Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
There's no better way to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of broadcast radio — or to completely enrage your sibling by rendering that brand new cellphone useless — than to craft your very own RF jammer. Branching out from the many other jammers we've already seen, the Wave Bubble touts itself as being a "self-tuning, wide-bandwidth" rig that doesn't require a spectrum analyzer, and can "jam many different frequency bands" all in a pocket-friendly enclosure. Powered by an internal Li-ion cell, this bad boy provides self-tuning via "dual PLL," and you can manually enter new frequencies to vex by simply plugging it into your PC's USB port and inputting the data when prompted. It can purportedly provide up to two hours of jamming on dual bands (such as "cellphones") or four hours on single bands such as "cordless phones, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc." Additionally, the output power ranges from 0.1-watts (high bands) to 0.3-watts (low bands), and the handy device sports an approximate range of about 20 feet with "well-tuned antennas." Of course, you aren't apt to find this for sale anywhere considering the fit the FCC would undoubtedly throw, but if you consider yourself a master of the DIY craft, be sure to tag the read link for some in-depth pedagogy.
[Via HackADay]
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time;)
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Cory Doctorow:
Larry Lessig writes with bitter disappointment about the Democrats' appointment of loony copyright extremist Howard "Hollywood" Berman to chair the House IP committee. Berman once proposed a bill that would let movie studios hack your PC if they thought you were infringing copyright — and would immunize them from liability if they destroyed an innocent bystander's computer in the process.
Dems to the Net: "Thanks for the blogs. And please continue to get outraged by MoveOn messages. But don’t think for a second we’re interested in hearing anything beyond the charming wisdom of Jack Valenti. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your money. But come on — you’re all criminals. Don’t expect your criminal ways to be taken seriously by an institution as respected as the US Congress."
Link
See also:
Emmett Plant on the Berman-Conyers P2P bill
Hollywood asks Congress for Letters of Marque
Filed under: Storage
If yesterday's announcement by Samsung was a tiny step in the direction of solid state disk (SSD) ubiquity, then today's announcement by SanDisk is a freakin' leap. That's right, the big bad daddy of consumer flash — SanDisk — joins Samsung and TDK today with a 32GB SSD drive all their own. The 1.8-inch SSD delivers a sustained read-rate of 62MBps and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Fine, but the most notable detail in the press release is the price. According to SanDisk, their 32GB SSD could increase the end-user price by "around $600" when released in laptops computers in the first half of 2007. That's down — way down — from the $900 to $1,400 premium we were paying for SSD equipped gear. Come 'ere, group hug all.
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: CES, Storage
Well, we knew it was likely to happen in 2006 or 2007: Hitachi has fulfilled their promise and broken the 1TB drive barrier with the introduction of Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000 drive. Thanks to perpendicular recording and the average consumers' voracious appetite for porn totally legitimate data, Hitachi's new $400 drives — available in SATA II or PATA 133 varieties, with differing speed modes, a 32MB buffer, quieting accoustics, SMART, and a 7200rpm spindle speed — will hit the market running in Q1 of this year. Also announced: the CinemaStar 7K1000, a DVR-centric drive due in Q2 which wasn't fully detailed, but apparently has "adaptive error recovery", "Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage", and other buzzy sounding stuff which just seems a lot like regular old drive features. We'll assume it's better tuned for high-throughput read / write performance, and leave it at that.
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Cory Doctorow:
The Telegraph published a map of London as it would look following a one-metre rise in sea-levels. It's not pretty — several billion dollars' worth of real-estate ends up under water. The proposal is to build defenses against the rising Thames, but of course that won't do much good if the Gulf Stream stalls out as many predict it would following such a rise in sea-level. If that happens, they won't need to defend London's pricey riverside real-estate from the rising seas, it will already be frozen under 10 metres of ice.
Dr Nassos Vafeidis of the University of the Aegean, Greece, and Prof Rob Nicholls of the University of Southampton and colleagues have weighed up the impact of rising levels on the Thames Estuary, where 1.25 million people currently live, 1.5 million commute and there are assets worth up to £100 billion.
Link
(via We Make Money Not Art)
Filed under: Displays, Misc. Gadgets
U.K.-based Plastic Logic has announced that it has secured some $100 million in funding to build the world's first factory dedicated to manufacturing plastic electronics on a commercial scale. More specifically, the factory's set to produce flexible active matrix display modules, aimed at making various electronic reading devices a little more portable and a little less hard on the eyes. According to the company, the plant will be built in Dresden, Germany, with production set to ramp up sometime in 2008 at an initial capacity of more than a million display modules per year.
[Via Slashdot]
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: CES, Portable Audio
Possibly setting the record for most interchangeable pieces in a set of earbuds, the SA6 from Sleek Audio packs a number of features unique in the high-end headphone market. Using "treble tips" and "bass ports" that can be swapped out, Sleek claims that the single-driver SA6 rivals the performance of two- and three- driver models from competing manufacturers by offering frequency response that can be tuned to the listener's preference. Also unique is the set's cord, which disconnects right at the bud — allegedly for a potential upgrade to A2DP down the road. Look for the SA6 in March for $250 ($230 on preorder).
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Portable Audio
Stop screwing around with mixing and recording in Garage Band, just pump 16-bit 44kHz sound right into your iPod with Belkin's new TuneStudio. A four-track XLR (with phantom power) mixer / recorder that uses your iPod as the medium, the TuneStudio also functions as a USB sound card so you can run audio in and out of your computer; you can snag your TuneStudio F9Z824 $179.99 for this summer.
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Robots
It's one thing to craft something remarkable all by your lonesome, but constructing an entire factory to handle all the dirty work for you is really doing something. A robotics group assembled (ahem) at a German "grammar school" (VHG) in lower Bavaria has fabricated a feat that even Toys R Us would marvel over, as the group's expansive LEGO Mindstorm factory was built entirely out of LEGO blocks, and moreover, programmed to assemble LEGO-based vehicles. Taking a note from every other major assembly plant in the world, this automated construction site feeds blocks from one end to the other, carefully pushing, pulling, and connecting pieces as necessary to completely assemble a LEGO car. While we've no idea how you'd even begin concocting this same masterpiece at your own domicile, nor how tough it is to be admitted into this apparently incredulous university, you'll reportedly need at least 2,000 man hours and €3,000 ($3,937) just to get started, but feel free to click on through for a lengthy video demonstration.
[Via MetaFilter]
Continue reading German robotics group crafts LEGO factory to build… LEGO cars
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Cory Doctorow:
Here's a research report on "unblurring" information on checks and credit-cards that has been scrambled with the Photoshop "mosaic" effect — this guy claims that he can extract the hidden numbers.
What does this mean? Well, let's take the mozaic version of 0000001 (zoomed in):
… and identify the brightness level (0-255) of each mozaic region, indexing them in some consistent fashion as a=[a_1,a_2...,a_n]:
In this case, the account number 0000001 creates mozaic brightness vector a(0000001)=[213,201,190,...]. We find the mozaic brightness vector for every account number in a similar fashing using a script to blur each image and read off the brightnesses. Let a(x) be the function of the account number x. a(x)_i denotes the ith vector value of the mozaic brightness vector a obtained from account number x. Above, a(0000001)_1 = 213.
We now do the same for the original check image we found online or wherever, obtaining a vector we hereby call z=[z_1,z_2,...z_n]
Link
(via /.)
