December 24, 2010
The O!Play HD2 may be the first media device to support USB 3.0, but we’re guessing that hasn’t exactly inspired too many of you to run out and buy the things — assuming you can actually find one for sale. Maybe a slimmer, shaplier form factor would do the trick. That’s the new O!Play Mini, a much more petite entry into the series that makes do with a single USB 2.0 connector along with an SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader up front. Around back are optical audio and an HDMI 1.3 connector, through which it will pump 1080p video and up to 7.1 audio in Dolby Digital AC3, DTS 2.0+, even TrueHD and DTS-HD, plus a variety of other formats. There are also RCA outputs if you prefer your digital steam in audio. File format support looks pretty legendary, including all the usuals plus less commonly supported extensions like MKV, MTS, OGG, and FLAC, even RighTxT subtitles. No word on price or availability yet, but with the HD2 clocking in at $129.99 we wouldn’t be surprised to see this slotting in somewhere under $100.
ASUS O!Play Mini player ditches the USB 3.0 but keeps the 1080p originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 24, 2010
The word “serendipity” was famously coined by the 18th-century aesthete Horace Walpole, who based it on an Eastern tale of three princes with a knack for “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Serendipity is a prized quality in Internet culture—and yet in stressing accidents over sagacity, we abuse the term. The princes in Walpole’s old tale describe a missing camel sight-unseen with such alacrity that they are accused of having stolen it; in their defense, they unravel the clues they used in reconstructing the absent animal, telling a story scavenged from the traces it has left. “Serendipity” demands the management of diverse kinds of tacit knowledge—a kind of networked wisdom, a hunter’s sagacity, a knack for combining clues.
In this sense, the science historian James Burke is the Carl Sagan of Serendip. Beginning in the late seventies, the Connections series he presented on the BBC and on American public television unraveled technology’s history as the interwoven record of sagacious discovery. Unlike mystical approaches to the history of technology, Connections didn’t approach its subject as the revelation of some plan or purpose or fate; Burke didn’t stoop to theorizing, but knit together, clue by clue, the story our inventive, tool-making ancestors left scattered through time. The story he tells does express a theory, however: that technology is the key in which serendipity expresses its role in human experience.
All three Connections series are available online for free viewing.
[via Brainpickings]
December 24, 2010
A wonderful present for this holiday season that you have to pay absolutely nothing for is the iFixit Repair Manual for the iPad. Though it?s going to be a little hard to gift-wrap an application, [...]
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December 24, 2010
We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Dhruv, who needs to live about 20 years in the future, where all PMPs start at 160GB. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.
“So I’m a music lover of sorts and my (already compressed) iTunes library is nearing 150GB. I used to have an iPod Classic 160GB, but that doesn’t allow for much growing room. Seeing as Apple has pretty much given up on the Classic’s future, I was hoping there was another player out there that would have higher capacity drives in it. I know Toshiba makes a 240GB and 320GB 1.8″ drive, but I see nothing using it.Also, I would love for it to have physical buttons. And like the Classic, it should be portable. I saw the Archos 5 online and it’s a mammoth. Basically, my ideal player is an iPod Classic with at least a 250GB HDD inside. Thanks!”
It’s a shame that Cowon’s gorgeous X7 tops out at 160GB, else that’d be a solid solution. Outside of the Archos 5, does anyone have any solid, high-capacity solutions? Looks like your best bet may be to snag a lower-end PMP that’ll hold a 1.8-inch drive, and then hack a larger one in yourself.
Ask Engadget: best high-capacity (250GB or more) portable media player? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 22:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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December 23, 2010
The Kabbalistic Tree of Life can be viewed as a model of organism and governance. Viewed as an organism it is often shown superimposed on the human body, emphasising how the spheres underpin the dynamics and functioning of a living thing. As a model of governance it employs the oldest metaphor for governance, that of kingship. At its heart (Tipheret) is the King. His crown is Kether, and his sword and sceptre are Gevurah and Chesed, the two primary aspects of leadership which stand traditionally for mercy and severity. His martial hosts are Hod and Netzach (hence the divine name Tzabaot) and the kingdom is Malkuth. The King is the One, and his subjects are the Many. When the Kabbalah began, the King with his subjects was the most pervasive form of collective human organisation.
To explore this idea of organism and governance further, I have chosen to look at one of the most popular contemporary ship narratives, the voyages of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as told in the television series Star Trek – The Next Generation. This is a useful example because most people have seen episodes and are familiar with the crew, their roles and their characters. They are more familiar today than the Greek, Roman or Egyptian pantheons of gods and goddesses, and the Star Trek script writers have clearly been inspired by the usual archetypes. Like most soap operas Star Trek attempts to address contemporary social issues — cultural diversity, variant sexual customs, non-interference and self determinism, core moral and ethical issues and so on. Whether it succeeds is largely irrelevant — emulating a lowbrow Plato, its dialogues are as close to a challenging ethical debate as many children are likely to receive.
From The Star Trek Tree, Colin Low’s 1999 explanation of the Kabbalistic concept of the Tree of Life, with characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation in place of the Sephirot, or emanations—the qualities by which Ein Sof or the Infinite reveals itself in the universe.
December 23, 2010
As if there weren’t enough Greys flying around in saucers and conducting strange experiments on us at night, a team at Tsukuba University went ahead and created their own. Two of them, as a matter of fact. It started with TalkTorque, a short, white bot with swoopy arms and head designed to help research in non-verbal communications. That poor guy is old news now, relegated to guide duty at the school’s Groupware Lab. TalkTorque 2 has come along with slightly refined looks and a chunky collar containing a trio of motion- and range-sensing cameras to help the thing figure out who it should be talking to. Of course, it still has no mouth, so the “talking” will be in broad arm gestures, which it will surely use to guide you to his ship’s examination chamber. There’s a video of that communication technique below, along with some dramatized footage of the TalkTorque 2 in action.
TalkTorque robot gets day job as creepy museum guide, TalkTorque 2 is now the future (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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December 23, 2010
We all love portable chargers. This is a fact we have come to terms with in this fast paced world, as we don?t always have a couple of hours to find an free outlet somewhere [...]
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December 22, 2010
What happens when you burn an iPad? Take a sledgehammer to an iPhone 4? Leave a stack of iPod nanos on the train tracks? Shoot a iPhone 3GS with a 9MM handgun? Carve up a Magic Mouse into sushi-sized chunks? Artist (and former Apple graphics designer) Michael Tompert strove for the beautiful, horrific truth. You’ll find his answer to one of these questions above, and eleven others at our source link below.
Visualized: Apple’s finest products destroyed in the name of art originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
December 22, 2010
Remote-control aircraft pilot Raphael “Trappy” Pirker blurs the lines separating hobby, art, and madness. A master of the new first-person view, or FPV, wing of the radio-control aircraft scene, with fliers piloting their relatively-tiny planes over relatively-great distances by means of remote on-board cameras, Trappy has garnered attention—and no small amount of controversy—with a recent series of flights over Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Trappy’s aircraft didn’t come from the local hobby shop, and he didn’t learn his skills from the pages of Popular Mechanics and Boys Life. His custom-modified rig costs more than two thousand dollars, and involves a hefty dose of engineering. The range and power of the RC units with planes of this calibre is astounding; Trappy, who set the long-range record of 27 miles for an RC craft, suggests elsewhere that his system’s range may top out at 120 miles.
Before taking off over New York City, Trappy honed his skills not only by flying long distances, but by buzzing the cliffs and ramparts of the Alps. This video of a previous record-breaking flight shows the mountain fastnesses into which Trappy peers—and his touchdown near a friend’s house to switch out the batteries on the way home (at 1:10) is a pretty neat trick:
While spectacular, the NYC flights have caused a measure of controversy in the RC world and beyond. (The safety measures Trappy and his team took, discussed in this interview, are fairly persuasive.) Looking beyond the immediate risk of crashing into buildings or people, some have suggested that Trappy has “shown the terrorists how to attack NYC.” But of course they already had that figured out long ago—and with long-distance armed drones in the international arms mix, the prospect of a weaponized RC airplane like the miniscule Ritewing Zephyr would seem a remote and minor affair. Indeed, the magic of Trappy’s stunt, at once antic and breathtaking—like Philippe Petit’s long-ago taut-wire act between the twin towers—might just help give back the New York skies to joy and wonder.
[via Singularity Hub]
December 22, 2010
Credit card fraud is never a good thing and reports are in that a UK teen recently was caught using stolen credit cards to purchase about $750,000 worth of music that he and his band offered on Amazon and the iTunes music store between January 2008 and June 2009, giving himself a juicy bit of royalty fees. The group allegedly downloaded the songs 6,000 times during said period and while it probably seemed like a good idea at the time to make some extra money, it’s probably not going to end too nicely for this teen (and possibly the other group members).
UK teen buys $750,000 of his own music online using stolen credit cards, By Ubergizmo, 22 Dec 2010. Top Stories : Kinect-like motion-sensing on the iPad at CES, MacBook Air Review, iPhone 4 Review,
