Stainless Steel Mini Hard Drives

From Gizmag

Stainless Steel Mini Hard Drives:

Check out the latest Monstor Drives from US Modular– portable storage has been awaiting an ultra cool form factor and this combination between Zippo cool, 120GB capacity and palm-sized chromium objet d'art which is substantial enough so you won’t lose it is absolutely ideal and we’re predicting it will become a must-have for sleek geeks during 2006. ..

Matrox VGA Y-Splitter

Matrox VGA Y-Splitter:

Tuesday Matrox announced a peripheral that can take a single VGA input and split it out to two monitors. With all of the latest and greatest PC video cards already having dual-monitor supports, this product is probably aimed more towards the laptop user. The DualHead2Go actually is pretty cool. Instead of just cloning the image twice, the splitter tricks your computer into thinking an extremely widescreen monitor is plugged in. This could be really useful in multi-projector presentations via laptop or dual-screen pR0N/FPS marathons. The DualHead2Go will run around $170 and should be shipping soon.

Matrox Box Splits One Monitor Into Two [Extremetech]

TAG! You're Stolen!

From Gizmodo

TAG! You're Stolen!:

Kerstin von Locquenghien has created an RFID embedded cabinet for her master's media project. In the center is a screen surrounded by multiple shelves with random items sitting around. When one of the objects with an RFID tag is placed on a shelf located directly below the screen, the information about that particular object pops up on the screen. The project is called "TAGGED!" and is designed to get more attention to how RFID is used in the public and to get people talking more about RFID. The funny thing about this is that all the objects are stolen and the RFID gives clues to the stories behind each object. Those crafty artists!

TAGGED! Stolen Things [WMMNA]

Tim O'Reilly BBC interview on Open Source's origins

Tim O'Reilly BBC interview on Open Source's origins:

Cory Doctorow:

The BBC has a two-part interview with Tim O'Reilly on open source -- available as a transcript or podcast:

The geeks are out there on the front edge. But coming back to this idea of open source - this idea that when you put people together with the internet they start doing things in different ways and the geeks, if you like, discovered pretty early that one of the great ways that you can use the internet was you give your stuff away and it gets the word out and that was sort of the beginning of what we now call viral marketing.

Photo-sharing sites liked Flickr are examples of the participatory web

They also discovered that when you give your stuff away, you can actually get a coalition of people to help you with it and so you were able to build new forms of social organisation around projects that people care about.

Podcast Link, Interview Link



(Thanks, Stuart!)

So check out Gumstix

For reference, Gumstix are cool. Gumstix are a tiny brand of computer board based on Intel XScale technology. They have a pretty good number of expansion modules.

They're on my "to play with" list. Complete with WiKi!

They'll fit nicely into my retro PDA design, if I can ever get that together.

Flexible Electronic Paper Display

Article: Flexible Electronic Paper Display

These "electronic paper" displays are manufactured by e-Ink. Really exciting stuff actually. I'm hoping to one day be able to use it to create an "Open" PDA that is cheap to manufacture.

Or any display for that matter!

Update: e-Ink is shipping kits in November. Link here.

Update #2: The kits are $3,000...!! Which will lead me directly to a post about Gumstix instead.

New Olympus V-40 and V-50 voice recorders

Article:

Olympus makes some good voice recorders. They're cross-platform compatible and have a pretty good capacity. I'll be watching these ones, as I think I need (yet another) replacement recorder.

The site is in Japanese. Looks like they'll be between $200 and $300 CDN.