The Null Device

Japanese synth manufacturer Korg have announced a Nintendo DS emulation of their MS-10 semi-modular synth. (They're those small L-shaped ones with the patch cords you sometimes see at gigs.) The Korg DS-10 is being developed by AQ Interactive, and will be released in July 2008, though only in Japan. From the screenshots, it appears to be labelled in English, so ¥4,800 could get you a usable copy.

(via Boing Boing Gadgets) ¶ gadgets korg korg ms-10 music nintendo ds synths [no comments]

Two artists have created a device for manipulating fonts as one would synthesiser sounds. The Meek FM Typographic Synthesizer consists of a box of synth-like knobs connected to a Mac running software which allows the user to tweak aspects of a font using the knobs. (The font is stored in a higher-level representation, consisting of strokes, though it's said to be able to import standard PostScript fonts.) There's a video of it in use here.

(via Engadget) ¶ art digital art gadgets synths tech typography [no comments]

Possibly following the rise of Balkan folk-influenced indie bands, Roland have now released a MIDI accordion. The Roland FR-2 V-Accordion® uses physical modelling to reproduce the nuances of sound (including valve and button noises and the sounds of individual reeds) and comes with 8 accordion sound sets, as well as 6 orchestral sound sets, and 15 microtuning presets.

(via Boing Boing Gadgets) ¶ gadgets music synths tech [no comments]

As I type this, Steve Jobs is giving his keynote speech at MacWorld. From what I can tell, he has announced a few consumer gadgets (an improved AppleTV with movie rentals (presumably in the US only) and Flickr support, iPhone and iPod Touch firmware upgrades) and a wireless Mac backup appliance named "Time Capsule". Mind you, Engadget's feed doesn't seem to be coping with the load of millions of Maccies across the world constantly hitting reload to see whether any new tidbits have appeared, and Gizmodo's feed, while more reliable, seems a bit lighter on content. It'll be interesting to see what the "one more thing" is, whether it's a solid-state, Asus Eee-sized MacBook named "Air", or whether all the rumours were all off.

The presence of Hollywood heavyweights and mention of Blu-Ray is ominous; given Blu-Ray's strict licensing conditions, any Mac with Blu-Ray would have to have the same onerous internal DRM surveillance infrastructure as Windows Vista, with the same fragility, loss of performance and the actual user generally getting the rough end of the pineapple.

Update: Nothing about Blu-Ray; though the Another Thing was, in fact, the MacBook Air, a ridiculously thin 13" laptop.

¶ apple drm gadgets mac macworld steve jobs tech [no comments]

They have now built a better mousetrap: a miniature gas chamber which asphyxiates the mouse, and sends a text message confirming its death.

(via Wired News) ¶ a better mousetrap death penalty gadgets tech [no comments]

Want some authentic Daft Punk robot helmets? That'll be US$65,000 and one year. Oh, and you'll need a license from the band. Also, be aware that they don't run on batteries, so if you want to wear yours with the lights running, you'll have to do so whilst tethered to a power cord.

(via Engadget) ¶ daft punk fashion gadgets [no comments]

Hot on the heels of the TrollTech Greenphone, a company named FIC is releasing an open-source, Linux-based mobile phone. The OpenMoko won't have WiFi (as the GreenPhone will), but it will have a GPS receiver built in, as well as Bluetooth, USB, a MicroSD slot and a multi-touch touchscreen capable of understanding two-fingered dragging gestures. More importantly, it's not so much a mobile phone (which is to say, a locked-down proprietary appliance) as an openly hackable general-purpose computer with a GSM module and GPS receiver attached. (The radio components are, for regulatory reasons, closed modules; everything else, though, is fair game.) And apparently it will have a Debian-style package management system built in which can download new (or updated) software components on demand. And, also unlike the Greenphone, it will be released to the mass market (they say in January, which could mean sometime in the first half of 2007).

(via /., gizmodo) ¶ gadgets gps linux open-source phone [no comments]

I recently acquired one of the newly-released WiFi Skype phones; in my case, I went with the Edge-Core WM4201. I ordered it in August or so, but it only arrived this week; I suspect this may be connected with the other Skype phones (the Netgear and Belkin ones, for example) not being released in Europe until October.

The WM4201 is a unit about that looks like a candy-bar mobile phone (complete with Sony-Ericssonesque joystick above the keypad), decked out in iPod White (which is the new Consumer Electronics Black). Or at least it looks like a mobile phone in photographs; the first thing one notices when one unpacks it is that it is considerably larger than an ordinary GSM mobile (or at least one with an equivalent number of keys):

WM4201, next to a Nokia 6230i, for purposes of comparison

As for making and receiving calls: the quality is pretty much standard Skype quality, i.e., good enough save for the occasional choppiness and echo. It only does voice calling as well; there is no way to send or receive text messages on it. Perhaps this will arrive in a future version of the firmware?

As this phone is a 1.0 product (1.0.0.10, it says), there are still some rough edges. For example, sometimes when it loses the wireless network, it crashes and becomes unresponsive, requiring you to remove and replace the battery to reset it. (The manufacturer seems to have neglected to provide the usual paperclip reset switch.) This only happens when it's running off battery power; leaving it plugged into a USB cable seems to make the problem go away. Also, on one network I tested it with, the phone kept losing the network connection every few minutes, though only when not making or receiving calls. Hopefully these issues will be fixed in the future.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the phone. It allows me to be reachable on Skype and make and receive phone calls without being near a powerful headset-equipped PC. It is usable as is, though there is room for improvement.

One question I have been wondering about: what exactly is the Edge-Core WM4201? The information page of the firmware reveals that it is implemented using TrollTech's toolkit (presumably Qtopia), which means that it's probably not a Windows CE device (after all, one wouldn't pay royalties to Microsoft and then avoid using their technologies). I suspect it runs on either Linux or some embedded system like QNX. The phone has a USB port on the bottom, though, disappointingly, there is no evidence of the data lines of this being connected to anything; connecting it to a computer reveals no new devices plugged in. It seems that the USB port is just used as a relatively standard way of feeding 5 volts to the device. The phone appears to be firmware upgradeable, though it does this by itself checking for updates on the internet.

I don't know what URL it pings to check for new firmware; I wonder whether it pings an Edge-Core URL for a version of the firmware specific to Edge-Core hardware, or a skype.com URL for upgrades to any WiFi Skype phones. I have seen photographs of other Skype phones, and they look similar, both in layout of buttons and the user interface. Could it be that Skype handed manufacturers a standard hardware platform and just makes a release of their software for this? If so, the differences between rival models would be limited to things outside of the reference design, such as quality of screens/keyboards/speakers and charging solutions.

¶ gadgets skype technology [2 comments]

A rather amusing guide on what not to put on an iPod when giving it to your beloved:

Fifth, excessive jazz, blues, or classical music. Surprisingly, many (N.B.) single males fail to understand that the reason Pop Music is called "pop" is because it is popular. Showing your well-roundedness is good, but copying all of your unmarried uncle's extensive jazz collection onto the iPod will not make her think that you are Sophisticated, but that you are balding.

If there was the slightest chance you could get laid in today's market by owning a Sonic Youth ceedee, there would be far fewer former record store clerks making mySpace pages.

Seventh, anyone who can listen to Nick Cave for more than a half hour at a stretch is mentally ill.

And then there is useful advice such as:

You weren't seriously thinking of a Shuffle, were you? Come on! If a Shuffle would work you might as well just offer her the rest of your bag of Dorito's and take off your pants.

Let not the dying battery, cracked screen, or sputtering disk drive end up being a metaphor for the failures of your relationship.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple gadgets music sex society [1 comment]

Hewlett-Packard is doing its part to tackle the affluent world's obesity crisis—by developing a digital camera that can make photographic subjects look slimmer.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ affluenza gadgets obesity photography vanity [no comments]

Gizmodo reviews the Belkin WiFi Skype phone (which doesn't appear to have a UK release date, though review copies have been floating around; the BBC Click Online presenter had one a few weeks ago, though didn't say much about the specifics). From the review seems generally pretty good, if somewhat limited (it doesn't do text messaging, only voice calling). . I wonder how the others (such as the Netgear and Edge-Core phones, or even the BCM Skype/SIP/MSN phone which may or may not be vaporware) will compare.

¶ gadgets skype tech voip [no comments]

And another (vaporware) Wi-Fi Skype/VoIP phone has been announced: the Edge-Core WM4201, like the BCM and Netgear Skype phones announced before it, is said to ship in July 2006. As with the BCM phone, there is no sign of anyone preparing to sell these to consumers.

(via The Register) ¶ gadgets skype voip [no comments]

Nintendo have announced a microphone/headphone headset for their DS handheld game console, intended for use with games allowing voice communication between players. Though perhaps that's only the start; were Nintendo to bring out a VoIP package for the DS, it would turn the WiFi-enabled pocket game console into a reasonably useful internet phone. Given that a version of the Opera web browser is about to come out for the Nintendo DS, it's not entirely implausible to imagine Nintendo doing a similar tie-up with Skype (or perhaps Google Talk), or else bundling a standard SIP client with their handheld.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ gadgets nintendo nintendo ds voip [no comments]

Looks like there's another WiFi-based, standalone cordless Skype phone coming out; unlike the Netgear and Belkin offerings, this one will hedge its bets and speak both Skype and SIP. It also does text messaging, which the Netgear phone may or may not do.

The PDF files on the manufacturer's web site say that the phones are firmware upgradeable through a USB serial console. I wonder whether they run something standard like Linux, and if so, how hackable they are. If would be rather cool if it were possible to add third-party extensions to the interface (for example, a version of Gaim, or even the promised Linux port of Google Talk).

(via Gizmodo) ¶ gadgets skype voip [no comments]

iRiver, the Korean MP3 player manufacturer started off making players that were USB mass storage devices; in other words, when plugged into a computer, they looked like a hard disk you could copy MP3 files to, which the device could then play. A while ago, seemingly persuaded by Microsoft, they abandoned this and replaced it with something called MTP, a proprietary Microsoft protocol for transferring audio files, which officially only works with Windows Media Player (sorry, Maccies and Penguinheads!). Now they seem to have realised the error of their ways (perhaps spurred on by other player makers, such as iAudio, proudly advertising that their devices look like standard USB hard drives that work with anything), and released a firmware update which lets users choose which USB protocol their player uses; for some of their players, at least.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ gadgets iriver mp3 [3 comments]

The latest gadget on the Japanese market is a gun that fires teddy bears, fitted with parachutes, into the air. The necessity that mothered this bizarre-sounding yet oddly compelling invention was the fashion in Japan to throw teddy bears, rather than bouquets, into the air at weddings. The teddy bear gun merely automates this process somewhat.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ gadgets japan teddy bears toys [no comments]

Over the past few years, a number of factors (increasingly miniaturised chipsets, cheap Chinese manufacturing, and the purchasing power of gigantic retailers like Tesco and Wal-Mart) has resulted in household electronic goods like DVD players becoming ridiculously cheap. The effect of this has been a steep fall in burglaries, as criminals realise that knocking over houses is no longer worth the bother:

"The falling value of electrical goods means housebreaking no longer makes sense. Even the simplest of criminal minds will carry out a risk-benefit analysis,"

He said: "There's no doubt the falling value of electrical goods has made housebreaking a less attractive crime. You can buy a new DVD player in Asda for about 20 quid, so there is no longer the same market for stolen goods.

Dr Cook added: "If you really want very cheap second-hand goods, they can be bought at money lender or cash-back places and are definitely not stolen. Second-hand stolen goods can't compete with that."

(via reddragdiva) ¶ crime gadgets tech [no comments]

A package just arrived in the mail, containing a Buddha Machine.

For those not familiar with the Buddha Machine, it is a small plastic device, about the size and shape of an old-fashioned transistor radio, which plays several loops of what sounds like minimal electronic ambient music, through a built-in speaker or headphones. It was designed by two artists from Beijing's electronic-music underground, Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian.

Built in Chinese factories (though what isn't these days?), the Buddha Machine proudly embodies a made-in-China commodity-gadget aesthetic. It comes in a box decorated with lotus flowers, Buddhist swastikas and a photograph of a temple, and looking more like it would hold patent medicines than consumer electronics. The box contained two AA batteries (designed to resemble Duracells, only more cheap-looking) and device itself. The device made of thick plastic, its pieces fitting together slightly roughly (no iPod sheen here), and all the labels are exclusively in Chinese, with the exception of the creators' URL on the bottom. The Buddha Machine comes in six colours, though there is no means of choosing one; they are distributed at random, and which you get is the luck of the draw. Mine was green.

When switched on, the device plays a randomly-chosen loop through its speaker or the headphones. It has a small, ordinary-looking switch on the side; when this is flipped, it changes the loop to a different randomly-selected one. (It has 9 built in.) The loops come from performances by the two artists, and are stored in memory on the device. They sound, in a word, ambient, varying from glitchy, saturated chords and slowed-down instrument sounds to minimalistic micromelodies played on a variety of lo-fi drones and distorted string-like instruments, to what sound like fragments of larger works, chopped out of their context and fashioned into textures. The loops are chosen at random; flicking the rather ordinary-looking switch on the side of the unit switches to another loop. It is probably a cliché to describe it as "oddly soothing", though the effect is.

And here is an interview with the creators, describing how they came up with the idea, and how surprised they were to sell as many as they have; they had expected to sell a few hundred, but then various bloggers and hipsters (notably Pitchfork Magazine) picked the Buddha Machine out as a techno-fetish object to file alongside their Lomo ActionSamplers.

¶ ambient art buddha machine chinese gadgets music [5 comments]

In the middle ages, it was the done thing to possess mementi mori, artefacts to remind oneself that life is fleeting and death is inevitable. In 1991, a gentleman by the name of David Kendrick took out a patent on a modern-day equivalent, a wristwatch that displays the (estimated) time one has left to live.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ death gadgets memento mori morbid [no comments]

This looks fairly interesting: a Taiwanese company is bringing out Flash-based MP3 players with built-in Sega games.

The Lavod PocketPlays will come preloaded with 10 or 20 Sega titles, and have TV output for playing them on a television. Other than that, little is known about them, except that one of them will have a SD Card slot and USB 2.0 port.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ gadgets videogaming [no comments]

A review of the ten most annoying alarm clocks, for those who find the basic model with a snooze button too lenient and easy to ignore. The selection includes fiendish devices that make loud noises and run away, forcing you to catch them and/or solve puzzles to shut them up:

The Kuku Alarm Clock greets you every morning by crowing and laying eggs. It won't stop chirping until you've returned its eggs.

The Blowfly alarm clock escapes from a cage in your room, moves and produces sound around you when the alarm goes off. To turn it off you have to catch it and put it back in its home.

(via bOING bOING) ¶ alarm clocks annoying architectures of control design gadgets [no comments]

Nifty objet d'art of the day: the Pong clock:

In a sense, this seems to be the computer-age equivalent of those mechanical clocks from centuries past, in which tiny figures promenaded around illustrating the time of day.

(I wonder what it's implemented on. If the device contains, say, a Mac mini or an entire Linux system and X server, it would seem somewhat decadent.)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ art digital art gadgets pong retrocomputing videogames [4 comments]

A hardware hacker with a very steady hand builds a head-up computer display into a pair of slim-line sunglasses. His ultimate goal is to fit sunglasses, a video camera and a microphone, covertly, into what looks like an ordinary pair of sunglasses, effectively making a Snow Crash-style gargoyle rig (just add a wearable computer).

(via gimbo) ¶ gadgets gargoyle hacks snow crash tech [no comments]

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, a hand-held, Linux-based, WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled web-browsing/email appliance, is out. In the UK, it's selling for £245, and appears to be out of stock already. It costs twice as much as the other hackable, Linux-based gadget, the GP2X, though has wireless communications technologies (which the GP2X lacks altogether) and more than four times the screen resolution; however, external storage is limited to the smaller RS-MMC cards, as opposed to the somewhat larger SD cards the GP2X takes; also, while it's likely that someone will port MAME to it, playing arcade games with the nagivation pad probably won't be as comfortable as with the GP2X's controls. I'd have one of each, had I £370 I had no better use for and a jacket with infinitely capacious pockets.

And here there is a round up of reviews of the Nokia 770.

¶ gadgets gp2x linux nokia videogames [no comments]

Never mind the PSP, I want a GPX2. It's a pocket-sized SD-based media player (capable of playing DivX/MPEG4 movies and MP3s) and some undefined games (with the provided joystick). Most interestingly, it runs Linux; assuming that they don't deliberately cripple it, that means it's going to be possible to put MAME on it, load up a SD card with old arcade ROMs and have an arcade in one's pocket. The only thing it's missing is WiFi.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ gadgets gpx2 linux retrocomputing videogames [no comments]

This looks interesting: BlackDog appears to be a device the size of a USB flash drive containing an entire Linux-based computer. Plug it into a PC's USB port and it appears as a network-connected Debian box, and auto-runs an X server to connect to the machine in question (this is presumably on Windows). It also includes a "biometric reader" to control access to it.

And then there's the Neuronium. An eye-catchingly blue box hand-built by a German vintage synth designer, it looks like some kind of dance-techno sample-synth module or virtual analogue synth, but is basically an analogue neural network for generating vaguely Tangerine Dream-esque electronic burbling noises. If you have €2499 to spare, it could be yours.

(via gizmodo) ¶ ambient computer music electronica gadgets linux music tech [no comments]

Not sure what to put in the remaining 5¼" drive bay of your souped-up PC, next to the DVD rewriter, 50-function fan-controller/card reader and graphical status display? How about an audio cassette deck. It plugs into a serial port and your sound card through a breakout box, comes with Windows software for controlling it and recording from/to audio cassettes, and can be yours for a mere US$149 (from ThinkGeek, not surprisingly).

(via gizmodo) ¶ cassette chindogu gadgets pc [no comments]

The first MP3 player I owned was an Archos Jukebox Recorder. This was a relatively bulky unit consisting of a low-power CPU, monochrome bitmap display and notebook hard drive (20Gb, though it was easy enough to open it up and swap the hard disk for a larger one, at least until Archos started soldering their hard drives into cages of circuit boards).

Just under a year ago, I bought an iRiver H340; this is a smaller unit, with a more powerful CPU (Motorola ColdFire; it's powerful enough to decode MP3 and OGG in software, and someone has gotten an iRiver emulating a GameBoy), a colour display, two USB ports (device and host), and based around a smaller (1.8", i.e., iPod-sized) hard drive. Like the Archos, it could record to MP3, from a (crap) built-in microphone or line in (I think it even has a microphone preamp built in, unlike the Archos). However, it seemed to have one crucial missing feature: no real-time clock.

Why is that such a big problem, you ask? Well, when you suddenly record something on the go, how will you know what it is that you recorded later on? The files it makes are named VOICE001.MP3, VOICE002.MP3 and so on, which doesn't say much. There is no keypad, touch screen or other data-entry method to give them names either. Of course, if the device has a real-time clock, you can look at the timestamp of the file to see when it was recorded, but with no such clock, all files created get an arbitrary creation time such as midnight on 1/1/2002, so you're left guessing.

Mind you, now it emerges that the H340 hardware does have a real-time clock, just that the firmware didn't use it. I just found out the most recent firmware upgrade adds a clock function, displaying the current time, and adding sensible timestamps to any files recorded. Which makes the iRiver slightly more useful for things other than listening to music.

(Of course, the firmware is still annoyingly clunky when it comes to doing some things; though now that it is confirmed that there is a clock inside the unit, Rockbox can make use of it when it is ported to it.)

¶ archos jukebox recorder gadgets hardware iriver mp3 rockbox [8 comments]

The latest mobile phone approved in the US is shaped like a Coca-Cola can, and has three buttons. One connects the caller, who has just found the device in a 12-pack, to a Coca-Cola representative who explains that they have won that most American of aspirational lifestyle symbols, a SUV; another sends the caller's whereabouts, picked up by a GPS receiver built into the device, to the company so that the lucky Coke drinker's SUV can be delivered. The device was developed by a Sydney company, Momentum Worldwide. This looks simultaneously nifty and obscene (disposable single-use electronic devices used for promoting junk food and giving away SUVs and then destined to leach toxins into the water table).

This lends itself to speculation about risks, and ways in which the street may find its own uses for these. The devices would probably cost a few hundred dollars to manufacture, and Coca-Cola would probably collect them for destruction upon delivery of the SUV. Though if one got one and didn't want to own a truck, I wonder how easy it would be to remove the SIM card and fit it to a different phone. Unless SIM cards can be configured, at the network level, to only call one number, an aspiring terrorist or troublemaker could have in their hands a completely anonymous SIM card, courtesy of Coca-Cola. Chances are it'd only be good for one call and one SMS message, though; I wonder whether it could receive calls.

¶ coca-cola gadgets tech [no comments]

The Archos Gmini units look really nifty. As long as they are USB Mass Storage devices, and don't need any proprietary Windows-only "media manager" software to upload MP3s (and manage your unwieldy collection of digital rights).

¶ gadgets mp3 [no comments]