straight to microSD memory card
This SkyPix Handheld Scanner captures full colour 600 dpi resolution images directly to a microSD card, or you can forsake convenience and transfer to a PC via the USB port. Your call. And your scan really, eh? $119.95.
This is the portable, cordless handheld scanner that preserves important documents, letters, or recipes, recording its contents onto a memory card for later retrieval on your computer (Play Video). As you move the scanner over an area as large as 8 1/2″ H x 50″ L, its sensitive color image sensor scans at high (600 dpi) or standard (300 dpi) resolution, saving images as JPEG files stored on an inserted microSD card. A scan of a passport takes only five seconds.
Remember those funky wheels on the cars in the movie “I, Robot”? Well it turns out they’re sort of real. Airtrax make a range of warehouse vehicles that use a unique, omni-directional wheel. Controlled via a joystick instead of a wheel-and-pedals, the Airtrax system is extremely manoeuvrable allowing the vehicles to move forwards/backwards, side-to-side or rotate within their own length. So far Airtrax have released a forklift called the Sidewinder, a scissor-lift called the Cobra and an omni-directional mobile platform called the MP2. There are videos of the vehicles in action on the site as well.
The term Omni-Directional means “capable of moving in any direction”. that is exactly what Airtrax vehicles are designed to be. In fact, our vehicles are holonomic, which is to say that they can change direction instantaneously, without stopping, without changing the orientation of the wheels, and without moving in some undesired direction, prior to moving in the desired direction.
Fuji Soft's new humanoid is powered by Atom and Ubuntu
Fuji Soft Inc. has unveiled its first commercial bipedal humanoid robot at the All Japan Robot Tournament (Sumo Wrestling) competition, which it also sponsors. The robots (one of which is called Sakura-chan), will have an official name and price disclosed in early 2010, though the company stated that it will be affordable.
It is expected they will target universities and other educational institutes, meaning Aldebaran Robotics’ NAO may have some competition in Japan (with home field advantage no less). Also, one imagines the All Japan Robot Tournament will introduce a new standard class humanoid sumo league to their competitions, which could be quite popular given the often unbalanced nature of ROBO-ONE fights.
Some of the robot’s specifications have been revealed: it runs Linux Ubuntu on an Intel ATOM 1.66GHz CPU integrated with Eclipse and wireless LAN. It stands 39.8cm (15″) tall, weighs 1.56kg (3.5 lbs), and will have 20 degrees of freedom (2 legs x6, 2 arms x3, head x2). An LED array in its visor will display various expressions, which jives well with its overall AIBO-like appearance.
As far as sensors, the robot will be capable of image and speech recognition, so it will have at least one camera and microphone. It will be interesting to see how much it costs – I expect it will be priced competitively with Vstone’s Robovie-PC.
Matt unboxes the Nokia N900 but not your average unboxing. This is the Nokia Hackerbox PR pack.
This is NOT your average unboxing video!
I've been trying to get my hands on the Nokia N900 for a while now, many of you have emailed me asking for a review or asking questions about the N900 so we've been bugging Nokia for a review model almost daily!
About a week ago I had an email from Nokia asking if I would like to try out one of their new handsets, but the catch was that they were unable to tell me which one they were going to send me! Not a problem I said, we'll take a look anyway.
So a few days ago this large, heavy black plastic cube turned up in the office. There were no instructions, no list of contents, just a USB to MiniUSB cable supplied. There was no obvious way to open the box - a little puzzle! :)
So first of all we connected the box up to a PC with the USB cable to see what would happen, when Windows reported that it was installing drivers for a USB to Serial bridge and added a serial device on COM4 I thought it would be a good idea to start a terminal connection to it and, well watch the video below to see what happened next.
Nokia N900 specification:
Dimensions: 110.9 x 59.8 x 19.55 millimetres Mass: 181 grams (battery included) 600 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 CPU 256MB RAM / 768MB ROM 32GB internal storage 3.5" colour transflective TFT 800 x 480 pixels Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP WiFi - 802.11b/g Infrared Gate Nokia Internet Tablet OS Maemo 5.0 Video output 3.5mm headphone connector Quad-band GSM and Tri-band HSDPA/3G FM radio (87.5-108MHz) with RDS Built in GPS and Nokia Maps 5 Megapixel auto-focus camera and dual-LED flash 0.3MP forward-facing camera for video calling 1320 mAh battery
Trucks on the highway often difficult maneuvering of other road users when overtaking or rebuild. Continuous broadcast "Transparentius" gives an opportunity to assess the situation in the "blind zone" before performing the maneuver.
The technology allows to get the image on the panel, even in bright sunlight.
The video signal is transmitted from the camera fixed in front of the truck at the rear door panel with a projector.
Transparentius, as with most good ideas, is remarkably simple -- you jack a camera onto the front of a truck, or lorry as they're known in some places, and then project that image onto the back of your hulking transporter. The effect of this is to render the truck figuratively transparent for the driver behind, who is enriched with a lot more information about what lies on the road ahead. No word on how the rear projection is achieved or how sunlight glare is overcome, but knowing Art Lebedev, you can bet both challenges are solved in the most unaffordable fashion possible.
