Just the other day, I was grousing in the BBG editor's chat channel about my Creative Zen Aurvana's, a pair of ear buds that I had spent a hundred bucks for, liked pretty well and which had spontaneously stopped transmitting sound through the right ear piece. "I'm never going to spend more than twenty bucks on ear plugs again," I vowed. "They're just too fragile: ear buds are basically made in a form factor meant to be wrapped around an MP3 player. They're always just going out on me."
And now comes along a pair of ear plugs to test the resolve. The Opera ear buds are wireless; the sound is relayed via a small transmitter that plugs into the headphone jack of your DAP. It runs on Kleer, a wireless technology that claims better audio quality than Bluetooth.And they're only 98 bucks when they come out in June.
I don't really care for the look of these buds, but 100 bucks to solve the "one ear bud breaking" problem of my last five pairs of headphones (which I've always assumed is because I've accidentally yanked the wire too hard) seems like a good investment. I'll be interested to see how Kleer pans out. Of course, being wireless, that also makes the Opera ear buds even easier to lose... the main reason I never kept my Aurvana's in the attractive little case they came with.
Opera earbuds make your iPod wireless, Kleerly [DVICE]
"1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide."
I am an appreciative consumer of alcohol endorsed by rock musicians. I lost my virginity to a freaky girlfriend wooed into the folly of sleeping with me by goblets full of KISS-brand wine (or, perhaps more likely, the engorged, 14-inch long protrusion of Gene Simmons' tongue prominently displayed on the label). I also like absinthe — not for the taste, which is fermented Listerine, but for the pretentiousness: the ornate louching rituals, the vague idea of opium-scented absinthe parlors, fluffy cravats and decadent poets tormented by wormwood-induced spectres.
Though an unapologetic Mac fanboy, I understand people who hate the unwarranted self-satisfaction of the hipster doofuses calling themselves "geniuses." I hate those Apple Store twats.
Cost Controller convinces you to pay $100 for an LCD display-equipped power strip which informs you how much power is being used by the eight appliances it can accommodate. If it doesn't add up to at least $100 a year, a sample of The Simpsons' Nelson laughing at you is played at random intervals throughout the day.
First tested in Japan under the "Kool Boost" brand, a new cigarette from RJ Reynolds will include a tiny menthol "powerball" in the filter that, when squished, will infuse the entire filter with lung-numbing flavor. They'll be sold under the "Camel Crush" brand and are being tested in a few markets.
New Scientist reports that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new super-weapon with an eerie familiarity to the Stiletto, a weapon from Arthur C. Clarke's 1955 novel Earthlight: a "solid bar of light" driven by giant capacitors that pierces through spaceships like "an entomologist [piercing] a butterfly with a pin."
Nearly six-inches tall — in-scale for the tiny dwarf a real-life Mario would be before eating an HGH-infused mushroom — this "Super Mario Singing Glow Star" sold at Thinkgeek for $18 will, when pressed, play the invulnerability theme from Super Mario Bros. while glowing on and off. Watch out co-workers! Dan from Sales is smashing ceiling tiles and landing flat-footed on your sack lunch.
"Beer Pong" is some sort of drinking-based sport, the object of which is to bounce a ping-pong ball into a plastic cup. (I was the guy trying to explain to dudes' girlfriends the emotional impact of Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII when I went to frat parties, so I may be a bit murky on the specifics.)
Vertu's latest issue proves again that the rarefied world of luxury gadgets is impervious to good taste. It's been selling cellphones aimed at lottery winners for ten years now, and offers the "Rococo Constellation" in celebration of this achievement.
Touchscreen computers installed in the hallways of fifteen apartments in Gothenburg, Sweden, inform the residents the carbon footprint of every action they've taken in their homes, helping them monitor the true cost of leaving the lights on or taking a long shower. They're part of a pilot program from Swedish start-up Manodo; they also give handy updates for things like tram stops, weather, and who's standing outside the door.
Now this is how shareholders should respond to bad corporate leadership. Quothe the AP:
I tried to blow Aaron's mind with my idea of doing fantasy scenes, but he stopped me mid-blurt, telling me about the large number of installations they've already done in home theaters that feature deep space scenes full of nebula and shooting stars. One of Sony's MMO groups apparently looked into getting one of their game's sky graphics installed in a board room. Another client was an orthodontist redoing his basement as a tribute to Star Wars (including an X-Wing cockpit mock-up) who recreated the little table at which Chewie and C-3PO play chess. Above it? A custom window looking out into a spinning galaxy. (Speaking of, can you imagine how awesome it would be to be an orthodontist in the Star Wars universe? You could retire on a sarlacc cleaning alone.)
"Activate" is a new line of sports beverages that store the powdered "vitamins and herbs" in the cap. Twist the top and a small plastic blade cuts the seal, opening an armature that allows the ingredients to fall into the water. The conceit is that the vitamins will say at "maximum potency" since they are not deteriorating in water.
LEGO sells this "Pink Brick Box" for $15, a tub of mostly standard full-sized bricks but with a few pink and green ones thrown in for good measure. I wish there were more beams and pieces I could use in spaceships; even the horse-loving 
Spurting meconium, its severed umbilical cord wildly lashing around like an out of control fire hose, the Asus Eee was born: a tiny, albino, physically undeveloped premie, barely capable of processing its own operating system, unable to go without life support for more than one and a half hours. A sad, sorry, adorable thing, but none the less, consumers lustfully dogpiled on top of it.
Connect it to your computer via USB, and set it up the way you want it with the included software, and you've got a spectacular-looking public performance. Whether it sounds all that good in person — or if it's anything more complex than a triggering mechanism for pre-produced clips and sequences — is another matter entirely.
Purported to weigh contents to an accuracy of one tenth of a gram, Pro•Idee's Spoon Scales are recommended for "Saffron, truffles, fine balsamic vinegar and crack."
Just watching the DL 3000 book scanner in operation scares me. The bars that swoop over the book, raising and flapping pages, seem far too large and heavy-duty; it's as if a brush of wind or the slightest nudge would have their dumb repetitions turn your discolored, first-edition Psychopathia Sexualis into so much confetti.
Shoes, especially expensive "running" shoes, fuck up your feet. They ruin a walking gait honed by countless generations of adaptation, and make you look like a fashion victim to boot. Dylan Tweney at Wired Science 
As my poor relationship with Sprint continues—I just tried to activate a new line with an old phone we already own, a Sprint Katana, but it was 'unable' to do so—The Consumerist has a doozy on America's third-largest cellular carrier. Allegedly, anonymous-sourcedly, Sprint's reps are under instructions not to write quotations from customers in notes. This is because such notes can be used by customers in lawsuits as evidence.
From the "Open Source Boob Project:"
Despite some equipment setbacks compounded by my embarrassingly poor grasp of the fundamental nature of circuits, I am computing to you from a hill overlooking the Hudson on a Lenovo X300 laptop being recharged by a Brunton Solo 15. The Solo 15 was recharged by our sun through a folding Solaris 52 solar panel. I'm also sipping water — well, coffee — cleaned by a SteriPen while taking the occasional phone call.
Thailand has an 18-foot abacus, fronting the counter at a pharmacy in Rayong. The pharmacist reports being able to calculate bills on it faster than with a standard electronic calculator.
A demented facsimile of a folk tune presented itself in mind the moment I set eyes on the ouija board guitar, a contemporary mashup to honor it's crazy blend of art, music and madness.
To nerdilettantes, Century's triple CF card SATA adapter is Manna from Heaven, which is to say, from Asia. Jam three compact flash cards in, and there you go—an instant solid state disk drive. The problem is that it's $200, which is pure comedy, especially given the 20 MB/s throughput it'll provide.
Okay, I'm going to try to make this quick, since I may be running out of battery sooner than I thought.
Sila Sutharat sells Thai roasted chicken at his stall in Bangkok, roasted under an array of sun-concentrating mirrors. It's a simple idea — one that many old solar ovens and newer solar energy farms are using — but it's the cooking time that surprised me: just 10 minutes for a whole chicken, claims Sutharat. Gizmodo's Mark Wilson thinks that the secret is in the marinade which, according to Wilson's theory, is highly acidic, effectively pre-cooking the chickens.
Sekai-Kaden's Vitantonia boiler cooks up to seven of 'em on demand, producing soft-boiled eggs in 10 minutes or hard-boiled oned in 15. It even comes with an insert to make three poached eggs, though the ~$50 price tag is a little disconcerting.
The "W-Cut" thread design from GRK Fasteners — available on all their screws — adds small teeth to the first few threads of a screw, making it possible to forgoe pre-drilling a hole entirely. Think of it as a tiny drill bit on the tip of each screw. These won't replace drywall anchors, probably the most common household drill-and-screw process, but for bigger construction projects they could save a lot of hassle, especially if you only have one driver, forcing you to keep switching bits.
Trust nothing, thieves. Even the 
1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?
Look, I know you're paranoid. I can see it in the way you're nervously trying to catch a rearward reflection in the glare of your monitor as you read this post. Relax. No one cares about what you're doing right now.
Hidden amid overburdened UMPCs and unportable subnotebooks is what was once called the Handheld PC. This now-mythical beast turns on instantly, does most of the productivity stuff you want, and briefly ruled in the form of NEC's MobilePro, a great writers' tool that suffered from poor connectivity options and a wallet-rogering $900 price tag.
Think you have it bad as a residential customer? Businesses get it much worse.
You should not pay $60 for the "SleepPhones Sleep Aid System." Yes, it's a headband that has headphones built-in. Yes, they include a CD with "binaural beats technology." I know, I know — the bag of "premium quality lavender" is enticing.
A wine importer is selling a Malbec grape wine called "Yellow + Blue" in TetraPak, a container familiar to many in the UK for its use in drink boxes. Dr. Vino took a look:
Western Digital is announcing a new line of high-end consumer hard drives today to supplant their "Raptor" line. The new SATA2 drives spin at 10,000 RPM and are available in sizes up to 300GB.
In a patent filing for a Second Life-style online shopping spot, Apple claims that standard web stores (which would include its own) can feel "sterile and isolating." From MacNN:
The story has been developing all week, but once Wal-Mart decided to stop carrying bottles that use Bisphenol A — a chemical which may or may not induce hormonal changes, especially in children — bottle-maker Nalgene has announced they'll ditch the chemical in their manufacturing process.
There's not much to recommend the SunView PMP Projector (PMPP), a pedestrian and chunky media player that runs Windows CE, except...a built-in "pico-projector" that will shoot a 53-inch VGA image onto any available flat surface. Now it's not a very bright image at that size — just 9 lux, just shy of one footcandle (to use a modern measurement) — which means you'll only be using this in a darkened environment. But it's the notion that counts. While these tiny LED-based projectors won't be replacing LCD screens in our gadgets any time soon, it's reasonable to think that in the next few years they could become as ubiquitous as the tiny, crappy cameras we now expect to see in almost every device we own.
I bought LG's 
The future of video rentals is pretty clearly in on-demand streaming of video over the Internet, but until then, DVD companies need to strengthen the legs of their business model somehow. Now, a German company named Einmal has announced that they have come up with a self-destructing DVD technology. Coated in a special chemical, the DVDs will begin to break down and corrosively melt after 48 hours, rendering them unplayable.
Nebbish and sunken-chested, a spindly and asthmatic ectomorph, I've long looked forward to exoskeleton technology. I'm sick of having sand kicked into my face by bullies at the beach as I pursue a dim chance at the reproductive act; an exo-skeleton will even the score by allowing me to confront all of the mesomorphic jerks who torment my life on their own brawny terms and, thus confronting them, hit them so hard they ejaculate their central nervous systems. In the 1940s, we had Charles Atlas; in the double oughts of the new Millennium, we have robot suits made out of titanium.
