We appreciate a good electronic cigar, but we never imagined that we could roll our own with USB storage.
Over at Instructables, there's a step by step on boring a cigar, treating its surface, and then loading it with a fiery LED along with a USB stick. The result is a classy cigar USB dongle that can possibly lead to computer mouth/throat cancer. But don't feel bad for your laptop, it'll turn obsolete well before its needlessly induced nicotine addiction claims its life. So you'll thoughtlessly drop your computer in a retirement home (a landfill disguised as a recycling center) from where it will spend the rest of its days doing its damnedest to poison you back. [Instructables via Geeky Gadgets]
To commemorate the Sony Walkman's 30th birthday, here are the trippy ads Sony used to promote it in the '80s. Noble monkeys, off-key kids and sweet-toothed senseis—where's that f'd up sense of humor now, Sony?
Back in 1983, Sony declared the WM-10 Super Walkman the "world's smallest cassette player," and promoted it with ads that appealed to the dudes and to the ladies. There's the fantasy hardware building demonstration, 1 minute into the following ad compilation (here if you don't want to wade through Seth Green's Matchbox spot and the rockin' Simon hair-band ad):
And then there's the dancer who'd prefer a slenderer music player:
OK, maybe that second one appealed to anybody with a leotard fixation (which, in 1983, was pretty much everybody).
Most people in their 30s will hate me for bringing this one up: The 1986 My First Sony campaign was responsible for sticking the following song inside the heads of a generation of people who are just now able to forget it. Click at your own peril...
Here's one of the last cassette Walkman commercials, from 1990 or thereabouts, where a father grills his ridiculously dumb daughter on the pictures that appear on TV. She gets everything wrong—everything—but he let's her mistaken sighting of a Walkman slide, because Walkmen (Walkmans?) are so cool.
And about that noble monkey, his name was Choromatsu, and he died at the extremely ripe age of 29 back in 2007. Here's his 1988 spot, in which he grips a (Japan-only?) WM-501 and contemplates nature:
Before the zany TV commercials there were the fat-bucking-insane print ads. For instance, the small sampling below contains: • A slick-looking posse of urbanites with nice shoes and likely heroin addictions • A sensei sucking a lollipop while sitting next to a nipply lass 2X his height • A lady perilously guiding a ten-speed at velocity while holding a Walkman
Forget Google Maps: NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy have released the most detailed three-dimensional map of Earth yet. It covers our planet between the 83 north and 83 south parallels thanks to 1.3 million stereo images like these:
The images were captured by ASTER, and then stitched together into a seamless map. ASTER—Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer—is the instrument taking maps of land surface temperature, reflectance and elevation flying onboard NASA's Terra satellite. Once the Global Digital Elevation Model was complete, it was divided into 23,000 GeoTIFF files, each covering 1 x 1 degree of the globe. You can download the map here. [JPL]
Starting next week, Dell Mini 10 netbooks will get a new geolocation option—and not just to foil bad guys. It's a proper A-GPS+Wi-Fi system, complete with CoPilot navigation software and network location services from SkyHook.
Dell's also throwing in the Loki browser plugin for FireFox and IE, which integrates your Mini 10 with their location aware web portal and a few other supported sites, like Flickr, Loopt and Brightkite. The Dell Wireless 700 location solution, as it has been christened, will be available from next week, but pricing options remain to be seen. [Dell]
Now fully finished, the amazing full-scale Gundam has become an unofficial Tokyo landmark. The robot is so impressive that photographers are populating Flickr with beautiful photos showing every single little detail. [Flickr Search]
What do you get when you mix a Fiat 500—a popular and tiny 50s car in Italy—with a bulldozer and a crazy Japanese ironsmith? A Fiat 500 bulldozer with crazy—and very happy—Japanese ironsmith inside, as the video shows.
Kogoro Kurata's invention only runs at 3 kilometers per hour, but who cares. It's red, it has treads, it can destroy stuff. That's all that matters to me. Better than Transformers 2 for sure. [Ironwork via Pink Tentacle]
Amidst all the business turmoil, tepidly-received new products and high-concept gaming news, it's easy to forget that, man, Sony can still do hardware design. Exhibit A: The NAS-Z200iO media player dock, CD player, radio and network streaming device.
Its nondescript exterior belies a fairly impressive feature set: support for iPods as well as other MP3 players via a USB or an audio-in port, a CD player with MP3 playback, an AM/FM radio and, most importantly, DLNA network streaming support over Wi-Fi, which lets you connect to your PC's music library or internet radio stations. Sound is piped out through two 20W speakers, housed behind a clean, monolithic grille.
The remote has a full 3.5-inch color LCD, which lets you easily browse through your iPod's library or hosted music collection. It's a tight, media-player-esque little piece of hardware, but also borderline extravagant: if you're planning on using the NAS-Z2000 primarily as a dock, then you'll have purchased what is essentially an iPod to control your iPod. No price for now, and the first (but hopefully not last) shipments will be to Europe exclusively, in September. [Akihabara News]
Now that the iPhone OS 3.1 SDK (and accompanying beta firmware) is out in the wild, new features are showing their faces. The update improves video editing and app integration, Voice Control over Bluetooth and a slew of minor tweaks.
Here's the breakdown, according to people who've played with it:
* Video editing on iPhone 3GS wont overwrite the clip over the original when you are editing a clip. * iPhone will now vibrate whenever you switch to the mode where you can move and arrange icons on the iPhone home screen. * "Fraud Protection" toggle has been added to settings under Safari. * iPhone boot time is now faster. * Voice Control over Bluetooth. * New APIs to enable third party apps to access videos and edit them.
The changes are decidedly incremental and oriented towards 3GS owners, but I wouldn't have expected much more from a decimal upgrade. And of course, this isn't an official feature list, so more changes could come to light soon. [Redmond Pie, iPhone Blog]
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We appreciate a good 
To commemorate the 
Starting next week, Dell Mini 10 netbooks will get a new geolocation option—and not just to 
Amidst all the 
Now that the